Caesar rises from the Rhone - Minerva

May/June 2010 Volume 21 Number 3 

Gold of 

the Inca 

Treasures from 

the Andes 

The mysterious 

travels of the 

Wrest Park 

altars 

Athenian 

trireme 

The warship that 

changed the world 

Caesar rises from the Rhone 

The archaeology of Roman Arles 

New York 

coin sales 

Review of the 

38 th Numismatic 

Convention 

Tutankhamun’s 

DNA decoded 

Incest and infirmity in 

Egypt’s 18 th dynasty 

£4.00 

ISSN 0957-7718 

9 770957 771032 

05

May/June 2010 Volume 21 Number 3 

Gold of 

the Inca 

Treasures from 

the Andes 

The mysterious 

travels of the 

Wrest Park 

altars 

Athenian 

trireme 

The warship that 

changed the world 

Caesar rises from the Rhone 

The archaeology of Roman Arles 

Review of the 

38th New York 

coin sales 

Numismatic 

Convention 


DNA decoded 

Incest and infirmity in 

Egypt’s 18th dynasty 

On the cover: Marble head, 

possibly of Julius Caesar, c. 46 

BC. H. 39.5cm. Photo: Musée 

départemental Arles antique © 

Maby J.-L_L.Roux. 

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Minerva May/June 2010 

Features 

08 Tutankhamun’s DNA 

Recently published results of a two-year research programme 

contain surprising revelations about New Kingdom royalty. 

James Beresford 

12 Beauty or truth? 

A new book examines the Classical Greek ideal of the human form. 

Murray Eiland 

16 Ship of the people 

The democratic legacy created by the trireme, the warship which 

propelled Classical Athens to naval supremacy. James Beresford 

20 From the central Aegean to rural England 

The strange and forgotten history of five Graeco-Roman altars 

brought from Delos to Bedfordshire. David Noy 

24 Picturing the past 

A look at the long and mutually beneficial relationship between 

photography and archaeology in investigations of Egypt’s history. 

Maria Golia 

28 River of memory 

A major exhibition in Arles features archaeological treasures 

recovered from the swirling waters of the Rhone. Elena Taraskina 

32 Out of the blue 

Aerial archaeological research offers a new and enlightening 

perspective on ancient Jordan. Robert Bewley and David Kennedy 

36 The fiery pool 

A new exhibition casts light on the role of the sea in the Maya world 

view. Sophie Mackenzie 

40 Civilisation of gold 

An exhibition in Brescia examines the origins of the Inca Empire. 

Dalu Jones 

44 High stakes 

The impact of the Aswan High Dam on Egyptian archaeology. 

Georgina Read 

48 Our man in Rome 

An interview with Prof Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, Master of Sidney 

Sussex College, Cambridge, and formerly Director of the British 

School at Rome. James Beresford 

52 Numismatic sales 

A review of some of the notable coins sold at the 38 th New York 

International Numismatic Annual Convention. David Miller 

Regulars 

02 From the Editor 03 News 

58 Book Reviews 60 Calendar 

contents 

volume21 number3 

08 

32 

40 

44 

36 

1

fromtheeditor 

Archaeology and 

the technology 

of humanity 

Since the dawn of time, humanity has undergone a series of 

technological advances that express themselves in the archaeological 

record. Today, technology allows archaeological enquiry to an 

unprecedented extent. 

In the last editorial I highlighted 

the interplay between humans 

and the role of the environment 

as a common thread running 

through the splendid range of 

articles in Minerva. Curiously, 

in this issue many of the topics covered have 

a common theme of a different nature – a 

component of equal importance that has 

enabled our species to progress since the 

production of the first stone tools 2.5 million 

years ago: technology. 

In the Western world we look to ancient 

Greece as the cradle of our modern civilisation, 

which gave birth to a sophisticated architecture, 

arts, democratic government, law, literature 

and learning, not least philosophy. Plato 

derided the rowers who manned the trireme, 

the technological advance that shaped the 

Athenian state, while his mentor Socrates 

observed the perfect human form in the athlete 

Charmides – a physique that came to epitomise 

the ideal in Greek sculpture. 

Contributors 

An independent artistic current flourished 

in the ancient American civilisations. The 

beautifully crafted ceramics of the Maya and 

the opulent gold of the Inca were made possible 

by technological advances in craftsmanship. 

The relationship between Egyptology and 

technology has ushered in further innovations 

in scholarship and technical advances. This is 

especially true in the study of Egyptian sites, 

which was greatly assisted by the development 

of photography, and the extraordinary DNA 

analysis of mummified remains, which has the 

potential to offer information about may facets 

of Pharaonic life, not least genealogy. 

Archaeological survey, too, has benefited 

from recent technological progress, with the 

enlightening aerial surveys of Jordan a prime 

example. If anatomically modern humans 

reached their maturity with the technological 

revolution of the Upper Palaeolithic, this very 

dynamic has paved the way to a world that will 

continue to change as this interplay progresses. 

Dr Mark Merrony 

Editor-in-Chief 


Editor 

Dr James Beresford 

Publisher 

Myles Poulton 

Managing Editor 

Sophie Mackenzie 

Art Director 

Nick Riggall 

Designer 

Lyndon Williams 

Editorial Associate 

Georgina Read 

Editorial Advisory Board 

Peter Clayton, FSA, 

London 

Prof Claudine Dauphin, 

Nice 

Dr Howard Williams, 

Chester 

Dr Murray Eiland, 

Frankfurt 

Massimiliano Tursi, 

London 

Prof Roger Wilson, 

Vancouver 

Correspondents 

David Breslin, Dublin 

Dr R.B. Halbertsma, Leiden 

Florian Fuhrman, Lisbon 

Dalu Jones, Italy 

Dr Lina Christopoulou, Athens 

Dr Filippo Salviati, Rome 

Rosalind Smith, Cairo 

Minerva was founded in 1990 by 

Jerome M. Eisenberg PhD 

Published in England by 

Clear Media Ltd on behalf of 

the Mougins Museum of Classical Art. 

Clear Media is a 

Media Circus Group company 

www.clear.cc 

www.mediacircusgroup.com 

20 Orange Street 

London WC2H 7EF 

Tel: 020 7389 0808 

Fax: 020 7839 6993 

Email: editorial@minervamagazine.com 

Dr Murray Eiland Dr David Noy Maria Golia 

Elena Taraskina 

is an archaeologist 

based in Germany. His 

main interests are near 

Eastern archaeology and 

archaeological science, 

particularly ceramic 

materials. He has a wide 

interest in ancient art and 

travels extensively. 

Beauty or truth p.12 

is the author of Foreigners 

at Rome (2000), five 

volumes of Jewish 

inscriptions, and papers on 

roman social history and 

inscriptions. He teaches at 

the university of Wales, 

Lampeter and the open 

university. 

Wrest Park altars p.20 

is the author of Cairo, 

City of Sand (2004) and 

writes about cultural, 

social, political and 

economic aspects of 

Egypt. Her article draws 

on research used in her 

book Photography and 

Egypt (2009). 

Picturing the past p.24 

has lived and worked 

in Arabia, britain and 

her native russia. she is 

currently based at Aston 

College, birmingham 

where she has an interest 

in how the heritage sector 

operates within the wider 

economy. 

River of memory p.28 

2 Minerva May/June 2010

inthenews 

recent stories from the world of ancient art and archaeology 

The coast of Crete near Plakias, where the tools were found. Photo courtesy of Silvain de Munck. 

Ancient mariners on Crete? 

Researchers on Crete have uncovered 

evidence suggesting that early humans, 

or even earlier hominids, have had a 

much longer history of seafaring than was 

previously believed. Over the past two years, 

archaeologists working on the island have 

found stone tools which are considered 

strong evidence of the earliest known 

voyaging in the Mediterranean. 

Artefact discoveries have provided 

evidence that humans reached Cyprus, 

many other Greek islands and possibly 

Sardinia, no earlier than 10,000 to 12,000 

years ago. However, Crete has been an island 

for more than �ve million years, so the 

anatomically modern humans – or possibly 

earlier hominids such as Homo erectus or 

Homo heidelbergensis – who le� these stone 

tools, which archaeologists believe to be at 

least 130,000 years old, must have arrived 

there by boat. � is pushes back the history 

of Mediterranean seafaring by more than 

100,000 years. 

Acheulean tools typically associated with 

Homo Erectus. 


More than 2000 stone artefacts, including 

hand axes, were collected on the southwestern 

shore of Crete, near the town of 

Plakias, by a team led by � omas F. Strasser, 

Associate Professor of Art History at 

Providence College in Rhode Island, together 

with Eleni Panagopoulou of the Greek 

Ministry of Culture. 

� e tools resemble artefacts from the stone 

technology known as Acheulean, which 

originated with Homo erectus populations 

in Africa. � ese distinctive oval and pearshaped 

hand axes have been found over a 

wide area, evidence that Acheulean tool users 

were the �rst to leave Africa and successfully 

colonise Eurasia. � is suggests that the 

axes could be up to 700,000 years old. � e 

standard hypothesis has been that Acheulean 

toolmakers reached Europe and Asia via the 

Middle East, passing mainly through what is 

now Turkey into the Balkans. � ese new �nds 

suggest that they did not only travel by land. 

It has been established that the earliest 

maritime travel was the sea crossing of early 

humans to Australia, which began about 

60,000 years ago. � ere is also some evidence 

of early hominids travelling by water to new 

habitats, particularly the Indonesian island 

of Flores, where skeletons and artefacts 

associated with so-called ‘hobbits’ have 

been found. � e research from Crete, if 

con�rmed by further study, could provide an 

entirely new timeline of human and hominid 

mobility. 


Accessing the 

Tombs of Jebel 

Hafit 

In the south-east of the United Arab 

Emirates, near the city of Al Ain, stands 

Jebel Ha�t, a mountain that rises more 

than 1200m above sea level and straddles 

the border between the UAE and Oman. 

� e mountain also lends its name to the 

early Bronze Age tombs that have been 

found on the northern and eastern slopes. 

More than 500 of these beehive-shaped 

tombs have been found in the area, the 

largest of which originally stood 4m in 

height. Dating to c. 3200 - 2700 BC, the 

Ha�t Tombs were constructed from locally 

quarried stone. 

� e tombs had been stripped almost 

bare by millennia of looting, and, until 

scienti�c testing is carried out on the small 

number of human skeletal remains found 

within a few of the tombs, it cannot be 

con�rmed if the bones belong to those 

originally buried in the tombs or are those 

of peoples who reused the structures 

during later periods. Finds of polychrome 

pottery discovered in some of the tombs 

indicate that the tomb builders had links 

with the wider Middle East with the 

pottery produced at Jemdet Nasr near 

ancient Babylon between c.3200-2900 BC, 

and therefore suggest trading contacts 

that connected Arabia and southern 

Mesopotamia during the early Bronze Age. 

Dr al Naboodah, Professor at United 

Arab Emirates University, Al Ain, says 

that, during the Early Bronze Age: ‘� e 

area was… a bustling farmland on the 

route of a caravan. So it is very likely there 

were immigrants and in�uences from 

Mesopotamia and the ancient Egyptians 

that introduced di�erent kinds of gods 

and deities as well as religious rituals that 

spread throughout the Arabian Peninsula.’ 

Until very recently this region was a 

military-controlled area, strewn with 

landmines and inaccessible to both 

archaeologists and interested tourists. 

However, in preparation for the building 

of a new resort complex, the mines and 

other military ordnance has been cleared 

away and, with the help of a 4x4 o�-road 

vehicle, visitors can now access the site. 

Although the majority of the tombs located 

on the northern side of Jebel Ha�t have 

been destroyed by recent construction, 

the structures that survive on the eastern 

�anks of the mountain are now protected 

by the Department of Antiquities and 

Tourism, while some of the tombs 

have also been undergoing a process of 

restoration. 

Benazir Siddique 

London School of Economics and Politics, 

Dubai 

3


A new non-destructive 

method of radiocarbon dating 

At the 239 th National Meeting of the American 

Chemical Society, held in San Francisco from 

21-25 March, research into a new form of radiocarbon 

dating has been revealed. The technique 

offers the potential to revolutionise our ability to 

assign extremely accurate dates to archaeological 

artefacts. 

Since being developed by Dr Willard Libby in 

1949, radiocarbon dating has been one of the most 

useful scientific tools available to archaeologists, 

allowing organic material to be dated by determining 

its content of carbon 14 (C 14 ). However, 

the method of testing has always necessitated the 

destruction of the material undergoing study. 

Although today only tiny samples are required in 

order to test the age of an object, any destruction 

of archaeological treasures. 

By contrast, the new dating method removes the 

need for the sample material to undergo destructive 

acid-base washes and incineration. Instead the 

entire object is placed in a special chamber filled 

with electrically charged gas, a plasma that gently 

oxidises the surface of the artefact to produce carbon 

dioxide for C 14 analysis. 

The research was led by Prof Marvin Rowe from 

Texas A&M University, College Station, who, with 

a research team from a branch of the university 

based in Qatar, developed the new dating method. 

According to Prof Rowe, ‘This technique stands to 

revolutionise radiocarbon dating. It expands the 

possibility for analysing extensive museum collections 

that have previously been off limits because 

of their rarity or intrinsic value and the destructive 

nature of the current method of radiocarbon 

dating.’ 

Rowe and the other researchers have used the 

new dating method to obtain the age of about 

20 different artefacts, including a section from a 

medieval Egyptian textile. In every case, the results 

obtained from the new non-destructive dating 

technique match those derived from the conventional 

C 14 sampling method. 

Even before the conference in San Francisco had 

come to an end, there was speculation that the new 

technique could be used to date the Turin Shroud, 

the most famous and controversial artefact ever 

to have been radiocarbon dated. Prof Rowe noted 

that, in theory, it could be used for this purpose. 

The linen cloth, believed by the Roman Catholic 

Church to be the burial shroud of Jesus Christ, 

underwent C 14 dating in 1988, when three separate 

laboratories reached the conclusion that the 

shroud was a medieval fake produced between AD 

1260 - 1390. The results of the tests carried out 22 

years ago have, however, been questioned by some 

scholars, who argue that the material was taken 

from a medieval patch sewn on to the much earlier 

shroud. The new dating technique offers the 

possibility of re-testing the shroud, and indeed a 

great many other precious artefacts, so as to provide 

a definitive date and finally bring an end to 

the speculation regarding this and other archaeological 

objects. 


Claims of infant sacrifice in ancient 

A study led by University of Pittsburgh 

researchers could finally lay to rest the 

conjecture that the ancient empire of 

Carthage regularly sacrificed its youngest 

citizens. An examination of the remains of 

Carthaginian children revealed that most 

infants perished prenatally or very shortly 

after birth and were unlikely to have lived 

long enough to be sacrificed, according to a 

report in the online journal PLoS ONE. 

The findings, based on analysis of skeletal 

remains found in Carthaginian burial 

urns, refute claims from as early as the 3 rd 

century BC of systematic infant sacrifice 

at Carthage, according to lead researcher 

Jeffrey H. Schwartz, a Professor at Pitt’s 

School of Arts and Sciences. Prof Schwartz 

and his colleagues present the more 

The tophet burial grounds, Carthage (modern 

Tunis). Photo: courtesy Johnny Shaw 

damage 

On 30 March, firefighters were called 

to the Golden House of Nero, the 

Domus Aurea, after the ceiling suffered 

partial collapse. The Domus Aurea 

gained its name from the extensive use 

of gold-leaf in the decoration of the 

palace. As well as frescoes painted on 

the walls, the walls and ceilings were 

also adorned with panels of ivory and 

semi-precious stones. 

Construction of the palace began 

on the slopes of the Esquiline Hill 

following the Great Fire which 

swept through Rome in AD 64, and 

the building was completed four 

years later, just before Nero’s death. 

Although most of the 80 hectare site 

was soon dismantled by Vespasian, 

about 150 rooms survived. 

The Golden House has been one of 

the most popular tourist attractions 

in Rome since it was reopened in 

1999. However, the palace was closed 

throughout most of the 1980s and 

1990s because of concerns over 

the safety of the structure. Since its 

reopening, it has continued to be 

prone to closure, with structural 

problems and water infiltration, with 

a section of the ceiling collapsing in 

2001. 


benign interpretation that very young Punic 

children were cremated and interred in 

burial urns regardless of how they died. 

Writing in the 1 st century BC, the Greek 

historian Diodorus Siculus wrote of how, 

‘In former times they [Carthaginians] 

had been accustomed to sacrifice… the 

noblest of their sons, but more recently, 

secretly buying and nurturing children, 

they had sent these to the sacrifice’ (Library 

of History, 20.14). However, according 

to Prof Schwartz, ‘Our study emphasises 

that historical scientists must consider all 

evidence when deciphering ancient societal 

behaviour. The idea of infant sacrifice 

in Carthage is not based on a study of 

cremated remains, but on instances of 

human sacrifice reported by a few ancient 

chroniclers, inferred from ambiguous 

inscriptions, and referenced in the Old 

Testament. Our results show that some 


The Medusa in Caesarea 

Art is a very useful index of the spread of 

mythology and artistic taste in the Roman 

Empire. This is especially true of Medusa, one 

of the three gorgon sisters, who had snakes for 

hair and – according to Graeco-Roman myth – 

could turn those who looked at her into stone. 

Medusa is depicted in stone as the centrepiece 

of a new open-air exhibition in northern 

Israel, ‘Medusas in Caesarea Harbour’. 

Medusa was a common motif in Roman 

art, appearing on bronzes, floor mosaics, 

architectural sculpture, and military 

paraphernalia – the Gorgoneion – to ward off 

evil and enemies. This fine example, dating 

to the 3 rd century AD, also contains motifs 

of theatrical masks – perhaps intended to 

entertain in the afterlife – and was recovered in 

the course of extensive excavations conducted 

in a necropolis adjacent to the ancient city. It 

weighs a staggering four tonnes. Sarcophagi of 

this character were unique to elite members of 

society, and it may have contained the remains 

of a local official, a female aristocrat, or a 

member of the priesthood. The ethnicity of the 

sarcophagus’s occupant is unclear, but because 

the originally pagan practice of interment 

in sarcophagi later spread to all religions in 

the region, he or she could have been pagan, 

Jewish, Samaritan, or even Christian. 

Caesarea emerged as a flourishing 

Hellenised urban centre from 22 BC onwards 

under Herod the Great, who dedicated the 

former city of Straton’s Tower to his great 

patron Augustus (r. 27 BC – AD 14). The 

city was capital of Judea and of the province 

Carthage debunked 

children were sacrificed, but contradict the 

conclusion that Carthaginians regularly 

sacrificed their own children.’ 

Schwartz and his colleagues analysed 

the remains of children found in tophets, 

burial sites peripheral to conventional 

Carthaginian cemeteries for older children 

and adults. Tophets housed urns containing 

the cremated remains of young children 

and animals, which led to the theory that 

they were reserved for victims of sacrifice. 

The researchers examined the skeletal 

remains from 348 urns for developmental 

markers that would determine the children’s 

age at death. Schwartz and Houghton 

recorded skull, hip, long bone and tooth 

measurements, which indicated that most 

of the children died in their first year, with 

a sizeable number aged only two to five 

months, and that at least 20 percent of the 

sample was prenatal. 


Marble sarcophagus lid carved with a bas-relief depicting Medusa, 3 rd century AD. 

