Month: January 2014

Tomb of pharaoh from Abydos dynasty found

Ancient

Penn Museum archaeologists have discovered the tomb of a previously unknown pharaoh from Egypt’s Second Intermediate Period, ca. 1650 B.C., in Abydos. The new pharaoh’s name is Woseribre Senebkay and his tomb was found next to that of 13th Dynasty pharaoh Sobekhotep I last week.

The tomb of Senebkay consists of four chambers with a decorated limestone burial chamber. The burial chamber is painted with images of the goddesses Nut, Nephthys, Selket, and Isis flanking the king’s canopic shrine. Other texts name the sons of Horus and record the king’s titulary and identify him as the “king of Upper and Lower Egypt, Woseribre, the son of Re, Senebkay.”

Senebkay’s tomb was badly plundered by ancient tomb robbers who had ripped apart the king’s mummy as well as stripped the pharaoh’s tomb equipment of its gilded surfaces. Nevertheless, the Penn Museum archaeologists recovered the remains of king Senebkay amidst debris of his fragmentary coffin, funerary mask, and canopic chest. Preliminary work on the king’s skeleton of Senebkay by Penn graduate students Paul Verhelst and Matthew Olson (of the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations) indicates he was a man of moderate height, ca. 1.75 m (5’10), and died in his mid to late 40s.

This is a highly significant discovery because it confirms that there was an independent ruling dynasty in Abydos contemporary with the dynasties ruling northern and southern Egypt. The northern 15th Dynasty rulers were Hyksos, invaders from what are today Syria, Lebanon and Israel. Down south in Thebes the 16th Dynasty was native Egyptian. Right around the time the Kingdom of Abydos ended, ca. 1600 B.C., the Thebans began a war to expel the occupiers in the north and re-unify Egypt. The war lasted 50 years. The Hyksos were defeated and the New Kingdom founded.

This Abydos Dynasty may have been a kind of buffer state between the two. They used the Anubis-Mountain area of South Abydos as a royal necropolis conveniently located next to the richer tombs of Middle Kingdom pharaohs like Sobekhotep I. There are approximately 16 tombs from the Abydos dynasty in the necropolis which range in date from 1650–1600 B.C., making Senebkay one of the first to be buried.

The archaeological team has located 10 of the possible 16 tombs. Six of them have been excavated; four have been detected by ground penetrating radar but not entered yet. Four of the six explored tombs had been gutted by ancient looters, but tomb number five had the remains of Senebkay. The cedar canopic chest that held his organs was, shall we say, borrowed from Sobekhotep I’s tomb. We know this because his name is still on it, although Senebkay’s people tried to obscure the name by gilding the chest.

That’s not the only piece of Sobekhotep’s funerary regalia to get recycled. The 60-ton red quartzite sarcophagus originally in his tomb was discovered in the sixth tomb of the Abydos kings. Archaeologists haven’t yet found a cartouche or any other information that might identify the pharaoh who pilfered the massive sarcophagus, but they think that wasn’t the first time it was re-used by the Abydos rulers.

The short-lived dynasty fills in a hole in the Turin King List. The ancient papyrus from the reign of Ramses II (ca. 1200 B.C.) has been damaged. There are two partial king names that read as “Woser…re” that top a list that originally had more than a dozen king names but now all have been lost.

The Abydos kings were nowhere near as wealthy and powerful as their neighbors to north and south. Senebkay’s limestone tomb is small and poorly appointed. The painting is colorful and lovely, but it’s fairly unsophisticated and sparse. This is probably why they recycled older pharaoh’s fancy gear.

Interestingly, this isn’t the first time archaeologists have stumbled on these tombs. Legendary Egyptologist Flinders Petri unearthed four of the tomb in 1901-1902, but he didn’t recognize them as royal or even high-status tombs because of how modest they are.

The excavation season is over for now, but team leader Josef Wegner of the University of Pennsylvania believes they will discover much more about the Abydos dynasty when they return in the spring. King’s tombs are usually flanked by the tombs of queens, courtiers and other important officials.

Freud’s cinerary urn smashed in attempted robbery

Looting, Modern(ish)

Some despicable piece of human garbage broke into the Golders Green Columbarium in London and, in an apparent robbery attempt, smashed the antique Greek vase that held the ashes of Sigmund Freud and his wife Martha. This happened on New Year’s Eve. When the Golders Green staff arrived on New Year’s Day, they found pieces of the 4th century B.C. urn on the floor in front of the plinth. There are no further details on the damage done to vase or about the fate of the ashes it contained. I imagine cemetery officials are being circumspect out of consideration for the Freud family.

