Ptolemy IV temple found during sewer construction

Ancient

A temple from the reign of King Ptolemy IV (221 – 204 B.C.) was discovered during sewer construction in the village of Kom Shaqao in the Sohag Governorate of Upper Egypt. The Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities announced on its Facebook page that crews drilling down to install new sewage pipes for the village stumbled on the remains of an ancient wall on Sunday, September 29th. Drilling ceased immediately and archaeologists were called in to examine the find.

According to the head of the Central Department for Antiquities of Egypt, Mohamed Abdel Badie, the mission then started work in the area south of the wall discovered during the drainage project.

The expedition unearthed the southwestern corner of the temple and the rest of the wall heading from north to south. These ruins featured inscriptions of the ancient Egyptian god Habi accompanied by many different animals, and the remains of texts containing Ptolemy IV’s name, according to Badei.

Another limestone wall heading westward was also found, covered with limestone slabs.

Kom Shaqao was the capital of the tenth region of Upper Egypt, west of the city of Tama, which was once called Wagit. The oldest mention of Wagit was in the Fourth Dynasty.

Located about 300 miles south of Cairo, today this area of the Nile Valley is largely rural and agricultural with high rates of poverty. There has been a recent uptick in infrastructure investment like road construction (hence the sewage project), but its archaeological history is still very much underexplored. Even the capital city of Sohag, one of the oldest cities in Egypt, has very few visitable archaeological sites. The Sohag National Museum, the first and only one of its kind in Upper Egypt, just opened last year. The discovery of the Ptolemaic temple, therefore, is not just archaeologically significant, but also has important potential as a source of much-needed tourist revenues.

Sapphire ring maybe worn by Caligula for sale

Ancient, Treasures

An ancient Roman sapphire ring once believed to have belonged to the Emperor Caligula is being sold by royal jewelers Wartski, best known as the foremost dealers and experts in the Fabergé Imperial Eggs and jewels after the fall of the Romanovs. It is an engraved sapphire hololith, meaning a ring carved from a single stone, with a gold band mounted on the inside, likely during the Middle Ages. The engraving is a left-facing profile of a beautiful woman believed to represent Caligula’s wife Caesonia.

The ring was in the famed intaglio gemstone collection assembled by George Spencer, 4th Duke of Marlborough, in the second half of the 18th century. Before that, it was part of a smaller but also renown group of engraved gems collected by Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel, in the first half of the 17th century. Via marriage and descent, Lord Arundel’s gemstone collection was added to the extremely fine pieces the Duke of Marlborough had bought from dealers and private owners on the continent.

The Marlborough Gems, as the great collection became known, were sold by the 7th Duke, John Winston Spencer-Churchill, at auction in 1875 to raise money for the renovation of Blenheim Palace. Many of them were bought by David Bromilow, Esq, and then sold again by his daughter at an 1899 auction. The collection was thus broken up and dispersed — the Getty dropped major ducats on a dozen or so of them earlier this year — and there are Marlborough gems whose whereabouts are unknown today. This ring was one of them.

Sapphires, hyacinthus to the Romans, is a hard stone to carve and is very rarely seen in intaglios. Third century grammarian Gaius Julius Solinus describes it in his Polyhistor:

Among the things we have spoken of, the hyacinthus, which has a shining sky blue colour, is to be found. It is a valuable stone if discovered without blemish, for it is not a little subject to flaws. It is frequently either tempered with a violet colour, or covered with cloudiness, or softened to a white wateriness. The best type is not blunted by too solid a colour, nor over-clear with an eager transparency, but sweetly draws its bloom from both, dyed with the right proportions of light and purple. This stone perceives the winds and changes with the sky: it is not equally bright when the day is cloudy as when it is clear. In addition, the stone is colder when put into the mouth. It is certainly not suitable for carving, as it defies all grinding. Yet it is not utterly invincible; it can be scratched and inscribed by a diamond.

Nowadays the deeper the blue, the more desirable the sapphire, but Solinus’ description of the most prized sapphires as a delicate balance of transparent, sky blue and light purple matches the color of the ring exactly. His comment also indicates that the extremely fine carving of the female profile on the ring had to have been done with a diamond. That’s how valuable and rare it was: diamonds were the tools used to make it.

