Silk Road
Amnh has a new exhibit on the silk road, quite well done for large themes and details of the objects along the route.
Information Highway: Camel Speed but Exotic Links
EDWARD ROTHSTEIN
Published: November 12, 2009
“You are about to make an unusual journey,” a wall label proclaims at the beginning of an exhibition that opens on Saturday at the American Museum of Natural History. Normally that promise would provide reason enough to be wary. But this is something different.
Traveling the Silk Road A caravan of life-size camel models greets visitors in an exhibition opening on Saturday at the American Museum of Natural History.
You are welcomed by life-size camels laden with worn canvas sacks, their bodies framed by sand dunes stretching into the distance. A while later, near a 17-foot-long wooden Chinese loom, you find bowls filled with mulberry leaves on which scores of white worms are gnawing. You see, too, what kind of cocoons they soon will weave, and how these sacs might then be boiled and unwound into silk threads. And later still, you seem to arrive in an outdoor market in evening as the sounds of footfalls and animal cries mix with the murmur of voices; stalls are piled with produce, furs and spices, including a leopard skin, a yak tail, pheasant feathers, lapis lazuli and barrels whose smell suggests that they are filled with rose petals, jasmine oil and patchouli.
Museum exhibitions often aspire to theater, but the stagecraft of this show, “Traveling the Silk Road: Ancient Pathway to the Modern World,” succeeds with compelling vividness. Designed and produced by the museum, under the direction of David Harvey, vice president for exhibition, it is meant to suggest a journey over the Silk Road in its prime, covering “the entire distance from East to West — from Xian, the capital of China, to Baghdad, the heart of the Islamic world.”
The Silk Road, which has now become part of folklore, was a loose network of Central Asian trade routes that made up the most dangerous, exotic and economically valuable overland passages in the ancient and medieval worlds. And while you never really believe that your own “unusual journey” is anything comparable, that is just as well. As the exhibition points out, the Silk Road trek was accomplished on foot or by stumbling camel train through unrelenting desert and over steep mountain passes. It is some 4,600 miles long and takes at least half a year to traverse. And it passes through regions whose temperatures range from minus 50 degrees Fahrenheit to more than 120. In ancient times (as in our own) weapon-wielding robbers ambushed travelers, and tribal armies clashed over shifting frontiers.
And the point of it all, particularly during the era focused on here — from the years 600 to 1200 — was to trade the products of human invention, cultivation and belief: the luxuries of spices and silk, the pleasures of music and image, the convictions of religion and science. “Traveling the Silk Road” really does give you an idea of what was involved, how valued the cloth, manuscripts and pottery must have been, and how vital, too, the resulting cultural cross-fertilization must have seemed in a world of daunting obstacles.
I have intellectual reservations about this exhibition, even as I celebrate the remarkable pleasures and insights it offers. This is less a show of objects than of atmosphere and ideas, but it incorporates more than 90 rare artifacts, including a 7th-century Buddha; a 10th-century ceramic showing a Chinese official draped in silk; a stunning silver drinking horn made for 7th-century Tibetan rulers; a 13th-century Koran written on the pioneering medium of paper. You can press buttons to select which traditional Chinese instruments you want to hear in an ensemble and watch videos of folk stories that spread along these trading routes with their resonant tales of misguided greed or triumphant trickery. You can also manipulate the nested wheels of an astrolabe and learn to tell time from the locations of stars.
The exhibition’s curator, Mark A. Norell, chairman of the division of paleontology at the museum (who also worked with the guest co-curator, William Honeychurch, an assistant professor in the department of anthropology at Yale University, and with Denise Leidy, curator of the department of Asian art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art), structured this journey by focusing on four particular cities, as well as on a series of crafts and technologies.
You begin with Xian, which in the seventh century, the museum suggests, may have been the largest city in the world, a million people living within its walls, another million just outside them. Silk making holds sway here, a process that becomes more amazing as the exhibition teaches how silk is woven from the cocoons of the worms nibbling away in the covered bowls. A single cocoon can unwind into a filament about 3,000 feet long, but it takes about 2,500 cocoons to create a single silk robe.
