Artifacts from the Getty Villa (Malibu, California)

I had the pleasure of visiting the Getty Villa recently in beautiful Malibu, California. I highly recommend it for anyone who is in California and has a few hours of time available.
The Villa (not the Museum, there are two Getty museums!) focuses on Ancient Greek, Roman and Etruscan civilizations. I loved many of the artifacts and have seen a few of them before in books and articles. I wasn't too crazy about the organization of the museum, by themes, rather than by civilizations/chronology, but it was neat to see how each civilization portrayed certain themes.


[My apologies for the quality of the photos. I took them with my phone, as I was nervous about using my camera with its flash. I got scolded by the staff for accidentally having the flash on for one of my pictures.]
Here's a peek at some of the artifacts:


I love painted Greek vases! This vase in particular is an amphora and was a prize given to winners in the Olympics. All the amphora were filled with the prized olive oil from Athens and would have a picture of Athena (seen here) on one side and a picture of the sporting event on the other side. There are several of these vases spread out throughout the world.

These items are Orpheus related. I thought they were pretty neat, particularly the little piece of gold, which is inscribed with a prayer to Orpheus.

Here is a replica of a Peristyle that would have been found in villa of Pompeii.

 Another Greek vase painting, with a very common subject of Ajax and Achilles playing a dice game.

A very large mosaic, which depicts a scene from the Trojan War. In this, the prize girl of Achilles, Briseis was being taken and handed over to the greedy Agamemnon (i'm not a fan of him..)

A sarcophagus that depicted scenes from the life of Achilles. This is much larger than it appears. 

This is probably my most favorite object from the museum. This is fragment from the Odyssey!

The Museum had some very early works, including this early vase painting from the Geometric period of the Aegean world. It depicts a funerary scene. 

This kouros may or may not be a forgery. I read an article about this in my archaeology course. (Here is a different article) Looking at it, and having seen other kouroi before, I wouldn't be surprised if it was a forgery. I am not an expert at all, but there was something about it that did not look authentic to other sculptures before and after this work's supposed date. 

I liked this golden wreath. 

 Second century BCE bronze shield made in present-day Turkey.

This helmet looked bizarre with its tiny eye holes.

LIVIA! I have used this image before in my first paper in grad school. Glad to see it up close and personal

I thought this Roman Egyptian mummy was fascinating. There was a video set up explaining the process. I particularly think the funerary masks were very interesting. It was nearly impossible to see in this picture, but it looked very Byzantine. 

The kids' area was excellent! I loved all the activities they had available for the children to do! 

Overall, the Museum was lovely. The artifacts were great and the views of the outside were breathtaking. I highly recommend it for anyone who is in the area. 

A History of the World in 100 Objects: Rhind Mathematical Papyrus

The Object for Wednesday, February 1, 2012 is the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus. 

© Trustees of the British Museum

To listen to the entire show, click here.

The Rhind Papyrus, containing 84 different mathematical problems, is the most famous papyrus to survive from Ancient Egypt. The equations contained on the papyrus were for practical uses such as how to distribute 100 loaves of bread among a workforce in different ratios. It was placed in a tomb, perhaps to indicate that the person entombed there was highly educated.

The papyrus dates from 1500 BC and was found in Thebes, Egypt.

© Trustees of the British Museum

Bridget Leach, Conservator, British Museum, wrote: 

Papyrus was used to write on in ancient Egypt and was used until the eighth century AD when it was replaced by the paper we are familiar with today. A remarkably large number of papyri from antiquity have survived, including the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus which is almost 4,000 years old.
There are several reasons why papyrus documents have survived so well.
Firstly, the way papyrus ‘paper’ was made was relatively simple which helped retain the purity of the plant material. It was made from strips of pith from inside the papyrus plant. A layer of horizontal strips was laid on top of a layer of vertical ones and the two layers were bonded together by pressing. When dry this made a sheet on which to write. 
Also the dry climate in Egypt and the tradition of placing papyri in tombs helped to preserve them. Tombs especially have protected the documents by acting as a kind of ‘buffer’ against the fluctuations of temperature and the relative humidity outside, even if they could not protect them from insects or tomb robbers.
Despite their remarkable durability, today many of these ancient documents are very fragile. A conservator has to work out how to make the object available to the public while keeping it in a safe and stable environment. The Rhind Papyrus presents such a problem.
It is made up of two parts, each kept separately between two pieces of glass. The Rhind papyrus is especially delicate as it was a working document 4,000 years ago and had a lot of use. It was also re-written on which meant that the first text had to be rubbed out, making the surface extra fragile today.
When the Rhind Papyrus first came to the British Museum in 1865, one of the pieces was displayed in the Egyptian galleries in direct light. This was before it was understood how damaging light can be to plant and animal materials. Today, this part of the papyrus is too fragile to be on display. Fortunately, the other part of this remarkable manuscript is in better condition and can be displayed under suitable lighting conditions in the Museum.

