Antiquities Exhibits

Humans have ornamentally carved ivory since prehistoric times. Very fine detail can be achieved, and as the material, unlike precious metals, has no bullion value and usually cannot easily be recycled, the survival rate for ivory pieces in the archaeological record is much higher than for those in other materials. Ivory objects were not crafted exclusively from the tusks of elephants but from a number of species including hippopotami, walrus, narwhale, sperm whale, elk, and even wart hogs. Worked ivory has been found from the earliest periods of Egyptian history, including both the Predynastic and Early Dynastic periods. Most were made of hippopotamus tusks, however, as elephants had disappeared from Egypt by the historical period. Elephant ivory was imported from Nubia, though, as well as Asia, since populatiions of elephants and hippopotami survived in western Asia into the Late Bronze Age. As hippopotami in Egypt decreased, imported elephant ivory became the most used source, re...

Mycenae at War The military nature of the Mycenaean Greeks is evident from the numerous weapons unearthed, the use of warrior and combat representations in contemporary art, and the preserved Greek Linear B records. The Mycenaeans invested in the development of military infrastructure, with military production and logistics being supervised directly from the palatial centers. According to the Linear B records in the palace of Pylos, every rural community (the damos) was obliged to supply a certain number of men who had to serve in the army. Similar service was also performed by the aristocracy. Mycenaean armies were initially based on heavy infantry, equipped with spears, large shields and in some occasion armor. Later in the 13th century BC, Mycenaean warfare underwent major changes both in tactics and weaponry and armed units became more uniform and flexible, while weapons became smaller and lighter. The spear remained the main weapon among Mycenaean warriors, whil...

Back in 2016, I had the opportunity to participate in a study tour that included a visit to the Ashmolean Museum where I photographed the so-called "Arundel Marbles". So here is a selection of my photographs of them as today's featured "Antiquities Alive" virtual exhibit. The Arundel marbles are a collection of carved Ancient Greco-Roman sculptures and inscriptions collected by Thomas Howard, 21st Earl of Arundel in the early seventeenth century, the firs t such comprehensive collection of its kind in England. They are now in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. The Earl of Arundel had supervised excavations in Rome, and deployed his agents in the Eastern Mediterranean, above all at Istanbul. Late in the seventeenth century, a visitor to Ottoman Turkey (in modern-day Izmir) complained: "the scarcity of antiquities now to be found in Smyrna arises from hence, that it furnished the greatest part of the Marmora Arundeliana." The earl displayed his unriv...

In 1980, two magnificent pieces of Roman silver serving pieces dating from the late 4th to early 5th century CE were offered for sale in London by two antiquities' dealers from Vienna. Documentation supplied by the Lebanese embassy in Switzerland claimed a treasure hoard that included the two pieces had been found in the Tyre and Sidon regions of Lebanon. The complete hoard was subsequently acquired by a consortium headed by the 7th Marquess of Northhampton who then attempted to negotiate a sale to the Getty Museum in Los Angeles for $10 million. At that time, the Getty Museum had been recently endowed with the complete fortune of J. Paul Getty, who had died in 1976 and was aggressively expanding its collections. But when the deal fell through, the treasure was put up for sale in New York in 1990 by Sotheby's. That sale was halted when documentation was determined to be suspect. Soon the governments of Hungary, Yugoslavia and Lebanon each made claims of ownership. Hungarian a...

Meleager was a Calydonian prince as the son of Althaea and the vintner, King Oeneus, although in some versions of the myth, the god Ares. Like a number of mythological heroes, Meleager was fated to die young by the Moirai (the Fates) who predicted he would only live until a piece of wood, burning in the family hearth, was consumed by fire. Overhearing them, his mother, Althaea, immediately doused the hearth and hid wood. When Meleager grew to manhood, his father, King Oeneus, ordered Meleager to gather up heroes from all over Greece to hunt the Calydonian Boar that had been terrorizing the area and rooting up the vinyards needed for the production of his father's wines. The boar was actually sent as a punishment by Artemis after King Oenus neglected to honor Artemis at a festival he held to honor other gods. In addition to the heroes his father named, Meleager also asked Atalanta, a fierce hunter who had been abandoned as an infant and raised by a bear, to participate as well. ...