Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

This afternoon, cattitude and I met treadpath and screaminghippo for pizza and a visit to the American Museum of Natural History, which has a special exhibit on the city of Petra. On the way in, Cattitude and I rejoined the museum; this not only gets us unlimited visits, and a discount on snacks and gift shop and such (though it'll be a few weeks before we get our membership cards), we'll get Natural History magazine again. And they threw in two free IMAX tickets, usable any time this year.

Petra is a city--now, the ruins of a city--in northern Arabia, built around the 4th century BCE by the Nabataeans. They turned a defensible location with reasonable access to water (no small matter in Arabia, then or now) into a major trading crossroads.

The exhibit was excellent, though smaller than I'd have liked. Most of the material was on loan, largely from the Jordanian Department of Antiquities. I suspect a large part of the problem is that there aren't that many portable artefacts from Petra: the people built by carving into the stone. But there were pictures of the stone tombs, pieces of buildings, a bit of jewelry, some sections of pipe, and images of deities, some made locally and some obviously imported. With trade came cultural influences. After Alexander the Great came back from India, the Nabateans started carving elephant heads into their buildings as a symbol of strength; some of the images show obvious foreign influence.

At the museum entrance, they gave us timed tickets; there was a guided tour leaving at the time we asked for, but we weren't required to stay with it. We didn't, partly because I wasn't thrilled with the guide, and partly because I didn't want to be surrounded by lots of strangers and thus unable to see the exhibits clearly. Fortunately, the explanatory material in the exhibit is also good: often, along with descriptions (e.g., "bronze lamp with human figure handle") there are discussions of cultural influences, and then a section on "how we know".

Petra was badly damaged by an earthquake, a couple of centuries after the Romans took over Arabia [there were notes on why they think the takeover wasn't by battle] and some time after Christianity became important in the city. The earthquake has been dated, and the "how we know" explains that, first, an earliest date was put on the quake by the discovery of a hoard of coins known to have been minted in a given year. And then a letter was found describing the quake: the author not only dated the letter, he gave the time of the quake itself and the aftershock. (The city had already become less important, as trade moved elsewhere for a variety of reasons.)

I wasn't surprised that they were getting pepper and fabric over the Silk Road, nor that Petra is mentioned in Chinese records beginning in the 2nd century BCE. What surprised me is that one of those Chinese mentions is of a troupe of traveling jugglers who had come from Petra to China.

After the Petra exhibit, we went down to the Hall of Ocean Life; I was the only one of us who'd seen it since it reopened. I had to bail out earlier than I'd wanted; first my toes cramped in a weird way while we were walking around, and then I just felt vaguely unsteady and quite tired, so it was clearly time to go home. Tea helped, but not enough; we were close to Museum closing time, and I wasn't up for a long wander outside, even on a relatively mild day. Once again, I was glad of that the basement entrance of the museum connects directly with the IND subway line.