Urghh, waking up at 5.45am is starting to catch up to me. I should try to write some more words, but before long I imagine I'll switch to reading.

The reason I got up so early? skyfilmhistlndn and I went to the British Museum to see the First Emperor exhibition (terracotta warriors!!), and needed to get there early for on-the-door tickets.

Here are the things I found particularly interesting in the exhibition:

- The detail on the warriors. Parts of them were mass produced, such as fingers and toes, but other parts were individually crafted, such as their hair styles and facial hair. Each warrior has a different hairdo. Some are pretty elaborate, with plaits at the backs of their heads and the topknot on top. The craftsmen combed the clay to give the impression of individual hairs. Some warriors have fuller beards, others barely any facial hair.
- The presence of not just warriors, but acrobats and bureaucrats (2 of each at the exhibition). The bureaucrats had clay tools on their belts: a bladed tool for scraping ink off bamboo strips, and the tool to sharpen it on.
- The similarities in kingly motifs between the First Emperor and the neo-Assyrian and Persian kings. Inscriptions basically said: "I am ruler of [this land], I am ruler of the universe, I am great, I have decreed that this be inscribed on this mountain-face in honour of my conquest of [those guys]." I wrote my BA dissertation (yay, flimsy excuse for my Alexander icon) on narrative motifs, for those newer to this journal, and touched on the tendency of neo-Assyrian and Persian rulers to write down their many titles and abilities on various places including mountain faces, so this made me all happy inside. It's not that I'm at all surprised to find other king-figures doing this stuff. But it's nonetheless awesome to see that it happened here too.
- The fact that some of pictures used in the language made the standard by the First Emperor are still used today. That's over 2,000 years in which these pictures remained the same. I have no idea if the meanings are the same, or if there was linguistic drift there. But 2,000 years and some of the writing is the same, for a language where the individual symbols used for writing have much more meaning than, say, our alphabet. That's amazing.
- The old money. As with written script, the First Emperor standardised the coins used, opting for a circular coin with a square cut into the middle. But before he conquered the other states, many different coins were used. Some of them were shaped like spades, others like knives. The rationale was apparently that spades are valuable objects to these people, so they shape their money after the valuable object. Ditto knives. This is the first time I've encountered coins that aren't circular or square or something very similar.

For those Brits on my f-list, if you haven't already gone to this exhibition, I really recommend going if you can. It finishes in early April. No pre-book tickets are left, so you need to get there early for on-the-door tickets. Weekdays the door opens later, so you won't need to way up quite so early. I really enjoyed it. Definitely worth the waking hour.

I also picked up two books from the British Museum bookshop: A History of the Ancient Near East: ca 3000-323BC by Marc Van De Mieroop, and its accompanying book The Ancient Near East ed. Mark V Chavalas, which contains historical sources from the period in translation. Since looking at some of the sources of the period for my dissertation, I've wanted a good general history. And I couldn't resist the book of translated sources to go with it.

And then I went to Forbidden Planet and picked up J.M. McDermott's Last Dragon, as Jeff VanderMeer has been highly recommending it on his blog, and also got Neil Gaiman's Odd and the Frost Giants because, hey, £1 book by a good author. I'm meant to say 'no' to that?

Tags: ancient history, book octopus