The urn was on public display in the columbarium along with the cinerary urns of many other luminaries, among them ballet dancer Anna Pavlova, author Enid Blyton, The Who drummer Keith Moon, actor Peter Sellers and Dracula author Bram Stoker. The room is open to visitors who wish to pay their respects. Or rather it was. Golders Green is understandably reviewing its security arrangements after this horror. The severely damaged vase has been removed to a safe place where experts can examine it and hopefully put it back together. These Greek vases are often found in pieces, either through natural processes or because looters deliberately smash them to make them easier to smuggle out of the country, so I’m keeping my fingers and toes crossed that conservators will be able to restore the urn.

The vase was very important to Sigmund Freud. He was an avid collector of antiquities, amassing by the time of his death a collection nearing 2,500 pieces of Greek, Roman, Egyptian and Asian artifacts. He used them in his practice with patients and famously included the mythology in his psychiatric theories. The Freud Museum in Hampstead, London, his former home and study, has his antiques collection, and there are multiple Oedipus themed pieces — vases, sculptures, even a fresco fragment.

The urn which would hold his ashes was a gift from Princess Marie Bonaparte, the extremely wealthy great-grand niece of Napoleon and wife of Prince George of Greece and Denmark. She was a patient of Freud’s starting in the 20s and did her own research on female sexuality with a particular focus on clitoral orgasm. The princess gave her analyst many gifts over the years, including his famous rug-draped sofa, but the southern Italian krater decorated with images of Dionysus, Greek god of wine, ecstasy and madness, and a maenad, was one of his most prized possessions. For years it stood on the windowsill behind his desk in his study in Vienna.

It was in significant part thanks to the financing and influence of Marie Bonaparte that Freud was able to get himself, his wife, his daughter and his antiquities out of Vienna in 1938. The Nazis hated Freud (his books were some of their favorites to burn), but the Nazi Kommissar in charge of his application to leave, Anton Sauerwald, had respect for Freud as a scholar, so he helped the family escape. He hid evidence of their foreign bank accounts to give them a chance to raise the extortionate “flight tax” but with his money out of reach to Freud, it was Marie who stepped in to pay the ransom. The family made it out of Austria on June 4th, 1938, and arrived in London two days later.

Princess Marie Bonaparte also helped him buy the Hampstead home and set up his office. She visited him there at the end of June to plan the escape of his sisters. Unfortunately, she was unable to secure exit visas for the four older women. They would all be murdered in the concentration camps.

They still outlived their brother, however. Freud had been diagnosed with mouth cancer in 1923 and over the next 15 years had dozens of surgical procedures to remove the tumors. By 1939, there was nothing left to operate on and Freud was in constant agony. His personal physician from 1929 on, Dr. Max Schur, had followed him to London. When Freud decided the pain was too great to live with, he reminded Schur that when they first met Freud had made him promise that “when the time comes, you won’t let them torment me unnecessarily.” Schur acquiesced and on September 23rd, 1939, he gave Sigmund Freud a fatal overdose of morphine.

The family decided to place his cremated remains in the vase, a fitting choice given that it was probably used as a cinerary urn in antiquity as well. The black granite plinth the urn stood on was designed by architect Ernst Freud, Sigmund’s middle son and the father of artist Lucien Freud who was almost 17 at the time of his grandfather’s death. When Martha Freud died in 1951, her ashes were added to her husband’s.

The London police have asked that anyone who may have information relevant to the attempted theft call DC Candler at 020 8733 4525 or Crimestoppers at 0800 555 111.

Adena Mound dated to first century A.D.

Ancient

The burial mound of the Adena culture on west side of the Scioto River in Chillicothe, Ohio, has been radiocarbon dated to the first century A.D. The Adena culture extended from around 800 B.C. to 200 A.D., a time known as the Early Woodland period, and until now, that thousand-year range was as specific as archaeologists could get in dating the Adena Mound. There were multiple ancient American mounds in the area, but this particular mound is the type site, the find considered the most representative of the culture. In this case, it’s also the source of the name of the ancient peoples because the mound was located on the estate of Ohio Governor Thomas Worthington, an estate he named Adena, the Hebrew word for “delightful place.” Thus the pinpointing of its age sheds a whole new light on the early history of Ohio and the United States.

