The Guardian, British Museum, London

Neil MacGregor’s swansong as director of the British Museum is a brilliant challenge to the modern western belief in unbelief: the cosy assumption that all sensible people are secular rationalists now. It confronts our inability to cope with a world in which religion is still passionately, viscerally, sometimes murderously, alive.

Trying to understand North Africa or the Middle East without somehow going to the heart of faith is like trying to read a book in a language you don’t understand. This exhibition begins with books that are indeed written in languages I don’t understand: Hebrew, Greek and Arabic. They are some of the most precious religious manuscripts on Earth, laid side by side here,just as the communities they speak to have lived side by side in Egypt for millennia. A ninth/10th-century Jewish Bible, with bright abstract illuminations among the handwritten Hebrew letters, sits near the Codex Sinaiticus – the oldest complete Christian New Testament in the world, made at the Monastery of St Catherine in Sinai in the mid-fourth century AD (that is, under the Roman empire). Nearby is a gorgeous page from an eighth-century copy of the Qur’an, created a century after Egypt was conquered by Islam.
Egypt is an incomparable preserver of lost time: a place where the past never dies. We think of ancient Egypt as a land of mummies and pyramids. But the same dry earth that preserved the pharaohs’ graves also miraculously preserved manuscripts, clothes, shoes and just about everything else. The oldest books in the world – on papyrus and parchment – come from Egypt, including texts of ancient Greek plays found on a rubbish dump at Oxyrhynchus. In this moving, absorbing exhibition, those precious documents mingle with everyday relics: a child’s wooden pull-along toy from Roman times beside a perfectly preserved tunic. These are mesmerisingly lifelike portraits of the ancient dead.

Yet what is most uncannily preserved is the fabric of faith itself. This show has a staggeringly important theme – nothing less than the emergence of monotheism out of polytheism, or how people went from idolising a pantheon of gods to worshipping one.

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