Month: July 2015

Inscription found mentioning last Thracian kings

Ancient

Archaeologists excavating the Roman site of Aquae Calidae in Burgas on the Bulgarian Black Sea coast discovered a marble slab with an inscription mentioning the last monarchs of the Sapaean dynasty, the last family to rule the ancient Odrysian kingdom of Thrace. The Greek inscription was carved between 26 and 37 A.D., a decade or two before Thrace ceased being a Roman client state in 46 A.D. and was absorbed into the Roman Empire as the province of Thracia.

The inscribed marble appears to be a dedication. It refers to a sanctuary to Demeter built by Apollonius Eptaikentus, strategos (military governor) of the city and region of region under the Sapaean King Rhoemetalces II. The slab was in all likelihood part of the sanctuary complex and archaeologists hope remains of it may still be found in Aquae Calidae, only 10% of which has been excavated.

The inscription lists the names of the last three kings of Odrysian Thrace and their dynastic connections. It is the first source to note the names of the children of Rhoemetalces II (r. 18-38 A.D.) and his sister Pythodoris II (r. 38–46 A.D.). It also confirms a previously uncertain familial link: that Pythodoris II was the daughter of King Cotys III (r. 12-18 A.D.), the son of Rhoemetalces I (r. 12 B.C. – 12 A.D.). Cotys III was killed by his uncle Rhescuporis II, so that means Pythodoris II, who married her cousin Rhoemetalces III, was wedded to the son of her father’s assassin. Surprising no one, she had her husband killed in 46 A.D. We don’t know what happened to her, but Rome took swift advantage of the power vacuum after Rhoemetalces III’s death and secured itself a new province.

This is important information about people for whom we have mainly numismatic evidence. The ancient sources are a bit thin on this time period, although Tacitus goes into some detail in Book Two of The Annals on how Augustus and Tiberius divided and conquered Thrace after the death of Rhoemetalces I. Pardon the long blockquote, but it’s such a delicious taste of the devious machinations of empire-building that I can’t resist including the whole story.

Tiberius … planned a crafty scheme against Rhescuporis, king of Thrace. That entire country had been in the possession of Rhoemetalces, after whose death Augustus assigned half to the king’s brother Rhescuporis, half to his son Cotys. In this division the cultivated lands, the towns, and what bordered on Greek territories, fell to Cotys; the wild and barbarous portion, with enemies on its frontier, to Rhescuporis. The kings too themselves differed, Cotys having a gentle and kindly temper, the other a fierce and ambitious spirit, which could not brook a partner. Still at first they lived in a hollow friendship, but soon Rhescuporis overstepped his bounds and appropriated to himself what had been given to Cotys, using force when he was resisted, though somewhat timidly under Augustus, who having created both kingdoms would, he feared, avenge any contempt of his arrangement. When however he heard of the change of emperor, he let loose bands of freebooters and razed the fortresses, as a provocation to war.

Nothing made Tiberius so uneasy as an apprehension of the disturbance of any settlement. He commissioned a centurion to tell the kings not to decide their dispute by arms. Cotys at once dismissed the forces which he had prepared. Rhescuporis, with assumed modesty, asked for a place of meeting where, he said, they might settle their differences by an interview. There was little hesitation in fixing on a time, a place, finally on terms, as every point was mutually conceded and accepted, by the one out of good nature, by the other with a treacherous intent. Rhescuporis, to ratify the treaty, as he said, further proposed a banquet; and when their mirth had been prolonged far into the night, and Cotys amid the feasting and the wine was unsuspicious of danger, he loaded him with chains, though he appealed, on perceiving the perfidy, to the sacred character of a king, to the gods of their common house, and to the hospitable board. Having possessed himself of all Thrace, he wrote word to Tiberius that a plot had been formed against him, and that he had forestalled the plotter. Meanwhile, under pretext of a war against the Bastarnian and Scythian tribes, he was strengthening himself with fresh forces of infantry and cavalry.

He received a conciliatory answer. If there was no treachery in his conduct, he could rely on his innocence, but neither the emperor nor the Senate would decide on the right or wrong of his cause without hearing it. He was therefore to surrender Cotys, come in person and transfer from himself the odium of the charge.

