Ikigai DailyExhibition 03 / History, objects and memory
The past is still here
Explore ancient places, the origins of coins and photographs, and stories recovered from oral history.
About this exhibition
03 / 03An everyday object can have a long history. These cards follow the evidence behind familiar inventions and events.
- Cards
- 6
- Chapters
- 3
- Languages
- EN · TR
Put time in perspective
Begin with ancient places and comparisons that make their age easier to grasp.
Objects with a history
Explore coins and photographs, then read about how they were made and used.
02.1Some of the world's earliest coins were made in Lydia, a kingdom in western Anatolia, around 600 BC. They were small lumps of electrum, a natural mix of gold and silver, stamped with a lion's head, the royal emblem, to guarantee their weight and value.
Before coins, people paid with goods or with pieces of metal that had to be weighed at every sale. The first Lydian coins probably date from the start of the reign of King Alyattes, who died around 560 BC, though experts' estimates range from 700 to 550 BC; key evidence comes from coins buried in the foundations of the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus. The capital, Sardis, near today's Salihli in Manisa, was the busiest mint. Because natural electrum varied in its gold content, Alyattes's son Croesus (reigned c. 560–546 BC) issued coins of pure gold and pure silver, the world's first such system. Coins soon spread to the Greek cities and, after the Persian king Cyrus conquered Lydia in 546 BC, across the Persian Empire. China developed coins independently at about the same time. Croesus's wealth became a byword: English still says “as rich as Croesus”.
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02.2The oldest surviving photograph taken with a camera is a blurry view of rooftops from an upstairs window at Le Gras, Nicéphore Niépce's country house in France. It was made in 1826 or 1827, and the exposure lasted many hours, perhaps days.
Niépce called his process heliography, 'sun writing'. He coated a pewter plate with bitumen of Judea, a natural asphalt that hardens in light, and placed it in a camera obscura, a simple box camera, pointed out of the window. Where light fell, the bitumen hardened; the rest was washed away with a mixture of lavender oil and white petroleum, leaving the image. Sunlight falls on both sides of the buildings, so the exposure was long: traditionally put at about eight hours, though a modern researcher who recreated the process concluded it must have lasted several days. The plate is kept at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas, in a sealed, oxygen-free case.
Read the full card02.3Louis Daguerre's 1838 photograph of the Boulevard du Temple in Paris shows a busy street as almost empty: the exposure took minutes, so moving people and carriages left no trace. The only clear figures are a man having his boots polished and, probably, the shoe-shiner, who kept still long enough to show up.
Daguerre, a French painter of theatre scenery, took the picture from his studio window at eight in the morning in late April or early May 1838 (possibly 1837). In his process, the daguerreotype, the image formed directly on a silver-coated copper plate. It cut the exposure from the eight hours or more needed for the oldest surviving photograph, taken by Nicéphore Niépce in the 1820s, to four or five minutes: still far too long for walkers and carriages. Like every daguerreotype, the picture is a mirror image. Daguerre announced his invention in January 1839 and that October gave this plate to King Ludwig I of Bavaria. The original was later ruined by a failed restoration, so the image we know comes from copies made in the 1930s by the photography historian Beaumont Newhall.
Read the full cardWhose story survives?
Compare the record of a conquest with the Inuit knowledge that helped searchers find lost Arctic ships.
The Mongol Empire, founded by Genghis Khan in 1206 and enlarged by his sons and grandsons, became the largest contiguous land empire in history. In the late 13th century it stretched in one unbroken block from the Sea of Japan to Eastern Europe.
Genghis Khan was born Temüjin around 1162. After uniting the nomadic tribes of the Mongolian steppe, he was proclaimed ruler of all the Mongols in 1206, and by his death in 1227 his armies held lands from northern China to the Caspian Sea. His heirs pushed on into Russia, Iran and the rest of China. At about 24 million square kilometres, it was second in size only to the British Empire, whose lands were scattered across the oceans. The conquests were extremely destructive, yet the order the Mongols then imposed, known as the Pax Mongolica, made long-distance trade along the Silk Road safer. A network of relay stations, the Yam, let messengers change horses and cover up to 200 kilometres a day. By 1294 the empire had split into four states: the Golden Horde, the Chagatai Khanate, the Ilkhanate in Iran and the Yuan dynasty in China.
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03.2In 1845 Sir John Franklin set out from England with two Royal Navy ships to complete the Northwest Passage, the Arctic sea route north of Canada. The ships were trapped in ice, and all 129 men died. The wrecks of Erebus and Terror were finally found in 2014 and 2016, where Inuit oral history had long placed them.
The ships became locked in ice off King William Island in September 1846, and Franklin died there in June 1847. A note later found in a stone cairn records that in April 1848 the 105 surviving men abandoned the ships and set off south on foot; none reached safety. In 1854 the explorer John Rae brought back Inuit accounts of dying men, but in Britain they were widely dismissed. Inuit families went on passing down what their elders had seen. The Inuit historian Louie Kamookak spent decades gathering these stories, and a memory shared by Inuk crew member Sammy Kogvik led searchers to Terror in Terror Bay. Both wrecks are now a National Historic Site that Parks Canada manages jointly with Inuit.
Read the full cardHistory is easier to question when you can follow its evidence.Next exhibitionThe practice of attention