Game of Thrones’ Dothraki at Manchester Museum?

Mongol coin, possibly of Uljaitu (704-716 = 1304-1316) showing hare

With the hotly anticipated seventh series of HBO’s Game of Thrones about to show it seems opportune to flag a coin in Manchester Museum’s numismatic collection with a passing link to the terrifying Dothraki horseman who began their long-awaited sea crossing to Westeros at the end of the last series. We have previously had occasion to comment on the use of ancient and medieval history and archaeology in the popular series.

The historical context for this coin is rather complicated but here goes:-

The story really begins with Yissugei, father of Jenghiz or Gengiz Khan, who was leader of one of the tribes on the northern boundary of the kingdom of China. Yissugei asserted his independence from Chinese influence and was succeeded by Temujin (the name of Jenghiz or Chinngiz Kahn). Temujin spent 30 years uniting the Mongol tribes and in 1206 AD claimed the title of ‘very mighty king’.

Map showing the extent Mongol Empire from MongolianCoins.com2016

 

By the time Jenghiz or Chinngiz Khan died in 1227 AD, aged 64, the Mongols had conquered a large part of Central Asia, and the Mongol Empire stretched from the Yellow Sea to the Crimea. The empire was created by an army of cavalry using bows and arrow but it was a force that also had access to sophisticated Chinese siege technology. The Mongols were irresistible. Their conquests have been referred to as an ‘appalling avalanche of destruction’ (J.J.Saunders, A History of Medieval Islam 1965, repr. 1982, p.171). The Mongol leadership demanded not friendship and alliance but abject submission (p.180). They are presumably the inspiration for J.R.R.Martin’s savage horse-riding Dothraki in Game of Thrones. It is symptomatic of how savage they are that when asked what is the Dothraki word for thank you, one of the characters replies pointedly, “There is no Dothraki word for thank you”.

Now I don’t know whether the Mongols  have a word for thank you but the name used for the Mongol tribes over which Jenghiz ruled is ‘the Golden Horde’, which subdivided into ‘the Blue Horde’ and ‘the White Horde’, each ruled by one of his sons. Hulagu, second brother of Mangu (with Khubilai Khan), were all grandsons of Jenghiz Khan. In 1258 the Mongols under Hulagu captured Baghdad, one of the great cities of the Islamic Caliphate, plundered it, slaughtered the Muslim population (800,000 is the lowest estimate) and killed the last Caliph, Al Mustasim, by trampling him to death.  The sacking of Baghdad put an end to 500 years of the Abassid caliphate. Hulagu was bitterly hostile to Islam. Osama bin Laden compared the US led invasion of Iraq to the Mongol conquest of the 1250s.

Of course, the Mongols were not the only people on horseback that spring to mind in relation to the Dothraki. In yesterday’s  Telegraph there was an article about the British Museum’s forthcoming Scythians exhibition, again making a connection with J.R.R.Martin’s fearsome horse riders. The Huns are another  example. However, given what the Dothraki are capable of, in terms of capturing and destroying cities and carting off their statues to their own city of Vaes Dothrak, the Mongols seem to offer the closest parallel, although all these peoples undoubtedly induced terror because of their tough way of life and their brutality.

Hulagu established a dynasty in Persia that became the Ilkhanid dynasty  – the Mongols of Persia. Ilkhan means a provincial khan. Further Mongol extension to the west was stopped by the Mamluks of Egypt at the battle of Ain Jalut or Goliath’s Spring (September 1260). Ain Jalut was one of the world’s decisive battles yet it is relatively little known in popular culture. Had the Mamluks been defeated Islam might well have been destroyed as a religion.

Coin of Uljaitu with Mongol and other script legend

In the numismatic collection of Manchester Museum is a coin known as a copper fals, issued in the reign of Arghun ibn Abaga (683-690 = 1284-1294) or Uljaitu ibn Arghun (704-716 = 1304-1316) showing a hare running to the right with the Kalima, the Islamic statement of faith (‘there is no God but Allah and Mohammed is his Prophet/Messenger’). The reverse shows lines of writing. This is Mongolian with Uyghur and Phags-Pa script and can be seen on most of the Ilkhanid coins. It is a statement of loyalty to the ancestors. However, the dynasty was established in the Middle East where Arabic was and remains the daily language for many people. Arabic was used on the coins because the Mongols still found coinage useful as a medium for communicating the power of the state.

On the reverse is:-

Qaghanu (tilte of khan)

Nreber (an honorific?)

The khan’s name e.g Arghun or Uljaitu

Deledkegulug (?)

For a good diagram explaining this, See:-

http://altaycoins.com/makaledetay.asp?dil=Mg==&id=MjI=

It is often said that Islam prohibited pictorial art but it is clear that this was not enforced rigidly and attitudes were more tolerant at different times. The Mongols, certainly, would have been familiar with hares from seeing them on the Asian steppes. A hare is sometimes seen on Islamic pottery of earlier and later date. The Mongols were influenced by Nestorian Christianity in the early years but later accepted Islam as their religion. Europeans tended to regard Nestorianism as heretical for its beliefs about the nature of Jesus. Uljaitu, the Ilkhan of Persia, in whose name this coin was probably struck, may have been Christian but converted to Islam.

Bryan Sitch
Curator of Archaeology and Numismatics

Manchester Museum’s Monuments Men

Eric Peet (1882-1934)

In the recent film The Monuments Men (2014) starring George Clooney, Matt Damon and Bill Murray, a task force is assembled to rescue art masterpieces from the Nazis and return them to their owners. Far from being an invention of Hollywood, it transpires there is some basis in history for this story, and staff from Manchester Museum, including Eric Peet and Arthur Randall Jackson, were monuments men during the First World War.