This letter Latinius Pandus, proprietor of Moesia, sent to Thrace, with soldiers to whose custody Cotys was to be delivered. Rhescuporis, hesitating between fear and rage, preferred to be charged with an accomplished rather than with an attempted crime. He ordered Cotys to be murdered and falsely represented his death as self-inflicted. Still the emperor did not change the policy which he had once for all adopted. On the death of Pandus, whom Rhescuporis accused of being his personal enemy, he appointed to the government of Moesia Pomponius Flaccus, a veteran soldier, specially because of his close intimacy with the king and his consequent ability to entrap him.

Flaccus on arriving in Thrace induced the king by great promises, though he hesitated and thought of his guilty deeds, to enter the Roman lines. He then surrounded him with a strong force under pretence of showing him honour, and the tribunes and centurions, by counsel, by persuasion, and by a more undisguised captivity the further he went, brought him, aware at last of his desperate plight, to Rome. He was accused before the Senate by the wife of Cotys, and was condemned to be kept a prisoner far away from his kingdom. Thrace was divided between his son Rhœmetalces, who, it was proved, had opposed his father’s designs, and the sons of Cotys. As these were still minors, Trebellienus Rufus, an ex-praetor, was appointed to govern the kingdom in the meanwhile, after the precedent of our ancestors who sent Marcus Lepidus into Egypt as guardian to Ptolemy’s children. Rhescuporis was removed to Alexandria, and there attempting or falsely charged with attempting escape, was put to death.

I love Tacitus’ scepticism of his sources. He’s totally on my “who would you invite to dinner” fantasy list.

Aquae Calidae, a sanctuary and spa resort in the 1st century (its name means hot waters), has been excavated for the past six years. The digs have been funded by the city of Burgas as part of the construction of new sewage and water systems for the neighboring districts and so that the Aquae Calidae site can be partially restored it to make it an attractive destination for cultural heritage tourism. The discovery of the inscription will likely spur additional excavations in the attempt to find the sanctuary of Demeter as well as other remains, like an early Christian church, artifacts suggest may still be slumbering under the surface.

2,000 Bronze Age gold spirals found in Denmark

Ancient, Museums, Treasures

An unprecedented cache 2,000 gold spirals from the Bronze Age has been discovered in a field near the town of Boeslunde on the Danish island of Zealand. Bronze Age spirals have been found before — gold ones in the Syke hoard in Germany, for example, and bronze ones in Poland — but these are the first to be discovered in Denmark.

The spirals are made of very thin, very pure, flat gold thread just 0.1 millimeter thick and up to three centimeters (1.18 inches) long. Some of the spirals are complete at up to three centimeters long; some are in small fragments. All totalled, the gold weight of the spirals is between 200 and 300 grams (7-10 ounces). Two gilded fibulae found with the spirals date the find to 900-700 B.C.

In 2013, metal detectorists Christian Albertsen and his uncle Hans Henrik Hansen found four gold bangles, so-called oath rings, in the same Boeslunde field. Six other gold oath rings had been unearthed in the field earlier (each individually at different times, not as part of a hoard) and in the 1800s local farmers found a group of six elaborately decorated gold bowls, two of which have incredibly thin gold wire wound around elongated handles crafted to look like stylized dragons. The total weight of the 10 oath rings found in Boeslunde is 3.5 kilos (7.7 pounds). The set of bowls weighs another kilo (2.2 pounds). That makes Boeslunde the richest gold field of the Northern European Bronze Age, and there may well be more to find.

It was the oath ring discovery that spurred the discovery of the spirals. After the bangles were found, the West Zealand Museum undertook an excavation of the field. It was a small search area — only a few square meters of soil were dug up — and archaeologists found a small group of three or four spiral fragments bundled together. Christian Albertsen, the finder of the oath rings who was assisting in the dig, brought one of the spirals to a jeweler. He confirmed that it was made of gold, not brass, so the Zealand Museum decided to dig again in the same spot, this time enlisting the aid of experts from the National Museum of Denmark.

During this second excavation archaeologists made the bulk of the find: a large pile of gold coils. Underneath and around the pile were shards of a grey-black material. Analysis in the National Museum’s lab identified these black chunks as birch bark tar, a substance used by prehistoric peoples, including the Neanderthals, as an all-purpose adhesive starting 80,000 years ago. The copper axe found with the 5,300-year-old iceman Otzi was hafted with birch bark tar. The tar chunks found under the spirals bore the imprint of a flat wooden surface on one side of the flakes and the imprint of animal skin on the other, which indicates the tar was used to glue a leather lining into a wooden box. Archaeologists think the spirals were placed inside a jewelry box or dress chest before being buried in the Boeslunde field.

