THE DIARY: NEIL MACGREGOR
By Neil MacGregor

FT.com
January 17 2009 00:25

On Thursday we celebrated the 250th anniversary of the opening of
the British Museum. It was January 15 1759 when the first national
museum in the world opened free of charge "to all studious and
curious persons".

It was an odd collection, the bulk of which had been formed by Hans
Sloane, a brilliant, scholarly doctor and friend of Newton, Handel
and Voltaire.

Sloane’s fortune was based on drinking-chocolate – sweetening bitter
cocoa with milk and sugar and then persuading the well-to-do it
was good for them. There has always been a market for the easy road
to health.

His collection – historical, botanical and anthropological, gathered
from all over the world – was open to all serious inquirers in
his house in Chelsea, and in 1753, parliament legislated that the
British Museum should continue this tradition. So, unlike the great
royal collections of the continent, this was not to be a triumphalist
display of national wealth but the private study collection of every
citizen. Nobody knew what the citizens would do with the knowledge
they acquired. The Enlightenment merely assumed that knowledge was
a public right and a civic good.

Even today, we never know what will result from putting things on show
at the museum. The current Babylon exhibition highlights some of the
Mesopotamian cl ay tablets that museum curators have been deciphering
for more than a century. Visually unprepossessing, to say the least,
these have proved startlingly popular, generating much discussion of
the virtues of the Babylonian number system, based on six rather than
10. I was fascinated to hear on Radio 4 a historian of science suggest
that this is why in most Middle Eastern religions, creation took six
days. The seventh day would inevitably be considered inauspicious,
and thus even the creator undertook to do no work. So apparently
we owe our Sunday rest to Babylonian mathematics, along with the
60-minute hour, the 12-month year and most of our calendar.

If we occasionally struggle with 30- or 31-day months, at least we
have only one calendar to contend with. In Iran, they easily juggle
with three – their own ancient solar calendar, the Islamic lunar one
and our western Gregorian system. Dauntingly, dates in a document
are, on occasion, given all three ways. The Armenian Christians in
Iran even have a fourth – their own church calendar, which, like the
Greek Orthodox, is 12 days behind ours.

So when I was in Isfahan earlier this week, post-Christmas celebrations
were still in full swing, though January 6, their Christmas day,
was more muted than usual this year as it coincided with Ashura,
the day in the movable lunar Islamic calendar when the Shia faithful
commemorate with great and tragic solemnity the=2 0martyrdom of
Hussein, the Prophet’s grandson. That the two celebrations, one of
rejoicing, one of mourning, can coexist without tension is among the
many surprises of life in the Islamic Republic. As is the fact that
in the Majlis, or parliament, two seats are reserved for Armenian
Christians, and one each for Jews and Zoroastrians.

I was in Iran for the same reason as the Armenians – Shah Abbas I,
a contemporary of Elizabeth I and James I, who brought Armenians to
his new capital Isfahan so that they could promote trade in silk and
carpets with western Europe and make Iran rich and strong. They did
this with such success that by 1620, Iran was the pivotal power in
the region and Isfahan one of the great crossroads of international
exchange, probably the only place in the world where Chinese, Indian
and European traders and envoys could meet.

Next month, the British Museum is mounting an exhibition, Shah
Abbas and the Remaking of Iran, and we were in Tehran to sign the
formal agreement with the National Museum, which is lending us great
illuminations, calligraphies, textiles and ceramics. Many of these were
given by Shah Abbas to the big Shia shrines in Iran, an act of piety
and a shrewd way of projecting royal power. It was also a little like
founding a museum. For the first time, great Chinese and Iranian works
of art were put on public view. Their impact on Iranian artists was 0D
unexpected and profound, and can be seen in their ceramics to this day.

As the loans are of national importance, the signing of the contract
is very formal. It was held in the office of the vice-president of
the Islamic Republic, with a representative of president Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad present, and was filmed for television and official
websites. We were welcomed with warm courtesy and humour, and
reminded of the power of such exhibitions to foster understanding
of each other’s history and traditions. In more earnest language,
we were invited to express to Unesco our concern at recent damage to
the historic buildings of Gaza.

Back in London, as well as building the installation for Shah Abbas,
we are finishing a new Egyptian gallery, funded by the financier Sir
Ronald Cohen (who was born in Egypt) in honour of his father. After
nearly 10 years in conservation, the paintings from the tomb of
Nebamun, some of the greatest paintings to survive from Ancient Egypt,
will go back on show next week.

Around 1400BC, Nebamun was a temple scribe and grain accountant –
a middle-manager in our terms but one who commissioned an exceptional
artist.

His tomb paintings evoke the pleasures of hunting and feasting,
music and dancing girls, which Nebamun had enjoyed in this world and
hoped to continue enjoying in the next. They are so saucy and lively,
so infectiously festive, that as we finalise the lighting and labe ls,
I find myself hoping that somewhere, on that great journey through the
Egyptian afterlife, Nebamun, who was clearly a paid-up party animal,
is still having as much fun there as he is here in the paintings.

British Museum Egyptologists are always in friendly, if edgy rivalry
with their colleagues working on ancient China: which civilisation
is older?

Which did what first? Or better? If Egypt seems at the moment to
be pulling ahead on the paintings front, the Chinese are about to
play a trump card with their bronzes, which are much older (around
1700BC) and far superior to anything comparable cast in the mere
Mediterranean. When later generations of Chinese accidentally came
upon these buried bronze vessels, they thought them so beautiful that
they assumed they must be hidden gifts from the gods.

It is not difficult to see why, and in a fortnight Londoners will be
able to put the hype to the test.

Shanghai, limbering up for Expo 2010, is launching Shanghai Week in
London at the end of this month. For a few weeks, the Shanghai Museum,
which probably has the greatest collection anywhere, is lending the
British Museum some spectacular bronzes, a rare chance for the British
public to explore a tradition little-represented in our museums but
central to Chinese culture.

I recall being deeply impressed when, on a visit to the British Museum,
the mayor of Beijing, Guo Jinlong, accurately dated then ranked in
importance all the bronze vessels we had on display.

We have just begun installing the Shanghai bronzes in the Manuscript
Saloon, beneath Sloane’s portrait. He, like many 18th-century
intellectuals, was beguiled by the idea of China, governed by emperors
who were philosophers and connoisseurs. What would he make of this
loan exhibition? Above all, what would he make of his collection 250
years on, enormously expanded but still open free to the studious and
curious? Although we have no reliable figures for our first hundred
years, we know that since 1851 the collection has been seen by more
than 250m people. As an intensely sociable man, who loved dinners
and music, we can hope that even now Sloane is celebrating it all
over a glass of wine with Nebamun.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress