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Thoughts of Ancient Babylon
Jul. 14th, 2016 04:42 pmThe most amazing thing at the ROM for me was a wall panel mosaic from the ceremonial hall of the palace of Nebuchadnezzar at Babylon.
A lot of the material at museums like that makes me sad. The simple vagueness of the context of some of the items point fingers at the 'gentlemen adventurers' who retrieved these things more as loot for national aggrandizement rather than as archaeological artifacts, heedless of the loss of the information embedded in their context. It makes me sad, and maybe that's a little of where my low mood came from yesterday.
At the same time, to stand in the presence of that panel was, for me, to feel a tangible, personal connection to the people and events of Mesopotamia 2500 years gone. More than that, as I stand and stare at it, I get lost in imagining the place it was once in; that Nebuchadnezzar too once stood and looked at this very same panel.
When Danae and I stopped at the Detroit Institute of Art on the way to Hamilton, we looked at a similar artifact there; a panel from the Ishtar Gate of the city of Babylon. I could have stood and stared at that panel for just as long a time, living briefly in my imagined vista of crowds of travelers passing in and out of the city, looking, awe-struck, at that very same panel. The ROM's panel, from the palace, with it's connection to the king and the court, feels very similar, but different too. More private, more connected to the king as an individual rather than the city and its commerce as a whole. I think I could look at either of them for hours at a time, lost in thought.
A lot of the material at museums like that makes me sad. The simple vagueness of the context of some of the items point fingers at the 'gentlemen adventurers' who retrieved these things more as loot for national aggrandizement rather than as archaeological artifacts, heedless of the loss of the information embedded in their context. It makes me sad, and maybe that's a little of where my low mood came from yesterday.
At the same time, to stand in the presence of that panel was, for me, to feel a tangible, personal connection to the people and events of Mesopotamia 2500 years gone. More than that, as I stand and stare at it, I get lost in imagining the place it was once in; that Nebuchadnezzar too once stood and looked at this very same panel.
When Danae and I stopped at the Detroit Institute of Art on the way to Hamilton, we looked at a similar artifact there; a panel from the Ishtar Gate of the city of Babylon. I could have stood and stared at that panel for just as long a time, living briefly in my imagined vista of crowds of travelers passing in and out of the city, looking, awe-struck, at that very same panel. The ROM's panel, from the palace, with it's connection to the king and the court, feels very similar, but different too. More private, more connected to the king as an individual rather than the city and its commerce as a whole. I think I could look at either of them for hours at a time, lost in thought.
