Rare Han treasures at San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum

A new exhibition opening next month at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco Tomb Treasures: New Discoveries from China’s Han Dynasty will display 160 artifacts discovered in recent archaeological digs of Han dynasty tombs. Very few of these objects have never left China, and this is the show’s only US stop. The exhibition opens on February 17th and runs until May 28th, so don’t dally in making your way there.

The rule of the Han dynasty (206 BC–220 AD) is considered the first Chinese golden age, a period of relative peace and great economic prosperity in which the arts, sciences and trades flourished. Most of what we know of the Han emperors and their courts comes from ancient chroniclers, but they tend to focus on major events — wars, diplomacy, political intrigue — paying little attention to the daily lives even of the rich and royal. Because Han nobles built large tomb complexes with multiple rooms filled with every necessity and luxury to ensure their high standard of living would carry over into the afterlife, objects discovered in tombs lend unique insight into the day-to-day of Han dynasty monarchs, their families, functionaries and courtiers.

Most of the artifacts in the exhibition were unearthed from the mausoleum of Liu Fei in China’s eastern Jiangsu province. Liu Fei was the son of Emperor Jing of Han (r. 157–141 B.C.). He ruled the valuable fiefdom Jiangdu from 153 B.C. until his death in 127 B.C. He was interred a vast tomb complex of almost 2.7 MILLION square feet that included the tombs of his wives, concubines and attendants, plus weapons and chariot pits. The tomb was discovered on Dayun Mountain in 2009. Even though it had been looted repeatedly since antiquity, the floors of the outer chambers collapsed early enough in the tomb’s existence to preserve artifacts stored in the chambers below. Archaeologists found more than 10,000 artifacts crammed into storage rooms.

The exhibition is divided into three galleries. The first, Everlasting happiness without end, displays objects that reveal the kinds of entertainment enjoyed in Han dynasty palaces: music, dancing, food, wine. Artifacts include musical instruments, most notably a set of bronze bells and stone chimes that would have been used only on formal court occasions, smoke-eating lamps to keep the party going well into the night and ceramic dancers captured in dynamic movement. Containers used to prepare and eat food held offerings that would nourish the Han ruler in the afterlife had ritual significance in tombs, and elegant dinnerware like jade cups, bronze bowls and tables inlaid with gold and gemstones ensured their heavenly food would be eaten in the high style to which they had become accustomed.

The second, Eternal life without limit, is set in a tomb-like space and features artifacts used to prepare the deceased for the afterlife and to prevent the decay of the flesh. There are medical implements and divination tools, but jade is the star player here. It was used in Chinese burials long before the Han dynasty (or any dynasty at all, for that matter) because it was considered to have the power to prevent the decay of the flesh. The Han took jade funerary artifacts to new heights. They believed that people had two souls, one that went straight to heaven after death, the other that stayed in the body. To keep the latter safe inside an intact body, the dead were covered in jade. Jade plugs were placed in all orifices and jade masks on the face. If the deceased was of high enough rank — emperor, king, important nobles — the body would be put in a suit made from hundreds of jade scales. An exquisite jade suit from the tomb of Queen Lian, Liu Fei’s second and likely favorite wife, is a highlight of this gallery.

The theme of the third gallery is Enduring remembrance without fail. It explores the private, personal spaces of Han palaces, exhibiting objects from people’s bedrooms and bathrooms. Artifacts in this gallery include personal hygiene and grooming tools, a silver bath basin, incense burners, lacquer cosmetics boxes and sex toys. There are gifts from kings to their wives and lovers — silver belt hooks, a bronze mirror, a jade pendant — identifiable as such from inscriptions. There’s even an earthenware model of a toilet from the 2nd century B.C. found in 1995 in the tomb of the King of Chu dug into Jiangsu’s Tuolan Mountain.

I’d like to conclude with a special note of thanks to Zac Rose of the Asian Art Museum for the beautiful photographs and wealth of information he was kind enough to share with me. I’ve written about ancient Chinese tomb discoveries before, and I would have written about more of them had there been any remotely usable pictures. There’s no relief once artifacts are in museums either, since most Chinese museums don’t have detailed pictures of their collection online. Getting such spectacular high resolution shots of recently excavated artifacts from Han tombs is an incredibly rare treat and I’m so grateful.

