That One Hundred Year Old Sinking Feeling

So for those of you who didn’t get enough of all the Titanic stuff leading up to the

centennial of its sinking on April 15, this is for you. The National Geographic Museum in Washington DC is hosting an exhibit developed in cooperation with filmmaker James Cameron called, Titanic: 100 Year Obsession. Cameron himself seems to have carried that very obsession for at least twenty of those hundred years, including numerous dives to explore the wreckage. There are no actual Titanic artifacts in this exhibit, but some of the material from Cameron’s movie and explorations and other material make for an engaging visit. You can see photos of the exhibit at the Huffington Post here.

RMS Titanic in 1912

One of the highlights is a beautifully executed eighteen foot model of the ship, which took Fine Art Models of Royal Oaks Michigan seven years to make; the Titanic itself was built in three. An elevated platform allows viewers to look down on the top deck of the model. Considering that there were over 2,000 passengers and crew, I found myself thinking that it really didn’t look like there were enough lifeboats, just looking at the ones positioned on the top deck.  And speaking of lifeboats, there is one of the full-sized replica lifeboats used in the movie that does give visitors some idea of their size. In the early stages of the disaster, the crewmen loading the boats were not allowing men, only women and children into the boats, and there was some thinking that the boats were just going to ferry the passengers to another ship they thought they had seen nearby. It meant that the life boats leaving the ship early in the disaster had lots of empty seats.

Further along is the fifteen foot model that James Cameron used to depict the rusting hulk of the Titanic as it looks now, sitting two miles at the bottom of the Atlantic. In a dark room with large backlit photos of the site of the wreckage, one gets some sense of the watery graveyard that it represents. Bacteria now eating away at the steel may turn the entire ship into a pile of rust in another couple of decades.

There are several screens in the exhibit showing video clips including one with Robert Ballard, who with a small group of French scientists found the wreck in 1985.

The exhibit doesn’t go into it, but one of the more recent theories dealing with the disaster has to do with the temperatures on the night of the collision having caused a cold-weather mirage which prevented the lookouts from seeing the iceberg until they were right on top of it. It might also explain why the California, or another ship that some on the Titanic claimed they saw, may have been much farther away than it seemed or why the captain of the California claimed the ship he saw was much smaller than the Titanic or why the ships were unable to communicate by signal lamp or why the flares the Titanic set off went unnoticed. No doubt there are more theories to come.

I think one of the reasons that the Titanic disaster is so compelling besides the sheer scale, is the idea that existed when it was built that due to the advances in design and technology, it was “virtually unsinkable.”  In our current day and age we find ourselves relying more and more on advanced technology that we trust won’t fail and will keep us safe. The events of April 1912 are sobering reminder that what we expect, doesn’t always hold up.

The exhibit runs through September 9, 2012. For more all-things Titanic, check out NatGeo’s dedicated website and for other DC area Titanic-related locations, click here.

Something Shiny from the Age of Darkness

Photo by David Rowan, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery

In July of 2009 a man with a metal detector went over a farmer’s field in the English Midlands and what he found that day is one of the most significant archeological finds of our young 21st century. Terry Herbert’s discovery is called the Staffordshire Hoard and consists of some 3500 individual small pieces and fragments of mostly gold and garnet with some silver. This treasure, containing 11 pounds of gold, was buried in the late 7th Century A.D. and the intact pieces are almost all fittings for swords and helmets, decorative parts of weapons of war.

And if you are interested in looking at some of this material through the end of February you’ll need to go see the Anglo-Saxon Hoard: Gold from England's the Dark Ages at the National Geographic Society Museum in Washington D.C. There are some one hundred items in the exhibit all small, and some quite beautiful. Many of the gold items are set with garnets, a dark red stone that when polished is stunning. Some of the most exquisite items are the sword or dagger pommels, the small triangular piece that sit on the end of the hilt. Their small red garnets are set in intricately patterned gold designs.

Some of items are just bands or strips of gold with incredibly fine detail. Others have human and animal designs including, fish, snakes and a horse or seahorse design. One of the largest pieces is part of a cheek plate for a helmet. The helmet pieces are extremely rare, only four Anglo-Saxon helmets have ever been found.There are some items whose function is completely mysterious and without the larger piece that they were connected will remain so.  One has a very small round black and white checkerboard design made of glass, which sits on top of a gold and garnet piece.

And then there are three religious items, two crosses, one, made of thin gold which is completely folded up, the other bent and one inscribed gold strip, perhaps something that would attach to a Bible cover, with a biblical verse in Latin, the only item with any writing.

One of the great mysteries of the hoard is why it was buried intentionally. The three main theories are, it was buried after an epic battle or series of battles for safe-keeping, thieves hiding a looted treasure, or perhaps even a pagan ritual of some kind.

The Roman armies left Britain around A.D. 400 which allowed Germanic tribes from the regions of Angeln and Saxony to find new room to grow and expand. Staffordshire, where the hoard was found was part of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Mercia and records indicate that between A.D. 600 and 850 Mercia fought 14 wars with its neighbor Wessex, 11 with the Welsh and 18 with other foes. This was a society almost constantly at war.

           

These items were a parts of prized possessions of an elite warrior class who lived some 1300 years ago, whose language would eventually transform into the one we speak today. But in many respects they remain a mystery to us. Time will tell if this discovery adds to the mystery or helps sort it out. The exhibit runs through March 4.

Where the Heck is Etruscany Anyway?

26 July 2005 Based on a map from The National Geographic Magazine

Vol.173 No.6 June 1988. NormanEinstein

Ok, I know the people that lived in that central part of Italy from the 9^th to the 3^rd centuries BC were the Etruscans and their land was called Etruria not Etruscany, and part of that area is today called Tuscany (go figure).  

Anyway, if you have any interest in seeing some of the stuff they left behind, you can go to the National Geographic Society Museum in Washington DC and see "The Etruscans: An Ancient Italian Civilization" before the end of September, 2011.

The Etruscans were the West-Central Italians before the Romans got up and running. They were defeated in battle by the Romans in the 3^rd century BC and were eventually absorbed by Rome. As the exhibit points out they were heavily influenced by the Greeks who were all over the Mediterranean during their heyday.

This is not a large exhibit, NatGeo is limited by their space, but there are some 400 pieces with lots of pottery, household items, weapons, jewelry and votive figures in clay, bronze and stone. The pieces that really stand out are the funerary sculptures. These Etruscans had a rich and complex view of the afterlife, and devotion to the departed was obviously a big part of their lives.

Visitors are greeted by a three dimensional sculpted funerary urn from the 4^th century BC with a not quite the life-size husband and wife sitting together the husbands hand reaching to touch his wife’s back, the wife’s right hand raised up. His torso is bare, she is covered with a cloak coming up over the back of her hair.

You can see them here at the exhibit site.

One of the more unusual items is a clay 7^th century B.C canopa or funerary vessel to hold cremated human remains. On the bottom is a small chair or throne, on top of it sits jar with handles and then on top of the jar is the is sculpted human head, a woman they say because of the earring holes. Experts also think that the protrusion on the back of the head was to hold a wig.

There are also a couple of life-size sarcophagus covers, one in terra cotta with a woman lying prone over the lower part that has a nice dolphin design and another in volcanic stone of a portly man lying in banquet pose, with his head resting on his arm, looking up as if he is about to speak.

Brian Mosley has some nice photos of the exhibit here.

As they say Rome wasn’t built in a day, and in terms of influence, they obviously had some help from the Etruscans. The exhibit closes September 25, 2011.