A gold pendant in the shape of a phallus has been declared officially treasure by Norfolk coroner William Armstrong at a treasure trove inquest at Lynn County Court on Monday. It was found by metal detectorist Kevin Hillier on January 30th. He reported the wee gold pen0r as possible treasure to the Portable Antiquities Scheme, and now the inquest has confirmed its status. (Any found gold and silver objects over 300 years old must be reported to the authorities under the Treasure Act.)
According to Erica Darch, a Finds Liaison Officer from Norfolk, the pendant is:
“hollow, formed from sheet metal soldered together lengthways, rounded at the terminal with a small aperture left open at either end. A loop formed from triple ribbed sheet is soldered into position at the top, with separately applied solid globular testicles to either side. Separately applied wire with irregular transverse grooves on the underside (perhaps to act as keying for the solder) defines the edge of the foreskin.”
There is no native English tradition of phallus-worship, so this piece most likely belonged to a Roman soldier. Other phallus amulets have been found in areas with a Roman military presence, but most of them are bronze. A gold one is a rare find.
Phallic pendants in ancient Rome were talismans used to ward off the evil eye. The phallic deity was called Fascinus (from “fascinare” meaning “to cast a spell” which is the root of our word “fascinate”) and the charms and amulets shaped like penises and testes were worn to invoke his protection against evil spells. This kind of sorcery was thought to be caused primarily by envy, aka “invidia,” and was targeted against other people’s greatest fruitfulness: the fertility of animal, crop and person. Phallus pendants were thus often given to babies and children to avert curses intended to blight their growth, and a large phallic image was carried to crossroads in the countryside outside of Rome, then through the city proper during the March Liber Pater festival to protect newly-planted crops.
The phallus also had an official role in Roman state religion. The Vestal Virgins tended the fascinus populi Romani, the sacred phallic image that ensured the safety of the city, along with the sacred fire of Vesta. The sacred phallus was the masculine counterpart of the female generative power represented by Vesta’s hearth. The Vestals were also responsible for attaching a phallus to the bottom of a triumphing general’s chariot to ward off any invidiousness directed his way.
Four objects looted from the Tutankhamun collection at the Cairo Museum on January 28 during the political unrest that toppled the Mubarak regime have been recovered, Zahi Hawass announced in a press conference on Tuesday. They were found by an employee of the Ministry of State for Antiquities Affairs in a bag in an Egyptian metro station, which I suppose is an improvement from being dumped in the trash.
MSAA public relations employee Salah Abdel Salam saw an unmarked black bag sitting unattended on a chair in Cairo’s Shubra Metro station during his daily commute. He didn’t think it was an explosive, so he (recklessly) looked inside and found a gold statue of King Tutankhamun looking back at him. He promptly picked up the bag and brought it with him to work.
“We brought back four pieces first, then 12 pieces after that and five pieces after that and four now. What we are missing now are only 33 objects, are mainly from the late period and I’m very happy to announce that this came to us this morning are very beautiful artefacts from the collection of Tutankhamen,” Hawass said.
There is some damage, especially to the gold statue of King Tutankhamun standing in a boat throwing a harpoon. The statue is missing a piece of its crown and pieces of its legs. The boat remains in the museum (it was never stolen in the first place). The figurine will be reunited with the base, restored and put back on display.
Another recovered artifact that will require some restoration is the top part of Tutankhamun’s fan. The decorative facade on one side of it is intact, while the other side has been broken into eleven pieces. Other parts of it remain missing.
The good news is one of ten missing ushabtis belonging to Yuya and Tjuya, Queen Tiye’s parents (Tiye was the mother of Amenhotep III, father of Akhenhaten, grandfather of Tutankhamun), was recovered in excellent condition. It does not need any restoration and will be returned to the museum exhibit immediately.
The final returned object is a gilded bronze trumpet and its wooden core. Both parts are in fine condition and ready to go back on display as well. This trumpet might have played a role in its own disappearance. According to legend, whenever someone blows into the trumpet, war breaks out. Zahi Hawass says that a museum staffer who was photographing and documenting the artifact had blown into it a week before revolution broke out. The same thing happened right before the 1967 Six-Day War and right before the 1991 Gulf War. Apparently not one of these blowers ever saw The Mummy. :no:
Hawass declared at the press conference an amnesty of sorts for anyone returning looted artifacts. “If anyone is afraid of handing over such objects they can put it at the MSAA entrance gate or the Egyptian Museum’s door and we will take care of them,” he said. No civil or criminal charges will be filed, and in fact there may be rewards for returned antiquities.
