Elephant II

Oliver East’s commemoration of Maharajah the Indian Elephant’s historic journey from Edinburgh to Manchester in 1872 has stimulated a lot of interest in elephants amongst tweeters and blog contributors. Yesterday I looked at some examples of elephants in the ancient world undertaking even longer journeys than the one that Oliver is re-enacting. The time taken by elephants to cover the distance was longer in the ancient world because they did not have the benefit of walking over surfaced roads like the ones that Maharajah followed with his keeper, Lorenzo Lawrence, and it is to be hoped that Oliver doesn’t face the sort of opposition that Hannibal and his army faced from the locals when he was crossing the Alps. In this respect the elephants in Hannibal’s army proved to be a great asset because the mountain tribesmen had never seen elephants before and were intimidated by their unfamiliar appearance, their size, the noise they made and their smell.

Terracotta figurine of Galatian in Manchester Museum collection.

More often than not they were as much a problem for their own side as the enemy, but in some circumstances elephants proved to be an extremely dangerous weapon of war but  One of the best examples of the debilitating psychological impact elephants had on the enemy on the battlefield in the ancient world is the ‘Elephant Victory’.  The Seleucids deployed sixteen elephants against an army of Galatians in Asia Minor in 275 BC. The Galatian warriors and their horses were terrified by the elephants. Their chariots and cavalry were reduced to chaos when their horses bolted. The Galatian infantry were trampled. The Seleucid king Antiochus I took the title Soter or Saviour because of this victory. He alone had proved equal to the challenge of defeating the Galatians. Tellingly, the victory monument took the form of an elephant because really it had been thanks to the elephants that the Galatians had been defeated, not the fighting skills of Antiochus’s men. The surviving Galatians were settled by a magnanimous Antiochus in central Anatolia where they gave their name to the place: Galatia. St Paul’s letters or epistles to the Galatians were addressed to the descendants of Antiochus’s former enemies. Who would have thought that but for elephants we might not have had an important component of New Testament Christian theology.

Gruesome fate: Galatian  roughly handled by an elephant

Another example of a military victory gained with the help of elephants is the battle of Heraclea. In 280 BC King Pyrrhus of Epirus in northern Greece crossed the Adriatic sea to fight the Romans in Italy on behalf of the city of Tarentum. The Tarentines  were Greeks who had settled in southern Italy and were now coming under pressure from the expanding Roman Republic. Pyrrhus landed with a Hellenistic army comprising 20,000 infantry, 3000 cavalry and 20 elephants. The Romans attacked Pyrrhus before he could receive any reinforcements . The advantage in the battle is said to have swung backwards and forwards seven times before Pyrrhus gave the order for the elephants to attack:

                                                 ‘as the Romans began to be driven back by the elephants and their horses, before they could get near the beasts, started to panic and bolt, Pyrrhus seized his opportunity: as the Romans faltered, he launched a charge with his Thessalian cavalry and routed the enemy with great slaughter.’

Plutarch’s Life of Pyrrhus, translated by Ian Scott-Kilvert (Penguin Books)

Despite his victory Pyrrhus had lost 4,000 of his best troops and this has given rise to the term ‘Pyrrhic victory’ meaning a victory that has been gained at great cost.

One of Pyrrhus’ elephants with calf on a southern IIalian plate

In 279 BC Pyrrhus, now reinforced by the Samnites and various other hill-tribes of southern and central Italy, fought the Roman legions again at the battle of Ausculum. Depending on which ancient historian you follow this was a one or a two day battle. At first heavily wooded ground on the edge of the swiftly flowing river caused Pyrrhus and his allies considerable difficulty. The next day at first light Pyrrhus sent troops to occupy the difficult ground, posted contingents of archers and slingers in the spaces between the elephants and made his attack. It was a fiercely contested battle until the elephants charged:

                                                           ‘Against this even the Romans’courage was of little avail: they felt as they might have done before the rush of a tidal wave or the shock of an earthquake, that it was better to give way than to stand their ground to no purpose, and suffer a terrible fate without the least advantage.’

