Across the Board, Segedunum; Buried Treasure, the Hancock Museum, Tyne and wear
I have been visiting the British Museum for more than 60 years. As an infant from London's East End, my first and sharpest memories are of being able to see and touch the Elgin Marbles - in those days you could do both - and the mysterious atmosphere of the Egyptian Galleries.
This gave me an early insight into the wonder of things.
Now, to my delight, the British Museum has thrown off curatorial caution and started to visit me in Northumbria. Fruits of the Partnership UK Project, exhibitions are emanating from Bloomsbury, arriving in the North-East with the volition of overdue London buses and more than three at once.
The first of these opened in Segedunum, the Roman Fort at Wallsend. Across the Board, Around the World in 18 Games, is curated by Irving Finkel, the assistant curator in the department of the Ancient Near East at the British Museum.
The exhibition has a warmth and wit that mirrors the personality of the man himself. We learn that the earliest board games date back 9,000 years to neolithic times, though mostly the rules are unknown. But Finkel has, as an expert in cuneiform, deciphered the rules of the 4,600-year-old Royal Game of Ur.
Among the other games on show are Senet, a race game popular in ancient Egypt, played both in life and in death as the tombs of Tutankhamun and others show. (Not even the rabid gamesmanship of my own children and grandchildren has yet condemned to perdition the eternal soul of their beaten ancestor.)
Finkel is emphatic that stress and antagonism are necessary to the complete enjoyment of board games. Chess and backgammon, warfare in another guise, may have developed from the Roman game Duodecim Scripta, whose boards are often inscribed with Latin insults such as Levate/Dalocu Ludere/Nescis Idiota/Recede.
This can be translated, if you read them in a certain order, into: 'Get up, give me space. You can't play. Fathead, why don't you **** off.'
I don't believe that ludo and snakes and ladders are proper board games for children or adults. Neither of them depend on skill, but on the arbitrary fatalism of the dice. Both games originated in India, the latter being used to teach the rewards of goodness and the penalties of sin.
Finkel shows how the original cloth boards, painted by artists who knew what real snakes were, have been superseded by the cheap plastic versions that are now produced and exported by the west. As he explained at the exhibition's opening, vulgarity is part of the historical process.
But the joy of curating is that 'you can put the most awful crap on exhibition and it will look fabulous'. Finkel can of course afford to make such statements, knowing that at the heart of his displays are 20 of the Lewis Chessmen, brooding queens, gloomy bishops and nervous soldiery, ascending a simple spiral display. I was a child again amazed by the glorious excitement of real things.
Buried Treasure, an archaeology exhibition with a difference on display at the Hancock Museum in Newcastle upon Tyne, also contains a few Lewis Chessman but they are outglittered by the gold and silver of treasure trove, released by the British Museum.
Neil MacGregor, the director of the British Museum, was only half joking when he described himself as coming from 'a small museum in the South-East - most of our collections are now here in the North-East'. And it is greatly to the credit of him and his colleagues that they have sent the most important of artefacts, not second division stuff from the reserve collections.
On display, among much more, is the Mildenhall treasure, splendidly ostentatious Roman silver of the 4th century AD, the remarkable bronze age Ringlemere Gold Cup, and the Hoxne hoard of gold and silver coins and jewellery.
I was struck again by the savage beauty of the iron age gold torcs from Snettisham and Winchester, which seem to cry out to be worn with the dresses of Zandra Rhodes.
The common factor to all of these treasures is that they were discovered by beachcombers, farmers or, more recently, by the users of metal detectors. About 95 per cent of all archaeological finds are made by amateurs and only if these are reported can the professionals look to conserve and research.
The feel of the two exhibitions is very different. There is a sense of fun about the first, a more solemn, almost sermonising atmosphere about the second. But they share a welcome return to simple and unequivocal displays.
Because they are on tour we are spared the all-singing, all-dancing, tediously technological interactivity of more permanent exhibitions. When the ceilings are lower, the walls closer and the galleries humbler we are able to look more closely at the things themselves.
It is the real stuff that is important not the cleverness of the interpretation. And it was clear in both museums that without sound and its inevitable overspill that the visitors were talking to each other about the things they were sharing.
This is an aspect that the relentless pursuit of access, in all its trendy manifestations, is in danger of losing. As a very wise amateur museologist (Winnie the Pooh, only allegedly a bear of very little brain) once advised: 'You find sometimes that a Thing… is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it.'
I am grateful for the chance to stand, study and marvel at objects such as the Lewis Chessmen. I was profoundly moved by the discovery of an artefact that I had not previously seen, the ceremonial Chertsey Shield, which was cast into the Thames, perhaps as a propitiatory offering to the gods, more than 2,350 years ago. Found in 1985 during gravel extraction, it has been restored to an austere beauty.
Some treasure trove waits to be found but I sometimes irreverently wonder if, like the display of grave goods, we are right to interfere in the original purpose of the object's disposal.
Would not the immediate return of the shield to the Thames plus the sacrificial dunking of the Mayor do more to ensure the success of the London Olympic 2012 bid than anything Tessa Jowell might do or say?
