ROYAL ONTARIO MUSEUM: THIS MUSEUM WILL BE TELEVISED

Our most recent visit to the Royal Ontario Museum, the ROM, was inspired by TV. No, not the history of TV, which pretty much consists of talking puppets, men in drag and horny spaceship captains, but by a TV program about history. Or, more accurately, a TV show about museums, which have just a little bit to do with history. And (you have to love this irony) the show airs on the History Channel. It's called Museum Secrets.
The show visits museums all around the world, relating stories not heard in a long time, and examining exhibits that have not been seen by the public in a long time, if ever. The series visited the ROM and to celebrate, the museum this month put on display a few of the exhibits discussed in the show.
The exhibit was small, but certainly diverse. They showed everything from a headdress owned (if not actually ever worn) by Sitting Bull ...

.. to a bull dog who's genes can be found in the majority of English Bulldogs in Canada today ..
.. to a rather a gigantic medieval cross bow, accompanied by some mysterious vessels that seem to have thermal properties ..
... some speculate that these vessels may have been an early form of hand grenades ..
.. and some fossil remains, never before displayed, of a "lost" ROM dinosaur ...
Perhaps the most compelling object in the exhibit was that of a baby mummy

Not a lot is known about the infant. It was a male, approximately 6 months old, perhaps from a wealthy family
The museum has never opened the elaborate wrapping for fear of damaging it, or the mummy inside, so they have only had X-rays with which to glean any information about the mummy.
After going through the Museum Secrets exhibit, we decided to spend some time in the ROM's Native Canadian Exhibit, a space that we haven't explored in some time.
Although the exhibit touches on the life of early Natives from all over Canada, much it focussed on the peoples who lived in this part of the world, around the Great Lakes.

One of the objects that really captured my attention and my imagination was a war robe, an elk hide robe that through pictures, told the personal history of it's owners life through the battles in which he had been involved.

You'll see the robe, along with other highlights from our visit, in the video below.

Royal Ontario Museum: Museum Secrets from Victor Kellar on Vimeo.

THE TERRACOTTA ARMY: SOLDIERS OF CLAY, EMPIRES OF BLOOD

History, that big vast clumsy all encompassing thing, the thing that just is, that just happened, that was simply us living without us worrying if, in the future, it would be all neat and definable or cateorizeable, that thing that we have some compulsion to define and organize ...

Sometimes the past, we find, has indeed already been defined, by the actions and usually the madness of one person.

Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great, Ghengis Khan, Cleopatra, Elizabeth I ... all individuals who had remarkable influences on their time; empire builders. Civilizations creators and by the same token, civilization destroyers.

This weekend at the ROM (the Royal Ontario Museum) Collette and I got (kind of) up close and personal with just one of these builder/destroyers

Meet Qin Shi Huangdi, the First Emperor of China. We became aquainted with the Emperor at a an exhibit at the museum that featured pieces excavated from his tomb in China, considered the largest royal burial tomb ever discovered, including members of his famous terracotta warriors
Qin is the individual generally credited with uniting all the nations of China ... his name would be pronounced "Chin" so that gives you some indication. From a collection of smaller, warring kingdoms, Qin made his new nation, which included its first full time professional army, organized systems of trade, currency etc, pretty much out of the force of his own will

And quite a will it was

It was Emperor Qin who started the construction of the Great Wall

He was also responsible for building the subject of the ROM's exhibition, his remarkable tomb. A tomb that was first discovered in the 1970's and is still being excavated at this time. A tomb, that in its entirety, was a a city, complete with buildings, and court and retainers and entertainers and soldiers, all in life size
The army is what is best know today. An army of some 8,000 soldiers complete with armour, real weapons, chariots and horses. All life sized. And each one completely unique, no one the same as the other, all with incredible detail.

The ROM has on display several of these pieces, including two of the nine generals found (so far) in the pits, a couple of horses and several soldiers including this archer

There is a full compliment of archers in the tomb, and they are arranged as they would have been in battle, with a line standing, their crossbows loaded and a line kneeling in front of them, ready to stand and fire so their companions could reload. The level of detail is pretty astonishing. Moving behind the statue, we could see the textured sole of his shoe.