Plutarch’s Life of Pyrrhus, translated by Ian Scott-Kilvert (Penguin Books)

Pyrrhus’ elephants rout the Romans at the battle of Heraclea 280 BC. Artistic license has run riot here.

Another account of the battle says the Romans deployed ‘anti-elephant’ wagons complete with burning brands and scythes as a counter measure to deal with the elephants but they were a failure. The Romans are recorded as having lost 6,000 men, Pyrrhus 3,505. Another Pyrrhic victory. On being congratulated on his success, Pyrrhus is said to have remarked ‘One more victory like that over the Romans will destroy us completely!’

Roman Republican currency bar decorated with a depiction of an elephant, presumably one of Pyrrhus’ beasts.

Pyrrhus accepted an invitation to intervene in Sicily as a champion of the Greeks against the Carthaginians. He enjoyed tremendous success but in the end alienated the people he was supposed to be defending and returned back to Italy where the Romans were once again pressing his southern Italian allies. At the battle of Beneventum in 276 BC Pyrrhus deployed his elephants but they proved to be as much a weapon against their own side as the Romans and Pyrrhus was defeated. One of the elephants had a calf (presumably the very animal depicted on the plate in the image above) and when they became separated during the battle, the calf panicked and the mother went to its aid, trampling nearby friendly troops. Pyrrhus returned to Epirus with the survivors. He campaigned in Macedonia and the Peloponnese again with elephants but was killed during confused street fighting at the city of Argos. It was a sad end to one of the great heroic characters of antiquity. Fittingly, his tomb was marked with a carving of an elephant.

One of the things that makes these characters from antiquity so deeply interesting is their use of elephants. It’s hard not to think they were just as much fascinated with the animals as we are.

Fascination with elephants? Child’s toy from Cyprus in Manchester Museum

Elephant

Ceramic elephant in Manchester Museum’s archaeology collection

News that the 160 mile journey of the Indian Elephant Maharajah from Edinburgh to Manchester is being repeated by comic artist Oliver East has really struck a chord here at Manchester Museum, not least because the skeleton of Maharajah is displayed here. Maharajah walked to Manchester with his keeper in 1872. Edinburgh’s menagerie had got into financial difficulty and the animals were being auctioned. Belle Vue zoo in Manchester bought Maharajah but then had the task of bringing him back. The original plan involved putting the elephant onto a train, but Maharajah did not take kindly  to this and so the elephant and his keeper Lorenzo Lawrence walked back to Manchester. It’s been suggested this may have been orchestrated by the keeper in order to make more money from undertaking the 160 mile journey on foot.

Maharajah’s route

The journey took ten days covering about 20 miles each day. Maharajah was a famous attraction at the zoo and gave rides to visitors on a seat suspended between his tusks. After he died his skeleton was acquired by Manchester Museum and can be seen on display on the first floor in the Manchester gallery.

Skeleton of Maharajah at Manchester Museum

Oliver East’s commemoration of Maharaja’s journey invites comparison with other long journeys involving elephants. One of the most famous journeys in history was Hannibal’s crossing of the Alps with no less than 37 elephants in 219-218 BC.

Elephants over the Alps – illustration by Andrew Howat in Neil Grant’s ‘Roman Conquests’ (1991)

Hannibal was a general from the city of Carthage in North Africa. The city had established an empire for itself in Spain after being defeated in the First Punic War by the  Roman Republic.  Hannibal’s attempt to defeat the Romans by taking an army overland from Spain to Italy was inspired and after defeating the legions in a number of battles, much of southern Italy went over to the Carthaginians. Rome, however, had the determination and the resources in manpower to withstand any number of defeats and after many long years of warfare,  Hannibal was ordered to return to Africa. He was defeated by the Roman general Scipio at the battle of Zama in 201 BC, Carthage sued for peace and the Second Punic War came to an end.

Smaller African Forest elephant on a Carthaginian coin

Marching elephants across the Alps has captured the imagination of many people over the generations but militarily the elephants were not terribly reliable as weapons of war. Most of Hannibal’s elephants sadly died during the northern Italian winter and although Hannibal received some more as reinforcements from Carthage, they were not really a major threat once the Romans knew how to deal with them. They were only really dangerous if the opposing forces had not encountered them before. Nowadays the elephants would be seen as an incredible piece of PR. Many of Hannibal’s elephants were of the smaller African Forest elephant species and it is debatable whether they were big enough and strong enough to carry a howdah or turret. Hannibal seems to have had at least one Indian Elephant, “the Syrian”, on which he rode during his campaigns.

So Maharajah’s long journey to Manchester (160 miles) is pretty modest in comparison with that undertaken by Hannibal’s elephants (almost 1000 miles) but even that is fairly modest compared to the earlier journey from North West India to Turkey made by elephants in the army of the Macedonian general Seleucus (about 2000 miles). Even if an elephant cannot trot, gallop or jump, it is perfectly capable of making very long journeys at a slow and steady walking pace.  The bones of the elephant’s foot are embedded in sponge-like tissue which, as writer H.H.Scullard says in his book The Elephant in the Greek and Roman World (Thames and Hudson, 1974)  acts like a shock-absorber. Maharajah’s daily stint of 20 miles or so is high in comparison with ancient journeys but it reflects the fact that he was walking on a road. Hannibal and Seleucus’s elephants had to walk at least for part of the way over the most challenging terrain ever tackled by elephants. Hannibal’s elephants averaged about 80 stades, which is about 10 miles a day.

More about the beloved pachyderms in a future blog post.

A Roman soldier from Egypt

Graham Sumner’s reconstruction of the Roman soldier from Egypt whose encaustic portrait is in the Manchester Museum collection

Reconstructing a Soldier from Roman Egypt

Encaustic portrait of soldier from Roman Egypt in the Manchester Museum collection (accession no. 11306)

This is the encaustic portrait of a man who lived in Egypt when it was a province of the Roman Empire. Unfortunately we don’t know his name. It is one of a large number of encaustic or mummy protraits – the total lies in the hundreds Campbell tells me – from Greco-Roman Egypt.

It was the basis of a reconstruction illustration by the talented artist, Graham Sumner, who used to work for the Greater Manchester Archaeology Unit. Graham Sumner’s article ‘Painting a Reconstruction of the Deir el-Medineh Portrait’ can be found in Marie Louise Nosch (ed.) Wearing the Cloak Dressing the Soldier in Roman Times (Oxbow Books, 2012), pp. 117-127.

Graham Sumner’s reconstruction of the Roman soldier from Egypt whose encaustic portrait is in the Manchester Museum collection

This is  how Graham Sumner has portrayed the anonymous man in a reconstruction. His work is featured in a new exhibition of paintings of Roman soldiers at the Museum of Lancashire in Preston which opens on 17th August. In the image above you can see that the man is wearing a sword. The pommel of the sword handle sticks up under the right armpit and there is a rather uncomfortable looking belt decorated with studs running from the left shoulder and under the right arm. Graham’s caption to his reconstruction painting says it prevented the fabric of the tunic interfering with the sword.

So far as encaustic portraits are concerned, it was the custom in Greco-Roman Egypt to put a portrait of the dead person in position over the face of the mummy. William Flinders Petrie found a number of encaustic portraits at Hawara and they caused a sensation when they were first shown in the UK. However, they tended to be seen like European paintings as works of art and shown in art galleries. Once divorced from the context of the mummy, the portrait lost vital information such as the name, status and rank of the dead person.

Manchester Museum is very fortunate in that it has three mummy portraits that are still in their original postiion on the mummy, which makes them very important indeed. They represent a small but nonetheless significant percentage of the less than a hundred mummy protraits that still survive in situ. They offer an independent and objective means of checking  how accurate a portrayal of the deceased has been made as the original appearance of the dead person can be recovered by making a facial reconstruction.

But what of the soldier himself? Unfortunately because many of the encaustic mummy portraits were treated as art objects, less attention was paid to the portrait as a vital piece of funerary evidence telling us the name and status of the deceased. Very likely some of these associations had already been lost by the time of recovery. Whatever the reason, sadly we don’t know this man’s name. However there are some very good sources, in the form of papyri, that shed light on the life of soldiers in Egypt. Some ancient Egyptian manuscripts found in the university library in Michigan provide a vivid impression of the kind of life that our soldier might have lived.

