On the Lost Museum

　

1.

When the Summer Olympics were scheduled for Rio de Janeiro in 2016, the government announced plans to thoroughly renovate the old Museu Nacional at Quinta de Boa Vista. Established in 1818 and one of the first universal and scientific museums in the world, the place was in tatters. Most Brazilians in Rio were more than a little embarrassed by the old, dowdy museum. Termite seethed in its walls and the elaborate stucco reliefs inside the structure, the former imperial residence, were prone to come crashing down onto the water-wrinkled wooden floors. The exhibits on display were labeled only in Portuguese; wi-fi and internet access didn’t exist and there was no reliable way to install electronic beacons to guide visitors through the huge crumbling mansion. The electrical wiring complied with no known code and some of it was exposed where the lathe and plaster walls had cracked open. Admission was next to nothing. Visitors asked about a gift shop in vain. No such thing existed. If you wanted to eat at the museum, meals were a bargain – the staff ushered you through some moldy backrooms to a tiny commissary where the employees ate their lunches and breakfasts. The big windows in their elaborate stucco moldings were always shut and, in fact, probably couldn’t be opened any longer. This was also unfortunate because the hilltop where the museum is located overlooking Guanabara Bay is a fine, breezy point and the park where the building stands is cool in the shade of its ancient trees. But the galleries in the big mansion were usually stifling, musty with the close, still heat of an old attic.

As often happens in Brazil, money ran out and good intentions didn’t translate into acts. Some funds were used to renovate the zoo nearby to avoid the outcry of those sympathetic to the idea of animal rights, but nothing was done to rehabilitate the old museum. After all, the place wasn’t even all that popular among Brazilians – in 2017, the Museu Nacional had 192,000 visitors; by contrast, 289,000 Brazilians visited the Louvre in Paris in that same year. In any event, it’s all moot now: the museum burned to the ground on September 2, 2018.

　

　

2.

In the Cincinnati Museum of Art, the American Indian collection contains an Adena Tablet. These tablets are 4 to 5 inch rectangular pieces of limestone that have been deeply engraved with a bone awl. The tables look a bit like decorations and images in the Irish Book of Kells – the limestone has been incised to show highly stylized animals, apparently vultures and spiders and deer, locked together in a system of symmetrical, labyrinthine lines. Only 14 of these tablets are known to exist and only one was discovered by a professional archaeologist – hence, the provenance of 13 of the tablets is more than a little unclear.

The tablets are thought to be associated with the Adena culture, eastern woodlands Indians who lived in south Ohio, Kentucky, and West Virginia. Although the meaning of the tablets is uncertain, and, in fact, their iconography disputed, they have been imagined to be astronomical calculators or, perhaps, templates that could be used to emboss patterns on leather garments. Others have speculated that the tablets are templates for tattoos inscribed on human skin. But no one knows for sure.

Here is the point of my digression: at least, three of the 14 known tablets were discovered in museum collections, one in California and two in county historical societies in Ohio. Museums don’t always know what they possess and, in fact, often they are unaware of the significance of their own artifacts. Some dusty, unassuming bit of wood or carved stone, a feather from an unknown bird, a emerald-colored beetle – these things may be immensely consequential if understood. Often, understanding must catch up with acquisition and mere hoarding.

　

3.

A series of fires had plagued the collections of the Museu Nacional – several other buildings owned by the institution had burned, beginning with a fire in a conservation laboratory in 2011. The most devastating of these fires was one that destroyed the resources of the Faculty of Languages. Thousands of tape-recordings of indigenous, undeciphered languages were lost – these are human languages that no one speaks, that are now extinct. Who knows if careful linguistic study of those tapes, perhaps, aided by computer analysis, might not have established connections between aboriginal languages still existing and the lost tongues that could be heard whispering and declaiming in fogs of static interrupted, now and then, by the startling cries of birds? What we don’t know today we may understand sometime in the future. But if the tapes are lost, carbonized by fire, there is no hope for any further study – a language spoken by a group of human beings that no longer exist has suffered extinction twice: first when the last speaker died, and, second, when melted the last recordings of that language.

