A museum, when done right, can be a truly spectacular experience. In my humble opinion, as a fairly frequent museum-goer, there are a few essential elements for a good museum. The National Museum of Beirut really nailed it on all counts.
We showed up on a Sunday morning, intending to do a quick breeze-through right when the museum opened before embarking on our day trip to Byblos and the Jeitta Grotto. When we arrived, we walked into the vestibule of the museum but the doors to the museum itself were closed and the museum was totally dark. After a couple of minutes of loitering, they let us into the museum on the promise we came back to buy tickets later, and we walked into the grand room you see above just as they were turning on the lights. It is probably unreasonable to expect such a grand entrance for all museum visits, but as element #1, we’ll just say: the museum should not be too crowded. We had the place to ourselves, except for the minders making sure we didn’t touch anything or take photos of stuff we weren’t supposed to (which was very little, actually).
Element #2 to a great museum is to be on the smaller side. I’ve been to a lot of world famous museums– all of the Smithsonians, the Louvre, MoMA, Museo Nacional de la Reina, etc. Museums that are too large, and have confusing floor plans or too many rooms, just make me exhausted and grumpy. You have to go into such places knowing 2-3 key things you want to see, beeline toward them, and get out. Otherwise you just end up with FOMO (that’s Fear of Missing Out) or regret that you didn’t see something you really wanted to see because you got tuckered out. As a corollary to this element, inevitably if you go into a museum with high expectations for some world famous thing, you will inevitably be disappointed (as anyone who has see the crowds ogling Guernica or the Mona Lisa can attest!)
Beirut’s museum was wonderful in its simplicity: it was only three floors. The first floor was one great hall with two rooms off the sides. The second floor was a ring around the grand hall of the first floor, so it was open and airy. Plus there was a small basement with a few specific exhibitions. You could literally see everything and read most of the descriptions and still be done in an hour or maybe a little more.
There probably aren’t many places outside of the Mediterranean that have the luxury of drawing on such a rich variety of antiquity. Literally everybody was in Lebanon– the Phoenicians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Byzantines, the Mamluks, and the Ottomans. Variety is the spice of life, and variety is element #3 to a great museum.
During Lebanon’s Civil War, the museum’s directors encased the museum’s mosaics in concrete, hid artifacts behind fake concrete walls, and stored artifacts in wood and concrete boxes. The museum was occupied by militias at various points over 20 years. With a few exceptions, most of the artifacts survived (apparently the basement flooded at one point, which caused some damage) and looting was minimal. I like that the museum doesn’t run away from its history, and while the museum now is pristine you can still see some indicators of what it’s been through, including bullet holes on the outside of the museum itself. Here you can see Severin in front of the “Mosaic of the Good Shepherd”– the hole in the lower left corner was caused by a sniper round– and that damage is despite the mosaic being encased in cement. Here is an amalgamation of artifacts fused together after the heat of mortar rounds melted some artifacts:
These glass things that look like fancy test tubes are apparently cosmetics jars from antiquity. I can’t remember if they were Phoenician or Roman, but the Phoenicians invented glass blowing so it’s possible this is their handiwork. Some of the colors were pretty psychedelic!
I had to take a picture of these Roman oil lamps. The museum in Kyrenia Castle in Cyprus also has a bunch of oil lamps, but they were all small (about the size of my hand) and mostly plain terra cotta. These were all metal, and the one on the left was probably a good two and half or three feet tall. Most were quite intricate. I really appreciated that we weren’t just looking at a bunch of Roman and Greek marbles, this is the stuff of ancient life!
A good museum also knows how to caption its artifacts (that’s element #4). The description for this hand just said the engraving you see on the wrist reads “Evexmanos made me.” Over the last 2,000 years people haven’t changed so much– we all still feel the impulse to immortalize on name on stuff. Heck, just yesterday I was unreasonably excited that I got to annotate a copy of a diplomatic note saying “this document is a true and accurate copy of the original”– the note was used to finalize an international agreement. My name will go down in obscure diplomatic history, so you do you Evexmanos!
This sculpture of Pan was small, about half the size of my palm. The detail was amazing and considering the U.S. Postal Service can’t get a package to us without breaking something, it is amazing to me the horns are still intact on this thing after a couple millennia.
These are murex shells. Murex were used in antiquity to produce Tyrian purple dye by the Phoenicians. These snails are why the color purple is associated with royalty and nobility– the dye is made from a mucus excreted by the snail and extracting mucus from tens of thousands of snails took a lot of time and labor. The prize was a purple dye that got brighter and deeper with exposure to sunlight, rather than fading as was the case with lesser dyes!
This gilded statue (and the others below) were found in Byblos and date to the Middle Bronze Age. They are most likely from the 19th century BCE, which means they are nearly four thousand years old.
One of the final elements of a great museum is that the building and surroundings itself should set the mood for whatever they are displaying. We were very lucky to be able to visit the Beirut museum’s basement, which had just reopened to the public for the first time since 1975 a few months prior. The basement was darker, with low ceilings, and a little more somber and moody. The basement contained all of the museum’s funerary artifacts, including tow medieval Christian mummies. They also had these amazing large terra cotta pots, probably three or four feet long, which we kind of split in half so you could see what was in them. Inside each was a skeleton with its knees tucked to it chins, you could still see the perfectly white teeth and ribs folded in on each other. I have no idea how they got the bodies into the jars, because the lip of the vase was way too narrow to squeeze them through– it looked as if the vase had been built around the body.
By far the most impressive display in the basement were 32 anthropoid coffins, which date from the 6th to 4th centuries BCE. They were off on their own in a long, dark corridor, dramatically lit and with a mirror so visitors could see their faces. The whole arrangement was eery and a little surreal. I’ve seen photos of a couple of the coffins out in the normal lit area of the museum; they definitely make a bigger impact in this setting! The picture doesn’t quite do their size justice– these things are big, and have quite wide girths.
We were extraordinarily lucky to get to see this museum. Obviously, we never would have come to Lebanon if we didn’t live in Cyprus, and getting to see all of this under one roof was a reminder of what rich and dense history we live among in the eastern Mediterranean.