Choosing a highlight for the 3rd gallery

Shuruq looking at lamps in the archaeology store

About a fortnight ago I met Andrea Winn, Curator of Community Engagement at the Manchester Museum, and a member of the Manchester Egyptian community, Shuruq, to choose a lamp to use as a highlight in the displays in the third of our Ancient Worlds galleries. This is the space where the Mediterranean gallery used to be.

We are using some of the display cases to explain why the Museum has so many objects, such as lamps, that are very similar, if not duplicates of one another. The idea is to show as many of these objects as possible rather than leaving them in the store. In this we have been guided by responses to consultation we did in advance of the new displays. Some people felt the Museum did not show as many objects as it could.  Displaying the lamps and other objects en masse will create an aesthetic or dramatic effect that will contrast with the experience of visiting the other new galleries.

In the dense displays of objects we will show Roman glass, Roman lamps, Egyptian shabtis, stone vessels, jewellery, fragments and Bronze Age metalwork. We have invited a number of community groups or representatives to select a highlighted object that will have interpretation. The bulk of the objects will not be labelled because it would make for a very different kind of display.

One of the reasons many museums have so many lamps is that they were mass-produced to serve the need for lighting after dark in the ancient world. Olive oil was available in virtually limitless quantities so fuel was not a problem. The lamps were made of fired clay and relatively cheap to replace if they got broken or discoloured. As popular taste changed and new styles came on the market, old-fashioned examples were thrown away. Several thousand years later the small, portable and easily recognised lamps made an interesting souvenir for the discerning traveller. The multitude of different designs made them very popular with collectors. Over the years large numbers of lamps have entered museum collections as the original collectors sought to find a permanent home for them.

Shuruq kindly came into the Museum and we showed her the lamps in our archaeology store. We had a really interesting discussion about the role the lamps played in the ancient world, how they had changed over time and how they illustrated aspects of life at the time, with pictures of gods and goddesses, gladiators and animals. We speculated that in another 2000 years perhaps people will be collecting electrical light fittings and arranging a typology ranging from brass light switches to Bakelite and plastic examples.

Which one shall I have? Choosing a lamp from the Manchester Museum collection

One of the lamps that caught Shuruq’s eye shows someone with thick tresses of hair and a crescent moon above. Shuruq commented that it looked a bit like Bob Marley! I don’t envy Shuruq who we have invited to write 75 words as a label for her highlighted lamp. How do you chose one lamp out of so many?

A Fake Lamp

We’re recently been looking in more detail at our third gallery in the Ancient Worlds displays. In particular we’ve focusing on objects of which the Museum has many examples such as lamps, ancient Egyptian shabtis and Roman glass vessels. It’s been a pleasure to welcome back our long-standing archaeology volunteer, Caitlin Barratt, a graduate of the University of Sheffield, who has been helping us enhance the records of our lamps. Caitlin is being supported in this work thanks to a Bursary for Museum Internships from the Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies. The information that Caitlin is enhancing will be made available to the public via mobile devices, freeing us of the need to include reams of written text in the new displays.

Caitlin with some new friends from the lamps collection

The decoration on one of the lamps proved difficult to make sense of so I went to the library and borrowed copies of Donald Bailey’s British Museum Catalogue of Lamps. The existing description on the Museum record said the decoration showed a centaur but when we looked it up in the Lamps Catalogue it turned out to be some men struggling to restrain a bull. One of the men had been tossed in the air by the bull. What was more interesting perhaps was that this lamp was a copy or forgery made by a workshop in Naples in the late 19th or early 20th centuries. It is somewhat ironic that a workshop producing copies, fakes and forgeries should command a level of academic interest you might expect to be shown to the real thing. But if we can’t tell copies or fakes from the real thing how can we be sure what we’re dealing with? Exploring some of these questions is part of the purpose of this third gallery in Ancient Worlds.

Fake lamp from the Naples workshop

It isn’t absolutely clear whether the lamp was made to deceive anyone but it looks as though this example has gone unrecognised in our collection as being of later manufacture. Caitlin is now keeping her eyes peeled for others.

It raises an interesting question, however. There is a display of copies, fakes and forgeries in the third gallery. Should we display this lamp there or keep it with the other Roman lamps and point out in the download information that it is was made long after the Roman Empire had ended?

Our thanks to Caitlin and to the Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies for supporting Caitlin with a museum internship bursary.