The hololith will be on display at Wartski in London from the 1st to the 7th of October, after which it will be available for sale. Wartski doesn’t do pre-sale estimates because they don’t want to scare off potential buyers, but it is in the neighborhood of £500,000 ($615,000).

Unique head-shaped vessel found in Bulgarian grave

Ancient

A unique brass vessel in the shape of a man’s head has been discovered in a Roman-era grave in Bulgaria. The grave was discovered in the Kral Mezar tumulus near the village of Boyanovo in southeastern Bulgaria. The tumulus had been repeatedly looted over the centuries and agricultural activity had altered its shape and size, so a salvage archaeology mission was undertaken in 2015 to excavate it thoroughly.

Inside the tumulus archaeologists discovered three burials — a sarcophagus, a brick grave and a tomb. The limestone sarcophagus with a pitched roof lid (found broken on the side) dates to around 150-200 A.D. Sarcophagi are rare finds in Roman Thrace and are believed to have contained the remains of non-Thracians. The tomb was built of stone and brick with plastered and painted interior walls. It was heavily looted, but the extant funerary goods include bone spindles, needles, glass beads, glass and ceramic fragments and clay lamp fragments. A silver denarius from the reign of Caracalla minted in 202 A.D. was found on the tomb floor. Because of the textile-making grave goods, archaeologists believe this was a woman’s tomb.

But it was the third burial, the brick grave, that contained a truly striking artifact. The rectangular pit was lined with bricks coated with a thick layer of white plaster. Marks on top of the brick walls indicate there had once been wooden beams across the top forming a flat roof. This type of grave was popular in Roman Thrace, particularly in the 2nd and 3rd centuries.

The body had been placed in a wooden coffin of which only a few iron nails survive. The skeletal remains are still articulated and just shy of six feet long (1.82 meters). Osteological analysis found the deceased was an adult male about 35-40 years old at time of death. Inside the grave was a bronze coin of Caracalla minted in Hadrianopolis 198-217 A.D., fragments from a glass flask, the remains of two pairs of hobnailed shoes, a balsamarium and a strigil.

“In our opinion, the grave belongs to a Thracian aristocrat, who has practiced sport in his everyday life, rather than to a professional athlete,” Daniela Agre, an archaeologist at the National Archaeological Institute with Museum at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, who led archaeological work at the site, told Live Science. […]

“We think that the tumulus was used as a family necropolis and the deceased was a part of this family,” Agre said.

The strigil is brass, of a type found in other Bulgarian graves from the 2nd and 3rd centuries. The balsamarium is also brass, but it is far from a type seen in other Bulgarian graves of the period. In fact, it is unique in the archaeological record of Roman Thrace.

This type of container is believed to have been used to hold scented oils or perfumes for use in the baths, which is why they’re often found coupled with strigils which would have scraped the oil off the skin to clean and exfoliate.

It is 4.7 inches high, 4.2 inches wide and is shaped like the head of man wearing an animal-skin skullcap. The visible features of the animal’s head — nostrils, eyes, canine teeth in the lower jaw — suggest it was a feline. A neck draped with robes forms the foot of the vessel with a flat bottom made from a single metal sheet. There’s a hole in the top of the head for a hinged lid that is now lost. On either side of the opening are loops where a swing handle was attached. There’s still a handle attached through one of the loops; the other side of the handle is broken.

The man’s face is broad with shaved cheeks and a neatly shaped goatee. His nose viewed from profile has a proud aquiline bump. Seen from the front, it is bent to the left and widened at the base, suggesting that it has seen the business end of more than a few clenched fists. Five vessels with comparable features are found in museums in Los Angeles, France and Germany. Scholars believe these features — the bent aquiline nose, the goatee, the skullcaps, the lock of hair on the back of the head — represent the heads of boxers or wrestlers. The Boyanovo piece is distinct from these comparables because it does not have the lock of hair and because of its feline skin cap. The former is likely necessitated by the latter; the sculptor couldn’t include both the lock of hair and the incredibly detailed feline skin covering the back of the hair.

The find has been published in the latest issue of the American Journal of Archaeology and can be downloaded here.

Help save one of Ohio’s last Hopewell earthworks

Ancient, Modern(ish)

Another of Ohio’s rare ancient Native American earthworks is being sold at auction today. Almost all of the Hopewell Culture earthworks in Ohio have been destroyed by development making Fortified Hill in Butler County of immense archaeological significance. When it was documented by Ephraim George Squier and Edwin Hamilton Davis in their 1848 work Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley, the first major archaeological publication dedicated to Native American mounds, Fortified Hill was one of six Hopewell earthworks along the Great Miami River. Now it is the only one remaining.