It’s not clear how the coils were used or for what purpose. Given the high quantity of sacrificed gold found in the field, the location may have held ritual importance.

Flemming Kaul from the National Museum also believes that the area had some sort of religious significance as a place where Bronze Age worshippers carried out rituals and sacrifices to the higher powers.

“Maybe the priest king had a golden bracelet around his wrist, and the gold spirals adorned his cape or his hat, where during rituals they shone like the sun. The sun was one of the holy symbols in the Bronze Age and gold was presumably seen as having some sort of particular magic power. It is colored like the sun, it shines like the sun, and because gold lasts forever, it was also seen as containing some of the Sun’s power,” Kaul said.

The Zealand Museum and the National Museum plan to continue to excavate the site in cooperation with amateur archaeologists/metal detectorists like Christian Albertsen who has been so instrumental in the momentous discoveries made in Boeslunde. The gold spirals will be on display at an open house at the Skaelskor City Museum on Wednesday, July 15th. Visitors will be able to enjoy the shiny pretty things and hear curator Kirsten Christensen speak about their discovery.

Turner’s High Street, Oxford to remain in Oxford

Modern(ish), Museums

The High Street, Oxford, an iconic view of the city’s main thoroughfare by Joseph Mallord William Turner, has been on display at Oxford University’s Ashmolean Museum since 1997, on loan from a private collection. Earlier this year the owners offered the painting to the nation under the Acceptance in Lieu scheme, a program that allows important works of cultural patrimony to be transferred to the state in lieu of inheritance tax. Because the appraised market value of the painting, £3.5 million ($5,387,000), is more than the tax owing, the Ashmolean had to come up with the difference of £860,000 ($1,324,000) to secure the masterpiece. If they couldn’t meet the price, the painting would be sold at public auction and very possibly to a foreign buyer who would take it out of the country.

Most of the sum was raised through grants — £550,000 ($846,570) from the Heritage Lottery Fund, £220,000 ($338,630) from the Art Fund, £30,000 ($46,180) from the Friends and Patrons of the Ashmolean — leaving just £60,000 ($92,300) outstanding to acquire the painting. On June 3rd, the museum launched a campaign to raise the last £60,000. The response from the public was immediate and enthusiastic. More than 800 individuals donated to the cause and the target was reached in just four weeks. Once the paperwork is done, The High Street, Oxford will officially be part of the Ashmolean Museum’s permanent collection.

JMW Turner had deep connections to Oxford. As a child he spent time in the area visiting his uncle so he was familiar with the city — there is at least one surviving watercolor of Oxford Turner painted when he was in his teens — and over the course of his lifetime he would finish more than 30 watercolors of the city, the largest number of works depicting a single place in his oeuvre. In 1799 when he was 24 years old, he received his first important commission: two watercolor of the college town to be published in the Oxford Almanack, the University’s prestigious annual calendar which had been printed every year without interruption since 1676. The watercolors were so well-received, he got commissions to make another eight watercolors which were published between 1799 and 1810.

The watercolors caught the eye of Oxford printseller, James Wyatt, who commissioned Turner to create a view of High Street that Wyatt would then have engraved so he could sell prints of the work. Turner worked on the painting over the winter of 1809-1810, consulting with Wyatt as he went along. Wyatt, while a townie, had many begowned friends, so the painting deliberately includes men in academic dress as well as more colorful townspeople at focal points along the street. Turner had once contemplated a career in architecture and as a young man he had worked for several architects as a draughtsman. That fascination greatly informed High Street which is drawn with exceptional attention to the architectural details of the buildings.

When the painting was finished in March of 1810, Wyatt put it on display in his High Street print shop. Both the oil painting and the print made from it were hugely popular. Turner displayed the oil painting in his personal gallery in Queen Ann Street, London. In 1812, The High Street, Oxford and a companion townscape Wyatt commissioned after the success of the first were exhibited at the Royal Academy.

Because, as anyone who has watched Morse and Inspector Lewis to the point of overdose can tell you, Oxford is basically frozen in time, what Turner saw when he looked down High Street is pretty much what you see today looking down High Street, give or take a bike or two (thousand). Any institution would be keen to have a Turner oil painting, but this work is so bound to its context, a context which has survived almost unchanged, that it would have been a tremendous loss to see it sold away from the city whose sempiternal beauty he captured so flawlessly.

