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II

Hall II

We discovered

From the archivist

This civilization could not stop measuring. It notched bones to keep a count, read the swell of an ocean it could not see across, and built gears to follow the sky. This hall holds the traces of that wanting to know.

10 fragments in this hall · Africa 3 · Europe 3 · Asia 2 · Oceania 2

A slender, pale brown bone about ten centimetres long, mounted upright on a thin metal pin in a museum case; fine parallel notches run across its surface in grouped rows.

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c. 20,000 years ago

The Ishango bone

Ishango, Virunga National Park, North Kivu, Democratic Republic of the Congo · Africa

Two columns of a papyrus side by side on a pale, fibrous beige sheet, filled with dense lines of black cursive hieratic script read from right to left, with many phrases picked out in red ink; small roman numerals mark the columns at the foot.

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c. 1600 BCE

The Edwin Smith Papyrus

Luxor, Egypt (place of purchase); now in New York, United States · Africa

A roughly square slab of corroded bronze, green and black, held by clear mounts against a dark background: in its centre, the outline of a large gearwheel with four spokes, and around it traces of smaller wheels fused into the mass.

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205 to 60 BCE

The Antikythera mechanism

Antikythera, Greece (find spot); National Archaeological Museum, Athens · Europe

A torn, brown leaf of birch bark against a black ground, written in lines of dark ink in an old Indian script; near the bottom left, figures are set inside ruled boxes, and small solid dots stand among the signs, the marks read as zero.

224 to 993 CE

The Bakhshali manuscript

Near Mardan, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan · Asia

Seven long, narrow palm leaves laid one above the other on a white ground, their brown edges frayed and pierced by string holes, each covered in fine lines of dark Sanskrit script; on the top leaf a small painted panel shows seated figures in red, green and gold.

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before 500 CE

The Sushruta Samhita

Varanasi, India; manuscript in Kathmandu, Nepal · Asia

Two dark hands wearing a ring and a silver bracelet hold a soft brush over a stack of brittle, yellowed manuscript leaves covered in dense lines of Arabic script, laid on white paper on a wooden table; flakes of old paper lie around them.

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after 1200 CE

The Timbuktu manuscripts

Timbuktu, Mali · Africa

A circular etching of the Moon at half phase on aged, creased paper: the left half filled with dense dark hatching, the lit right half pale, and along the boundary between them a ragged line of bright spots and dark hollows where Galileo saw mountains and craters catching the sunlight.

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1610

Sidereus Nuncius (Galileo, 1610)

Venice, Italy · Europe

A coloured print titled La Vaccine: a man in an eighteenth century red coat, seated, pricks the arm of a baby held on the lap of a woman in a flowered dress, while behind them another man takes matter from a cow; below, a small oval portrait of Jenner and his signature.

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1796 to 1980

The end of smallpox

Berkeley, Gloucestershire, United Kingdom · Europe

A square lattice of thin wooden sticks lashed together with fibre on a dark blue backing: straight sticks cross diagonally, a few curved sticks sweep across the frame, and small white shells are tied at many of the crossings.

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1920 to 1929

A map of the swell: Marshall Islands stick charts

Majuro, Marshall Islands · Oceania

A double-hulled voyaging canoe under two tan crab claw sails crosses choppy blue water towards the shore, flying the Hawaiian flag and the United States flag; crew in bright clothes stand on the deck between the hulls, small motorboats follow, and green mountains rise behind under white clouds.

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1976

Hōkūleʻa

Hawaiʻi, United States, to Tahiti, French Polynesia · Oceania