In 2003, a student of Classical Archaeology at the University of Michigan, Rob Stephan, discovered more than a dozen unpublished texts in the Papyrology Collection. The University collection contains more than 12,000 individual fragments of papyrus. The papyri Rob found were originally uncovered during an excavation of the Egyptian town of Karanis during the 1920s and ’30s led by Prof. Francis Kelsey. Kelsey had worked at Oxyrynchus with B.P.Grenfell and seen for himself how much documentation was lost by ignoring the Greco-Roman contexts on ancient Egyptian sites. He sent the papyri back to Michigan at the end of the excavation for further study. Apparently the papyrus documents that Rob Stephan were not previously known. They were found under a stairway in a house during the excavation of Karanis.

From our point of view what is really interesting about this discovery is that the letters were written to a retired Roman soldier, Tiberianus, who settled in Karanis in Egypt, about 200 miles south-west of Cairo, during the early second century AD. Admittedly this was some time earlier than the time when the man on our encaustic portrait was alive but essentially this archive correspondence allows us to reconstruct a social context for our soldier.

The archive consists largely of letters he exchanged with a number of other individuals, in particular Claudius Terentianus who refers to himself as Tiberianus’ son. The relationship isn’t necessarily a biological father-son relationship, however. Another man Ptolemaios is also described in the Karanis archive as father of Terentianus. Was Tiberianus something like a guardian to Terentianus? Both men have Roman names and were stationed in Egypt during the Roman occupation. However, the letters are written in Greek, the everyday language used by non-Egyptian communtiesin Egypt, not Latin.

Like the famous Vindolanda tablets from northern Britain, the letters reveal the everyday realities of life in the Roman world, particularly for a soldier in the Roman army. For example, the young soldier wrote home to ask for boots and socks to keep his feet warm during a cold winter and to ask his father for permission to marry his native Egyptian girlfriend. Terentianus also tells how he is being sent to Alexandria to quell riots. Tiberianus, was clearly well-read because one of the papyri is a fragment of Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War. In other words, Tiberianus, could read Greek literature, suggesting that he came from an educated family, and could read several different  languages. He was must have been part of the social elite in the community of Keranis at the time.

In drawing upon the wonderful archive of letters from Keranis to provide a biography for the soldier who appears in the encaustic protrait displayed at the Manchester Museum, I have taken a lead from the inspiring work carried out at the John Rylands library. That project brought together the library’s papyrus collections with portraits from this museum. The students of Thomas Whitham Sixth Form College, Burnley, were invited to ‘voice’ a particular person based on what was known about his or her life, their family relationships and standing in society, working under the guide of academics and graduate students from Classics, and Religions and Theology at the university. You can see the short film about this work at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bd-OJkLBTww

I have tentatively linked Graham’s reconstruction of the Museum’s encaustic protrait (no.11036) with the letters of Terentianus from Karanis as a way of giving him a plausible social context but it would only be fair to point out that Graham has also painted a dedicated reconstruction of Terentianus. It can be seen on page 118 of Graham’s article in Wearing the Cloak (see above for reference). You’ll also find a short account of Terentianus in Richard Alston’s Soldier and Society in Roman Egypt (Routledge, 1995).

Classics Staff Visit to the Archaeology Store

Staff from Classics visit the Archaeology store

I recently had the great pleasure of showing lecturers from the University’s Classics department round the Museum’s  archaeology store. This is part of an initiative designed to raise the profile of the Manchester Museum collection and to encourage students  in the various schools and departments of the university to make greater use of objects in their studies. What better way to stimulate interest amongst students than by engaging the lecturers?

In this I was not disappointed. The other morning I showed a party of lecturers from Classics some Greco-Roman material that had came off display last year and other items in the store. It was great to see lecturers getting excited about objects in the collection. Here was a lamp depicting the Magna Mater. There was an apparently otherwise unknown figurine of the ancient Greek philosopher Socrates from Egypt in our metals store. Roslynne Bell later sent me a picture of a figurine of a tragic actor that was somewhat similar to the piece we have but these things must be as rare as hen’s teeth. It looks as though a mould was made from it to sell casts in the Museum shop years ago.

Another lecturer is working on medicine in the ancient world and is interested in votive offerings, of which we have examples of a model foot and no less than two wombs.  Someone else expressed interest in slingshot and arrowheads. We have some interesting examples with decoration and one with a Greek inscription that may be from the city of Kamiros on the island of Rhodes. Another lecturer questioned the attribution of a particular ancient Greek pot to a particular painter.

Seeing their reactions to the objects was great and there are now a number of suggestions for developing more interaction between the department and the Museum’s Greek and Roman collection. It is a simple thing to do to open up the store  when there is a conference so that delegates can see some of the objects in the collection and share their expertise about them.

All this bodes well for the future. We have already had discussions about setting up an ancient wargaming club based on the availability of relatively cheap, high quality and historically accurate plastic figurines. We don’t have the funding to introduce this straightaway but it would be another way of stimulating interest in the ancient world. My thanks to Roslynne Bell for supplying photographs of the visit.

Examining the lamp collection

DNA and the Roman Army in Britain

Fresh from the success of confirming the identity of the skeleton in the car park in Leicester as the remains of Richard III, and hot on the heels of the documentary about Eddie Izzard’s genetic ancestry, another DNA research breakthrough was announced about 10 days ago. In The Daily  Telegraph (23rd February 2013) it was reported that up to a million Britons carry genetic signatures that are commonly found in and are likely to have their origin in Italy. The DNA marker R1b-S28 is thought to come from men who served in the Roman army.

I have to confess I am a tad sceptical about this. After all it’s not so long ago that claims were made on the basis of DNA studies that the Etruscans really were descended from people who left Lydia or western Turkey to settle in northern Italy as was claimed by some writers.  Later it was revealed that the DNA link went back much much earlier and it reflected the fact that people recolonized Europe after the last Ice Age over ten thousand years ago from warmer refuges in western Asia. Most Italians had the Asian DNA not just those living in northern Italy because they were mainly descended from a small population of ancestors who’d lived in the same refuge before the last Ice Age.

The claim in The Daily Telegraph seems to assume that all the men in the Roman army were Romans or at the very least Italian. However, detailed research on the Roman army over many years has shown that it was ethnically an extremely diverse organisation. ‘Odds and sods’ of all sorts as Mark Hassall once put it. The number of soldiers fluctuated but much of the time there were three legions numbering in total 15,000-18,000 men in Britain and at least as many auxiliaries. The auxiliaries were recruited from peoples who had been incorporated in the empire or who supplied troops under a treaty obligation. After serving for 25 years the auxiliaries received Roman citizenship. One of our best sources of information about ethnicity in the Roman Empire is epigraphy or the study of inscriptions. Gauls, Spaniards, Moors, Germans, Syrians and many other peoples are attested. For example, for a time here in Manchester the garrison of the Roman fort consisted of men from Raetia and Noricum (Switzerland and the modern Styria, Carinthia, Salzburg, and part of Austria and Bavaria in eastern central Europe). Once these men had become Roman citizens their sons would have been eligible to serve in the legions. This being so, we should expect a diverse DNA profile.

Raetians and Noricans are mentioned in an inscription on an altar from Roman Manchester displayed in the Ancient Worlds galleries

Even if we focus on the legions, historically the recruitment shifted over time from Italy to the provinces, although these men must have been the sons and grandsons of men who were Romans and Italians in the late Republic/early Empire. Later as the sons of auxiliaries awarded Roman citizenship became eligible to serve in the legions a broader genetic catchment must have had an influence.

One of the best examples we have here in the Museum’s Ancient Worlds displays of ethnicity in the Roman army is a fragmentary bronze auxiliary diploma from Ravenglass in Cumbria. This official record showed the recipient has been awarded Roman citizenship after serving the requisite number of years. We don’t know the man’s name. That bit of the diploma hasn’t survived, sadly, but we do know he came from Syria.

