May 26, 2011

The story behind the world's oldest museum, built by a Babylonian princess 2,500 years ago.
posted by homunculus 13 years ago
  • It quickly dawned on Woolley that this might actually be an ancient museum, the 6th century BCE equivalent of the sorts of institutions that were now sponsoring him. Great link! Thank you, homunculus.
  • Interesting. And we think our museums of today don't have agendas?
  • "If it takes the death of your civilization's future to realize that your past is worth celebrating, preserving, and (most importantly) organizing...well, I've heard of worse trade-offs." So the article ended. Yet it was stated earlier that the organizing was a temporal jumble, neatly arranged only to the eye... Is that what we are headed toward? All the American Idol contestant's videos arrayed in columns and rows for the sake of future historians, who will berate the labels? I guess that's the most we can hope for in our dying Peak Oil segment of civilized decrepitude - that and a few platitudes from Benjamin Franklin and a bust of President Washington thrown in with a prisoner's hulk or two left over from the Australian start-up... Maybe a few pages from Hugh Hefner's Playboy Philosophy? Or what else? What would the future monkeyfilter museum look like?
  • That was super-interesting, and warranting lots of further research. Top link as always, homunculus, thankee. Dan - that's a really depressing thought...
  • It was supposed to be funny.
  • Happier museum specimens would be humans just waiting to be resurrected by aliens, according to A.E. Vanvogt!
  • Dan, I remember that story - one of my favourites. Of course, van Vogt tended to manufacture his stories with a level of glee that recognised the ability of the human race to survive anything.