They’ve arrived. No, I don’t mean the Turks, but the hordes of visitors at Turks: A Journey of a Thousand Years: 600—1600 AD. It was like a rugby game in there today, albeit a very polite one.

But the exhibits, if not perhaps the exhibition, deserve the attention.

I only had an hour to spare, and so concentrated on two sections. Doing it in parts, if you possibly can, is undoubtedly the way to go; the span is so broad, the flood of empires of which you’ve never heard before (or at least I certainly hadn’t) so overwhelming.

I learnt that the people called the Turks first appear in history in the 6th century AD, when they established ties with the Western Wei dynasty (535-51) in China. They are, on the Silk Road, at the very crossroads of the world, as is made clear in rooms two and three, where all of the exhibits are religious, but pick your religion. There’s Buddhism, Nestorian Christianity*, Manichaeism, Mazdaism (a local form of Zoroastrianism), and some of the carved stone statues (used as gravemarkers) look distinctly animist to me, although that’s not specifically mentioned that I saw.

Marking graves with stones was one of the characteristics that continued through centuries and religions. I was taken with a humble gravestone, a triangular lump of basalt worked only on one side to produce a flat surface. It was scratched, almost graffitied, with a Nestorian cross, and the label said “identifies the deceased, a Turkic maiden, and her death year, ‘the year of the dragon’ using a 12-year animal cycle adopted by the Turks”.

(NOTE TO CURATOR: we want names! This maiden wasn’t anonymous when she was buried, why should she be now?)

It is displayed with several similar gravestones, and a note that many of these were found in Semirechye (modern Kakakstan and Krygyzstan). I will confess I was unaware of a country of the former name and I only got eight Google hits – is it maybe a quasi-autonomous republic of somewhere? They weren’t clear. Anyone who knows, please comment! (If it is a country, is this a record minimum for Googling?) (ADDITION: I meant Kakastan – sorry I realise this wasn’t very clear!)

One of the similar gravestones, from 1302, is dated “according to the era of Alexander the Great”, showing how his influence lingered in the region, as I’d previously learnt at the Musee Guimet.

Opposite were some stakes of a form that I’ve never seen before. Carefully shaped into an octagonal cross-section, up to a metre or so in length, covered in writing (Uighur), they seem to have been driven into the floor of temples to record the contributions of benefactors. One temple in Khocho seems to have been entirely founded by a woman, but again, no name is given!

This delightfully eclectic period seems to have come to an end in the late 900s, when there were mass conversions to Islam and significant migrations.

I said the exhibits were great, but sadly not so the exhibition. Perhaps it is showing signs of the internal wrangles at the RA – the people-flow seems very badly arranged (objects that can be seen from all sides only have labels on one, crowding everyone together), the print on the labels is far too small, so the RA visitors, who aren’t on average on the young side, were almost pressing their faces up to the surface to read them, and the explanatory panels so packed with names, dates and times as to be almost incomprehensible – a dictionary reference rather than an explanation.

Still, the objects are wonderful – go anyway!

*There’s a great deal on Nestorian Christianity in China on this site.

Julia Gillard has withdrawn from the contest for the leadership of the Australian Labor Party. That’ll teach her: next time she’ll put apples in the fruit bowl, (except of course that kitchen photo will pursue her forever).

Lenny Ann Low says: “There are times when even the most cynical of us have unavoidable patriotic, lump-in-the-throat moments … ”

Ah, no.

But if you want to be cheered up, particularly is you are a sub-editor (copy-editor for Americans), check out The Onion for Someday, I will copy-edit the great American novel.

The first essay in the Yourcenar collection on which I posted yesterday is a comparison of the state of Rome as recorded in the Historia Augusta (which covers the second and third centuries AD).

This site, which has the – almost – complete set in Latin and English, rather unkindly describes it as a “mockumentary”.

Yourcenar would agree with that conclusion, but her main point is, for her, a rather conventional one, that the “decline” of Rome in this period is being mirrored as she writes: “We have learned to recognize that gigantism which is merely the morbid mimetism of growth, that waste which makes a pretense of wealth in states already bankrupt, that plethora so quickly replaced by dearth at the first crisis … that atmosphere of inertia and panic, of authoritarianism and of anarchy, those pompous reaffirmations of a great past amid present mediocrity and immediate disorder, those reforms which are merely palliatives … The modern reader is at home.” (Pages 22-3; written in 1958 – and boy could she write)

But what did take me was the reflection she makes about how today’s times might be seen not as something new, but merely as an extension of Roman times “… Hitler waging his last battles in Sicily or in Benevento like a Holy Roman emperor of the Middle Ages, or to Mussolini .. strung up by the heels in a Milan garage, dying in the 20th the death of a third-century emperor.” (pp. 21-2)

It left me musing about how a historian in 3,000AD, or 4,000AD, assuming of course that there is any such creature – and the way we are going with the environment it may well have a carapace and lots of legs, so think a bit differently to we do – might sum up the history of the world before the time it gets interesting, the last millennia or two for her. (Much as I skipped over the Hittites and neo-Hittites in Syria a couple of days ago.)

