Alexander the Itsy Bitsy

A magnificent miniature of Alexander the Great has been found during the excavation of Tel Dor, an ancient port city 30 miles south of Haifa, Israel.

It was engraved on a gemstone less than a centimeter long and less than half a centimeter wide. Despite the teeniness of the medium, the artist carved the youthful Alexander in exquisite detail.

Clearly this was a highly valuable piece even in its own day, something that is surprising given the location. You’d expect to find a treasure like this in the major centers of the Greek empire, not so much in Israel, although Alexander did take the ancient city (called just plain Dor back then) without encountering resistance on his way to Egypt in 332 BC.

“It has been accepted to assume that first-rate artists – and whoever carved the image of Alexander in this gemstone was certainly one of them – were primarily active under the patronage of the large royal courts in Greece itself or in major capitals,” the scientists explained. “It turns out that local elites in secondary centers such as Dor could allow themselves – and knew to appreciate – superior artwork.”

This is one of the reasons archaeological context is so important, btw. Not to flog my hobby horse or anything, but if this piece had been looted and turned up wherever without a record of where it was found, nobody would ever have thought it came from Israel.

Now not only do we have this extraordinary piece of art, but we know something we hadn’t even considered about the time and place in which it was made.

Finally a non-annoying use for cellphones in museums

Starting tomorrow, the Brooklyn Museum will give visitors with internet-enabled cellphones a program to create their own customized gallery guides.

So you go to the Brooklyn Museum, add an item to your cellphone gallery guide, then the program suggests other things you might want to see. You can add notes as you go, and upload your guide to the museum website for other visitors to share.

For example, a visitor to the ancient Egyptian galleries containing more than 1,200 objects might focus on the Old Kingdom section, encompassing Dynasties 3 through 6, from 2675 through 2170 B.C. There, they might select a limestone group statue depicting a man, his wife, and their small son that was the first major work of Egyptian art ever exhibited in America. Given their interest in this statue, the program then might suggest that the visitor look at three elaborately painted wooden tomb statues depicting a man at various stages of his life and an exquisite alabaster statue of the child King Pepy II seated on the lap of his mother. […]

Through the aggregation of data provided by many visitors and their individual tastes, the guide is designed to grow more intelligent as more visitors use it and more data is supplied. The new customized guide will be free to all visitors and may be used on any Web-enabled mobile phone.

That’s going to be damn handy, and I say this as someone without an internet-enabled phone. It’s so easy to find yourself wandering aimlessly in large museums. After a while even the most extraordinary objects can seem to blend into one.

On a side note, who knew the Brooklyn Museum had a 1,200-object ancient Egyptian gallery? 😮

Golf course groundskeeper finds mammoth tooth

Nineteen-year-old groundskeeper Patrick Walker was edging weeds on the Morrison Lake Country Club golf course in Saranac, Michigan, when he came across a large black rock-looking thing.

His boss was ready to toss it out, but Walker remembered a plaster cast of a mammoth tooth he had seen in a science class once and immediately recognized its shape, size and that unusual tread pattern.

They called up some local folks who had found fossils in their back yard and got the names of some University of Michigan experts, one of whom hilariously suggested that this 9-inch-wide, 10-pound fossil was the remnant of a pig barbecued on the property.

Thankfully, they reached Dr. Scott Beld, from the University’s Museum of Paleontology and he recognized it as the tooth of a small Columbian mammoth, perhaps an adolescent or a female.

There may be more of the mammoth to be found under the green, but the golf course is a small operation and they can’t afford to tear up the property for excavation.

Roman naval battle in New York City

Brooklyn artist Duke Riley has a thing for recreating historical watercraft. Two years ago he sailed a wooden submarine he made from Revolutionary War designs towards the Queen Mary 2. Naturally they arrested him.

This year, he staged a whole Gladiatorial-style naval battle in the reflecting pool at Flushing Meadows Corona Park, site of two World’s Fairs, one in 1939, the other in 1964.

A giant “Unisphere” was built in the middle of the central fountain in 1964, along with other structures, statues and reflecting pools. (It’s near the New York Mets’ old Shea Stadium and new Citi Park.)

One of the 1964 pools became the site of this naumachia. Plumbers from the city parks department filled the pool for the first time since the 1964 World’s Fair. It provided a perfect venue for the mock Colosseum on water.

Of course, even filled the reflecting pool is just a foot and a half deep, so the reed ships and catamarans had to be designed to carry people and float on a puddle.

So he invited a bunch of friends to make 5 ships representing the five boroughs of New York City, plus representatives from museums in each of the boroughs to serve as crew on their ship.

Instead of the gladius and trident, toga-clad crew and spectators used tomatoes as weapons. The spectators were inspired to join the fray more directly, and the ships were basically torn apart.

Then for the grand finale Riley produced a surprise 6th ship modeled after the Queen Mary 2, his old nemesis, and set it joyously alight with fireworks until they flipped it over in the water to douse the flames.

Now that is what I call a great time.

Scotland’s earliest face

It’s basically a stick figure made out of rocks, but it’s notable as the earliest anthropomorphic carving ever found in Scotland.

The face and its lozenge-shaped body – measuring just 3.5cm by 3cm – were carved on the Orkney island of Westray between 4,500 and 5,000 years ago.

The enigmatic figurine had lain undisturbed in the earth at the Links of Noltland – one of Orkney’s richest archaeological sites – until just last week.

It’s not only the earliest known Scottish Stone Age carving of a human, but so far it’s the only one.

The cup and ring carvings I blogged out earlier this week are from the same era, and that sort of abstract design is all they’ve found dating to Neolithic times before now. So needless to say, Scottish archaeologists are psyched.

It’s a little on the border between human form and morse code, to be honest, but I can see the person in there.

See, the dots on either side of the Tic-Tac-Toe grid are eyes, the grid is his nose, the scratches above might be hair, the circles on the right and left of the trunk are probably breasts.

The arms are carved on the sides and can’t be seen in this picture.