Month: July 2021

Carved brick mural tombs found in China

Medieval

Archaeologists have discovered a cluster of 12 rare carved brick tombs dating to the Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368) in Jinan, capital of Eastern China’s Shandong province. Inscriptions found in the tomb indicate they all belong to one elite family, the Guo, who lived in the late Yuan Dynasty. Eleven of the 12 are elaborately frescoed and carved brick mural tombs. One is a stone chamber tomb.

“The tombs were arranged in an orderly and apparently planned way, and some of the owners were related by blood, providing new material for the study of the arrangement of family cemeteries in the Yuan Dynasty,” Li [Ming, director of Jinan’s archeology institute] said.

The 12 Yuan tombs were part of a group of 35 tombs of different ages unearthed at the site since excavations began in April.  It’s the largest group of Yuan brick mural tombs discovered in Shandong.

Yuan Dynasty carved brick tombs feature designs carved into the brick with chisels and wooden hammers. The carving creates patterns enhanced by brick placement to convey a three-dimensional relief effect.

Over 60 pieces of pottery and porcelain wares, bronze mirrors, copper coins and other cultural relics were unearthed during the excavation, which will help with the study of porcelain during the Yuan Dynasty reign in the region and the surrounding areas.

Iron Age hoard found during highway construction

Ancient, Treasures

Archaeologists excavating the site of highway construction in the Hillingdon neighborhood of West London have unearthed a hoard of more than 300 rare coins from the late Iron Age. The Hillingdon Hoard was found after a rainstorm exposed a patch of greenish soil indicating the presence of oxidized metal. Upon closer examination, the team spotted slim metal discs packed in the soil which proved to potins from the 1st century B.C.

Potins are coins made of a mixture of copper, tin and lead cast in Britain but copying an earlier Celtic coin minted 2,175 years ago in what is now Marseille. They are about 1.2 inches in diameter A stylized profile of Apollo facing left is on the obverse. A bull charging to the right is on the reverse.

The first series of potins produced in Britain, are known as Kentish Primary or Thurrock types, and are likely to have been made no later than 150 BC. Sometime before 100 BC, these rather bulky coins were replaced by thinner coins with more degenerate designs, now called Flat Linear types. Over a period of several decades, the Flat Linear potins gradually evolved into a wide variety of forms, with the depiction of the bull and the head of Apollo becoming more and more stylised. The Hillingdon Hoard is late in the Flat Linear sequence.

A hoard of a similar size, the ‘Sunbury hoard’ was discovered in 2010 but the potins were dated much earlier in the Iron Age. Potins from late in the Iron Age, similar to the Hillingdon Hoard, have been found previously but in much smaller quantities, making this find very significant.

Hillingdon Hoard after discovery. Photo courtesy HS2.The coins have been removed to a lab for cleaning, conservation and assessment of condition. They will be catalogued and analyzed by experts to learn more about their origins. The find has been reported to the local coroner to initiate the process of determining whether the hoard qualifies as treasure. (It does, no question.)

Potin cleaned. Video by Drakonheritage.

Honey gathering cave art found in Spain

Ancient

Archaeologists have discovered a rare detailed cave painting depicting honey-gathering in Castellote in the Iberian System mountain range of northeastern Spain. Painted in the Levantine (meaning eastern Iberian) art style which is characterized by intricately painted small human and animal figures, the honey collection scene is exceptionally well-preserved, the best-preserved and most detailed of any of its kind in Levantine art. Stylistic classification suggests the honey-gatherer painting is approximately 7,500 years old.

Man gathering honey ca. 7,500 years ago. Image courtesy Martínez et al.

The painting was found in the central section of the Barranco Gómez rock shelter on the banks of the Guadalope River. There are three sets of painting on a wall more than 40 feet wide. Along with the honey gatherer scene are a pair of archers on the hunt and a doe on the run looking backwards.

Honey gathering scenes have been found before in Levantine rock art sites, most famously The Man of Bicorp in the Cuevas de la Araña near Valencia which at 8,000 years of age is the oldest known surviving depiction. While other populations in Europe at this time were farming and growing grains, the hunter-gatherers of eastern Spain had to rely on bee hunting for their sugar fix, and they were willing to pay a steep price, literally. Bicorp Man climbs lianas up a rock face to get his sweet loot from a hive in a crevasse. Barranco Gómez man uses a rope ladder.

[W]e can see the figure of a person, with well-defined facial traits, who climbs up a ladder to reach a beehive. The scene depicts that during the painting period, they used advanced techniques to climb: before going up, the ladder has been fixed at the top, near the beehive, while there is a pole at mid-height to secure the ladder to the rock and provide more stability. […] Both in the hind picture and the scene of the honey extraction feature elements of the same cave in the composition of the painting: the honey harvesting is painted in the wall and the ceiling and it uses both mediums to better represent the scene, while the mouth of the hind is insinuated by leaving a piece of rock unpainted.

The depiction is so detailed that it not only elucidates the honey gathering technology of the period, but also the technique. The gatherer climbs the ladder with outstretched arms and legs, hugging it to minimize swaying.

France buys 120 Days of Sodom for $5 million

Modern(ish)

After more than five years of legal wrangling, France has acquired the iconic original manuscript of the Marquis de Sade’s magnum opus The 120 Days of Sodom for 4.55 million euros ($5.34 million). The purchase was funded entirely by one generous donor: investment banker Emmanuel Boussard.