Richard Parkinson, Curator, British Museum, wrote:

Practical mathematics underpinned not only the vast construction works of Ancient Egypt but also the bureaucracy that supported the whole civilisation for thousands of years. 
Such everyday things were not always preserved, but the scribe Ahmose had this mathematical papyrus buried with him as a sign of his elite status and education. 
It is very rare for a scribe to sign and date a papyrus at this period, as he did. Ahmose proudly claims that he copied these maths problems out ‘according to the writings of old made in the time of the Dual King Nimaatre’, some 250 years earlier. Such claims were often made (or invented) to stress how authoritative a text was, but I hope it is true here - it looks back to a golden age that Ahmose would have known from the old classic poems that he had to copy out as a student, and that was very different from his own war-torn world of 1530 BC.
What fascinates me about this papyrus is that we can still see the moments when Ahmose re-dipped his pen - especially when he was drawing ruled lines to keep his layout of the problems neat and straight. And here, we can see that his mind wandered; and here, he left part of the papyrus blank. 
When you see the papyrus in front of you, you can realise the texture and reality of ancient lives. Details like these give us a sense of a real individual who was trying to be neat rather than a standard ‘ancient Egyptian’. 
Such material artefacts are a common ground where the ancient and modern viewers can almost meet – as you look at these signs, it seems as if the hand that wrote them on the papyrus has just left them and moved on a few moments before. 

To get more information, please visit the website.

A History of the World in 100 Objects: Flood Tablet

Today's object is the Flood Tablet.

© Trustees of the British Museum

To listen to the entire show, click here.

The Assyrian tablet, first translated in 1872, caused quite a stir. It tells the story of the gods' plan to destroy the world with a great flood. The person in the story Ut-napishti, builds a huge boat to rescue his family and every type of animal. Sound familiar?


The Flood Tablet was found in modern day Iraq and dates back to 700-600 BCE.

© Trustees of the British Museum

This story is from the oldest written story, the Epic of Gilgamesh.

Jonathan Taylor, Curator, British Museum, wrote:

The Flood Tablet is a truly amazing object. Almost 150 years after its sensational appearance, it still captures the imagination like no other tablet. Perhaps even more amazing, though, is where it comes from — the Library of Ashurbanipal.

Ashurbanipal was a king of Assyria during the mid-seventh century BC. Fate had propelled him to become the most powerful man ever to have walked the earth. The exquisite reliefs that once decorated his palace in northern Iraq project the image of an accomplished hunter and warrior. But his library of clay tablets tells another story.

As a young boy Ashurbanipal had been trained not in kingship but in the scribal art; he was probably expected to serve as an expert advisor to his older brothers. When he became Ashurbanipal, King of the World, he used his power to assemble a library capturing the accumulated wisdom of all Mesopotamia.

In addition to great literature such as the Epic of Gilgamesh (to which the Flood Tablet belongs), there were hymns, prayers, rituals, dictionaries, magical and medical works, letters and treaties, as well as archives of legal and administrative documents. Most important of all were the manuals to help him divine the will of the gods, and thereby predict the future.

With the benefit of his unusual education, Ashurbanipal understood the power of knowledge. His library is that of a reflective and educated man, but also one designed to consolidate a king’s rule. His success is plain for all to see.

One of the most remarkable things about clay tablets is that they survive at all. Had the Assyrians written with parchment, nothing would have remained of this great library.

This in turn means that we have not just the words of the texts, but also the very clay manuscripts on which those texts were originally written. Among them are some that proudly proclaim: “I am Ashurbanipal,” writing the name on the homework of the future king.

Throughout his rule, Ashurbanipal retained his interest in scholarship. He boasted that: 'I have read cunningly written text the Sumerian of which is obscure and the Akkadian difficult to clarify. I have examined stone inscriptions from before the flood that are blocked up, sealed, mixed up.'

Letters between him and court scholars reveal discussions of omens and other complicated matters. The safety and prosperity of the empire depended on their correct interpretation.

The survival of Ashurbanipal’s library, albeit in fragmentary condition, has helped us to read and understand cuneiform writing, and given us a wealth of information about ancient Assyria. Even today, these tablets are the most heavily studied by modern scholars, seeking to piece together the broken fragments of the scholar-king’s library, and thereby reveal its astonishing riches.

Jacqui Honess-Martin, playwright, wrote:

After a week of preparation in the library, my first impression upon seeing the actual Flood Tablet was one of bewildered anticlimax.

Tucked away in the corner of a gallery at the British Museum was a chip of stone no bigger than my hand. Dull, worn, unimposing and the lack of straight edges made it look sort of lopsided on its mount.

This had caused all that fuss? This tiny lump of rock had made a man called George Smith tear his clothes off and run screaming through the Museum when he found it? That brought him fame, fortune and a premature and agonising death in the middle of the desert?

Surely this was not the piece of stone upon which a story was etched, so controversial that the then Prime Minister attended the meeting at which it was first read. A story that cut straight to the heart of Victorian understanding and that still galvanises and splits society today. It really didn’t look as if was hung straight.

The deciphering of the Flood Tablet and the rest of the epic of Gilgamesh by George Smith was the subject for my next play. It didn’t even have a spotlight.

Nose pressed to the glass I squinted to make out the scratches and markings of the cuneiform. And then something dawned on me.

This tiny fragment had been found amongst the rubble of a fallen, ransacked city, 13 miles wide and abandoned for 2,000 years to the devouring desert sands. It had been found again amongst piles of broken pieces that had been shipped thousands of miles on horseback and by sea to the British Museum.

It had eventually been deciphered, through the poor light of the Victorian smog, by the lowliest of assistants, a man who taught himself to read its language. A man who realised instantly the incredible story locked into the tiny rivets and bird-like indentations that I now struggled to make out.

