Report 5: The National Museum of Saudi Arabia
The Saudi National Museum in Riyadh is a big picture narrative museum befitting a country with a unique history. I don’t know of another nation in the history of the world that obtained wealth and influence at such a rapid rate as Saudi Arabia did in the 20th Century. (The silver mines of Bolovia in the 1600s are the closest example I can think of in terms of a geological wealth, but Saudi Arabia is really a different story.) And so, Saudi Arabia with its relatively short history built a grand museum not far from its birthplace at Fort Masmak.
The founding of the Kingdom begins in the 1930s but the National Museum begins millions of years earlier with the formation of the Arabian Peninsula. The Kingdom itself may be young, less than 100 years, but its history started when the Peninsula was a shallow sea and dying life forms accumulated under the perfect conditions for billions of barrels of oil to form over time and eventually be unleashed on the world and change that world in innumerable ways.
The are several interesting psychological-architectual tricks built into the National Museum. For example, One of the first sections of the museum is introduced as Jahiliyyah, the time before Islam, the time of ignorance. It’s here we find neolithic carvings and pottery; the evidence of people existing in what would become Saudi Arabia, but who had not yet developed a proper relationship with reality or God.
After leaving the space of Jahiliyyah, the visitor takes a long dark escalator ride up and into a kind of birth chamber of Islam- a glowing room with a gilded copy of the Koran in the center and the story of Mohamed on the walls around the room. The ride up the escalator is really an ascendancy into into a higher reality, away from the idiocy of Jahiliyyah and into the radiating nirvana of a new religion.
After leaving the glowing Hall of Islam, the visitor walks down a long hallway lined with a beautiful ceramic tile piece which extends the length of the hall. In addition to the tile there is an audio component that tells the story of the transition of the Arabian Peninsula from a violent pre-Islamic barbarism into a place of harmony thanks to the civilizing influence of Islam.
While traversing this hallway, about a third of the way down, I heard and recognized what I believed to be Doom ’95 Zombieman sounds. I would not consider myself a video game expert at all, however I did finish Doom ’95 from beginning to end. The sounds I heard were the guttural moans of the zombiemen dying. I wondered, “How did the sounds of Doom ’95 end up in the Saudi National Museum?” Could this have been a prank that a sound engineer played on the museum out of boredom? I asked a man in the Museum about the sound and he told me that the sound was made by a camel. (Edit: further research confirmed that the sounds were part of an old sound library that had been used for decades in film and video and that they were indeed camel sounds.)
The Saudi National Museum ends with displays about Mecca and the discovery of oil. There probably is no better way to end the National Museum considering the far reaching power and influence that these two sources of wealth and influence have had on the Arabian Peninsula and the Saudi state. I don’t think I fully realized this until I stood there in the museum, and in Riyadh, and saw the power of oil money to transform the landscape and its people. There’s really something like science fiction at work here, two energies radiating outward and inward, transforming lives all over the world. Could American suburbs have happened without Saudi oil?