There is nothing left of Adena Mound today. Almost 27 feet high, 140 feet in diameter with a circumference of 445 feet as measured in 1901, the once dominant mound is now a slight bump in the road in a Chillicothe subdivision. In the 1840s, archaeologists excavated the Mound City tumuli north of Adena Mound and Chillicothe group of mounds south of it. They tried to do the same to Adena Mound, but the Worthington family (the governor himself died in 1827) refused to allow any digging. It wasn’t until the property was sold to Joseph Froehlich in the waning days of the 19th century that the virgin mound, topped with mature trees, was cleared and excavated.

It was William C. Mills, curator of archaeology of the Ohio Historical Society, who took on the job. According to his published account, he was saving the mound’s archaeological importance in the nick of time because Froehlich wanted to use the fertile alluvial valley soil for farming and so planned to destroy the mound. According to a letter Mills wrote to a colleague in February of 1901, however, he had approached Froehlich proposing a dig as soon as the property left Worthington hands so he wasn’t so much a savior as an opportunist at best, instigator at worst.

In June of 1901, Mills signed a contract with Froehlich to excavate the mound and dump the compacted earth from which it was built in a nearby cut of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad. Froehlich cleared all the trees from the surface first, then Mills’ team started at the top and dug down in five foot sections. He found three strata, layers of construction and use. The first and earliest layer was made of dark sand from neighboring Lake Ellensmere. It was packed together so hard diggers had to use pickaxes to budge it. The second layer was lighter sand mixed with soil. The third was leaf mould, most likely a natural accumulation from when the mound was covered with trees.

Mills found human remains in both construction layers. The earliest stratum had 23 burials, the second 13. The burial practices differed significantly between the two stages. The first round of burials were concentrated at the base of the mound and were considerably more elaborate. The deceased were wrapped in bark and/or textiles and buried in crypts made of logs. The second period burials were spread out and had no log crypts. The grave goods were also far more dense in the first period. Twenty of the 23 burials included funerary objects while only four of the 13 second period burials included funerary offerings.

One particular burial stood out. Burial 21, found at the north base of the mound, was an adult male buried in a large sepulcher made of logs up to 17 inches in diameter. The floor was made of bark and the roof of smaller logs and brush. Grave goods buried with this man included 500 shell beads, once sewn to a loincloth, three strings of bone beads and freshwater pearls, a raccoon effigy carved out of a shell, seven flint spear points, three flint knives and three antler spear points. It was what he held in his left hand that made Mills’ heart sing: it was a pipe carved into the effigy of a man, deity or anthropomorphic figure of some kind.

The Adena Effigy Pipe, as it became known, is the first representation of a human in Ohio history. Carved out of pipestone, a form of catlinite native to the hills along the Scioto River which is soft when first quarried but hardens when exposed to air and heat, the Adena Pipe is one of a kind. Plenty of Adena pipes have been found, but they’re relatively simple tubular pieces with a widened bottom for the bowl and a hole at the top for a mouthpiece. This is the only Adena pipe ever discovered to be carved in the shape of a person. It is eight inches tall and weighs a pound, significant heft for a pipe. The figure wears large ear spools in his pierced ears (round jewelry had been found in burial mounds before, but the Adena Effigy Pipe provided the explanation for their use) and an unusual loincloth decorated with carved lines in the front that may be stylized animal figures and a feather bustle in the back.

Last May the Adena Pipe was named the official state artifact of Ohio thanks to the indefatigable lobbying efforts of four years of Fourth-graders at the Columbus School for Girls. Still, its precise date remained as much a mystery as the dates for the rest of the mound. Along with former Ohio State University provost Richard Sisson, the Columbus School for Girls helped raise the funds to finance the new C-14 dating.

It was Mills’ foresight that made the new dating possible. Despite the horrifying destructiveness and hastiness of the dig — the mound was busted down to nothing by the end of 1901 — and the vague disposition of the human remains, at least one set of which appears to have been shipped to the Smithsonian while the rest are lost, Mills made a point of keeping several pieces of black locust tree bark used to line the central burial in the mound and fragments of coarsely woven cloth found within. There was nothing he could do with them at the time. They weren’t pretty, so no institution would be interested in displaying or studying them. There was no radiocarbon dating in 1901. Even after there was nearly 50 years later (Willard Libby led the team that discovered carbon-14 dating in 1949), for decades the sample size required to date organic materials was so large the Adena Mound specimens could not be tested.

Advances in technology now make it possible to obtain dates from much smaller samples. Using two pieces of bark and a piece of the textile, researchers were able to obtain three dates. The bark samples both dated to around 40 A.D. The cloth is older, dating to 140 B.C. Archaeologists believe it was an heirloom textile used to enshroud the dead.

