The other pyramids of Africa

by Sean McLachlan on


This desert land was once home to a great empire that built giant temples in honor of strange, animal-headed gods and memorialized their rulers with pyramids. It had one of the most advanced civilizations of its time and was known throughout the ancient world.

Egypt? No, Sudan.

The Kingdom of Kush in what is now Sudan built great cities and traded the products of its large and expert iron industry as far away as India and China. It lasted from about 1000 BC to 350 AD before finally being conquered by the Empire of Axum in Ethiopia. For almost a hundred years from 747-656 BC, the Kushites ruled Egypt as the twenty-fifth dynasty.

A new exhibit at the Louvre in Paris is the first to focus on Meroë, the capital of Kush in its later period and home to more than two hundred pyramids, some of which are shown in this photo. Meroe: Empire on the Nile showcases works of Meroitic art that help us understand the daily life, religion, and social structure of this often-overlooked empire.

Meroe: Empire on the Nile runs until September 6, 2010. Many of the objects are loans from the Museum of Khartoum, so if you can’t make it to Paris before September, you can always go to Sudan and the see the objects, and the pyramids, for yourself. Last year The Wall Street Journal listed the country as one of the top five destinations for the super adventurous.

Image courtesy Sven-steffenarndt via Wikimedia Commons

ABBAworld opens in London

by Katie Hammel on

Get ready, ABBA fans, because ABBAworld, the first official (and band-supported) ABBA museum has just opened in London.

The interactive museum will contain 25 rooms full of ABBA memorabilia, including behind-the-scenes footage and interviews, never-before-seen music videos and photos, and clothes, instruments, and personal belongings from each member of the band. In one room, you’ll even find the helicopter pictured on the cover of the “Arrival” album.

Visitors will have the chance to feel like a part of the group too, as they see images of themselves projected into music videos and photos and onto album covers (which fans can then access online afterwards). The can test their trivia knowledge with quizzes, remix their own ABBA tunes and even be a “dancing queen” up on stage with a holographic projection of the band.

The exhibit is open daily now through March 28. Tickets are available via Ticketmaster for £21.45 per adult and £14.30 for kids.

The exhibition is expected to visit other cities, but so far no others have been announced.

Exhibit highlights 1001 inventions of the Muslim world

by Sean McLachlan on

A new exhibit at London’s Science Museum explores the often-forgotten contributions to science from Muslim scholars.

1001 Inventions: Discover the Muslim Heritage in our World follows the contributions of Muslim civilization from the 7th to the 17th centuries. After the disintegration of the Roman Empire, scientific study lapsed in Europe, but soon dynamic civilizations based in the Middle East took up the slack. From important centers such as Damascus and Baghdad came developments in medicine, mathematics, astronomy, geography, and a host of other studies. Muslim scholars were the first to build gliders, the first to create free public hospitals, and the first to use carrier pigeons s a means of quick, long distance communications.

The exhibition is divided into sections such as Home, Town, and Market, each highlighting different contributions to science and daily life. Also discussed is how civilizations in the Middle East preserved many ancient Greek and Latin books in Arabic translations when they were lost in Europe. Later they were translated back into Greek and Latin so Renaissance scholars could read them, thus bringing much of Europe’s heritage back to Europe.

The centerpiece of the exhibition is a replica of a 13th century clock by the Arab scholar Al-Jazari that stands more than twenty feet high and celebrates the diversity of knowledge by having an Indian elephant holding up an Egyptian phoenix, Arab figures, a Persian carpet, and Chinese dragons. The clock runs on moving water following a system invented by the Greeks.

In an interview with the BBC, Professor Salim Al-Hassani, one of the exhibition’s organizers, suggested that science lapsed in Islamic civilization after the twin blows of the Crusades and the destruction of Baghdad by the Mongols. Much of the Muslim world was taken over by the Ottomans, a bureaucratic state that stifled scientific initiative. Then the scientists of Renaissance Europe adopted their learning and progressed it further, much like the Muslim world took the learning of the Classical World and developed it.

1001 Inventions runs until April 25. Admission is free.

Museum Junkie: Royal Ontario Museum hosts Dead Sea Scrolls

by Sean McLachlan on

Visitors to the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto this summer will have a chance to see the famous Dead Sea Scrolls.

“Dead Sea Scrolls: Words that Changed the World” will showcase some scrolls that have never before been seen by the general public as well as numerous artifacts from the period. There will also be a series of lectures by leading religious and secular scholars.

The scrolls, found in caves near the Dead Sea, date from about 150 BC to 70 AD. and include all the books of what is now known as the Old Testament. Many are close to later versions of the same books of the Bible, but there are a few surprises as well. The collection of scrolls includes some previously unknown psalms as well as numerous Apocryphal books that were never incorporated into the standard version of the Bible. Some of the more accepted books, such as Exodus, are quite different from later versions. Controversy has raged over the scrolls since their first discovery, but one thing they do prove is that there were several different variations of the Old Testament until the books became canonized in about 100 AD.

In an interesting article in HalogenLife, Dr. Risa Levitt Kohn, the curator of the exhibit, said that the scrolls concern themselves with philosophical issues that we still wrestle with today.

The show starts June 27 and runs six months.

Spectacular summer art season in Madrid

by Sean McLachlan on

Madrid is one of the art capitals of Europe, and each season the city’s big three art museums host major exhibitions. This summer looks like it’s going to be an especially good one.

Perhaps the biggest show of the season is the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum’s show on Matisse. Running from June 9 to September 20, it focuses on the work the famous painter and sculptor did in the middle part of his life. In the 1920s he and Picasso were at the vanguard of making modern art acceptable to the general public, and in the 1930s Matisse’s work became more inward-looking as the Depression, the buildup to World War Two, and the invasion of France took their psychological toll.

The Prado will has a show focusing on the Spanish painter Joaquín Sorolla, who in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries became one of Spain’s best-loved painters with his brilliant images of sun-soaked gardens and beaches. This show runs from May 26-September 6. One of his paintings, titled “Walk on the Beach”, is shown here. If you like his style, you might also want to check out his house, which is now a museum showcasing his life and work.

If modern art is more your thing, check out the Reina Sofia, Madrid’s home for modern and contemporary art. Their big show this summer will be Los Esquizos de Madrid, an art movement that flourished in Spain’s capital in the Seventies as the country made the transition from dictatorship under Franco to a fragile multiparty democracy. This movement embraced figurative art at a time when the rest of the European art world seemed have abandoned it.

The Reina Sofia will also have an exhibition by Lebanese artist Walid Raad, who created The Atlas Group, an art movement of one. His work explores censorship and the Lebanese Civil War though various media and will be open from June 3 to August 31.