Trunk of undelivered 17th c. letters rediscovered

Yale University music historian Rebekah Ahrendt was researching a theatrical troupe that entertained audiences in turn of the 18th century The Hague when she came across a notice in a 1938 French journal describing a collection of undelivered letters at a museum. Intrigued, Ahrendt tracked down the collection at the Museum voor Communicatie in The Hague where it had lain undisturbed and unremarked since 1926. She found a trunk waterproofed with sealskin and filled with 2,600 letters sent from France, Spain and the Spanish Netherlands between 1689 and 1707.

The letters were collected by The Hague postmasters Simon de Brienne and his wife, Maria Germain. Any letters that could not be delivered because the recipients could not be found, or if found they refused receipt or could not or would not pay the postage due, the couple kept. (At the time the recipient paid postage, not the sender.) Most postmasters destroyed such letters, but the de Briennes hoped someone might someday take delivery and pay the postage so they put them in the trunk as a kind of fingers-crossed savings account.

Simon de Brienne was good at making money. Born in France, he was a servant of Prince Rupert of the Rhine, the younger son of German prince Frederick V, Elector Palatine, and maternal nephew of King Charles I of England. He was arrived in The Hague in 1669 and was appointed Postmaster seven years later. His wife was appointed postmistress in 1686. His new job didn’t stop Simon from working his royal connections. He was employed as chamberlain to William of Nassau, Prince of Orange, and when his boss became King William III of England, Scotland, and Ireland in the Glorious Revoultion of 1688, the Briennes went with him to England. As a trusted confidant, Simon was given a plum position as Keeper of the Wardrobe at Kensington Palace in 1689. Ten years later, he sold the office for £1550 and a cask of the best Burgundy wine. They returned to The Hague shortly thereafter.

The collection, still in Simon de Brienne’s original trunk, was bequeathed to the museum in 1926. Out of the 2,600 letters in the trunk, 2,000 are opened and 600 are sealed. They include missives from people from all walks of life — noblemen, merchants, singers, actors, spies, peasants, Hugenot exiles, women, men — and are written in French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch and Latin. Most of the correspondence that has survived from this period was written by the elite. To have such a wide range of society represented in their own voice (many of the letters were written phonetically with little punctuation in the dialect of the writer rather than in the formal, educated hand of the highly literate) is unique.

One open letter from the collection has been transcribed and translated manages to delicately suggest a pregnancy scandal without actually coming out and saying it. It was sent to a wealthy Jewish merchant in The Hague.

“I am writing on behalf of your friend and mine and she realized as soon as she left the opera company in The Hague to go to Paris that she had made a terrible mistake. Now she needs your help to come back to The Hague. You can divine without difficulty the true cause of her despair. I cannot put it into so many words; what I ought to say to you is so excessive. Content yourself with thinking on it, and returning her to life by procuring her return.”

The letter wound up in de Brienne’s collection because it is marked “niet hebben,” which means it was refused.

It’s not just the content of the letters that are of interest to historians. Scholars who study paper, postal systems, economics, linguistics and seals will find in this collection a unique source of information from the late 17th and early 18th century. It will be an invaluable resource for the nascent study of letterlocking, the practice of folding a letter in complex ways to convert it into its own envelope.

Ahrendt has already made significant historical discoveries in her own specialty.

As a music historian, Ahrendt found the correspondence between musicians especially interesting and says the information these missives contain casts a different light on the development of the musical labor industry: “This archive is truly a cultural history of musicians. I was surprised to learn that musicians traveled so much during that time period. We have so few witnesses to describe what daily life was like for your average musician, and these letters tell of large networks of these musicians traveling frequently. This is completely different from what we previously believed about the history of musicians.”

Brienne also put his own records as postmaster in trunk, giving historians another unique view into the business of mail. The accounting books for incoming and outgoing mail lists the price for every letter.

blockquote>”We discovered how postal routes and the financial system of that time worked. There is documentation of the point at which you paid a rider or a boatman to transport your post. We learned about the connection between the post office in Hague and the post office in Paris. We even found nasty letters from the Parisian postmaster saying that he hadn’t been paid properly,” says Ahrendt.