Bradley T. Lepper, Mills’ heir as curator of archaeology for the Ohio Historical Society and co-author of the dating study, explains its significance:

If we are to understand the historical processes that led to the rise of the Hopewell culture from its roots in the preceding Adena culture, we first have to be able to place key events into a reliable chronological framework.

The Adena Mound, as the type site of the Adena culture, is an important cultural landmark in Ohio’s past. Knowing its relationship, in time as well as space, to the other earthworks in the Scioto Valley will help archaeologists eventually write the history of this important chapter of our past.

Goldfinch eclipses Girl with a Pearl Earring at Frick

Modern(ish), Museums, Renaissance

A little goldfinch is giving a pretty girl with a pearl earring a serious run for her money at New York’s Frick Collection, and literature is the catalyst. The Goldfinch, a small, unassuming 1654 panel painting by Dutch master Carel Fabritius, has become the surprise breakout star of the Frick’s Vermeer, Rembrandt, and Hals: Masterpieces of Dutch Painting from the Mauritshuis exhibition. Johannes Vermeer’s masterpiece Girl with a Pearl Earring was expected to be the number one box office draw. That’s how it was at every other stop in the year-long American tour. At the Frick, the last leg of the tour, her beautiful face got its own room, the cover of the catalogue and 99% of the products in the museum shop.

But a random coincidence would defy expectations. The October 22nd opening of the Frick’s show just happened to coincide exactly with the publication date of The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt , a novel in which Fabritius’ Goldfinch plays a hugely significant central role. Neither the author, the publisher nor the museum had any idea of this synchronicity. It took Tartt 11 years to write the book; she got the idea 20 years ago when she saw a copy of the painting on a trip to Amsterdam. The Goldfinch was unmoving in the Mauritshuis throughout most of those decades. Nobody at the Frick was aware that Fabritius’ bird was the main character of an upcoming novel that would become an immediate best-seller.

Now the museum is reaping major benefits in visitor numbers, gift shop sales and new memberships.

The Frick is now selling 800 Goldfinch postcards for every 1,000 postcards of Girl With a Pearl Earring. “There is a feeling among us that people are nearly equally interested in both,” says a Frick spokeswoman.

With The Goldfinch’s help, the exhibition has become the best attended in Frick history. The museum expects the show to exceed 200,000 visitors, more than a third of its typical annual attendance of 275,000 to 300,000. Membership to the museum (which costs between $25 and $600) has also more than doubled during the exhibition’s three-month run, growing from 5,000 to 12,000. Around 100 people are joining daily, according to the spokeswoman, compared to an average of three new members per day during a typical fall season.

Fans of the book are traveling to New York from all over the country to catch The Goldfinch before it flies back to Europe. This story quotes a woman from Atlanta who made the trip just because of the book, and the exhibition was actually in Atlanta’s High Museum of Art right before it went to the Frick. The Girl with the Pearl Earring, which was itself boosted into international superstardom by the success of Tracy Chevalier’s eponymous novel published in 2000, wasn’t enough to draw Ms. Anderson to the museum in her hometown, but The Goldfinch lured her 1,000 miles to see it. This article about the exhibition focuses entirely on The Golfinch, painting and the novel.

The Goldfinch‘s charm has been more than evident to curators and fans of the Dutch Golden Age for centuries, of course. That’s why it’s included in what is basically a greatest hits exhibition. The petite piece, about the size of a piece of A4 paper, is a trompe l’oeil, a painting that creates the deliberate illusion of reality. A goldfinch stands on a feedbox, a delicate chain tethering him to the spot, against a whitewashed wall with crumbling bits of plaster. The shadows cast by the box are at a fairly steep upward angle and we see the box’s semicircular perches from below, suggesting Fabritius planned the piece for display relatively high on a wall.

Fabritius’ confident, smooth brushstrokes create an incredibly lifelike bird despite the lack of precision photorealistic detail. He learned from the best, studying under no less of a master than Rembrandt in the early 1640s in Amsterdam. You can see Rembrandt’s influence in the splash of yellow in the bird’s wing. Fabritius laid the yellow on thick and then scratched it while it was still wet using the butt of his brush. The scratch exposed the underlying layer of black. This is a technique Rembrandt taught him.

The overall look of the painting, however, is a departure from Fabritius’ early work in Amsterdam. Fabritius was 28 years old when he moved to Delft in 1650 and over time, he moved on from Rembrandt’s dark palette and atmospheric lighting to the brighter scenes and homier subjects of the Delft school of artists. Johannes Vermeer was influenced by this approach (he may have even been an actual student of Carel Fabritius, but the evidence for this is very thin).

