February 2012 – Page 4 – The History Blog

83 animal mummies found at Abydos

February 14, 2012

Ancient, Treasures

Archaeologists with the North Abydos Votive Zone Project have had a remarkably fruitful digging season. They found 83 animal mummies, most of them dogs, packed tightly in a single chamber of a monumental structure that bears inscriptions referring to Pharaoh Seti I (reigned ca. 1290 B.C. – 1279 B.C.). The mummies are of more recent extraction, dating to around 2,000 years ago. Most of them have lost their linen wrapping. Experts believe the dogs, cats, sheep and goats were sacrificed and interred in a nearby tomb that has yet to be discovered, and removed haphazardly when robbers broke into that tomb later in antiquity.

Abydos was an important holy site going back to the earliest kings of Egypt. According to Egyptian religion, Osiris was buried at Abydos after his brother Set killed him. A temple to Osiris was built on the site and yearly processions in his honor carried a statue of Osiris from the temple to his tomb where rituals were performed overnight. The next day another procession would bring the effigy back to the temple.

Over the centuries, additional chapels were built along the procession route. One of the important discoveries made by the archaeological team this past summer was an early chapel (about 3,600 years old) built very close to the processional route. This discovery disproves a theory some historians have proffered that the chapels along the processional route got increasingly closer until they began to encroach on the road itself. This chapel is both old and close.

Another significant find is a wooden statue of a pharaoh discovered in a chamber next to the animal mummies. Wooden statues of Egyptian royalty are rare. This one was discovered covered in mud and termite droppings and only identified as a pharaoh once the conservator restored it. Which pharaoh is still unanswered, but there is one particularly intriguing possibility.

The statue’s proportions matched up with those of statues dating from the 18th dynasty of Egypt’s history, from about 3,550 to 3,300 years ago. That is, with one big exception — the waist is significantly thinner.

This brought up an intriguing question — could this statue be a representation of Hatshepsut, a female pharaoh who ruled Egypt about 3,500 years ago? No wooden statues of her are known to exist, so [excavation director Mary-Ann] Pouls Wegner examined large stone statues of her.

“Even though she was portrayed as a man in her [statues], oftentimes they did give a nod to her female physique by making her waist narrower,” she said. In addition the contours of her cheeks and chin are sometimes depicted as being a little more delicate. Could it be her? “I think it’s possible,” Pouls Wegner said.

In that same monumental building — which has walls six feet wide, typical of storage buildings, only the layout of this structure is closer to that of a temple — archaeologists found the richly appointed tomb of a priest. The tomb contains two groups of shabtis, figurines of servants who would work for the deceased in the afterlife. One group is made of Egyptian faience, a non-clay ceramic with a vitrified glaze in shades of blue and green. There are 58 faience workers and six faience overseers.

The second group is less elegant, perhaps, but contains rare social historical clues to ancient Egyptian life.

These figures held clear fingerprints of children, suggesting children in Egypt crafted together shabtis to do the work of the deceased in the afterlife. “One could do fingerprint analysis with them, they’re very crisp and very clear,” Pouls Wegner said.

Lombard necropolis found in ancient capital

February 13, 2012

Ancient, Medieval, Treasures

Archaeologists excavating in the town of Cividale del Friuli in northeast Italy right across from the Slovenian border have unearthed a necropolis of more than 30 Lombard graves of men, women and children. It’s one of the largest Lombard burial grounds ever found.

The discovery is new so the remains haven’t been dated yet. Authorities have hired guards to protect the site, rich in artifacts, from looters. The goods interred along with the deceased are what mark the graves as Lombard.

Spears, swords, knives and bags containing coins and other iron objects were found in the men’s tombs while combs and clips were found in the women’s.

In most cases, ceramic vases had been placed at the foot of the graves. At the center of the necropolis was the tomb of a veiled woman with a bronze clasp pinning the cover to her head and a gold-embossed cross placed on her chest.

Some of the graves show signs of having been looted in the past.

Cividale was the first major city conquered and occupied by the invading forces of Lombard King Alboin in 568. Italy had been severely depopulated by the Gothic Wars between the Byzantine Empire and the Ostrogothic Kingdom that ravaged the peninsula between 535 and 554 A.D. When Alboin crossed the Julian Alps from Pannonia into Italy, he encountered virtually no resistance. Byzantine troops were scarce at the border and the locals were in no condition to put up a fight. There is little evidence of battle violence in the archaeological record, and documentary sources confirm that Alboin basically just walked in and took it.