This pearl of great price won’t just be available to those who are fortunate enough to study them in person. An interdisciplinary team of researchers from Yale University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the Universities of Leiden, Groningen, and Oxford is working on digitizing this exceptional archive. The project is called Signed, Sealed, & Undelivered and the website is already live although the content is limited as of yet. Right now the Letters section is a slideshow of beautiful high resolution images of seals and letters, some with brief summaries describing the image, some labeled only with an archive number. Click on the icon with the four boxes in the bottom right corner of the screen to browse the letters index via a topic gallery instead.

Thanks to the latest scanning technology, the sealed letters won’t be opened, but they will seen nonetheless.

Dr Nadine Akkerman, from the University of Leiden, says: “Because early modern ink contained iron, incredibly delicate scanning can detect it on the paper. By scanning each layer of paper in a letter packet, we should be able to piece the letters back like jigsaw puzzles and read them without breaking the seals.”

Earlier this year they tested the technology by creating a bundle of 20 stacked letters, each written with quills and iron gall ink, folded using period accurate letterlocking formats and sealed with two different kinds of wax. The bundle was then scanned with high contrast TDI CT (Time Delay Integration, computed tomography) and the contents were revealed without damaging the folds and seals. This video is a fly-through of the test:

Kitchen of Shakespeare’s last home found

Archaeologists excavating the site of William Shakespeare’s last home, New Place, in Stratford-upon-Avon, have discovered the remains of the property’s kitchen. They have identified a fire hearth (the Tudor equivalent of an oven) and a cold pit (the fridge) and a brew house where the playwright’s staff would have made beer and preserved food by pickling and salting. They also found fragments of dishes and cups. The latest archaeological finds have made it possible to create accurate drawings of what New Place looked like in Shakespeare’s time.

The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust has raised half the £5.25 million needed to restore and redesign the site of New Place from sources including the Heritage Lottery Fund. (Click here to help the Trust raise the second half.) The three sections of the property — Nash’s House, home of Shakespeare’s granddaughter Elizabeth and her husband Thomas Nast built adjacent to the New Place home, the Knot Garden, a sunken garden inspired by Jacobean designs installed on the grounds after World War I, and the Great Garden, a former priory garden incorporated into the New Place property in the mid-16th century — will be refurbished and reconceived as a museum and garden dedicated to Shakespeare, his life, family and works. The archaeological surveys of the site are part of this program.

The house that would become known as New Place was originally built by Hugh Clopton, a wealthy mercer (a merchant specializing in the trade of imported luxury fabrics and dress accessories) who had made his fortune in London where he served terms as Sheriff and Lord Mayor. He was a proud native son and benefactor of Stratford-upon-Avon, rebuilding a guild chapel, replacing a rickety wooden bridge with a beautiful stone arch bridge and leaving provisions in his will for further improvements to the city along with funds to help support maidens, scholars and apprentice mercers. Even as he held important guild and municipal offices in London, in about 1483 Clopton had a new house built for himself in his hometown on Chapel Street. It was the second largest house in town.

The property stayed in the Clopton family until the mid-16th century when it passed to the recusant Catholic Underhill family. Shakespeare purchased the house and property including gardens, two barns and an orchard, from William Underhill on May 4th, 1597, for £120 in silver. It was a grand home, with impressively wide frontage, 20 rooms and 10 fireplaces, but by the time Shakespeare bought it, the house, which had been described by antiquary John Leland sixty years earlier as a “praty house of bricke and tymbre” was in “great ruyne and decay and unrepayred.” Renovations began immediately. Shakespeare’s wife Anne seems to have moved in full-time right away; William split his time between Statford and London for a while before moving permanently into New Place in 1610. There he planted the first mulberry tree in Stratford, according to legend with his own two hands.

