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.

Teaching Classics using Objects from the Museum Collection and Star Trek

Irit and the Classics students (3rd February 2014)

Some time ago we were asked by tutors in the Classics department to support teaching using objects from Manchester Museum’s rich archaeology collection. We provided a list of objects from archaeology and numismatics to help the teaching of ancient Greece and Rome. Last week a number of preparatory sessions took place. Irit Narkiss from the Museum’s conservation team led a training session to look at not only how the objects should be handled but how to examine objects too. Obviously special care is needed when handling objects that may be fragile because they are several thousand years old but as a university museum we like to try and find ways of making practical use of the objects in teaching and research that is taking place at the University of Manchester.

Irit leading the session about objects

This came to fruition on Friday afternoon when we spoke to two classes of students and they found out for the first time which objects they would be working with. The objects include a mortarium, a miniature amphora, a Roman coin, some samian pottery, a lamp, a glass vessel, some coarseware pottery and a piece of ammunition from a Roman stone-thrower.

There was a ‘bran tub’ lucky dip whereby the students got their objects. As there were a few leftover items there was also the option to swap objects for other items the student might feel more interested in. They will do a written piece of work called an object biography in which they’ll explore what the object is, how it was made, what it was used for and what it tells us about life in Roman times.

This is something of a new development in working with colleagues in Classics to make objects available for teaching and hopefully it will help to surmount some of the difficulties that students may experience in making use of the Museum and its collections as an educational resource. Many are familiar with written records of the period but for some this will be the first time they will have worked with objects.

Students with objects (7th February)

The benefits of working with objects to me seem obvious. I always think of the wonderful scene in the film Star Trek First Contact in which Jean-Luc Picard (played by Patrick Stewart) and his android officer Commander Data (played by Brent Spiner) go back in time and encounter the first spaceship – the Pheonix – to have warp drive. This development made interstellar travel possible for the first time so the rocket is in Picard’s time, several hundred years later, a very popular exhibit in the Smithsonian Museum.

As Picard explains: “It’s a boyhood fantasy Data. I must have seen this ship hundreds of times in the Smithsonian but I was never able to touch it”. Data asks “Sir, does tactile contact alter your perception of the Phoenix?” And Picard gives what I think is one of the best recommendations for handling objects in museums: “Oh yes, for humans touch can connect you to an object in a very personal way and make it seem more real”.

Of course this is lost on Data, who replies: “I’m detecting imperfections in the titanium casing and temperature fluctuations in the fuel manifold. It is no more real to me than it was a moment ago…”

Patrick Stewart and Brent Spiner meet the Phoenix

Harpy Tomb Gets Go Ahead

Panel from North Side of the Harpy Tomb at Xanthos in Lycia, Turkey

One of the areas that we did not have time to look at last year when we opened our new Ancient Worlds galleries last October was the corridor between the Numismatic gallery and the third gallery of Ancient Worlds. Which was a shame given that some of the conservation work on the objects we planned to display had already been done. In fact the objects concerned, the plaster casts of the Harpy Tomb from Xanthos in Turkey, have already featured in the Ancient Worlds blog. Earlier this week I met Senior Technician, John Miller, to discuss how we might go about displaying them.

Line drawing of the North Side of the Harpy Tomb from the Illustrated London News (courtesy of Debbie Challis)

Unfortunately we don’t have a complete set of the casts of this impressive 2500-year-old funerary monument, which may be no bad thing because the exhibition space we have in mind wouldn’t be long enough, unless we took out some rather useful cupboards to create the space needed. We’ve decided to get round the problem of not having all the pieces of the jigsaw by showing images of the missing panels alongside plaster casts of the panels we do have. In this way we’ll be able to give visitors an overview of this amazing monument using attractive objects from the store that would otherwise hardly be seen, and in a location that lends itelf to a more visual experience.

The plaster casts are copies of panels that once decorated the four sides of a monument known as the Harpy Tomb or the Kypernis tomb at Xanthos, in Lycia, in south western Turkey. The panels were at the top of a stone tower. They appear to show a ceremony taking place at the Lycian court. The ruler, who is sitting on a throne, receives offerings. The ruler and the courtiers hold sweet-smelling flowers or fruits to their noses. One of the figures is carrying Classical Greek armour: a hoplon shield and a Corinthian helmet.

Panel depicting winged deities – Harpies? – from Xanthus. From the Illustrated London News courtesy of Debbie Challis.

It is not clear what the winged figures on some of the panels mean. They may be carrying off the spirits of the dead to the afterlife. In Greek mythology winged women called harpies tormented people. The best-known depiction of  Harpies is in the film Jason and the Argonauts (1963) starring Todd Armstrong and Nancy Kovack. It is the special effects of  Ray Harryhausen that stay in the memory. They put modern CGI to shame. In the film Jason and his crew land on an island to seek some information from the blind seer Phineus, who is being tormented by the harpies. Every time he is served a meal the harpies turn up and eat his food or defecate on it. Jason catches the harpies in a net, imprisons them in a cage and in return Phineus gives him the information he needs to find the golden fleece.  All of which is great fun, especially when you’re a nine-year-old lad and it’s the best thing you’ve ever seen on TV in your entire life.

Line drawings of the Harpy Tomb from the Illustrated London News (courtesy of Debbie Challis)

The original panels from the Harpy Tomb at Xanthos are in the British Museum. They were collected by English archaeologist Charles Fellows (1799-1860) who travelled in Turkey and found the ruins of the town of Xanthos in Lycia in south west Turkey. At this time Britain and France were competing with one another to collect antiquities for their respective museums. With the help of the Royal Navy, Fellows collected stone carvings from some of the tombs at Xanthos for the British Museum.

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

Ancient Worlds and Early Years

Elaine Bates Early Years and Family Learning Co-ordinator with ‘goody bag’

Surprising what a chance encounter and chat can do. Some time ago I bumped into Elaine Bates who is Early Years and Family Learning Co-ordinator at Manchester Museum and we got talking about her work with mothers and young children. I mentioned in passing that there was an ancient Greek pot depicting a crawling toddler in the archaeology collection. I later sent a photo of it to Elaine and she said she’d have a think about how she could use it and I forgot all about the matter. Until earlier this afternoon that is when a very proud Elaine came into my office to show me one of the new self-guided discovery bags. They have been designed with a label and the image they chose was that of the crawling ancient Greek infant.

Red Figure pot with crawling infant (Accession number 41380)

Here’s the pot in a bit more detail. The infant is crawling on all fours, there is a string tied around his middle and there appears to be some sort of toy in front of him. The technical name for the pot is a chous. It comes from Alan Rowe’s excavations at Cyrene (M.1300). The rim would have been trefoil shaped and there was a rod handle originally. It was found in a  a child’s grave.

The Baby Explorer sessions at Manchester Museum are designed to engage babies (who are not yet walking) and their parents and carers with our unique spaces and collections using  sensory play and interactive storytelling.

Our latest session is themed around our new Ancient Worlds gallery. We have developed a treasure sack for parents to use in the session and to help them explore on the gallery. The sacks contain a range of fabrics, household items and special things with different colours, textures and materials for babies to explore with all their senses  which reflect the richness of the collections.

Baby Explorers is on every other Tuesday @ 10.30, 12.30 and 1.30 and lasts for 45 minutes

Find out more about Baby Explorers and take  a look at our film to see Baby Explorers in action @

Culturebabies.org.uk

Facebook/culturekidsmanchester

http://www.museum.manchester.ac.uk/learning/

Desperately Seeking Women in the Ancient World

Meeting to discuss project using the Manchester museum collection

The recent teaching sessions using the Manchester Roman word-square have paid dividends because lecturer in Classics, Dr Roberta Mazza, met me, Campbell Price and Naomi Kashiwagi a few days ago to discuss making a grant application to help support further student use of the collection. Roberta showed us some inspiring work that had been done over at the John Rylands library using the beautiful Greco-Roman mummy portraits. The project brought together the library’s papyrus collections with portraits from the Manchester Museum. The students of Thomas Whitham Sixth Form College, Burnley, were invited to voice that particular person based on what was known about their life, their family relationships and standing in society, and all this working under the guide of academics and graduate students from Classics and Religions and Theology. You can see the short film at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bd-OJkLBTww

This certainly struck a chord with us because the new Ancient Worlds galleries make extensive use of real people, people who have gathered the collections, researched and conserved them or made use of them in teaching. Roberta asked if we could suggest some people from the past who were represented in the Manchester collections. Straightaway we thought of the Syrian man who was awarded Roman citizenship on a bronze diploma found at Ravenglass or one of the Palmyrans whose bust will be displayed in the portraits gallery or Senecianius, the Roman centurion from VI Legion Victrix in York, who commanded the Manchester garrison.

Mummy, complete with painted portrait, of Artemidorus

Another candidate is one of the Manchester Museum mummies, a man called Artemidorus, who was found at Hawara in the Fayum. He dates between about AD 110 and 160. He is one of those relatively rare instances where the wax portrait is still in position above the face. Worsley Man is another possibility, funnily enough dating from a similar period but from the province of Roman Britain, as far as you could get from Egypt but still be in the Roman Empire.

There’s just one problem. As Roberta reminded me in her email: “We desperately need a woman now!!!! Don’t we have an interesting case?” Sadly women were often denied access to the high profile roles exercised by men in the ancient world so they are less visible archaeologically as named individuals. Women turn up on ancient Greek painted pottery or as terracotta figurines all the time but we don’t know who they were. Egypt is one of the places where women do appear to have had more rights as is shown by papyri. The Etruscans may help us. There is a facial reconstruction of Etruscan noblewoman Seianti Hanunia Tlesnana in the collection and other relevant material like a votive offering of a woman’s womb, for example, can be seen in the Ancient Worlds galleries.

Votive offering of an Etruscan terracotta womb (MM acc.no.35152)

The idea is that the students will research this person and produce a short film in which they give voice to that person’s experiences in so far as they can reconstruct them using a wide range of resources. The films can be shown in the galleries. In this way they will gain practical experience of working with the material evidence of the past that may be of practical use to them in the future. Thinking about what to call the project was a no-brainer: ‘Ancient Lives, Future Skills’.

It’ll be interesting to see how this develops. There is certainly no shortage of content material. If students develop skills in presenting and interpreting fascinating information about the past hopefully it’ll be an antidote to the current vogue for celebrity presenters who think the subject of the programme is themselves and who skirt over the really interesting stuff.

Clash of the Titans meets the Museum

Why is it that Ancient Greek mythology has such lasting appeal? It’s not so long ago that advertisements for The Clash of The Titans  were everywhere and last night on T.V. Bethany Hughes was talking about the myth of Atlantis.  Though from what she was saying Plato’s account may have been loosely based on folk memories of the eruption of Santorini. Nearer home, some of the Museology MA students at the University have been working on a educational catalogue of ancient Greek celebrities who appear on objects in the Museum collections.  

We invited Kostas Arvenitis’ Museology class at the University to work on an ‘un-numbered collection’  in our archaeology store. This is a group of miscellaneous objects that we know little about.  It is often the case that  objects like these can  be particularly exciting and the students did us proud by finding a fascinating bowl with images of the ancient Greek gods, helpfully labelled to say who was who. Zeus, Hera, Athena, they’re all there.  

   

Greek gods on a bowl in the Manchester Museum collection (courtesy of Hannah Manson)

If testosterone fuelled heroics are more your cup of tea the Museum already displays  ancient Greek vases showing Odysseus escaping from the Cyclops’ cave and (more sedately) the Greek warriors Ajax and Odysseus playing dice.    

It’s interesting that the students chose celebrity as the focus of their project to appeal to modern schoolchildren. I’d like to think that the ancient Greek deities and heroes enjoyed a more lasting kind of fame than that of modern celebrities many of whom are only famous for having been on TV.   

 

In terms of lasting appeal, it must be because ancient Greek myths and legends deal with  archetypal  human emotions like love, pride, anger, passion and jealousy, all of which have fuelled dramatic presentations from Aeschylus to Coronation Street. Although “Sing Goddess the anger of Jackie’s son Tyrone…” doesn’t somehow have quite the same ring to it.   At the very least it’s a reminder not to overlook Classical Greek material in Ancient Worlds .

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wonderful Things in the Large Object Store

As part of the Ancient Worlds Project we’ve been looking recently at the walk-through between the Numismatics displays and the Mediterranean Gallery. I wondered  if it might be a good spot to use some of the extensive plaster cast collection at the Manchester Museum. It includes copies of such famous sculpture from the ancient world  as the Elgin Marbles,  the Temple of Bassae and the Harpy Tomb at Xanthos in Turkey.

I suppose I talked my way into a job and so it was that I found myself in the rather cramped, dusty and  a slightly creepy  Large Object Store at the Manchester Museum. I had some accession numbers and found some of the casts quite quickly. Others were hidden from view behind a table on the Mezzanine floor above. They will need cleaning.

Harpy or siren on plaster cast from the Harpy Tomb at Xanthus

I cut through the packing to reveal the cast. It was a bit like how Howard Carter felt peering into Tutankhamun’s tomb except that instead of seeing everywhere the glint of gold I  saw some rather frightening harpies or sirens. It brings to mind that wonderful episode in Jason and the Argonauts where the harpies are tormenting Phineas who had upset one of the gods. In the film – through the wonderful stop motion work of Ray Harryhausen – the Harpies were caught and put in cages. We’re planning to put together the sides of the tomb as a linear display in the walk-through.

Some people can be  a  bit sniffy about casts but it seems unlikely we’d be able to borrow the originals from the British Museum, there would probably be floor-loading problems  and this is a walkway, not necessarily somewhere to show off somebody else’s prize exhibits. If only we could find a set of moulds or duplicate casts to fill the gaps we  have in our series from the Harpies Tomb.

Plaster cast of panel from the Harpy Tomb

It would be nice to find the missing pieces from the friezes and show all four sides complete.