Amanda Gregory, Senior Museum Assistant, British Museum
I manage the team of four Museum Assistants in the Department of Coins and Medals, and we are responsible for all aspects of practical collections care, which includes exhibition installation, loans, gallery maintenance, documentation and supervision of the Study Room, where any interested visitor can examine objects from our collection of over one million coins, medals, banknotes, badges and tokens.
The Citi Money Gallery installation is by far the biggest project I have ever dealt with, and one of the biggest challenges has been the schedule. In any gallery refurbishment, the objects are always installed last, after all the building, decoration and case refurbishment has been completed. This is to ensure that our collection material, particularly sensitive metal, is not adversely affected by fumes given off by paints and varnishes, a process known as “off-gassing”. The opening date is fixed, so if the initial building works overrun, the period we have to install the objects is squeezed.
Some money boxes ready to be installed in the gallery
We begin installing the first of over a thousand objects this week, and have three weeks to complete the task. In the meantime we have been laying out all of the panels for the wall cases and pinning the objects. As we have 48 panels to pin in a small department overflowing with numismatists, horizontal surfaces are at a premium.
Underwear with a concealed pocket to store cash
As well as familiar objects like coins, medals, banknotes and tokens, we have had to tackle more unusual items such as a Barbie cash register, a beer-can shaped money box, and perhaps the most bizarre of all, a pair of lacy ladies’ pants with a concealed pocket to store cash. My colleague Henry nobly took up the challenge of pinning this item, which inevitably made him the butt of many lame jokes. Moments of levity like this, together with the plentiful supply of home-baked cake provided by a kindly curatorial colleague, have kept our spirits up during this challenging time.
The Money Gallery project is supported by Citi and opens in June 2012.
If you visit Room 90 on the fourth floor here at the British Museum, you will find a display of some of the stranger prints in our collection. Hercules Segers and his printed paintings, is on show just outside the study room of the Prints and Drawings department and is a rare outing of the unusual and weird-looking etchings created by this visionary printmaker. Honestly, they attract the amazement of everyone who lays eyes on them.
Distant view with a mossy tree branch
Hercules Segers lived and worked at the beginning of the seventeenth century. He created prints that looked completely different from anything that came before. While other printmakers tried to make identical impressions of their engraved works in order to distribute them to a large market, Segers wanted to create unique works of art.
Every single one of his prints looks entirely different from any other one and the eeriness and desolation they emit makes them stand out from other artists’ work from the same period. This is because, after the printing process, Seger’s hand-coloured most of his works in a wide range of colours, from aubergine purple to olive green (see Distant view with a mossy tree branch: S.5528), while the etched lines are often printed in blues, greens or even bright turquoise (see River valley with a waterfall: S.5519). While most prints of the time were made by applying black to white background, he went against the grain and printed one of his etchings in white on a black background (see Ruins of the Abbey of Rijnsburg: 1854,0628.73).
Segers also invented a completely new printmaking technique called sugar-lift etching, creating darker areas within the landscapes which look grainy upon closer inspection and evoke a sense of the supernatural (see Rocky mountains with a plateau: S.5521).
It is no surprise that when I became curator of Dutch and Flemish drawings and prints in 2010 I was itching to share my passion for this eccentric artist with the Museum’s visitors who I am sure will grow to love his colourful works.
Mary Beard, Professor of Classics, University of Cambridge
If you want to find some really vivid stories about ordinary ancient Romans – not just about the toffs, the generals, and the emperors – some of the very best places to look are their tombstones. These give some amazing insights into the lives of real Romans – not those right at the very bottom of the social heap (people down there couldn’t afford a memorial) but those not all that far from the bottom.
OK, the epitaphs are written in Latin – but it’s often very easy Latin. And even if you don’t know a single word of the language, you can get quite a lot out of them with only a very little help.
In the BBC Two series Meet the Romans, we have looked at some really memorable – and quirky – epitaphs. I’m particularly keen on one ex-slave woman we came across: Allia Potestas, who lived in a ménage à trois with her two lovers (she was always the first up and the last to bed of the trio, we’re told – do things ever change?). But my other favourites were poor little Doris, who died in a terrible fire, and a splendidly pushy baker called Eurysaces, who didn’t only tell you what his job was, but even had his tomb built in the shape of a baker’s oven.
We actually filmed one epitaph from the British Museum, which we didn’t in the end use in the series – partly because there was almost too much to say about it. You can find it on the wall in Room 70
It’s a tombstone from Rome (first century BCE) of a husband and wife pictured in the middle. He (on the left) is called Aurelius Hermia and she (on the right) is called Aurelia Philematio (or Philematium, as it’s written a bit further down). They are both ex-slaves, who have at some point been given their freedom.