Photo: courtesy of the Israel Antiquities Authority. 

of Palaestina Prima after the reforms of 

Diocletian (r. AD 284 - 305). Other finds 

displayed in the current exhibition include 

a piece of building fabric with a dedicatory 

inscription by a female named Cleopatra, and 

a sarcophagus with an inscription dedicated 

by Eliphis to his wife Manophila. Dedicatory 

Schwartz and Houghton then selected 

teeth from 50 individuals they concluded 

had died before or shortly after birth, 

and examined these for a neonatal line. 

This opaque band forms in human teeth 

between the interruption of enamel 

production at birth and its resumption 

within two weeks of life, and is used to 

determine an infant’s age at death. A 

neonatal line was present in the teeth of 24 

individuals, meaning the others had died 

prenatally or within two weeks of birth. 

The contents of the urns also dispel 

the possibility of mass infant sacrifice, as 

none contained enough skeletal material 

to suggest the presence of more than two 

complete individuals. Although many urns 

contained some superfluous fragments 

belonging to additional children, the 

researchers concluded that these bones 

remained from previous cremations. 

inscriptions of this character are commonly 

found in the Romano-Byzantine Levant and 

provide an informative index of family ties 

and patronage. This is the first of several 

planned exhibitions in the harbour compound 

at Caesarea. 


The team’s report also disputes the 

contention that Carthaginians specifically 

sacrificed first-born males. Schwartz and 

Houghton determined sex by measuring 

the sciatic notch (a crevice at the rear of 

the pelvis that is wider in females) of 70 

hip bones. They discovered that 38 pelvises 

came from females and 26 from males. 

Two others were likely to be female, one 

probably male, and three undetermined. 

Schwartz and his colleagues conclude 

that the high incidence of prenatal and 

infant mortality are consistent with modern 

data on stillbirths, miscarriages and infant 

death. If conditions in other ancient cities 

were comparable with Carthage, young 

and unborn children could have easily 

succumbed to the diseases and sanitary 

shortcomings found in such cities as Rome 

and Pompeii. 


5


The ‘golden bough’ is found in Italy 

Italian archaeologists claim to have found a stone enclosure 

that once protected the legendary ‘golden bough’. The 

discovery was made whilst excavating a sanctuary in the 

Alban hills north of Rome, by a team led by Filippo Coarelli, 

a recently retired Professor of archaeology at Perugia 

University. The researchers believe that the enclosure was 

built by the Latins to protect a large cypress or oak tree. The 

stone enclosure is in the middle of an area that contains 

the ruins of an immense sanctuary dedicated to Diana, the 

goddess of hunting. Finds of pottery fragments dating to 

the 13 th or 12 th centuries BC indicate that the site was in use 

during the mid or late Italian Bronze Age. 

Prof Christopher Smith, the head of the British School 

at Rome, commented: ‘It’s an intriguing discovery and 

adds evidence to the fact that this was an extraordinarily 

important sanctuary.’ 

In the Aeneid, Virgil tells of the Trojan hero Aeneas’ 

journey to the underworld. Anchises, Aeneas’ dead father, 

appears to his son to tell him to visit the underworld, where 

he will learn what the future holds for his people. Aeneas 

must first find the oracle Sibyl of Cumae, who will lead 

him to the land of the dead – but she informs him that he 

cannot pass through the underworld without the golden 

bough. Two doves lead him through the forest to an oak 

tree bearing a sacred branch, and he and the Sibyl enter 

the underworld together. The bough allows the hero to 

pass safely through various hazards, and be taken by the 

boatman Charon across River Acheron to the kingdom of 

Hades. There he finds the spirit of his father. 

The sacred oak branch described in the Aeneas myth also 

gives its name to The Golden Bough, a highly influential 

study of myth and religion published in 1890 by Sir James 

Frazer (1854-1941). 


The Museum of Classical Archaeology at 

Cambridge reopened to the public in April. 

With more than 600 plaster casts of Graeco- 

Roman sculpture, of which 450 are on 

display, the collection is one of the largest of 

ancient statuary in the world. First opened 

in 1884, the museum provides an invaluable 

resource for students from Cambridge 

University, specialists and the public. 

Although none of the works of art on show 

are original, all the sculptures, reliefs, vases, 

and shards of pottery are accurate replicas 

cast from the originals, allowing most of the 

great sculptures created during antiquity to 

be viewed together in a single location. 

The collection is important not only as a 

teaching tool, but because it preserves the 

form of artworks that have subsequently 

been destroyed or damaged. For example, 

the Lysicrates Monument in Athens, built 

In the neighb’ring grove 

There stands a tree; the queen of Stygian Jove 

Claims it her own; thick woods and gloomy night 

Conceal the happy plant from human sight. 

One bough it bears; but (wondrous to behold!) 

The ductile rind and leaves of radiant gold: 

This from the vulgar branches must be torn… 

Cambridge cast gallery reopens 

in 334 BC, has become gravely eroded as a 

result of the city’s air pollution over the past 

century. The museum’s copy, cast in the 18 th 

century, preserves some of the figures that 

have been worn away from the late Classical 

monument, allowing researchers a better 

understanding of the monument than from 

study of the original. 

One of the most famous casts in the 

museum is that of the Peplos Kore. While 

the original statue, carved from white 

Parian marble, stands in the recently opened 

Acropolis Museum in Athens (see Minerva, 

November/December 2009, pp. 8-11), the 

cast at Cambridge is presented in the vibrant 

colours that were painted on the statue when 

it was first erected on the Athenian Acropolis 

in c. 530 BC. The cast therefore provides a 

good impression of how the sculpture was 

originally intended to be viewed when it was 

created during the Archaic period. 

The reproductions in the museum also 

allow sections of statues that have become 

broken and separated over the years to be 

reunited. A plaster cast of another Archaic 

kore from the Acropolis of Athens – known 

as the Lyon kore because the upper body 

and head are in the French city – is reunited 

in cast form at Cambridge with the other 

surviving pieces of the statue, which are 

currently on display in the Greek capital. 

The Museum of Classical Art is housed in 

the Classics Faculty building on Sidgwick 

Avenue, Cambridge. Entrance to the museum 

is free. 

For further information about the 

museum, and access to the online database 

of the collection of casts, visit http://www. 

classics.cam.ac.uk/museum/ 



Roman 

aqueduct 

unearthed 

in Jerusalem 

A team of archaeologists has recently 

identified a large section of the high-level 

aqueduct system that supplied the Roman 

city of Jerusalem. The find was made under 

the direction of Dr Ofer Sion as part of an 

excavation conducted under the auspices of 

the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) in the 

area inside the Jaffa Gate in the west of the Old 

City. The section of aqueduct is 1.5m above the 

original ground level, with an internal conduit 

width of 60cm, and is preserved for 40m in 

length with inspection shafts placed at 15m 

intervals – a characteristic of many Roman 

aqueducts for purposes of maintenance (often 

to clear limescale, known as sinter in civil 

engineering terms). 

Sion and his colleagues have confirmed that 

this section of aqueduct corresponds to the 

EGyPT NEWS 

Discovery of the remains of Queen 

Behenu’s pyramid at Saqqara 

French archaeologists excavating at Saqqara, in the necropolis 

of the 6 th dynasty pharaoh Pepi I (reigned c. 2332 - 2283 BC) 

have discovered the tomb of queen Behenu, containing an intact 

sarcophagus within. Although it has not yet been confirmed, it 

is thought Behenu was one of several wives of Pepi II (reigned c. 

2278 - 2184 BC), who, on succeeding Merenre (c. 2283 - 2278 

BC) to the throne as an infant, is recorded as reigning for 94 

years, the longest of any pharaoh. 

Also discovered by the archaeologists were the broken and 

scattered remains of Pyramid Texts belonging to the Queen. 

These focused on rituals concerning the resurrection and 

afterlife. Only 11 other tombs have been found containing these 

texts, the earliest religious writing in Egypt. The importance of 

the Pyramid Texts was stressed by Philippe Collombert, who 

heads the mission sponsored by the French Ministry of Foreign 

Affairs: ‘Pyramid Texts are the first compass of writing in the 

world. This is the very first huge grouping of text in the history 

of the world. That’s why it’s so important to find these Pyramid 

Texts, even if they’re the same as those found in other pyramids. 

Sometimes one sentence will change and some new words and 

sentences will appear with formulas for the afterlife.’ 

Unfortunately, Behenu’s pyramid, like most of the others 

located at the necropolis, was heavily damaged during the 

Mamluk period (c. AD 1250 - 1517), when the limestone 

casings were removed and stone was quarried from the funerary 

chambers, often leaving little more than a mound of rubble for 

archaeologists to investigate. 


Section of Roman aqueduct channel recently discovered near the Jaffa Gate in Jerusalem, 

2 nd century AD. Photo: Assaf Peretz, courtesy of the Israel Antiquities Authority. 

water conduit identified by German architect, 

archaeologist and Protestant missionary Dr 

Conrad Schick in advance of construction 

work in 1898. Originally, the channel formed 

part of the high-level aqueduct system that 

supplied water to the Palace of King Herod and 

the Pool of Hezekiah. The low-level aqueduct 

fed water to the area of the Second Temple and 

supplied the Pools of Bethesda and Siloam – 

now attested archaeologically – where Jesus is 

known to have carried out his healings in the 

days prior to the Crucifixion (see Minerva, 

July/August 2009, pp. 19-23). 

It has been ascertained that the high-level 

channel was part of the new system supplying 

the city rebuilt by Hadrian (r. AD 117-138) 

as Aelia Capitolina after it was razed in the 

Bar Kokhba Revolt of AD 135. Both branches 

of the system were supplied by Solomon’s 

Pools, three impressive cisterns located 5km 

south-west of Bethlehem – incorrectly named 

after the biblical king. These had a combined 

capacity of an estimated 200 million litres 

and were supplied by a series of underground 

springs. The cisterns were configured as a 

cascade system, with a height differential of 

6m, and were fed by a rock-cut tunnel and 

connected to the Jerusalem supply lines in 

the same manner. Collectively, this ingenious 

system represents yet another magnificent 

achievement of Roman civil engineering. 


Funerary temple statues discovered 

at Kom el-Hettan 

It was announced in late March that two statues had been 

discovered during routine work being carried out to reduce 

groundwater levels close to the funerary temple of Amenhotep III 

(reigned c. 1386 -1349 BC) at Kom el-Hettan on the west bank 

of the Nile near Luxor. Both statues were carved from red granite, 

the first depicting Amenhotep together with the god Re-Horakhty, 

while the second is of the god of wisdom, Thoth, shown with 

the head of a baboon. A large fragment of a statue carved from 

calcite was also unearthed during the maintenance work, and 

has also been tentatively identified as dating to the reign of 

Amenhotep III. Excavations in the area around Kom el-Hettan will 

remain in progress in the hope of recovering additional statues 

that were once placed within the funerary temple. 

Registering Egypt’s privately owned 

antiquities 

In order to meet new government regulations concerning the 

ownership of antiquities by Egyptians (see Minerva, March/April, 

p.7), on 10 March the country’s Culture Minister announced 

the setting up of a committee that will inspect and register any 

privately owned artefacts. Under the terms of the new legislation, 

which was brought into effect at the start of February to reinforce 

the country’s ban on the trade in antiquities, Egyptians who 

possess historic artefacts must register them with the committee, 

which is affiliated to the Supreme Council of Antiquities. 


7

New Kingdom royalty 


Tutankhamun was a clubfooted, 

inbred teenager with 

a cleft palate, who probably 

died as a result of an infection 

from a broken leg and complications 

resulting from malaria. These are 

just some of the long-awaited findings 

of a study undertaken in Egypt over the 

last two years. Using the latest scientific 

procedures, the objective of the study 

was first to discover the much-debated 

reasons behind the early death of 

Tutankhamun. Secondly, the researchers 

set out to unravel the complicated 

and highly incestuous family lineage 

of the young pharaoh and the other 

royal members of the 18 th dynasty who 

ruled Egypt’s New Kingdom from the 

mid 16 th through to the beginning of 

the 13 th century BC. While not without 

8 

DNA 

James Beresford reviews recently 

published results of a two-year 

research programme analysing 

the teenage pharaoh and other 

members of New Kingdom royalty 

Fig 1. The gold 

death mask from 

Tutankhamun’s middle 

coffin, Cairo Museum. 

Photo: D. Williams. 

Fig 2. Dr Hawass 

(left) and his team of 

researchers extracting 

DNA from the mummy 

of Tutankhamen. 

Photo: The Press 

Association. 

1 

its critics, the new research has offered 

some extremely interesting findings 

that will be scrutinised by scientists 

long into the future. 

In addition to Tutankhamun, ten 

other royal mummies, known or 

believed to have been closely related 

to the young pharaoh, were also examined. 

The remains of an additional 

five mummies dating to the early New 

Kingdom were also included in the 

study to act as a control group. All 16 

mummies were subjected to detailed 

study, with the results released in 

the Journal of the American Medical 

Association (JAMA) in February, while 

the leader of the research team, Dr Zahi 

Hawass, Secretary-General of Egypt’s 

Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA), 

also presented some of the more sensational 

results of the two-year study 

during a press conference. 

Using a Computed Tomography 

(CT) unit, 12 of the mummies held at 

Cairo Museum were scanned, as were 

those of Tutankhamun and two other 

bodies recovered from tomb KV35 in 

Luxor. (The only mummy not scanned 

was that of Ahmose-Nefertari, wife of 

pharaoh Ahmose I, c.1550-1525 BC.) 

Alongside the CT scans, a series of 

DNA tests was also carried out on all 

the mummies, except that of Thutmose 

II (c. 1493-1479 BC). Between two and 

four biopsies were performed on each 

mummy (Fig 2). Samples extracted 

from the bone tissues of the mummies 

underwent two types of analysis. 

Specific nuclear DNA sequences 

from the Y-chromosome – which is 

passed down through the male line, 

from father to son – were tested in 

order to determine the paternal line. 

Alongside this, microsatellites were 

examined; these repeated sequences 

of DNA acted as ‘genetic fingerprints’ 

and allowed the researchers to trace 

the genealogy of many members of the 

18 th dynasty, resulting in the production 

of a family tree for Tutankhamun 

that spanned five generations. 

That such an invasive procedure 

required to retrieve the DNA was 

carried out at all is remarkable. Dr 

Hawass himself has long been adamant 

that such examinations should 

not be inflicted on Egyptian mummies 

because DNA would not have 

survived the mummification process 

or the heat and humidity of thousands 

of years in an Egyptian tomb. A scientific 

paper published in the American 

2 

Journal of Physical Anthropology in 

2005 also summed up research into the 

viability of DNA survival in ancient 

Egyptian mummies: ‘To conclude, we 

find that the thermal history of most, 

if not all, ancient Egyptian material 

argues against the recovery of DNA. 

Consequently, such claims should continue 

to be considered skeptically.’ 

What may have helped persuade Dr 

Hawass and the SCA to undertake the 

recent research was funding from the 

Discovery Channel (which also gained 

filming rights for the research), allowing 

the equipping of a new DNA laboratory 

at the Egyptian Museum in 

Cairo. The establishment of this new 

laboratory alongside the one at the 

National Research Center in Cairo 

meant that DNA testing could be carried 

out independently at two different 

locations in the Egyptain capital 

without the need to involve any foreign 

institutions, a source of great pride for 

the Egyptian scientists. 

More importantly, the use of two 

seperate laboratories eliminated any 

possibility of contamination of the 

ancient DNA by the research staff 

affecting the final results. According to 

the report in the JAMA, ‘because the 

[genetic] profile differed from those of 

the laboratory staff and were not identical 

to the ones established for the 

control group [of mummies] the data 

were considered authentic’. The fact the 

DNA was extracted from the bone also 

offered a greater chance that the samples 

would be free from contamination. 

Nevertheless, the long years in which 

the mummies have been poked, prodded, 

and sweated over by Egyptologists 

makes it difficult to rule out the possibility 

that modern DNA has permeated 

into the bone, corrupting the tests 

and leading to distorted results. 

Despite such concerns, the results 

from the DNA tests offer the chance to 

closely map Tutankhamun’s immediate 

Minerva May/June 2010

lineage. Perhaps the most momentous 

announcement of the entire project 

was that the DNA fingerprinting 

has allowed the researchers to conclude 

that the father of the boy king 

was the unidentified mummy found in 

tomb KV55, and that the poorly preserved 

body is probably that of the 

infamous heretic pharaoh, Akhenaten 

(Figs 4, 5). As Dr Hawass noted: 

‘The analysis proves conclusively that 

Tutankhamun’s father was the mummy 

found in KV55. The project’s CT scan 

of this mummy provides an age at death 

of between 45 and 55 for this mummy. 

Most earlier forensic studies had put 

forth an age of 20-25, which would be 

too young for Akhenaten, who came to 

the throne as an adult and ruled for 17 

years. The new CT scan proves that this 

mummy is almost certainly Akhenaten 

himself… The DNA also traces a direct 

line from Tutankhamun through the 

KV55 mummy to Akhenaten’s father 

Amenhotep III.’ 

Tomb KV55 – its entrance lying 

barely a dozen metres from the opening 

to Tutankhamun’s tomb of KV62, 

– was found in 1907 by Edward Ayrton 

(Fig 6). Inside, both the walls of the 

tomb and the mummy itself were badly 

damaged by water sepage, and identifying 

the body had been impossible 

because all the cartouches on the coffin 

had been obliterated. Originally 

thought to have been the body of Queen 

Tiye, the mummy was later identified 

as male and, until the latest research, 

had generally been linked to 

that of Smenkhkare, the little-known 

pharaoh who 

seems to have briefly succeeded 

to the throne on 

the death of Akhenaten. 

If the KV55 mummy 

is indeed that of 

Akhenaten, then the 

body of the most controversial 

pharaoh 


Fig 3. The Northern 

Palace at the site 

of Amarna. Photo: 

James Beresford. 

Fig 4. Limestone 

profile of Akhenaten, 

c. 1350-1334 BC. 

Unknown provenance, 

H. 14.4cm. Neues 

Museum, Berlin. Photo: 

George Groutas. 

Fig 5. Sandstone 

statue of Akhenaten, 

c. 1350-1334 BC. H. 

124cm. Luxor Museum 

Photo: Oscar Dahl. 

5 

3 

ever to rule Egypt has finally been 

identified. This will put an end to years 

of speculation surrounding the final 

resting place of a king whose theological 

focus on a single god, the Aten – the 

worship of which was centered on the 

newly created city at Amarna (Fig 3) – 

was a radical departure from the traditional 

pantheon of deities controlled 

by the powerful priesthood in Thebes. 

The DNA testing also indicated that 

Tutankhamun’s mother was probably 

the ‘Younger Lady’ found in tomb 

KV35, and that she was of royal blood, 

probably the daughter of Amenhotep 

III and Queen Tiye. It would therefore 

appear that she was full sister as well as 

wife to Akhenaten. If this is confirmed, 

then Tutankhamun’s family tree was 

extremely well pruned, a fact noted 

by Dr Hawass during his press conference: 

‘Tut’s only grand-parents, on both 

his paternal and maternal sides, were 

Amenhotep III and Tiye.’ 

Such inbreeding may also explain 

the two stillborn foetuses discovered 

in Tutankhamun’s tomb by 

Howard Carter in 1922. Their mummified 

remains were among those 

included in the recent research study 

and indicate that they were children 

of Tutankhamun, while their mother 

was probably the previously unidentified 

mummy found in KV21 in 1817. 