The Ravenglass auxiliary diploma

The date he was demobbed – in the reign of Antoninus Pius –  suggests he was recruited in the early 130s AD. In his publication of the diploma Paul Holder, who works at the Rylands Library, suggested that the most likely historical circumstance in which this man was recruited is the suppression of the Jewish revolt in 132-5 AD. Afterwards the man came back to Britain with his unit and, because his diploma was found in the North West, he must have stayed here. Like another easterner, Barates, the Palmyran who married his former slave, the British woman Regina or Queenie (her tombstone is at South Shields),  the Syrian on the Ravenglass diploma probably put down roots. Maybe he got married, had children, and ran a business in a vicus or civilian settlement attached to a fort. Could Syrian DNA be identified in the populaton of northern Britain? The numbers involved were probably not large. A cohort of Hamian archers on Hadrian’s Wall numbered 480 men. However, in the First World War Yemeni sailors settled at South Shields and married local women. 1800 years earlier Tigris boatmen had been garrisoned at Arbeia.  Just a thought.

Greek Hoplites Clash at the Manchester Museum

Last Saturday’s meeting of the Museum branch of the Young Archaeologists Club provided that rare spectacle of the members being too busy and preoccupied with their activity to stop for biscuits and squash! What was it that so engaged the attention of the children? The meeting was about ancient Greek warfare and in particular we looked at the ancient Greek hoplite.

No time for biscuits?!?!

Starting off in the first gallery of the Museum’s Ancient Worlds displays I showed the members the fine Corinthian helmet and the plaster cast showing hoplites from the Nereid monument at Xanthus in Turkey. I pointed out the large round shield known as a hoplon from which the soldiers got their name. The purpose of the meeting was to show the children how to make their own shields out of craft materials.

Carolanne cutting out a shield

Upon on the third floor of the Museum Clare, Carolanne and the helpers were already hard at work cutting out pieces of cardboard ready for the children to decorate. In true Blue Peter fashion there was one we’d prepared earlier to inspire the kids. I talked about the weight of the shield and the special grips – known as the porpax and antelabe – needed to hold it. The shield was used in a close-order formation called the phalanx some eight or more ranks deep. The shield gave protection to the soldier standing to the left of the soldier carrying it in the ranks. This was not a shield for use in open order. I am always amazed at the depiction of ancient battles in which the fighting is shown as a series of one-to-one duels rather than soldiers standing in formation.

Pegasus design

The children chose their own shield designs and could choose from a Pegasus or winged horse, a bull’s head, the Medusa, a snake, a cockerel and an upside-down ‘V’ for the Greek letter ‘L’ used by the Spartans or Lacedaemonians. They were free to create their own designs too. The activity really engaged their attention and at the end of the session we lined the children up in a phalanx formation. There were just enough of these latter day hoplites to pose for a battlefield clash between the Spartans and the rest of Greece. It is gratifying to report that none of the children went home without their shield so it was an honourable experience for all concerned.

Greek phalanx at the Manchester Museum

Warfare in the Ancient World: ancient Greeks

First job of the New Year was to give one of my ‘curatorial talks’ to the Visitor Services Assistants or VSAs. This is part of a programme talks that curators give to the Front of House team with the intention of briefing them about the displays and the collections so that they can share the information with visitors and improve the service that they offer. The first topic of 2013 was warfare and I focused on the ancient Greek Corinthian helmet in the archaeology gallery of Ancient Worlds. We show a number of ancient Greek pots with paintings of soldiers wearing similar armour alongside the helmet. I explained that the soldiers were called hoplites on account of the large bronze-covered shield that they carried which was known as a hoplon.

Well-preserved ancient Greek pot showing hoplites in Ancient Worlds (MM Accn no.40088)

About a metre or three feet diameter and weighing some 6kg it was quite a feat just to carry it. Imagine carrying round the equivalent of 6 bags of sugar on your left forearm all day! Fortunately there were special attachments called the porpax and antilabe on the inside of the shield. The hoplite slid his left arm through the porpax behind the centre of the shield and gripped the antilabe with his hand behind the edge of the rim. The rounded profile of the shield meant that it could be supported on the left shoulder too. Not only did it give excellent protection to the body, the shield could also be used offensively by driving it into the bodies of opponents.