Eric Peet was born in 1882 in Liverpool and was educated at Queen’s College, Oxford. From 1909 onwards he conducted excavations in Egypt for the Egypt Exploration Fund (now the Egyptian Exploration Society). From 1909 to 1913 Peet worked on the dig at Abydos with Swiss Archaeologist Edouard Neville where he was instrumental in pushing for more scientific methodology to be used. From 1913 to 1928 he was a Lecturer and Curator in Egyptology at  Manchester University and the Manchester Museum.

Peet, against the advice of friends and colleagues, made the decision to enlist, which he saw as his patriotic duty. He was commissioned in October 1915 into the 14^th Battalion of the King`s Liverpool Regiment, an infantry regiment from his home town. However, the Egyptian Exploration Fund considered him so important to their work that their controlling body agreed to pay him a retaining fee on top of his army salary to ensure his return to Egyptology after the war!

In 1917 Peet was serving with a unit of the Army Service Corps with the British Expeditionary Force on the Salonica Front. In this mountainous region formally Alexander the Great’s Kingdom of Macedonia and straddling the border between Greece and Bulgaria, a combined British, Serbian, Greek and French force faced Bulgarian, German, Austrian and Turkish troops. The front line consisted of trenches and mountain top strong points. Troops digging in here soon discovered that the area was rich in archaeology!

Edmund Barrett of the 12^th Lancashire Fusiliers noted that “…you could hardly turn a shovel of earth without a piece of old pot coming out…..” At first the soldiers on the ground dumped the objects into sandbags without further thought, although the more enterprising would pocket items they felt of value to sell to local traders or their officers later. A drawing of an almost complete pottery vessel found whilst digging a well at Gallipoli in Manchester Museum collection provides a glimpse of what soldiers were finding during active service.

Turkish pot from Gallipoli

It wasn`t long before a number of men and officers with pre-war archaeological experience realised the importance of what was being found and alerted head quarters. In order to protect these potentially valuable finds and as much to mollify a sometimes hostile Greek Government as to further historical knowledge, both the British and the French forces decided to set up specialist archaeology units whose job it was to locate, catalogue and save these artefacts.

The British unit was initially under Lieutenant Commander Ernest Gardner, a leading archaeologist who established ‘B.S.F H.Q Museum’, as the unit became known. Manpower was provided by the Royal Engineers who also ran a Museum to hold finds, while field teams were formed to retrieve and record finds. These were commanded by officers with archaeology backgrounds recruited from units in theatre.

Peet with his huge experience was originally recruited as a field section commander. However, in 1917 Gardner was recalled to London and Peet took over command of the Unit. One of its major finds was a battlefield site found by the 7^th Royal Berkshire Regiment while digging trenches in the “Birdcage Line” when Private Reg Bailey literally put his pick through an ancient oil lamp before turning over ‘…bones with ancient armour and helmets…’. Amongst the finds the field team involved discovered the finest example of a 5^th century BC Greek helmet ever discovered. At the end of the War General Milne the British Commander negotiated with the Greek government for its transfer to the British Museum, where the collection resides to this day, a lasting reminder of Peet and the work of this unique wartime unit.

Peet himself remained a highly patriotic soldier who believed the war must be won but this was not without pangs of sadness for friends lost on both sides. German academics were well-represented in archaeology before the war and many were co-workers at the University and on excavations at sites such as Abydos. Former academic colleagues found themselves on opposite sides in the fighting. A letter home still in procession of his family reveals Peet’s dilemma when the Journal of Egyptian Archaeology recorded the death of a German Egyptologist serving with the German Army. This prompted some anger amongst two officers sharing the trench who thought it wrong to show regret for the death of a German soldier. Peet while understanding this animosity from men who had lost friends and brothers to the Germans could not at the same time bring himself to hate an old colleague. “…Both asked me how my paper could……print obituaries of slain Germans with …..expressions of regret for their deaths. I had no answer.”

Demobbed in 1919 and declining a post with the Egyptian Exploration Fund, Peet returned to the University and in 1920-1 was involved on the Amarna excavations in Egypt. This would be his last major excavation as he began to concentrate on academic research. He became a noted expert and author on Egyptian military campaigns, and in 1933 he was appointed Reader in Egyptology at the University of Oxford. He died in February 1934 aged 52, leaving a wife and daughter only weeks after taking up his new post. The Queen’s College, Oxford houses the University’s Egyptology library, and it is named the Peet Library in his honour.

Capt. A.Randall Jackson (1877-1944)

The second of Manchester Museum’s ‘monuments men’ was Dr Arthur Randall Jackson, sometimes known as the “Father of British Arachnology”. Born in Southport in 1877 he studied Medicine and Zoology at Liverpool before setting up a practise originally in Hexham but moving to Chester in 1905. As a GP he was noted for his accuracy in diagnosis. He described himself as a ‘…cyclist, spider hunter and bird watcher.’  He was a distinguished amateur scientist and became an acknowledged expert on British spiders, discovering 47 new species. He wrote a number of papers and books on the subject and won the Charles Kingsley Medal for his work.

On the outbreak of the Great War Jackson enlisted in the Royal Army Medical Corps and was appointed a Captain and the Medical Officer of the 9^th Seaforth Highlanders with whom he served in France and Flanders from March 1916 until the end of the war. He was noted by his men for his jokes and stories as well as what some of them considered his eccentric habit of collecting natural history samples in the front line. In this Jackson was like Francis Buckley who collected Palaeolithic artefacts from the Red Trenches at Coigneux in northern France during the First World War. In late 1917 Jackson was awarded the Military Cross for ‘… conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty….in his efforts to get in casualties, repeatedly going forward through enemy barrages…’ (Edinburgh Gazette March 11^th 1918).

His links to the Museum came through his membership of the Cheshire and Lancashire Natural History Society and a long standing friendship with the Museum Director Walter Tattersall. Jackson seems to have been donating samples to the Museum from long before the War and is fleetingly mentioned in the 1915 Museum year book. He sent samples from the trenches back to Manchester Museum and kept up a lively correspondence with the Museum`s temporary wartime Director Thomas Coward. These letters reveal his passion for collecting and study even in the midst of war. Some of his personal feelings are revealed in an excerpt from a letter to the Museum dated September 1918:-.