Nestled amongst the other tablets, it suddenly held a quiet humility. A self assurance that it would be found. Its story would be told. Again and again. The oldest narrative set down would endure. It didn’t need a bigger stand.

Taking in the gallery around me for the first time I realised everything in this incredible building was the same. The survival of every object against the ravages of time bestowed it with a sense of calm. Every single thing has been someone’s obsession, passion and joy. Every fresh understanding a controversy; every discovery a story. I hurried from the gallery, humbled, moved and anxious to begin my own.

For more information, visit the website.

A History of the World in 100 Objects: Early Writing Tablet

Today's object is an early writing tablet.

© Trustees of the British Museum

To listen to the entire show, click here

On this clay contains some of the world's earliest writing called cuneiform which literally means "wedge-shaped." All the letters were written with a cut reed. It contains a record of daily beer rations for the workers.

Beer during this time period was not like today's beer, but in fact was more of a meal.

The tablet is found in modern day Iraq is from about the year 3,100 BCE to 3,000 BCE.

© Trustees of the British Museum

When did writing develop?

The earliest examples of writing came from out of Mesopotamia around 3300 BCE. As time progressed, different forms of writing came out of Egypt, the Indus Valley, Central America and China. It is unknown whether this orginiated in Mesopotamia and spread or if each culture came up with their form of writing independently. In Mesopotamia, the cuneiform writing was mostly used for record keeping.

© Trustees of the British Museum

Gus O'Donnell, Cabinet Secretary and Head of the British Civil Service, wrote:

This tablet is amazing. For me it’s a first sign of writing but it also tells you about the growth of the early beginnings of a state. You’ve got a civil service here, starting to come into place in order to record what is going on. Here is very clearly the state paying some workers for some work that’s been done. They need to keep a track of the public finances, they need to know how much they have paid the workers and it needs to be fair.

What’s amazing for me is that this is a society where the economy is in its first stages, there is no currency, no money. So how do they get around that? Well, the symbols tell us that they have used beer - beer glorious beer, I think that is absolutely tremendous; there is no liquidity crisis here, they are coming up with a different way of getting around the problem of the absence of a currency and at the same time sorting out how to have a functioning state. As this society develops you can see that this will become more and more important and the ability to keep track, to write things down, which is a crucial element of the modern state – that we know how much money we are spending and we know what we are getting for it – that is starting to emerge.

This tablet for me is the very equivalent of the cabinet secretary’s notebook, it’s that important.

Irving, Finkel, Curator, British Museum, wrote:

A tablet with beer allocations – a good 5,000 years old – pinned up in a glass case like a butterfly for all to see. What can be interesting in that beyond the fact, obvious enough when you think about it, that hard-working individuals throughout history have always wanted their glass of beer?

Well, this most ancient document – like all its neighbours in the British Museum – deserves more than a quick glance.

It is written in cuneiform, the oldest known writing in the world, a non-alphabetic kind of writing that grew out of a simple system of pictographs into a flexible medium with which the Sumerian (unrelated to anything) and Babylonian (related to modern Hebrew and Arabic) languages could alike be recorded.

And all this began before 3,000 BC. From the outset the writing was done on clay, a most fortunate decision because tablets survive in the ground for millennia even when unbaked. A cascading waterfall of inscriptions has gradually become available, accounting for more than 3,000 years of history. Only a handful was originally intended to survive long-term; the remainder are more or less ephemeral documents that cover many aspects of life in Mesopotamia, state and private – from beer rations to heroic literature with every kind of document in between.

In the British Museum we have a treasure-store of such writings, about 130,000 of them. They represent a marvellous challenge. One hard-to-learn script, two hard-to-learn languages and the whole of ancient Mesopotamia is at your feet.

For more information, please see the website. 

-VB

A History of the World in 100 Objects: Jade Axe

Today, January 27's object is the Jade Axe.

© Trustees of the British Museum

To listen to today's show, click here.

This axe, made from a jade found not in Britian but in the Alps, would have taken hours to polish. It was possible obtained through trade through Brittany in France.  It is unmarked and was probably used a status symbol rather than a practical item.


The axe was found in Canterbury, England and is from approximately 4,000-2,000 BCE.

© Trustees of the British Museum

How were axes used for farming?

The stone axe was a tool that was used in society after the Ice Age and allowed for a great revolution. People were able to clearn wood and allow space to plant crops and for animals to graze. These farmers likely came from other parts of Europe to England, crossing the water in small boats.



Mark Edmonds, Professor of Archaeology, University of York, wrote:

Almost anybody presented with one of these things would just stop in their tracks!

They are stunning and they are not only visually very striking but if you have the good fortune to actually handle one of these axes the feel in the hand, the balance, the weight, the smoothness – they have been polished to an extraordinary degree.

We are talking about hour upon hour of grinding against stone and then polishing with fine sand or silt and water and then rubbing backwards and forwards in the hand, perhaps with grease and leaves, to really get that polish - that’s days of work. It gives the edge a really sharp and resilient bite to it but the polishing also brings out the shape, allows the control of form, and brings out that extraordinary green and black speckled quality to the stone – it makes it instantly recognisable, visually very striking, and maybe those things are equally as important as the cutting edge.

