Museum Visit

As I mentioned in the entry below, yesterday I stopped at the Museum of Idaho. I figured I probably wouldn't get very many opportunities to see actual Dead Sea Scroll fragments (plus, I'd been to Hell's Half Acre two weeks in a row, and it was even colder yesterday). The museum is in Idaho Falls. Easiest way to get there from out of town is to get off at the Broadway exit and go towards the main part of town. Eventually, Broadway crosses some railroad tracks and the museum is just barely past them.

For the moment, the majority of the museum's display space is devoted to this "Ink and Blood" presentation. The lights are on low, to protect fragile documents. The first room held some old cuneiform tablets, a very old leather parchment (close to two feet by four), a Gutenberg press (I didn't stay long enough to see the demo, though I saw printed pages hung up around it) and a few other documents. The next room had some fragments of parchments older than the Dead Sea Scrolls (and ironically, larger than the DSS fragments later on), as well as some old bibles.

The actual DSS fragments were upstairs, locked away in odd containers. Most of the other documents were in glass frames. These were deep down in their boxes. A magnifying lens was either the viewing window or directly below the viewing window. I pushed a button, and the light came on, so that I could see the little scrap of paper inside. These were tiny, and I couldn't make out any of the actual writing on them. The whole scrap looked very dark, even with the light on. The older fragments in their glass frames downstair were more impressive, appearance-wise.

In each room of the display, there was an excerpt from the DVD "Ink and Blood" playing, giving information about the documents and artifacts in each room. What I saw of it was fairly well done, enough so that I actually considered purchasing the DVD in the gift shop. But I didn't. I bought a guidebook to Desert Flowers, a condensed version of the Lewis and Clark journals, and an Idaho atlas instead.

There were a few sections not taken up with the DSS display, but most of these were fairly typical of Idaho museums: some old machinery, some taxidermic animals, some Indian artifacts. The unique features were (1) a tribute to INL: "Hey, kids! Nuclear energy is your friend!" Okay, it wasn't quite that asinine, but I was bored the instant I walked in. The display hadn't been updated since the '70's or '80's; and (2) a hallway lined with old-time shops/stores/sights. That was cool. The general store looked like it was just closed for the day and might open again at any time. The dressmaker shop...would have been better if they hadn't put a very fake mannequin in it to be the dressmaker, next to a nearly identical mannequin intended as a dressmaker's dummy. But that whole area was fun. The sounds playing on the speakers were rather obviously canned (the exact same horse whinny five times in a row?), but at least they didn't put any fake (or taxidermic) horses in their stable area.

I didn't take any pictures at all while there. Cameras weren't allowed, period, in the DSS display sections. The other sections seemed to allow them (though an old US flag had a warning not to use a flash on it), but I didn't see too much I wanted a picture of. But the official web-site, www.inkandblood.com has some pictures up.