From Paul the Deacon’s 8th century Historia Langobardorum (History of the Lombards):

When Alboin without any hindrance had thence entered the territories of Venetia, which is the first province of Italy – that is, the limits of the city or rather of the fortress of Forum Julii (Cividale) – he began to consider to whom he should especially commit the first of the provinces that he had taken.

He chose his nephew Gisulf and made him duke of the new Duchy of Friuli with Cividale as its capital. This was as significant socially as it was politically, because before their migration to Italy the Lombards had avoided urban centers. From here on in, Lombard nobility would settle primarily in walled cities.

The Lombards would rule for the next hundred years until Charlemagne’s Franks defeated them in 773-774 A.D.

Mary Todd fraud

February 12, 2012

Modern(ish), Museums

A purported portrait of Mary Todd Lincoln by Francis Bicknell Carpenter that hung in the governor’s mansion in Springfield, Illinois for three decades turns out to be neither Mary Todd Lincoln nor by Francis Bicknell Carpenter. It’s a painting of an anonymous 19th century woman by an anonymous painter that was intentionally altered by a con man in 1929 to defraud the Lincoln family.

The purported painting of Mary Todd Lincoln as it looked in 1965

Anonymous lady by anonymous painter underneath the Mary Todd Lincoln alterations

The con man in question was one Lew Bloom, né Ludwig Pflum, a sometime circus performer, vaudevillian and later art collector who was described in his obituary as having “dabbled in oil paintings.” He dabbled on that oil painting of an anonymous lady, darkening her hair and eyes, changing her facial features, painting over a cross pendant and adding a brooch with a miniature of Abraham Lincoln to make her look like an idealized portrait of Mary Todd.

Mr. Bloom concocted a story to accompany his handiwork, saying that Mrs. Lincoln surreptitiously approached Mr. Carpenter while he was at the White House working on his 15-by-9-foot painting, “The First Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation,” which hangs in the Capitol. She had planned a party, he said, where she would give the portrait as a surprise to her husband.

But, as the story went, after John Wilkes Booth shot the president at Ford’s Theater on April 14, 1865, the distraught and impoverished first lady asked Mr. Carpenter to dispose of it. Mr. Carpenter, Mr. Bloom claimed, sold it to a wealthy Philadelphia family, the Neafies, who in turn gave it to Mr. Bloom’s sister Susan, in thanks for her nursing a relative through a long illness.

He had this melodrama notarized to make it look official and everyone fell for it, most prominently Robert Todd Lincoln’s daughter Jessie. Her father had died in 1926. She was keen to rehabilitate his reputation which had long been sullied by the ugly aftermath of his attempt to have his mother committed to an insane asylum against her will in May of 1875. Illinois law at the time required a public insanity trial before anybody could be forcibly committed and the trial of the woman who had been First Lady to a martyred President just 10 years before was major news. A jury declared her insane after three hours of testimony and she was sent to Bellevue Place, by all accounts a nice rest home kind of place rather than the scary Victorian asylum one imagines.

Still, Mary was a highly sympathetic figure to the public and Robert, who now controlled her finances, was seen as a heartless, greedy, unnatural son. That reputation was solidified three months later when Mary engineered her release by recruiting important politicians to come to her defense and planting stories in the press about her sanity and Robert’s cupidity. Mary died in 1882, still estranged from her son.

This wasn’t ancient history even in 1929. In late 1927, Robert’s widow Mary Harlan Lincoln was approached by the granddaughter of James and Myra Bradwell, a couple who had helped Mary Todd Lincoln bust out of the asylum, who planned to publish a book about Mary Todd based on her correspondence with the Bradwells. Mary Harlan Lincoln was so alarmed she paid $22,500, a huge sum at the time, to buy the manuscript and the original letters which she of course never published. (They survived, though, and were discovered by a historian in 2005.)

This is the context in which Mr. Bloom managed to scam Jessie Harlan Lincoln into spending thousands of dollars for a sentimental portrait of some random lady who even when repainted still didn’t look all that much like Mary Todd Lincoln. The family kept the painting until 1976 when Jessie Harlan Lincoln’s son Robert Todd Lincoln Beckwith donated it to the Illinois State Historical Library, now the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum.