Peter Lewis is a writer and a past director of Beamish, the North of England Open Air Museum.
I have been visiting the British Museum for more than 60 years. As an infant from London's East End, my first and sharpest memories are of being able to see and touch the Elgin Marbles - in those days you could do both - and the mysterious atmosphere of the Egyptian Galleries.
This gave me an early insight into the wonder of things.
Now, to my delight, the British Museum has thrown off curatorial caution and started to visit me in Northumbria. Fruits of the Partnership UK Project, exhibitions are emanating from Bloomsbury, arriving in the North-East with the volition of overdue London buses and more than three at once.
The first of these opened in Segedunum, the Roman Fort at Wallsend. Across the Board, Around the World in 18 Games, is curated by Irving Finkel, the assistant curator in the department of the Ancient Near East at the British Museum.
The exhibition has a warmth and wit that mirrors the personality of the man himself. We learn that the earliest board games date back 9,000 years to neolithic times, though mostly the rules are unknown. But Finkel has, as an expert in cuneiform, deciphered the rules of the 4,600-year-old Royal Game of Ur.
Among the other games on show are Senet, a race game popular in ancient Egypt, played both in life and in death as the tombs of Tutankhamun and others show. (Not even the rabid gamesmanship of my own children and grandchildren has yet condemned to perdition the eternal soul of their beaten ancestor.)
Finkel is emphatic that stress and antagonism are necessary to the complete enjoyment of board games. Chess and backgammon, warfare in another guise, may have developed from the Roman game Duodecim Scripta, whose boards are often inscribed with Latin insults such as Levate/Dalocu Ludere/Nescis Idiota/Recede.
This can be translated, if you read them in a certain order, into: 'Get up, give me space. You can't play. Fathead, why don't you **** off.'
I don't believe that ludo and snakes and ladders are proper board games for children or adults. Neither of them depend on skill, but on the arbitrary fatalism of the dice. Both games originated in India, the latter being used to teach the rewards of goodness and the penalties of sin.
Finkel shows how the original cloth boards, painted by artists who knew what real snakes were, have been superseded by the cheap plastic versions that are now produced and exported by the west. As he explained at the exhibition's opening, vulgarity is part of the historical process.
But the joy of curating is that 'you can put the most awful crap on exhibition and it will look fabulous'. Finkel can of course afford to make such statements, knowing that at the heart of his displays are 20 of the Lewis Chessmen, brooding queens, gloomy bishops and nervous soldiery, ascending a simple spiral display. I was a child again amazed by the glorious excitement of real things.
Buried Treasure, an archaeology exhibition with a difference on display at the Hancock Museum in Newcastle upon Tyne, also contains a few Lewis Chessman but they are outglittered by the gold and silver of treasure trove, released by the British Museum.
Neil MacGregor, the director of the British Museum, was only half joking when he described himself as coming from 'a small museum in the South-East - most of our collections are now here in the North-East'. And it is greatly to the credit of him and his colleagues that they have sent the most important of artefacts, not second division stuff from the reserve collections.
On display, among much more, is the Mildenhall treasure, splendidly ostentatious Roman silver of the 4th century AD, the remarkable bronze age Ringlemere Gold Cup, and the Hoxne hoard of gold and silver coins and jewellery.
I was struck again by the savage beauty of the iron age gold torcs from Snettisham and Winchester, which seem to cry out to be worn with the dresses of Zandra Rhodes.
The common factor to all of these treasures is that they were discovered by beachcombers, farmers or, more recently, by the users of metal detectors. About 95 per cent of all archaeological finds are made by amateurs and only if these are reported can the professionals look to conserve and research.
The feel of the two exhibitions is very different. There is a sense of fun about the first, a more solemn, almost sermonising atmosphere about the second. But they share a welcome return to simple and unequivocal displays.
Because they are on tour we are spared the all-singing, all-dancing, tediously technological interactivity of more permanent exhibitions. When the ceilings are lower, the walls closer and the galleries humbler we are able to look more closely at the things themselves.
It is the real stuff that is important not the cleverness of the interpretation. And it was clear in both museums that without sound and its inevitable overspill that the visitors were talking to each other about the things they were sharing.
This is an aspect that the relentless pursuit of access, in all its trendy manifestations, is in danger of losing. As a very wise amateur museologist (Winnie the Pooh, only allegedly a bear of very little brain) once advised: 'You find sometimes that a Thing… is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it.'
I am grateful for the chance to stand, study and marvel at objects such as the Lewis Chessmen. I was profoundly moved by the discovery of an artefact that I had not previously seen, the ceremonial Chertsey Shield, which was cast into the Thames, perhaps as a propitiatory offering to the gods, more than 2,350 years ago. Found in 1985 during gravel extraction, it has been restored to an austere beauty.
Some treasure trove waits to be found but I sometimes irreverently wonder if, like the display of grave goods, we are right to interfere in the original purpose of the object's disposal.
Would not the immediate return of the shield to the Thames plus the sacrificial dunking of the Mayor do more to ensure the success of the London Olympic 2012 bid than anything Tessa Jowell might do or say?
Peter Lewis is a writer and a past director of Beamish, the North of England Open Air Museum.
