Benton Kidd has been the curator of ancient art for the University of Missouri Museum of Art and Archaeology for a decade. He does work that requires meticulous patience. For example, he recently spent three years on a project digitally reconstructing the bold, complex pattern of wall plaster from a first-century B.C. villa in Israel. Yet it is a challenge to display the results of this work, as well as the 8,000 artifacts from MU’s antiquities collection, in a way that conveys their pricelessness to museum visitors.
The exhibition — composed mostly of artifacts from MU’s collection as well as several pieces on loan from around the country — traces the import and export of currency, luxury items, perfume, wine and oil around the Mediterranean between approximately 500 B.C. and 500. As these commodities traversed seas and borders, so did ideas, deities and a taste for exotica. The artifacts are concrete examples of the ways ancient cultures touched and changed each other and how this influenced individual lives.
At the beginning of the exhibition is a necklace of alternating gold and pearl beads, still in pristine condition after several millennia. Kidd explained that usually such jewelry is found in graves and must be restrung because the threads have long ago disintegrated. All of the jewelry in the case would have conferred considerable prestige on its wearers. “I think we have lost some of the value of these things today,” Kidd said. “We just buy it and don’t think about where it comes from, what distance it traveled — whereas, to them, they would have been totally aware of the exotic quality.”
By way of further differentiating the ancient attitude toward jewelry from the modern one, Kidd added, “Also, a lot of gemstones had magical significance — like amethyst.” He pointed to a large stone. “The word ‘Amythystos’ translates from Greek as ‘not drunk.’ They thought if you wore it you wouldn’t get drunk. So this had a talisman function to them.” He shook his head. “It’s incredible that these had owners. People wore these. And now they are here in the Midwest.”
Kidd pointed out other notable pieces — a bronze statue of Attis, the castrated Turkish god who inspired some of his most dedicated devotees to follow suit; a high-gloss Egyptian bowl carved from an enormous hunk of agate; juglets in the form of African human heads, which Kidd hypothesizes might have held African perfumes or medicines — before coming to the Funerary Stele of Heliodora. The gravestone is from the Roman period, between the second and third century, and was found in Egypt. Heliodora herself, whose name is Greek, is represented reclining in a niche bearing both Egyptian and Greco-Roman architectural elements. She wears an Egyptian hairstyle and offers a bowl to the Egyptian god Anubis.
Kidd wondered aloud, “So is she Greek, or is she Egyptian? Did she grow up in Greece and start worshipping Egyptian gods? The inscription is also really interesting. It tells us she was an unmarried scholar, at about 52 years old, which was, of course, unusual at the time. And somehow she wound up here. Her life goes on, which I suppose is what she hoped for.”
Author: Shea Boresi | Source: Columbia Daily Tribune [October 30, 2011]