The Bard lived there until his death on April 23rd, 1616. He bequeathed the property to his daughter Susanna Hall who lived there until her death in 1649. It then went to her daughter Elizabeth. Elizabeth died in 1670. After her husband’s Thomas’ death in 1674, New Place was sold to Sir Edward Walker who in turn left it to his daughter, wife of Sir John Clopton. Thus by 1700, New Place once again belonged to the Clopton family. Sir John had it almost entirely rebuilt before 1702 for his son Hugh.

Sir Hugh Clopton took pride in the association of his family home with William Shakespeare. He opened New Place to visitors and told stories of questionable likelihood about finding epigrams scratched onto the windows by Shakespeare and his daughters (his only son, Hamnet, had died the year before they bought the house). The next owner would not be so genial.

Reverend Francis Gastrell, a canon of Lichfield Cathedral, bought the property from the Clopton estate in 1753. He had no interest in opening his home to literary pilgrims and was sick to death of people showing up at his house expecting to get a show the way they had in Sir Hugh’s day. In 1756, he chopped down the mulberry tree that was the focus of many a literary pilgrim’s attention thanks to the story that it had been planted by the Bard himself. In 1759, he got into a dispute with the city on whether he should pay the full tax rate or get a reduced rate because he lived part of the time in Lichfield. Vowing New Place would never be assessed again, he razed it to the ground.

Several depictions of New Place in the 18th century survive. Engraver and antiquary George Vertue visited Stratford in 1737. He sketched New Place and took notes describing the property as a two storey, half-timbered building with an attic, five gabled bays and a central gateway facing onto Chapel Street. Scholars now believe the Vertue sketch is not of the home itself, but of a gatehouse with servants’ quarters and a long gallery. There’s also an extant print of a drawing by Samuel Winter of the main house ca. 1759.

The New Place property was sold multiple times in the late 18th and 19th centuries. Parts of it were sold piecemeal and became detached from the original property. What had once been the Great Garden became the Royal Shakespearean Theatre in 1829, but it didn’t even survive 50 years. Shakespeare enthusiast J.O. Halliwell launched a fundraising campaign in 1861 to acquire the full grounds of New Place. He cleared some parts of the property of its later construction and excavated the site in 1862 and 1863, finding parts of the original 15th century home and the 18th century rebuild. In 1872 the former Royal Shakespearean Theatre was demolished. The grounds were redesigned as a pleasure garden and in 1884, the entire New Place property was transferred the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.

Because the site is now a listed park and garden, so the Trust can’t just reconstruct the house as they think it was when Shakespeare lived there. Instead, they’ve designed an imaginative way to convey the important areas of the structure within the parameters of the garden. Brass lines in the ground will mark the footprint and key areas of the previous structures. Halliwell’s excavations will be of aid in this because he never had them backfilled which has helped archaeologists determine which part of the buildings were in which location and where else to dig to find undisturbed archaeological features. The garden will be re-landscaped with themes evoking Shakespeare.

The redesign was originally scheduled to be complete in time to commemorate the anniversary of William Shakespeare death in April of 2016, but the archaeological discoveries have pushed back the opening date to the summer.

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Pre-Inca mummy remains found in Lima temple

The remains of four mummies of the pre-Inca Ychsma people have been unearthed in the Huaca Pucllana temple in the Miraflores neighborhood of Lima, Peru. All of the mummies are of adults, three women, one man, buried in a seated posture. They were originally mummy bundles, wrapped in layers of textiles, straw and ropes then covered with mats. Today they are very decomposed, almost entirely skeletonized, with few of their organic grave goods extant. Next to them were found ceramic pots, mate’ drinking vessels and objects related to textile production (needles, yarn, woven fabric and more).

They were found at the top of the Great Pyramid, an impressive structure made of adobe and clay brick by the Lima culture between 200 and 650 A.D. as a religious and administrative center. Its bookshelf style construction in which bricks were placed side by side like books on a shelf with the outer ones leaning in made it earthquake resistant and when the Wari Empire took over the area in around 650 A.D., they continued to use the pyramid, burying their important dignitaries within its walls. Now it appears the Ychsma did the same.

