Biblical Archaeology in the British Museum
For some time the British Museum had a temporary exhibition of Biblical archaeology in room 88 in the basement. This has now been closed and a larger, permanent exhibition laid out in rooms 57-59, where items from the Western Levant (the Lebanon and Palestine) are displayed. The new display forms an extension to the Raymond and Beverly Sackler Gallery, where Hittite and Mesopotamian finds are on show.
Some of the items on display are new to the museum and most of these come from three sites in Jordan: Tel es-Sa'idiyeh and Tiwal esh-Sharqi in the Jordan Valley and 'Ain Ghazal near Amman. British Museum staff are actively excavating at all three sites.
Tel es-Sa'idiyeh is an Early Bronze Age farming settlement which was destroyed by fire. Archaeological evidence indicates that this happened in the summer time. A well-labelled display shows the pottery, the food in the storage jars and even the state of the washing-up being done for the eleven people who lived there at the time of the fire. Evidence indicates that the inhabitants were semi-nomadic and pastoral.
Room 57 contains eight glass cases and several free-standing exhibits, arranged roughly in chronological order from the earliest settlements to the Babylonian conquest. Among the objects on display which caught the writer's eye are the Lachish letters, some of the Amarna tablets and the Shebna inscription. Unfortunately the labels are somewhat terse and in the case of the Shebna inscription the label is on the wall in a corner below eye-level, while the inscription is on a ledge over six feet higher!
The Shebna inscription was taken from a tomb in the Kidron Valley in Jerusalem. Shebna was the scribe who negotiated with the Assyrians who were besieging Jerusalem, as recorded in 2 Kings 18:18. He prepared an elaborate tomb for himself which prompted the prophet Isaiah to write:
"To Shebna, who is over the house, and say, 'What have you here and whom have you here, as he who hews himself a sepulchre on high, who carves a tomb for himself in a rock'?"
Isaiah 22:15-18
The inscription, in archaic Hebrew, cut into a sunken panel above the door into his tomb, identifies Shebna as the Royal Steward ("who is over the house") and says, "There is no silver and no gold here but [his bones] and the bones of his slave-wife with him. Cursed will be the man who will open this [tomb]." Shebna need not have worried. If Isaiah's prediction was fulfilled, Shebna was not even buried in his elaborate tomb.
Room 58 contains the finds from Tel es-Sa'idiyeh and a reconstruction of tomb P19 from Jericho, discovered by Kathleen Kenyon. The many objects which filled the tomb are well displayed, including even a plastic spider crawling across one of the skeletons. (The plastic is not original but the spider is. Kenyon concluded that the objects in the tomb were so well preserved because the cave had filled with poisonous gases such as methane and carbon dioxide which killed living objects in the tomb, including white ants, bacteria, of course, the spider!)
Room 59 is really just the landing at the top of the West Stairs, where formerly the prime exhibit was the "Lady looking out of the window" ivory from Nineveh. Now there are only two cases with objects related to the Levant: one case displays Neolithic pottery while the other shows the one-third life-size human figures discovered at 'Ain Ghazal. They are known as "the straw men" because they are made of straw covered with lime and clay plaster. Curiously, some of them have six fingers.
My enjoyment of my visit to these new galleries was somewhat marred by the conditions I found there this summer. Despite the high ceilings the temperature reached that of a Swedish sauna and the lack of fresh air, added to the crowd of visitors, with the result that the smell in the galleries resembled the less salubrious parts of an eastern bazaar. One might have expected a high-cost refurbishment to have afforded a temperature controlled environment for the humans as well as the artefacts.
It must be remembered that the British Museum only holds items that have been gifted to it or from digs funded by the Museum. As such it can only portray a small part of the available evidence in the field of Biblical archaeology. However once might have hoped for a greater level of interpretation, cross-indexing and explanatory diagrams to better inform the less academic visitor of the importance of what is on view. Let us hope that this will follow in the education and information displays proposed for the area formerly housing the British Library Reading Rooms.
A nicely produced colour leaflet costing 50 pence, which can be bought at the entrance to the exhibition, provides little more information and the serious visitor really needs to purchase Mitchell's guide book, available from the museum bookshop. The Bible in the British Museum: Interpreting the Evidence (ISBN 0-7141-1698-X British Museum Press, was first published 1988 and reprinted with corrections 1996 and 1998) by T. C. Mitchell, former Keeper of the Western Asiatic Antiquities. This book covers 60 artifacts, of which 51 are in the British Museum and five in the British Library at King's Cross, London. It contains photographs of each object, Biblical references, descriptions and translations where appropriate. At £10, it is an excellent guide for a visitor interested in the Biblical exhibits and a useful reference work for those who can't visit in person
Paul Richardson
