Wednesday, January 31, 2007
This is the first of two back-to-back business trip that take me to two different conferences.
Got to Pearson in the morning, and took the just over one hour flight to New York City's LaGuardia airport from there. I didn't have a window seat unfortunately, but I had a great view of flying over central Manhattan, looking down at the Empire State building as we were coming in for a landing. The flight was smooth as silk up until the end, when crosswinds jostled the plane side-to-side, but the landing was clean and I soon got off and grabbed a yellow cab to head to my hotel downtown.
Got to the Grand Hyatt, which is just beside Grand Central Station. Lots of marble and brass everywhere in the main foyer to the building. Am here for a conference being hosted by SDL, a firm that provides localization software and associated tools. I can't get into the details of why I am here as that is strictly work-related, and I hope that this will not be a "hard sale" conference, though I have been assured that it will not be.
The hotel room was clean, if somewhat more spartan in spots than what I would have expected for the price being paid. I guess that's New York for you. The small safe in the room doesn't work, (the display saying "BATT" in big red LED letters; batteries run down presumably) and they were obviously working on the plumbing as I couldn't flush for the first hour or so I was there (this thankfully didn't last). The bed was big and comfortable, and while there wasn't any view to speak of outside the window, at least the quiet promised a good night's sleep.
Answered all of my work emails on my BlackBerry, and decided to venture out to do some "museum-ing" I wanted to do. Got in a cab heading south and I asked the driver to take me to the Brooklyn Museum.
The Brooklyn Museum has a world-renowned collection of Ancient Egyptian antiquities, and has the second-best collection in NYC. It has a lot more besides, but that was what I was most interested in seeing, especially a couple of pieces I knew we're in the collection.
I was not to be disappointed. I entered the main gallery, camera in hand (with the flash turned off), and headed towards the Predynastic and Old Kingdom displays.
The initial and signature piece of the collection is a predynastic figure of a woman with outstretched hands and a bird-like beaked face. There are a couple of similar pieces from the R.O.M.'S collection as well. No-one knows the intent of these figurines, which have been interpreted variously as "mourning women" or as fertility symbols.
One of the real jewels of the collection is an alabaster statuette of the young pharaoh Pepi II sitting on the lap of his mother the Queen regent. I knew the piece was here thanks to the work I had done on the history of this pharaoh for Wikipedia, and was looking forward to seeing the piece in person. It is much larger than I expected it to be, just under an arm's length tall. It is one of a very small number of three-dimensional representations of this pharaoh, and the photos I have previously seen of this piece manage to convey the serene look on the face of the queen, but not of the slightly grumpy and put-out look of the young king sitting on her lap.
Alabaster statuette of Pepi II sitting on his mother's lap
I was disappointed in not finding a statue of Ahmose I, another pharaoh I had co-written a Feature Article for Wikipedia on, instead finding an empty plinth where it had been. Again, another case of an object for which there are few examples, so I was disappointed at its absence.
No statue head of Ahmose I here
I exited the Old Kingdom displays and doubled back to the galleries heading the opposite direction. I started out at the Amarna galleries, with pieces dating to the time of the "heretic" pharaoh Akhenaten, who turned a multi-theistic culture into something approaching monotheism, worshiping the sun disc, called the Aten. The striking thing about this period is the distinct change in the art from this time, dispensing with much of the stiff formalism inherent in much Ancient Egyptian art and instead moving to a more languid style, sometimes breaking with various established conventions. I was pretty much spoiled when I visited the Egyptian collection in Berlin, as it has a large room devoted entirely to Amarna-era masterworks, and while there's nothing to rival the famous bust of Nefertiti, there are some interesting pieces here as well
The first piece I saw was the so-called "Wilbour Plaque", named after the former owner who donated the piece to the museum. It depicts an Amarna-era pharaoh (which narrows it down to Akhenaten, his successor Smenkhare, or possibly Tutankhamen -- I would favour the first identification in this case), along with Queen Nefertari. What makes this piece interesting is that the faces were never done as part of a larger relief, now lost, but instead as perhaps a sort of guide for other relief sculptors, the hole at top center made deliberately for hanging the piece on someone's wall.
The Wilbour Plaque, depicting an Amarna-era pharaoh and Nefertiti
Beside this was a larger piece that depicted the pharaoh Akhenaten. What I found most interesting about it was the systematic way in which the cartouches bearing his name had been chiseled away at, reflecting the destruction that was visited up most of the pieces in the room, many in a fragmentary state.