Earlier evidence of Ychsma activity at the Great Pyramid was discovered in 1967 when offerings of anthropomorphic figurines were found at the foot of the western slop of the pyramid. A follow-up excavation revealed that the spot was used by the Ychsma to dry their crops. As farmers and weavers, they would leave offerings of their most significant products: packets of cotton and food jars filled with beans and maize. The discovery of burials at the top of the pyramid suggests stronger presence of the Ychsma in the area that would become Miraflores.

“Our hypothesis is that they were involved in politics, religion or of high status,” said archaeologist Mirella Ganoza. “This site was not chosen at random.”

Isabel Flores, director of the Museum of Site of Huaca Pucllana, notes that we may discover more about the remains and burial practices of the Ychsma when the remains are analyzed. The exact date of the burials will also hopefully be revealed by radiocarbon dating. The only date range we have now is 1000 to 1450 A.D., the known range of Ychsma presence in the area.

Before the city of Lima was founded by conquistador Francisco Pizarro in 1535, it was a river valley populated by the Ychsma people who were one of two cultures who came to dominate central coastal Peru after the collapse of the Wari Empire around 1000 A.D. The Ychsma developed the Rímac and Lurín river valleys, modifying old Wari temples and building new ones of their own. When the area was conquered by the Inca under Emperor Túpac Inca Yupanqui in 1470, the Ychsma were absorbed into the Inca Empire and ceased to exist as a separate political and cultural group.

Frescoes torn from Paestum tomb walls found

A group of five frescoes torn from the walls of a tomb in Paestum, southern Italy, have been found by the Carabinieri art theft squad. The frescoes date to around the 4th century B.C. and depict a warrior returning triumphant from battle on his horse followed by attendants, one of them driving a mule laden with spoils, and being greeted by the lady of the household and two of her servants. They originally adorned the tomb of a wealthy man of the indigenous southern Italian tribe of the Lucanians before looters got to them. Unfortunately, since the frescoes were brutally removed and smuggled into the netherworld of the antiquities trade, we don’t know which tomb they came from or anything about its contents that might give us more information about the tomb’s owner.

The slabs were discovered last May, 20 years after the seminal investigation that first alerted the art squad to their theft. Operation Geryon was launched by the Carabinieri in 1995 after the theft of eight Greek vases from a Castle of Melfi in south central Italy. A fatal accident ultimately broke the case, when dealer Pasquale Camera crashed his car and died. Highway police found Polaroids of what appeared to be freshly looted artifacts in Camera’s car. A subsequent search of his house which turned up hundreds more pictures and a paper trail a mile long which named names, leading to 70 more raids and the arrest of close to 20 people involved in the looted antiquities trade.

The frescoes were found locked in a bank in Campione d’Italia, a town in Lombardy just a few miles form the Swiss border, which is a shocking twist to the oft-told tale because usually the ill-gotten goods cross the border into Switzerland as soon as possible. The collector who was in illegal possession of them claimed he had no idea they were stolen. We’re to believe he saw five Lucanian fresco panels, each of them cracked and damaged in the same way across the middle, and didn’t realize those were the characteristic wounds left by smugglers when they broken the frescoes in half for easier illegal export.

The recovered paintings will be on display at the Historic Museum of the Carabinieri in Rome before moving to their permanent home at the Paestum Archaeological Museum on January 10th.

Paestum was a Greek colony founded around 600 B.C. 65 miles south of Naples on the southwestern coast of Italy. They called it Poseidonia after Poseidon, god of the sea. The Lucanians conquered the city in the late 5th century B.C. and renamed it Paistos. The name was Latinized to Paestum when the Romans took control in 273 B.C. after their final defeat of King Pyrrhus of Epirus whom the Lucanians had sided with against Rome.

The Lucanians left behind hundreds of richly decorated tombs in necropoli around Paestum. They are and have long been a prime target for tombaroli, the Italian term for the grave robbers who, through chains of increasingly well-connected and well-paid dealers, supply the international antiquities market with archaeological treasures that auction houses and museums can pretend come from “a Swiss private collection.”

