Exhibition review: Treasures -The World's Cultures from the British Museum

"Treasures: The World's Cultures from the British Museum" features 309 artifacts and works of art from a premiere collection that trace the development of civilization.

The sprawling 52,000-square-foot exhibition at Victoria's Royal British Columbia Museum in western Canada runs from May 1 to September 30, 2009. A smaller version of the show, attended by 1.3 million people, toured nine Asian cities. This incarnation includes an additional 150 items, some specifically chosen to illustrate Vancouver Island's First Nations history. The objects displayed provide a vast panorama of human creative expression that began some 1.5 million years ago.

Organization of Treasures...

After an introduction to the British Museum, Treasures... is divided into seven areas: Africa, the Middle East, Europe, Asia, Oceania, the Americas and the Modern World. The galleries surround the Enlightenment Center, a hands-on activity room with computer stations devoted to four subjects: Death & Commemoration, Images of Beauty, Technology & Innovation and Language.

Prehistory, Egypt and Sub-Saharan Africa

Treasures... begins in mankind's remotest past with Early Stone Age handaxes (1.6-1.4 million B.C.) from Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania. Discovered by Kenyan archaeologist Louis Leakey (1903-1972), the creation of these lava block implements with a stone hammer distinguished humanity from the rest of the Animal Kingdom.

Egyptian civilization is introduced by a scale replica of the Rosetta Stone (196 B.C.), excavated in 1799 by Napoleon's troops. The granodiorite monument's combination of hieroglyphic, demotic and Greek scripts aided in the 1822 decipherment of ancient Egypt's language by French philologist Jean-François Champollion (1790-1832).

Artifacts describe Egyptian history, culture and funerary practices. Principal among them is the Ptolemaic Wooden Anthropoid Inner Coffin of Djeho (305-30 B.C.). Embellished with gold leaf, the painted sarcophagus was designed for a man of high social standing. Beneath the lid's large amuletic collar is a representation of the sky goddess Nut, her wings protectively outstretched. Under the deity is an image of Djeho's mummy atop four canopic jars that stored his preserved stomach, intestines, lungs and liver. The coffin's vertical inscriptions safeguard the deceased in the afterlife.