It’s also in some respects so delicate that you really would not want to hit anything harder than a soft cheese in case it broke! That may suggest that beyond the practical tasks that you can use one of these things for, axes had a further significance, a significance that came from where they were found, who you got them from, where and when they were made, the sort of stories that were attached to them.

Sometimes they were tools to be used, and carried and forgotten about, but at other times they would come into focus as important symbols to be held aloft, to be used as reminders in stories about the broader world, and sometimes to be handed on – in an exchange with a neighbour, with an ally, with someone you had fallen out with, and perhaps in exceptional circumstances, on someone’s death, the axe was something that had to be dealt with. It had to be broken up like the body or buried like the body, and we do have hundreds if not thousands of axes in Britain that appear to have been given that kind of treatment – buried in graves, deposited in ritual ceremonial enclosures and even thrown into rivers.

Gillian Varndell, Curator, British Museum, wrote:

The axe has been a powerful symbol for thousands of years in many parts of the world. It means different things to different societies.

To the early farmers the everyday working axe was an essential tool for clearing land for cultivation. Objects like the Canterbury jade axe, however, were not used for farming, they were symbols of status.

Ownership of one was undoubtedly restricted. The green colour of jade might itself have been significant, as copies were made using local greenish rock.

More than a hundred axeheads made from jade have been found in Britain and Ireland. Most of them have been accidental and isolated, so there is no sense of a pattern.

The rock they were made from was quarried miles away in the Italian Alps, and many years before the axes reached these shores.

It is possible that they arrived here from France. Finds of jade axes are strewn across Europe. In Brittany (France) they were buried in numbers with the dead. These axes were shaped and polished to a mirror finish, and were probably commissioned by men of power and status.

Their meaning to communities in Britain remains a mystery but they may have been regarded as sacred objects containing memories and myths.

For more information, please see the website.

-VB

A History of the World in 100 Objects: Indus Seal

Yesterday, January 26th's object was the Indus Seal.

© Trustees of the British Museum

To listen to the entire show, click here.



This seal, found in the 1870s,  led to the discovery of an ancient civilization in the Indus Valley. The seal was probably used to close documents and mark packages of goods, which perhaps indicates that the Indus were among an extensive trading network. The language is the oldest in South Asia and has yet to be deciphered.


It was found in the Indus Valley, Modern day Pakistan/India, and is from 2500-2000 BCE.

© Trustees of the British Museum

What was the Indus Civilization?

The Indus Civilization is the earliest in South Asian and developed along the Indus river. The civilization was similiar to that of Egypt and Mesopotamia, however, it is believed that it was not dominated by religious elite, as no temples or idols were found. Indus civilization declined in 1500 BCE due to climate, deforestation and invasions.
Here are other seals found:

© Trustees of the British Museum

Nayanjot Lahiri, Professor of History, University of Delhi, wrote:

In 1924 when the civilisation was discovered, India was colonised. So to begin with there was a great sense of national pride and a sense that we were equal if not better than our colonisers and considering this that the British should actually leave India. This is the exact sentiment that was expressed in the Larkana Gazette – Larkana is the district where Mohenjodaro is located.

After independence, the newly created state of India was left with just one Indus site, in Gujarat and a couple of other sites towards the north, so there was an urgency to discover more Indus sites in India. This has been among the big achievements of Indian archaeology post-independence – that hundreds of Indus sites today are known, not only in Gujarat but also in Rajasthan, in Punjab, in Haryana, and even in Utter Pradesh.

The great cities of Harappa and Mohenjodaro, which were first excavated, are in Pakistan, and subsequently one of the most important pieces of work on the Indus civilisation was done by a Pakistan archaeologist – Rafique Mughal (presently a professor at Boston University) who discovered nearly 200 sites in Pakistan and Cholistan. But my own sense is that on the whole the state of Pakistan has been much more interested, not exclusively but significantly, in its Islamic heritage so I think there is a greater interest in India as compared to Pakistan.

There is not a competition but a certain kind of poignant sentiment that I have when I think of India, Pakistan and the Indus civilisation, for no other reason than that the great remains - the artefacts, the pottery, the beads etc that were found at these sites - are actually divided between the two states. Some of the most important objects were actually divided right down the middle – like the famous girdle from Mohenjodaro. It’s no longer one object, it’s really two parts that have been sundered like pre-independent India into India and Pakistan - these objects have met with a similar fate.

For more information, go to the website.

-VB

A History of the World in 100 Objects: The Standard of Ur

Wednesday's, January 25th, object was the Standard of Ur.

© Trustees of the British Museum

To listen to the entire show, click here


It is unknown how the Standard of Ur was used. It was buried in a grave of a royal and shows two opposing themes of the king of Ur (the largest figure). On one side, enemies are being presented to the king and on the other is a musical procession.

© Trustees of the British Museum

JD Hill, Lead Curator, A History of the World, British Museum, wrote:

We live in a world of cities. In 2010 for the first time in history more of the world’s population lives in cities than in the countryside. A tipping point passed in Britain over a hundred years ago.

Because of this, it is hard to imagine a world without any towns or cities, or what a major change creating the world’s first towns and cities must have been. Yet for over 5,000 years people lived in small farming settlements – farms and villages – over large parts of the world without any towns or cities. That is from 10,000 years ago to 5,000 years ago.

This long time period, 200 generations, does suggest that there was nothing direct that links the origins of farming to the emergence of towns and cities 5,000 years ago in southern Iraq, Egypt, Pakistan and north west India.