Corinthian Helmet – Ancient Greek helmet

Men standing side-by-side holding the shields and wearing helmets and bronze leg protectors known as greaves were well-protected but weighed down by the amount of bronze they carried. The Corinthian helmet on display weighs about 1.5 kg. Many ranks deep, such soldiers provided a solid and formidable formation known as the phalanx. Visitors can see details of the shield and its fittings on a plaster cast of a relief from the famous Nereid monument from Xanthus in Lycia in Turkey. It shows hoplites fighting and there is a view of the inside of one shield.

Ancient Greek hoplites from the Nereid tomb, Xanthos. Note the hand grip or antelabe on the shield

The method of carrying the shield had implications for how it was used in battle. As it gave most protection to the left side of the body there was a tendency for soldiers to lean to the right to shelter behind their fellow-hoplite’s shield. In battle, lines of heavily equipped soldiers drifted to the right. Perhaps this was deliberately to seek out the left flank of the enemy or maybe it was unconscious, the unintended result of the way the shield was carried. Maxine and Lill were even game enough to help with a practical demonstration. Maybe we should try it with the Young Archaeologists Club too.

The Macedonian phalanx

Of course, effective though it was, this way of fighting came to an end with the development of the Macedonian phalanx in the late 4th century BC. This denser formation was characterised by soldiers equipped with a long spear or pike. Given the heavy weight of the pike or sarissa as it was called the pikemen needed both hands to carry it. They could not carry the heavy hoplon or shield as well as a pike and so they made use of a smaller shield – the aspis – held in position with straps. In the literature we read of formations of pikemen known as the ‘silver shields’ (the argyraspides), the ‘bronze shields’, the ‘white shields’ and even the ‘gold shields’. Thanks to the availability of miniature figurines this formation can be shown (see photo above) though this is just one quarter of what was known as a syntagma of phalanx, which was 16 men across by 16 ranks deep. Please note that it’s the first 5 ranks that should have their spears horizontal but interlocking the pikes at this scale is incredibly fiddly. I ‘m afraid my patience with a paint brush doesn’t yet extend to painting the remaining 192 model soldiers… Sigh.

Another false friend

Last week we met Jelena from Opera to go through some case lay-outs in the third gallery for Ancient Worlds. Susan had done a mock-up of the fakes and forgeries case and we discussed the material to be exhibited.

About the same time I was researching some ancient weapons for a photo enquiry and I found some interesting but unusual slingshot in our collection. These almond-shaped objects, often made of lead, were whirled in a leather sling and hurled at members of an opposing army. One piece has an ancient Greek inscription and what looks like a depiction of a sword or a spearhead on either side.

Through our network of contacts I contacted Guy Stiebel at the Institute of Archaeology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and he asked whether the slingshot could have come from the island of Rhodes. I didn’t have any information about where it was found on the computer but the old index card told me it was bought from a Mrs Finch. I checked our catalogue for other items acquired from Mrs Finch and guess what? Of over 30 items associated with her, about half came from Rhodes. There seems to be a link with a Finch Collection at the Preston Museum in the early 1950s so that’s my next port of call to find out more. And the fakes and forgeries?

Copper slingshot (1981.760)

Another slingshot in our collection is made of copper or bronze. This is an unusual metal to use to make slingshot because it is relatively valuable. It looks distinctive with a tree on one side and three pellets on the other. Guy suggested that this might be a 19th century forgery. If we did want to add material to the fakes and forgeries display here’s something else that we could show.

It’s great that this information has come to light at this particular time. Not only do we seem to have identified another ‘false friend’ in our collection but thanks to Guy we may have a new line of enquiry on a genuine slingshot.

Guy has suggested that the lead slingshot may have come from the site of Kamiros on Rhodes. Knowing the name of the site would make of this all the more interesting.

Ruins of hellenistic town of Kamiros, Rhodes