And now, even more pictures!

George Washington’s field tent stands again

George Washington’s Headquarters Tent was his most consistent office, following him on campaigns for almost the entire duration of the Revolutionary War. He slept there (for real this time!), planned battles, wrote letters, met with his staff and visitors. Washington’s portable headquarters was kept in the family with many other artifacts from his service in the Revolutionary War for generations. It was the Civil War that wrested it from the family. The tent belonged to Mary Custis Lee, great-granddaughter of Martha Washington and wife of Robert E. Lee. After her husband resigned his commission in the United States Army on April 20th, 1861, he set out for Richmond within days, leaving Mary behind at Arlington House in Alexandria, Virginia, the estate she’d inherited from her father George Washington Parke Custis (Martha Washington’s grandson).

She, like many on both sides, was sure the war would be over in a matter of months. Mary planned to ride out the short-lived hostilities in the comfort and safety of her home. That fantasy was shattered in less than a month. With the Union troops rapidly approaching, Mary Custis Lee packed a small selection of family treasures, including as many pieces of her Washington collection as she could carry. The headquarters tent and other marquees (she had several Washington tents) were too large to pack, so she locked them in the cellar and gave the keys to her elderly slave Selina Gray. She left Arlington House on May 15, 1861. Union troops occupied it on May 24th, confiscating the Washington field tents and other artifacts. Arlington House became the headquarters of Union General Irvin McDowell and the 1,000-acre plantation became a camp for 14,000 Union soldiers. Mary would never again return to her beloved family home. After the war, the Arlington House plantation was turned into the Arlington National Cemetery.

Meanwhile, the cellar key was burning a hole in Selina Gray’s pocket. McDowell was sympathetic to Mary Custis Lee — he wrote her a very kind letter promising to help safeguard her home — and had the utmost respect for her illustrious ancestry, but as the war dragged on into the end of 1861, he was increasingly unable to keep his restive troops from breaking into the house and pocketing any valuables they could find. When Gray saw that the cellar had been broken into and some of the Washington objects were missing, she told McDowell everything. She told him how historically significant these treasures were, gave him the key and a list of the missing artifacts.

With no realistic way to keep his men from stealing the house blind by dribs and dabs, McDowell wrote to his bosses in Washington that Arlington House was no longer safe “for the preservation of anything that is known to have an historical interest small or great.” In January of 1862, the tents and all other remaining pieces of the Washington patrimony were sent to the Patent Office in Washington where they went on display within two weeks in an exhibition organized by former Congressman Caleb Lyon called Captured at Arlington. Lyon had visited with the Lees before the war, and he personally saw to the packing, shipping, inventorying and installation of the tents in the Patent Office’s main exhibition hall.

The tents remained on display at the Patent Office for almost 20 years. The disastrous 1877 fire which destroyed 80,000 patent models and 300,000 drawings raised concerns about the safety of the Washington artifacts. In 1881 they were moved to more secure facilities at the Smithsonian Institution.

Despite her ailing health, Mary never stopped writing to anyone in the federal government who might help her get back her family heirlooms. She was ignored for years. Then for a moment in 1869 it looked like she might prevail after all when President Andrew Johnson approved the return the “relics of Mount Vernon.” He took it back when the press reported the story as the feds giving away all of the Father of Our Country’s stuff to rebel general Robert E. Lee.

Mary Custis Lee died in 1873 but the struggle lived on with her eldest son George Washington Parke Custis Lee. He petitioned successive administrations for the return of Arlington House and took it all the way to the Supreme Court which ruled in his favor. (Thousands of soldiers were already buried there, so Lee sold the property back to the government. It was the principle of the matter.) Then he hounded them for decades over the Washington memorabilia. Finally it was William McKinley, the last US President to be a Civil War veteran, who ordered the return of the Washington tents and artifacts to George Washington Parke Custis Lee. It was 1901.