Inscribed stone funerary relief of Aurelius Hermia and his wife Aurelia Philmatium
How do we know that? Well right in the middle of both their names are two give-away letters “ L. L” – short for “Lucii libertus” or “Lucii liberta”, that is, “the ex-slave man or ex-slave woman of a man called Lucius”. One of the most extraordinary facts is that well over half the tombstones discovered from the city commemorate ex-slaves, and most of them are instantly recognizable with the letter “L” or more often the abbreviation “Lib” in their names. Romans owned hundreds of thousands of slaves, but also freed loads of them. Slavery in Rome wasn’t always a life-sentence.
Anyway, the husband takes the left. This side is more battered (as you can see, even a bit of the name has been lost). But we can still work out that he was a “lanius de colle Viminale”, “a butcher from the Viminal hill”, one of the seven hills of Rome. (The word “lanius” is missing its first couple of letters… but if we had, in English, the phrase “…tcher from the Viminal hill”, we’d have little doubt what it meant!).
He goes on to explain that his wife had predeceased him (you can spot the word “praecessit”), and of course that she had always lived devoted to him, as he was devoted to her (that is, she “stood by her man”, “fida viro” on the fifth line from the bottom). That, I guess, is a cliché even of epitaphs today. I don’t think we have to imagine that there was literally never a cross word between this pair.
Detail of the right hand side of the tombstone
It’s the woman’s side on the right, though, where things get really curious. It starts off with some fairly conventional praise for a Roman woman. She was “casta, pudens, volgei nescia”, that’s “chaste, modest and unknown to the crowd” – she was “not gossiped about” would perhaps be a better translation. But after that it starts to get intriguing, if not downright odd.
The husband, we are told, “was more than a parent” to the wife (you can spot the word “parens” seven lines up). They had met when she was just seven years old (“septem me naatam annorurum”) and he took her on his lap (“gremio”), and she died when she was 40 (“XXXX”) – meanwhile her husband had flourished under her dutiful care (“meo officio”).
Hang on, we think. He took her on his lap when she was just seven years old? What exactly was Hermia up to with little Philematio on his knee? When precisely did they get married? Of course we don’t – and can’t – know. But explanations tend to fall into two broad camps.
Explanation A. Some people imagine that when this pair had been slaves, the older Hermia had looked after the little girl, just like a dad… and maybe years later when both had been freed by their master Lucius, they married. This was a slave friendship that grew into free married union.
Explanation B. Other people take a rather more dismal view of the partnership. They point out that Roman girls often got married much earlier than we do. In Meet the Romans we find one 12 year old, dying just before her wedding day. Even seven years old is not absolutely unheard of. So forget all those romantic notions of a kindly Hermia innocently befriending the young Philematio in the slave quarters. Slave or free, he had probably marked her out (at least) as his partner at the tender age of seven.
I hope Explanation A is the right one. But we certainly can’t be sure. The dutiful, chaste and modest Philematio may have been, quite literally, a child bride.
Professor Mary Beard presents Meet The Romans on BBC Two at 21.00 on Tuesdays from 17 April
Mary Beard, Professor of Classics, University of Cambridge
In my job, I get the biggest kicks out of making ordinary things used by ordinary ancient Romans really SING. Go to any museum and the big objects always cry out for attention (no one is going to miss those massive marble sculptures). The tiny precious ones get their fair share of attention too: the exquisite cameos – sometimes managing to pack a whole story into less than a couple of square centimetres – attract crowds of admirers. I’m as big a fan of these as anyone.
But what I really like doing is turning the spotlight onto the ordinary objects that most people don’t notice – the things that you and I would have used if we’d been Roman.
I’ve just made a series of documentaries for BBC Two (“Meet the Romans…!”) and I’ve been trying to get a bit closer to the ordinary Romans than history books usually take us. It’s a series of programmes that features the bodyguards, the hairdressers, and the bakers, of ancient Rome – not the emperors, the orators and the other toffs. And in our search for the Roman (or woman) on the street, our first stop – after the museums of Italy itself was the British Museum.
We filmed a wonderful gladiator’s helmet from Pompeii, and I came as close as anyone has for the last couple of thousand years to trying it on (no, very right and proper, it’s not allowed). But we had just as much fun with some cheap little gladiator models… maybe the kind of things Roman kids played “toy gladiators” with – and with a handful of pretty ordinary Roman rings.
