British Museum, London With its miraculously preserved ancient objects – precious texts, gleeful art, children’s toys – Neil MacGregor’s last hurrah gets close to solving the mystery of religion itself Neil MacGregor’s swansong as director of the British Museum is a brilliant challenge to the modern western belief in unbelief: the cosy assumption that all sensible people are secular rationalists now. It confronts our inability to cope with a world in which religion is still passionately, viscerally, sometimes murderously, alive. Trying to understand North Africa or the Middle East without somehow going to the heart of faith is like trying to read a book in a language you don’t understand. This exhibition begins with books that are indeed written in languages I don’t understand: Hebrew, Greek and Arabic. They are some of the most precious religious manuscripts on Earth, laid side by side here,just as the communities they speak to have lived side by side in Egypt for millennia. A ninth/10th-century Jewish Bible, with bright abstract illuminations among the handwritten Hebrew letters, sits near the Codex Sinaiticus – the oldest complete Christian New Testament in the world, made at the Monastery of St Catherine in Sinai in the mid-fourth century AD (that is, under the Roman empire). Nearby is a gorgeous page from an eighth-century copy of the Qur’an, created a century after Egypt was conquered by Islam. Continue reading...
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