A History of the World in 100 Objects - Dr Neil MacGregor [4]
Such acts of imaginative interpretation and appropriation are essential in any history told through things. These were methods of understanding familiar to the founders of the British Museum, who saw the recuperation of past cultures as an essential foundation for understanding our common humanity. The collectors and scholars of the Enlightenment brought to the task both a scientific ordering of facts, and a rare capacity for poetic reconstruction. It was an enterprise being pursued simultaneously on the other side of the world. The Qianlong emperor in China, an almost exact contemporary of George III, in the middle of the eighteenth century was also engaged in gathering, collecting, classifying, categorizing, exploring the past, making dictionaries, compiling encyclopaedias and writing about what he had discovered, on the surface just like an eighteenth-century European gentleman scholar. One of the many things he collected was a jade ring or bi (Chapter 90), very like jade rings found in the tombs of the Zhang Dynasty about 1500 BC. Their use is still unknown today, but they are certainly objects of high status and very beautifully made. The Qianlong emperor admired the strange elegance of the jade bi he found and began to speculate what it was for. His approach was as much imaginative as scholarly: he could see it was very old, and he reviewed all the broadly comparable objects he knew about, but beyond that he was baffled. So, characteristically for him, he wrote a poem about his attempt to make sense of it. And then, perhaps rather shockingly to us, he had his poem inscribed on the prized object itself – a poem in which he concludes that the beautiful bi was meant to be a bowl stand, so he’ll put a bowl on it.
Although the Qianlong emperor came to the wrong conclusion about the purpose of the bi, I confess I admire his method. Thinking about the past or about a distant world through things is always about poetic re-creation. We acknowledge the limits of what we can know with certainty, and must then try to find a different kind of knowing, aware that objects must have been made by people essentially like us – so we should be able to puzzle out why they might have made them and what they were for. It may sometimes be the best way to grasp what much of the world is about, not just in the past but in our own time. Can we ever really understand others? Perhaps, but only through feats of poetic imagination, combined with knowledge rigorously acquired and ordered.
The Qianlong emperor is not the only poet in this history. Shelley’s response to Ramesses II – his Ozymandias - tells us nothing about the making of the statue in ancient Egypt, but a great deal about early nineteenth-century fascination with the transience of empire. In the great ship burial of Sutton Hoo (Chapter 47), two poets are at work: Beowulf’s epic tale is recovered in historical reality, while Seamus Heaney’s evocation of the warrior helmet gives an urgent topicality to this famous piece of Anglo-Saxon body-armour. A history through things is impossible without poets.
The Survival of Things
A history of the world told through objects should therefore, with sufficient imagination, be more equitable than one based solely on texts. It allows many different peoples to speak, especially our ancestors in the very distant past. The early part of human history – more than 95 per cent of humanity’s story as a whole – can indeed be told only in stone, for besides human and animal remains, stone objects are all that survive.
A history through objects, however, can never itself be fully balanced because it depends entirely on what happens to survive. It is particularly harsh on cultures whose artefacts are made mostly of organic materials, and especially so where climate will cause such things to decay: for most of the tropical world, very little survives