The library had it examined by professionals at the Art Institute of Chicago who of course saw that it had been overpainted and that the lady underneath the retouchings didn’t look at all like Mary Todd, but they thought the overpainting was the work of sloppy restorers rather than deliberate fraud at the time of its sale. They wrote off the original portrait’s lack of resemblance to Mary Todd as an idealized view of the sitter. They restored the painting, revealing the cross but leaving the miniature of Abraham Lincoln, and then hung it in the governor’s mansion.

Last year the library sent the painting to conservator Barry Bauman for cleaning. He delved further into the alterations and researched the history of the painting. He discovered Bloom’s dabbling hand and that whoever the sitter was, she wasn’t painted by Francis Bicknell Carpenter. He restored the painting to its original condition. She’s blue-eyed now and the Lincoln brooch is a little scroll of flowers. She won’t be returning to the governor’s mansion, but the library might put her up just because of the interesting backstory.

Should old nitrate film be destroyed after copying?

February 11, 2012

Modern(ish)

A debate is raging in Germany over whether highly combustible nitrocellulose film, the film all early motion pictures from the 1890s to the 1930s were shot on, should be preserved after a copy has been made or whether it should be destroyed like unexploded ordnance. The Federal Archives in Hoppegarten, outside of Berlin, keeps canisters of important film from the dawn of the movie era in 40 concrete rooms with steel doors. The temperature is a crispy 43 degrees Fahrenheit because nitrate film doesn’t even need oxygen to ignite; heat or pressure will do the trick. Once it’s set off, nitrocellulose film explodes with more force than gunpowder.

These preservation conditions are required under the German Explosives Act. As far as German law is concerned, nitrate film and land mines are in the same category, and understandably so. The Federal Archives take it a step further, however.

Since the old nitrate films are also potential explosives, the archive feels obligated to copy them onto newer acetate film and then destroy many of the originals. In particular, bulk film material such as weekly newsreels from the 1930s and 40s is handed over for disposal by companies that also specialize in clearing land mines. Only the most valuable works are returned to the storage facility after a copy is made.

Experts at another film preservation organization, the German Film Archive, disagree with this practice. Curator Martin Koerber points out that other countries preserve the original nitrate film without question. The originals are in fact the most valuable and important versions of any film, just as they are with any cultural work.

Although the Federal Archives employees work as carefully as possible, any copy will inevitably vary slightly from the original in coloring, exposure and range of contrast. The Federal Archives are “methodically and systematically destroying their nitrate inventory,” three professors complained in a 2007 appeal. Irreplaceable nitrate films had already been destroyed, they added, including a 1911 film featuring Danish star Asta Nielsen.

Winfried Bullinger, a Berlin lawyer, is working to change the law so instead of being governed by the Explosives Act, the handling of nitrate film will be governed by historic preservation laws. He points out that technology is ever-evolving so a few decades from now there will far more accurate ways of copying nitrate originals.

That was underscored painfully during the most recent restoration of Fritz Lang’s masterpiece Metropolis. Twenty-five minutes of precious footage long thought lost was discovered in a Buenos Aires museum allowing an almost complete version of the film (it had been chopped to bits by artless distributors/butchers immediately after it premiered) to be patched back together so we could see the film as Lang intended it to be seen for the first time since 1927.

The newly-discovered footage was in horrible condition because all that was left was a conversion from the original nitrate to 16mm acetate done in the 1970s. They didn’t clean or restore the nitrate at all before making the copy so all the scratches and dirt transferred to the new medium. Once the copy was made, they destroyed the original. If restorers today had that original nitrate, they could do even more amazing things than they were able to do with the copy.

This has nothing to do with the debate, but since I’m talking about early film, I shall now take the opportunity to inflict upon you something that has haunted me since I first came across it a few days ago: the 1910 film version of The Wizard of Oz, wherein Dorothy’s BFF is Imogen the Cow instead of Toto, the Wicked Witch of the West is called Momba the Witch, and several donkeys play oddly prominent roles. Based on L. Frank Baum’s 1902 stage musical of his popular novel, Wonderful Wizard of Oz is the earliest surviving film adaptation of the book.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1MMaXcEI98&w=430]

Collector pleads guilty to stealing thousands of historical documents

February 10, 2012

Modern(ish), Social policy

Media relations professional, self-educated presidential historian, collector of inauguration memorabilia, pathological liar and thief Barry Landau pleaded guilty in federal court Tuesday to stealing thousands of historical documents from museums including (but not limited to) the Maryland Historical Society, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, the Connecticut Historical Society, the University of Vermont, the New York Historical Society, and the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library.