Ancient Romans didn’t have wedding rings in exactly the same way that we do. The woman didn’t get a ring, as a standard thing, when she got married. But you do find some rings that show the pair of clasped hands that are often a symbol of Roman marriage. They were probably a gift from husband to wife (or possibly vice versa) when they got married. But what emotions lay behind this. True romantic love? Maybe. But try thinking about them as a gift from a 30-plus year old man to a bride of (say) 13, as was often the case.
Gold finger-rings showing the ceremony of joining hands at a marriage
Something of the personal, ordinary Roman voice really comes out with another ring. It’s a nice, middle range ring (and I really mean, not especially posh). And written on it are three words in Latin “Te amo parum” – “I love you too little”. It’s an odd thing to put on a ring given from Roman man (I guess) to Roman sweetheart: “I don’t love you enough”.
But maybe the point of the words is: “I don’t love you enough because it would be impossible to love you as much as you deserve.” I like to think that it‘s a quirky, ordinary lover’s voice that takes us right into the heart of one bloke’s relationship with his girlfriend.. Or wife.
Professor Mary Beard presents Meet The Romans on BBC Two at 21.00 on Tuesdays from 17 April
Duygu Camurcuoglu, Money Gallery project conservator, British Museum
As project conservator for the re-display of the Money Gallery, it is my job to keep an eye on the ceramics, glass and metal objects going on show in June. While the re-display continues and the final work has started on the design of the gallery, myself and seven other conservators who are specialised in different materials (ceramics, glass, stone, organics, paper and prints), are responsible for checking through more than 1,000 objects to ensure they are in good condition to go on permanent display, so our visitors get the best out of these fascinating artefacts.
I joined the project in late January 2012 and since then I have looked at nearly 1,000 coins and objects mainly made from metal. There are 19 cases in total containing mixed materials and my responsibility is to check all the objects in these cases and direct specialist conservators to their related items.
Examining coins in the lab
Luckily most objects require only light cleaning or simple stabilisation work, but fragile objects needing more detailed work such as paper and prints are given more time to complete their treatments.
One of the most interesting parts of this project is to be in contact with other curatorial departments and see all money related objects from different parts of the world and from different eras. Even though the number of objects to be checked is very high, we maintain a good communication with the departments to complete the work on time while considering the requirements from specific curators. In the mean time, we give advice to the design team on the environmental conditions inside cases such as relative humidity and light levels as well as on the use of conservation grade case materials such as boards, tapes, fabrics and mounts, which must be used for the long-term display of the artefacts.
High relative humidity and light levels can cause problems on objects such as those made from metals, wood, paper and textile, while dry conditions can also be very damaging particularly on organic objects; the effects can be warping, shrinking or drying. Higher light levels can cause textile, paper and painted surfaces to fade away.
The most challenging situations take place when different materials are desired to be displayed in the same cases. For instance, an iron dagger with a velvet-covered scabbard from the collection of the Department of Asia, was assessed and we decided that the light levels should be minimum and the object should only stay on display for a year due to the vulnerability of velvet under display conditions. Relative humidity levels must be mid-range for textiles (40-55%), while iron requires the lowest levels as possible. In a situation like this, curators and conservators need to be in agreement, with support from the design team, that the display requirements for certain objects can be met.
Our work, of course, is not complete without monitoring the cases throughout the display, checking how the most susceptible objects react with changes in the case environment. Apart from the risk of very dry and damp conditions, fluctuations of relative humidity can create undesirable conditions for the objects and need to be addressed immediately.
Conservators, preventive conservation scientists and museum assistants work closely to make sure all the objects are safe and plan to deal with unexpected situations during the course of display. Small monitoring units for temperature and humidity will be placed in the cases in order to check the conditions regularly.
The conservation work on all the objects needs to be completed by the end of April, so time is tight! There will be many silver and gold coins put on display, mounted on new grey background fabric – and visitors will be able to really see their detail thanks to the way, particularly the silver coins, have been cleaned.
Most of the objects are now ready to be placed in cases and the conservation team will be on hand throughout to work with the museum assistants and curators, advising them on the safest display options while still giving visitors the best view of these objects.
The Money Gallery project is supported by Citi and opens in June 2012.
For many years before joining the British Museum as a curator in the Department of Ancient Egypt and Sudan, my life was tied up with the so-called ‘Ramesseum papyri’: a library of ancient Egyptian papyri that were discovered in 1895-6 under the temple of Ramses II, now known as the ‘Ramesseum’. As a school boy I had bought Alan Gardiner’s 1955 partial publication of some of the papyri and my doctorate was a commentary on one of the poems preserved in them, The Eloquent Peasant.