Information Highway: Camel Speed but Exotic Links
EDWARD ROTHSTEIN
Published: November 12, 2009
“You are about to make an unusual journey,” a wall label proclaims at the beginning of an exhibition that opens on Saturday at the American Museum of Natural History. Normally that promise would provide reason enough to be wary. But this is something different.
Traveling the Silk Road A caravan of life-size camel models greets visitors in an exhibition opening on Saturday at the American Museum of Natural History.
You are welcomed by life-size camels laden with worn canvas sacks, their bodies framed by sand dunes stretching into the distance. A while later, near a 17-foot-long wooden Chinese loom, you find bowls filled with mulberry leaves on which scores of white worms are gnawing. You see, too, what kind of cocoons they soon will weave, and how these sacs might then be boiled and unwound into silk threads. And later still, you seem to arrive in an outdoor market in evening as the sounds of footfalls and animal cries mix with the murmur of voices; stalls are piled with produce, furs and spices, including a leopard skin, a yak tail, pheasant feathers, lapis lazuli and barrels whose smell suggests that they are filled with rose petals, jasmine oil and patchouli.
Museum exhibitions often aspire to theater, but the stagecraft of this show, “Traveling the Silk Road: Ancient Pathway to the Modern World,” succeeds with compelling vividness. Designed and produced by the museum, under the direction of David Harvey, vice president for exhibition, it is meant to suggest a journey over the Silk Road in its prime, covering “the entire distance from East to West — from Xian, the capital of China, to Baghdad, the heart of the Islamic world.”
The Silk Road, which has now become part of folklore, was a loose network of Central Asian trade routes that made up the most dangerous, exotic and economically valuable overland passages in the ancient and medieval worlds. And while you never really believe that your own “unusual journey” is anything comparable, that is just as well. As the exhibition points out, the Silk Road trek was accomplished on foot or by stumbling camel train through unrelenting desert and over steep mountain passes. It is some 4,600 miles long and takes at least half a year to traverse. And it passes through regions whose temperatures range from minus 50 degrees Fahrenheit to more than 120. In ancient times (as in our own) weapon-wielding robbers ambushed travelers, and tribal armies clashed over shifting frontiers.
And the point of it all, particularly during the era focused on here — from the years 600 to 1200 — was to trade the products of human invention, cultivation and belief: the luxuries of spices and silk, the pleasures of music and image, the convictions of religion and science. “Traveling the Silk Road” really does give you an idea of what was involved, how valued the cloth, manuscripts and pottery must have been, and how vital, too, the resulting cultural cross-fertilization must have seemed in a world of daunting obstacles.
I have intellectual reservations about this exhibition, even as I celebrate the remarkable pleasures and insights it offers. This is less a show of objects than of atmosphere and ideas, but it incorporates more than 90 rare artifacts, including a 7th-century Buddha; a 10th-century ceramic showing a Chinese official draped in silk; a stunning silver drinking horn made for 7th-century Tibetan rulers; a 13th-century Koran written on the pioneering medium of paper. You can press buttons to select which traditional Chinese instruments you want to hear in an ensemble and watch videos of folk stories that spread along these trading routes with their resonant tales of misguided greed or triumphant trickery. You can also manipulate the nested wheels of an astrolabe and learn to tell time from the locations of stars.
The exhibition’s curator, Mark A. Norell, chairman of the division of paleontology at the museum (who also worked with the guest co-curator, William Honeychurch, an assistant professor in the department of anthropology at Yale University, and with Denise Leidy, curator of the department of Asian art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art), structured this journey by focusing on four particular cities, as well as on a series of crafts and technologies.
You begin with Xian, which in the seventh century, the museum suggests, may have been the largest city in the world, a million people living within its walls, another million just outside them. Silk making holds sway here, a process that becomes more amazing as the exhibition teaches how silk is woven from the cocoons of the worms nibbling away in the covered bowls. A single cocoon can unwind into a filament about 3,000 feet long, but it takes about 2,500 cocoons to create a single silk robe.
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