After a struggle lasting 40 years, the family heirlooms were back in family hands. The Headquarters Tent was sold by Mary Custis Lee, Robert and Mary’s daughter, in 1909 to raise funds for Confederate widows. The buyer was Reverend W. Herbert Burk who spent a whopping $5,000 on it. An avid history buff, he was the founder of the Valley Forge Historical Society and of the Washington Memorial Chapel built at Valley Forge. He also founded the Valley Forge Museum of American History where the Headquarters Tent was erected outdoors in the snow, just like it was in George Washington’s Day. Burk’s extensive Revolutionary War collection, including the tent, became the core of the new Museum of the American Revolution’s collection in 2003.

Fourteen years later, the tent will be one of the jewels of the new museum slated to open at long last this April. It needed a lot of care to make it ready for display. Textile conservator Virginia Whelan had to repair the linen’s 550 holes, a large missing piece (likely a victim of the practice of cutting souvenirs from famous textiles like the poor Star Spangled Banner) and numerous stains.

Wearing a thimble but no gloves, Ms. Whelan layered fine, nearly invisible netting over and under each hole, then used polyester thread finer than human hair to stitch around the damage to prevent further fraying. For large tears and the missing piece, she worked with the faculty of Philadelphia University’s textile design department to make high-resolution images of the fabric, which were printed on polyester with a digital inkjet printer.

The whole effort took 525 hours of handwork by Ms. Whelan and an assistant.

Then they had figure out to erect so fragile a textile. The original wooden poles and tent pegs are extant, but they’d be way too rough on the fabric these days.

Alex Stadel, a structural engineer from Keast & Hood, devised the custom base, which looks like two unfurled umbrellas, standing upright and connected by a ridgepole, adding some upright poles on tracks for additional flexibility.

To attach the walls to the tent top, the team avoided iron hooks and eyes that were used in the original design, and chose rare-earth magnets that tether the fabric in place.

The Museum of the American Revolution opens in the historic center of Philadelphia on April 19th, the anniversary of the Battle of Lexington and Concord, the opening salvo of the Revolutionary War.

Italy’s greatest detective and master of disguise

Giuseppe Dosi has gone down in history as Italy’s greatest detective, a master of disguise who went undercover to solve the thorniest of crimes and did us the great courtesy of taking pictures of himself in his many disguises. He even had a little postcard-sized contact sheet of a dozen pictures made to give to people. Famous in Italian police circles for his pioneering efforts, Dosi is getting wider attention thanks to the publication of a new biography, the airing of a new documentary about him and the digitization of some his papers, now in the Museum of the Liberation of Rome.

Born in 1891, he had tried his hand at the theater in his youth and even though his stage career was stillborn, he put his love of performance and many other considerable talents into his job as a detective. He wore disguises to alter his appearance, changed his voice, his walk, even his gender when drag was called for. He had at least 17 confirmed disguises — two priests (one foreign, one Italian), a Galician banker, a German doctor, a Yugoslavian merchant, a nihilist, a Czech World War I veteran with a bum leg — and five fully fleshed identities complete with fake documents and background stories.

His enthusiastic embrace of disguises and creating characters in police investigations, known as “fregolismo detectivistico,” (“detectival transformism”) after the actor Leopoldo Fregoli who was so adept at transforming into diverse characters on stage that his last name became a neologism for chameleon-like quick changes. His impersonation of the Czech guy with a limp completely fooled poet and would-be dictator Gabriele D’Annunzio, who in 1922 had mysteriously “fallen” (been thrown?) out of a window. Dosi went undercover to find out what had happened, a politically sensitive investigation since D’Annunzio’s greatest rival and enemy was one Benito Mussolini, who later that year would march on Rome with his Blackshirts and be appointed the new Prime Minister of Italy. Dosi’s detecting discovered that D’Annunzio had indeed been pushed, not by a political assassin, but by his volatile mistress. The case was quietly closed. He did manage to copy 10 sexually explicit letters D’Annunzio wrote to said mistress before he got out of Dodge, though. The poet called him a “dirty cop” when he found out the limping Czech was really an undercover Roman.

