Irving Finkel on how to raise the dead

If you thought Irving Finkel, the British Museum’s Middle East curator and foremost cuneiform expert, outdid himself in that video where he played the Royal Game of Ur, you’re going to love his Halloween themed video. In it he summarizes in his characterstically witty style the inscructions for necromancy, raising the dead for the purpose of foretelling the future, found on a tablet (K.2779) in the British Museum.

Written in Neo-Babylonian in the 7th century B.C., the tablet was one of tens of thousands discovered at Nineveh that were part of what is known as the Library of Ashurbanipal. Only the top half of it and a few fragments have survived so we don’t have the full recipe for conjuring the spirits of the dead, sad to say, and there are a few lines of magical incantantions that are untranslatable because they were written in what scholars think may be a mixed-up kind of Sumerian seeing as by the 1st milennium B.C. nobody could speak the real thing anymore. This kind of magic-speak has been found on tablets before, including ones dealing with necromancy.

There aren’t a great many specifically dedicated to the raising of ghosts and questioning them, interestingly enough. The namburbi genre this tablet is a part of usually deals with warnings and magic to repel ghosts and contain the damage they can do. Tablet 2779 is unusual in that it covers both subjects: how to raise the ghost and then how to prevent its evil from harming the home and its residents. As it was not incised in Nineveh, it’s likely the tablet was brought to the library in a deliberate attempt to flesh out the collection in subject areas that were sparsely covered.

Here’s a translation of the surviving cuneiform from K.2279, minus the couple of lines of untranslatable verse:

An incantation to enable a man to see a ghost.

Its ritual: (you crush) mouldy wood, fresh leaves of Euphrates poplar in water, oil, beer (and) wine. You dry, crush and sieve snake-tallow, lion-tallow, crab-tallow, white honey, a frog (that lives) among the pebbles, hair of a dog, hair of a cat, hair of a fox, bristle of a chameleon (and) bristle of a (red) lizard, “claw” of a frog, end-of-intestines of a frog, the left wing of a grasshopper, (and) marrow from the long bone of a goose. You mix (all this) (in) wine, water (and) milk with amhara plant. You recite the incantation three times and you anoint your eyes (with it) and you will see the ghost: he will speak with you. You can look at the ghost: he will talk with you.

In order to avert the evil (inherent) in a ghost’s cry you (sic) crush a potsherd from a ruined tell in water. He should sprinkle the house (with this water). For three days he should make offerings to the family ghosts.

He should pour out beer (flavoured with) roast barley. He should scatter juniper over a censer before Samas, pour out prime beer, offer a resent to Samas, and recite as follows:

O Samas, Judge of Heaven and Underworld, Foremost One of the Anunnaki!
O Samas, Judge of all the Lands, Samas Foremost and Resplendent One!
You keep them in check, O Samas, the Judge. You carry those from Above down to Below,
Those from Below up to Above. The ghost who has cried out in my house, whether of (my) father or mother, whether (my) brother or sister,
Whether a forgotten son of someone, whether a vagrant ghost show has no-one to care for it,
An offering has been made for him! Water has been poured out for him! May the evil in his cry away behin him!
Let the evil in his evil cry not come near me! <…> You do this repeatedly for three days, and <…>

You wash his hands, you anoint him with U.SIKIL: “It is finished”: in oil.

I love that they pour out beer for him. Very 90s rap.

The only negative thing I can say about Finkel’s explanation of the tablet is that it’s way too short. I’m hoping he does what he did with Ur and films himself actually performing the ritual. He’s already scared up a suitable skull (Mesopotamian, one hopes, although there is nothing in the literature that suggests the skulls used in these rituals needed to have belonged to any specific individual, group or time period). It’s just the ingredients for the magical brew he’s having difficulty obtaining. That, Dr. Finkel, is what the Internet is for. All you need is a little viral luck and within days you will be inundated with sufficient snake tallow, frog end-of-intestines and chameleon bristles to raise an army of the dead.

Portland Vase keeps confounding experts after 500 years

An interdisciplinary study at the Australian National University (ANU) has discovered evidence that the Portland Vase, a 1st century A.D. Roman cameo glass of extraordinary beauty that has captured the imagination of the artists and antiquarians for half a millennium, may have been manufactured completely differently than scholars have thought up until now.