Unfortunately Fabritius’ great artistry was severed shortly after he painted The Goldfinch. On October 12, 1654, a gunpowder magazine in Delft exploded, destroying a quarter of the city. Fabritius was killed at the age of 32. His studio was reduced to rumble and most of his paintings were lost. Only a dozen or so of his paintings are known to survive today. It’s possible that The Goldfinch was a witness to this tragedy. When the Mauritshuis restored it in 2003, they found microscopic damage to the surface. It may have been rescued from the rubble.

The Goldfinch, Girl with a Pearl Earring and the rest of the treasures will be on display at the Frick through January 19th, so you have no time to lose if you want to see the exhibition before it leaves the country. There is one more international stop of the tour in the Palazzo Fava in Bologna from February 8th until May 25th, and then the group returns to The Hague in time where they will be installed in the newly renovated Mauritshuis in time for its grand re-opening on June 27th.

Anglo-Saxon game piece found at royal complex

Medieval, Treasures

Archaeologists with the University of Reading excavating an Anglo-Saxon royal complex at Lyminge, Kent, have unearthed an extremely rare board game piece dating to the 7th century. It’s the first discovery of this particular form of gaming piece in 130 years, and it’s the only time one has ever been found outside of a burial context. This one was unearthed in a room adjacent to the feasting hall, a place where it would actually have been used in active play rather than as a ceremonial grave good.

Alongside this astonishing discovery, Dr Gabor Thomas and his team have also uncovered items of jewellery, numerous fragments of luxury vessel glass and pits with animal bones, confirming that feasting and social display were integral to Lyminge’s role as a place of royal ceremonial events and gatherings during the late 6th and 7th centuries.

Dr Gabor Thomas from the University’s Department of Archaeology is leading the Arts and Humanities Research Council funded dig. He said: “Our excavation is providing an unprecedented picture of life in an Anglo-Saxon royal complex. Gaming, along with feasting, drinking, and music, formed one of the key entertainments of the Anglo-Saxon mead-hall as evoked in the poem Beowulf.

“The discovery of Anglo-Saxon gaming-pieces and gaming-boards has previously been restricted to male burials, particularly those of the Anglo-Saxon elite. To find such a well preserved example in the hall, where such board games were actually played, is a wonderfully evocative discovery.”

The piece is a made of a hollow tube of bone capped at both ends with bone discs held together through the middle by a copper alloy rivet. Anglo-Saxons were fond of a board game and a number of pieces, even sets, have been found, but this kind of craftsmanship is top of the line. The only comparable pieces of this type ever discovered in Britain were found in the Taplow burial, a 7th-century Anglo-Saxon princely burial mound in Taplow Court, Buckinghamshire, that was excavated in 1883. The grave goods interred at Taplow include a pair of drinking vessels made out of aurochs’ horns with elaborate gilded silver fittings, a gorgeous set of four glass claw beakers, a lyre, multiple weapons, gold braids, a gold and garnet belt buckle and a set of game pieces laid out at the prince’s feet. The Taplow burial is contemporary in age with the Sutton Hoo burial and the artifacts are of a same high level of quality.

The game pieces were almost certainly an import from Germanic Europe, most likely of Langobardic manufacture. The most apt parallels have been found in the Lombard kingdom of Italy. Saxons were part of the Lombard invasion force of Italy in the late 6th century, and it’s probable these luxury goods made their way up north through trade routes that ranged as far as the Byzantine Empire.

The Lyminge game piece was discovered by a volunteer. He’s a metal detectorist who works side by side with the archaeologists exploring the site as they dig. He wasn’t actually using his metal detector the time. He was digging in a trench in the spot where several buildings in the complex intersect when he found this small but immensely important artifact. The structural evidence reveals a complex with large timber halls, floors made out of Roman-style mortar with opus signinum, a crushed tile finish, and huge entrance portals larger than any other from this period unearthed in England.

As far as what games the royal hall denizens might have been playing with these pieces, we don’t know. There are no written descriptions of the fine sport to be had in the feasting halls of Anglo-Saxon royalty. What we have to go on is archaeological evidence from the Germanic burials pre-dating the Anglo-Saxon takeover of England. One burial in Leuna, Saxony, dating to around 300 A.D., contained a set of black and white pieces on a double-sided wooden board. This was used to play two games: tabula, an early form of backgammon, and latrunculi (soldiers), a checkers-like game wherein matched sides attempt to capture each other’s pieces. These games were brought to England in the fifth century during the Anglo-Saxon migrations.

For more photographs of this season’s and the previous four years of excavation at Lyminge, see this photo gallery.