When thinking about how cities emerged it might be assumed that the average size of a settlement slowly grew so that small hamlets turned into villages, which in turn grew into large towns or cities. However, archaeological evidence shows this was not the case. Across the world villages of farmers rarely grew to be larger than housing more than 1,000 or 2,000 men, women and children. So the appearance of towns and cities in the fourth and third millenniums BC with 10,000 to 40,000 people was a big jump in size – and there are few settlements in the archaeological record that fall between the two.

What lay behind this is one of the biggest questions in archaeology. To answer it helps to answer an even bigger question in world history and archaeology – why did states and cities emerge for the first time when they did and where they did?

It would seem the answer lies in how people worked out how they could live together. It appears that about 2,000 people is a natural upper limit to the size any group of people can live together without needing layers of administration, formal political institutions or marked differences in wealth and power. The jump in settlement size to create towns and cities of up to 40,000 people implies a major change in how people solved the day to day problems of organising people, resolving disputes between neighbours and allowing people who were actually strangers to each other to live together in the same settlement.

Whether large settlements were created first, or new ways of organising people to live together came first, is not clear. But this was a major change in how people lived their lives – you might even describe it as the origins of politics. It is a change that shaped the rest of world history and we are still working through its ramifications.

For more information, visit their website.

-VB

A History of the World in 100 Objects: King Den's Sandal Label

Tuesday's, January 24th, artifact is King Den's Sandal Label.

© Trustees of the British Museum

To listen to the entire show, click here.


The figure holding a mace is King Den. Den among the First Dynasty, which had united Egypt. This label, carved from the tusk of a hippopotamus, was attached to one of Den's sandals and placed in his tomb when he died.

On the label, the large Den is defeating a much smaller enemy cowers. Hieroglyphs on the label celebrate, 'the first occasion of smiting the east'. They refer to King Den's military conquests in Sinai, eastern Egypt.


The Label was from about 2,985 BCE and was located in Abydos, Egypt.

© Trustees of the British Museum

Den's tomb was excavated in 1900 by Sir Willaim Matthew Flinders Petrie

© Trustees of the British Museum

Jeffrey Spencer, Curator, British Museum, wrote :

Den was the fourth ruler of the first dynasty of Egypt and the first to adopt the title ‘King of Upper and Lower Egypt’. This later became the title used for all Egyptian kings.

When he came to power, the dynasty was well established throughout the country and Egyptian authority was being extended by military expeditions to the south and east, into Nubia and the Sinai.

Most of our knowledge about Den comes from his tomb at Abydos and the tombs of his high officials at Saqqara. The limited inscribed material available adds some interesting details, such as the fact that Den celebrated a jubilee festival and took part in religious ceremonies.

Although the dynastic family came originally from southern Egypt, the court ruled from the city of Memphis in the north. Den chose to make his own tomb in the south, returning to the region of his origin.

This tomb and its contents have provided most of the information we possess about the material culture of his reign. The tomb was a large brick-built monument with a burial chamber sunk into the desert gravel, floored with granite slabs but lined and roofed entirely with wood.

In front of the tomb stood a pair of monumental tombstones inscribed with the name of Den. The idea of a stairway into the burial-chamber was invented during Den’s reign and used in his tomb as well as those of others. This enabled the roof of the tomb to be finished before the funeral.

The wealth of Egypt at this time is reflected in the array of goods placed in the tomb as offerings for the dead king. Even after repeated raids by tomb-robbers, the remains of the tomb equipment included pieces of fine furniture inlaid with ivory, tools, weapons, metal, stone and pottery vessels, jewellery and even games.

In addition to these gifts, the king was also accompanied into the afterlife by members of his personal household staff, over 130 individuals, who were buried in rows of graves around his tomb. Each of these graves originally had its own small tomb-marker of limestone, inscribed with the name of the occupant.

Higher ranking officials were buried in their own tomb. The names of certain high officials who served under Den have been preserved on clay seal-impressions. The most important were named Hemaka and Ankhka, and their tombs on the desert at Saqqara were almost as lavishly equipped as that of Den himself.

For more information, see the the website.

-VB

A History of the World in 100 Objects: Jomon Pot

Yesterday, January 23rd's object was a Jomon pot from Japan.

© Trustees of the British Museum

To listen to the entire show, click here.


The Jomon pots, invented by the people living in Japan, China and Korea, are the oldest form of pottery in the world, dating back to the last Ice Age, approximately 14,000 years ago. The pots allowed people to cook foods. This particular Jomon pot was found thousands of years after it was made.
The gold foil in the inside was added in the 1800s to be used during Japanese tea ceremonies.

The pot was found in Japan and is from about 5,000 BCE.

© Trustees of the British Museum

Pottery was originally believed to be developed by farmers and not hunter-gather nomads. These pots, however, proved that pottery could be used for hunter-gathers. The people of Japan had a different environment than their European, African and Central-Asian counterparts. The Japanese area provided several different foods that allowed them to settle in one place for several years, making pottery a needed development.



Rebecca Stacey, Scientist, British Museum, wrote:

Pots with preserved original contents are very rare.

We cannot fully reconstruct ancient recipes by analysing food residue but we can recognise types of food that were cooked. This helps us to understand the range of foodstuffs that were available in the ancient diet and how the cooking of these foods may have improved their nutritional value or preserved them. So, we can start to understand more about how food resources were managed in the past.