As if the thousands of life sized soldier, horses and chariots weren't enough, Qin's city would not be complete in the afterlife without a full contingent of courtiers and civil officials

These court officials also have remarkable detail. There is a slit in the side of their robe where in real life, they would have their tablet for accounting. Such attention to detail can also be found in the many animals in the tomb, such as the swan that was on display, whose head was titled as if looking up at for a bit of bread.

At the museum we watched a short video about how these thousands of objects were created; each one individually cast and "cooked" via a method that cannot be replicated today. There is much about Qin's tomb that puzzles archeologists. Before the tomb was first discovered in the 70's, many of the descriptions were thought to be preposterous. No one could really conceive of building an entire army out of clay, or equipping them with real weapons, or building huge structures underground ...

There were also descriptions that Qin wanted to mimic nature as well as man made objects. Ancient texts described rivers of mercury to represent actual Chinese rivers. Many scholars dismissed this idea ... until recently, when high mercury levels were recorded underneath the funeral mound

Seeing these objects, especially the beautiful and totally life like statues was impressive. Knowing that are thousands of more just as detailed, just as beautiful, was more impressive. But learning that Qin did all of this, the tomb, the terracotta army, the great wall, the creation of a unified state, in only 15 years ...

It rather boggles the mind. So much, in such a short period of time. Of course, Qin was quite mad or went mad at the end and he was entirely ruthless. Not only characters of clay were entombed down there, so were all his concubines who had not given birth and so were all the artisans, probably why we lost their knowledge.

He was ruthless on many levels and his tremendous conceit of fashioning himself a perfect life sized after life bankrupted the nation and eventually turned his own people upon him. The dynasty that followed Qin, the Han dynasty, learned from his mistakes. Their rulers also buried with them soldiers to take in to the afterlife but they were much smaller and much more modest

Qin must be regarded as one of the greatest empire builders in history. By consolodating the warring kingdoms he actually brought peace and stability to the area. He organized commerce and unified a vast and diversified people. But his arrogance, the very drive that helped him create China, also turned it against him in the long run

Arrogance, madness, vision .. it's all up to interpretation. In less than 20 years the First Emperor created a nation and oversaw the creation of objects that when viewed now, inspire awe.

Soldiers of clay, beautifully preserved. You can no longer see the blood

SOME REALLY, REALLY, REALLY OLD "PULP FICTION"

The ROM (Royal Ontario Museum) here in Toronto has recently been hosting the travelling Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit. Collette and I are members of the ROM but we really don't get down there as often as we should and since she will be going back to work soon, we thought we would take advantage and go down there for the afternoon.

The Dead Sea Scrolls is not one of those exhibitions that I get all twittery and drooly about, but they're something I've been reading and hearing about pretty much my whole life, so I thought I may as well cash in on the opportunity to learn more about them. We weren't allow to take our cameras into that exhibit, so no images from it, sorry.

It was pretty interesting. No matter your views on religion, you can't dismiss it from ancient or recent human history. The exhibit did a great job of presenting the era in which the scrolls were written; Israel under Roman rule, Judaism and Islam and the multi-deity cultures existing side by side .. not peacefully, of course, but all there, with yet another one god religion in the crucible.

Here in Toronto we make this big deal out of our multi-culturalism but of course, that's nothing new . The exhibit did a good job of putting you in that time and place, with Jerusalem as the major urban centre of that part of the world, the Jews living under Herod, under Roman law, of the power of religion, of the need for it, that compel people to create their own deities, their own sense of mythology, the need to identify with their own gods, to the point of risking their very survival as a culture.