Specifically, by using a combination of computed tomography and mathematical analysis the researchers have shown that Roman cameo glass was not made by blowing, but by a different process known as “pate de verre”.

While glass-blowing involves basically inflating a balloon of molten glass by pushing air into it through a tube, pate de verre is a form of casting. Finely crushed glass particles are mixed into a paste with a binding material (and colours), which is then put on the inner surface of a mould and then fired.

Research on Roman cameo glass fragments led by Richard Whitely of the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra focussed on studying the fine structure of air bubbles trapped between blue and white layers. The collaboration between the university’s schools of art and design, classics, and physics and engineering revealed evidence that the glass could not possibly have been produced by blowing.

“We saw a bubble configuration within the glass that results from a pressing and turning motion,” says Whiteley. “I believe that cold granulated glass has been packed into a mould and then a blob of molten blue glass introduced and pressed against mould heating the white granules from behind. You just would not get a bubble that size and flat-shaped from blowing.”

He knows whereof he speaks, because Whiteley is an experienced glass artist in his own right. His first-hand knowledge of how glass works was supported by Tim Senden from the school of physics and engineering who analyzed the data from the scans. Senden created mathematical models of the glass bubbles and found they were not compatible with bubble patterns created during the process of blowing glass.

The Portland Vase has been confounding and enchanting people if not since it was made between 1 and 25 A.D., then at least since its rediscovery in the Renaissance. It is believed to have been found in a tomb just southeast of the ancient Servian walls that still marked the official boundary between the old city (where bodies could not be buried) and the outskirts (where they could). Known as the Monte del Grano (the hill of grain), the grave purportedly contained a large marble sarcophagus thought to be the final resting place of Emperor Severus Alexander (r. 222-235 A.D.) and his mother Julia Mamaea. The imperial attribution proved to be groundless, but the legend stayed attached to the vase, which was found inside the sarcophagus and because of its exceptional quality was assumed to have been used to contain the ashes of the emperor, for centuries.

The discovery was not documented at the time so a lot of this story is nebulous in its details. It was well-established as the background of the vase by the 18th century, but the first known recorded reference to the Portland Vase was a comment by Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc who saw the artifact in the winter of 1600-1 in the collection of Cardinal del Monte. Peiresc was riveted by it as were his friends Peter Paul Rubens and antiquary Cassiano dal Pozzo whose “Paper Museum” (a collection of more than 7,000 paintings, watercolors and sketches of antiquities, botany, zoology, architecture and more) included multiple drawings of the vase. The three of them wrote to each other about it often, discussing its aesthetic attributes, imagery, original shape and date of manufacture.

As secretary to Cardinal Francesco Barberini, dal Pozza had front-row seats to the cameo glass vase. Cardinal Del Monte died in 1626 and the vase was acquired by the Cardinal’s brother Antonio, both nephews of Pope Urban VIII. That’s where the vase got its next name: the Barberini Vase. The family was the most powerful in Rome at that time and had patronage ties to artists all over Italy. Word of the rare beauty of the vase spread far and wide in the artistic community, and by the end of the century it was considered a must-see for antiquarians, artists and well-bred amateurs who would later become known as Grand Tourists.

Not that anybody had any accurate idea of where it came from or even what it was made out of at this point. Late 17th century sources from encyclopedist Bernard de Montfaucon to Giovanni Battista Piranesi, meticulous engraver of antiquities and fantasy prison landscapes, repeated the story that the vase had been found in the Monte del Grano tomb in the sarcophagus of Severus Alexander. Piranesi engraved the tomb, sarcophagus and vase in his characteristic high detail, but he hadn’t seen them together as the original context was long since scattered. Montfaucon and Piranesi both mistakenly thought the vase was made of sardonyx agate, and they weren’t the only ones to make that mistake.

Sir William Hamilton bought the vase from Scottish antiquities dealer James Byres in 1782 who had bought it from the debt-ridden Donna Cordelia Barberini-Colonna in 1780. In 1784, the vase ceased to be a Barberini and found a new home (and a new name) with the Duchess of Portland. She died the next year and her great collection was sold at a multi-day auction. The buyer of the vase kept things in the family, however, because he was the Duchess’ son, the 3rd Duke of Portland. A year after the sale, Josiah Wedgwood got permission to borrow the vase to make copies in jasperware. His versions were huge commercial hits and geometrically expanded the fame of the original vase.

The Portland Vase darkened the doorway of the British Museum in 1810 when the 4th Duke of Portland loaned it to the institution for safe-keeping, but alas, there is no safety to be found in a world full of crazy people. On February 7th, 1845, a paranoid alcoholic on a bender picked up one of the carved stones on display in the gallery and smashed the Portland Vase and its vitrine to bits. It wound up in 37 pieces but was puzzled back together by restorer John Doubleday within a year. It was finally bought by and entered the permanent collection of the British Museum in 1945.

Dragons return to Kew Gardens’ Great Pagoda

The Great Pagoda at Kew Gardens is in the midst of a major restoration project that will return it to its original glory. This is a tall order, no pun intended, for a wooden octagonal tower ten stories high that was built in 1762. Towering 50 meters (164 feet) above London, the Great Pagoda was unique for its time with its height, Chinese-inspired design and spectacular bird’s eye view of the city. It was the highest Chinese-style building in Europe. A great many people doubted that so tall and thin a structure could even survive and expected it to fall down at any moment. Not everyone would have been unhappy with that outcome, mind you. Horace Walpole, antiquarian, author and son of Prime Minister Robert Walpole, disliked it immensely. He complained in correspondence with a friend that he could see it from his Strawberry Hill House, his Gothic estate in Twickenham, and that if it kept on like this, soon it could be seen from Yorkshire.

Kew Gardens wasn’t the national botanical garden then that it is now. That didn’t happen until 1840. It started out as a private garden with a collection of exotic plants created by Lord Capel John of Tewkesbury on the grounds of Kew Park near Richmond Palace. After the 1751 death of Frederick, Prince of Wales, heir to the throne and father of the future King George III, his wife Augusta, Dowager Princess of Wales, greatly expanded the little exotic garden. She commissioned architect Sir William Chambers, a favorite of John Stuart, 3rd Earl of Bute, Augusta’s closest advisor (some said lover, some Svengali), to design several new structures and follies for Kew Gardens. Over the decades he built the Gallery of Antiquities (now demolished), the Temple of Pan (demolished), the Temple of the Sun (demolished), and still standing today, the Ruined Arch, the Temple of Bellona, the Temple of Aeolus, the Orangery and the Great Pagoda.

Chambers was uniquely suited to that last task. Born in Sweden to a Scottish merchant, he had worked for the Swedish East India Company for almost a decade starting when he was 17 years old. While in its employ, Chambers went to China three times and dedicated himself to the study of Chinese architecture. When he came back to Europe for good, he chose to pursue architecture, studying with masters in Paris and Italy before opening starting his own firm in London in 1755. Just two years later, thanks to John Stuart, he had made the big time garnering an appointment as tutor in architecture to the Prince of Wales. That same year he published a book about Chinese architecture that made a huge splash and popularized Chinese style in design, fashion and the decorative arts. His list of subscribers might as well have been Debrett’s Peerage — His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales, Her Royal Highness the Princess Dowager of Wales, His Royal Highness the Duke, and a few rungs down on the ladder, the Earl of Bute.

Here’s how he described Chinese towers in Designs of Chinese Buildings, Furniture, Dresses, Machines, and Utensils:

The towers called by the Chinese Taa, and which the Europeans call likewise pagodas, are very common in China. In some provinces, says Du Halde, you find them in every town, and even in the large villages. The most considerable of them all are the famous porcelain-tower at Nang-Kingj, and that of Tong-Tchang-Fou, both of which are very magnificent structures.

In regard to their form, the Taas are all nearly alike being of an octagonal figure, and consisting of seven, eight, and sometimes ten stories, which grow gradually less both in height and breadth all the way from the bottom to the top. Each story is finished with a kind of cornish, that supports a roof, at the angles of which hang little brass bells ; and round each story runs a narrow gallery, inclosed by a rail or balustrade. These buildings commonly terminate in a long pole, surrounded with several circles of iron, hanging by eight chains fixed to the top of the pole, and to the angles of the covering of the last story.