On September 2, 2018, at about 9:30 pm, fire was reported in the Museu Nacional. Fire trucks raced through the Paco de Sao Cristavao, the large and elaborate grounds where the imperial palace stood. The fire hydrants near the museum were rusted shut and almost impossible to open. Once the hydrants were wrenched into flow, it was discovered that there was almost no water pressure. The water drizzled from the hydrants in a trickle. (The museum occupies the highest point on the tall bluff overlooking Guanabara Bay). By this time, the orange flames could be seen man-high and dancing in the elaborately framed vertical windows on the front facade of the building. Pumper trucks were dispatched to a nearby lagoon where water was sucked into their reservoirs, but there was duckweed and algae and the water was difficult to spray. Some museum staff risked their lives by charging into the building and carrying out a few armfuls of artifacts. But these efforts were in vain. The museum’s roof collapsed at about 11:00 pm sending pillars of sparks skyward. At dawn, the front facade of the building was all that remained upright. Studding the top of that facade where yard-high stucco figures, little pawn-shaped gods and goddesses. Blackened with soot, they stood sentinel over the ruins.

　

4.

Although the museum was built as an imperial palace, and used as a royal residence until the military coup in 1889, visitors remarked that there was little trace of opulence inside the structure. Most of the palatial rooms had been gutted and replaced with nondescript plaster walls enclosing the galleries. The ambassador’s quarters were an exception, a dim suite of rooms representing interior decoration in the 1880's – perhaps, one or two chairs in that suite of rooms were original. The throne room was also preserved, a surprisingly unostentatious space with a carved wooden chair, high-backed and upholstered in scarlet and green satin. The most-visited relic from the imperial family was the chapel built by Empress Teresa Cristina. The empress was a long-suffering and kindly woman still recalled with fondness as "the Mother of the Brazilians". Her husband, Pedro II, was a well-known philanderer, something for which he was also admired. (He installed his mistress in the palace where his wife lived.) Teresa Cristina was twice deposed – once in 1861, when the family had to flee Rio for Lisbon, and, then, later after a brief restoration, again in November 1889. In the latter case, after a military junta seized power, Pedro and Teresa went to Spain where the Empress died in December 1889, supposedly of a broken heart, longing for her lost empire in Brazil.

Empress Teresa Cristina was an avid collector of Greek and Roman antiquities. Because of her, the museum owned the largest collection of classical archaeological artifacts in Latin America.

　

5.

Several of Brazil’s emperors were whispered to be Freemasons. This society traces its lineage to the Temple of Solomon and the pyramids of Egypt. As a result, the Egyptian collections held by the museum were extensive – six human mummies and innumerable mummified cats and vultures and crocodiles. One gorgeously decorated sarcophagus in which reposed the mummy of Sha-Amun-en-es, the famous singer of Amun, was never opened – it is one of the very few mummy cases in the world that hasn’t been disturbed. (No one will open it now – it has been reduced to ash and slag.) Princess Kherima, who was elaborately embalmed and mummified, was also on display. Each of her fingers and toes was separately bound in multi-colored ribbons, a mortuary treatment unique to this mummy. The preserved cadaver of Princess Kherima, the Princess of the Sun, was said to induce trances and hallucinations in those sensitive to psychic influences – Rosicrucians from around the world came to stare at her corpse and several women wrote well-reviewed novels about her life and loves. Of course, the collection also contained many limestone stele, now cracked and blackened, golden masks, and alabaster canopic vessels.

The museum owned four majestic frescos peeled from walls in Pompeii – dark works depicting the bottom of the sea where octopuses and dolphins and sea-dragons frolicked. A headless Kore from the fifth century BC graced one gallery. There were red- and black-figure kraters, hydrai, askoi, and oinochoe, phallic amulets, and thirty or so mysterious Tanagra figurines made from baked clay. The Meso-American collections included a set of Inca quipus (knotted message strings), several exceedingly rare Jivaro shrunken heads (most such artifacts are fakes – shriveled skull-less monkey heads with eyes and lips sewed shut), incredibly beautiful and fragile Nazca textiles knit from llama and Andes camelid hair, obscene Moche ceramics, Wari textiles and delicate filigree gold and silver work made by Chimu and Lamabeyeque artisans. Several naturally formed mummies from the Atacama desert were on display as well as an Aymara mummy found at a ritual site amidst the snow-covered mountains overlooking the barren heath around Lake Titicaca. A family group of mummies found in the Caverna de Babilonia in the Minas Gerais of Brazil was also on display.