Detail from a relief depicting Akhenaten, with his names in cartouches chiseled out
Much of the rest of the room was devoted to reliefs from Amarna, many depicting the royal family and others showing more pastoral or everyday themes. One of the more instructive was a pair of reliefs depicting Nefertiti, the top one from the early part of the Amarna period, the bottom one from the end of that era. The top one depicts a face with highly exaggerated features, with large eyes, a straight nose and full lips. The bottom one is more subdued in style generally. The extensive text beside these pieces suggests that the change in style was due to a new successor to the title of Chief Royal Sculpture, specifically the same Thutmose who created the famous colourful Nefertiti bust I saw a couple of months back in Berlin.
Two Amarna era reliefs depicting Nefertiti, from the early and late Amarna periods
One in particular that struck me as interesting was a particular talat showing a team of horses pulling a chariot. Egyptian reliefs are often "busy", filling up every available space, but this team of horses has an empty space it is evidently heading into, giving more of an impression of speed than it would otherwise be if the space was filled with text. And one of the horses is looking straight at the viewer, another thing simply not seen in Ancient Egyptian reliefs, which always have faces and heads depicted in profile.
Amarna relief depicting chariot and its team of horses, one of which looks straight at the viewer
More to come...
Labels: Ahmose I, Akhenaten, Amarna, Ancient Egypt, BlackBerry, Brooklyn Museum, Grand Central Station, Grand Hyatt, Manhattan, Nefertari, New York City, Pepi II, SDL, Smenkhare, Tutankhamen, Wilbour Plaque
Friday, January 05, 2007
Today, a second feature article that I contributed to substantially has ended up on Wikipedia. Here it is:
Late last year I ended up collaborating with another contributor to Wikipedia and largely between the two of us we managed to bring up a previously negligible article on this particular Ancient Egyptian pharaoh up to snuff
In my opinion it's too bad that the Wikipedia-powers-that-be opted to go with the mummy head as the "lead picture" for the article. There's a much better image of a shabti that has this king's likeness, but I gather that as it is ultimately derived from a scanned image in a book, they would instead prefer to use an image that is free and clear of any copyright, and the mummy image (which originally was taken in the late 1890s) fits the bill. Still, it is somewhat gruesome image to be greeted with when you load up Wikipedia.
Luckily I have built up a decent personal reference library on the general subject, so I was able to add to the article, as well as source some of the graphics that were used on the page (at least one from an out-of-copyright text that I was familiar with on the Project Gutenberg site). It's a hobby.
It is interesting how much Wikipedia has become one of those "essential" Web sites, on par with search engines like Google or news services like Slashdot. Despite the bad press that the site sometimes gets, and I just about everybody I work with uses it in their daily and professional lives extensively. Sure there are individual articles that you need to take with a large grain/box/dried-up seabed of salt, but so long as one is aware of this you can find a lot of genuinely useful information on a lot of topics in an easy-to-find place.
From my time as a reader and as a frequent contributor to the site, the types of articles that are vandalized the most (almost always by people who do not have accounts – signing an article addition using only an I.P. address is enough to warrant further scrutiny by any upstanding editor) tend to be biographical articles, television shows or places. The vandalism is usually pretty obvious, like the persons who replaced the entire content of this article earlier today with "batty", or "Dahh Timmy", or "he was silly". Everything on Wikipedia is under version control, so it is easy to revert such changes quickly. In addition to attentive human editors and admins there are anti-vandal bots that look for typical vandal phrases, so the more obvious cases don't usually stand for more than a minute, typically stamping an additional ban on the vandal editor to boot. On the whole the system is getting better and the information seems to be getting more and more reliable over time. And given the usual vector I see for vandalism I for one am an advocate that anyone who edits ought to go through the bother of registering first. (There are lots of good anonymous contributions, but they are far outweighed by the number of anonymous vandals).
Arguably articles like the Ahmose I collaborated on are good test cases as to why Wikipedia is useful and worthwhile. IMHO the article is arguably better and more complete than any single piece I have run across in any other reference work I have seen -- I very much doubt that any one expert (or two) would spend as much time and effort on this subject as did the group of people who ended up contributing to this article.
The other thing I like about Wikimedia is that it is the one project must in keeping with what the founder of the Web, Tim Berners-Lee originally had in mind that the Web ought to be a place where you can not only view Web pages, but amend them with new/better information. It was a vision that couldn't easily be done in the early 1990s, but Wikipedia shows that this idea can bear fruit. I have used it as a reference for work and for play, and where possible, I like contributing back some of my time and effort into something that is genuinely useful and is quickly becoming the source for summary info on just about any topic.
Labels: Ahmose I, Feature Article, Google, Project Gutenberg, Slashdot, Tim Berners-Lee, Wikipedia
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