Hawass also said that he has met with Field Marshal Hussein Tantawi, head of the Supreme Council of Army Forces, and they have agreed to establish a security department dedicated to the protection of antiquities and archaeological sites. A force of armed guards will be trained specifically in the safeguarding of ancient objects and sites and will be assigned to museums, open-air sites and storehouses to prevent any further looting.
The Sandy Museum in Sandy, Utah is a small local museum dedicated to displaying historical artifacts from Sandy’s settlement and founding in the late 19th century onwards. To raise funds, they invited people to bring their antiques to be appraised by professionals for a small donation, like a mini-Antiques Roadshow. Rare book dealer Ken Sanders was one of the volunteer appraisers and since he’s done this kind of thing before, he wasn’t expecting much.
Imagine his surprise when one of the locals (who at this point has chosen to remain anonymous) presented him with a 1493 edition of the Nuremberg Chronicles, an extremely rare book from the early era of European movable type known as “the cradle of printing.” An illustrated world history, the Nuremberg Chronicles was printed 38 years after the first Gutenberg Bibles and its view of history is structured in parallel to the history of man as described in the Bible.
It was published by Anton Koberger, godfather of woodcut master Albrecht Dürer. There are an astonishing 1,809 woodcut illustrations in the Chronicles, most of them created by the workshop of Michael Wolgemut, Nuremberg’s premier artist at that time. Young Albrecht Dürer had been an apprentice in the Wolgemut shop between 1486 and 1489, and since Koberger first commissioned the woodcuts in 1487-88, Dürer could very well have had a hand in some of the original drawings.
As was common for books at that time, some of the images are duplicated. They’d make an illustration of a town, then on one page label it Town X, while on another page label the same drawing as Town Y. There were also some reprints of illustrations made for earlier books and some reused stock engravings.
“Well it’s very important,” Sanders said. “It’s considered to be one of the world’s first illustrated books printed with movable type.”
The book was that era’s equivalent of a history and travel book. But for its day, it was exceptionally lavish in its illustrations. “It has some 1800 woodcut illustrations in it,” Sanders said. “Every page has an illustration, which is highly unusual for a book of that antiquity.”
The owner requested anonymity from Sanders and the museum. He told Sanders he inherited the book from an uncle in Pennsylvania.
“It passed the smell test. Just, ‘yeah, this is real!'” Sanders said. “Outside of a museum or a library, I’d never seen one before. And I’d never got to touch one.”
How a book that was printed the year after Columbus stumbled on the Bahamas found its way to Sandy, Utah is a tantalizing mystery. The owner’s uncle was an estate attorney from Pennsylvania Dutch Country, an area of southeastern Pennsylvania that was settled beginning in the late 17th century by German immigrants (Dutch being an Americanization of Deutsch). It’s certainly plausible that one of those early immigrants might have carried the precious volume with him to the New World.
If it is authentic, its monetary value could reach the $100,000 mark. The binding has long since degraded, however, and the pages are out of order. It will have to be carefully collated and conserved before any sale price determinations are made.
Right now, there’s a tentative deal in place for Ken Sanders to sell the book if it proves authentic and the owner chooses to sell, but he hasn’t made up his mind about what he plans to do. The book needs professional care, that much is clear, and the owner has said that he isn’t interested in converting it into a financial windfall so much as ensuring it is properly tended to and available for public viewing. Let’s hope all the media attention doesn’t result in an offer he can’t refuse that’ll hide this beauty in a private collection.
One hundred and fifty years ago today, at 4:30 in the morning, Captain James fired a shell from a ten-inch mortar across Charleston harbor at Fort Sumter. The garrison had been running desperately low on supplies, and since South Carolina had been the first state to formally secede from the Union months before (on Christmas Eve, 1860, in reaction to the election of Abraham Lincoln), Union troops weren’t going to be able to just waltz into Charleston and buy what they needed. Lincoln ordered a relief expedition and so informed the governor of South Carolina.
Confederate commander General P.G.T. Beauregard decided the fort had to be abandoned before the relief came. He demanded that the garrison surrender Fort Sumter or be fired upon. U.S. Army Major Robert Anderson, Fort Sumter’s commanding officer, offered to leave on April 15th, but only if relief didn’t arrive first and if he did not receive orders contradicting the plan. Beauregard did not accept and notified him in return that they would open fire an hour from that time and so they did. It was all very civilized and officer-and-a-gentlemanly. Anderson had been Beauregard’s artillery instructor at West Point 30 years earlier.
