This entry was posted on 8/22/2009 6:33 PM and is filed under Footnotes.
I am in England for the summer and for me that means a trip to the British Museum and at least one performance at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre.In these two buildings the whole of human experience spanning four thousand years can be seen and heard. It is a heady journey through love, loss, joy,despair, jealousy and friendship, to name but a few.
Readers of my blog will know that I am a regular visitor tothe British Museum. They have been running a series of truly excellent exhibitions charting the lives and achievements of great men and cultures as different as ancient Babylon, China and Rome.(1)This season the curators are offering visitors Garden andCosmos, a rare chance to see paintings in the royal collection of the Mehrangarh Museum Trust, Jodhpur – remarkably, none of which have been displayed in Europe before.(2) To study them was a revelation. These were commissioned by the Maharaja Bakhat Singh (1725-52), Viljai Singh (1752-93) and Man Singh (1803-43), just at the time the British were expanding their influence (interference?) in the Rajastan region of India. The paintings in brilliant reds, oranges, blues as well as tin and gold, were painted using brushes of squirrel tails. The details are exquisitely fine and detailed, the effect lustrous and vibrant, full of joy and energy. They depict royal life in the gardens of the fort of Nagaur and the maharajahs enjoying a supremely comfortable life surrounded by large numbers of women servants and wives. Life was clearly fun if you were a maharajah.
However, the exhibition also revealed the deeper belief system of the maharajahs and the Naths through their art. To a westerner, like me, this exposition was a revelation. I knew little of the Hindu faith and nothing of the Naths, the yogis and their gurus. I confess I read the accompanying notes and understood some, and while the complexity of the stories and beliefs perplexed me, yet I came away with a great respect for the ancient Hindu tradition, the roots of which extend to between 2000 and 1500BCE duringt he Vedic age of India.(3) I was particularly taken by extracts cited from the Shiva Purana, one of the purāṇas dedicated to the Hindu deity Shiva.(4)
During the same visit to the Museum, I went to the Egyptian gallery to see the gallery opened just this year to showcase the wall paintings of Nebamun.(5) As the official press release states
The paintings are some of the most famous images of Egyptian art, and come from the now lost tomb-chapel of Nebamun, an accountant in the Temple of Amun at Karnak who died c. 1350 BC, a generation or so before Tutankhamun. They show him at work and at leisure -surveying his estates and hunting in the marshes.(6)
The paintings show a real zest for life, a delight in Nature and all its diversity. For a wealthy man, as Nebamun clearly was, his life was as rich as the Indian Maharajahs of three thousand years later. Money might not buy a man happiness, but in any given age it can afford him the greatest conveniences. Yet I was struck by the similarities, despite the millennia separating them, of the sophistication of their belief systems.
I was also struck by the insightful words translated from a fragment of a papyrus called The Teaching of the Vizier Ptahotep, from in a private library at Thebes dated to1950BCE. The ‘Teachings’ contain a message of humility for those aspiring professionals who feel they are destined for greatness. The document reads,
Do not be proud because you are wise,
but consult with the ignorant as well as the wise!
The limits of art are unattainable;
no artist is fully equipped with his mastery.
Fine speech is more precious than malachite,
but can be found with maid-servants at the millstones.
Across the River Thames in the reconstructed ‘wooden O’ a performance of Helen by the truly great Greek playwright Euripides was going on.(7) Greek tragedies and comedies are not performed these days, so it was a chance to catch this one for a mere £5 as a groundling standing for the duration of the play. Written in 412BCE, this tragic-comedy reunited Helen with her husband Menelaus who has been away for 17years fighting the Trojans. It transpired that the Helen they were fighting for was a ghost created by a jealous goddess and she was in Egypt the whole time.When it dawns on him that the loss of lives of hundreds of Greek soldiers’ lives at Troy was all for nought, the messenger exclaims:
Now indeed I see how worthless the seers' doings are, and how full of falsehood; there was no health in the blaze of sacrifice after all, or in the cry of winged birds; even to think that birds can help mankind is certainly foolish. …Then why do we consult prophets? We ought to sacrifice to the gods and ask a blessing, but leave divination alone;for this was invented otherwise, as a bait for a livelihood, and no man grows rich by sacrifices if he is idle. But sound judgment and discernment are the best of seers.(8)
It is a comment that could be applied equally well to pundits and forecasters today.
If there is any message that resounds through the millennia it is surely this one. It is from the Harpist’s Song, written on papyrus dated to about 1400BCE, and its message applies to all people everywhere and in every age:
Follow your heart while you’re alive.
Put perfume on your head,
Clothe yourself with fine linen…
Make holiday and don’t tire of it!
‘Garden & Cosmos’ is at the British Museum until 11thOctober 2009; ‘Helen’ plays at the Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre until 23rdAugust.