“Imagine Tattersall hasn’t been over yet! I am awfully tired of it, but there is no escape, nor home service for the likes of me. Whether I shall have any Natural History work when I return I don`t know. My practice at Chester has vanished and possibly I may have to move elsewhere or even emigrate. Anyhow all my old habits have been broken up and retired and physically and mentally I`m not what I was three years ago.”  (Manchester Museum Collection)

(Tattersall was the Director of Manchester Museum, then serving in the Royal Garrison Artillery.)

After the War however Jackson didn`t emigrate but re-built his practice and became a keen gardener and a collector of art and antiques. On his death in 1944 he donated his personal collection to the Atkinson Museum, Southport, in memory of his son who was killed with the RAF in World War 2. The items he sent back to Manchester Museum from the trenches are still extant and form part of the Natural History Collection alongside some of his wartime letters.

This blog post is a slightly shortened version of an article sent me by Michael Whitworth, Head of Commercial Operations at Manchester Museum, which has drawn upon information kindly provided by Clare Lewis at UCL, as well as  excerpts from letters in the possession of the Peet family. Deepest thanks to both for sharing this for Ancient Worlds.

Bibliography

Clare Lewis (2014) Peet,The JEA And The First World War – Journal of Egyptian Exploration Society
Alan Wakefield (2013) Archaeology Behind The Lines – “Mosquito” The Journal Of The Salonica Campaign Society
Manchester Museum Annual Report 1915

Dodecahedron Mystery Solved?

Modelling glove made with a dodecahedron

It is quite some time since I was last persuaded to don my Roman arms and armour (for good reason, I’ve still got the chafe marks on my shoulders to prove it) but an opportunity presented itself recently when my office was flash-mobbed by the Curator of Egyptology, Campbell Price, with visiting researcher Regina Degiovanni who proceeded to give me an impromptu demonstration of how to make a pair of Roman gloves using a bronze dodecahedron… I feel I should point out that Manchester Museum has a wonderful knitted Coptic sock in its Egyptology collection, making us a popular port-of-call for experimental archaeologists who seek to puzzle out how people in antiquity rose to the challenges that everyday life threw at them, such as how to knit themselves a pair of socks, or, as in this case, a pair of gloves.

Coptic sock in the Egyptology collection with Regina’s instruction

Except that I suspect the reverse was true: presented with the mystery of what the bronze dodecahedra found in the north-western provinces of the Roman Empire were for, the intrepid experimental archaeologists arrived at the ingenious solution that they were used for knitting gloves. Sadly the wonderful archaeology collection at Manchester Museum is not blessed with an actual example of a dodecahedron but Regina had managed to obtain a 3D scan of one. Generations of Romanists, Classical scholars and archaeology students have long debated the purpose of these enigmatic objects. With ten sides, containing circular openings or apertures of different diameters and surmounted by knobs where the planes intersect, the famous dodecahedra have long defeated academic enquiry. The someone hit on the solution that they were used for knitting and Regina showed how it was done and asked me to model the fingers of the gloves (see photo).

Finger gloves and dodecahedron

Regina had been in contact with living history interpreters who dressed as Roman soldiers and they had talked about the need to cushion or insulate their hands against metal arms and armour, which not only chafes but in cold weather can be very uncomfortable to carry or wear. I happened to have a replica Roman spear lying around the office and so it was, literally within a minute, my calm orderly existence talking to Sam our Conservator before going to meet my 2 o’clock appointment was turned upside down and I found myself posing for a photo, pilum and dodecahedron in hand, wearing knitted finger stalls. I don’t suppose many people can say they’ve done that.

The fingers of the glove

One thing is for sure: the gloves certainly helped to take the chill off the metal spear I was holding. Whether this does indeed solve the mystery of the dodecahedra is another question. What we need is some use wear analysis of the surface of the knobs on the outside of actual archaeological examples of dodecahedra using a stereomicroscope or a metallographic microscope to see if indeed there is any evidence of threads having been looped around the knobs consistent with the process of knitting. If this does indeed prove to be the case then activities for public programmes in the Museum for the foreseeable future can expect to be dominated by the experimental knitting of gloves to go with our Coptic sock. Does a new career modelling experimental archaeological knitwear beckon I wonder? Watch this space.

Guest blog: Mice in Antiquity by Greg M.

Roman mouse lamp in Manchester Museum collection (accession number 40647)

Regular readers of this Blog will no doubt recall that mice have sometimes featured in the posts. It is a great pleasure to host a guest contribution by student Greg M. who recently studied a Roman lamp with a depiction of a mouse in Manchester Museum’s collection. He kindly agreed to write this up as a  post for the Ancient Worlds Blog:-

I was given the opportunity by my Sixth form College to undertake an Extended Project, or EPQ, on any topic I liked. Naturally I turned to the Manchester Museum for inspiration.
Having contacted the Museum’s Curator of Archaeology, Bryan Sitch, I was pointed towards a small, intriguing object. Nestled within the museum’s vast array of ancient artefacts, lies an ancient oil lamp with a small mouse design appearing on its surface. This lamp entered the Museum in the early 1900s, having been collected by a Victorian architect and antiquarian named William Sharp Ogden (1844-1926). The lamp arrived with little associated information card, offering little precise evidence of its history, provenance or age.

The Curator, Bryan Sitch, suggested I research both the lamp itself, so as to contribute to the Museum’s records, and also the cultural significance of mice in antiquity. While I anticipated the occasional source of mouse-related information, I found myself increasingly confronted by a complex and fascinating cultural assemblage, including Egyptian comics, satirical literature and Roman Republican anti-decadence legislation!

I sought to learn more about the role of oil lamps in the ancient world, when and where the lamp was made and the role of mice in ancient culture.

For thousands of years, oil lamps provided a key source of light for those who wished to extend the hours of daylight. Oil lamps provided a compact, portable and customisable light source that was to be found in homes, tombs and businesses across the ancient world. With the arrival of mould production in 3/4^th Century BC Greece, factories around the Mediterranean began to churn out a massive range of lamp designs. The cost of using these lamps, however, limited their use. According to Diocletian’s Edict of 301 AD, an anti-inflationary fixing of prices, a litre of oil was the equivalent of 20 pence, compared to 14 pence for a teacher’s monthly wage. Therefore lamps were a luxurious, but widespread part of Ancient life.

Having ordered the hefty Royal Ontario Catalogue of Ancient Lamps through the public library system, I discovered that the Manchester lamp closely resembles those produced in Northern Africa. The Manchester lamp’s form closely mirrors those produced at ancient Tunisian lamp manufacturing sites. Furthermore, the chronological development of lamp design, with the emergence and development of the ‘fat type’, suggests the Manchester lamp dates from the 3^rd Century AD.

Detail of mouse on lamp. The curl behind the mouse is the handle of the lamp.

While many lamps are often designed with standard ancient images, such as a posing Hercules, I found that flexible production created a huge variety of designs. The small mouse, pictured drinking oil, on the Manchester lamp initially seemed a strange choice of image for decoration. However, I found mice to be a key part of ancient culture.

The 2^nd Century AD Roman ‘Messy floor mosaic’, now held by the Vatican, contains an extensive scene of gluttony, with scattered food and a mouse nibbling the remains. This image suggests the Manchester lamp may be a similar satirical reflection on Roman voracity, or perhaps it’s just to be regarded as a cute image, or an ironic prediction of might happen to the oil in the lamp.

Messy floor mosaic in the Vatican

In addition to consuming food, mice could be food themselves. While Mary Beard’s ‘dormouse test’ suggests that the longer you wait for edible dormouse to appear in a banquet re-enactment, the greater its accuracy, they were certainly part of the elite diet. Greedy Roman nobles would fatten up prized specimens in a ‘Glirarium’, before serving them glazed with honey. The aristocratic taste for dormice led to Imperial censors banning their consumption in 117 AD.

Vessel for raising doormice

When you think of Ancient Greek epics, Homer’s noble and fearsome warriors spring to mind. In the 3^rd Century BC epic, the ‘Batrachomyomachia’, however, the warriors are mice attacking a hoard of frogs. In this parody, ‘Crumb snatcher’ is killed by ‘puff jaw’ and war ensues. This epic, which was apparently painted on tavern walls, strikes at a surprisingly common theme in literature, mice warriors. On an Egyptian papyrus from 1150 BC, an army of mice launch an offensive against a citadel of cats. This suggests that the parodying of generally austere war imagery enabled a cultural exploration of war, and it also suggests that mice were a seen in a sympathetic light. Dr Campbell Price, Curator of Egyptology at Manchester Museum, commented that this image was a fairly common ‘inversion’ of the real world that is sometimes shown on playful or Satirical ostraca, on which the powerful cat is made to be subservient to the mouse.

Mice storming the city of the cats on an Egyptian papyrus

In the story of the ‘Town Mouse and Country Mouse’, Horace extends one of Aesop’s fables, exploring the relative merits of rural and urban living. Again mice are used as a harmless and charming tool to make a point, with the traditional rugged values of the countryside triumphing over urban sophistication.

By exploring, at great depth, such a seemingly small but highly specific object, I have gained an enormous amount. In addition to my understanding of the Manchester lamp’s cultural and historical role, my eyes have been opened to the possibilities of ancient history. By scratching the surface of this tiny strand of inquiry, I uncovered a host of possible questions and answers and had a lot of fun in the process.

Thanks to Greg for writing about this charming object in the archaeology collection.

 It’s a pleasure to report that Greg has now published an article about his research on Roman mice in an archaeology magazine released in time for New Year 2017.

 

 

 

 

 

Lithics Collections at Manchester Museum

Manchester Museum on Oxford Road

Manchester Museum has a very large and varied collection of prehistoric lithics collection, including hundred-thousand-year-old Palaeolithic hand-axes from southern England, Mesolithic microliths from the Pennines around Manchester,  neolithic rough-outs from so-called ‘axe-factories‘ in Great Langdale in Cumbria and Craig Llwyd in Wales, Bronze Age stone mauls or mining tools from Alderley Edge in Cheshire, more recent material collected from indigenous peoples in the Americas, and Australia, and stone tools, flint flakes and other objects of all periods from the UK, Europe and other countries around the world.

Danish flint dagger with carefully flaked handle

The richness of the Museum’s lithics collection is due to the first curator, William Boyd Dawkins (1837-1929). Though primarily a geologist, Dawkins was an expert on the identification of prehistoric animal remains and wrote what was regarded at the time as the text-book about cave archaeology called Cave Hunting (1876). Dawkins is perhaps best known for work at Creswell Crags, conducted, at least initially, with Revd Magens Mello and Thomas Heath. Star finds include Neanderthal stone choppers and a beautiful Font Robert point dating from around 29,000 BC.The Museum has a very important archive of finds, photographs and other documentation relating both to these Victorian excavations and to later work undertaken by A.Leslie Armstrong (1878-1958).

Work at Creswell Crags

Dawkins’ successor at the Museum was J.Wilfrid Jackson (1880-1978). Like Dawkins, Jackson had wide-ranging interests, excavated prehistoric sites and published important regional summaries of lithic discoveries. As a result of the collecting activities of Dawkins and Jackson, the Museum’s archaeology collection contains large quantities of flint and other stone implements, not to mention prehistoric metal, pottery, bone and antler objects. They built up collections of stone objects, including fakes, as reference material and for teaching purposes. One individual by the name of Edward Simpson alias ‘Flint Jack’, ‘Bones’ or ‘Fossil Willy’ was notorious for selling his dodgy flint artefacts to gullible collectors and museum curators, served time in prison and ended his days demonstrating flint-knapping for  gentlemanly antiquarian societies.

Flint Jack’s ‘Flint Jacks’ – forgeries of early Bronze Age barbed-and-tanged arrowheads

Many of these objects are displayed in the Museum’s Ancient Worlds galleries, where, thanks to the range of disciplines represented in the collection it has been possible to show axes with ornate binding and rafia sleeves for comparison from New Guinea and Borneo – where the Stone Age finished as recently and precisely as 10am on 8th March 1933 – from the Living Cultures collection.

Stone axe with interwoven rafia wrapping from Bourneo/New Guinea

The intellectual focus of the Museum displays shifted in the latter part of the 20th century in favour of the Classical world but research on the lithics collection continued. For instance, many of the Museum’s stone axeheads were sampled petrologically during the 1970s and 1980s and the results published in Stone Axe Studies; researchers such as the late Roger Jacobi (1947-2009) carried out detailed work on the Creswell Crags archive, even identifying joins between fragments of the same implement in different museums; and an important landscape study of Alderley Edge was undertaken by Prof John Prag of Manchester Museum. The Museum also subscribed to excavations in the Middle East and received a proportional share of finds including lithic artefacts from sites such as Abu Hureyra in Syria, Jericho on the West Bank, and from the excavations at Mount Carmel in Northern Israel directed by Dorothy Garrod (1892-1968).

With the redevelopment of the new Ancient Worlds archaeology galleries, more of the Museum’s historically important lithic collections was put on show. The recent updating of the National Curriculum so that it includes the Stone Age offers another opportunity to work with teachers and school groups to interpret this material for the younger generation. Meanwhile new digital technology and augmented reality are providing more stimulating ways of engaging with the artefacts.

We will be having a special activity day about flint knapping at the Museum on Wednesday 18th November if you want to see how it’s done and maybe have a go yourself.

 

Some Reading

W.Boyd Dawkins (1876) Cave Hunting: researches on the evidence of caves respecting the early inhabitants of Europe (London, Macmillan and Co.).

J.W.Jackson (1936) ‘The Prehistoric Archaeology of Lancashire and Cheshire’, Transactions of the Lancashire and Cheshire Antiquarian Society 50 (1936), 65-106.

J.W.Jackson (1936) ‘Contributions to the Archaeology of the Manchester Region’, The North Western Naturalist 11, 110-119.

T.H.McK Clough and W.A. Cummins (1988) Stone Axe Studies II Research Report no.67, Council for British Archaeology, 218-221.

 

 

 

Making a Good Impression with Roman Inscriptions

Just got back exhausted but exhilarated from a really successful teaching session about Roman inscriptions with a class of children from both Manchester Grammar School and a Blue Coat School studying Latin and/or Classical Civilisation. The session was led by Dr Andrew Fear from University of Manchester Department of Classics. The idea was to engage schoolchildren with Roman material to help them with their studies and to encourage them to maintain an interest in things Classical.

Earlier this afternoon we divided the class into two groups and one half looked at making impressions from Roman inscriptions using the cliche mould or ‘wet squeeze’ method and the other studied some Roman coins that our Numismatist Keith Sugden had got out in advance for them.

sestertius of Trajan (AD 98-117 ) obverse

The cliche mould technique involves placing a sheet of blotting paper over an inscription and using a stiff brush to push the softened paper into the incised surface of the piece of stone. This is a very old way of making accurate copies of Greek, Latin and other inscriptions in the field. The practical aspect of making a cliche mould from an inscription really engaged the students, whereas talking to them about epigraphy  would almost certainly have left them cold. Fortunately no damage was done to a Roman inscription because we used a piece of marble with an inscription that is a fake. That wasn’t a problem because the whole point of the exercise was getting the students involved in doing something practical.

It’s all in the brush work

 

Finished cliche mould of Roman inscription

The other exercise was looking at and understanding Roman coins. We got out a denarius and a sestertius of the emperor Trajan (AD 98-117) and a denarius and a sestertius of the emperor Hadrian (AD 117-138). Armed with a crib sheet from their earlier session with Andy and a magnifying glass and an angle-poise lamp, the students studied each coin, transcribed the inscriptions or legends and translated them. In this way they were able to consolidate what they had learnt earlier about the use of abbreviations such as COS – Consul, or AVG – Augustus, or PP – Pater Patriae for ‘father of his country’. We swapped the coins over half way so they could look at different coins.

Looking at Roman coins

The students picked this up remarkably quickly, further evidence, if any were needed, that there really is nothing like the real thing for inspiring and engaging young (and old) minds. The thought of teaching Classics without supporting objects seems to me to do students an injustice, and, of course, we are well-placed at the Museum in being able to draw upon some amazing collections and provide invaluable hands-on  experience. If that doesn’t enhance the learning experience, then nothing will. We hear a great deal about digital interpretation and augmented reality, and new technology certainly has a place but I don’t think anything beats tactile interaction with the real thing. My observations of this afternoon suggest that it was a successful session and that the children enjoyed it and were stimulated by it. It’ll be interesting to see the evaluation sheets from the school.

Of course we have to declare an interest. Fewer and fewer students study this type of material. This is hardly surprising given that it used to be government policy to  marginalise Classics. Charles Clarke, back in 2003, said he was little concerned were the study of classics ‘to go the way of all flesh’. The number of pupils taking Latin GCSE in the state sector plummeted from about 8500 in 1988 to less than 3500 in 2004. Yet the benefits of teaching Classics have long been known. An Indianapolis survey on the effects of teaching Latin to 6^th grade children (1973) showed that after 5 months of Latin, the children had advanced 7 months in maths, 8 months in word knowledge, 9 months in problem solving, one year in reading, AND 13 months in language.

denarius of Hadrian (AD 117-138)

The session was supported by the University’s Widening Participation Department. Thanks to to Cat Lumb, Andy Fear and Irit Narkiss for organising and running the session.

Caught Knapping

Preparation for a knap-in

Manchester Museum is holding a knap-in on 19th November and on Friday Dr Elizabeth Healy and a PhD student Ray Nilson came to talk to Anna Bunney, Curator of Public Programmes, and me about the arrangements and to see some examples of worked flint artefacts. At the event, which is limited to 65 participants and ticketed (£10, or £8 concessions)  visitors will be able to watch enthusiasts striking or knapping raw materials and making a range of implements. There will be opportunities for people to try this for themselves under supervision of course. There is a real interest amongst visitors to the Museum in discovering how people in the past made things, some of them of considerable quality and demonstrating breath-taking crafts working skills.

Debate about one of the stone implements

I got out a selection of some of the wonderful flint and other stone objects in the lithics store at the Museum. A fine ground and polished early Bronze Age stone axe-hammer (below) is a wonderful exhibit although sadly we know little about where it was found. It was transferred to Manchester by  Salford Museum some years ago and I live in hope that some day information about the circumstances of discovery will turn up in an antiquarian publication…This kind of material was the focus of research and collecting at Manchester Museum during the later 19th and early 20th centuries when William Boyd Dawkins was Curator. From the 1970s the focus shifted to Classical antiquities but now prehistory in back in fashion, not least because of changes to the National Curriculum.

Anna with early Bronze Age axe-hammer

One of the added benefits is asking the flint-knappers who are coming to the event on 19th November to make copies of stone tools that were used on Easter Island or Rapa Nui. Manchester Museum will show material from the island in a temporary  exhibition opening in early April next year. Exhibits will include a stone statue called moai Hava that was brought back to Britain by HMS Topaze in 1868 and presented to the British Museum, and a range of artefacts borrowed from a number of other museums in the UK. We’re working closely with Prof Colin Richards of the Department of Archaeology at the University who has been conducting fieldwork on Easter Island. We will recreate for the exhibition part of the quarry at Puna Pau where Prof Richards has been excavating with his team. This was where islanders carved pukao or topknots that sat on top of some of the statues or moai.

We will dress the reconstruction of the quarry in the Museum with replica tools made by the flint-knappers for greater authenticity. Large numbers of stone implements or toki have been found in the quarry where the statues were obtained as if the work was suddenly interrupted and the islanders downed tools. It is not clear whether the islanders ceased to honour the statues after ‘first contact’ with Europeans or whether the notorious ‘blackbirding’ raids to secure labourers for Chile compelled the workers to drop their tools and flee or whether discarding the stone implements tools was part of the islanders’ belief system in relation to work on the statues.  It’s a very exciting project and it’s nice to know that the knap-in is contributing to the exhibition.

First World War Archaeology

Session for the Youth Board at Manchester Museum

Thanks to the kindness of Andrea Winn, Curator of Community Outreach  here at Manchester Museum, I can show an image of the recent session about the First World War with the Youth Board  and creative consultants. Whilst the Museum does not collect social history, some objects in the collection were acquired during the First World War. I got out some objects donated by Francis Buckley (1881-1949) when he was serving in northern France during  the First World War. The circumstances were rather unusual. 2nd Lieutenant Buckley was charged with preparing a line of trenches known as the Red Line at the village of Coigneux in 1918. This was in response to a German offensive. Buckley was there from April until the middle of August and had plenty of time to inspect the upcast soil from the excavations to create the trenches. Reginald A.Smith of the British Museum had asked Buckley to look at disturbed ground in case archaeological material was revealed.

Red Line Trenches Coigneux

The drawings above show Francis Buckley’s painstaking care in recording the stratigraphy of the trenches which had yielded flint implements of Mousterian or Neanderthal date, so going back potentially going back several hundred thousand years. The Neanderthal stone tools were found along the tops of the parapets. Buckley knew that the material on top of the parapet was likely to be from the soil from the very bottom of the trenches when they were deepened because of the German threat. Buckley noted ruefully that had it been possible to excavate the parapets  he would have found more implements. ‘But for military reasons this was quite out of the question’ he wrote in his article about the Coigneux discoveries published in Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society of East Anglia (1920-1), pp.1-9.

Francis Buckley was clearly someone to have around in an emergency and he was mentioned in dispatches (‘His Majesty’s high appreciation of the services rendered’) on 9th April 1917. Even so you wonder what Lieutenant Buckley’s commanding officer made of the close observation of the trenches for archaeological material…

This kind of behaviour is not unusual in warfare and quite coincidentally I came across the image below earlier this week in one of our archive boxes. It shows a rather charming little painting of a pot decorated with a white wavy line on its shoulder. Two views are shown.  It’s only when you read the pencil inscription underneath that you realise what this represents. ‘Found whilst deepening a well in Gallipoli – about 3 feet of mud on top of it. The well contained water and was near Cape Hellas about 2 miles from Knithia (?)’. Someone has added in ink  ‘Said at S.Kensington to be modern Turkish, possibly 200 years old’. In other words this pot was found during the unsuccessful Gallipoli campaign in which so many soldiers were killed or wounded, and yet someone still took the trouble to make a record of a pot they had found. There is no name attached to the painting but one likely candidate is Lieutenant Thomas Eric Peet B.A, of the Kings (Liverpool) Regiment, Army Service Corps who worked in the Egyptology Department of Manchester Museum. In 1917 Thomas Peet commanded an Army unit dedicated to excavating and preserving antiquities discovered on the classically rich battlefields of the Salonica Front. Perhaps his promotion was the result of the beautiful records he had made of chance discoveries like the Turkish pot.

Turkish pot from Gallipoli

When I was talking to the Youth Board I said that soldiers weren’t fighting all of the time and often found time to practice some of the skills they had developed in civilian life. Perhaps the detailed recording of flints from the trenches at Coigneux or of a Turkish pot Gallipoli are evidence of soldiers finding ways to express their humanity in an inhumane situation.

Afterwards I showed the Youth Board some Roman material to explore how soldiers 2000 years ago introduced new styles of jewellery and pottery into Britain that the native British would not have been familiar with. New introductions such Continental brooches and mortaria or mixing bowls were adopted by the soldiers’ families and by civilians, making the soldiers important agents of Romanisation in newly-conquered provinces. Roman soldiers as advocates of Mediterranean culinary expertise in their spare time is a far cry from recording archaeology disturbed by the trenches or the fighting at Gallipoli. It seemed somehow glib in comparison.

Thanks to Andrea Winn and Michael Whitworth for information and images used in this blog.

Roman Finds Group Meeting at Manchester Museum 8th October 2014

Roman military diploma

The last week has been rather busy, not least because of the Roman Finds Group meeting that was held at Manchester Museum on 8th October, which I helped to organize. The group is aimed at people, museum curators, archaeologists and those who share an interest in Roman archaeology. First up was Paul Holder, who works at the University’s library and who is leading authority on Roman military diplomas. It was Paul who published Manchester Museum’s incomplete military diploma from Ravenglass, arguably awarded to a man perhaps from Heliopolis in the Lebanon who was recruited into a regiment from the Roman Army of Britain when an expeditionary force went out to help suppress the serious Judaean revolt during the reign of Hadrian in the 130s AD.

Norman Redhead talking about the recent work at Castleshaw Roman forts

Norman Redhead, County Archaeologist and Director of Greater Manchester Archaeological Unit talked about recent work at Castleshaw Roman forts. This was not the first time the site had been excavated and Norman described the various interventions at this fascinating early Roman military frontier site, which lies between Slack, near Huddersfield, and Manchester. In the 18th century the antiquary Percival sketched two forts here and the people’s poet Ammon Wrigley did some work, but the first serious archaeological work was directed by Francis Bruton over two seasons in 1907-8. Rosser and later Thompson during the late ’50s and early ’60s carried out further work for the University of Manchester, helping to clarify the relationship between the earlier and larger fort for an auxiliary cohort, and the smaller, later fortlet for a garrison for as few as 50 men. There was a community programme excavation on the site during the mid 1980s.

The earlier fort was occupied between about AD 79 and the mid-90s AD and the fortlet between 105 and the early 120s AD. This tight chronological framework means that finds from the site can be closely dated. Unfortunately the soil conditions were prejudicial to the survival of many materials. One coin of Vespasian could only be documented because its imprint had been preserved in the soil, and even samian was very abraded. Glass objects survived very well, however.  Other finds included a lava quernstone, melon beads of glass and faience, rusticated ware greyware sherds, an onyx intaglio depicting Minerva, and a little Black Burnished ware, which must have entered the North of England shortly before the fortlet was decommissioned in the 120s AD. The finds from the most recent work will go to the Saddleworth Museum. Manchester Museum has the finds from the university-led excavations.

Handsome trumpet brooch from the Knutsford hoard

Vanessa Oakden, Finds Liaison Officer for the Portable Antiquities Scheme spoke about the Knutsford Hoard which was found by a metal-detectorist and included 103 coins, three trumpet brooches, finger rings and vessel fragments. Unfortunately the point of deposition had been ploughed out and the hoard dispersed but there was still a dense concentration of metalwork over some 20 x 10 metres. Some of the coins were still stuck together from their time in the container. The coins included denarii struck for Mark Anthony’s legions, and issues of Vitellius, Hadrian and Antoninus Pius and those struck for imperial ladies such as Sabina, Lucilla and Faustina II. Vanessa compared the hoard contents with another Roman hoard found at Church Minshull, which had 58 denarii and trumpet brooches. The trumpet brooches were similar to the beautiful Carmarthen brooch. The more complete brooches helped explain the rosette mount found loose in the Knutsford hoard. It looks as though the Knutsford hoard was deposited in the 190s AD. It may represent the private wealth of a soldier, landowner or merchant, and is perhaps indicative of the importance of the salt trade in the economy of the area. For further details  look this up on the Portable Antiquities database (LVPL -B44185/2012 T406).

A visit to the Manchester Museum store

The last session before lunch was presented by yours truly and I showed some of the Roman treasures from Manchester Museum’s archaeology collection, such as the Manchester word-square and talked about a couple of breakthroughs that had enabled us to provenance a previously unattributed sizeable collection of Romano-British pottery excavated by Prof.Donald Atkinson at Gayton Thorpe in Norfolk during the 1920s and a Romano-British pot from Longendale, purchased from some young lads who had found it hidden amongst some rocks. When first encountered in the store the latter shared its storage box with two unannotated small format black and white photographs showing the place of discovery and a cryptic note saying it was to be collected ‘by a gentleman’. A discussion of this acquisition turned up in an issue of Transactions of the Lancashire and Cheshire Antiquarian Society and the mysterious gentleman turned out to be Christopher Hawkes. This presentation was followed by a visit to the Museum archaeology store where I’d got out a selection of interesting material, including small finds from Castleshaw excavations, late iron Age metalwork from Bigbury, a complete set of decorative zoomorphic feet for a box or casket and an interesting but undoubtedly fake Mithras figurine. In this I was ably assisted and supported by Irit Narkiss, a member of the Museum’s conservation team, to whom thanks are due.

Wooden combs from Vindolanda

After lunch we were treated to a wonderful talk by Barbara Birley who presented the preliminary findings of her study of wooden combs from Vindolanda. The anaerobic soil conditions preserved a range of objects made of organic materials, including textiles, leather shoes, writing tablets and the combs. Vindolanda has yielded some 140 combs and this turns out to be the largest site collection to date (Roman London has only yielded 40). Most date from c.AD 85 to the 160s. Some of the combs were marked with graffiti or stamped with a maker’s mark. Some may have been used by professional hairdressers. Some were decorated with fretting and some had a copper alloy plate. The carefully-recorded excavations allowed the combs to be plotted spatially. One particularly interesting example came with its own leather carrying pouch or case.

Gaming counters from Chester

Our next speaker, Gill Dunn, talked about recent finds from the Chester amphitheatre site. There were two phases of building and the dep0sits contained a fragment from the hilt of a sword and remains of fast food consumed by the crowds, such as swans, geese, duck, and chicken, and fish bones from salmon, eels and carp. In fact there are few sites with such a range of domestic fowl. There were pieces of ceramic portable ovens that were probably made at Holt. The glass included pieces of facet cut vessels and are indicative of relatively high status table ware. A large collection of gaming counters (above) – of particular interest to me because of the set found outside Manchester Roman fort – appear to have been redeposited from elsewhere. Metal finds included mail links, hob nails, tools, and iron finger rings.

Enamelled Romano-British metalwork

The next speaker, Justine Bayley, talked about enamelled Roman objects. Enamel is glass fused to a metal sub-strate. Enamelling occurs on small decorative objects such as brooches, belt plates, seal boxes, studs, fittings and fasteners and votive stands, and occasionally is found on larger vessels, such as the Staffordshire Moorlands pan. Sometimes larger objects were made in separate pieces and soldered together. Some were clearly made a souvenirs for people to take away with them after a posting in the province. Reconstructions of enamelled metalwork showed just how gaudy the enamelled material was originally.

Matt Ponting talking about Roman coin analysis

Our next speaker, Matt Ponting of University of Liverpool, presented results of a programme of sampling of silver Roman coins. Earlier work in this area had sampled the surface of the coins but this gave variable and misleading results because the Romans treated the coin blanks to brighten the surface. This project showed that the Julio-Claudian emperors had a fine silver coinage until Nero reduced the fineness from 93% to 80% silver. The results of the recent sampling were more consistent than earlier readings. This brought the  denarius into line with the coinage of the Greek East and resolved problems with tax collection. The speaker also showed how studying isotopes from the samples might indicate the sources of the silver that was used. Some issues can now be characterized as using Spanish silver, some Gallic. It may be possible to identify a fingerprint for recycled metal. Matt acknowledged the institutions that had allowed sampling of coins in their collections, which include the Manchester Museum.

Scan of a coin showing differences in the metal.

Our last speaker, Rob Philpott, from Liverpool Museum discussed finds from the Roman port of Meolls. In the mid 19th century Abraham Hume reported large numbers of mostly metal discoveries on the foreshore when that stretch of coastline was undergoing rapid erosion by the river.  Activity seems to have started during the later Iron Age  and there are Roman finds even before the region was absorbed into the Roman province. Meolls was an important trading centre on the edge of the tribal territory of the Cornovii, close to that of the Brigantes. The exploitation of salt in the North West may lay behind  the economic transactions that we can detect in the coins and other metalwork found at Meolls. Sadly many of Liverpool’s finds were lost during bombing in World War II but more material has been recorded from the vicinity since then, including tantalizing objects from a later period such as a St Menas flask and a small hoard of Byzantine coins. Such discoveries are often explained away as redeposited souvenirs collected by British servicemen during the first and second World Wars but in some cases the original contextual information appears impeccable. A 6th century AD context for such finds in such a location, easily accessible by water, cannot be lightly dismissed.

St Means flask

Meolls reminded me strongly of a Roman port at Faxfleet, near Brough on the Humber Estuary in East Yorkshire, where large quantities of Roman pottery dating from the later 1st and early 2nd centuries AD was found. Its location close to the confluence of  a number of tributaries flowing into the Humber would have made it a useful location for trade. Unlike Meolls, most of the material found was ceramic. Another site further along the estuary at Redcliff, like Meolls, shows evidence of Roman trade some decades before the Romans came to northern Britain.

There was a great mix of papers at this meeting and my thanks to all those who presented or helped with the day.

Abu Hureyra

Prof. Andrew Moore with the Abu Hureyra material

Last week I had the privilege of meeting Prof Andrew Moore and his wife who visited Manchester Museum to deposit objects from Abu Hureyra in Syria. The objects, mostly lithic small finds, were excavated during the early 1970s. The excavation was funded, as so often was the case in the past, by different institutions which subscribed to the costs of the project, and in return they received a share of the finds.

This is why Manchester Museum has such a brilliant Egyptology collection: Manchester textile magnate, Jesse Haworth, subscribed to William Flinders Petrie’s projects in Egypt and gave the material he received to the Museum. Manchester Museum received most of its share of the Abu Hureyra material many years ago but Professor Moore and his wife were dropping off the last of the objects, now that final publication work had been completed.

The 45 objects include flint arrowheads, a delicate piece of obsidian, various palettes, grinders and other objects.The Abu Hureyra material dates from some time around 9000 BC when hunter gatherers were experimenting with farming.

One of the flint arrowheads from Abu Hureyra

It was sobering to reflect that the excavation work would no longer be possible today. Abu Hureyra was flooded as part of a dam building project, and the recent fighting has put the discoveries that remained in the care of the Syrian Antiquities in great danger. Manchester Museum received all the objects from a particular context which makes the recent acquisitions very important.

It shows the wisdom of distributing the discoveries amongst a number of institutions and not putting all the fragile archaeological ‘eggs’ in one basket. Heaven only knows when the terrible fighting will end and the region return to something like peaceful conditions so that the condition of the archaeological sites and the antiquities in museum collections can be assessed. Perhaps not for a generation. At least some of the discoveries from this now inaccessible site can be seen in Manchester Museum. Below is a fragment of a gypsum plaster vessel that was created by smearing the plaster over some woven basketry and allowing it to dry before peeling it off.

Part of a gypsum plaster vessel