The rarest and most important collection of human-made artifacts was the Museum’s exhaustive holdings documenting Brazil’s indigenous cultures. Since most of those people are now extinct, the objects in those collections were literally irreplaceable – I am writing, of course, in the past tense. The museum held extensive artifacts from the Marajoaro tribe including the peculiar figurines that show obviously female goddesses molded into the form of a phallus. There were zoolites from the Trombetas River culture, many of them exquisitely carved fish and jaguars, funerary urns from the Maraca people, Kondreri potbelly ceramics, and so-called Muirooquitas – that is, tiny statues carved into emerald and other green gemstones made by the Santerem Indians.

In a glass case, visitors could see the oldest human remains discovered in Latin America, the fragmentary skeleton of a slender teenage girl nicknamed Luzia. Several halls were full of taxidermied specimens – jungle cats and peccaries and giant rodents from the Amazon basis. There was a corridor lined with mountings of rarely seen parrots and other birds from the jungles. Vitrines showed hundreds of amber specimens with insects and flower petals trapped in them, herbal samples used in indigenous medicines, thousands of dried flowers, butterflies, huge horned beetles with iridescent walnut-sized shells, plate-sized bird-eating spiders, the world’s largest collection of lace-wings and Amazonian walking-stick insects. A huge articulated skeleton of a Maxikalisaurus dinosaur loomed over one gallery, the beast’s bony head and jaws hovering close to the water-blistered stucco ceiling of the museum. In filing cabinets, there were uncounted numbers of rare photographs showing scenes from Brazilian history, Indios families cooking food under ornate palm trees, the grass and wicker habitations of lost tribes, an image of Albert Einstein quizzically looking up at the dragonish Maxikalisaurus fossil, Marie Curie inspecting some of the museum’s large collection of meteorites. Indeed, the largest meteorite ever recorded as crashing to earth in South America, the so-called Bendego stone, a big chunk of space slag, pitted and corroded iron that little children were invited to touch when they came to the museum with their parents.

The fire burned amidst all these things.

　

6.

Brazilian news media claimed that the Museu Nacional held 20 million artifacts in its collections. I doubt the accuracy of this figure – when it comes to large numbers, people are unreliable estimators. Let’s say that the museum, in fact, held two million objects, discounting the official estimate by 18 million. Then, let’s imagine that there were fifty scholars employed by the museum, biologists, ethnographers, and archeologists who, perhaps, had an understanding of 10,000 objects each. This means that the staff affiliated with the museum could, perhaps, accurately index, explain, and catalog 500,000 objects in the collection. This leaves 1.5 million artifacts unclassified and, therefore, essentially unknown – tens of thousands of botanical and insect specimens, thousands of pieces of ceramic, hand-tools, arrow-heads, fragmentary bones, bits of textile, small carved cartouche-shaped stones like the Adena tablets, gems, fossils, shreds of papyrus, a galaxy of things that no one had examined for, perhaps, a hundred years. These things, objectively treasures, were mostly destroyed and are lost.

Even if some of these materials can be sifted from the ruins, the identifying labels and other catalog or indexing materials are lost. And, so, the hanks of hair and bone are just debris, garbage, more or less, unaccountable curiosities of no real value because without provenance.

　

7.

Museum staff squatted in ash and cinders looking for artifacts.

Nine Torah scrolls from the Fifth Century A.D. were found, more or less, intact. Perhaps, God had spared these holy books.

Someone’s boot kicked over a human skull. Some other bones were found, nearby, charred but still intelligible as fragments of a skeleton. The authorities were called – perhaps, some homeless person had broken into the museum and died in the fire. The bones were carefully photographed in situ. When measurements were taken, the skeleton was identified – it was the Luzia, the Indian girl who died 11,500 years before flames burned down the National Museum of Brazil.

September 9, 2016