Month: October 2011

Giant 50-ton replica of Ramesses needs new home

Modern(ish), Social policy

Memphis — the one in Tennessee — has a 50-ton, 25-foot-tall homeless pharaoh on its hands. It’s a fiberglass replica of a colossal statue of Ramesses the Great found in pieces in Memphis — the one in Egypt — and is the only officially permitted replica of the original Colossus of Ramesses in the world. It stands outside the Pyramid Arena, a sports arena in downtown Memphis on the banks of the Mississippi which is no longer in use as a sports venue and will instead be the locus of a new Bass Pro Shops megastore (plus other retail outlets, office space, even a river museum). Neither Bass Pro Shops nor the Memphis City Council think Ramesses the Great should have a second career as a mall cop, so the city is looking for a new home for their giant.

The City Council ran multiple advertisements in local press outlets looking for any takers who would keep Ramesses on display for the benefit of the people of Memphis. Only the University of Memphis, whose men’s basketball team once played in the Pyramid Arena, responded. The university offered to pay a token dollar and move the statue to its campus. Some people on the City Council are not thrilled with the idea, though, because the university is state-owned rather than city-owned. Also, the campus is in East Memphis; the ideal location would be more centrally located.

There’s also the small matter of the original agreement with Egypt. The Memphis City Council brought in Glen Campbell, the former curator of the Wonders series that brought the ancient limestone Ramesses colossus to Tennessee, and former Memphis mayor Dick Hackett to testify to the stipulations of the deal.

Campbell said that he, Hackett and the rest of Memphis delegation first saw the original statue in the Egyptian city called Memphis in 1986. It was lying in a ditch in about three big pieces and about a thousand smaller pieces.

When Hackett proposed moving it to the Bluff City for what would become the first Wonders exhibit, he suggested that it be displayed in pieces, just as it was in Egypt. Campbell recalled the response from an Egyptian antiquities official: “Pharaohs do not recline outside of the sands of Egypt.”

So the Memphis delegation agreed to restore the statue with funds from the Coca-Cola corporation, display it in Memphis and send it back to Egypt when they were done. They also won agreement to create a fiberglass replica to keep in the city. But there were conditions. The Americans had to agree to destroy the mold used to make the statue and send the Egyptians a videotape of the destruction, Campbell said.

And there were stipulations that are relevant to the current discussion: They also had to agree to keep the statue on public display somewhere in the city of Memphis, not to sell it and not to give it away, Campbell said.

Shall we bet on who that pithy Egyptian antiquities official was? I won’t name names, but I’m guessing his initials are Zahi and Hawass.

The agreement was signed by Hosni Mubarak, so an argument could be made that it’s invalid now and Memphis can do whatever it wants with the replica, but thankfully they’re not taking it that way. Keeping the statue on display for its educational and aesthetic value to the city of Memphis is their priority.

Bass Pro Shops is scheduled to begin renovations and construction of Pyramid Arena this month. The statue will remain in place until the matter is resolved.

Unique Roman-era mosaic found in Bulgaria

Ancient, Roma, Caput Mundi, Treasures

Archaeologists have found an intricate Roman-era mosaic floor in the southern Bulgarian town of Stara Zagora. According to Dimitar Yankov, chief curator of Stara Zagora’s Regional Museum of History and leader of the archaeological team, the mosaic dates to around the 3rd century A.D. and nothing like it has been found in Bulgaria before. The scene is a Bacchanalian revel and thus far the figure of Semele, Bacchus’ mortal mother, and two dancing women have been revealed. Semele is leading the revels and the dancing women follow her.

“The complex figures of dancing women suggest the mosaic was done by a great master. The clothes are in five shades of blue and the red color varies from pink to dark red. The figures are very fine. One of the women holds castanets in her hands and the other one holds other music instruments. The folds of their clothes suggest their knees are bent. Their ankles are bare and their legs move. There is play of light and shade.”

The building in which the mosaic was found was a temple to Bacchus located a hundred feet from the walls of the ancient forum. Yankov hopes that more of the mosaic remains and that continuing excavations will reveal the god Bacchus himself.

Restorer Nikola Stoyanov notes that the mosaic was created using the opus tessellatum technique where the mosaic tiles (tesserae) in the background are laid out so they align either vertically or horizontally, but not both. The tesserae are just one centimeter square, which give the mosaic its complexity and detail, but will also ensure that any future attempts to remove the mosaic for conservation and display will be an enormous challenge.

It has to happen, though, because the property being excavated is privately owned. In order to ensure that the mosaic is preserved and shown to the public, somebody is going to have to peel thousands of one-centimeter tiles off the floor.