I suppose that's some kind of basic human need, or at least the need of humanity, or humans when they form a community. To be unique. To be their own unit. To the point that they need their own deities, so that they can say "We were created for a purpose, for a reason, we are special and we want to acknowledge that by creating the myth of our own creation"

I love the story of how the scrolls were discovered in 1947 by Bedouin tribesman who then sold it to a local trader. When that merchant tried to sell some of the scroll to some western merchants they thought it was a fraud, so well persevered were the parchments. At the museum, there were indeed a few fragments so well preserved they could have been written a year ago, not three thousand years ago.

A lot has been discovered about the scrolls over the years, but there is still some mystery surrounding them. Not necessarily what the scrolls contain (they've been pretty thoroughly translated at this point) but where did they come from and to whom did they belong. They found the remnants of an ancient settlement nearby called Wadi Qumran. One theory goes that this was a Jewish religious sect that had become dissatisfied with the existing temple in Jerusalem. So, apparently, another case of "ok, I agree there is only one god but golly, I think my version of the one god makes way more sense than your version" Sounds like a cranky lot to me

The other theory of Qumran is that it was some kind of artisan settlement. A lot of pottery, dishes, amphorae etc were found there ... a lot, so some researches decided it must have been like some kind of communal factory. The settlement theorists counter argue that Qumran was a commune, and that these types of settlements held mass meals together which would explain the large numbers of supplies. Hell, hundreds of plates and dishes just sounds like your average Kellar dinner get together.

The scrolls themselves were pretty interesting. A lot of it is biblical writing of writing of course. I always chuckle when, in no matter what religion, we have these passages of biblical writing that never seem to make it into the authorized version. If you live your life by this book, has it ever occurred to you that someone .. someone human, just like you .. has edited it? If these writings are so important to you, don't you want them all? You know, me personally, I always want the extended director's cut. Maybe that's why so many of these religions don't seem to make much sense, every body's living their life by the Cole's Notes version (for my American friends, that's like Cliff Notes)

What I liked about the scrolls was twofold: First, just the fact that I was looking at these fragments of writings that were thousands of years old. I have to admit that kind of thing gives me a bit of a tingle. You can read about the past all you want but when you see it, when it's right there in front of your eyes, it really brings it home to you. The other thing I liked about the exhibit were the little bits of recovered artifacts that represented the day to day life of the time: Clay pots, coins, buttons, even bits of fabric and braids made out of human hair. Grand visions of gods are all well and fine but it's this kind of thing, the common detritus of everyday life, that really gives me a sense of who these people were.

After we went through the exhibit, we decided to wander around the ROM for a bit more. Our first stop was the Asian halls, which cover ancient China, Korea and Japan.

Lots of cool stuff to look at here, like these fragments (perhaps not the best term, some of these pieces are huge) from temples and palaces.

Lots of the little details of everyday life, as well, as I was mentioning earlier. Of course, I gravitated right to the armour and weapons

There is art in these ancient weapons, particularly the Japanese ones. But the quality of art overall displayed here is pretty astonishing. There was a huge tapestry, at least 10 feet long, a single work of art depicting a Japanese emperor visiting one of his provinces The detail in thing was breathtaking, from the waves in the river to each individual stick painted in a bundle carried on the back of a wood cutter.

After the Asia galleries we wandered up to Egypt (yeh, that ROM is a big building *rimshot*) another one of our favorite exhibits. Even older artifacts, with some huge murals, statues, and of course mummies

You'll some more examples of these items in the video below.

One can spend all day at the ROM. There are always special exhibits and the permanent ones are deep and varied. But it was a lovely summer day in Toronto, our feet were sore, we were thirsty ... and anyone who is muttering the word "patio" at this point knows us all too well. This time we went to the patio at Jack Astor's at Younge & Dundas, the intersection that defines the downtown area of our city. I love this patio, it's many stories high and gives a nice view of the intersection.

About the video: For the sake of convenience and in respect of ROM policy I took my little Samsung DV palmcorder. So the indoor shots have enough grain in them to bake a loaf of bread. At any rate, it may give you some taste of how we spent our afternoon.

Royal Ontario Museum Outing from Victor Kellar on Vimeo.