If this assumption is correct, then 

this is almost certainly the body of 

Ankhesenamen, the queen and only 

known wife of Tutankhamun (Fig 

7). Ankhesenamen may have 

been a half-sister of 

Tutankhamun, further 

‘evidence’ of 

the inbred nature of 

Egypt’s 18 th dynasty, 

and possibly a 

major reason for 

the stillbirth of the 

two foetuses. 

However, if the 


4 

research team are correct in identifying 

Ankhesenamen and Tutankhamun 

as the parents of the two foetuses, then 

the DNA results raise new problems. 

The genetic fingerprinting indicates 

that if the KV21 mummy is indeed 

Tutankhamun’s queen Ankhesenamen, 

then the DNA taken from the remains 

of the two foetuses appears to show 

that the mummy in KV55, identified 

as Akhenaten, was not their maternal 

grandfather. If this is correct, then 

either Ankhesenamen was not the 

mother of the stillborn babies in his 

tomb, or she was not the daughter 

of Akhenaten and his beautiful wife 

Nefertiti (Fig 8), despite the strong 

historical evidence in support of this 

being Ankhesenamen’s parentage. 

Instead of identifying the mummy 

from KV55 as that of Akhenaten, there 

is a possibly that it is, as originally 

thought, the body of the enigmatic 

pharaoh Smenkhkare. If this is the case, 

then the DNA would seem to prove 

that Smenkhkare was the father of 

Tutankhamun and, like Akhenaten, he 

was a son of Amenhotep III. However, 

given the inbreeding and incestuous 

nature of 18 th dynasty marriages, as 

9


6 7 

well as the limited historical sources 

that survive from this period, constructing 

a family tree deciphering the 

genetic data remains exceptionally difficult 

and will no doubt remain contentious 

well into the future. 

Akhenaten and other royalty 

of the Amarna period, including 

Tutankhamun, are often depicted 

with a strange and somewhat feminised 

physique (Figs 5, 7). This has 

led to speculation that male members 

of the royal family had a form of gynaecomastia 

which saw them develop 

abnormally large mammary glands 

resulting in enlarged, female-like 

breasts. Scholars have also theorised 

that Akhenaten and Tutankhamun 

suffered from Marfan syndrome, a 

hereditary genetic disorder that will 

often cause elongated, slender arms 

and legs, and can produce other skeletal 

problems such as curvature of the 

spine (scoliosis). Sufferers will sometimes 

also have either an abnormally 

hollowed chest or, conversely, an 

abnormally protruding sternum. 

Such disorders have therefore 

been readily equated with many 

of the highly unusual physical 

features with which Akhenaten is 

portrayed. 

Unfortunately, even if the 

recent study published in the 

JAMA is correct in assuming 

that the KV55 mummy is 

Akhenaten, the poorly preserved 

skeletal remains make identifying 

physiological characteristics 

impossible. Similarly, because 

the front of Tutankhamun’s 

chest wall is missing, and his 

pelvic bones have also been 

removed, it is impossible to detect 

any traits associated with gynaecomastia 

or Marfan syndrome from 

either of the mummies. The researchers 

did carry out tests for dolichocephaly, 

which sometimes results from 

Marfan syndrome and can cause 

10 

Fig 6. The Valley of 

the Kings on the west 

bank of the Nile near 

Luxor. Photo: 

Oscar Dahl. 

Fig 7. Back of 

the throne from 

Tutankhamun’s tomb. 

The scene depicts 

the young pharaoh 

seated while his wife 

Ankhesenamen stands 

to the right. The rays 

of the sun disc, the 

Aten, reach down from 

above. Cairo Museum. 

Photo: D. Williams. 


and stucco bust of 

Nefertiti, sculptured 

c. 1345 BC by 

Thutmose at Amarna. 

H. 19cm. Neues 

Museum, Berlin. Photo: 

George Groutas. 

8 

the premature fusion of the sagittal 

suture on top of the skull, leading to 

the head becoming disproportionately 

long and narrow. This is reflected in 

the art of Amarna, in which the heads 

of Akhenaten and other royal members 

appear very elongated. However, 

CT scans revealed that neither the 

skull of the KV55 mummy nor that of 

Tutankhamun exhibited any sign of the 

sutures closing prematurely early. The 

researchers also measured the shape 

of both mummy skulls and found that, 

rather than being abnormally longheaded 

(dolichocephalic) both were 

in fact short-headed (brachycephalic). 

After testing all the mummies associated 

with the 18 th dynasty, the report 

in the JAMA emphasises that ‘a Marfan 

diagnosis cannot be supported in these 

mummies’. 

The research did, however, reveal 

that Tutankhamun suffered from a 

bone disorder known as Köhler disease, 

which inhibits the flow of blood to the 

feet. It was stressed by Dr Hawass during 

his press conference that: ‘The 

CT scan also revealed that the 

king had a lame foot, caused 

by avascular bone necrosis. 

This conclusion is supported 

Egyptologically by 

the presence of over one hundred 

walking sticks in the tomb 

and by images of the king performing 

activities such as hunting 

while seated.’ Some scholars have 

claimed that the published images of 

the recent scans do not clearly lead to a 

diagnosis of a loss of blood flow (osteonecrosis) 

to two of the metatarsal bones 

of Tutankhamun’s left foot. Instead it 

has been suggested the deformities in 

the young pharaoh’s foot may be the 

result of the embalming and mummification 

process. However, the reported 

signs of new bone growth in the foot as 

a reaction to the necrosis would appear 

to confirm that Tutankhamun suffered 

from osteonecrosis and had 

a lame foot. This disability may also 

explain the fracture in Tutankhamun’s 

left thigh – unhealed at the time of his 

death – which was discovered during 

a previous examination of the king’s 

body, a breakage that may have been 

the result of the pharaoh suffering a 

heavy fall through being unable to 

walk properly on his lame leg. While 

Dr Hawass may be correct in regarding 

the presence of 131 walking sticks 

in Tutankhamun’s tomb as a reflection 

of the pharaoh’s club foot, it is also possible 

that the canes primarily fulfilled 

ceremonial and symbolic rather than 

medical functions. 

The researchers concluded that the 

osteonecrosis of Tutankhamun’s left 

foot and the fracture of his thigh, in 

combination with malarial infection, 

probably lead to the pharaoh’s early 

death. The DNA results certainly prove 

that Tutankhamun, together with three 

of the other mummies tested, was 

infected with the Plasmodium falciparum 

malaria parasite. This may have 

led to a weakening of the pharaoh’s 

health and contributed to his early 

death. The malarial infection also possibly 

explains the presence of medicinal 

seeds, leaves, and fruits found 

in Tutankhamun’s tomb. However, 

other experts are cautious of attributing 

the young king’s death to malaria 

since many people living in malarious 

regions contract the disease in childhood 

but gain partial immunity in 

later life. While Tutankhamun’s DNA 

appears to show that he suffered from 

malaria, there is no definitive proof that 

the disease was the cause of his death. 

Malaria had already been detected 

in Egyptian mummies thought to be 

older than those of the 18 th dynasty. 

However, the recent research is interesting 

in that none of the mummies 

had tuberculosis, leprosy, bubonic 

plague, or many of the other diseases 

that have troubled human populations 

in later periods of history. n 


Greek sculpture 

Beauty or truth 

Murray Eiland examines a new book on the Classical Greek ideal of the 

human body, as revealed by sculptures in the British Museum. 

The classical conception of 

the human form is often 

misunderstood in modern 

culture. When the phrase ‘a 

body like a Greek god’ is used, it often 

simply refers to musculature. This 

was clearly part of the equation, but 

the Greek ideal of human perfection 

goes beyond muscular development. 

Modern bodybuilders, for instance, 

would probably not have been considered 

beautiful in ancient Greece. On a 

physical level, the male athlete should 

have a body with certain proportions. 

The shoulders should be larger than 

the waist; the arms, neck, and calves 

of similar size. Bulging muscles would 

not be desired. Perhaps the 

toned bodies of modern 

swimmers come closest 

to the ideal. As with so 

many other aspects of 

culture, conceptions of 

beauty were also bound 

up with social mores. Then, 

as now, the majority of the population 

idolised successful athletes. However, 

the elite of ancient Greece had a distinctive 

set of rules for determining 

what constituted perfection. 

With The Greek Body, Ian Jenkins 

and Victoria Turner have written a 

book that covers this subject, based 

upon the comprehensive collections 

of the British Museum. 

Such a thematic volume should 

provide inspiration to find 

the pieces that are distributed 

throughout the collections. Select 

objects from other museums are 

also presented to assess the accuracy 

of Roman copies of Greek 

originals, as well as to make up for 

missing originals. For all practical 

purposes, the book is produced 

as if it were a catalogue for a major 

exhibition. 

Lying at the most abstract 

end of scale, representing 

an early depiction of the 

human form, the authors 

have selected a clay 

‘plank’ figurine from 

Cyprus (Fig 6). Dating 

from the Bronze Age, 

it demonstrates why 

artistic expression is 

12 

Fig 1. A Roman period 

copy of Myron’s 

diskobolos (the 

Lancellotti Diskobolos), 

Museo Nazionale, 

Rome. H. 169cm. 

Fig 2. Reconstruction 

by Georg Römer of 

the spear bearer by 

Polykleitos of Argos, 

based upon Roman 

period copies. H. 221cm. 

1 

linked to technical mastery. The head 

of the figure is portrayed as a smaller 

flat rectangle in relation to the body. 

Facial detail consists of incised lines 

and small lumps of ears and a projecting 

nose. The geometric detail on the 

body probably indicates clothing. The 

main focus is the crudely modelled 

arms, which cradle a baby, and there 

is one exposed breast. It is no surprise 

that the figure is taken to be connected 

with fertility. Many of the earliest figurines 

from Europe are female, which 

has led a number of scholars to suggest 

that there was heightened importance 

given to women at this time. Whatever 

the case in distant antiquity, by the 

the 5 th century BC and the start of the 

Classical period, particular attention 

was paid to the male body. 

Plato’s dialogue, Charmides, 

describes how Socrates, following his 

return from military service in 431 

BC, went to the wrestling school of 

Taureas where he saw Charmides, a 

youth said to be 

aprosopos – so 

perfect he represented 

a type 

and not just 

an individual. Socrates 

observed his grace and 

charm, and saw that the 

boy did nothing to encourage his 

admirers, also noting that he had 

a mentality to match his physical 

attributes. Socrates was himself a 

balding, snub-nosed, pug faced and 

pot bellied follower of Dionysos, but 

he extolled the cultivation of body as 

well as mind. The rulers of ancient 

Greece had long acclaimed these virtues, 

at least among their youth. 

Those from the right families were 

not encouraged to engage in leisure 

pursuits, but rather to aspire to arete 

or excellence. To excel in athletics and 

public speaking took hard discipline 

and long training, but being able to 

serve the city as a politician or a warrior 

was highly regarded. Then, as now, 

a life cut short secured fame. Dying in 

defence of one’s city was considered a 

beautiful death (kalos thanatos). The 

kouros statues of the 6 th century BC 

represented the ideal of the Greek 

body for the age (Fig 3). The posture 

2 


Fig 3. Kouros of Kroisos, National 

Archaeological Museum of Athens. 

530 BC. H. 195cm. 

appears formal, but already it is a 

departure from ancient Egyptian sculptures, 

whose models they had initially 

followed. The Greek kouros statues, 

with weight balanced between both 

legs rather on the back leg, show a 

more naturalistic appreciation of 

musculature. The legs were freed 

of their bridge of stone. The so 

called ‘archaic smile’ also appears 

on the figures. It can be seen as 

expressing self-content, if not 

self-satisfaction, in pursuit of 

excellence. The famous kouros 

of Kroisos bears theepitath: 

‘Stay and mourn at dead 

Kroisos’ tomb; Whom in the 

first ranks raging Ares did 

destroy’. Grave markers of 

the Classical period may express grief 

rather than a smile, but to the Greeks at 

this time, it was a beautiful death. 

As a rule, women were idealised in 

a very different way from men. Most 

obviously, the young woman of the 


Fig 5. Marble kore 

from Athens, 100-30 

BC (copying a much 

earlier style). H. 56cm. 

Fig 6. Red polished 

ware figure of a 

woman with a child. 

Cyprus, 1975-1850 

BC. H. 26cm. 

Fig 7. Terracotta 

group of 

Aphrodite and 

Eros, 300-100 

BC. Although 

said to be 

from Tanagra 

it is also 

possible it is 

from Anatolia. 

H. 27.5cm. 

6 

Fig 4. Aphrodite of Knidos, 2 nd century 

AD, copy of original of c. 360 BC. Vatican 

Museums. H. 210cm. 

archaic period, represented as korai, 

were always dressed (Fig 5). There is 

some debate as to whether they were 

intended to represent humans or deities, 

so there may not be an exact correlation 

with male figures made at the 

same time. From surviving colour it 

is clear many had bright clothing 

and jewellery. They also often 

bear a restrained smile. 

This implies some degree 

of modesty that continued 

to be seen throughout 

Classical Greek 

civilisation. There 

was no conception 

of the ‘heroic nude’ 

when depicting a 

female body. Nudity 

was usually reserved 

for scenes involving cults, 

rape, or the sex industry. 

Women were typically 

painted with light complexions 

while, because 

7 

5 


of their outdoor pursuits, men were 

usually portrayed as tanned. However, 

there were exceptions to every rule. 

The Spartans expected all members 

of their society to be strong, and outdoor 

pursuits were encouraged in 

young women so that they would bear 

healthy children and raise powerful 

warriors. Foot-races for girls, held at 

Olympia in honour of Hera – who covered 

marriage in her purview – were a 

time when the female body could be 

partially exposed. Pausanias, writing in 

the 2 nd century AD, describes the runners 

at the race at Olympia: ‘…their hair 

hangs down, a tunic reaches to a little 

above the knee, and they bare the right 

shoulder as far as the breast’ (Fig 10). 

Classical depictions of goddesses 

often follow different standards from 

those of humans. Aphrodite can be 

portrayed as a relatively demure 

woman in a cloak with her head 

covered by a headdress 

(Fig 7). In contrast, 

other images can leave 

little to the imagination, 

emphasising her attributes 

as the goddess of 

love, beauty and sexuality. 

A well known example, 

which survives in copies, is 

by the sculptor Praxiteles 

(Fig 4). The original lifesized 

statue, dating to the 

late 3 rd or 2 nd century BC in 

marble or bronze, graced 

the temple at Knidos in 

south-western Anatolia. 

Early generations of arthistorians 

regarded the 

13


original as a turning point in Classical 

sculpture. Before Praxiteles, only male 

statues were naked, but after his statue 

was placed in Knidos, a number of 

sculptors portrayed the goddess nude. 

Sculptures of this type are in keeping 

with what is known of the sexual nature 

of the deity, and possibly also indicate 

a change in the way women were perceived. 

Jenkins and Turner note that 

while this was not the first such nude 

Aphrodite, it was nonetheless an innovative 

and extremely lifelike statue. Of 

all the goddesses, she is the only one 

who is regularly shown nude in Greek 

art. However, while masterpieces of 

this kind could grace elite homes, it is 

clear that household figurines made of 

clay in a more conservative style were 

produced for centuries after the mores 

of the elite had changed. 

Polykleitos of Argos (c. 440-430 

BC), was regarded as one of a handful 

of great sculptors of Classical antiquity. 

None of his original works survive, 

although there are a number of Roman 

copies. One of his best known is the 

Doryphoros or ‘Spear-carrier’ (Fig 2). 

The artist pays particular attention to 

the human form, contrasting stretching 

and contracting, and tensing and 

relaxing. Polykleitos wrote a treatise 

called The Kanon – now lost – which 

14 

Fig 8. Greek bronze 

vessel, 2 nd -1 st century 

BC. H. 10.2cm. 

Fig 9. Bronze statuette 

of Dionysos, Greek 

but perhaps made in 

Taranto, Italy, 

c. 200 BC. From Chessy, 

France, H. 21.3cm. 

Fig 10. Bronze figure 

of a running girl, 

probably made in 

Laconia, 6 th century 

BC, said to be from 

Prizren, Kosova. 

H. 11cm. 

Fig 11. Pentelic marble 

grave relief, 4 th century 

BC probably from 

Athens. Head re-cut in 

the 1 st century AD. 

H. 179cm. 

Ancient Greek 

artists were able to 

capture the beauty as 

well as the diversity of 

everyday life 

proposed a precise set of measurements 

that were supposed to define 

the perfect male body. This was no 

doubt influenced by other works 

of the period, specifically those of 

Pythagoras, who defined perfect intervals 

in music. Not surprisingly, given 

that he had a well defined theoretical 

basis for his art, he attracted followers 

who also had a great impact upon 

Classical sculpture. 

Myron of Athens (c. mid-5 th century 

BC), also known in ancient 

Greece as an outstanding sculptor, 

may have influenced Polykleitos. He 

is not well represented in literature 

– the first reference of his name 

comes from the 3 rd century BC – 

and is best known for his bronzes. 

His depictions of athletes could be 

seen at Olympia, Delphi, and no doubt 

other places as well. 

Several Roman 

copies of his 

Diskobolos exist 

8 9 

10 

11 

(Fig 1). The attribution is based upon a 

description of his sculpture in Lucian 

(Philopseudes, 18) dating to about AD 

160. The pose of the figure is unique, 

and in this case there appears to be 

little doubt that the Roman statues 

are copies of this artist’s work. What 


is notable is that, unlike other artists 

from the period, Myron chose to capture 

a figure in motion. In the copies 

the athlete has pulled back and 

is preparing to throw the discus forward. 

However, as Jenkins and Turner 

note, it is not an accurate depiction of 

a throw, but a composition designed to 

show the ideal of male beauty, intended 

to be viewed from one angle. 

The School of Praxiteles of the 4 th 

century BC continued their quest to 

naturalise sculpture so that it should 

more closely imitate the human body. 

This school had a wide impact on the 

period, and was known for elongated 

figures with a proportionate decrease 

in the size of the head (Fig 13). The 

torso was also often portrayed with 

an S-shaped curve. Some scholars 

even describe his figures as ‘lounging’. 

Figures of this style can be viewed 

12 


Fig 12. Terracotta 

figure of a tattooed 

woman from Boeotia, 

350-290 BC. From 

Tanagra. H. 19cm. 

Fig 13. Marble statue, 

the ‘Farnese Hermes’ 

of the 1 st century AD, 

copying an original of 

the 4 th century BC of 

Praxiteles. H. 201cm. 

13 

from either side, rather than simply 

from the front. The face is also typically 

portrayed in three-quarter view. 

Jenkins and Turner point out that there 

is also a softening and blurring of the 

modelled parts of the torso, and an 

unusually fine finish 

that imitates 

flesh. The products 

of this 

school mark a 

definitive break 

with the past; 


the kouros was replaced by a new 

conception. 

Later Greek art could portray a variety 

of figures. The wine god Dionysos 

is a good example. Depictions of this 

deity are, perhaps not surprisingly, 

fleshy rather than athletic (Fig 9). 

Pursuit of pleasure has warped the 

ideal of physical excellence. Many grotesque 

or comical images were created 

from lesser materials, such as clay. 