With Mme Nelson examining new finds from her excavations at the site of the Ramesseum in 2006
The 24 papyri are an almost unique surviving example of an ancient Egyptian library that was buried in its owner’s tomb around 1680 BC, but although some of them have been much studied they are extraordinarily fragmentary and fragile. Over the years, Bridget Leach, the Museum’s papyrus conservator, and I have helped many students and scholars examine them, and every time we have worried about their extreme fragility. And so we were eager to have a full visual record made in high resolution colour, so that the papyri could also be studied remotely without being disturbed too often, as well as enabling a global audience to access them. Nothing can substitute for working on an original manuscript, of course, and this will continue, but a good visual record allows much of the preliminary work to be done virtually, before a final collation with the actual fragile originals.
The British Museum’s Online research catalogue format offered a marvellous tool for this visual presentation, especially as it is linked to the collections database with its descriptions and bibliographies. Unlike a print catalogue it is continually updatable (and it needs to be: in May I am in Geneva to examine a new doctoral thesis by Pierre Meyrat on the previously untranslated magical texts in the library). Many of the fragments have not been fully published, some have never been published in photographs before, so this format will open up the library for study – as a whole and for the first time in its modern history.
Lisa Baylis photographing the papyri in Berlin in 2007
Most satisfyingly for me, the catalogue includes all of the papyri. Two of the most important manuscripts are now in the great Egyptian Museum and Papyrus Collection in Berlin (including the poem of my doctorate). Thanks to their immensely kind collaboration, I was there with Lisa Baylis, a British Museum photographer, in 2007, and these two papyri now sit together with the London papyri in this new virtual version of the ancient library. The excavator had distributed the objects that he found with the papyri to the various institutions that had funded him, and they are now in Manchester, Cambridge and Philadelphia, but the catalogue has links to these items in their various institutions, and so reunites not only the papyri but the whole surviving tomb-group.
Underlying the project is the sad and rather irritating fact that Egyptologists often study texts away from their material context – both their physical reality as manuscripts and their archaeological findspot – and I hope that the catalogue will help change this and encourage a more grounded and theoretically informed approach in line with the so-called ‘Material philology’ school of textual studies. But my dominant memory of the whole enterprise is simpler: the sheer fun and overwhelming kindness I’ve encountered with so many helpful friends, students and colleagues in Britain, France, Germany, America and Egypt, who all have helped us get to this point in a common project.
But this is only a beginning, simply one step in encouraging people to start re-reading these texts that have miraculously survived (only just!) from 1680 BC.
It’s now a couple of months since the last blog post – so much has been going on that we haven’t had time to write anything about it all. Sometimes, when I talk to friends outside the museum sector, they are surprised at how long major exhibition or gallery projects seem to take, but when you’re working on one of these projects, you see the number and range of things that there are to do.
At the moment, there is hoarding up in what will become The Citi Money Gallery, and behind there, the cases have all been emptied, and the walls and ceiling have been repainted. Next, there’s work to do on cabling and other basic infrastructure, before we start to install the new displays. Before the scaffolding came down, I made sure I went up to the top, touched the ceiling, and took this picture.
The view above the hoardings
At the same time, the final work is being done on the design of the gallery, including the layout of objects in the cases, and the text that will go with them. With so many specialist curators involved, each piece of text has to be edited, and checked, and re-checked, to make sure we have every detail right. Then, the text and images all go to our graphic designer to create the panels and labels for the new displays. As I write, we are expecting the first proofs of the panels to arrive, which means that it starts to feel like the new gallery is nearly ready to be installed.
The objects aren’t being neglected either, and the team of Museum Assistants in the Department of Coins and Medals are busy checking all the object lists, and getting all the objects ready for display. This preparation involves every object being individually checked by one of the Museum’s conservation team to make sure it’s in good enough condition to go on permanent display, as well as so they can advise on how objects are mounted. With more than 1000 to check, this is a big job.
It’s amazing sometimes what a gallery curator gets involved with – from paint colour choices to deep discussions about how to ensure consistency in our use of ancient place names, and from climbing scaffolding to talking about whether a plastic object would deteriorate if it was on display for five years. I’ll be talking more about this to the next generation of museum curators at a Museum Studies day in March, which I’m very excited about.
The Money Gallery project is supported by Citi and opens in June 2012.
Anna Bright, Interpretation Officer, British Museum
In redeveloping the Money Gallery at the British Museum we have been thinking about ways to help visitors make sense of a collection that will span 4,000 years of world history and comprise over 1000 objects. On average a visitor to the Museum may spend several hours here, but only three or so minutes in any particular gallery. Given that one of our aims is to encourage visitors to engage with the collection, we want to give them quick and accessible ways into some of the fascinating and important stories that these objects tell.