In actual fact he was the polar opposite of a dirty cop. Dosi was a man of resolute integrity, fearless in pursuit of the truth, even when his bosses would have preferred he look the other way, and he paid a very high price for it. In 1927, he took on a case that had bedevilled Rome since 1924. It was a horrific series of crimes, the rape of seven little girls and the murder of five of them, the youngest just three years old. The rapes and murders were breathlessly reported by the sensationalistic press and the city was in turmoil. Mussolini himself, who saw the failure to solve these crimes as an embarrassment because it made it seem like his strident law-and-order party could not deliver on its promises, pressured Chief of Police Arturo Bocchini to arrest someone on the double.

So the police found someone. Sure, Gino Girolimoni didn’t match the description of a tall, middle-aged man with a bristling mustache and an imperfect command of the Italian language — he was average height, in his 30s, clean-shaven and a native Roman — but the mild-mannered photographer and mediator for the destitute in legal cases was a warm body, and between riled up public opinion and Mussolini breathing down their neck, that was enough for the cops. They ginned up some blatantly fake evidence and arrested him in 1927.

It was not enough for Giuseppe Dosi. He knew the evidence against Girolimoni was flimsy and was convinced the real murderer was still out there. He reopened the case, over the objections of his superiors, and quickly zeroed in a more likely suspect: a British Anglican priest named Ralph Lyonel Brydges who had gotten caught molesting a girl in Canada before he moved to Rome. In April of 1928, Dosi got a search warrant for Brydges’ room and found a note in a diary referencing the location of one of the murders, newspaper clippings about the crimes and handkerchiefs identical to the ones used to strangle the little girls. Brydges had friends in high places, however, and diplomatic interference from Britain and Canada (his wife was the daughter of a very prominent Toronto politician) kept him out of jail. He was briefly committed for observation to the insane asylum Santa Maria della Pietà only to be released and flee the country.

With the case against Girolimoni in shambles, charges against him were quietly dropped. Every newspaper in the country had splashed his name and face on their front pages as the “Monster of Rome” when he was arrested. His release was covered in a few cursory articles in the middle of the paper. He could no longer make a decent living because everyone thought he was a child rapist and murderer. He died in 1961, penniless and alone. Only a handful of friends showed up to his funeral. Dosi was one of them.

So now the authorities no longer had their patsy to execute for crimes he didn’t commit, and the only other suspect was far out of reach. Mussolini, who in 1925 after Dosi foiled an assassination plot against him had sung his praises and recommended him for a promotion to whatever role he preferred, was deeply displeased by Dosi’s dogged persistence. Dosi’s police bosses, already antsy about him exposing their corruption and lies setting up poor Girolimoni, also felt the pressure from the top to curb their man’s hubris.

First they fired him. Then they just cut to the chase and arrested him. He was imprisoned in Regina Coeli, a truly scary jail in Rome which during the Fascist period was replete with political prisoners. In case that wasn’t extreme enough, they moved him to Santa Maria della Pietà where the police detective spent 17 months forcibly detained in the same psychiatric facility where Brydges, a certain child molester and possible serial child murderer, had spent a few nights. He was finally released in January 1941.

Before the end of the war, his great courage and initiative would perform another historic service. On June 4th, 1944, Allied troops under General Mark Clark liberated Rome. The Nazi occupiers beat a hasty retreat and a mob assembled at the notorious SS torture prison on Via Tasso to free any political prisoners and Jews who hadn’t been murdered by the Nazis on the way out the door. The Germans had set their papers on fire in the attempt to cover their tracks, as was their wont, and when the mob freed the prisoners, they tossed bunches of records out the window in a sort of riot of de-Nazifying the place.