Medieval inscribed slates found in Welsh castle

Medieval, Treasures

A team of archaeologists on their fourth year of excavations at the 12th century Nevern Castle in Pembrokeshire, Wales, have unearthed 12 slates inscribed with a variety of designs. Found at the south entrance to the castle, the scratched symbols were probably made by laborers to keep evil spirits from crossing its threshold.

Inscribed slates from this early on are a rare discovery. There’s a later Welsh tradition of scratching curses or blessings on slate tiles and throwing them down wells, but what you usually see are the initials of a cursee or blessee inscribed, not symbols.

“Scratched images from the medieval world are rare, and we can confidently date these to the period 1170-1190 when the stone phase of Nevern Castle was built,” added [Lead archaeologist Dr. Chris] Caple.

“These drawings connect us with the lives and beliefs of masons or labourers who built the castle. We hardly ever recover evidence about the peasants of the medieval world, and never information about their beliefs and ideas, but these scratched designs are from the imagination of a serf, a farm labourer or a man at arms.”

Welsh slate had been quarried and used as a building material, particularly roof tiles, since the Roman period. The south entrance was made of slate bedded with clay, a local building technique that creates a strong structure as long as you ensure the bedded slate walls are capped with large stones or wide eaves to ensure rain doesn’t wash the clay away.

On top of the clay bedded slate, the doorway was built out of blocks of local sandstone. Finely chiseled, evenly faced square blocks of sandstone were not a local building technique at this point. That style was imported by the Anglo-Norman invaders, and in fact it was Anglo-Norman lord Robert FitzMartin who built Nevern castle as we know it today in the first decade of the 12th century. That makes the doorway an extremely early fusion of native and invader construction.

Control of the castle shifted over the century between FitzMartin and Welsh prince Rhys ap Gruffudd. During the period in which those slates were inscribed, 1170-1190, the castle was in FitzMartin’s hands. Most of the masonry was built onto the timber and earthenworks castle by The Lord Rhys between 1135 and 1170, but FitzMartin is thought to have added some new stone structures after he regained control. By 1195 it was back in Welsh hands, but Rhys died in 1197 and his son Hywel Sais demolished much of it and left it to decay.

Its short lifespan and connection to Rhys ap Gruffudd makes the castle an important site for Welsh history. Not only was Rhys a powerful figure in his time, but if archaeologists can pinpoint buildings that he added on to the castle, that will make Nevern the earliest excavated remains of a stone castle built by the Welsh themselves.

Portsmouth slaves petitioned for freedom in 1779

Modern(ish)

Pivoting off the language in the Declaration of Independence three years earlier, 20 slaves in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, signed and submitted a petition for their freedom to the New Hampshire General Assembly. One of the signers, Prince Whipple, was the slave of William Whipple, a New Hampshire delegate to the Continental Congress and a signer of the Declaration of Independence.

It’s not known who wrote the petition, but it was signed in November of 1779. The petition was submitted to the General Assembly six months later, in April of 1780. The legislators ordered that it be published in the newspaper “that any person or persons may then appear and shew (sic) cause why the prayer thereof may not be granted.” The New Hampshire Gazette duly published it (pdf copy) on July 15th, 1780, but they added a disclaimer that it was printed for their readers’ “amusement.” The petition lost steam. The General Assembly postponed the hearing they had scheduled and that was the end of that.

This was not the only petition of its kind, of course. Revolutionary fervor spread throughout the colonies making the language of freedom and natural rights common vernacular. Slaves could hardly have heard the words and not applied them to their circumstances, which some might argue were far more aptly described in terms of tyranny and oppression than wealthy colonial leaders’ struggles with the Stamp Act.

The signers of the petition, although slaves, were people of importance in their community, often ranked socially according to the importance of their master. They actually ran a shadow justice system called the Negro Court which adjudicated disputes and punished slaves who committed petty crimes. As property, slaves couldn’t be convicted of crimes in the colonial judiciary, so the Negro Court stepped up to the plate. The members of the bench were elected by the slaves of Portsmouth, and this wasn’t done in secret or even quietly. They were out and proud.

“Arrayed in brilliant clothes, the region’s black population assembled, then processed out of the city center to the outskirts and returned some hours later with festive music and boisterous gunfire to a grand celebration of their newly elected monarch and court,” Cunningham and Sammons wrote.