You have two weeks left to design the World War I Memorial

Modern(ish)

On May 21st, the US World War I Centennial Commission announced that they were opening a design competition for a World War I Memorial to be built in Washington, DC. Every other war of the 20th century has a memorial on the National Mall or environs except for World War I in which 53,402 US servicepeople died in battle and 63,000 more died from disease and accident. More than 200,000 veterans came home wounded and had a damned hard time of it too. World War I is the third bloodiest war in the US history after the Civil War and World War II, but the only monument that comes close to paying respects to the many dead from that war is a memorial dedicated to General John J. Pershing, the commander of American Expeditionary Forces in World War I. A bronze statue of the general and two small granite walls inscribed with maps and quotes describing the American effort stand in a corner Pershing Park, a 1.8-acre urban park a block from the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue.

In December of 2014, Congress authorized the World War I Centennial Commission to expand the current Pershing memorial into a national World War I Memorial. It won’t just be in the corner of the park with the statue and walls, however. The entire park will be transformed. It’s in dire need of a new purpose, too, because the main feature of the park was a shallow sunken concrete basin that held water for an ornamental pool in the summer and an ice-skating rink in the winter. When the pool’s mechanics failed a few years ago, they weren’t repaired so the park is now dominated by an eyesore of a useless concrete slab taking up the bulk of its area.

Here’s your chance to make all your Sim City/Leslie Knope visions come true. The competition is wide open. Anyone — students, professional architects, WWI history nerds from around the world — can submit an entry.

The memorial should honor and commemorate the service of American forces in World War I with sufficient scale and gravity that the memorial takes its place within the larger network of memorials and monuments situated on and around the National Mall. At the same time, designers should forge functional and perceptual linkages to the pathways, streets, and civic spaces and architectural landmarks around the site. Design and landscape elements should contribute to the park composition and strengthen the park’s relationship to the larger urban context, while complementing, and not detracting from, the meaning of the commemorative elements (whether new or pre-existing) within the site.

It seems like a tall order for anyone who is not an accomplished architect or designer, but remember, Maya Lin was still an undergraduate when she submitted her design for the Vietnam Memorial in 1981. She got her BA later that year and went on to graduate school where she got her Master of Architecture degree in 1986, four years after the wall was built. So there’s a very important precedent for someone with a great vision but no architecture experience to win a memorial design competition.

The deadline for submissions is July 21st. Memorial Design Competition website has tons of information and resources for anyone interested in taking the plunge. Get started by downloading the competition manual here and the Pershing Park site plan here. If turning a sad little blighted park into a worthy memorial is outside your skill set, you can contribute to the project by donating here. The memorial cannot be funded by Congress so it relies on private donations to raise the projected $25 million necessary and there’s a long way to go.

Restored 1813 presentation flag, Betsy Ross & the Lost Dauphin

Modern(ish), Museums

A rare presentation flag the United States government gave to the Six Nations Iroquois in 1813 has been restored and is now on display at the New York State Museum in Albany. The flag measures 60 inches by 118 inches, has 15 horizontal stripes (eight red, seven white) and a painted eagle with the shield of the United States in the blue canton instead of stars. The number of stripes matches those on the official US flag at the time — from 1795 there were stripes for each state until 1818 when Congressional passed a law requiring flags to have 13 stripes representing the original colonies while a star would be added to the canton every time a new state was admitted to the Union — including the most famous of them all, the Star Spangled Banner.

While authorship is not certain, the painted eagle on this flag is close to identical to others painted by Philadelphia ornamental painter William Berrett. Berrett’s friend and neighbor, one Elizabeth Claypoole, was his colleague in flag production. Elizabeth Claypoole has gone down in history as Betsy Ross. Ross was the name of her first husband John who died in 1776. She remarried and was widowed again. Her third marriage in 1783 was to John Claypoole, and it was under this name that Betsy had her greatest success as a flagmaker.

Although she was making flags during the Revolutionary War as part of her upholstery business, the story of her making the first American flag at George Washington’s behest with the 13 alternating white and red stripes and the 13 stars in a circle on a blue canton is probably apocryphal. It doesn’t appear on the historical record until a century after the supposed events, promoted entirely by her grandsons, William and George Canby, who first announced the tale in a talk at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania in 1870. Their evidence was solely family lore, but that was more than enough for people to run with in the heady patriotism of the approaching national celebration of the Centennial. William Berrett makes a cameo in the Ross legend as the artist who made a painting of George Washington’s flag design for Betsy to use as a model while she was stitching the flag.