Depictions of women who show their 

age, perhaps after careers as prostitutes 

or slaves, are known (Fig 12). It is hard 

not to imagine these were intended to 

be comical, yet they also remind the 

viewer of everyday life rather than an 

ideal world. At the same time ancient 

Greek artists were able to capture the 

beauty as well as the diversity of everyday 

life. With the attempted invasions 

of Greece by the Persians in 

the early 5 th century BC, and the conquests 

of Alexander the Great from 

334-323 BC, there was more interest 

in peoples from distant lands and 

more sculptures of foreigners were 

produced (Fig 8). On one hand, 

this can be interpreted as a 

fascination with the exotic; 

on the other, it is evidence 

that Greek art, for centuries 

concerned with expressing a 

type, was now considering the 

world as it truly was. 

The Romans’ fascination with 

the Greek world is well known. They 

were avid collectors of Classical sculptures, 

through looting, purchase, 

or the production of copies. Greek 

sculpture could be used in a variety 

of ways. One of the most interesting 

is a Greek gravestone dating to about 

350 BC (Fig 11). It commemorates 

a male who was probably not an athlete 

himself, but for aesthetic reasons, 

was portrayed as a perfect example 

of the human form. Around the time 

of the emperor Augustus, another 

male named Tryphon died. His name 

was carved above the figure in rather 

crude lettering. The head of the figure 

was also re-carved to resemble 

the emperor. It is almost certain that 

Tryphon did not resemble Augustus 

any more than the first possessor of 

the stele was an athlete. While past 

vanities may be amusing, the rationale 

can be easily understood. After all, 

who would not wish to have the body 

of a Greek god? n 

This article is based on The Greek 

Body by Ian Jenkins and Victoria 

Turner, British Museum Press, 2009. 

144pp. 132 colour illustrations. 

Hardback, £19.99. 

15

Greek seapower 


looks at the 

democratic legacy 

created by the 

trireme, the warship 

which propelled 

Classical Athens to 

naval supremacy. 

Some 45km to the south of 

Athens, perched above the 

craggy cliffs of Cape Sounion 

on the southern tip of Attica, 

stands the ruined temple of Poseidon 

(Fig 2). When constructed around 

the middle of the 5 th century BC, the 

temple, with its Doric columns of 

locally quarried white marble, was an 

invaluable coastal landmark for mariners. 

It also provided a reminder to 

passing sailors from all states that the 

Athenians were the favourites of the 

god of the sea, and it was with his 

blessing that the mighty navy of Attica 

held sway over the sea-lanes of the 

Aegean. This period of Athenian domination 

of the Eastern Mediterranean 

extended from the war against Persia 

in 480/79 BC until the establishment 

of Macedonian hegemony over Greece 

in 322 BC. 

As with the many other states and 

empires that crowded round the 

shores of the Mediterranean ‘like frogs 

around a pond’, as Plato described it, 

many Athenians looked to the sea for 

their livelihood, whether as sailors, 

seaborne traders, fishermen or even 

pirates. However, what would separate 

Athenians from all other maritime 

states during the Classical Age of Greek 

history was their unrivalled mastery of 

16 

1 

Ship of the 

people 

the trireme, the most powerful weapon 

of war yet to take to the waters of the 

world. Swift, manoeuvrable, and without 

equal as a warship, the trireme 

would allow Athens to project military 

and political power to any point 

in the known world that lay within 

reach of the sea. It was the slender 

hulls of fleets of triremes, propelled by 

the muscle and sinew of skilled rowers, 

that launched and maintained a golden 

age for Athens. The warship created 

and preserved the military, political, 

and economic conditions that allowed 

Athenian society to make great strides 

in philosophy, literature, and art, laying 

the foundations for much of the 

Western cultural tradition. 

Fig 1. Olympias under 

oars while undergoing 

sea-trials in 1988. 

Photo: Courtesy of The 

Trireme Trust. 

Fig 2. Marble columns 

from the Temple of 

Poseidon at Cape 

Sounion, constructed 

c. 450 BC. Photo: Jorge 

Orte Tudela. 

Fig 3. Reconstruction 

of a Late Roman 

Republican display 

of bronze rams and 

anchors stripped 

from captured enemy 

warships. Museum of 

Roman Civilisation, 

Rome. Photo: James 

Beresford. 

2 3 

No physical remains of a trireme 

have ever been recovered from the seabed, 

and even well funded expeditions 

to locations where ancient writers have 

described large numbers of triremes 

being sunk in naval engagements, or 

wrecked in storms, have failed to find 

any trace of the elusive galley. This 

should not come as a surprise, as the 

Classical trireme was built for speed 

and manoeuvrability and so was 

exceptionally light. Moreover, the ship 

carried no ballast, and the 200 rowers 

and sailors who crewed each vessel left 

virtually no room for cargo. Therefore, 

even when rammed and holed during 

combat, or broken up by the pounding 

waves of a storm, the vessels did not

sink and retained their positive buoyancy. 

Indeed, after most naval battles, 

if weather and sea conditions permitted, 

the triremes would be towed away 

by the victorious side and patched up 

and incorporated into their fleets. If 

they were too badly damaged, then the 

rams of captured enemy vessels were 

removed and placed on public display 

as trophies of victory (Fig 3). 

It is to be hoped that a Classical trireme 

will one day come to light, possibly 

excavated from the anaerobic mud 

of a riverbank on to which it was drawn 

and left when its fighting days came to 

an end. However, until that happens, 

all our information about these famous 

war-galleys comes from references in 

ancient literature and from the handful 

of reliefs, frescoes, sculptures, coins, 

and vase paintings that depict triremes, 

most of which were created long after 

the Classical heyday of Athenian seapower 

(Figs 4, 5). 

Although no actual physical remains 

of a trireme has ever been found, 

finds of merchant ships across the 

Mediterranean have provided archaeologists 

with priceless insights into 

how ancient ships were constructed. 

From the early medieval period 

through to the present day, wooden 

vessels of the Mediterranean have, virtually 

exclusively, been constructed in 

what is referred to as the ‘skeleton-first’ 

or ‘frame-first’ shipbuilding technique. 

As the name implies, the frame and ribs 

of the ship are constructed first and, 

once they have been secured in place, 


Fig 4. Fresco depicting 

a Roman galley, 

probably one of the 

larger warships that 

replaced the trireme 

during the Hellenistic 

and Roman Republican 

periods, capable of 

carrying far greater 

numbers of heavily 

armed marines on 

deck. From the House 

of the Priest Amandus 

in Pompeii, 1 st century 

AD. Photo: M. Harrsch. 

Fig 5. Cast from 

Trajan’s column 

(erected AD 106- 

113) depicting three 

Roman war-galleys, a 

double-banked vessel 

in the foreground 

and at the rear, while 

between them is a 

larger warship with 

oars at three levels 

– very probably a 

trireme. Museum of 


Rome. Photo: James 

Beresford. 

then the planking that makes up the 

sides of the vessel is nailed directly to 

them: a hull built in this manner therefore 

derives virtually all its structural 

strength and rigidity from the internal 

skeleton of the framework. However, 

the study of ancient shipwrecks has 

revealed that the principal method of 

Mediterranean ship construction during 

the Graeco-Roman period involved 

a radically different procedure, generally 

referred to as the ‘shell-first’ technique. 

The strength and rigidity of a 

vessel built in the shell-first manner 

came not from its internal framework 

but from the planking of the hull. This 

was achieved by building up the sides 

of the vessel, one plank at a time, from 

the central keel; the planking was laid 

edge-to-edge and locked together with 

tight-fitting mortice-and-tenon joints 

which were then pegged in place with 

dowels of hardwood. These closely 

spaced, interlocking joints provided 

the vast majority of an ancient vessel’s 

strength; the internal framework gave 

very little additional strength and was 

only added once much of the hull was 

5 


already in place. The discovery of a 

bronze warship ram dating to the early 

2 nd century BC, recovered from the sea 

off Athlit, Israel, came complete with 

16 fragments of the vessel’s bow still 

adhering to it: splinters that provided 

clear evidence that the shell-first construction 

technique was also applied to 

the hulls of ancient warships. 

At Athens’ port city of Piraeus, naval 

inventories inscribed into stone provide 

invaluable information for aspects 

of some of the equipment required for 

triremes of the later 4 th century BC. 

The stone footings of the ship-sheds of 

Zea, the main naval harbour at Piraeus, 

also indicate that if the warships were 

to fit inside, then the hulls were, at 

most, 37m in length and almost 6m 

across the beam. 

It is 35 years since The Times carried 

the longest-running series of letters 

ever to appear in its correspondence 

section, discussing the various possibilities 

of the design and construction 

of the ancient Athenian trireme. 

The focus of the debate was the nature 

of the oar-system of ancient triremes 

4 

17

Xxxxxx Xxxxx 

and the number of levels at which the 

rowers sat in the warship, and it was 

concluded to the satisfaction of most, 

though by no means all, scholars that 

the trireme contained an oar-crew of 

170 men seated on three different levels. 

The discussion in The Times also 

initiated the development of a fullscale 

working replica of the warship, 

designed by the retired naval architect 

John Coates, working alongside 

John Morrison, a classical scholar from 

Wolfson College, Cambridge. Their 

plans, models, and mock-ups formed 

the basis for the Olympias, which when 

commissioned into the Greek navy in 

1987, became the first trireme to take to 

the seas since the 4 th century AD (Figs 

1, 7). The Olympias underwent a series 

of sea trials in the late 1980s, generating 

new and fascinating insights into 

the construction processes that went 

into the building of these remarkable 

ships and the cramped and uncomfortable 

conditions and high level of skilled 

oarsmanship that the crews faced when 

rowing such galleys. 

Although there were different classes 

of triremes serving the navy of Classical 

Athens, they were all designed and 

constructed to maximise speed and 

manoeuvrability, the attributes likely to 

prove most decisive in battle. The galleys 

were therefore built long and narrow, 

so as to slice through waves rather 

than riding over them, and displacement 

and beam on the waterline had 

to be kept to a minimum to reduce the 

amount of immersed surface area and 

lessen the friction and drag generated 

between the hull and the water. For 

the oar-crew to function as effectively 

18 

8 

Fig 6. A Phoenician 

warship with oars at 

two levels. However, 

a third bank of rowers 

could have been 

accommodated on 

the upper deck. The 

Bas-relief from the 

Palace of Sennacherib, 

Nineveh, dating to 

c. 700 BC, may 

therefore be the 

earliest depiction 

of a trireme. British 

Museum. Photo: 


Fig 7. The bow 

section of Olympias, 

a reconstruction of 

an Athenain trireme 

of the 4 th century 

BC. Photo: James 

Beresford. 

Fig 8. Attic red-figure 

stamnos depicting 

Odysseus lashed to the 

mast of his singlebanked 

galley while 

being rowed past 

the sirens. The Siren 

Painter, c. 480 BC. 

British Museum. Photo: 


Fig 9. Bas-relief of 

either Xerxes or Darius 

I, from the Palace of 

Persepolis. The Persian 

king holds a staff and 

lotus flower, while 

incense burners are 

set before his throne. 

First half of the 5 th 

century BC. National 

Archaeological 

Museum of Iran, 

Tehran. Photo: 

Sebastia Giralt. 

6 7 

More than merely a sophisticated weapon of 

war, the trireme changed the political landscape 

of both the ancient and modern worlds 

as possible, freeboard – the distance 

between a vessel’s deck and the waterline 

- also had to be kept low. These features 

made the trireme the fastest oared 

warship ever to sail the Mediterranean, 

but they took a heavy toll on the ability 

of the war-galleys to weather even 

moderate breezes and relatively small 

waves. So narrow and lightly constructed 

were Athenian triremes at the 

time of the Persian invasion in 480 BC 

that they carried only ten hoplites and 

four archers on their decks, and the 

hoplites were even required to throw 

their javelins from a sitting position so 

their movements should not, quite literally, 

‘rock the boat’; any such rolling 

of the vessel would have made it exceptionally 

difficult for the rowers to take 

their strokes effectively. 

The trireme appears to have been 

invented about two centuries before 

the Persian invasion. Clement of 

Alexander (c. AD 150-215) attributes 

the maritime states of Phoenicia with 

developing the new galley, and this 

is supported by Assyrian bas-reliefs, 

which depict Phoenician galleys with 

three levels (Fig 6). The Egyptian pharaoh 

Necho (r. 610-595 BC) was said 

to have constructed triremes which 

he operated on the Mediterranean 

and Red Sea (Herodotus, Histories, 

2.159.1), while according to the historian 

Thucydides, writing in late the 5 th 

and early 4 th century, the Corinthians 

were the first Greeks to adopt the 

new warship. However, the vast funds 

required to build, equip, maintain, 

and crew even one of these technically 

sophisticated war-galleys meant 

that the wealthy elites who ruled most 

Greek city-states during the Archaic 

period (800-480 BC) preferred to use 

smaller one or two level galleys (Fig 8). 

It was silver, mined from the low 

hills of Laurium to the north of Cape 

Sounion, that provided the wealth 

upon which was launched the naval 

ambition of Athens. In 483 BC, a meeting 

of the Athenian Assembly, a body 

consisting of all citizens of Attica, was 

held on the hill of Pnyx to decide how 

best to distribute the surplus from 

the state-owned mines to the population. 

With the urging of the politician 

Themistocles, the Assembly renounced 

the claim to a public handout of ten 

drachmas for each citizen, and instead 

adopted the idea put forward by 

Themistocles that all the silver revenue 

for that year be diverted to the building 

of 100 triremes. In 499 BC, Athens had 

been able to send only 20 ships, none 

of which were triremes, to aid their fellow 

Greeks in their revolt against the 

Persian Empire on the eastern shores 

of the Aegean. In a single show of 

hands, the citizens of Athens embarked 

on a new direction that, within just 

two years, would provide Athens with 

a state-owned trireme fleet that transformed 

the city into the leading naval 

power in Greece. 

9 


While Classical Athens owed its 

prominent position in Greek affairs to 

its powerful fleet of triremes, the ships 

themselves derived their lethal power 

from the sweat and skill of men drawn 

from the lowest classes in Athenian 

society. 

At the time of the Persian Wars, 

each trireme consisted of a standard 

complement of 200 men divided into 

the three main categories of 170 oarsmen, 

16 deckhands and petty officers, 

and usually 14 marines for close quarter 

fighting. This crew was capable of 

generating speeds of up to 18km per 

hour (9.7 knots) at the sprint, and 

almost 14km per hour (7.5 knots) 

over several hours. Herodotus claims 

that 180 Athenian triremes were 

deployed to counter Xerxes’ navy at 

Artemisium and Salamis in 480 BC 

(Fig 9), so more than 30,000 rowers 

were required to pull the oars of the 

Athenian trireme fleet that fought the 

Persians. In the 4 th century BC, the 

fleets of the Athenian navy reached 

their zenith, with some figures suggesting 

more than 400 ships in service 

(some of which were new types of 

war-galley even larger than triremes). 

With such vast numbers of highly 

skilled rowers required to pull the oars 

of the triremes that conferred naval 

mastery on Athens, it was inevitable 

that the oarsmen should also expect 

political recognition for their efforts. 

The Athenian democratic system 

came into existence, at least in part, 

as a result of the enfranchisement of 

the sailors of the increasingly important 

trireme fleet. Despite lacking 

the agricultural-based wealth upon 

which was founded the traditional 

hoplite warrior, the thetes – the lowest 

class of Athenian citizen – were to 

become central to the military ambitions 

of the city state. The thetes were 

also to gain an enhanced political 

status which reflected this shift away 

from the wealthy ranks of the army 

to the massed oar-banks of the navy. 

By the middle of the 5 th century thetes 

were allowed to stand for the highest 

magistracies, in spite of earlier legislation 

that excluded them holding these 

offices of state; recognition of the contribution 

made by this social class in 

ensuring Athenian naval supremacy. 

It was Pericles who most readily 

grasped the potential of democratic 

government and its close relationship 

to the trireme fleet (Fig 11). To 

ensure the crews of the Athenian warships 

were maintained in a state of 

constant readiness in 449 BC, he 

also instituted a training programme 

in which 60 triremes were sent out 

on annual cruises lasting for eight 

Fig 10. Detail of the 

fresco, The School of 

Athens, painted in 

1509-10 by Raphael 

Sanzio (AD 1483-1520), 

depicting Plato (c. 428- 

347 BC) to the left, and 

Aristotle (384-322 BC). 

Both the celebrated 

philosophers were 

opposed to democratic 

politics and the 

reliance of the citystate 

on her powerful 

fleet of triremes. 

Fig 11. Marble bust 

of Pericles (c. 494-429 

BC). The influential 

statesman, acclaimed 

as ‘the first citizen of 

Athens’, championed 

democratic politics 

and naval power 

during the city’s 

Golden Age. Marble 

Roman copy dating 

to the 2 nd century 

AD, from a 

Greek original 

by Kresilas 

from c. 440- 

430 BC. H. 

48cm. British 

Museum. 

Photo: Rafi 

Torres. 

11 

months. This allowed the crews to 

hone their skills and techniques as they 

sailed the sea-lanes of the Aegean and 

Eastern Mediterranean, while the wargalleys 

also acted as potent symbols of 

Athenian naval might. 

The wealthier social classes of 

Athens, which provided the heavy 

infantry and cavalry forces of the state 

and were not liable for service as rowers 

on the warships, took a hostile view 

towards the growth of naval power, seeing 

in its ascendancy the diminution of 

their own military and political prominence. 

Drawn from the landed elite 

Plato, like most philosophers, viewed 

democracy, and the fleet of triremes 

that nurtured it, with barely concealed 

distain (Fig 10). He regarded the sea as 

breeding ‘shifty and distrustful habits 

of soul’ (Laws, 4.705a) while advising 

that seaborne merchants be kept outside 

the walls of cities (Laws, 

4.705a). As the principal 

architect of Athenian naval 

power, Themistocles was 

criticised by ancient writers 

for undermining the 

power and values of the 

hoplite class and laying 

the foundations on which 

was built radical democracy: 

‘instead of steadfast 

hoplites, he made Athenians 

sea-tossed mariners... 

Themistocles robbed 

his fellow citizens of 

spear and shield, and 

degraded the people 


of Athens to the rowing cushion and 

the oar.’ (Plutarch, Themistocles, 4.3). 

The dearth of depictions of stateowned 

triremes on vase paintings, 

finely carved reliefs, or statues can also 

possibly be attributed to the dislike 

that the wealthier classes of Athenian 

society – who commissioned such 

works – felt towards the warship and 

the political revolution it initiated. 

Ancient writers, who were also invariably 

drawn from the higher classes 

in society, also appear to have pursued 

an agenda that emphasised the 

heroic deeds of the hoplite army, while 

down-playing the actions of the navy. 

Herodotus, for example, our main 

source for the Persian invasion of 480 

BC, focuses on the heroics of the heavy 

infantry, led by the small Spartan contingent 

of 300 hoplites, that attempted 

to hold the pass at Thermopylae. By 

contrast, the navy is portrayed as cowardly, 

repeatedly retreating or desiring 

to flee. However, the historical facts 

leave no doubt that while the army 

was rapidly overwhelmed, allowing 

the Persians to march into the heart 

of Greece, the fleet of triremes actually 

repulsed the invaders at the Battle 

of Artemisium and held off Xerxes’ far 

larger navy until forced to withdraw 

following the inability of the army to 

hold the pass. 

It was the crushing naval victory 

at Salamis soon after that destroyed 

not only the Persian fleet, but also the 

confidence of Xerxes, and the Persian 

king retired eastwards after the battle. 

