The links between archaeology and the Bible have fascinated generations of scholars who seek documentation of events narrated in the Bible. The British Museum's collections include numerous inscriptions, pictorial reliefs and other objects which provide such evidence. For this book the author has selected seventy-two such 'documents, ' mainly from Western Asia, with some examples included from Greece, Egypt and Asia Minor, dating from the period of the patriarchs to the New Testament times, c. 2000 BC to c. AD 100. He transliterates and translates extracts from the ancient texts, which include cuneiform, Aramaic and Hebrew, and discusses the contribution they make to our knowledge of the culture and history of biblical times.

By 1901, the public museum was firmly established as an important national institution in British life. Its very centrality led to its involvement in a wide range of debates about art, knowledge, national identity, and individual agency. Ruth Hoberman argues that these debates concerned writers as well. Museum Trouble focuses on fiction written between 1890 and 1914 and the ways in which it engaged the issues dramatized by and within the museum. Those issues were many. Art critics argued about what kind of art to buy on behalf of the nation, how to display it, and whether salaried professionals or aristocratic amateurs should be in charge. Museum administrators argued about the best way to exhibit scientific and cultural artifacts to educate the masses while serving the needs of researchers. And novelists had their own concerns about an increasingly commercialized literary marketplace, the nature of aesthetic response, the impact of evolution and scientific materialism, and the relation of the individual to Britain’s national and imperial identity. In placing the many crucial museum scenes of Edwardian fiction in the context of late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century cultural discourse, Museum Trouble shows how this turn-of-the-century literature anticipated many of the concerns of the modernist writers who followed.

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