The Secret Museum. Molly Oldfield
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Название: The Secret Museum
Автор: Molly Oldfield
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Изобразительное искусство, фотография
isbn: 9780007516896
isbn:
1. Swish salt-water around your cheeks.
2. Spit it into a glass containing water and washing-up liquid.
3. Mix for a minute or so.
4. Pour some ice-cold vodka, slowly, into the glass.
5. In a couple of minutes, you will see some white strands form. These are strands of DNA. If you were able to look closely at them, you’d see the double helix shape sketched in Crick’s drawing.
After co-winning the Nobel Prize, Crick became a household name. He was invited to all sorts of events, but he preferred to concentrate on his work, and keep to himself. In the archive is a ready-made, multi-purpose reply card from the 1960s, which reads:
Dr Crick thanks you for your letter but regrets that he is unable to accept your kind invitation to –send an autograph –help you in your project –provide a photograph or read your manuscript –cure your disease –deliver a lecture –talk on the radio or act as chairman –appear on TV or become an editor Delete where appropriate.
Later in life, Crick moved from Cambridge to San Diego, and worked at the Salk Institute there. He lived in a house called the Golden Helix. There he began focusing on neurobiology. He wanted to look inside the human brain, to study the networks, connections and firing patterns of neurons, as he thought they held the key to understanding mental activity and consciousness.
The Wellcome Library bought Crick’s papers in 2001, while he was still alive. They consist of his research papers, letters from people who were ill, a lovely letter from a young boy saying he’d enjoyed meeting Crick and letters from colleagues. They all give you a sense that Crick, like all scientists, was – of course – a real person. It makes science seem less removed from normal life.
Crick was keen for his work to become a part of this vast medical library, which anyone can access free of charge. On the day I visited, the library was packed with medical students cramming for exams. Perhaps one day, one of those students will make a breakthrough in healing and add their work to the collection, alongside the discoveries of herbalists in the fifth century and scientists like Crick.
[Crick’s doodle of a DNA molecule] As we leafed through Crick’s papers I instantly recognized the spiralling ladder that carries the Earth’s variety of life forms.
[Watson and Crick with their model of DNA] They made a model as a way to represent, in reality, the ideas they were carrying around in their heads.
[Crick wins a Nobel Prize] Telegram to Crick announcing his Nobel Prize, 1962. He won the prize jointly with Watson and Dr Maurice Wilkins for their work on the molecular structure of DNA and ‘its significance for information transfer in living material’.
AS WE WALKED ACROSS THE great hall, we started chatting. Finkel is very friendly, kind, interesting and seriously clever. He is one of only a hundred or so people in the world who can read cuneiform, the oldest form of writing in the world.
He was first shown the basics of how to read the script, when he started at university and he knew ‘within about 20 minutes this was what I wanted to do for the rest of my existence’. He learned cuneiform, and later applied to work with it at the British Museum. He got the job. ‘In that moment, I achieved my life’s ambition.’
Since that day in 1979, he has been working on the world’s largest, most cosmic jigsaw puzzle, piecing together pieces of cuneiform writing. His domain has been the Arched Room, a three-tiered room where all 120,000 of the British Museum’s behind the scenes cuneiform tablets are stored.
On the top two levels are books about cuneiform and the cultures that employed this form of writing. On the ground level is a long run of tables for cuneiform scholars to write at. The walls are lined with bookshelves that once stored the British Library’s Mills and Boon collection. Now they are filled with trays, each one containing glass-topped boxes. Inside the boxes are clay tablets covered with ancient cuneiform writing. It looks like an alien script.
Cuneiform script is made up of short, straight lines which go in different directions. The lines (called wedges) were imprinted in pieces of soft clay with a cut reed, used like a pen; ‘It looked a bit like a chopstick,’ explained Finkel. Cuneiform means ‘wedge shaped’, from the Latin cuneus, or wedge. The word doesn’t rhyme with uniform: you pronounce it ‘cu-neigh-i-form’.
A lot of the clay tablets in Finkel’s domain come from the Royal Library of King Ashurbanipal, who lived in the sixth century BC. ‘He was king of the world at the time,’ Finkel told me, ‘a proper Arabian Nights king – harems, exotic foods, hundreds of servants, chariots.’ But he was also literate, and he loved clay books. He built his capital in a city called Nineveh (today called Kuyunjik, in Iraq) and, at the heart of his palace, in the citadel, he created his library.
The library contained spells, myths about gods and heroes, stories of wrestling with bulls, recipes, astrology, medicine, histories, books on fortune telling, poems, love letters – and multiple copies of the Epic of Gilgamesh. Until I visited Finkel’s realm, I hadn’t been aware that the story had come down through the generations to us written on pieces of baked clay.
The library also housed maps, plans, dictionaries, books of grammar and mundane tax forms, everyday ‘to do’ lists and legal records. There were a few ‘weirdo’ things, also, Finkel told me. ‘Like what?’ I asked. ‘Well, you know, strange dramas: there is one about a relationship between a god and his mother-in-law that was probably performed as a play in Babylon.’
The king ordered every temple in Babylonia, in the south, to give him a copy of every piece of literature they owned. In some cases, pieces of writing had to be commandeered for the royal library.
Every piece of clay writing in the library is written in exactly the same style of cuneiform. The king employed a roomful of scribes to read every single thing that went into the library and copy it out into perfect Assyrian cuneiform writing, ‘like BBC English,’ Finkel suggests. Important things were baked to terracotta, so that they would survive for a long time, and less important things were simply laid out in the sun to dry.
The cuneiform on one particular clay tablet looks completely different to the rest. It has really big, childish writing on it and looks totally out of place. Finkel picked it up and began reading, tracing his finger across the clay tablet in his hands.
Turn your faces to the petition manifest in my raised hands. May your fierce hearts rest, May your reins be appeased, grant me reconciliation That I may sing your praises without forgetting to the widespread people.
It’s an incantation, written in a child’s hand, with letters a centimetre high which aren’t joined up. It was written by King Ashurbanipal when he was a child and learning to write. This is his school exercise book. Just as you might still have a school exercise СКАЧАТЬ