This is the second time the French state threw $5 million at the famous manuscript. The first time the Bibliothèque Nationale de France raised the huge sum to acquire it when its private owners put it up for auction in 2013. Negotiations fell through at the last minute due to the complications of the dirty title. (The manuscript had been stolen from the Sade family descendants by a con man in the 1980s and sold in Switzerland. Swiss courts ruled the buyers had legitimate title because they bought “in good faith.” French courts recognized it as the blatantly stolen and illegally exported object it was, so any return of the scroll to France would see it confiscated at the border. Read the whole fascinating, sordid backstory in this post.)

In 2014, the manuscript was sold privately to Gérard Lhéritier of Aristophil, a company that bought historic documents and then sold shares in them. Aristophil’s collection of 130,000 historic documents was seized in 2015 and the company’s business plan revealed to be a Ponzi scheme that defrauded more than 18,000 investors. Aristophil was forced into insolvency and the courts mandated the sale of all its assets.

The collection was so huge that it was sold piecemeal over the course of six years to properly catalogue everything and so as not to flood the important documents market and drive down prices. While the sale divisions were being worked out, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France feverishly set to having the scroll declared a national treasure which would prevent any international sale. They succeeded in 2017 and The 120 Days of Sodom was withdrawn from auction.

It was trapped in this holding pattern — no private sale allowed, no funds for public acquisition — for almost four years. In February 2021, the French government appealed for private help, offering a reduction in corporate taxes for any company that helped buy the manuscript for the country. Boussard heeded the call.

The manuscript is a scroll five inches wide and 39 feet long, made from 33 pieces of parchment the Marquis had smuggled into his cell in the Bastille in 1784. He covered every piece with his tiny cramped handwriting and then glued the next piece of parchment to the completed one so he could keep on going. The long, skinny parchment train could be rolled up tightly and hidden in a crack in his wall. He wrote the whole thing in 37 days, and while he would spend five years in the Bastille, getting transferred to Charenton asylum on July 4th, 1789, 10 days before the prison fortress was so famously stormed, he never completed what he hoped would be his great masterpiece.

When he was hastily transferred to Charenton in the middle of the night, he had to leave his scroll behind. He assumed it had been destroyed in the assault on the Bastille, but in fact a young revolutionary named Arnoux de Saint-Maximin had found it and spirited it out of the prison on July 12th. It has been in private hands, licit and otherwise, for more than 230 years.

The scroll has been assigned to the Arsenal branch of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris.

2021 conservators bust 1940 conservator for forging demon wall

Medieval, Modern(ish)

Painting conservators working on the west wall of the choir in Sauherad Church in southeastern Norway have discovered that the ostensible 17th century “Demon Wall” discovered during conservation work in 1940 was not discovered by the conservators. It was made by them.

The dense black line drawing of demons, animals, clerics, princesses, one drawing linked to the next, all interwoven together in minute detail, cover the full width and height of the wall from the arch 8.5 feet above the floor to the top of the ceiling. The figures in some parts of the drawing are so tiny they are invisible to the naked eye from the floor.

Built between 1150 and 1250, Sauherad Church was ravaged by fire in the mid-17th century and extensively rebuilt. An altarpiece depicting scenes from Revelation was made in 1663. Around 1700, frescoes were painted on the walls and ceilings by Lauritz Pettersen. By the end of the 1700s, the church was in a dilapidated state, but it was repaired and expanded in 1848 and today is known for its surviving frescoes.

Gerhard Gotaas and his son Per Gotaas were employed by the Directorate for Cultural Heritage to restore the faded frescoes on the walls of Sauherad Church from 1935 to 1941. The demon wall came to light in August 1940. Conservator Gerhard Gotaas wrote to Henry Fett, head of the Norwegian Directorate for Cultural Heritage and an expert in medieval Norwegian church art, that they had uncovered “faces and figures of humans and animals” on the west wall of the choir.

The drawings, unique in the Norwegian archaeological record, attracted much attention at the time of the discovery. Demons and the devil make an appearance in Norwegian church art, but always as part of a larger traditional Christian composition emphasizing the redemptive power of God and Christ. The demon wall of Sauherad is all damnation and no salvation.

Henry Fett wrote about the wall in glowing terms in his 1941 book A Village Church:

Here the devils of revelation, the demons of the time, the eerie powers of existence, with all its uncontrolled and fateful forces and eerie mask life are depicted – all this which Christ had declared war, we have on the west wall of the choir. In large swarms, demons and devils hover in space, herd upon herd – a whole air squadron, an insect swarm of demons, animal masks with human features. human masks with animal features, the animal in man unfolds in all sorts of fantastic bastard forms, spiritual complexes have taken shape. What a gallery of demonic face types!

Traces of older wall paintings beneath the density of demons date to the time of the altarpiece, so mid-17th century, and the demons were believed to have been added shortly thereafter. There was speculation that they might have been painted by the proverbial insane priest. Fett nominated Jens Christensen Slagelse, who worked at Sauherad Church from 1621 to 1641.

Curator Susanne Kaun and art historian Elisabeth Andersen set up scaffolding to examine the murals under magnification, UV light and raking light. They also and scoured the archives for information about the discovery and 1940 conservation.

Gotaa claimed in his correspondence that he had found incised drawings and color remnants, but Kaun and Andersen found no incisions at all, and the original faded color elements that were from 17th century featured zero demons. The Gotaas did it all themselves, and bamboozled everyone for decades.

“We suspected for a long time that a lot had been painted and added, but when we saw the extent of Gotaa’s hand – we could hardly believe it,” Andersen says.

“That a conservator himself has painted his own decor, and claims that it is something he has found, is contrary to all conservation principles – also in the 1940s,” Kaun adds.