Entering The Hunterian Museum feels, quite literally, like entering the heart of the University of Glasgow. High, wooden ceilings are guaranteed to immediately catch your gaze, as the soft echo of your own footsteps seems to welcome you to this majestic place of knowledge. And even at a first glance, it is evident that the science and knowledge stored here is wide and varied: the Antonine Wall exhibit opens in front of you like a window on ancient Scotland, while on the right the mysteries of the human body are revealed in the glossy transparency of medical preservation jars, and just above their case, the intricately horned skull of an extinct Giant Irish Deer silently surveys the hall. Men, ancient and modern, have always enjoyed exploring the nature of things, and sharing their discoveries with others. These rooms have been filled with that knowledge from the time of William Hunter onwards, and are now open for all to discover.
Ph: The Hunterian
Among the tall columns and expressive figures of the sculptures lining up the Antonine Wall exhibit, I have always found one of the smaller objects to be the most striking: the remains of a Roman gaming board, encased with other everyday objects from the Roman baths at the end of the right side of the hall. The board is nothing more than a polished slab of rock, a chequered pattern chiselled on its surface and fading at its broken corner; the design is simple, but regular, and small coloured pebbles are scattered on and around it. They are the gaming pieces, made of clay, rocks and bone smoothed out to round, flat shapes of different sizes. The rules of the game might have been similar to those of modern chess, and thus requiring the different colours and shapes of the pieces. One might have been considered more valuable than the others, or maybe they were part of a set. Maybe they were acquired by a soldier to play with his comrades, or passed down to him when he was just a child and his father taught him the game for the first time. These games were extremely popular among the soldiers manning the Wall, always accompanied by bets and friendly chatter while enjoying leisure time at the baths. These objects, so small and apparently insignificant, offer us a glimpse into the everyday life of these ancient people: soldiers fighting under the Roman banner, but most likely coming from a Province of the Empire in Europe, North Africa or the Middle East; sometimes even natives, whose tribe had submitted to the Romans and whose culture would subtly continue living, merging and influencing Roman culture itself. While most of the artworks and artefacts recovered from excavations of the Antonine Wall seem to celebrate the grandiosity of the Roman Empire, objects like this gaming board remind us that everything that was made was made by people, and that those people’s lives might not actually have been so radically different from our own.
Ph: The Hunterian
Walking further into the museum, into The Hunterian’s main gallery, the variety of the objects exposed emerges even more. A dinosaur skeleton seems to smile toothily down at you as you enter, its prehistoric fins pulling apart invisible water. On the left, a small fragment of an asteroid glistens in its case, the tiny remnant of a much bigger mass of minerals that has travelled further than any human ever will, for longer than anyone on Earth can properly imagine. And on the other side, halfway through the long corridor of the all, a single glass case offers the visitors the opportunity to look into the portrait of a queen. The likeness of Cleopatra, the last Egyptian Pharaoh, is impressed in this bronze coin, the best example of such an object in the world. She is renowned today for her supposedly legendary beauty and the mixture of political and romantic intrigue that marked her reign, up to its tragic end. But that is not what this portrayal, officially approved by Cleopatra herself, is meant to convey. Her features are sharp, with a pronounced nose and a strong jaw: this is an image of royalty and power, meant to impress her likeness in the mind of her subjects as that of a strong, legitimate leader, whenever they handled the currency of her reign. She lived, and governed, in a time of extreme uncertainty and danger for Egypt, and showed her intelligence and political abilities in more than one occasion; yet history has handed her figure down to us with images of exotic beauty and a dramatic death. Looking at the solemnity of her portrait on this coin, the question remains: how much can we really know about the men and women of our past? What were they really trying to say, even with the simple act of crafting a simple bronze coin?
For some cultures, the answer to these questions is so important that it is passed down with each object, literally woven into the material through the very act of making something. The Maori Cloak exposed in The Hunterian’s main gallery is a fine repository of this kind of knowledge: hand-made from plant fibres by Master weavers, always female, who passed down their tradition and connection with the Earth Mother from mother to daughter. Generation after generation, the transmission of weaving techniques allowed the tribe to create cloaks like this one, that would then be passed down as well for as long as possible. To their makers and the tribe, they carry in their patterns and decorations the power of generations of chiefs, their mana and spiritual energy, and are regarded as having a magic of their own. This object’s connection with the past is not only physical, but spiritual and cultural as well, and it keeps propagating to more and more people even today. The Hunterian hosts an internationally important collection of early Maori cloaks, and has welcomed Maori experts and academics from all over the world to share in this connection, so that the knowledge contained in these objects is not only preserved, but translated and transmitted continuously, as it was always meant to be.
All these objects, then, seem to highlight a common value: the importance of sharing and enriching our knowledge by finding ways to connect with the world, both in terms of human cultures and natural environment. This value was at the basis of the creation of The Hunterian, and it guides it still in the pursuit of more archaeological, historical, artistic and scientific discoveries. And a walk through the main gallery is guaranteed to help you understand the grandiosity of this purpose, as well as giving you plenty of opportunities to learn about the past and the present through the objects collected there.
The Hunterian Museum and The Hunterian Art Gallery are now open. Admission is free.
Why not pre-book a tour of The Hunterian led by one of the student volunteers? Tours last 15 minutes and are limited to two tickets per tour. Each ticket admits up to a maximum of three people from one household. Pre-book your tickets here: https://www.gla.ac.uk/hunterian/visit/tickets/
Tours run at 11am, 1pm and 2pm Tuesday to Friday, 11am and 2pm on Saturdays and 12pm and 2pm on Sundays.
Tour tickets include general admission to The Hunterian Museum. For more information visit The Hunterian website https://www.gla.ac.uk/hunterian/
