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| Illustration by Minho Kwon |
This has proved to be one of the objects which has stayed longest in my mind during five years spent off and on
writing Curiosities from the Cabinet–
a Babylonian tablet made in 700-500 BC sitting in the middle of room 55 in the
British Museum. Assistant Keeper of the Department of the Middle East Irving
Finkel explains that it is ‘the world’s oldest usable map’. The Babylonians who
drew it were picturing their known world – a circle surrounded with a ring of
‘bitter water’ and six stylised mountains where there are wonders like ‘winged
birds [which] cannot flap their own wings’, and oxen which can run fast enough
to catch wild animals.
‘The real principle [of the map] is to anchor
in position some of the heroes and important things in mythology and odd things
that were to be seen if you went far enough,’ says Dr Finkel. ‘It’s an attempt
to bring a lot of disparate material under control.’
Perhaps the tablet’s staying power for
me is because it is a document as much as an object. Its words and pictures throw
out links to other times and civilisations, such as the Judeans who lived
alongside the Babylonians and borrowed the flood myth from them (which the
tablet’s script touches on), or to later medieval myths recounting the fabulous
things to be seen on voyages. Also because of the questions it throws up, often
unanswerable – which birds were those? Was it purely a kind of ‘mental map’, to
help people understand their world, or might it have been actually used for
navigation?
After speaking to me about the
tablet for half an hour at his desk in the British Museum, Dr Finkel went off
script and chatted about what he thought museums were for, showing that even
very experienced museum professionals still puzzle over the nature and function
of their institutions. He commented:
‘Museums are not meant to be universities. In my opinion the
correct way to categorise a museum is as a wonder house. The museum should be
full of wonders so when you see something you think ‘I never knew they could
make something that beautiful’, or ‘I never knew they had earrings like that
all that time ago.’ You see something and questions present themselves and
sometimes you answer them, sometimes you don’t.
‘Another idea is to connect objects typologically - toys
together, cosmetics together, or glasses, dolls, tea strainers, whatever they
may be. I have always loved those cases that are absolutely stuffed so every
time you go there you see something you’ve never seen before. People’s lives
are beset by the same problems, and by and large they tend to respond in the
same ways. But the things they produce are always characteristic of their part
of the world and their artistic tradition. If you put objects with the same
purpose from different parts of the world together, then visitors will
automatically supply their own context, and the objects will fizz into a unity.’