We have planned a trail of 12 key objects that have been designed to be as eye-catching as possible. Visitors can either follow the trail, or dip into it at any point. If someone reads the text that accompanies these 12 objects they will get an overview of the major themes in the gallery. We call these key objects ‘gateway objects’ as they can work as gateways into all or part of a gallery. This interpretative approach has been developed at the Museum over the last five years and we have found that it can be an effective way to help our audiences to engage with bigger stories and themes.
Maiolica offering box, Italy, sixteenth century
Gateway objects work on the principle that people are drawn to objects rather than text. By placing important contextual information in close proximity to a key object, we increase the likelihood that visitors will read that information. Ideally a gateway object would embody the following four qualities: it should work as an intellectual gateway into a section of the display; be an important object in the collection; be intrinsically attractive and eye-catching, and it should be an iconic object visitors have heard of.
One of the challenges we face in the Money Gallery is that many of the objects are small. It’s not that they are necessarily unattractive, but it is fair to say that they are less attention grabbing than, say, an ancient Egyptian mummy. We have worked closely with designers to make sure that our 12 key objects stand out as much as possible. As the design has progressed we are all getting excited about how the new gallery will look, and are looking forward to seeing whether our gateway objects do in fact entice visitors to spend more time engaging with the fascinating and diverse collection on display.
The Money Gallery project is supported by Citi and opens in June 2012.
The Cloisters is a truly exceptional museum devoted entirely to medieval art and architecture and the chessmen look perfectly at home. They occupy five cases in the Romanesque Hall, a space that resembles a great medieval hall where a lord – or King – might once have played with chesspieces just like these.
The Lewis chessmen fire our imagination because they are miniature people carved with great skill and intricacy from walrus tusks. They are generally considered to be mournful, grumpy or comic because of their squat forms, protuberant eyes and down-turned mouths but they are also works of great beauty. This is especially evident from the seated figures of the kings, queens and some of the bishops, all of whom occupy elaborately decorated thrones.
Berserker pieces in the British Museum collection
One of the most significant pieces on loan to the Cloisters is the Berserker. This unusual character may not be recognisable to most players of chess but at the time the Lewis chessmen were made in the twelfth century, the Berserker took the place of the modern day rook. He stands armed with a sword and exposes his huge teeth with which he bites into his shield. It is this gesture that identifies him as a Berserker – a fierce warrior drawn from Norse mythology that bites his shield in a self-induced frenzy prior to battle.
The Berserker has been imaginatively used in the merchandise on sale at the Cloisters where T-shirts emblazoned with the Berserker’s features broadcast “Berserk for Chess’ – I’ll be wearing mine in London!
The Cloisters exhibition, The Game of Kings: Medieval Ivory Chessmen from the Isle of Lewis, opens on 15 November and runs until 22 April 2012 during which time New Yorkers will undoubtedly develop Lewis chessmen frenzy.
Last week, the extremely exciting news broke of the discovery of the ship-burial of a high-status Viking in Scotland.
The excavation was undertaken by a team of experts from a number of institutions working on the Ardnamurchan Transitions Project, which is exploring evidence on the Ardnamurchan peninsula on the west coast of Scotland for the Mesolithic, Neolithic and Bronze Age periods (from about 9000 to about 1000 BC).
Laid to rest at least 1,000 years ago, this must have been an important individual as his remains were found surrounded by what’s left of a large ship (mainly just rivets, as the wood it was built from has rotted away) and possessions including a sword, shield, knife, axe, bronze ringed pin and whetstone.
Some of the finds shown in these videos are very similar to objects in the collection of the British Museum, where the Vikings are well-represented.
My colleague Barry Ager told me about another boat burial dating back to more or less the same period as this one. It was discovered in Lilleberge Norway in the nineteenth century, and there is a large collection of iron rivets from it in our collection online.
This fascinating discovery also reminded me of a much earlier ship-burial, objects from which are on display here at the British Museum. The burial at Sutton Hoo in Suffolk is not Viking, rather it held the remains of an Anglo-Saxon of clearly high status and surrounded by some incredible finds, many of which have become rightly famous – the magnificent helmet in particular.
A new display in Room 2 at the British Museum shows some of these finds in the context of the wider early medieval world of Europe and beyond, while their permanent home undergoes a refurbishment.
It interestingly places the both Anglo-Saxons and Vikings – among others – in the wider context of contact and trade across a vast area from Scandinavia to north Africa, the Atlantic to the Black Sea.
