Are you smarter than a 7th grader? Apparently, some of the curators of the Metropolitan Museum of Art aren’t. According to The Huffington Post, Benjamin Lerman Coady, a 13-year-old from West Hartford, CT, visited New York City’s worldly museum of art and antiquities, and noticed that a map of the Byzantine Empire circa the 6th century A.D. was inaccurate. It attempted to depict the reach of the entire empire at the time — but was missing the inclusion of Spain and part of northern Africa.
“The front desk didn’t believe me,” Coady told The Hartford Courant when recalling his tale of how to alart the museum. “I’m only a kid.”
Coady, who had just learned about the Byzantine Empire in school, went through formal channels, but it wasn’t until four months later that he got a reply from Helen Evans, the Met’s curator of Byzantine art: “You are, of course, correct about the boundaries of the Byzantine Empire under Justinian.”
The seventh grader and museum curator had a meeting last February to discuss the error, and have since made plans to correct the map. Evans claims the mistake was due to a map reprint from a few years ago.
A few years ago? The museum only had 1500 years to correct that error. Good thing some seventh graders are perceptive when it comes to history. “It may be the makings of a young historian,” Evans said.
