(11)
“…it took only 48 hours for the museum to be destroyed, with at least 170,000 artifacts carried away by looters.”
That is roughly one artifact per minute.
An artifact is a message from antiquity; some of these messages were over 4000 years old. These messages are now:
Dispersed?
Scattered?
Mobilized?
Will the sum of information, as communications from the past, decrease with distance from the museum? A museum is a gathering place for both artifact and audience. Under one roof, we experience them en masse; an orchestra of ancient messages. We strain to hear the sum of their individual voices.
After their initial journey to the museum, having been harvested from their contextual origins, they are again scattered, stripped of their collective meaning. Among the reported losses were the stone birds of Nemrik, a site dating from 8,000 B.C. Where have they flown?
Posted by peggy at April 14, 2003 08:39 AM