When the British Museum opened its doors more than two centuries ago, scores of visitors waited eagerly outside for a first glimpse of ancient relics from Egypt, Greece, and Rome. Even today, in this age of satellite television and high-speed Internet access, museums maintain their unique allure, continuing to play a vital role in connecting us with little-known terrains and the deep mysteries of our historical past. That's because, as Stephanie Moser argues in "Wondrous Curiosities", museum displays don't just transmit knowledge - they actually create it. Based on her exploration of the British Museum's world-famous collection of Egyptian antiquities, this pioneering study reveals the powerful role of museums in shaping our understanding of science, culture, and history. Drawing on guidebooks and archival documents, Moser demonstrates that this British exhibition of ancient Egyptian artifacts was central to the way we came to define the remarkable society that produced them.

Pictorial reconstructions of ancient human ancestors have twin purposes: to make sense of shared ancestry and to bring prehistory to life. Stephanie Moser analyzes the close relationship between representations of the past and theories about human evolution, showing how this relationship existed even before a scientific understanding of human origins developed. How did mythological, religious, and historically inspired visions of the past, in existence for centuries, shape this understanding? Moser treats images as primary documents, and her book is lavishly illustrated with engravings, paintings, photographs, and reconstructions. In surveying the iconography of prehistory, Moser explores visions of human creation from their origins in classical, early Christian, and medieval periods through traditions of representation initiated in the Renaissance. She looks closely at the first scientific reconstructions of the nineteenth century, which dramatized and made comprehensible the Darwinian theory of human descent from apes. She considers, as well, the impact of reconstructions on popular literature in Europe and North America, showing that early visualizations of prehistory retained a firm hold on the imagination—a hold that archaeologists and anthropologists have found difficult to shake.

This book celebrates the career of Brian Sparkes, whose work in Classical archaeology has covered many diverse areas such as art, pottery, and theatre. Such interdisciplinary work is at the core of this book, which seeks to explore the relationship between different kinds of text and material culture and the ways in which these can be interpreted. Chapters include studies on the relationship between vase painting and sculpture (Karim Arafat) , images on wedding bowls (Sue Blundell) , and the role of pottery workshops in the choice of iconography (Robin Osborne) . There is also, unusually for this kind of publication, a paper by Brian Sparkes himself, focusing on how artists and craftsmen in ancient Greece conceived the appearances of men and women and of the move from idealised naturalism to realistic naturalism.

When the British Museum opened its doors more than two centuries ago, scores of visitors waited eagerly outside for a first glimpse of ancient relics from Egypt, Greece, and Rome. Even today, in this age of satellite television and high-speed Internet access, museums maintain their unique allure, continuing to play a vital role in connecting us with little-known terrains and the deep mysteries of our historical past. That's because, as Stephanie Moser argues in "Wondrous Curiosities," museum displays don't just transmit knowledge--they actually create it.
Based on her exploration of the British Museum's world-famous collection of Egyptian antiquities, this pioneering study reveals the powerful role of museums in shaping our understanding of science, culture, and history. Drawing on guidebooks and archival documents, Moser demonstrates that this British exhibition of ancient Egyptian artifacts was central to the way we came to define the remarkable society that produced them. And she also reveals the specific strategies--such as using pattern and symmetry, juxtaposing different types of objects, and singling out particular items--that the British Museum and others used, and still use, in representing the past. With a wealth of illustrations and a detailed account of how the museum acquired and displayed its Egyptian collections, "Wondrous Curiosities" will fascinate curators and scholars of British history, Egyptology, art history, archaeology, and the history of science.