Confederate batteries fired for 34 hours straight. Fort Sumter returned fire at 7:00 A.M., but to no avail. The fort was surrendered and the garrison evacuated on April 13th. Major Anderson lowered the Union flag on April 14th, the day of his official surrender, and took it with him to New York. The flag would be used as a patriotic rallying symbol in the North for the duration of the war. It was auctioned off regularly to raise money for the war effort, with the expectation that everyone who “bought” it would immediately return it so it could be auctioned again. On April 14, 1865, Major General Anderson raised the flag over Fort Sumter again, in celebration of the end of the war. That same night, Abraham Lincoln went to the theater and never returned.
There were no Union nor Confederate fatalities in the first battle for Fort Sumter, although two Union soldiers and one Confederate died from their own misfires. The fort was not so lucky. It was ruined by the heavy shelling and ruined even harder two years later when the Union barraged Charleston from the water. It would be partially rebuilt by the US Army after the war and is now a national monument, along with the Fort Sumter Visitor Education Center in Charleston, and Fort Moultrie on Sullivan’s Island in the harbor.
Speaking of preserving history, the Civil War Trust is dedicated to the preservation of Civil War battlefields. To further their goal in the long term, they have put together an impressive group of educational resources so that future generations can grow up to be as properly obsessive about preserving these sites as they are. They have an entire Civil War Curriculum on their website, including freely downloadable lesson plans, exams and in-class presentations for elementary, middle and high school students. There’s a coloring book (pdf), crossword puzzles, links to primary sources, contemporary pictures, maps, and best of all, lessons based on visiting Civil War battlefields.
Did you know that 70% of the pictures taken during the war were actually shot in 3D for viewing through a stereoscope device? The Civil War Trust also has an extensive collection of digitized stereoview photographs. You can order 3D glasses free of charge from the website. They also have many galleries of period and contemporary non-3D pictures of the battlefields they are working to preserve.
If you’re planning a trip to Washington, D.C., the Smithsonian has set up a website featuring all the current and upcoming events and exhibits on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the Civil War. If you’re staying put but would like to learn out more about the Civil War, Smithsonian magazine has reposted articles from their archives about the Civil War in honor of the sesquicentennial.
In the pictures worth a thousand words category, Smithsonian offers a slideshow of select Civil War artifacts in the Smithsonian museums, and an interactive timeline of the Civil War (click on the question mark icons for more information).
I can’t let a national commemoration pass without a nod to the history nerd paradise that is the Library of Congress. The Last Full Measure: Civil War Photographs from the Liljenquist Family Collection opens today at the Library of Congress. I blogged about the donation of this impressive collection of over 700 ambrotype and tintype portrait photographs of Civil War soldiers and civilians last fall. Now almost the entire collection has been digitized. A selection of about half of the pictures will be part of the exhibit.
Preserving the history of slavery is also the mission of National Trust for Historic Preservation program officer Joseph McGill who spends the night in slave dwellings all over the South to publicize the need to preserve slave quarters as well as the big fancy plantation buildings. Since they were constructed out of flimsy materials to begin with, slave dwellings are even more endangered than their architecturally sound contemporaries.
Finally, if you’ve kept reading this wall of text, here’s a little payoff. After Lincoln’s inauguration in March 1861, he received piles of congratulatory letters. One of them was from the Most Serene Republic of San Marino, the wee little statelet of 24 square miles in the middle of Italy that according to legend was founded in the 4th century A.D. as a monastic community by Marinus, a Christian stonecutter and Deacon. It has retained its sovereignty since then, making it the oldest sovereign nation in the world, and since its constitution (which codified a political system already in place since 1300 or so) was written in 1600, San Marino is also the oldest constitutional republic in the world.
Surrounded by an almost-unified Italy in 1861, San Marino was sweating a little when its Capitani Regenti (elected leaders) wrote to Lincoln. The letter expressed solidarity with the Union — six Southern states had already seceded by the time Lincoln was inaugurated — and conferring honorary citizenship on the American president. From the letter:
We have wished to write to you in our own hand and in English, although we have little knowledge and no practice in the language. It is a some while since the Republic of San Marino wishes to make alliance with the United States of America in that manner as it is possible between a great Potency and a very small country. As we think not extention of territories but conformity of opinions to procure friendly relations, so we are sure you will be glad to shake hands with a people who in its smallness and poverty can exhibit to you an antiquity from fourteen centuries of its free government.
Now we must inform you that to give to the United States of America a mark of high consideration and sincere fraternity the Sovereign Counsel on our motion decreed in its sitting of 25th October … that the citizenship of the Republic of San Marino was conferred for ever to the President pro tempore of the United States of America and we are very happy to send you the diploma of it.
We are acquainted from newspapers with political griefs, wich you are now suffering therefore we pray to God to grant you a peaceful solution of your questions. Nevertheless we hope our letter will not reach you disagreeable, and we shall expect anxiously an answer which proves us your kind acceptance.