According to the plea agreement (pdf), Landau and his Canadian accomplice Jason Savedoff researched their targets online and off, compiling lists of the most valuable documents in the collections. From December 2010 until July 2011, the two of them cut a swath through museum collections, distracting staff with cupcakes then stuffing documents into hidden coat pockets and folders. They also removed any “finding aids,” like card catalogue entries, to make it hard for the museum to realize a document was missing.

Prosecutors said the value of the stolen documents easily exceeded $1 million. One of 60 documents stolen from the Maryland Historical Society was an 1861 land grant signed by Abraham Lincoln to a former member of the Maryland militia who served in the War of 1812. It’s worth $100,000, prosecutors said.

The oldest pilfered document was penned 533 years ago by Lorenzo de Medici during the Italian Renaissance. Among the most revered were three inaugural addresses delivered by Franklin D. Roosevelt, with the president’s handwritten notes and corrections. […]

Among the items taken from the Pennsylvania archives, prosecutors said, was a 1788 handwritten proclamation by John Hancock regarding the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. […]

Federal prosecutors have described the scope of the thefts as “truly breathtaking,” with stolen documents that include an endorsement for a judge signed by George Washington, a letter written in French from Marie Antoinette, and an 1874 note from Karl Marx inquiring about the price of a book bearing his signature. […]

Among the most valuable documents stolen was a letter written in 1780 from Benjamin Franklin to naval hero John Paul Jones about gunpowder deliveries from the French. It is worth several hundred thousand dollars, according to prosecutors.

The court documents filed Tuesday list stolen papers signed by luminaries from a broad swath of history: Susan B. Anthony, John Hancock, John Adams, Robert E. Lee, Sir Isaac Newton, Napoleon and Florence Nightingale. Another item was a letter from Charles Dickens to Edgar Allen Poe.

Back at the lair, they would remove any inventory markings or other institutional references on the document by scrubbing them off using sandpaper or other abrasives. They called this “performing surgery.” The surgeried documents were then either sold or kept in Landau’s apartment.

Landau and Savedoff were caught by a sharp-eyed part-time staffer at the Maryland Historical Society in Mount Vernon on July 9, 2011. David Angerhofer thought the pair were “too schmoozy for regular people,” so he spied on them from a balcony and saw them stuff historical documents under their own papers and called the cops. Savedoff was in the bathroom when the police arrived. They banged on the stall door until he came out. The historical society staffer saw pieces of old-looking paper floating in the toilet but wasn’t able to fish them out right away. When he returned, the toilet had been used and flushed by another visitor.

Landau and Savedoff were arrested and police found 70 documents hidden in a computer bag. Sixty of them belonged to the Maryland Historical Society, including that land grant signed by President Lincoln and presidential inaugural ball invitations worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. When the FBI searched Landau’s New York City apartment, they found 10,000 historical documents and ephemera. Experts from the National Archives and Records Administration have been able to trace 4,000 of them to the libraries and museums from whence they were stolen thus far.

Authorities think Landau has been stealing documents for years (President Bill Clinton’s secretary Betty Currie was sure he stole a signed book of the President’s speeches from her home in 2009) but the plea agreement only covers the thefts from December to July. Savedoff pleaded guilty last October to Conspiracy to Commit Theft of Major Artwork and Theft of Major Artwork. Now Landau has pleaded guilty to the same charges. He will be sentenced in May of this year.

This guy is such a despicable skeeze I can’t even. He spent years collecting presidential inauguration memorabilia, promoting himself as this huge expert with a collection that eclipsed even that of the Smithsonian. He was treated as the main expert on inaugurations by major media outlets, actors and film producers, plus a number of Presidents, First Ladies and Congress. Read this article from 2005, but keep a flight sickness bag handy because in hindsight it’s truly nauseating.

Four years ago, when the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies needed plates for the inaugural luncheon, it turned to Landau, who had a collection of china used at Thomas Jefferson’s inauguration in 1801. Presidents come and go, but traditions remain, and Landau is the keeper of traditions, the go-to guy.

“I have a letter from Jacqueline Kennedy,” Landau said, “and she wrote: ‘They should make you the Minister of Inaugurations.’ “