129 CHAPTER SIX Visual and material cultures Jennifer Tucker I had monuments made of bronze, lapis lazuli alabaster . . . and white limestone . . . and inscriptions of baked clay . . . I deposited them in the foundations and left them for future times. ESARHADDON, king of Assyria, c. seventh century BCE 1 Introduction When the astrophysicist Carl Sagan and his colleagues were invited to assem- ble the ‘Golden Record’, a collection of sounds, diagrams and images, for the Voyager II mission in 1977, they reached for inspiration to Esarhaddon, king of Assyria from 681 to 669 BCE, best known for rebuilding Babylon. Esarhaddon wrote his own praises into the bricks and stones of the city for posterity. Likewise, Sagan and his team sought to assemble as accurate a representation of the evolution of the human and natural environment on earth as possible in a collection of 118 images. The ‘Golden Record’ was launched into interstellar space to ‘appeal to and expand the human spirit, and to make contact with extraterrestrial intelligence a welcome expect- ation of mankind’ 2 (Figure 6.1). Visual materials excite viewers’ imagination about the past and also raise the question of how these materials will be viewed in the future. In assem- bling an archive, whether for a research project or for an institution, the question remains: why do we select this image and what message is being sent to those in the future who might study it? 3 Most of the vast sea of 9781472580801_pi-266.indd 129 9781472580801_pi-266.indd 129 8/29/2017 6:36:35 PM 8/29/2017 6:36:35 PM