He began construction on the Great Pagoda at Kew Gardens in 1761, four years after the book was published. Chambers followed the template he’d written about in his book to the letter, using the Porcelain Tower of Nanjing as his model. He went for the most ambitious goal referenced in his book, the ten story tower, even though in reality Chinese towers have uneven numbers of floors, seven ideally. Each floor he made just 30 cm (12 inches) narrower than the one underneath it. It was also a riot of color originally. The roofs were tiled with varnished iron plates and had a dragon perched on each corner. The dragons were hand-carved out of wood and gilded. Over time the varnished iron roof tiles were replaced with slate and the dragons were removed in 1784 during roof repairs. Nobody knows for sure what became of them. Gossip has it that they were sold to pay King George IV’s gambling debts, but they weren’t made out of solid gold and you can’t really hock gilded wood dragons. The true story, confirmed by at least one contemporary, is probably more mundane than that: they were simply neglected and rotted away.

Pagoda roof view of repaired hole from World War II bomb tests. Kew Gardens, Historic Royal Palaces.Architect Decimus Burton, a botanical enthusiast as well as one of the leading architects of the Greek Revival, Regency and Georgian styles, proposed a restoration of the Great Pagoda to its original splendour, but he was denied on the grounds that the sum of £4,350 it would require was just too princely. Piecemeal restorations have taken place since, mainly to the roofs — holes were cut in each floor during World War II so British bomb designers could test the trajectories and movements of their bombs when dropped — and while there was some talk of going for a larger magnitude reconstruction that would include replica dragons, nothing came of it for decades.

Except for a brief window in 2006, the tower has been closed to the public. That sad loss is soon to be remedied, however, because the ambitious restoration is scheduled to be completed and the Great Pagoda reopened in all its iridescent 18th century glory come spring of 2018. And yes, there will be dragons. All 80 of them are going back to their respective corners. The eight dragons on the first roof will be carved by hand out of wood, just like the originals. The ones on the higher story will be more workmanlike, made out of nylon on 3D printers and virtually indestructible.

Technology can only help so much. This is not a relatively simple matter of creating an exact copy of an existing object. Not only were all the dragons long gone decades before Louis Daguerre took that first picture of a Parisian street, but they aren’t even any extant depictions of the dragons. Curators have had to rely on archival resources and research into the Chinoiserie style of the period to recreate the carving and paint colors. See them at work in these fantastic(al) videos:

Cache of Assyrian cuneiform tablets found in Iraq

Archaeologists have unearthed a cache of 93 cuneiform tablets at the ancient city of Bassetki in Kurdistan. Most of them, 60, were discovered in a ceramic pot stashed in a room of a structure from the Middle Assyrian period. It and two other vessels had been wrapped in a protective coating of clay, which was providence because the building itself was long-since destroyed. It might even have been a deliberate choice spurred by the tablets themselves.

“The vessels may have been hidden this way shortly after the surrounding building was destroyed. Perhaps the information inside it was meant to be protected and preserved for posterity,” [dig leader] Professor [Peter] Pfälzner said.

“It is not yet known if the tablets contain business, legal, or religious records.”

“Our philologist, Dr. Betina Faist, deciphered one small fragment of a clay tablet. It mentions a temple to the goddess Gula, suggesting that we may be looking at a religious context.”

“I hope the texts will yield a wide variety of detail about the history, society, and culture of this little-researched area of northern Mesopotamia in the second millennium BC,” he added.

A team from the Institute for Ancient Near Eastern Studies (IANES) at the University of Tübingen has been excavating the site near the town of Dohuk in the autonomous providence of Kurdistan, northern Iraq, since 2013. It was a statue fragment looted during from the Iraqi National Museum in 2003 during the chaotic period after the US invasion that tipped archaeologists off to Bassetki’s potential significance. The statue in question was a cast copper base with human legs and lower body of a naked man which had been discovered in 1975 near the modern-day village of Bassetki. Even though the top of it is missing, it is still incredibly heavy at 150 kg (330 lb) and an inscription on the base tells of Akkadian king Naram-Sin (2254–2218 B.C.), grandson of Sargon the Great, first ruler of the Akkadian Empire. It recounts his successful suppression of a revolt, his elevation to the godhead by the residents of Akkad city and their construction of a temple to him in the city center.