Burnt food deposits are sometimes found on the surfaces of cooking pots and these can be analysed to detect the foods that were cooked.

Even seemingly ‘clean’ vessels often contain the remains of foods which have been soaked-up by the fabric of a vessel. These ‘invisible’ residues are usually better preserved than surface deposits because the ceramic fabric protects them from decay.

Residues are analysed by using a technique known as gas chromatography – mass spectrometry (GC/MS). This separates the molecules of the residue and provides information from which these molecules can be identified. It is a powerful method for understanding what is present in ancient food residues.

Some food stuffs preserve better than others. Fats are insoluble in water and fairly resistant to decay, whereas sugars and proteins are much more likely to be lost over time. For this reason fatty foods – such as meat, fish, dairy products and vegetable oils – are the most commonly detected.

For more information, please the website.


-VB

A History of the World in 100 Objects: Maya Maize God Statue

Today, January 20th's featured object is the Maya Maize god statue.

© Trustees of the British Museum

To listen to the entire BBC portion, click here.



The statue is of the Mayan maize god,found with other maize gods. Mayans believed that their maize godwas beheaded at harvest time but then reborn during the growing season, which gave an explanation for the changing seasons.

The statue was made about 715 CE and was found in Copan Honduras.

© Trustees of the British Museum

Thomasina Miers, Owner, Wahaca Mexican Market Eating, wrote:

Corn had a mythical status in Mexico, being an ancient and nutritious crop full of vital minerals like niacin, calcium and riboflavin. Under the Mexica ruler, Moctezuma, corn became a symbol of life and fertility and was offered to the Gods as sacrifice.

Corn is different from other cereals: its nutrients are encapsulated in solid particles that do not crack with heat or water. The Mesoamerican cultures discovered more than 5,000 years ago that cooking corn with lime allows the solid particles to crack, releasing the minerals for the body to absorb.

Grains of corn boiled with lime and water are easily milled to obtain a nutritionally rich dough or ‘masa’. From the masa tortillas, tostadas, totopos, sopes, tlacoyos, chalupas and other Mexican streetfoods are baked.

The Spanish conquistadores did not understand the need for lime. For them, lime was synonymous with death, as they used lime to disintegrate organic matter. So the European colonisers in Mexico did not eat tortillas or other masa products. Instead they imported wheat and with it they baked bread.

Bread became a symbol of wealth and power, tortillas of ignorance and poverty.

The Spanish brought corn to Europe where it easily adapted to the local conditions. It became a staple for poor rural European populations since its yield was much higher than wheat. By the seventeenth century around 60% of the diet of southern Europe consisted of untreated corn. But then disaster struck.

From the 1730s symptoms of digestive disturbances, dementia and death were recorded. The disease was later named pellagra. It killed thousands. It was not until 1930 that it was discovered that pellagra was due to a deficiency in niacin (a mineral that transforms fat and proteins into readily usable body energy). The disease occurred because the Europeans were not able to digest the corn’s nutrients. The culinary secrets of the ancient Mesoamerican cultures had not been learned.

The white corn masa so loved and revered today in Mexico and amongst Mexican communities abroad is still largely unknown to bakers across the world. But the culinary secrets of the ancient Mesoamerican cultures have been preserved for centuries.

For more information, see the BBC website.

-VB

A History of the World in 100 Objects: Egyptian Clay Model of Cattle

Yeterday, January 19th's, object is an Egyptian Clay Model of Cattle.




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To listen to the whole show, click here.


This model was found in a tomb and was perhaps a way to provide food for the afterlife. Sometimes whole live cows were buried with a person. The cow was revered as a source of life and there was even a cow goddess Bat - the protector and mother of the pharaoh.

The model was made around 3500 BCE and was found in Egypt.

© Trustees of the British Museum

When were cows first domesticated?

Cows were first domesticated in North Africa in 8000 BC. People of Egypt lived in the Nile valley, where they relied on cows for food and as beasts of burden to carry water. Cows were also domesticated independently in the Middle East and today all cattle across the World are descendents of these Middle Eastern cows.

Here is an image of cattle herders in Ancient Egypt.

© Trustees of the British Museum

Professor Diane Gifford-Gonzalez, Anthropologist, University of California, wrote:

This figurine shows the form of the earliest domestic cattle in Africa, with high shoulders but without humps and graceful, lyre-shaped horns. They resemble modern Kuri cattle of Africa’s western Lake Chad.

Genetic studies shed light on when and where cattle were first domesticated. After the Ice Ages, wild cattle thrived from Pakistan and North India across the Near East into North Africa and Europe. DNA from living cattle and ancient bones suggests there were three domestications, that all took place 8,000-10,000 years ago.

One domestic line originated in the mountains that run from Turkey through to Iran. Humped cattle like India’s “sacred cows,” were domesticated around the Indus River Valley in the north-west of the country, and wild African cattle may have been domesticated in north-eastern Africa.

Modern African breeds have genetic markers that show they descend from a common regional gene pool. Europe’s cattle breeds descend from Southwest Asian stock which had been introduced into Europe by 7,500 years ago.

The remains of the earliest known African domestic cattle date to about 7,800 years ago. Humped cattle, including cross breeds common in Africa today, have South Asian ancestors.