The earthwork is on private property. It was acquired years ago by the late Dr. Lou Barich with the intent of protecting it from the encroaching development of nearby Dayton and Cincinnati. Unfortunately, he did not make those good intentions explicit in his will. He died this summer and some of his heirs are insisting on cashing out, so all of his property, including the four parcels that contain most of the Fortified Hill earthworks and extremely rare surviving gateways, are going under the hammer today.

In an effort to save the ancient earthworks for future generations, Dr. Jeff Leipzig, a friend of Barich, has stepped up and organized a variety of historical preservation groups to raise money for the auction. […]

Leipzig hopes the coalition can preserve the land as a public park, and limit excavation to responsible archeologists and historians, so as to permanently protect a rare window into Native America and the forgotten ancient world.

“It’s for science,” said Leipzig. “This isn’t gonna be somebody randomly digging up a mound and trying to find treasure in it, which is the risk… That’s the risk with any of these properties, people dig into them and they destroy them. They’re cemeteries, they’re spiritual sites, they’re sacred sites.”

Every minute and every dollar counts, so if you’d like to help the Archaeological Conservancy raise enough funds to get an ownership stake in the Fortified Hill parcels and keep the McMansions from obliterating this unique archaeological treasure, please pledge here immediately. (Sorry for the late notice. I only just read about this and it’s imperative that the funds be available by auction time.)

17th c. Mexican national treasure for sale

Modern(ish), Renaissance

A rare 17th century folding screen that is officially classified a national treasure of Mexico is being offered at an online-only auction by Sotheby’s with an estimated price of $3-5 million. Bidding is open through October 11th. The starting bid is $2,800,000. No bidders yet. As a national treasure the screen cannot leave Mexico, so whoever buys it is going to have to be local or willing to lend it to a local institution indefinitely.

The screen is more than six feet high and 18 feet long, composed of 10 joined panels on a wooden frame. It is double-sided. On one side is a violently active depiction of the conquest of Tenochtitlán. Key events are shown in the locations where they took place as if they had occurred in the same moment and are numbered for identification with a key in the bottom left. Cortés’ arrival is in the upper right corner. Moctezuma II, the last Mexica emperor, is on the fourth panel from the left on a balcony as his assassins below aim fatal arrows at him.

In a deliberately stark contrast, the other side features an overhead map of the new Mexico City, the capital of the Viceroyalty of New Spain, a grid of clean, airy streets lined with stucco buildings with red-tiled roofs, churches, schools, hospitals, public squares, a Roman-like arched aqueduct in the foreground, mountains and lake in the background. Devoid of people, this is the idealized vision of colonial Mexico. All the fire, feathers and fighting replaced with the calm cleanliness of European civilization.

Entitled Biombo de la Conquista de Mexico y Vista de la Ciudad de Mexico, it was painted by an unknown artist in the second half of the 17th century. The fall of Tenochtitlán was based on the account in the True History of the Conquest of New Spain, a popular memoir of the conquest of Mexico written by Bernal Díaz del Castillo, one of Hernán Cortés’ soldiers. The view of the colonial city was inspired by early 17th century decorative maps like the 1628 map of Mexico City by Juan Gómez de Trasmonte, now lost and known only from replicas.

The word “biombo” is a Hispanicized version of the Japanese “byobu,” literally meaning “protection from wind.” Byobu were luxury goods, first introduced to Japan from China in the 8th century, and imported into New Spain via the Manila Galleons that, in exchange for Mexican silver, transported Asian spices, silks, porcelain and other luxury goods from modern-day Cebu in the Philippines to Acapulco and many, many points in between. The trade between America and Asia had an enormous influence on Mexican decorative arts during the Viceroyalty period. Biombos took the Japanese form and replaced the pastoral landscapes, people and animals with narratives and urban locations that resonated strongly with the criollos (Mexican-born Spaniards) of the ruling class who commissioned them.

It is unquestionably of museum quality. The Museo Franz Mayer and the Museo Nacional de Historia in Mexico City each have biombos of their own on the same theme. This is the finest and largest example still in private hands.