It was during the Jefferson and Madison administrations, particularly during the War of 1812, that Elizabeth Claypoole draped forts around the young country with her work. She had contracts with the War Department to make garrison flags for the US Army. One contract was for six flags to be flown in a New Orleans fort. Another was for an astonishing 46 garrison flags to be delivered to the Schuylkill Arsenal, quartermaster for the US military. These flags were massive, each 18 by 24 feet in dimension. That’s 432 square feet (Betsy’s house was 468 square feet per floor) unfurled, and 24 feet of seam for each stripe. Since the seams were felled (ie, the edges were sewed down flat), she actually sewed 48 feet of stitches per stripe. You can see how her experience as an upholsterer rather than, say, a tailor, was invaluable to work on this scale.

The War Department, then tasked with handling Indian affairs (the Department of the Interior only got the job after the slaughter was over and all that was left was reservation management), also commissioned Betsy to make presentation flags to be used as diplomatic gifts for Native American tribes as the country began exploring/appropriating territories west of the Mississippi. She collaborated with Berrett on the presentation flags, doing the stitching while he did the painting.

That’s not to say that Betsy Ross made this particular presentation flag, but it’s certainly a possibility. The provenance of the flag is nebulous, however, so it’s unlikely there will ever be a solid attribution. The New York State Museum acquired it in 1962 from the Minnesota Historical Society who received it as a donation from Clay McCauley in 1889. McClauley claimed the flag had once belonged to Eleazer Williams, an Episcopal minister, missionary who was the son of Mohawk Chief Te-ho-ra-gwa-ne-gen, also known as Thomas Williams. Thomas was the grandson of Eunice Williams, a Puritan English colonist (her mother was a Mather) who had famously been captured when she was seven years old by French and Mohawk warriors at the Deerfield Massacre of 1704. She and 100 other captives, including four of her siblings and her parents, were marched north to Canada. Although the rest of her surviving family was eventually ransomed, Eunice was adopted by a Mohawk woman, converted to Catholicism married a Mohawk man and refused to return to Massachusetts no matter how many entreaties her Puritan father made.

Her great-grandson Eleazer also lived in two worlds. He spoke fluent Mohawk, Oneida and several other languages which he made use of when attempting to convert Oneidas and in negotiations between the tribes and the US government. He represented the St. Regis Mohawk tribe at multiple conferences between the Indian commissioners and the tribes. Williams thought the northeastern tribes of New York state and Canada should move west, settle down permanently in a reservation in Green Bay, Wisconsin, where they could create a new confederacy like the Iroquois free from northeastern population and political pressures that were endlessly chipping away at their territory. Williams was a signatory witness to the 1848 treaty with the Stockbridge tribe in Wisconsin, and as a member of the St. Regis Mohawk tribe he was not just a signatory to the 1838 treaty with New York tribes, but was specially singled out in Article 9 as the acknowledged owner of extensive lands along the Fox River in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Known as the Williams Tract, the 4,800-acre property belonged to his wife Madeleine Jourdain, daughter of Joseph Jourdain, a successful French blacksmith and Margaret Craselle, the granddaughter of a Menominee chief, who he had married in 1823 when she was 14 years old.

A small part of the Williams Tract is now in Wisconsin’s Lost Dauphin State Park, and Eleazer is entirely responsible for the excellent name of that park because, not content with making up military exploits and diplomatic victories, Williams also claimed to be Louis-Charles, doomed son of Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI, the long-lost Dauphin of France. He hadn’t been killed as a child by his cruel jailers, but rather had been spirited away by supporters when he was 10 years old and sent to French Canada where he was adopted by kindly Thomas Williams and kept safe from the pernicious lies of Revolutionaries. He only came to understand his true identity in 1841 when he met the Prince de Joinville, younger son of the restored Bourbon King Louis Philippe, who was touring the waterways of what had once been New France aboard the steamer Columbia. Joinville recognized him instantly, Williams said, from scars on his face, and asked him to sign an abdication document to ensure his father wouldn’t lose his throne.

The story, which had morphed over the years, finally hit the big time with the publication of an article entitled “Have we a Bourbon among us?” in the February, 1853, issue of Putnam’s Magazine. The Iroquois Bourbon became a huge thing, engendering much published back and forth between people who were enthralled by the tall tale and people who rejected it on the grounds that it was blatantly unsupported nonsense. The con man character of the “king” in Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn who claims to be the lost Dauphin of France is modelled after Williams.