Art from the time, made in the then-green Sahara, depicts spotted cows like these, with curving horns and full udders. Later Egyptian tomb paintings show cattle pulling plows and being milked. These pottery cattle were buried to offer help in the afterlife.

For more information, visit the website.


-VB

A History of the World in 100 Objects: Ain Sakhri Lovers Figurine

Wednesday, January 18th's object was the Ain Sakhri Lovers Figurine.



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To listen to the whole show, click here.


This is the oldest known representation of a couple making love in the world. It depicts the couple face-to-face in a lover's embrace.


This figurine is about 11,000 years old and was found in a cave in Khareitoun, Judea.

© Trustees of the British Museum

 Here are some drawings of multiple views of the figurine.

© Trustees of the British Museum

Marc Quinn, Artist, wrote:

An artefact is something from a particular time that stays in that time like a piece of pottery and it becomes like a relic of that time. An artwork is something that is from a time but is also eternally in the present moment and I think you can definitely say that this sculpture is in the present moment.

That to me is the great strength of making artwork, you are making essentially emotional time machines. You’re making an object of meditation that will communicate with people in 10,000 years time (were it to survive) in a very direct way – I mean certain things are beyond time!

Jill Cook, Curator, British Museum, wrote:

A work of art may be appreciated across cultures and millennia because it expresses something which we can recognize on our own terms.

Whether we see the Ain Sakhri lovers as a piece of erotica, a tender expression of homosexual or heterosexual love, a symbol of fertility, masculinity or a metaphor for creation, depends on our own background and beliefs. As we enjoy the ingenious composition and skilful artistry, we connect our present to its deep past and a period of significant transformation in human history.

11,000 years ago the Natufian people of the Middle East lived by hunting gazelle with their pet dogs. Gazelle have fixed territories so where it was also possible to collect seasonally abundant figs, acorns, pistachios, as well as wild lentils, chick peas and wheat grains, these hunter gatherers could stay longer in one place allowing some permanently occupied villages to develop.

Although it was probably only a temporary shelter, even the toolkit from the cave of Ain Sakhri includes little flint blades which slotted into the wooden handles of reaping knives. By gathering wild wheat and barley, Natufian gatherers were preferring strains which did not release their grains in the slightest gust of wind.

This accidental process of selection began the slow genetic modification of cereals which enabled the growing of crops Sheep, goats, cattle and pigs were also gradually domesticated from wild species for farming. Like Adam and Eve, the lovers’ descendents, particularly the women, faced a future of hard labour in fields.

For more information, visit the website.

-VB

A History of the World in 100 Objects: Bird-Shaped Pestle

Tuesday, January 17th's object was the Bird-Shaped Pestle

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To listen to the entire show, click here

This decorative pestle was used by early farmers to grind vegetables.  Papau New Guinea was one of the seven separate locations after the last Ice Age to start farming, about 9,000 years ago. The Pestle's long neck is too delicate to be used on a daily basis and was most likely only used on special occasions.

The Pestle is about 4 - 8,000 years old and was found in Aikora River, Papau New Guinea.

© Trustees of the British Museum

When did humans start to farm?

Growing plants and raising animals, a gradual process which took place over several thousand years about 10,000 years ago, is one of the most important developments in human history. It allowed for people to gather and remain in one spot and sustain larger populations. This was believed to have started in Ancient Mesopotamia (Modern day Iraq) in a place called the Fertile Crescent, however, historians, with the help of archaeologists are coming to find that farming did not just spring up from one area and spread.


Pamela Swadling, Archaeologist, Australian National University, wrote:

This stone pestle was found over 100 years ago by gold miners in the banks of the Aikora River in Oro in Papua New Guinea.

At the time of its discovery other stone pestles and stone mortars, or bowls, were being unearthed across British New Guinea and German New Guinea. What was intriguing was that the local people did not know when they were made or who had made them. Their history was a mystery.

Archaeology is now helping to reveal their story as some have been found among deposits of archaeological material. The dates of these deposits tell us that these artefacts were made and used between about 8,000 and 3,000 years ago.

The stone pestles and mortars are always found in areas where taro, an edible starchy tuber (or plant stem), can be grown. This tells us that the objects might have been used to pound cooked taro and local nut products into a rich edible paste. This dish is still prepared for feasts in a few predominately coastal areas of Papua New Guinea.

Unlike this pestle, the majority of pestles and mortars are undecorated. Most stone bird pestles have been found in Papua New Guinea. The largest cluster of finds comes from the shores of a former inland sea, which was in-filled about 4,000 years ago.

Curiously most of the birds sculpted on the handle tops of the pestles found in this cluster have their wings folded rather than raised like this stone bird pestle.

Birds sculpted with raised wings like this one have been discovered in other areas of the island instead, usually where only small numbers of other stone mortars and pestles have been found.

Many have been found on major pathways from the coast to highland valleys. Why this should be the case is not fully understood. It may be related to the trading of bird of paradise plumes between the highlands and the coast.

Professor Graeme Barker, Archaeologist, University of Cambridge, wrote:

New Guinea has one of the oldest histories of food production in the world. Soon after our species, Homo sapiens, arrived here around 40,000 years ago as part of their expansion out of Africa, they began exploiting plants like yams and taro.

Studies of fossil pollen show that they burnt forest to encourage the growth of these plants. Archaeologists have proposed the term ‘vegeculture’ for what these hunters and gatherers were doing.