Browse this Flickr album for a marvelous collection of photographs of Lucanian tomb frescoes from the Paestum Archaeological Museum. The ones with men reclining at a symposium and the last picture of the diver are from the Tomb of Diver and are Greek, not Lucanian. The painting of the diver is unique in its iconography and is the most famous artifact in the museum, so much so that the silhouette of the man diving is the museum’s logo. Wikimedia has a great many pictures of Lucanian tomb frescoes from the museum as well.

7th century tavern with plates still on shelf found in Ephesus

The Austrian Archeological Institute (OAI) has unearthed a 7th century Byzantine-era tavern in the ancient Greek city of Ephesus one mile southwest of the town of Selçuk, Turkey. The tavern was discovered by accident during work to protect one of the three main roads of the city, the Embolos (the OAI call it the Kuretenstraße), from landslides. In its heyday during the Roman imperial era, the road linked the Commercial Agora with the State Agora and ran through the valley between the two hills that framed the city. It was paved with marble slabs and decorative mosaics, lined with colonnades, funerary monuments to prominent citizens, public fountains, shops, a brothel and overlooked by luxury homes on the slopes. When those buildings collapsed from earthquakes, sacking and abandonment, the denuded hillsides became subject to erosion and landslides. In order to protect the archaeological remains of the city, the OAI team regularly monitors their condition and takes necessary measures to prevent landslides, like shoring up the slopes and building dry-stone retaining walls to make the site safe and legible for visitors.

They were building just such a wall when they unearthed the tavern. While the street was dotted with many shops, archaeologists were able to identify this one as a tavern because they found an exceptional collection of more than 100 vessels — cups, bowls, plates, amphorae — in perfect condition. Archaeologists even found a shelf with dishes stacked on it ready for service. Low benches, chairs and small marble tables (probably recycled from earlier buildings in ruin) were also found.

According to Sabine Ladstätter, OAI’s excavation director of Ephesus, the discovery increases our understanding of the road as a community lifeline and center of communication in late antiquity when the once-dominant city was in steep decline. The main focus of public, social and economic life in the city moved from the Agorae of old to the streets and the businesses that lined them. The tavern served local food and wines as well as beverages from further afield. The amphorae were found to contain local grape varieties and ones from Gaza and Cilicia, which means that trade was still active enough and there was enough money in the citizens’ hands to make it worthwhile for the pub to stock premium brands.

The tavern’s fate was indicated by coins found in a highly destructive fire layer. A greater than average number of large denomination coins were discovered in the tavern, left behind in a fire so severe that people didn’t even bother trying to recover valuable cash in an era when monetary circulation dropped precipitously to a tenth of its previous quantity and coin was scarce. This was during the reign of Emperor Heraclius (610-641 A.D.), who for years was engaged in fighting off a Persian invasion. The Persians sacked Ephesus in 616, two years after an earthquake had brought down a significant portion of the city. Then the forces of the Umayyad caliph Muawiyah I sacked the city again in 654-5.

Whether it was the Persians or Arabs or fires in the wake of earthquake that caused the destruction of the tavern, it was never rebuilt. It wasn’t even pillaged for supplies. It was just closed and left to decay as were the other shops along the street. The street itself was swept and kept clear of debris for centuries after that, probably because it was a useful connection to the port before it silted up irredeemably and a straight shot for Christian pilgrims to use when visiting shrines.

The Austrian Archeological Institute assumes that duty now, which is how it found the tavern. The OAI has a long, strong connection to the city of Ephesus. In fact, the organization was founded specifically to excavate the ancient city. German archaeologist Otto Benndorf started excavating Ephesus in 1895, financed by a large donation by Austrian businessman Karl Mautner Ritter von Markhof. Benndorf founded the Austrian Archaeological Institute in 1898, with the excavation of Ephesus as its first brief. The Institute had been digging and conserving the site ever since, pausing only during both world wars.