Dosi, who lived on a neighboring street, showed up with a cart and took it upon himself to enter the burning building and save all the surviving records. He turned them over to the Allied Command who wisely saw this guy was a badass and appointed him special investigator of the Counter Intelligence Corp. His testimony and those records he single-handedly saved from the flames, including the list of 75 Jews taken from Regina Coeli to their deaths in the monstrous Ardeatine massacre, would be crucial in the prosecution of numerous Nazi war criminals. In November of 1946, he rejoined the police force as director of the Central Office of International Police.

Over the course of his long and storied career, Dosi put his great energy, dedication and diverse interests into areas of policework that are now standard but were newfangled in his day. He wrote essays on scientific policing, was a vocal advocate for women police officers, promoted photographing and fingerprinting arrestees, the preservation of cultural patrimony and cross-border law enforcement. Not only did he help found the Italian branch of INTERPOL, he coined the name, originally as a telegraphic address for the organization that soon stuck. He retired in 1956 with the title of Chief Inspector General. He wrote several books about his detective work and lived a long life, dying in 1981 at the age of 90.

38,000-year-old aurochs engraving found in France

An international team of anthropologists has unearthed a 38,000-year-old engraving of an aurochs at the Abri Blanchard site in Dordogne, southwestern France.

First excavated in 1910, the Abri Blanchard rock shelter quickly proved itself to be an enormously rich source of archaeological material from the Aurignacian culture of the Upper Palaeolithic. It’s one of the top three Aurignacian sites in terms of numbers of bone pieces found, and archaeologists also found large quantities of flint tools, weapons and production waste indicating flint tools were being made inside the shelter. It wasn’t all business at Abri Blanchard, however. Decorative ornaments including soapstone beads, pierced shell and animal teeth were unearthed in the prehistoric deposits as were numerous artworks engraved and painted stone blocks and slabs.

As was accepted practice at the time, the finds from the 1910-1912 excavation of Abri Blanchard were sold in batches to collectors and museums and dispersed across Europe and the United States. The widespread selling artifacts was actually encouraged by the archaeological community because it was one of very few reliable sources of funding for future excavations, and it was inconceivable that all of materials recovered from such a rich dig could find a single home in a local or nationally prominent museum. The dig was also poorly documented, with no stratigraphic and spatial mapping, and while remains and objects were found in two archaeological layers, excavation director Louis Didon mingled the discoveries without concern for which layer they came from, grouping them by type or other shared criteria that appealed to buyers.

In 2011, more than a century after the first excavations began, a new research team returned to Abri Blanchard to reexcavate the site armed with modern equipment and modern archaeological standards. In 2012, they unearthed a limestone slab engraved with the image of an aurochs (wild cow once native to Europe and one of my top three favorite extinct animals) decorated with dozens of dots aligned in neat rows.

The aurochs was a popular motif in Aurignacian art. The Abri Blanchard engraving has notable similarities in technique and design to the aurochs painted on the walls of the spectacular Chauvet Cave, and the aligned dots have been found in Chauvet as well as other Aurignacian sites in Germany and France.

“The discovery sheds new light on regional patterning of art and ornamentation across Europe at a time when the first modern humans to enter Europe dispersed westward and northward across the continent,” explains NYU anthropologist Randall White, who led the excavation in France’s Vézère Valley.

The findings, which appear in the journal Quaternary International, center on the early modern humans’ Aurignacian culture, which existed from approximately 43,000 to 33,000 years ago. […]

White contends that Aurignacian art offers a window into the lives and minds of its makers—and into the societies they created.

“Following their arrival from Africa, groups of modern humans settled into western and Central Europe, showing a broad commonality in graphic expression against which more regionalized characteristics stand out,” he explains. “This pattern fits well with social geography models that see art and personal ornamentation as markers of social identity at regional, group, and individual levels.”

Fragments found of Amenhotep II box

Recently identified fragments from an elaborately decorated wooden box inscribed with the cartouche of 18th Dynasty Pharaoh Amenhotep II have revealed new information about the original design of the box. The fragments were held by London antiques dealers Charles Ede. Egyptologist Tom Hardwick researched them and discovered their connection to the box in the National Museums Scotland. He alerted the gallery and the gallery alerted the museum. Thanks to financial support from the Art Fund and the National Museums Scotland Charitable Trust, the museum acquired the fragments for £25,000. The reunited box and fragments will go on display at the National Museums Scotland where they will be part of the exhibition The Tomb: Ancient Egyptian Burial which runs from March 31st through September 3rd, 2017.