Of course the themes would depend on this creature’s own concerns; she might want to do decadent decay, if she thought her own society was decaying, as did Yourcenar, or she might even want to do Victorian era-style growth towards a glorious present.

But it is salutary to think how unimportant most of the things that we anguish over today would be, and to consider what elements of today’s politics and society might be thought important.

I’ve always thought of Piranesi as a sculptor; when I look several times a week at the giant, spectacular, if rather ugly “Piranesi vase”, which towers above your head in a riot of decorated marble in the Enlightenment gallery in the British Museum, that’s perhaps not surprising, but I’m learning from Marguerite Yourcenar that he was primarily, and probably most importantly, an artist and engraver.

He produced “coffee table books” (no they hadn’t invented “coffee tables” then, but it describes their nature – something that was a status symbol as well as a beautiful text) – that sold to the same clients as bought his “restored” sculptures. (Sometimes so restored there was only a tiny fraction of ancient material involved.)

Piranesi was very much of the artisan class, although he was ennobled by the Pope in 1767. Yourcenar is interesting on the way in which he did not regard himself as an “artist” in the prima dona-ish way that is often regarded today.

“To the last he docilely follows custom, which consists in numbering on the plates each part of the structure, each fragment of ornament still in place, and making certain explanatory notes in the lower margin corresponding to them, without it ever occurring to him, as it certainly would to an artist nowadays, that these schoolbook specifications or engineering diagrams might diminish the aesthetic or picturesque value of his work.” (p. 98)

Yourcenar (writing in the Sixties) notes that about a third of the structures Piranesi recorded did not survive, and many more had been significantly modified or “restored” in unsympathetic ways. His work is thus a hugely valuable record of what has been, only relatively recently, lost.

He did, however, have an “artistic” side, expressed in the curiously modern-feeling Imaginary Prisons (1745). Supposed to have been done while he was suffering from a fever (quite likely malaria), they have a haunting, frightening insanity reminiscent of the late Goya.

Yourcenar says they are unlike anything that came before, but presage much to come. They “may well be one of the first and most mysterious symptoms of that obsession with torture and incarceration which increasingly possess men’s minds during the last decades of the 18th century. One thinks of Sade and the dungeons of the Florentine villa in which his Mirsky imprisons his victims … both express that abuse which is somehow the inevitable conclusion of the Baroque will to power.” (p. 118)

The prints are here. See also an essay by Aldous Huxley on the Prisons etchings, and a piece on a modern exhibition they inspired.

(The Dark Brain of Piranesi and Other Essays, Marguerite Yourcenar, Trans. Richard Howard, 1980)

… particularly female politicians. Julia Gilliard is vying for the leadership of the Australian Labour Party. But her kitchen looks too empty. That obviously rules her out then.

This story, while still dwelling on her single, childless condition, at least manages to say something about her politics.

If you need cheering up after that, check out this pleasant little essay in response to that inevitable question when a woman reaches a certain age: Are you pregnant yet?

A sample: “Is there any carbon-based life form who wouldn’t rather be relaxing in a café with a warm, spicy cup of tea than scraping pudding from the ceiling or having someone claim they’ve ruined their life?”

Not yet on top of my inboxes at the end of the week, but I thought I’d share a few gems I’ve found thus far.

First up today’s Oxford Dictionary of National Biography character of the day is Mary Carleton (nee Moders), better known as the “German Princess”. That last was the role she played in life, and on the stage. From humble beginnings, she learnt the manners, the language and the skills to pass herself off as aristocracy, and when finally exposed, having escaped a bigamy charge, she played herself upon the stage. Were she alive today, she’d undoubtedly be on I’m a Celebrity … And, probably, her story would also end badly, although not on the scaffold.

A review of Phillip Taylor’s Goddess on the Rise: Pilgrimage and Popular Religion in Vietnamprovides a glimpse of the rise of the “the Britney Spears of the Vietnamese religious world”, the goddess Ba Chua Xu, the “Lady of the Realm”.

An interesting thought, perhaps, for cross-cultural comparisons: “The author further elaborates on this popularity in the context of Vietnam’s late socialism that is marked by a thriving, urban-based economy. To the same extent as the vibrant markets are dominated by commanding women, the world of spirits, with whom a significant number of them enter into a symbolic, reciprocal relationship of support and indebtedness, is predominantly inhabited by female deities.”

An announcement introduces Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton’s Bodies in Contact: Rethinking Colonial Encounters in World History, which sounds like fascinating attempt to tell the history of the colonialism around the world (including Ottoman and Han) from a gender perspective.

“Discussing subjects as diverse as slavery and travel, ecclesiastical colonialism and military occupation, marriage and property, nationalism and football, immigration and temperance, Bodies in Contact puts women, gender, and sexuality squarely at the center of the “master narratives” of imperialism and world history.”

Finally, and I take no responsibility if this damages your wallet (it has already done mine), Oxford University Press is having a direct sale, with many books 75 per cent off. If you are in Europe or the Middle East it is here, America here. I don’t know about Australia, Asia or other parts.