Exhibition Review: Sacred at the British Library

by Natalie Bennett

Sacred, the exhibition at the British Library, undoubtedly has a tough task: the stated aim is to put some of the great texts – the physical objects – of the three “religions of the book” – Judaism, Christianity and Islam – on display, but that’s a task fraught with the potential for dangerous controversy.

That the curators have chosen to bend over backwards to avoid offence is only to be expected, so don’t hope for any brilliant insights from the text of this exhibition, or radical interpretations. Descriptions tend to range from the banal (“within most church buildings an altar or Communion table forms an important feature”) to the kowtowing: “No Christian tests are known to have been written during Jesus’ lifetime on earth.” You can see the priest leaning over the curator’s shoulder there.

That doesn’t, however, mean that it isn’t worth seeing – for over the past two millennia a huge amount of the human race’s greatest creative efforts (and monetary resources) went into supporting these three faiths, so the objects themselves are unmissable, even if, as I’d recommend, you ignore the interpretative captioning.

If these books could talk how much more would we know about the last millennia and more? Three Coptic biblical manuscripts are displayed with the simple pot in which they were found with coins from Justinian I, Justin and Maurice Tiberius. They were probably buried during the Persian occupation of Egypt c 616-26, when many Coptic clergy fled.

A “Lives of the Saints” from the Georgian Monastery of the Cross in Jerusalem was penned in 1061. The now brownish lines have the astonishing neatness so foreign to our keyboard age. A 19th-century “saddlebag Koran” from West Africa, complete with leather carry case, was made portable for nomadic tribesman, unbound with the loose leaves kept between boards. What deserts did it cross? What great raids did it witness? And it is not just books: a portable altar from northern Germany in the late 12th century allowed mass to be celebrated where there were no altars – both most of Europe’s great Gothic cathedrals were built.

There are, as you’d expect, many “firsts”, including obvious ones such as the Codex Sinaiticus (now being digitised), the Codex Alexandrinus and Coverdale’s Great Bible.

But some are less obvious. I learnt that the text of the Koran text was collated and codified on order of the third caliph about 650 and the work he directed remains the authoritative text. On display here is a new copy of what is believed by Muslims to be one of original five from Tashkent. It is written in a huge, neat but bold hand, on parchment, with no more than half a dozen letters to a line.

There’s everywhere reminders of the lengths people will go to in order to meet what they deem to be divine wishes. During Torah reading in the synagogue it is forbidden to touch the sacred text with the hands. So on display is a carved ivory and gold pointer in the shape of a hand bearing arms of Sir Moses Montefiore (1774-1885), a City of London merchant and champion of Jewish rights. Still considered the most scholarly version of the Brian Walton’s polygot Bible of 1654, which contains nine languages in parallel: Hebrew, Greek, Samaritan, Aramaic, Latin, Syriac, Ethiopic, Arabic and Persian.

In any exhibition I’m always on the lookout for the women (not so easy usually in such times and places), but there are a couple of stars here, one of them being Maymunah, daughter of Muhammad ibn ‘Abd Allah al-Zarli. A scroll attests that she made made the Haj pilgrimage in 1432-3. I’m not sure where she started out from – perhaps not that far in today’s terms, but it still must have been quite a journey.

Then one of the most spectacular objects here is the “mortuary roll” of Lucy de Vere, the first prioress of the Benedictine nunnery of Hedingham in Essex. When she died c. 1225 her successor sent this to other communities asking them to pray for her soul. Others responded and aded their own request, until the final document reached the length of 19 feet. The accompanying drawings of two angels carrying a naked Lucy up to heaven, and monks and nuns around her coffin, are for the time quite fine.

But this is an exhibition that can take you much further afield, in space not just time. A centuries old silver spoon etched in a “naive” style tells the tale that the Ethiopian church uses spoon to offer communion to congregation. That’s unique to it, although the church is ‘Catholic’ in its belief in transubstantiation. A manuscript Last Judgement in Slavonic is described as “the most celebrated surviving example of medieval Bulgarian art”.

There’s a Torah scroll from Kaifeng, capital of China’s Hunan province, from a community dating back to 12th century. It was prepared in the 17th, using sheepskin strips sewn not with customary sinews but silk thread. No matter how much the authorities tried to keep religion “pure”, there signs everywhere here that it always evolved, developed and changed to survive in its surrounds – like a virus really.

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The exhibition continues until September 23. Entry is free, although for reasons not obvious you have to collect a ticket from just inside the entrance before proceeding into the exhibition.