Brick from the Tower of Babel
Description:
The top image ("Fig. 1") depicts a brick, believed to be taken from the Tower of Babel. "Fig. 2" and "Fig. 3" each depict a canopic jar, or "canopus"; these were vases used by the ancient Egyptians to store the entrails of enbalmed bodies. "Fig. 4," the image between the symmetrically placed jars, depicts an Egyptian ring.
Copyright:
Copyright 2009, Department of Special Collections, Memorial Library, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI
Accession Number:
Thordarson T 4136
Associated Places
The British MuseumAmong the Numbers whom Curiosity prompted to get a Sight of this Collection, I was of Course one; but the Time allowed to view it was so short, and the Rooms so numerous, that it was impossible, without some Kind of Directory, to form a proper Idea / of the Particulars. (Dodsley xiv)Eric Gidal notes that the British Museum was unique in this unprecedented degree of access granted to the public: "As an institution founded ‘not only for the inspection and entertainment of the learned and curious, but for the general use and benefit of the public,’ the British Museum marked a union of legitimization and freedom both aesthetic and social" (21). With free admission came crowds, and with those crowds came anxiety regarding who ought to see the collections as well as how they ought to be seen. Over the course of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, the museum continued to gain popularity. By 1805, 12,000 people visited annually. By 1817 that number grew to 40,000, and by 1833 over 210,00 people came each year to see the collections (Goldgar 229-30). As many reviewers noted, large and often raucous crowds were now an inescapable part of the museum-going experience:
[T]he bustling crowds which thrice-a-week are to be seen in the British Museum, swarming with aimless curiosity from room to room, loudly expressing their wonder and disapprobation of the very things most worthy of admiration, or passing with a vacant gaze those precious relics of antiquity, of which it is impossible that they can understand the value as they are, for the most part, insensible to the hallowing associations, which render these objects the links of connexion between distant ages and our own. (“A Visit to the British Museum” 42)The behavior of these crowds generated considerable anxiety in the press, with one 1839 reviewer even going so far as to publish three “cautions” for visitors to the British Museum and other public exhibitions: “Touch nothing,” “Don’t talk loud,” and “Be not obtrusive” (“Synopsis” 302-3).
Associated Texts
The long title of the Museum Britannicum, a guidebook to the British Museum, is as follows:Subject
“Table XIII, Brick from the Tower of Babel. Figure 1 shows an unburnt brick of about twelve and a half inches square and five inches thick, which was taken from the foundations of the supposed Tower of Babylon. Figure 2, Vas Ægyptium, a canopus with a head of Osiris or hawk, in white alabaster with hieroglyphics painted in black. Figure 3, Canopus, the cover a dog’s head. Figure 4, Egyptian ring” (Thornton 70).Significance
What is perhaps most remarkable about this illustration from the Rymsdyks’ Museum Britannicum is how unremarkable the most prominent drawing actually is: Figure 1, the square brick which dominates the upper half of the plate, is drawn with the same meticulous attention to detail that Rymsdyk devotes to the most complex of forms, yet it hardly seems to warrant this degree of particularization. However, the footnote to the accompanying page of text reveals Rymsdyk’s eagerness to “embellish the history of this unburnt brick,” and it seems that the biblical and political history surrounding the artifact may have dictated Rymsdyk’s interest more than any particular attribute of the object itself (Rymsdyk 34). Moreover, a number of reference works, including Ephraim Chambers’s 1728 Cyclopaediashow that bricks were frequently defined—or their definitions embellished—by references to Babel: "Brick, a fat reddish Earth, fom’d into long Squares, 4 Inches in Breadth, and 8 or 9 in Length, by means of a wooden Mould; and then bak’d or burnt in a Kiln, to serve for the Uses of Building. Bricks appear to be of very antient standing; the Tower of Babel being built thereof" (1.126).Bibliography
“An Account of the British Museum” New London Magazine 4.40 (1788): 377-78. Print.Delineator:
Image Date:
1791