Made from Lebanese cedar wood, the cylindrical box was made around 1427-1400 B.C. with the finest of raw materials and craftsmanship. It is inlaid with ebony strips and ivory plaques with copper alloy and faience accents. Some of the gilding on the central figure of the god Bes and on three bands encircling the cylinder has survived. Ivory cartouches on the top half of the box contain the throne name of Amenhotep II. Underneath the cartouches are the Egyptian hieroglyph for “gold,” a symbol of the divine and eternal life. Notched ribs from palm tree branches, symbolizing the passage of a year and therefore the portent of a long reign, stand on either side of the cartouches. The cartouches and royal symbols festooned around Bes, fierce protector of hearth and home, suggests the box invoked the protection of a very personal, homebody god to ensure a long reign and life for Amenhotep.

The box has been in the collection of the National Museums Scotland for 160 years, but its origins are nebulous. The first time the box appears in the museum records is in the 1890s when it was first reassembled from fragments by archaeologist and museum director Joseph Anderson. According to an article written in 1895 by renown Egyptologist Sir Flinders Petrie, Anderson found the fragments in a box of odds and ends from the Rhind Collection.

Alexander Henry Rhind was a Scottish archaeologists who excavated Egypt in the mid-19th century and who pioneered detailed archaeological documentation. He brought back hundreds of artifacts now in the collection of the National Museums Scotland, including the full contents of a tomb he’d excavated in Thebes which was built in 1290 B.C. for the Chief of Police, looted repeatedly and reused for more than a 1000 years. When Rhind discovered the tomb, its last occupation from the Roman Egyptian era was undisturbed. Until he took it all to Scotland, of course. This is the tomb that is the focus of the National Museums Scotland’s upcoming exhibition.

Unfortunately, Rhind’s archaeological recording skills did not extend to documenting the discovery of the box fragments, and since he died in 1863 when he was just 29 years old he was no longer around to answer any questions by the time Joseph Anderson stumbled on the pieces. Museum curator and expert in Egyptian art Cyril Aldred studied the box in the 1940s. He made a detailed line drawing and watercolor of it in 1946 and proposed that Rhind had discovered the box in a tomb next to the recycled Roman Egyptian tomb. This tomb held the mummies of Amenhotep II’s granddaughters, among other princesses. They would have had good reason to have an extra fancy box dedicated to the grandpa, and since this was not the mummies’ original resting place but rather a second, less visible location used by priests to spare the royal remains from looting, the box’s fragmentary condition could be explained by the move.

The box was restored again in 1950s, and while it was less terrible than the 19th century attempt (the back is missing, but they still curved into a cylinder even though it was too skinny and the ends didn’t meet or match), conservators had to fill in blanks without references to what it might have looked like when whole. The newly surfaced fragments answer some of those questions and confirm that the last restoration was not accurate.

The decoration on one of the fragments features a motif representing the façade of the royal palace, tying in with the rich royal symbolism on the box, and confirming the object’s royal association. Furthermore, where the decoration of the box differs from that of the fragments, it reveals that the part of the box was incorrectly restored in mid-20th century.

The box is a much more elaborate version of the types of wooden containers often found in ancient Egyptian tombs, other examples of which are in National Museums Scotland’s collections. It was probably used in the royal palace to hold cosmetics or expensive perfumes and likely belonged to a member of the king’s family, most probably one of his granddaughters.

Even with its missing bits and questionable past restorations, the box is widely considered a masterpiece of ancient Egyptian decorative woodwork. Petrie described it as “a very interesting example of the fine work of that most wealthy and luxurious period, the 18th Dynasty.” After their stint on display in the new exhibition, the box and fragments will be kept in storage while the museums constructs a new Ancient Egypt gallery to house it. The new gallery is scheduled to be completed in 2018-2019.