Secretary of State William Henry Seward personally brought the letter to Lincoln’s attention. After some weeks, the President replied accepting the honorary citizenship and describing the key issue of the war in terms that presage his Gettysburg Address. From Lincoln’s reply:
Although your dominion is small, your State is nevertheless one of the most honored, in all history. It has by its experience demonstrated the truth, so full of encouragement to the friends of Humanity, that Government founded on Republican principles is capable of being so administered as to be secure and enduring.
You have kindly adverted to the trial through which this Republic is now passing. It is one of deep import. It involves the question whether a Representative republic, extended and aggrandized so much as to be safe against foreign enemies can save itself from the dangers of domestic faction. I have faith in a good result.
Abraham Lincoln’s letter is now one of San Marino’s most treasured historical artifacts. It is on display in the National Museum. In 1937, San Marino issued an Abraham Lincoln stamp, quoting the “most honored” line. They also dedicated a bronze sculpture to him, and the letter was read aloud at the ceremony inaugurating the bust. It was the first time in history Lincoln appeared on a foreign stamp. In 1959, they issued another set of Abraham Lincoln stamps, this time in honor of the sesquicentennial of his birth. Abramo Lincoln looms large in little San Marino.
This is why patronizing your local used bookstore is so vitally important, because nobody’s digging through piles of weird old mildewy tomes in the Amazon warehouse and squealing with delight when they come across a stack of Flapper magazines (not for old fogies) from the 1920s. Okay, I may be projecting a little there. I don’t know if Jim Lewin of the Bookflaps blog and The York Emporium used bookstore actually squealed when he found the near-mint lifestyle magazines of the fast-car, bathtub-gin, Charleston-dancing party girls of the Jazz Age, but he probably did on the inside at least.
The magazine’s mission is downright feminist:
“What the FLAPPER stands for: short skirts, rolled sox, bobbed hair, powder and rouge, no corsets, one-piece bathing suits, deportation of reformers, non-enforcement of Blue Laws, no censorship of movies, stage or the press, vacations with full pay, no chaperons, attractive clothes, the inalienable right to make dates, good times, [and] honor between both sexes.”
Rock on, sisters! (Please to observe the Flapper cover girl above right making the appropriate “rock on” gesture long before Ronnie James Dio was a twinkle in his father’s eye.)
One of the issues contained a glossary of Flapper slang that is so truly exquisite, I intend to make every effort to memorize it all and speak only in Flapperese from now on.
The July 1922 edition of Flapper contained “A Flapper’s Dictionary.” According to the uncredited author, “A Flapper is one with a jitney body and a limousine mind. The Shifter is a new species who flaunts as his banner, “Something for nothing and then very little.”
“The flapper movement is not a craze, but something that will stay,” the author maintained. “Many of the phrases now employed by members of this order will eventually find a way into common usage and be accepted as good English.”
That turned out to be an unfulfilled prophecy, I’m sad to say, although a few of the phrases have indeed become part of our lexicon. Bee’s knees, cat’s pajamas, blaah, dogs (meaning feet), and ducky (describing something good) are all still in common parlance. “A jitney body and a limousine mind” do not appear in the dictionary, but if we take the vehicular metaphors at face value, it’s actually quite racy. A jitney was a small bus that charged only a nickel for passage, while of course a limousine is a big fancy expensive car. I guess that makes a flapper a cheap ride with an expensive wit.
Here are a few choice entries from the dictionary that are in desperate need of revival:
Brush Ape—Anyone from the sticks; a country Jake.
Dingle Dangler—One who insists on telephoning.
Noodle Juice—Tea.
Nosebaggery—Restaurant.
Strike Breaker—A young woman who goes with her friend’s “Steady” while there is a coolness.
Trotzky (sic)—Old lady with a moustache and chin whiskers.
Wurp—Killjoy or drawback.
See what I mean? The knees get calloused after the first hundred what, exactly? Also lol @ something new under the sunburn.
If you wish to immerse yourself further in the world of biscuits and sheiks, you simply must check out Carrie, a ’20s comic strip by Wood Cowan that follows the adventures of stylin’ flapper girls and the men they use for their entertainment.
A gold pendant in the shape of a phallus has been declared officially treasure by Norfolk coroner William Armstrong at a treasure trove inquest at Lynn County Court on Monday. It was found by metal detectorist Kevin Hillier on January 30th. He reported the wee gold pen0r as possible treasure to the Portable Antiquities Scheme, and now the inquest has confirmed its status. (Any found gold and silver objects over 300 years old must be reported to the authorities under the Treasure Act.)
