Proving the folly of throwing out old books and papers, the Oriental Institute, one of the world’s renowned keepers of such things, found out Thursday how handy a 2,700-year-old document can be.
Faced with scripting a public ceremony to lay the cornerstone for its new museum addition, officials at the institute, 1155 E. 58th St., found what they needed in their archives.
It was the text from a clay cuneiform tablet written by an Assyrian bureaucrat who had given some thought to the subject about 700 years before Christ. The bureaucrat put a title on his essay:
“Tablet About Everything Needed For Laying The Cornerstone Of A Temple.”
It called for using certain potions and potables to be spread around the building, dictated a couple of official incantations and called for sacrificing a sheep. Slightly altering some of those instructions, museum officials and major donors to the $10.1 million museum addition happily laid their cornerstone.
Putting up the three-story, 16,000-square-foot addition, though still on schedule for completion next year, has been anything but easy or routine.
In fact, museum officials could have made good use of a musty manuscript telling them ” . . . Everything Needed To Rip And Jackhammer Out Old Walls, Floors And 18-Inch Thick Foundations Without Damaging 200,000 Delicate, Irreplaceable Ancient Artifacts.”
Alas, no such manuscript exists. So, construction workers and museum personnel are having to gingerly feel their way–sometimes literally–through the work of removing the museum’s south wall and extending the building.
In an ordinary building expansion, workers can pretty much jackhammer, pound and pile drive to their hearts’ content. A building housing some of the best collections anywhere of ancient artifacts from early Near East civilizations, however, is not ordinary. When objects are present that are so old they are under constant danger of cracking and crumbling, workers have to take a gentler approach.
“This is both a renovation and construction project, so we’re going right into the heart of the museum, disturbing the environment in which artifacts are held,” said Joe Auclair.
“We’re adding 16,000 feet and renovating 43,000 square feet.”
Auclair is an outside consultant who specializes in museum construction, hired by the institute to help overcome unforeseen pitfalls.
To anchor the new Oriental Institute addition, for example, contractors had to sink caissons 23 feet below the basement level to bedrock.
Normally they would have used pile drivers to sink the caissons. Instead, to minimize the impact, contractors drilled holes and lowered the caissons in.
While some workers jackhammered out old walls and foundations, others, equipped with walkie-talkies, hugged and caressed the museum’s huge, priceless, 3,000-year-old Assyrian stone sculptures and carved wall reliefs.
“The human hand is still the most sensitive instrument around for this sort of work,” Auclair said.
Even so, before the work began, curators had carefully encased every square inch of the carved stone surfaces with acid-free rice paper, attached with water soluble adhesives.
That was a precaution in case vibrations caused by workers or by moving the objects caused surface cracking, allowing pieces of stone to break loose.
“The rice paper,” said Karen Wilson, the museum director, “will keep any stone that has become dislodged in its place, instead of falling to the floor and being lost.”
Though the museum has several huge artifacts, such as the stone reliefs, a 20-foot statue of King Tut, the Egyptian boy-king, and a 10-ton carved bull’s head from Persepolis, most of its artifacts are smaller.
Before construction began last August, curators spent eight months carefully packing and moving the smaller objects to areas safely away from the construction work. Objects too big to move, such as the Tut statue, were encased in protective plastic wrap and wooden crates.
The museum’s immense Egyptian Hall has become the central storage area, tightly packed with boxes stacked nearly to the ceiling.
The oldest objects in the collection are Stone Age tools dating back 150,000 to 200,000 years, including a flint cutting tool caked with one of history’s earliest identifiable human blood samples. From there it ranges through artifacts from the earliest human civilizations as they emerged in the Near East “Fertile Crescent.”
The addition, the first since the building opened in 1931, allows the museum to install critically needed climate control systems to protect the artifacts.
Never before air conditioned, the museum halls in summer months became dangerously hot and humid.
Consequently, the museum for years has been unable to show some of its most valued artifacts. Its Egyptian mummies and ancient metal objects disintegrate quickly in such conditions.
Even more stable objects that are on display, such as stone and pottery, succumb gradually to decay without a climate control system.
“Now we’ll be able to display everything we have in the collection,” Wilson said. “We’re also going to be able to bring in some traveling exhibits from other museums that were off-limits to us before because we lacked a climate control system.”
The first exhibit hall will be reopened to the public late next year. Unpacking and stowing away the mountains of now-crated artifacts stacked around the building will take two years. Wilson said it won’t be until the year 2000 that all exhibits are reopened.
Celebrating the halfway point of the addition at Thursday’s cornerstone laying, institute scholars edited the three-day Assyrian ritual down to 15 minutes. Bowing to modern sensibilities, they also sacrificed a Styrofoam sheep instead of a live one.
Hugo Sonnenschein, president of the University of Chicago, speaking for donors who have contributed to the new addition, addressed the institute’s long pent-up Egyptian mummies.
“We have spared nothing to remedy your . . . conditions and to escape your curses,” he said. Reminding donors that the building fund drive still is $2.3 million short, he invoked the drive’s motto: “Your Mummy Needs You.”