The statue, the only ancient object known to have been found in the Bassetki area, was later recovered by US troops who found it hidden in a cesspool behind the house of antiquities dealers suspected of trafficking in looted artifacts which they obviously were. The rediscovery of the enormously significant piece piqued the interest of Professor Peter Pfälzner who, in collaboration with the Directorate of Antiquities in Dohuk, began to excavate Bassetki with the IANES team. They found that today’s sleepy little village was preceeded by a bustling settlement that was founded around 3000 B.C. and thrived for at least 1200 years after that. As early as 2700 B.C. a defensive wall protecting the upper city from would-be marauders was already standing. The team also found large stone structures dating to around 1800 B.C. and Assyrian cuneiform tablet fragments from around 1300 B.C. Translations of the tablet remains, as much as they were possible, revealed there had once been a temple to the weather god Adad at Bassetki.

Geomagnetic surveys also discovered a smattering of ruins outside the ancient downtown. There was a lower town about a half mile long, a complex network of roads, multiple residential neighborhoods, expensive and expansive homes of the wealthy and a monumental building of some sort dating to the Bronze Age. The town was hopping in its day, located on a highway dating to around 1800 B.C. that connected it to Mesopotamia and facilitated extensive trade. The whole time they were doing this work, by the way, they were less than 30 miles from ISIS-controlled territory. Archaeology ain’t for the lily-livered.

“Our finds provide evidence that this early urban center in northern Mesopotamia was settled almost continuously from approximately 3000 to 600 BC,” Professor Pfälzner said.

“That indicates that Bassetki was of key significance on important trade routes.”

Most of the 93 recently-discovered cuneiform tablets were unfired, which always makes them a conservation and translation headache. They are brittle and easily worn by simple erosive elements. Their preservation challenges only increased when the building burned down around them. Researchers will study them with the latest and greatest equipment in the hope of being able to read at least part of the texts.

Looks like Obelix dropped something in Helvetia

Swiss archaeologists have discovered a large stone block they think is a prehistoric menhir. My headline is deceptive, I freely admit (I can’t resist an Asterix reference), because the stone was discovered at the Bronze Age site of Breitenacher outside of Bern and thus far predates even fictional menhir-slinging indomitable Gauls. The Archaeological Service of the Canton of Bern has been excavating the site near Kehrsatz in advance of construction and have unearthed the remains of an extensive Bronze Age settlement dating to around 3500 years ago. The monolith is two meters (6.6 feet) long and 1.3 meters (4.3 feet) in width and weighs somewhere in the environs of two or three tons. It is ovoid in shape, coming to a gentle point at the top end.

Its siliceous sandstone identifies it as having come from the debris ridge of a nearby glacier and there is no direct evidence of tooling, carving or working by human hand on the surface of the stone, but archaeologists don’t think it just randomly landed where they found it. It wasn’t deposited there by glacial movement. Humans were involved. Which humans, when and how is unclear.

Traces on the ground … suggest that the stone was once laid vertically and was lying in a pit at the beginning or during the Bronze Age settlement. The location of the stone, equidistant from several Bronze Age houses, could imply that it played a role in the construction of the city, for example as a point of reference. Similarly, other blocks, which have not yet been exhumed, may have been around. It is also possible that the stone was used in earlier times, in the Neolithic, and that it was moved to make room for the construction of the Bronze Age houses.

By its size and shape, the stone of Kehrsatz looks like a menhir (breton maen , hir ). This term refers to oblong, often uncut, isolated stones used to mark the location of places of worship or assembly. The megalithic alignments and dolmens (tumulus) of the Neolithic, about 4500 to 5000 years old, probably had similar functions. In Switzerland, there are about a hundred of these megalithic monuments, mainly in the Lake Geneva region, in Valais and at the foot of the Jura. In the canton of Bern, a dolmen used as a collective grave was updated a few years ago in Oberbipp.

To date, only about fifteen isolated menhirs have been discovered in Switzerland. These are usually simple blocks from one to four meters high. The best example of the canton of Bern is for the moment in Sutz-Lattrigen, on Lake Biel. The discovery of a menhir at Kehrsatz would therefore be an event. This interpretation must in any case be verified by examining other stones in the vicinity. This discovery would be all the more interesting because, with the exception of a few isolated finds, very little is known about the settlement in the Stone Age around the city of Bern.

The possible menhir has been raised and moved to an indoor facility where it can be protected from the elements and studied further. Once the site has been fully excavated, authorities plan to return the stone where it was found and put it on public display. Construction on the mixed-used development will proceed after excavations have been completed.