Philobiblon

I spent this afternoon working at the British Museum’s Big Draw event. It’s a day when the Great Court really comes into its own, as a great hive of buzzing, excited people. It is surprising how keen people of all ages are to express themselves with a crayon when given the chance.

Then I stewarded a talk by the artist Professor Michael Craig Martin. (I’ll confess I hadn’t heard of him; while I enjoy modern art I’ve not developed the interest as much as I would like.) Some samples here.

He made some interesting observations, obviously from an artist/philosopher’s eye.

* Objects are becoming more and more alike, and their functions less and less obvious, e.g. telephones. In the Seventies it was obvious how you held a handset, where you talked and where you listened, but that is not true of mobiles today.

* Asked about the apparent lack of emotion in his work, he questioned why we assume a violent squiggled line is more “expressive” or “emotional” than a straight line.

* He argued a true personal expression is something that the artist cannot help; that’s what tells you what the artist is.

* Asked about the YBA movement (many of whose members he taught) he said that while many might lack traditional skills, this was not a handicap, indeed it could be an advantage, because they had to discover an individual way to express themselves, a way to dominate what they did. “When you are talking about a skill it is something we recognise; it already exists.”

The talk was supposed to be mainly about the “Drawing the Line” exhibition, which he curated. It matched, or paired, drawings from all ages, and it was interesting how some of the most modernist sat beautifully beside a Raphael or a Michelangelo, each telling you something about the other.

From today’s DNB email: “There is some evidence to suggest that Godwine [father of Henry II of England] was the son of the late tenth-century renegade and pirate Wulfnoth of Sussex, who had rebelled spectacularly against Aethelred the Unready and had purloined his fleet; and judging from the location of Godwine’s estates it does appear that the family had long been established as thegns in Sussex and Hampshire.”

Strange news from Shadwell
Being a True & Just Relation of
the Death of Alice Fowler, who had
for many years been accounted a Witch

“In King St near Whapping, lived a widow woman named Alice Fowler, about the age of four score years, and had always been a malicious ill-natured woman and for many years had been accounted a witch; she was always observed to be muttering and grumbling to herself, and was continually holding a Discourse as it were with herself … she was always poor, as it is observable that those kind of people are.”

[Her son Waler, had been transported to Barbados; “nine years since he was hung for murdering his wife & breaking open a house.”]

The poor neighbour who was nursing her went out, locking her in & taking the key. When she came back “local account had her lying dead on the floor with her 2 big toes tied together, naked, with a blanket lying over her” … neighbours examined the body and “found 5 Teats, all as black as Coal”.

She was buried at St Paul’s, Shadwell. No one attended the funeral.

Printed by E. Mallet, London, 1685.
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I just cycled home through Shadwell; it hasn’t changed much.

I learnt today from a talk at the British Museum that you’ve got it all wrong. Mummies were not white, or even off-white; most of the ones you see in museums are just like that because they’ve been exposed to light for some time and the dye has faded.

The outer wrapping was usually a deep pinkish red (there are a couple of examples in gallery 64 for anyone interested), sometimes with strips of contrasting colour patterned across it.

The mummy masks have blue hair because the hair of the gods was thought to be made of lapis lazuli, and and faces were made of gold, or gold-painted cloth because that was what the gods’ faces were made of.

If the owner, or the rellies, could afford it, the body was coated with resin after the drying process, a resin made especially from the pistacia tree. The ancient Egytian word was sineture (sp?) – “that which makes divine”. It again helped up the mummy on the level of the gods.

You could buy happiness in the afterlife, it seems, or at least the status of a god.

More here.

From yesterday’s research: John Wilkins, distinguished Royal Society member, was, I learnt, keen on developing a new “universal” language. (A sign of how even in the 17th-century at least some people saw that Latin was on the way out.) His “Essay Towards a Real Character and Philosophical Language” was read to the Royal Society on May 14, 1668.

His language is explored in an essay here, appropriately enough “translated from the Spanish”.

I went to an interesting talk today (well yes it is 2am, but it’s today in my terms) on Mahdism in Africa at the Britism Museum. (I love learning about things I know nothing about.)

The object highlighted that I found most interesting was a huge cylindrical slit drum, maybe 2m long and a good metre in circumference, carved, it seemed, out of a single tree trunk, that was taken from the forces of the Khalida Obdullahi (the Mahdi’s successor) after the battle of Omdurman (Sudan) in 1898. This is a form normally used many hundreds of miles to the south-west in Central Africa, but was probably made by the black slave troops who eventually formed Mahdism’s crack troops. (This was after the Mahdi had got over his aversion to firearms, which did not square with his “knightly” form of Islam.)

What is particularly interesting is that it is carved with Arabic script, “Islamising” it, and taking it from its pagan roots. There are also some “throwing knives” displayed beside it that have been through the same process.

Unfortunately the drum is not on the BM’s website, but there are some fairly similar ones here.

There are quote marks around “throwing knives” because actually these were seldom if ever used for that purpose, or even as weapons, although they look like pretty effective ones, being instead symbols of rank and status. (Some early Europeans even called them boomerangs, but as you can tell from the pictures here, you really wouldn’t want them whizzing back at you.)

A note in the gallery says: “Mahdism remains a vital political force in contemporary Sudan”; history isn’t just for fun.)