Salamis was a victory masterminded 

by Themistocles and spearheaded by 

the triremes of the Athenian navy. 

In the preface to his wonderful new 

book, Lords of the Sea (2009, Viking 

Press), John Hale writes of the ‘mighty 

navy of Athens, bulwark of liberty and 

engine of democracy’. It was mastery of 

the trireme that provided Athens with 

naval supremacy throughout most of 

the 150 years of the Classical period, 

and the warship allowed Athenians 

to extend their imperialistic ambitions 

across much of the Eastern 

Mediterranean. However, more than 

merely a sophisticated weapon of war, 

the trireme was a vessel that changed 

forever the political landscape of both 

the ancient and modern worlds. The 

galley empowered the lower classes 

of Athenian society, initially providing 

them with liberty from the Persian 

invaders in 480-79 BC, but also allowing 

them to cast off the yoke that had 

harnessed the majority of Athenian 

citizens to the wealthy elite minority. It 

was on the rowing benches of the trireme 

that radical democracy was born 

and maintained. n 

Minerva May/June 2010 19 

10

Graeco-Roman altars 

From the central Aegean 

David Noy examines the strange and forgotten history of five Graeco-Roman altars that 

were brought from Delos to Bedfordshire 

Wrest Park in 

Bedfordshire is a 

minor stately home 

in the care of English 

Heritage. The present house, built 

in the French style in the 1830s by 

Thomas, Earl de Grey, replaced an earlier 

building, which was demolished 

after he inherited the estate from his 

aunt Amabel, Countess de Grey (d. 

1833). The gardens, which are now 

being restored, were mainly laid out in 

the early 18 th century, and were already 

regarded as old-fashioned by visitors 

such as Horace Walpole. A series of 

woodland walks and clearings radiate 

from a formal canal (the Long Water) 

and a baroque Pavilion dating from 

1709-11 (Fig 5). 

One circular clearing contains a 

group of five cylindrical marble altars 

arranged in an X pattern (Fig 1). The 

English Heritage guidebook labels 

them as ‘Graeco-Roman altars’ (Fig 2 

shows images of the five side-by-side). 

Wrest Park was never endowed with 

other genuine antiquities (although 

a ‘Mithraic Altar’ was built there in 

1748), and the altars have therefore 

escaped the attention of students of 

classical collections in England. 

The clearing in which the altars are 

situated can be seen on a plan of 1737. 

The altars appear first in sketch plans 

made by Earl de Grey in c.1828 and 

1834, and he drew them in a collection 

of watercolours of the grounds made in 

1831, Views of Wrest (Fig 1). He added 

these notes: 

‘These are believed to be genuine 

antique Greek altars. They were 

formerly the property of Topham 

Beauclerc [sic] Esqr at Muswell Hill 

20 

1 

Fig 1. Earl de Grey’s 

watercolour, Views 

of Wrest Park, 1831. 

Picture reproduced 

by kind permission of 

Lord Lucas of Crudwell 

and Dingwall. 

Fig 2. The five altars 

at Wrest Park. Photo: 

David Noy. 

near Barnet but nothing is known as 

to whence he got them. Upon his death 

they were purchased by the Countess 

de Grey about 1817, and were placed 

in their present position.’ 

The Earl’s memory seems to have 

been at fault here. Beauclerk, a wellknown 

collector of books but not 

antiquities, died in 1780, and his collection 

was sold in 1781 (the sale catalogue, 

Bibliotheca Beauclerkiana, only 

lists books). His widow Diana lived 

until 1808, but moved house twice 

and is unlikely to have taken five massive 

altars (probably weighing half a 

tonne each) with her. The voluminous 

diaries of Countess Amabel survive, 

but a search of the years 1815-20 has 

produced no reference to the altars, 

and it appears that they had not yet 

been installed by 1820. Nor is there 

any indication from the diaries of 1808 

of any dealings with Diana. Amabel 

did visit the Elgin Marbles in 1808, 

and described them in great detail, 

but without any reference to plans for 

bringing antiquities to Wrest Park. 

The altars were noticed occasionally 

by later visitors to the gardens. William 

Treacher wrote in a pamplet of 1899, 

based on Earl de Grey’s notes and his 

own rather romantic observations: 

‘… we found a circular space amidst 

the trees, with four cylindrical stone 

altars round the outskirts and one in 

the centre, all moss-grown and dank 

2 


to rural England 

3 

with age and exposure to the weather. 

On examining them closely we found 

they were ornamented with rams’ 

heads and wreaths of flowers (Fig 3). 

On the centre altar is an inscription in 

Greek signifying that they were raised 

to the memory of Diogenes, the son 

of Jupiter, who conquered some great 

enemy. They are believed to be genuine 

antique Greek altars, and were purchased 

by the Countess de Grey about 

1817.’ 

They have remained in the same 

position in the gardens since the early 

19 th century, even though they were 

offered for sale for £50 when the estate 

was sold in 1917. After nearly 200 years 

of weathering, the decorations are not 

well preserved (Fig 7), although they 

are now maintained with care. The 

inscription is still legible, and with its 

help it is possible to be specific about 

the altars’ origin. They range from 84 

to 99cm in height and from 67 to 85cm 

5 


Fig 3. One of the 

altars at Wrest Park, 

the bulls’ heads and 

wreaths of flowers 

carved into the 

weathered marble still 

clearly visible. Photo: 

David Noy. 

Fig 4. Altars that still 

remain on Delos. 

Photo: Peter Clayton. 

Fig 5. View towards 

the Long Water and 

Pavilion, with modern 

‘classical’ statuary. 

Photo: David Noy. 

Fig 6. Water-colour 

of Old Schools by 

William Westall. The 

altars act as plinths 

for the statuary. 

Picture courtesy of the 

Ashmolean Museum, 

University of Oxford. 

in diameter. Each one is decorated with 

four bulls’ heads (bucrania) linked by 

garlands of leaves and fruit. In most 

cases ribbons depicted in very low 

relief are draped over the bulls’ horns, 

hanging down behind the garlands. On 

one altar the spaces above the garlands 

are filled with rosettes. There are minor 

differences between the five altars, particularly 

in the profile of the top of each 

of them, and there is no reason to think 

that they formed one original group. 

The Greek inscription on the central 

altar (Fig 9) is in high-quality lettering 

laid out carefully above one of the garlands. 

It reads: 

Διογένῃ Ζήνωνος 

Ἀσκαλωνῖτᾳ χρηστὲ 

χαῖρε 

For Diogenes [son] of Zeno, 

Ascalonite. Excellent one, 

Farewell 

This shows that the altar was a funerary 

one, used to mark a tomb. In fact, 

the altar may have formed the tomb 

itself: two holes in the top surface have 

been filled in (Fig 8), and it is possible 

that one of them originally held some 

of the deceased’s cremated remains. 

In the absence of direct evidence, the 

altars’ provenance has to be deduced 

from what is still visible. Altars with 

this style of decoration were common 

on the Aegean islands in the 2 nd century 

BC, and better preserved ones 


show how the Wrest Park altars may 

have looked when first installed. The 

form of the lettering and the wording 

of the epitaph, particularly the formula 

at the end, are typical of the island of 

Delos and its adjacent burial island of 

Rheneia (burial on Delos itself was forbidden 

on religious grounds). Delos 

was a very prosperous commercial centre 

until it was sacked by Mithridates’ 

forces in 88 BC and by pirates in 69 BC. 

Origin on Delos or Rheneia is 

made almost certain by the fact that 

Diogenes came from Ascalon (modern 

Ashkelon on the coast of Israel, which 

in the 2 nd century BC was an independent 

Graeco-Phoenician city). Delos 

was a multi-ethnic trading port, where 

Italians and Syrians worked alongside 

Athenians and other Greeks. A community 

of Ascalonites on the island is 

well-known from inscriptions. Some 

16 individuals are attested, of whom 

the leading figure was the banker 

Philostratos son of Philostratos. He 

was responsible for many architectural 

works on Delos: he built the 

north part of the Agora of the Italians, 

and an exedra in it, as well as making 

4 

6 

21


A second wave of 

looting of Delos by 

British and French 

collectors and their 

agents took place in 

the first three decades 

of the 19 th century 

dedications to numerous gods in the 

Syrian Sanctuary, including Astarte, 

Aphrodite Ourania and Poseidon 

of Ascalon, on behalf of the city of 

Ascalon and his wife and children. 

Delos was virtually abandoned 

from Late Antiquity onwards, and its 

ruins therefore became a source of 

material for collectors of antiquities. 

During the period of Ottoman rule 

until Greek independence in 1832, 

the island was particularly vulnerable. 

Sir Thomas Roe, who went on 

a mission to Constantinople in 1621, 

had Rheneia pointed out to him as ‘a 

rich mine of treasures’ by the Bishop 

of Andros, and informed the prominent 

collector and patron of the arts 

Lord Arundel of this. As a result, 

nine altars of the same type as those 

at Wrest Park became part of the 

Arundel collection, and they are now 

on display at the Ashmolean Museum 

in the Randolph Sculpture Gallery, 

where they are used as plinths for a 

variety of Greek and Roman sculpture. 

They can be seen performing 

exactly the same function before the 

collection was moved to its present 

home in William Westall’s watercolour 

sketch Old Schools of 1813 (Fig 

6). One of these altars has epitaphs in 

Greek and Latin for Quintus Avilius of 

Lanuvium, an Italian trader or banker 

on Delos, inscribed in much poorer 

lettering than the epitaph of Diogenes. 

A second wave of looting of Delos 

by British and French collectors and 

22 

Fig 7. A weathered 

bucranium and 

garland. Photo: David 

Noy. 

Fig 8. Top surface of 

the altar bearing the 

epitaph. Photo: David 

Noy. 

Fig 9. The epitaph 

of Diogenes. Photo: 

David Noy. 

9 

their agents took place in the first 

three decades of the 19 th century. 

William Martin Leake visited in 1806 

and wrote that the shore of Delos was 

‘strewed with broken columns and epistylia 

of marble’ – which is still the 

case, as many objects were abandoned 

near the harbour after the antiquities 

trade came to an end (Fig 4). He also 

noticed the prevalence on Delos and 

Rheneia of altars ‘adorned with bulls’ 

heads and festoons’. Among the people 

who removed objects was Lord Elgin, 

who took two altars from Rheneia 

in 1802. These are now in the British 

Museum, along with two others which 

the Museum purchased in 1847. Many 

other altars similar to those at Wrest 

Park found their way to England at this 

time, and in 1824 the Director-General 

of the French Royal Museums encouraged 

the captains of the French navy 

to follow the example of the British in 

helping themselves to the antiquities of 

Delos. 

Some altars were ultimately acquired 

by museums, such as one now in the 

Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. This 

was given to Professor E.D. Clarke by 

Rev. Bridges Harvey of Jesus College, 

8 

whose ‘ancestor’ had brought it from 

Delos, and was placed in the vestibule 

of the University Library by 1809. 

Others remained in private collections. 

Frederick North, 5 th Earl of Guilford 

[sic], acquired an altar on Delos c.1810, 

and displayed it in his London house. 

It was bought from his estate in 1827 

by Thomas Wentworth Beaumont and 

taken to Bretton Hall near Wakefield, 

where it remained unnoticed in the 

grounds until Professor David Hill 

of the University of Leeds recognised 

what it was in 1995; it is now in the 

Rothschild collection at Waddesdon 

Manor. When sold by Christie’s in 2002 

it had a guide price of £30,000-50,000 

in the sale catalogue, rather different 

from what was asked unsuccessfully 

for the Wrest Park altars in 1917. 

When Countess Amabel installed 

five Delian altars in the grounds at 

Wrest Park, she was in keeping with 

the fashion of the time. Delos does not 

seem to have been of particular interest 

in its own right, but as a source of supply 

for collectors of ‘Greek’ antiquities 

it was unsurpassed. The altars remain 

where she placed them as evidence of 

life and death on 2 nd -century BC Delos, 

and of antiquarian interests among the 

19 th -century aristocracy. n 

The author would welcome any 

additional information relating to 

the removal of the Wrest Park altars 

from Delos and their arrival in 

Bedfordshire; please contact Dr Noy: 

d.noy@btinternet.com 

The author also wishes to express 

thanks to: Bedfordshire & Luton 

Archives and Records Service, West 

Yorkshire Archive Service, Naomi 

Hicks, David Hill, Gareth Hughes, 

Janet Huskinson, Suzanne Lindsey, 

Jill Mitchell, Nicola Smith, Emma 

Stafford, and Susie West. 


7

Courtesy of the rare books and ColleCtions library, ameriCan university in Cairo. 

Photographing Egypt 

Maria Golia looks at 

the long and mutually 

beneficial relationship 

of photography 

with archaeology 

in investigations of 

Egypt’s history 

Long accustomed to darkness 

or the guttering flame 

of a traveller’s torch, in 1865 

the King’s Chamber, set deep 

within the Great Pyramid of Giza, was 

illuminated by a prototypical flash, an 

explosive mixture of magnesium filings 

and gunpowder. The photographer was 

Charles Piazzi Smyth (1819-1900), 

Astronomer Royal of Scotland, and 

the photographs were part of a survey 

undertaken to prove that the pyramid’s 

architect was the Biblical Noah. 

Smyth’s attempts to scientifically buttress 

religious claims met with mixed 

reviews, and he went on to use his camera 

to study the properties of clouds. 

However, his work subsequently influenced 

the career of Flinders Petrie, 

one of the first Egyptologists to photograph 

excavations. Petrie’s parents 

had first met in Piazzi Smythe’s home, 

and Petrie’s father, a great admirer of 

Smyth’s theories, encouraged his son 

to survey the pyramids. Smyth’s work 

at Giza was one of many examples in 

1 

Picturing 

the past 

Fig 1. Francis Frith, 

Interior of the Hall of 

Columns, Karnac, 

c. 1857, albumen print. 

which photography, an artistic medium 

still in its infancy, was advanced by the 

demands of the equally youthful science 

of archaeology. The sibling disciplines 

would develop alongside each 

other throughout the 19 th and 20 th centuries, 

each testing and improving the 

other as they grew to maturity. 

William Fox Talbot was the British 

inventor of the calotype technique of 

photography, announced within weeks 

of the daguerreotype in 1839. He 

worked to promote his discovery as a 

tool for the study of antiquities, as it 

had several advantages for photographers 

in the field. The paper negatives 

could be prepared in advance, and 

exposure times were shorter than those 

required for daguerreotypes. Most 

importantly, calotype negatives could 

produce multiple positive prints, 

whereas daguerreotypes only permitted 

unique images. Talbot also suggested 

what would become a classic 

archaeological technique: that of 

recording and dating remains according 

to the successive layers of earth in 

which they were found. ‘I should think 

it would be highly interesting’, he 

wrote, ‘to take a view of each remnant 

of antiquity before removing it, and 

while it remains in situ and surrounded 

with stones and bushes and all the 

other accompaniments of wild nature.’ 

Just as geologists had begun to calculate 

the earth’s age by examining 

stratification, so the study of antiquity 

was shifting its focus from ancient 

languages, architecture, and works 

of art, to archaeological investigations 

of material remains of all sorts. 

‘Archaeologists pursued the positivist 

goal of revealing ancient civilizations 

as they once were,’ noted Claire 

Lyons, in the Getty Museum publication 

Antiquity and Photography, 

‘by looking at artifacts emancipated 

from Scripture, ancient texts, and the 

motives of their authors. The study of 

antiquity was thus at the centre of an 

upheaval in world view in which the 

were high and verifiable visual evidence 

was essential. In the new faith 

of science, “seeing was believing”’. 

Photography was there to provide the 

necessary proofs, and Egypt, with its 

incomparably rich ancient heritage, 

became a testing ground for archaeology’s 

development as science, and as 

a source of captivating, commercially 

valuable imagery. 

In 1851, a new photographic process, 

known as the wet collodion or 

wet plate technique, was introduced 

in England by Frederic Scott Archer. 

Using glass plate negatives, it produced 

the sharp focus that calotypes 

lacked. Francis Frith, a former grocer, 


Courtesy of the museum of fine arts, boston. 

learned the technique prior to travelling 

to Egypt in 1856. A product of 

Britain’s up-and-coming middle class, 

Frith’s talent, dauntlessness, and commercial 

instinct would combine to 

form the most successful photographic 

publishing career of the mid 19 th century. 

Between 1858 and 1862, he 

published eight photographically illustrated 

books. The sparkling clarity of 

his images (Fig 1), in addition to their 

size (mammoth 48 x 38cm plates) contributed 

to their immense popularity. 

‘A truthful record,’ Frith believed, ‘is of 

more value than the most elaborately 

beautiful picture.’ More than pictures, 

Frith’s photographs offered the public a 

window on to Egypt – a country that, 

though distant, was becoming increasingly 

familiar. 

Frith realised his photographs 

would inspire greater numbers of people 

to visit Egypt, and understood the 

ramifications of his popularising. He 

described how the monuments were 

threatened by ‘travelers of all nations 

[who] break and carry off, without 

scruple, the most interesting of the 

sculptured friezes’. He likewise abjured 

modern economic developments that 

saw monuments dismantled and their 

stone blocks appropriated for houses 

and factories, even while recognising 

that these circumstances gave 


Fig 2. Photo by Said 

Ahmad Said: Men 

at Work Moving 

Granite Block at the 

Menkaure Pyramid 

Temple, 1907. Silver 

gelatin dry plate. 

Fig 3. Howard 

Carter (1874-1939), 

photographed while 

on a visit to the United 

States of America in 

1924. 

3 

2 

‘additional value to good photographs 

of Eastern antiquities’. Frith sensed the 

paradoxical nature of his endeavour to 

present the ‘true’ Egypt to the world, 

on the one hand observing the country’s 

rapid modernisation, on the other 

producing images of Egypt’s seemingly 

changeless past. ‘We were put ashore 

with our cumbrous loads of apparatus,’ 

he wrote, ‘and began our walk 

over the rough ground, and… mile 

after mile we went until we began to 

regard our guides, our temple-mania, 

our stars, our photographic lumber, 

ourselves as so many palpable mockeries 

and snares.’ Frith still had cause for 

pride in his craft. Photography ignited 

avid public interest in, and therefore 

funding for, the study of Egyptology 

and related efforts to preserve Egypt’s 

legacy. 

With the dawning awareness that 

‘to dig is to destroy’, photography was 

increasingly implemented to preserve 

records of archaeological sites 

as they were dismantled and excavated. 

American Egyptologist George 

Reisner (1867-1942) made photography 

a systematic feature of his digs 

in Egypt. In 1902, Reisner was given 

permission to investigate the Giza plateau, 

and for 40 years excavated the 

Old Kingdom cemeteries that lay close 

to the great pyramids on behalf of 

Harvard University. Reisner’s achievements, 

aside from extensive finds, publications, 

and rigorous methodologies, 

include the training of some of the first 

Egyptian photographers. His staff was 

largely responsible for photographing 

23 digs around Egypt and producing a 

staggering 45,000 glass plate negatives 

recorded in the process. Around the 

turn of the century, Reisner engaged 

a young man named Said Ahmed Said 

to assist in the darkroom, where he 

proved exceptionally talented. By 1906, 

Reisner had taught him how to use the 

camera and entrusted him with the 

documentation of the entire expedition. 

Said’s photographs illustrated not 

just the scientific process of the excavation, 

but also the drama of the digs 

and the strenuous labour they involved 

(Fig 2). He in turn instructed at least 

The interplay of 

tourism, archaeology, 

and photography may 

be said to have reached 

its apogee with Howard 

Carter’s discovery of 

Tutankhamun’s tomb 

in 1922 


six others, all fellahin (‘peasants’). The 

body of work Said and his studentcolleagues 

produced for Reisner ranks 

amongst the great contributions to 

Egyptology. 

His 20 years of experience digging 

and compiling a photographic record 

in Egypt and Sudan had shown Reisner 

that photography was by no means 

infallible. His 1924 paper on field photography 

included a section entitled 

‘The Limitations of Photography’: 

‘The excavator as a general rule can 

only photograph what he has observed. 

It is futile for an inexperienced man to 

hope to redeem his faults of excavation 

and observation by a copious photographic 

record… [Photography] can 

only differentiate shadows and colors. 

There are other things like consistency, 

perceptible to the eye or touch, but 

practically imperceptible to the lens 

of the camera… [they are] reminders 

to the eye of the excavator but are 

not much better than blank paper 

to one who has not seen the object 

photographed.’ 

In the 1850s, as Peter Dorrel observes 

in Photography in Archaeology and 

Conservation: ‘Archaeologists had 

begun to regard photography as a panacea, 

rather as their descendants 100 

years later were to regard C 14 dating. 

Much the same sort of disillusion followed 

when it was realized that such 

innovations were capable of distorting 

evidence.’ By the end of the 19 th century, 

the value of photographs as scientific 

documents was under question. 

Reisner’s contemporary, James 

Breasted (1865-1935), Professor 

of Egyptology at the University of 

Chicago, was enthusiastic about photography’s 

educational applications, 

but shared Reisner’s concerns as to 

its limitations (Fig 6). Breasted supplied 

the text for a series of 100 stereographs, 

Egypt Through the Stereoscope, 

published in 1905 (Figs 4, 5). The stereographs, 

organised as a tour with 

Breasted as eminent guide, offered an 

illusion ‘of substantial reality’ rivalling 

the real experience: ‘The viewer will 

have become more familiar with Egypt 

than most tourists to that country, who 

usually read so rapidly on the spot and 

are hurried about at such a rate that 

they bring home only blurred and confused 

impressions of what they have 

seen.’ In suggesting that stereographs 

were better than being there, Breasted 

betrayed a wish to staunch the increasing 

flow of tourists that began in 1869 

with the opening of the Suez Canal and 

Thomas Cook’s steamer tours. He later 

founded an enduring institution dedicated 

to preserving the monuments 

using photography. 

25

Courtesy of the rare books and ColleCtions library, ameriCan university in Cairo. 

Photo Courtesy of the Pearson sCott foresman ComPany. 


4 

The Chicago House in Luxor, 

the archaeological mission of the 

University of Chicago, began its epigraphic 

survey of Thebes in 1924. The 

goal was to create ‘documentation so 

precise it could stand alone as a replacement 

in the absence of the original 

monument’. A photographic archive 

was necessary, but Breasted realised 

this was not enough. The ‘Chicago 

House Method’, a meticulous documentation 

process, evolved to combine 

the efforts of photographers, artists 

and Egyptologists. So painstaking was 

the process that it took longer to copy 

the inscriptions, even with the aid of a 

camera, than it did to engrave them in 

the first place. For example, documentation 

of the Ramses III funerary temple 

began in 1924, has continued each 

winter, and is still ongoing. Meanwhile, 

the photographic archives of Chicago 

House and other archaeological missions, 

including the French Institute of 

Oriental Archaeology (est. 1880), and 

the German Archaeological Institute 

(est. 1907) have themselves become 

artefacts in need of conservation. 

Photographic records from the early 

20 th century are now used to construct 

virtual reality tombs available to the 

public as online educational tools, and 

also to alleviate the pressures of tourism. 

Between 1914 and 1916 Robert 

Mond (1867-1938), a British industrialist 

with an interest in archaeology, 

conducted a photographic 

survey of the 

Tomb of Menna (TT 

69) in the Valley of the 

Nobles, on the West Bank of 

Luxor. To accomplish this, 

he developed an innovative 

grid-photography technique 

similar to those used today 

to capture images 

for computerbased 

3D models. 

The camera 

26 

Fig 4. Stereoscope 

card, Falling Rocks, 

Temple of Karnak, 

Thebes Upper 

Egypt, Copyright 

1896. Underwood 

& Underwood, 

Publishers. 

Fig 5. Stereoscope 

used for viewing a 

stereograph. 

Fig 6. James Henry 

Breasted. Photo 

courtesy of the 

Oriental Institute, 

Chicago. (The Institute 

currently has a 

temporary exhibit, 

‘Pioneers to the 

Past’, focusing on the 

archaeological work of 

Breasted in Egypt and 

the Near East.) 

5 

was attached to rails installed along 

the tomb’s walls, and pictures taken at 

overlapping intervals, covering every 

surface from floor to ceiling. The fullscale 

prints were mounted on cardboard, 

and the seams retouched to 

create the illusion of continuity. The 

resulting walk-through model Mond 

constructed now has a digital counterpart 

which, like the earlier stereographs, 

is promoted as a way of 

avoiding the crowds and gaining more 

information than a visit to the real tomb 

would allow. Yet despite such convenience, 

people still want to come and 

see the actual monuments of Egypt, and 

the country’s government does its best 

to make them welcome. 

6 

Photo Courtesy of the oriental institute, ChiCago. 

The ‘drawing power’ of antiquities 

often determines the amount of funds 

allotted to conserve them, and photography 

has done much to promote the 

value of Egypt’s Pharaonic remains. 

The interplay of tourism, archaeology, 

and photography may be said to 

have reached its apogee with Howard 

Carter’s discovery of Tutankhamun’s 

tomb in 1922 (Fig 3). Carter’s sponsor, 

Lord Carnarvon, sold the lucrative 

syndication rights for the excavation 

photographs to The Times, and Carter 

hastened to make the site available to 

the expected influx of tourists. 

While Reisner and Breasted were 

photographing Pharaonic ruins 

unearthed from the sands, Sir Keppel 

Archibald Creswell (1879-1974) 

focused on Cairo’s Islamic legacy of 

mosques, tombs, and palaces, which 

had been all but devoured by the rapidly 

expanding modern city. He documented 

buildings throughout Egypt, 

including the extensive renovations 

undertaken in his lifetime. His photographs 

of buildings that have been 

entirely destroyed, alongside those 

that had been restored but which 

have subsequently again fallen into 

ruin, make these documents the more 

precious for the cycles of decay and 

renewal they portray. Along with his 

seminal publications, Creswell’s photographic 

collection helped rescue 

Egypt’s Islamic legacy from Pharaoh’s 

shadow. 

Through a combination of scholarly 

interest and public curiosity, Egypt 

has been photographed literally inside 

out. From the first daguerreotypes 

and calotypes, to aerial and underwater 

photography, sonar, infra-red, 

laser, and satellite imagery, every available 

technique has been pressed into 

service to provide a record of Egypt’s 

monuments and artefacts. Mummies 

have been X-rayed and CT-scanned, 

the Sphinx probed with a video camera 

attached to a robotic drill. Technical 

advancements (most recently digital 

photography) have demanded 

constant reassessment of the medium’s 

advantages and possibilities for 

archaeology as a discipline, but they 

have also enhanced Egyptology’s value 

as spectacle. Along with the tourism it 

inspires, the alliance between archaeology 

and photography has had far-ranging 

implications for Egypt: never has a 

nation’s past so nearly supplanted its 

present in the collective mind’s eye. n 

This article draws on research 

carried out by Maria Golia for her 

recent book Photography and 

Egypt (Reaktion Books, 2010). 


Rhone treasures 

28 

River 

of memory 

Elena Taraskina reviews a major exhibition, currently 

underway in Arles, which features archaeological 

treasures recovered from the waters of the Rhone 

For over 20 years archaeologists 

from the Department 

of Subaquatic and Deep Sea 

Archaeological Research 

(DRASSM) have been working closely 

with researchers, museum curators, 

and other professionals in the field of 

heritage management to excavate and 

conserve the exceptional archaeological 

finds recovered from the muddy 

riverbed of the Rhone. More than 700 

of the items discovered over the past 

two decades are now on display in 

the exhibition ‘Caesar, the Rhone of 

Memory’, which traces the period from 

the 1 st century BC through to the 4 th 

century AD. 

The Director of the Museum of 

Ancient Arles, Claude Sintes, has 

highlighted the importance of the 

archaeological work carried out in the 

demanding and dangerous conditions 

of the riverbed. ‘We hope to set the 

scene that allows visitors to fully experience 

the sinister and disturbing environment 

for themselves... This “virtual 

immersion” will allow people coming 

to the exhibition to better understand 

the difficulties which went into the discovery 

of the objects.’ The exhibition 

designer, Pierre Berthier, has closely 

Fig 1. Restoration 

of a wooden anchor 

from a Roman ship. 

2 nd century AD. 

Photo: © ARC-Nucléart. 

Fig 2. Laboratory 

installation in the 

museum exhibition. 

Photo: Mark Dion, 

Musée départemental 

Arles antique © Maby 

J.-L L.Roux. 

Fig 3. Solidus of 

Valentinian I (r. AD 

364-375) recovered 

from the riverbed. 

Photo: Droits reserves 

© C.CHARY DRASSM 

2ASM. 

Fig 4. Iron gladius 

and leather scabbard, 

reflecting the 

settlement of Arles 

by Legio VI Ferrata, 

by Caesar. 1 st century 

AD. Blade L. 46cm, 

sheath L. 48cm. Photo: 

Mark Dion, Musée 

départemental Arles 

antique © Maby J.-L_L. 

Roux. 

followed this concept in his creation 

of the exhibition rooms and, in addition 

to the artefacts, the displays often 

show the process of discovery and restoration 

of the various objects (Fig 

1). In an ‘air locked immersion’, the 

experience of the underwater archaeologists 

is recreated, and visitors can 

gain an understanding of the difficulties 

involved in carrying out archaeological 

work on the bottom of a river. 

This dark and dangerous setting is 

mimicked in the installation created by 

the artist Mark Dion, as are the laboratories 

in which many of the artefacts 

recovered from the river were restored 

(Fig 2). 

The largest section of the exhibition 

is dedicated to the port of ancient Arles 

(ancient Arelate) and the role played 

by the city in maritime commerce during 

the Late Republic and Imperial 

Roman periods. Arles was certainly 

one of the major port cities of the western 

Mediterranean, and a great volume 

of local commerce, as well as long- 

distance trade, was conducted in the 

city throughout antiquity. The commercial 

nature of ancient Arles is 

stressed throughout the exhibition. 

The names of individual traders and 

merchants, or those of corporations, 

can still be read, inscribed on the 

plinths of statues which adorned the 

Roman city, or stamped and carved 

into the sides and lids of amphorae. 

These pottery containers were used to 

transport wine, olive oil, garum (fish 

sauce), and a variety of other essential 

and luxury foodstuffs in and out of 

Arles and the other cites of the ancient 

world. Discoveries such as coins (Fig 

3) and an ancient set of weighing scales 

recovered from the swirling waters of 

the Rhone further emphasise the commercial 

transactions that allowed the 

city to flourish under Roman rule. 

Seaborne trade connected Arles to 

other maritime cities and provinces 

that looked out on to the Romancontrolled 

Mediterranean Sea. The city 

also benefited from its location on the 

banks of the Rhone, which functioned 

as a major artery of trade, allowing the 

transport of commodities and people 

northwards into the heart of Gaul. The 

favourability of the riverine connections 

was stressed by the Greek author 

Strabo (c. 63 BC - AD 25) who wrote 

of how ‘… the courses of the rivers of 

Gaul are so excellently disposed in 

relation to one another that goods can 

3 4 


1 

2

e conveyed from the Mediterranean 

to the Atlantic with ease and cargoes 

need only be conveyed over the land 

for a short distance and that without 

difficulty, while for most of the journey 

they travel by the rivers’ (Geography, 

4.1.2). 

Maritime trade in this region of the 

north-west Mediterranean, and along 

the Rhone estuary, with its constantly 

shifting banks and shoals, was, however, 

notoriously dangerous, and many 

ancient ships were lost while attempting 

to reach Arles. The excavations 

undertaken in the Rhone over the last 

two decades have found evidence of 

more than a dozen vessels that sank 

in the waters near the city, and the 


6 

5 

remains of these ancient merchant 

ships have been carefully preserved 

and placed on display in the navigation 

section of the exhibition (Fig 1). 

Despite the hazards of waterborne 

commerce, Arles profited from its 

advantageous location, which allowed 

merchants and traders based in the city 

easy access to both the shipping lanes 

that ran across the Mediterranean Sea 

and the river systems of Gaul. During 

the Roman period, Arles therefore 

became the dominant port of southern 

Gaul, eclipsing the older city of 

Massalia (Marseilles), which, according 

to the historian Thucydides, had 

been founded by Greek colonists from 

Phocaea in c. 600 BC (Histories, 1. 13). 

However, while Arles was blessed with 

a navigable river that provided easy 

access into the heart of Gaul, Massalia 

had no such riverine routeway, and the 

mountainous spurs of the Maritime 

Alps to the north and east of the city 

also made overland transport difficult. 

Massalia had therefore declined into 

little more than a university town by 

the Roman Imperial period. 

Arles was therefore able to overshadow 

Massalia as the most important 

city of the province of Gallia 

Narbonensis through political as well 

as geographical reasons. During the 

Civil War that raged across the Roman 

Mediterranean from 49-48 BC, Arles 

backed Julius Caesar, while Massalia 

sided with his rival Pompeius Magnus. 

Fig 5. Marble head, 

possibly of Julius 

Caesar. H. 39.5cm. 

Photo: Musée 


antique © Maby J.-L 

L.Roux. 

Fig 6. Cast of the 

marble bust of 

Caesar in the Vatican 

Museum. Museum of 


Rome. H. 35cm. 

Photo: James 

Beresford. 

Fig 7. Bronze Victory, 

probably dating to the 

reign of Augustus (27 

BC-AD 14). 

H. 76cm. Photo: Musée 


antique © Maby J.-L_L. 

Roux. 

7 


With the defeat of the latter following 

the Battle of Pharsalus in 48 BC, 

Massalia was deprived of many of its 

territorial possessions, and these were 

handed to Arles as a reward for the 

city’s loyalty to Caesar. On Caesar’s 

orders, Arles was given the title and 

rights of a Roman colonia and, in 

46 BC, was formally established by 

Tiberius Claudius Nero, father of the 

future emperor (Fig 4). 

The much-discussed centerpiece 

of the exhibition, accentuated by dramatic 

lighting, is the life-size head of 

a prominent Roman who the museum 

authorities contend is Julius Caesar 

(Fig 5). Recovered from the silt and 

weed of the Rhone by underwater 

archaeologists in the autumn of 2007, 

the head is in an exceptional state of 

preservation, with only a little fracturing 

on the nose. Given the relationship 

of Arles with Caesar, it is 

understandable that immediately on 

recovery of the marble head, archaeologists 

and journalists proposed that 

this was a representation of the Late 

Republican dictator. In the spring of 

2008, Le Monde published a picture of 

the statue on its front page, under the 

headline ‘Julius Caesar emerges from 

the Rhone’. 

There are certainly a number of 

physical attributes of the sculpture that 

match other those on statues made 

of Caesar, or his portrait stamped on 

to coins. The museum features a film 

documenting the restoration process 

29


the sculpture underwent on being 

removed from the Rhone, and analysing 

how the facial characteristics of the 

head matched those of known images 

of Caesar, with the prominent Adam’s 

apple and receding hairline. It has 

been argued that the statue was carved 

around 46 BC, very possibly from life 

while Caesar stayed in the city. On 13 

May 2008, the French Culture Minister 

stated that the statue was the oldest 

surviving sculpture of Caesar. With the 

30 

8 

9 

10 

Fig 8. Bronze captive, 

possibly a Gaul, 

although the figure 

does not sport the 

long moustache 

common in depictions 

of Gauls, probably 

cast in the last two 

decades of the 

1 st century BC. 

H. 63.5cm. Photo: 



J.-L L.Roux. 

Fig 9. Amphora made 

for the export of 

locally produced wine, 

c. AD 50-120. 




L.Roux. 

Fig 10. Ceramic jugs, 

possibly used for the 

boiling of water. 1 st – 

2 nd century AD. Photo: 



J.-L L.Roux. 

Fig 11. Marble head of 

a goddess, either Juno 

or Venus, 2 nd century 

AD. H. 78.5cm. Photo: 



J.-L L.Roux. 

Fig 12. Marble statue 

of Neptune with a 

ketos, and, to the 

rear, Eros riding a 

dolphin, c. 3 rd century 

AD. H.157cm. Photo: 



J.-L L.Roux. 

assassination of the dictator in Rome 

two year later, it has been argued the 

statue, suddenly regarded as politically 

undesirable, was deliberately smashed 

and thrown into the Rhone. 

Some scholars have, however, been 

more cautious in identifying the head 

of the statue as that of Caesar, pointing 

out that the face is rather fleshier than 

other depictions of the hollow-cheeked 

dictator in the years immediately 

before his death. Caesar is also usually 

portrayed as possessing a nose rather 

less bulbous than that which appears 

on the Arles head, while the nasolabial 

folds – the skin that stretches from the 

sides of the nose to the corners of the 

mouth – are also unlike other depictions 

of the Roman general (Fig 6). 

There is no doubt that identifying the 

statue with so famous a historical figure 

has generated a great deal more publicity 

than would have been achieved for 

a sculpture associated with a lesser figure 

from the Roman past. Moreover, 

the very title of the exhibition, and the 

manner in which it is presented in the 

gallery, indicate the prominence given 

to this single artefact. 

Alongside the contentious head of 

Caesar, a beautiful bronze Victory is 

displayed (Fig 7). Dressed in a Greek 

chiton, cinched at the waist, Victory 

appears to be about to take flight, with 

her eyes fixed straight ahead. Although 

the wings and arms have been lost, the 

hairstyle and the profile of the nose are 

of Hellenic inspiration and appear to 

refer to the classic workmanship inherent 

in female figures of the Praxitelean 

type. Also fashioned from bronze is a 

sculpture of a bound figure, a bearded 

and heavily muscled warrior (Fig 8). 

Although defeated, the naked figure 

is nonetheless portrayed with a dignified 

demeanor, kneeling on his left 

knee, his hands tied behind his back, 

his head tilted as he looks upwards and 

to the left. Upon close examination, the 

anatomy of this captured man is out 

of proportion: the right leg is shorter 

than the left and the feet are excessively 

long; the arms are short, while the 

wrists are delicate and the arms short. 

While displaying clear Greek influence, 

it is thought the statue portrays 

a Gaulish prisoner, an opinion that, if 

correct, would make the bronze one of 

the earliest surviving representations 

of a captive Gaul. 

Throughout the Late Roman 

Republic, vast numbers of slaves were 

taken from Gaul and transported to 

the lands of the Mediterranean, where 

they were used to work in the fields, 

mines, and the multiplicity of other 

roles for which human muscle was 

necessary to power the economy of the 

Roman world. Writing in the 1 st century 

BC, the Greek author Diodorus 

Siculus (quoting the slightly earlier 

writer Poseidonius) highlights the ease 

with which Roman slave traders would 

use alcohol to procure vast numbers of 

slaves very cheaply through trade with 

the Gallic communities: ‘Italian merchants, 

with their usual love of money, 

regard the Celtic passion for wine as a 

source of treasure. They transport the 

wine by boat on the navigable rivers 

and by cart through the open country 

and they get an incredibly good price 

for it: for one amphora of wine they get 

a slave – a servant in return for a drink!’ 

(Histories, 5.26). With its location 

astride the Rhone, which offered ready 

access to the interior of Gaul, Arles 

was well placed to take advantage of 

12 

11 


13 

14 

this lucrative trade in humanity, which 

may manifest itself archaeologically in 

the shape of the bronze statue of the 

bound warrior, and also in the numerous 

wine amphoras recovered from the 

bed of the Rhone (Fig 9). Further up 

the riverine network of Gaul, at trading 

sites such as Chalon, more than 

24,000 wine amphoras of the 1 st century 

BC were extracted from the bottom 

of the Saone during work carried 

out in the 19 th century, while it was 

believed the site probably contained 

a further 200,000-500,000. Given the 

scale of the wine trade, and its close 

relationship with the trade in slaves, it 

has therefore been estimated that there 

were some 300,000 Gallic slaves in Italy 

by about 70 BC, and this number was 

greatly increased during Caesar’s military 

campaigns directed against the 

tribes of Gaul between 58-51 BC. 

Among the impressive collection of 

statuary contained in the gallery is a 

head of a goddess, generally referred 

to as Juno, although the hairstyle and 

diadem suggest it may be Venus (Fig 

11). Despite the effects of erosion from 

centuries at the bottom of the Rhone, 

the statue was obviously of extremely 

high craftsmanship. Exhibited next 

to the head of the goddess is a marble 

statue of Neptune dedicated to the 

emperor Septimius Severus (r. AD 

193-211) and his two sons and co-rulers, 

Caracalla (r. 198-217) and Geta (r. 

209-211). Brought up from the Rhone 


Corinthian capital 

carved during the 

Julio-Claudian period. 




L.Roux. 

Fig 14. The neck and 

handle of a bottle 

blown from blue 

glass, 2 nd half of the 1 st 

century AD. H. 10.4cm. 

Photo: Musée 



L.Roux. 

Fig 15. Bronze 

amphora dating to the 

early 1 st century AD. H. 

44.5cm. Photo: Musée 



L.Roux. 

Fig 16. Clay oil lamp 

with a broken handle, 

c. AD 70-100. 

L. 16cm. Photo: Musée 



L.Roux. 

Fig 17. Gold ring for a 

woman or possibly a 

child, 1 st century AD. 

Diam. 1.4cm. Photo: 



J.-L L.Roux. 

as fragments spread over 

a wide area of the riverbed, 

the statue has been 

pieced back together (Fig 

12). To the right of the 

god is the ketos, a water 

monster, while together 

with the waves that are 

carved at the rear of 

the sculpture, a little 

winged Cupid sits 

astride a dolphin. The 

aquatic theme of the 

sculpture has led to the suggestion that 

the statue was dedicated to honour the 

boatmen of Arles. 

Displayed alongside the statuary 

are finely carved architectural features, 

Corinthian columns, fragments 

of entablature, and cornices (Fig 13). 

The collection of statuary and richly 

appointed architectural features highlight 

that Arles was considerably more 

than a mere stop-over port for merchant 

ships. It is therefore little wonder 

that the Roman poet Ausonius, writing 

in the 4th 16 

century AD, described Arles 

as ‘the little Rome of Gaul’, sentiments 

echoed by Luc Long, Chief Curator of 

the museum, who regards its architecture 

as ‘an ostentatious facade aiming 

to display Rome’s wealth and power.’ 

Among the collection of artefacts 

the archaeologists retrieved from 

the river are numerous day-to-day 


household items such as 

kitchen utensils (Fig 10), 

metal tools, oil lamps 

(Fig 16), toys, and little 

statuettes, washed into 

the river during flooding 

or intentionally thrown 

into the Rhone over several 

centuries. This section of 

the exhibition is titled 

‘The Junkyard’ from 

the amount of refuse 

found by the archaeologists. 

However, mixed in with the 

household waste are remnants of fine 

jewellery (Fig 17), well-made glassware 

(Fig 14), and bronze artefacts 

(Fig 15) that point to the wealth in the 

region. The anaerobic conditions in 

the mud at the bottom of the river have 

allowed for wonderful preservation 

even of organic objects, which would 

normally have rotted away over the 

centuries, and the exhibition includes 

items such as remnants of cloth, rope, 

and wood, which have all survived in 

the silt of the riverbed. 

Upon the termination of ‘Caesar, the 

Rhone of Memory’, the artefacts recovered 

from the river will be incorporated 

into the permanent collection of the 

museum, for which a new extension has 

been proposed. New discoveries made 

by archaeologists working in the River 

Rhone throughout 2009 have led Luc 

Long to believe that many treasures yet 

remain in the murky waters that will no 

doubt be added to the museum exhibition 

over coming years. n 

‘César, La Rhône pour mémoire’ runs 

at the Musée l’Arles antique until 19 

September. A catalogue of the same 

name is available. Eds. Luc Long & 

Pascale Picard. Actes Sud / Musée 

départmental Arles antique. pp.400, 

300 illus. €39. 


17 

15

Aerial archaeology 

In 1997, David Kennedy 

(University of Western 

Australia), who had been carrying 

out archaeological research 

on Roman frontiers in Jordan, sent 

Bob Bewley an email asking if they 

could work together on a potentially 

exciting project using aerial survey 

for archaeological research in Jordan. 

Thus began 15 seasons of aerial reconnaissance 

and photography. 

Prior to the first flight for this project, 

David Kennedy had been systematically 

examining some 4000 aerial 

photographs taken of western Jordan 

in 1953 by Hunting, a commercial survey 

company. This investigation led to 

a staggering 25,000 features being identified, 

many of which were of interest 

to archaeologists. At that time, Jordan’s 

national archaeological database had 

approximately 8000 recorded sites, so 

this was an exponential expansion of 

the known resource. The most efficient 

and cost-effective method of exploring 

these potential sites was from the air. 

In 1997, after many years of trying 

to obtain permission and gain access 

to aircraft, especially helicopters, the 

Royal Jordanian Air Force provided 

a trial flight, and since then Kennedy 

and Bewley have flown in their Huey 

or Super Puma helicopters (Figs 1, 2, 

3). There was a brief interlude when 

the researchers were obliged to use a 

Cessna 150 (a high-wing aircraft familiar 

to aerial archaeologists in Europe), 

but the helicopter is better suited to 

the terrain and location of airfields in 

Jordan. It also provides a very stable 

platform for photography through the 

wide viewing area offered by the huge 

open door. 

The method of locating and photographing 

the archaeology of Jordan is 

relatively simple. Unlike other parts of 

the world, where cropmarks or soilmarks 

indicate the presence of archaeological 

structures, in Jordan the sites 

are mainly upstanding and have been 

relatively well preserved, at least until 

recently. The vast majority of Jordanian 

sites are also either stone-built or of 

earthwork construction and the low, 

raking sunlight of early morning or 

late afternoon creates shadows, so their 

features can be photographed in a great 

deal of detail (Fig 4). 

The Jordanian authorities were willing 

to cooperate with the researchers 

because of the project’s role in maximising 

Jordan’s potential as a tourist 

destination. Some of its historic sites 

are widely known, such as Petra (Fig 

6) and Qasr Amra (Jordan’s two World 

Heritage sites); Jarash (Fig 5), Pella, 

Umm Qeis, and other Decapolis cities; 

and Mount Nebo, Madaba and 

32 

2 

Robert Bewley and 

David Kennedy’s aerial 

archaeological research 

offers a new and 

enlightening perspective 

on ancient Jordan 

Out of 

the 

blue 

Fig 1. David Kennedy, 

ready to take 

photographs through 

the open door of a 

Huey helicopter. 

Fig 2. Huey (UH-1) 

helicopters, supplied 

by the Royal Jordanian 

Air Force, are the 

preferred platform for 

aerial photography. 

Fig 3. Bob Bewley in a 

Huey helicopter. 

Crusader Castles such as Kerak and 

Shaubak. There are, however, many 

more sites that are worth visiting 

for those interested in Jordan’s rich 

archaeological landscapes. The aerial 

survey work aims to achieve a greater 

understanding of the nature of these 

sites, as well as revealing the pressures 

being placed on the fragile archaeological 

landscapes. 

It became clear very early in the 

project that the landscape was under 

threat. Every town, city, and village, 

even those on or near important 

archaeological remains, seemed to be 

undergoing a house-building boom, 

while in the rural areas there were farm 

projects and bulldozers everywhere. 

The researchers realised that their 

work had a greater significance than 

they had at first thought: they were 

recording sites that might be destroyed 

in the near future (Figs 7, 10). 

3 

Another significant aspect of the 

project was that few other archaeologists 

in the region knew of the potential 

for aerial archaeology. The researchers 

therefore staged training events and 

workshops as a way of providing an 

introduction to the techniques of aerial 

survey for archaeological purposes. 

The most recent of these took place in 

2008 and was attended by 16 students 

drawn from 13 countries in the Middle 

East and North Africa. 

Although its borders are arbitrary, 

Jordan is bounded on the west by the 

Jordan River valley, which runs north 


to south and flows into the Dead Sea, 

the lowest point on earth. The land 

rises up sharply from the Dead Sea, 

with deep-cut gorges, the largest of 

which is the Wadi Mujib. On the limestone 

plateau in central Jordan (Biblical 

Moab and Edom) the land is very fertile; 

in the north the rolling hills have 

a Mediterranean feel, with trees and 

olive groves, as well as some spectacular 

sites such as Jarash, Ajloun Castle 

(Fig 8), Umm Qais (ancient Gadara) 

and Pella. Further south, the landscape 

around Petra and Wadi Rum becomes 

mountainous before leading down to 

the small coastal area around the growing 

city of Aqaba. 

Heading east, the limestone gives 

way to a black basalt lava desert, part 

of the great Harrat Ash-Shams. Despite 

its seeming bleakness, in the northwest 

there are abandoned Nabataean 

and Roman towns such as Umm el- 

Jimal, as well as forts, roads, and villages. 

In the region around the Azraq 

Oasis, the landscape is strewn with 

tens of thousands of enigmatic prehistoric 

walls, kites, wheels, and burial 

cairns and pendants (Figs 9, 13). This 

wealth of important historic and prehistoric 

sites attracts many archaeological 

teams to the country each year. 

The aerial images help them with their 

research and highlight areas which 

would otherwise take days to survey, 


1 

Fig 4. The late Roman 

site of Qasr Bshir, 

and a Nabatean 

fortlet (top right) 

photographed in low 

morning sunlight. 

Probably a winter 

palace for a Roman 

governor, above the 

main entrance is an 

inscription with the 

name of the praeses, 

Aurelius Asclepiades, 

c. AD 293-305. 

5 

Fig 5. Roman Jarash 

flourished between 

the 1 st and 3 rd 

centuries AD. However, 

the site was occupied 

from the early Bronze 

Age, and there was 

Umayyad activity 

in the 7 th and 8 th 

centuries AD. 

Fig 6. The so-called 

‘Monastery’ 

(‘Al-Deir’) at Petra, 

c. 1 st century BC. 

Fig 7. New roads and 

houses encroach on 

the ruins and ancient 

necropolis of the hilltop 

site of Tunayb. 

7 

4 

6

Aerial archaeology 

or might not be visited at all (Fig 11). 

The excitement of an aerial survey 

can be likened to a voyage of discovery. 

In 1999, the team flew over the limestone 

landscapes east of the ancient 

city of Jarash to photograph a Roman 

tomb in the village of Ain. On the adjacent 

hill-top, they noticed a clear rectangular 

structure, apparently a small 

fort that had not been seen or recorded 

before. A visit to the site a few days 

later turned up finds of pottery that 

suggested occupation between the 2 nd 

century BC to the 7 th century AD (Fig 

12). 

In the 1920s the RAF opened up the 

region by creating an air-mail route 

from Cairo to Baghdad. This required 

a combination of pioneering spirit and 

overcoming simple practical navigational 

problems, including ploughing 

a furrow for the pilots to use to help 

them fly in the right direction. But 

there was also an archaeological benefit 

of the pilots observing the ground 

– they spotted large, kite-shaped stone 

enclosures, which they reported in 

archaeological journals (see Antiquity 

1927 and 1929). Since then these enigmatic 

sites have attracted some archaeological 

attention, but perhaps not the 

amount of research they deserve (Fig 

9). Bewley and Kennedy have enlisted 

the help of a doctoral student, Karen 

Henderson (University of Western 

Australia), to examine the distribution 

and nature of these sites which occupy 

whole landscapes – all interconnected 

and ‘articulated’, suggesting their use 

over a long period of time. 

In the same areas where the Kites 

exist, are also found circular forms, 

collectively termed ‘Wheels’ (Fig 13). 

These are probably burial mounds 

or religious in character, as are the 

‘Pendants’, large burial cairns which 

run a ‘tail’ of small cairns. Some of the 

sites in these areas may be settlements, 

but these have yet to be investigated, so 

their function is not yet fully understood. 

Although there are many areas 

where these sites exist untouched, 

there are also large areas where a variety 

of forces have combined to remove 

the stones once and for all. 

The project has highlighted the 

plight and fragility of a whole new type 

of site – the ‘Circle’. Although one or 

two of these large, circular stone-built 

sites had been known before the project 

began, they had never been subject 

to archaeological study. Bewley and 

Kennedy have recorded over a dozen 

of these sites, the majority of which 

are almost exactly 400m in diameter, 

and often located in pairs. On the 

ground these sites would hardly be 

visible, but when photographed from 

34 

8 

Fig 8. Unlike the other 

castles in Jordan, 

Ajloun Castle (Qal’at Er 

Rabad), on the heights 

above the Jordan 

Valley, was built as a 

defence against the 

Crusaders in 1184-5. 

Fig 9. These remarkably 

intricate and extensive 

sites were labelled 

‘Kites’ by the early 

pioneering RAF pilots. 

There are thousands 

of them in Jordan 

and neighbouring 

countries. They are 

thought to have been 

prehistoric hunting 

sites in use from the 7 th 

millenium BC onwards. 

the air in the right light, they are very 

clear. However, as yet, the researchers 

have no idea what these structures 

were for or how old they are. They thus 

stand as something of a metaphor for 

all Jordanian archaeology: that there 

is a vast treasure-trove of archaeological 

sites to be recorded and discovered, 

but speed is of the essence if they are 

to be properly investigated and understood 

before they are destroyed. 

9 

Tourism plays a major part in the 

economy of Jordan, and visitors flock 

to Petra, Jarash, Madaba, Mount Nebo, 

and the resorts on the Dead Sea. One 

of the primary aims of this research has 

been to highlight the rich archaeological 

heritage that lies beyond these wonderful 

sites. However, bringing fragile 

monuments and landscapes to public 

attention has to go hand-in-hand 

with measures designed to protect and 


The excitement of an 

aerial survey can be 

likened to a voyage of 

discovery 

conserve the archaeology, and sites 

that were visited frequently in the past 

can suffer damage if access to them is 

increased. For example, Aseikhim is a 

wonderfully remote and hugely significant 

site, with finds that stretch 

back as far as the Palaeolithic, while 

the visible remains include Neolithic, 

Roman, and Umayyad construction. 

However, an access road created 

to allow work to be carried out 

on the site to improve its appearance 

for visitors had the unintended consequence 

of allowing large bulldozers 

the opportunity to access the area and 

remove a large amount of rubble for 

use in the construction industry. 

Two more flying sessions are 

13 

planned for 2010, as well as a third 

workshop to continue training local 

archaeologists in the various methods 

of landscape archaeology and aerial 

survey. It is a credit to Jordan’s openness 

and desire to embrace new methods 

of archaeological research that 

these techniques can be practised. It is 

hoped that aerial investigation will also 

spread to adjacent countries. n 

All photographs by the authors and 

the Aerial Photographic Archive 

of Archaeology in the Middle East 

(APAAME). 

Robert Bewley and David Kennedy 

have published the book Ancient 

Jordan from the Air (Council 

for British Research in the Levant, 

2004) while their aerial research 

has created thousands of images 

available online at www.flickr.com/ 

photos/36925516@N05/. 

Fig 10. The site 

of Imredan, near 

Amman. Apart from 

this photograph 

very few records of 

the site exist, but 

the square platform 

with retaining wall 

is reminiscent of 

Nabataean structures. 

Recent construction of 

a four-lane highway 

along the north 

side of the site, and 

clearance of ground in 

preparation for new 

housing, emphasise 

the threats to much of 

Jordan’s archaeology. 

Fig 11. Trench systems 

dating to World 

War I. These were 

photographed and 

recorded as part of 

the Great Arab Revolt 

Project (GARP). The 

trenches were named 

‘Bewley’s Bluff’ after 

one of the authors. 

Fig 12. The previously 

unknown hill-top 

fort overlooking the 

village of Ain was first 

photographed and 

recorded in 1999. A 

visit made to the site 

soon after suggested 

the fort was in use 

from the 2 nd century 

BC through to the 7 th 

century AD. 

Fig 13. So-called 

‘Wheel’ at Safawi. 

Remarkable 

prehistoric sites 

similar to this are 

numerous in the black 

basalt desert, but 

very little is known 

about their function. 

Dating them is equally 

problematic, although 

it is thought likely 

they were is use 

around the 5 th or 6 th 

millennia BC. 


10 

11 

12 

The authors would like to 

acknowledge the support of the 

organisations which have allowed 

them to carry out their aerial 

research: Society of Antiquaries, 

British Academy, Prehistoric Society, 

Palestine Exploration Fund, Seven 

Pillars of Wisdom Trust, Australian 

Research Council, University of 

Western Australian Research Fund, 

Mrs Francesca Radcliffe and, above 

all now, the Packard Humanities 

Institute. We are grateful, too, 

for the support of Their Royal 

Highnesses, Prince El-Hassan and 

Prince Feisal, Brigadier General 

Ababneh, Dr Fawwaz al-Khraysheh, 

the pilots of the RJAF and the 

Directors and staff of CBRL (now the 

British Institute in Amman).

Maya mythology 

A new exhibition casts 

light on the role of 

the sea in the Maya 

world view. Curator 

Daniel Finamore told 

Minerva more about 

this ground-breaking 

research 

Until 18 July 2010, the 

Peabody Essex Museum in 

Salem, Massachusetts, will 

be home to ‘Fiery Pool: 

The Maya and the Mythic Sea’, devised 

by Daniel Finamore, Curator of 

Maritime Art and History, and Stephen 

D. Houston, Professor of Archaeology 

at Brown University. The exhibition is 

remarkable in that it offers a new way 

of looking at the art of a great civilisation, 

and will become the standpoint 

from which all Maya art is assessed in 

future, Daniel Finamore believes. 

At the height of its power, between 

300 and 900 AD, the Maya civilisation 

spanned hundreds of cities across 

Mexico and Central America. With a 

culture that was highly advanced in 

mathematics, astronomy, architecture 

and art, the Maya practised a complex 

religion and used a refined pictorial 

writing system composed of more 

than 800 glyphs. Interpretation of this 

language has been central in attaining 

an understanding of Maya culture. 

While today 90 percent of glyphs 

are understood, it was only in the late 

1980s that a glyph for the sea was identified. 

Translated literally as Fiery Pool, 

identification of this glyph was part of 

a growing awareness of the centrality 

of the sea to Maya life. 