By 10,000 BC people were draining land to make special gardens, and growing taro, as early as the earliest signs of farming in America, the Near East, and China. But what this enigmatic and slightly sinister object – part bird, part phallus - does is to remind us how producing food was as much about ritual and religion for most early farmers as it was about producing calories and filling stomachs.

It is one of a number of strangely ornate pestles known from New Guinea, collected like this one by European visitors in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Many of them are probably prehistoric, but some were still being used at the time they were collected.

They were used for grinding up plants and seeds, but in recorded times this was often associated with making magical potions used in rain-making. Birds are still hugely important omens for people in New Guinea, their flight paths checked anxiously for whether they bring good luck or misfortune.

We might think that we compartmentalise food and faith, supermarket and church or mosque, but for us, too, just like the New Guinea farmers who used this pestle, coming together at the dinner table underpins all our social interactions and life ceremonies

For more information, please visit their website.

A History of the World in 100 Objects: Clovis Spear Point

Monday, January 16th's object was the Clovis Spear Point.

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To listen to the entire show, click here.

 The spear head and others like it are called Clovis points and are the first evidence of human activity in North America. The period of the people who used the Clovis spear aligns with the extinction of mammoths, giant sloth, camels and giant bison in North America. The extinction of these animals is a combination of climate change and human hunters.

The arrow head is about 13,000 years old and was found in Arizona

© Trustees of the British Museum

North America was one of the last continents in the world to be settled by humans. During the last Ice Age, there was a land bridge between Siberia and Alaska which allowed the crossing into North America. The Clovis spear points can be found throughout North America.

 Even though the spears were used to hunt large game, the spear point is rather small.


© Trustees of the British Museum


Gary Haynes, Archaeologist, Univeristy of Nevada, wrote:

I suppose everybody that ever finds a Clovis Point is deeply moved by the act of discovering something that’s 13,000 years-old. You can almost detect a ghost that had made it.

The people who made these points were new to the Americas, they were people on the move – explorers – and I can really feel quite a bit of empathy with what it must have been like to enter a country that nobody had told you about – that no-one had actually been in before you, and to try to figure out where you want to go next, how you stay in touch with your relatives and friends. These things are markers of their identity, as much as being very functional. They’re very sharp, they’re very well made, they’re extremely well engineered – maybe over-engineered – they’re made better than they probably had to be.

I worked as a graduate student back in the 1970s in Virginia at a site called the Thunderbird site on the banks of the Shenandoah River, and that was a place where people were making these Clovis points or Clovis type points, and sometimes they’d fail, they’d break one – they’d drop it or discard it. Sometimes there’d be piles and piles of flakes from when they were reducing a rock into these nice sharp spear points.

Being there at the time of discovery and finding these little bits and pieces that could be put back together to sort of ‘discover’ the process people had gone through in making them inspired me to learn how to make them myself, which I tried to do, and it takes a while. It isn’t something that comes as easy as you might hope it would and every time I find one now I still sort of relive that thrill; the idea that this is something wonderful – this is something from the past and it isn’t easy to make, and very few people probably could do it.

I have an image, it’s a very romanticized, I suppose, image. It’s impossible for me not to think of these people as all very young. I mean that’s just the way it seems to be with Stone Age people that they don’t live very long lives, and it has even been suggested that many of these Clovis points were made by teenagers – young men or women on the move, old enough to reproduce, old enough to explore and very switched on as hunter-gatherers.

For more information, please visit the website. 

-VB

A History of the World in 100 Objects: Swimming Reindeer

Friday, January 13th's object was the carved Swimming Reindeer.

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To listen to the entire show, click here.

This sculpture of two swimming reindeer is one of the oldest works of art in the British Museum. It was carved from the tip of a mammoth tusk during the last Ice Age. These types of art, unlike the cave paintings, could be carried around. These Ice Age artists were fully modern people with the same mental abilities as humans today.

This work is approximately 13,000 years old and was found in Montastruc, France.

© Trustees of the British Museum

A question has arisen.. What is the point of Ice Age artwork?

Some believe it could be a charm of sorts to help grant a successful hunt. The reindeer, while swimming, could represent migration or a vulnerable time for them against human hunters. The reindeer are also depicted as they appear in autumn, the time when their meat, skin and antlers are the best for food and other materials.
Jill Cook, Curator, British Museum, wrote:

The two reindeer found at Montastruc in 1867 form a figurative sculpture of remarkable naturalism carved with considerable skill and artistry.

Examining the work closely, it is possible to see, gesture by gesture, just how the artist shaped, polished then engraved the animals using flint knives and engraving tools.

Comparing the figures with living reindeer reveals how accurately they are depicted and we are reminded that human society at this time was part of nature. The artist could contour the bodies and shade the skins from knowledge acquired by hunting and butchering reindeer, their main source of food and materials.

Evaluating the aesthetics and spirituality of unknown artists in an extinct culture is much more difficult. While it may make us examine the works closely to collect evidence, we have to recognize that we could not reconstruct Christianity from an image of the Crucifixion although we might be able to construct a view of the society which commissioned it.

Nevertheless, when we see the reindeer in the Museum, we see it as a work of art which touches us deeply and provides a thread connecting us to a spark of human imagination across a 13,000 year time barrier

For more information, please visit BBC's website.

-VB