Here’s what I learnt:
In a large room at the museum there was a collection of various dinosaurs’ skeletons big and small with unpronounceable names such as leptospirosis and tri-cycle-steps; and they all had small labels with the dates of their various ages. One skeleton had no label so I asked the attendant in that room how old it was.
He replied with confidence “It is 230 million years and 9 months and 3 weeks old, Sir.”
“That’s very precise,” I said in amazement.
“Yes Sir,” he said, “I have been working here for 9 months and 3 weeks and it was 230 million years old when I started.”
Now that’s something I didn’t know.
I then moved on to another room which had a lot of human skeletons and different bone parts collected from various places in the world. On a table there were two skulls – a small one and a larger one. The labels both read “Skull of Marco Polo’s bodyguard”.
I asked the attendant to explain and he told me that one skull belonged to the bodyguard when he was a child and the other when he was a grown man. It was fortunate that both were found by the same archaeologist in the same excavations in the desert where Marco Polo had a picnic and his bodyguard choked on a fishbone stuck in his throat.
The attendant, who was well-read, unlike me, also told me that statistics of marriages and divorces over the years show that archaeologists make the best spouses. Apparently, the older you get the more interested they are in you.
I then moved on to the Roman Rooms. There were a lot of sculptures of ancient Roman emperors’ heads and busts and faces. The history behind all these sculptures is quite fascinating I must say.
Apparently, in Roman times there were a number of check-points by the Roman guards along the Appian Way; that’s the strategic main road connecting Rome to Brindisi and Apulia. The road was named after the Roman censor Appius Claudius Caecus. He it was who held a census and having discovered too many uneducated Romans was frightened out of his census; but that’s another story.
Anyway, the Roman Centurion guards along the Appian Way stopped all chariots and checked that the drivers had a driving license. Unfortunately, as cameras had not been invented at the time, all owners of chariots, such as emperors, senators and the like, carried a sculpture of their heads or faces with them as a form of Roman Identity Card.
That’s why there are only Roman sculptures of famous people and not the peasants and plebs.
Another thing I learnt about the Romans is that they collected urine. By that I don’t mean that they resisted going to the toilet and walked around cross-legged. I also don’t mean that they collected it like you or I would collect stamps, or books or whatever else people collect as a hobby.
No … they collected urine in large tubs left around in the street. People would walk by and when nature called they deposited their half-pint in the tub – there in public!!!
The collected deposits were then used in washing all those white togas. Apparently the ammonia in the urine acted like a bleaching agent and turned the togas extra clean and white.
And when all the senators met and debated in the senate and some jeered at one of them making a controversial speech shouting “You stink!” – they meant it quite literally.
In the Roman Rooms there was a plastic replica of the statue of Venus de Milo. I asked the attendant why it had no arms and he explained that it was an example to ancient Greek children as to what would happen to them if they continuously bite their nails.
Armless joke on which to end my visit to the museum!