The court was led by a king — likely a nod to the royalty of tribes in Africa. In the period when the petition was written, the court consisted of “King” Nero Brewster, owned by Col. William Brewster; Viceroy Willie Clarkson, owned by Peirse Clarkson; Sheriff Jock Odiorne and Deputy Pharaoh Shores. […]

“It was a way within slavery to maintain social order and a sense of community,” Watters said. “They replicated the white hierarchy and power structure, and it is obvious that there was at least some cooperation and perhaps even some status within white families of having a slave on the court.”

Fascinating, isn’t it, how complex the social dynamics were?

Judging from the first line of the petition, the Negro Court was certainly involved in it, if not directly responsible.

The petition of Nero Brewster, and others, natives of Africa, now forcibly detained in slavery, in said state, most humbly theweth, That the God of Nature gave them life and freedom, upon terms of the most perfect equality with other men; that freedom is an inherent right of the human species, not to be surrendered, but by consent, for the sake of social life; that private or public tyranny and slavery, are alike detestable to minds conscious of the equal dignity of human nature; that in power and authority of individuals, derived solely from a principle of coersion, against the wills of individuals, and to dispose of their persons and properties, consists the completed idea of private and political slavery; that all men being amenable to the Deity for the ill improvement of the blessings of his providence, they hold themselves in duty bound, strenuously to exert every faculty of their minds, . . .; that thro’ ignorance & brutish violence of their native countrymen and by similar designs of others, (who ought to have taught them better) & by the avarice of both, they, while but children, and incapable of self defense, whose infancy might have prompted protection, were seized, imprisoned, and transported from their native country, where (tho’ ignorance and inchristianity prevailed) they were born free to a country, where (tho’ knowledge, christianity and freedom, are their boast) they are compelled, and their unhappy posterity, to drag on their lives in miserable servitude. . . .

Notice that although their forcible and violent removal from Africa is the opening salvo, they fully identify with and support the nascent Revolutionary ideal of the United States as the land of the free.

New Hampshire’s state constitution was passed in 1783. It declared that “all men are born equal and independent,” the same language that led to the abolition of slavery in Massachusetts pursued through the courts, but there was nothing specific about manumitting slaves and there are census records indicating the presence of slaves in the state off and on through 1840. Officially, slavery in New Hampshire was only abolished with the passage of the 13th amendment to the US Constitution in 1865.

Frome Hoard on display in new Museum of Somerset

Ancient, Museums, Treasures

The Frome Hoard, the second largest coin hoard ever found in Britain and the largest ever found in a single container, has gone on display for the first time at the newly refurbished Museum of Somerset in Taunton.

The hoard was discovered last April by hospital chef and metal detector enthusiast Dave Crisp in a field near Frome in Somerset. He found twenty or so copper coins just 14 inches under the surface but when he realized that beneath the loose coins was a large pot-bellied vessel packed to the brim with thousands more, he reported the find to the authorities. His conscientiousness ensured that this extraordinary find could be excavated properly by professionals, saving the two-foot-tall clay vase and the order in which the coins were added to it. Archaeologists were therefore able to determine that this was not savings hastily buried during troubled times with the expectation that the owners would return. The vessel’s base is too small to have supported the weight of all the coins. It was in all likelihood buried first, and then filled with coins gradually, probably as an offering to the gods.

The vase and coins went to the British Museum where they were examined in detail. There were 52,503 coins dating to the 3rd century, almost all of them made from copper alloy. Almost 800 of the coins were minted by quasi-emperor Carausius who revolted against Rome and declared him emperor of Britain and Gaul in the late 3rd century A.D. Five of them are silver, extremely rare Carausius silver denarii minted by the usurper. Carausius’ coins were the first Roman coins struck in London, and the coinage he issued is our primary source of information about his reign. Such a large group of Carausius coins found in one place may increase our understanding of the emperor and of the early London mint.

The museum has chosen to clean some of the coins thoroughly to show them as they would have looked when first placed in the vessel, but left most of the copper ones close to the condition in which they were found. The five silver denarii are in a separate display on their own.

The Museum of Somerset has spent three years and approximately $11 million on the renovation. In addition to the Frome Hoard, exhibits include dinosaur fossils, Stone Age artifacts, another immense hoard — the Shapwick Hoard of 9,238 silver coins, the largest hoard of Roman silver coins found in Britain — the bronze age South Cadbury Shield and the Low Ham mosaic, a mid-4th century mosaic floor from the baths of a Roman villa that is a 14 foot square representation of the story of Aeneas and Dido in five panels. It’s the earliest narrative art ever found in England.

The Museum of Somerset’s YouTube channel has a great introductory video about the Low Ham mosaic’s discovery and removal:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IyTgcTqk5TM&w=430]

Here’s a neat time-lapse of the excavation of the Frome Hoard: