Young Archaeologists and Ancient Etruscans or what to call your rabbit

Seianti Hanunia’s sarcophagus in the British Museum

In mid-January the first of the Manchester Museum’s Young Archaeologists Club meetings for 2013 took place. We were scratching our heads wondering what to do because it was too cold to take the children out on a site digging and we had already talked about the ancient Greeks, Romans and Egyptians in previous sessions. However, there was one people of the ancient world we hadn’t looked at and they are the Etruscans. The Etruscans lived in northern Italy and were very powerful and influential between about 1000 and 100 BC. The Greeks called them Tyrrhenians and the Tyrrhenian Sea is named after them. The Roman name Tusci gave rise to the modern region of Italy called Tuscany, favoured holiday retreat of a former prime minister.  The early kings of Rome were Etruscan. The Manchester Museum happens to have quite a good collection of Etruscan material and a few objects are shown in the new Ancient Worlds displays. A catalogue of Manchester Museum’s Etruscan collection was published by Jean Turfa in the early 1980s.

I got out a selection of Etruscan objects from the stores. I set up four tables and put out groups of bronze figurines, brooches, pottery, stone cinerary urns, inscriptions and votive offerings on each. We talked about the rich mineral resources that were the source of the Etruscans’ wealth and prosperity and how contact with ancient Greek traders stimulated a passion for imports of Greek things such as pottery. Not that they didn’t have their own graceful and attractive pottery called bucchero ware. We explored the role of Etruscan women who seem to have had slightly more freedom than their Greek and Roman sisters. A facial reconstruction of an upper class Etruscan woman made by Prof.John Prag and Dr Richard Neave of the University of Manchester is shown in the new displays. Her name was Seianti Hanunia Tlesnana and her beautiful sarcophagus can be seen at the British Museum. It offers one of those rare chances to compare a depiction of someone who lived in the ancient world with a facial reconstruction based on their physical remains.

We stopped in the middle of the session to go and see Etruscan objects on display including the facial reconstruction, a votive offering of a woman’s womb and a carved marble slab from a cinerary urn.  This gave the children a chance to get up and move around after about half an hour of sitting. We returned to the Discovery Centre for the last topics about writing and religion. The Manchester Museum has a few Etruscan inscriptions and one of them is all the more interesting for being longer (most Etruscan inscriptions are quite short and often do no more than mention someone’s name, status and family relationship). This one has been translated and it mentions ‘Hercle’ or Heracles. It may refer to the offering of a statue of the hero.  I distributed a photocopy of the names of Etruscan gods and goddesses compared with their Greek and Roman equivalents. The children were amused when they found out the Etruscan equivalent to Dionysos was called Fufluns. Someone said it was a good name for a rabbit!

Andrea’s rabbit Eric with one of Irit’s cabbages (March 2015)

Gladiators

Roman lamp used in ‘Dig Stories’

Since the opening of Ancient Worlds last autumn I have been doing some work to support colleagues in education who are using the new displays for teaching. I suggested some Greco-Roman objects for a session called ‘Dig Stories’. Debbie Doran in our education team chose some oil lamps for use in the session. One of the lamps is a Roman lamp showing two gladiators fighting. Last week I spent some time trying to identify which gladiators in particular they are. There is, it turns out, a bewildering variety of gladiators: secutor, thraex, samnite, murmillo, retiarius, even a gladiator woman or gladiatorix, to name but a few!

Detail showing two gladiators – perhaps secutors

The list is bewildering but no doubt the Roman audience in the arena had a connoisseur’s appreciation of the different kinds of gladiator and his or her weaponry and equipment. I can imagine Roman schoolboys collecting sets of gladiator-themed cards or stickers in the same way that we used to collect cards or stickers showing footballers or dinosaurs in the 1970s and 1980s. There were always rare issues and buying the stickers from the local newsagents was ruinously expensive as I recall. Playtimes were mostly taken up by impromptu ‘swapsie’ sessions to try and collect the full set. I don’t know if they ever released a ‘Gladiators of the Ancient World’ set but I can just picture Roman schoolboys shouting “I’ll swap you my murmillo for a secutor but my gladiatrix is worth both!”

The heavy rounded helmet, shields, arm protectors and greaves used by the gladiators on our lamp seem to identify them as secutors. It’s interesting that the gladiators are mirror images of one another, which suggests the gladiator on the right is left-handed. The British Museum has a relief showing two women gladiators ‘Amazon’ and ‘Achilia’  (presumably their professional fighting names) who are also shown as mirror images of one another.  This may be no more than artistic licence, however. There are certainly lots of representations of right-handed gladiators squaring off, with the shield and the sword held appropriately. It does raise the question of what evidence there is for left-handedness in the Ancient World. Was it simply beaten out of men who had to hold their shield and weapon in a certain way in order to maintain an effective military formation? A hoplite holding his shield on the right hand side just wouldn’t work would it?

Relief showing women gladiators in the British Museum

You can find out more about the different kinds of gladiators from Susanna Shadrake’s The World of the Gladiator (2005) which features reconstruction drawings and photos of re-enactors equipped as the different kinds of fighters. It’s good to know that ‘Amazon’ and ‘Achilia’ were freed after thrilling the crowds.

Gladiator lamp at Manchester Museum

Women in Ancient Worlds

The recent blog ‘Desperately seeking women in the ancient world’ seems to have struck a chord as the site statistics show one of largest totals for visitors since we opened. Not that ladies aren’t represented in the new galleries. There are interviews with Dr Chantal Conneller from Archaeology, Vanessa Oakden who works for the Portable Antiquities Scheme, Dr Sonia O’Connor who is a materials scientist and Dr Roberta Mazza in Classics. However, so far as historical references or archaeological discoveries are concerned, women don’t feature as frequently. To take an example, as you might expect, Roman inscriptions set up by women or mentioning women don’t turn up as often as do inscriptions set up by men serving in the Roman army. Wouldn’t it be great to have the equivalent in Manchester of the wonderful set of tombstones set up in memory of the wives of soldiers who served at Templeborough Roman fort?

Etruscan cinerary urn showing a reclining woman. She wears a short-sleeved, high-girt chiton, long cloak with veil over the back of her head, and a large round “jewel” on her ring-finger. MM acc. no.29946a-b

What we do have in the Ancient Worlds galleries is the mummy of the ancient Egyptian temple chantress Asru and a facial reconstruction of an Etruscan lady called Hanunia Tlesnana on display in the second table of the archaeology gallery of Ancient Worlds. Is it any accident that one of the ladies whose life can be reconstructed to some degree happens to be Etruscan? After all, didn’t Etruscan ladies enjoy a greater degree of equality relatively speaking than say Roman or Greek ladies?

Well not necessarily. I checked Antonia Rallo’s chapter about ‘The Woman’s Role’ in Mario Torelli’s The Etruscans (Thames and Hudson, 2000). ‘Both in antiquity and in modern times Etruscan women have been invested with qualities and roles that were actually not theirs…we see an attempt to overestimate the Etruscan woman’s role… thus arose the myth of Etruscan matriarchy, which appears in light of modern criticism and available information, entirely unfounded’ (p.131).

Carved frieze depicting a battle scene from the front of an Etruscan sarcophagus. MM acc.no. 29949b

Of course, if any evidence were needed that Etruscan women were not to be trifled with, one has only to look at a funerary monument in the Museum collection which shows a battle scene with what looks like a woman apparently holding a tray of muffins clouting a warrior round the back of his head (right in photo)…

All the best for the New Year.

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 .