‘We are still establishing our understanding 

of Mayan iconography, but 

today we are able to see things that 

weren’t recognised 20 years ago. In the 

past, images of water in Maya art were 

studied from a practical point of view, 

in terms of the information they conveyed 

about travel or trade. Many overblown 

ideas about Maya seafaring have 

been put forward in the past; in 

fact, no Maya canoes survive, 

and there is no 

evidence that the 

objects traded from 

distant cultures were 

brought by Maya 

canoes, as opposed to 

those of neighbouring 

groups,’ says 

Finamore. ‘It is far 

36 

1 

The 

fiery 

pool 

2 

more interesting, and far more illuminating, 

to examine the significance 

and symbolism of the sea in the Maya 

world view. The sea and water were 

central to the Maya, even those who 

lived far inland, and many artistic 

motifs actually emphasised this – but it 

has not previously been recognised by 

Mayaists. These images of water represent 

something more than everyday 

practicalities: the passage through 

the phases of life.’ 

Accordingly, the exhibition 

is organised in four 

thematic sections. 

Water and cosmos 

More than a necessity to 

sustain life, water was the 

vital medium from which 

the world emerged, gods 

arose and ancestors communicated. 

The first section of the exhibition presents 

the viewer with an introduction to 

how water is represented in Maya art, 

and the prominence of its role in their 

belief system. As Daniel Finamore 

explains: ‘In the Maya mind, all water 

was unified. The sea, rivers, lakes, mist, 

clouds, atmosphere – all were interconnected 

and central to daily existence. 

Water was seen as a central, powerful 

force with its own motivations.’ 

The Maya likened the curve of the 

earth to the carapace of a giant turtle, 

swimming in a cosmic sea. A lidded 

pottery bowl, made in Guatemala 

around AD 300-400, serves as a microcosm 

of three vital areas: the sky is 

indicated by a bird, the earth by a turtle, 

and the waters by a horizontal band 

with shell-like volutes (Fig 2). The 


turtle’s power lies in its ability to break 

the boundary between the worlds of air 

and water. Another beast with a central 

role in origin and creation mythology 

is the crocodile, which possesses the 

same ability. A lidded vessel, almost 

half a metre in diameter, depicts the 

battle between mythical beasts and 

humans (Fig 1). The cosmic crocodile 

is shown eviscerating its victims, their 

blood streaming down the sides of the 

vessel, where it merges with the sea. 

The vessel dates to AD 500, and scholars 

are still interpreting its complex 

meaning. However, this gory image is 

a reference to the creation of the world 

– the presence of blood at birth and at 

death – and has links to bloodletting 

rituals during life. 

Like these mythic beasts, Maya 

rulers and noblemen were believed 

to possess the ability to exist in two 

worlds at once – a royal court and a 

water-filled cavity (Fig 3). Dating from 

AD 795, this panel shows the ruler 

known as Tajchanahk – ‘Torch-Sky- 

Turtle’, seated on a throne in the shape 

of a water-lily, and presiding over two 

lesser lords. The scene is bordered by 

a bubbly, watery band, and the fourlobed 

shape of the panel signals an 

underground hollow or cave. The two 

lords’ arm-gripping posture is a sign of 

subordination, and while all three figures 

have water-lily headdresses, a fish 

is nibbling at Tajchanahk’s. He is on 

his throne, ruling – yet surrounded by 

water; he is able to rule because he can 

control that element. 

Creatures of the fiery pool 

The world of the Maya brims with life, 

animated, realistic and supernatural, 

often all brought together in a single 

Fig 1. Lidded bowl 

with the iguana-jaguar 

eviscerating humans. 

Becan, Mexico. 

c. AD 500. H. 34cm, 

Diam. 49.3cm. 

Fig 2. Lidded vessel 

of a world-turtle. 

Tikal, Guatemala. 

AD 300-400. H. 18cm, 

Diam. 26.5cm. 

Fig 3. Panel of a seated 

ruler in a watery cave. 

Cancuen, Guatemala. 

AD 795. L. 66.5cm. 

Fig 4. Conch trumpet 

with a floating 

ancestor. Possibly 

north-eastern Petan, 

Guatemala. 

AD 300-500. L. 29.3cm. 

Fig 5. Vessel with 

a duck lid. Becan, 

Mexico. c. AD 500. H. 

22cm, Diam. 23cm. 

Fig 6. Sculpture of a 

pelican. Comalcalco, 

Mexico. AD 700-800. L. 

70cm. 

Fig 7. Carving of 

a frog. Topoxte, 

Guatemala. AD 

700-800. 

L. 7cm. 

3 

scene. Objects in the second section 

of the exhibition portray a wide array 

of fish, frogs, birds and mythical beasts 

inhabiting the sea and conveying spiritual 

concepts. The Maya viewed all 

aquatic creatures as imbued with their 

own life force and the spirits of ancestors, 

so although these are works of 

art in their own right, they can also be 

interpreted on a deeper level. 

Many of the artefacts in this section 

are accessible representations of 

familiar creatures. Frogs are inextricably 

linked to water through their 

aquatic metamorphosis from egg 

to tadpole to adult. The delightful 

carving of a swimming frog embodies 

that connection – the creature is 

carved from an aquatic material, Oliva 

porphyria shell, which is found in the 

southern Pacific Ocean (Fig 7). Its eyes 

are smooth stones, and the natural pattern 

and colour of the shell reflects the 

texture of the frog’s skin. The carving 

formed part of a sumptuous burial 

offering from the island of Topoxte 

in Lake Yaxha, Guatemala, and dates 

from AD 700-800. 

Ducks were used in Maya art to represent 

wind, vitality and the life force. 

The exhibition does not feature many 

pieces of blackware, but the vessel with 

a duck lid (Fig 5) is a particularly fine 

and complex example. Bands of dots 

and circles around the rim of the lid 

and the outer body of the vessel represent 

the surface of still-water – a possible 

allusion to the swampy habitats 

preferred by muscovy ducks and their 

prey. The vessel dates from c. AD 500 

and was found at Becan, in the centre 

of the Yucatan Peninsula. 

The Maya would have noted the 

ease with which water fowl move 

between the sky and the waters. Some 

even plunge from the air to below the 

water’s surface – descending into the 

underworld and emerging unscathed. 

A massive stucco carving of a pelican 

from the site of Comalcalco, a city near 

the swampy estuaries of the Gulf of 

Mexico, pays tribute to this ability (Fig 

6). This naturalistic sculpture includes 

the bird’s rounded head and narrow 

bill, and cross-hatching is used to represent 

the stretchy, featherless skin of its 

throat – and possibly to echo the texture 

of a turtle’s shell. 

Among the Maya and other peoples 

of Mesoamerica, the conch served as 

a basic symbol of the sea (Fig 4). The 

spiral form of these large shells evokes 

volutes of breath and wind, phenomena 

closely linked with the moist 

ocean breezes. The spirits of the ancestors 

were believed to rise from the sea 

to form clouds and thus bring precious 

rain back to earth. This conch 

trumpet features a floating 

ancestor, only the head and 

elaborate headdress shown. 

The headdress depicts the 

rain god Chahk, 

and the clouds 

swirling beneath 


7 

5 

6 

4


the ancestor’s chin convey his ethereal 

nature as the embodiment of rain. 

When the trumpet was held horizontally 

to be played, the ancestor’s face 

would seem to gaze downwards from 

the sky. 

Navigating the cosmos 

Beyond its necessity to sustain life, 

water in the Maya world was a source 

of material wealth and spiritual power. 

All bodies of water – rivers, cenotes 

(deep inland pools) and the sea – 

were united, and all could be traversed 

to a cosmic realm. They could also be 

crossed by canoe for purposes of trade. 

As noted, no Maya canoes survive, so 

scholars rely on images of the vessels 

to research their structure and uses. 

However, one of the most detailed 

images of a Maya canoe has nothing 

to do with trade (Fig 8). Portrayed 

on a drinking vessel that depicts the 

death and rebirth of the Maize God, 

the scenes show maize entering water 

(death) and the watering of seed corn 

(rebirth). His watery voyage is rendered 

on a black background to mimic 

the murk of primordial time. In one 

part of the image, the Maize God is 

transported in a canoe guided by the 

so-called Paddler Gods. They propel 

the craft in asynchronous fashion; one 

paddle enters the water as the other is 

drawn out, suggesting that, as deities, 

normal nautical rules do not apply to 

them. Beneath the canoe, another version 

of the Maize God is nibbled by fish 

– perhaps a reference to maize being 

used as bait by fishermen. 

One of the only extant images of 

boats being used as transport is a 

watercolour copy, by the American 

archaeologist Ann Axtell Morris, of a 

mural discovered at Chichen Itza in 

the 1920s (Fig 9). The original paintings 

had been preserved for a thousand 

years in the ruins of the Temple 

of the Warriors, created from AD 

900-1100, but are now almost entirely 

eroded, so these painstaking copies 

are all that remain. They contain 

unique, if enigmatic, historical data. 

The original mural was part of a cycle, 

38 

10 

8 

9 

Fig 8. Drinking vessel 

with the death and 

rebirth of the 

Maize God. Holmul 

region, Guatemala. 

AD 700-800. H. 22.7cm. 

Fig 9. Watercolour 

copy of a mural from 

the Temple of the 

Warriors, Chichen Itza, 

Mexico. AD 900-1100. 

300 x 420cm. 

Fig 10. Sculpture of the 

head of a god. Altun 

Ha, Belize. AD 550-650. 

H. 14.9cm. 

which appears to depict a conquest 

and shows many scenes of destruction, 

including sieges, prisoner-taking and 

human sacrifice. Dark-skinned warriors, 

probably Toltecs, are led to victory 

by a divine plumed serpent, while 

the less fortunate Maya are rendered in 

a lighter hue. This particular painting 

depicts a moment of calm: a bustling 

village goes about its daily business 

while the warriors slip past, unheeded, 

in canoes. The ocean is rich in detail: 

crabs, fish, shellfish and stingrays surround 

the invaders, and may represent 

the presence of ancestral spirits. 

The Maya were major players in the 

Beyond its necessity 

to sustain life, water 

in the Maya world was 

a source of material 

wealth and spiritual 

power. 

trade of jade around central America, 

and the exhibition includes some 

remarkable objects made from this 

material. The single largest piece of 

jade sculpture from the Maya world is 

a carving of the head of a god, worked 

from a single piece of jade and weighing 

almost 5kg (Fig 10). The sculpture 

was discovered in 1968 at the site 

of Altun Ha, Belize, in the tomb of an 

elderly man, who was buried with it 

nestling in his arms. It dates from AD 

550-650. 

The Maya lacked metallurgy as well 

as native sources of turquoise, so the 

discovery of a pair of ear spools at 

Santa Rita Corozel, Belize, attests to 

long-distance maritime trade with central 

Mexico (Fig 11). As well as a clear 

Mexican influence in their design, the 

ear spools contain materials that were 

probably imported from locations 

around Mesoamerica, including the 

American South-west, Costa Rica and 

Panama – evidence of a vast and complex 

network of communication, contact 

and trade, reliant upon the sea for 

its existence. 

Birth to rebirth 

The final section of the exhibition 

addresses the cyclical motion of the 

cosmos as the Maya experienced it. 

The sun rose in the morning from the 

Caribbean in the east, bearing the features 

of a shark as it began to traverse 

the sky. Cosmic crocodiles exhaled 

storms and battled with gods of the 

underworld, while on earth the rituals 

of everyday life went on. This section 

of the exhibition comprises four 

themes: birth, life, death and rebirth, 

and we see deities and humans moving 

through the cycle. 

Each day began with the re-emergence 

of the Sun God from the ocean, 

an event depicted on a pottery incense 

burner (Fig 13) made in Palenque, 

Mexico, in AD 700-750. A water curl 

down his cheek shows his aquatic origins, 

and he carries Spondylus shell ear 

ornaments linked to Chahk, the Rain 

God, who also rises from the eastern 

sea. A shark serves as his headdress, 

and above it protrudes the head of a 

crocodile, as if the god is rising from 

the depths of the water. 

Gods required potent offerings from 


11 

14 15 


12 

13 

Fig 11. Turquoise mosaic 

ear spools. Santa Rita 

Corozal, Belize. 

AD 1300-1550. L. 6.4cm. 

Fig 12. Carved lintel, 

depicting blood-letting 

ritual. Yaxchilan, Mexico. 

AD 723. H. 126.5cm. 

Fig 13. Pottery incense 

burner. Palenque, Mexico. 

AD 700-750. H. 118.5cm. 

Fig 14. Figurine of a deer. 

El Peru Waka. AD 550-650. 

H. 15.9cm. 

Fig 15. Figurine of a 

dwarf. El Peru Waka. AD 

550-650. H. 21.8cm. 

Fig 16. Figurine of the 

Jaguar God on a crocodile. 

Jaina Island, Mexico. AD 

700-800. H. 24.9cm. 

16 


their subjects. A carved lintel, one 

of three commissioned by Ix K’abal 

Xook, chief wife of the king known as 

Itzamnaaj Bahlam of Yaxchilan in AD 

723 and 724, depicts her and her husband 

engaged in a variety of ritual acts 

(Fig 12). Here, Ix K’abal Xook has used 

stingray spines to pierce her tongue, 

and is allowing the blood to flow on to 

strips of paper, which will be burned in 

offering to the gods. From the smoke 

in the bowl in front of her, the Rain 

God Chahk is emerging from the maw 

of a giant, double-headed centipede. 

By night, the Sun God takes on 

another aspect: he transforms into the 

Jaguar God of the underworld (Fig 

16). In this figurine, carved on Jaina 

Island, Mexico, in AD 700-800, he is 

depicted riding the earth crocodile, 

his dominance over it suggested by his 

grip on its jaw and thus his control of 

its breath. He sits in the posture associated 

with rulers on their thrones, and 

the crocodile appears relaxed and docile, 

its snout turned towards the deity. 

In this way, the god of night tames the 

earth and steers it towards dawn and 

rebirth. 

Mortals, too, required guidance 

through the underworld on their journey 

towards new life. In 2006, the tomb 

of an unknown ruler was discovered 

in a temple acropolis at the ancient 

Maya city of El Peru Waka. An exquisite 

array of figurines had been buried 

with the ruler, to accompany him into 

the afterlife. The 23 figurines display 

unerring attention to detail, and had 

been painstakingly arrayed on a stone 

bench in the chamber, each with its 

own role to play in the transformation 

of the dead Maya king into a healed 

and reborn spirit. The tableau includes 

an anthropomorphic deer (Fig 14), 

which may be the ‘way-creature’ – a 

supernatural co-essence or spirit companion 

– of the shaman seated in the 

centre of the ring. Also in the scene 

are a frog, a hunchback scribe, and 

four dwarves. One dwarf bears particularly 

potent references to the role 

of the ocean in the process of rebirth 

(Fig 15). Clad in an elegant deer headdress, 

he holds a conch trumpet, used 

to create conduits to convey gods and 

ancestral souls from this world to the 

next. The note he sounded could open 

the portal that would allow the dead 

king to pass along the watery path of 

the night sun, and be reborn. n 

‘Fiery Pool: The Maya and the 

Mythic Sea’ is at the Peabody Essex 

Museum, Salem, Massachusetts, 

until 18 July 2010. Visit www.pem. 

org for more details. 

39

Civilisation of 

gold 

nca: origins and mysteries 

of the civilisation of gold’, 

on view until 27 June at the 

Museo di Santa Giulia in 

Brescia, displays 270 artefacts fashioned 

from silver, wood, terracotta, 

stone, copper, bronze, silver and especially 

from gold. As the title of the 

exhibition highlights, this metal was 

of special importance to the ancient 

civilisations of the Andes (Figs 1, 2). 

40 

Dalu Jones 

reviews an 

exhibition 

in Brescia 

examining the 

origins of the 

Inca Empire 

The exhibition provides a rich panoramic 

view of the pre-Columbian 

cultures that flourished in Peru for 

the 3000 years until the arrival of 

European Conquistadores in AD 1532. 

It plots a course through the variety 

of lesser-known societies that would 

ultimately mesh together to form the 

famous, yet short-lived, Inca Empire 

(AD 1440-1539). The artefacts on display 

also provide an evocation of the 

1 

environment, the myths and the rituals 

that set a context for their creation, as 

well as the mysterious functions they 

were intended to fulfil. Emphasis is 

placed on the importance that precious 

metals had in the development of the 

ancient cultures of the Central Andes. 

Adoration of gold is a theme that 

runs through all the cultures that 

evolved in the Andean region, and glorification 

of the metal would ultimately 


2 3 

entice Europeans to the area and bring 

about the collapse of the Inca Empire. 

Archaeological evidence indicates 

that metallurgical techniques developed 

independently in three separate 

regions: the cultures of Northern Peru, 

characterised by gold sheets (tumbaga) 

and gilding; the societies of the 

Bolivian highlands, Northern Chile, 

north-west Argentina and southern 

Peru, which produced objects in 

copper and bronze; and a centre in 

Columbia where the preferred method 

of metalworking was the lost wax technique. 

Gold appears to have been in 

use some 4000 years ago, while the 

working of silver and copper developed 

between 1500-1300 BC. The 

metals were employed in ritual and 

funerary implements and as an expression 

of social status. 

Many of the most spectacular objects 

currently on display in Brescia were 

created by the Sicàn-Lambayeque culture 

(c. AD 800-1375), a coastal state 

located in the north of Peru, which 

predated the Incas. On loan from the 

Bruning Museum, Lambayeque, Peru, 

the treasures were part of elite funerary 

traditions in which tombs (fardos), 

furnished with exceptionally rich 

funerary goods, were positioned at the 

base of deep vertical wells. Large burial 

mounds were then raised over the well 

shafts. Most current knowledge of 

Sicàn burial customs, and the social 

structure of society as a whole, comes 

from the rich graves excavated at the 

Huaca Loro site in Poma. Grave goods 

collectively weighing more than a ton 

were recovered from a single tomb 

at the site, and offer clear evidence 

of the highly developed skills practised 

by Sicàn artisans, particularly 

smiths working with gold and silver. 

The deceased were often buried with 

gold crowns and masks, or the peculiar 

narigueras which were designed 

to hang from the nose of the wearer 

and cover the nostrils and mouth 

(Fig 4). The hands and forearms were 

Fig 1. Funerary gold 

mask with traces 

of cinnabar, Sicàn 

culture AD 750-1375. 

37.9 x 64.9cm. Museo 

Arqueologico Nacional 

Bruning, Lambayeque. 

Fig 2. ‘The room 

with the five rulers’. 

Exhibition display 

inside the Museo di 

Santa Giulia, Brescia. 

Fig 3. Wooden 

sculpture with mother 

of pearl insets for 

the eyes, holding a 

ceremonial keru cup, 

Chimu Culture, AD 

1200-1470. H. 138cm. 

Museo Arqueologico 

Nacional Bruning, 

Lambayeque. 

Fig 4. Gold crown 

and gold nariguera, 

Cupisnique Culture, 

1250 BC-AD 100. 

Crown, H. 51.1cm, 

L. 8.6cm. Museo 

Arqueològico Nacional 

Bruning, Lambayeque. 

Fig 5. Gold, silver 

and copper alloy 

ornament, Moche 

culture, AD 100-800. 

H. 22.4cm. Museo 

Larco, Lima. 

Fig 6. Gold disk with 

central figure, Sicàn 

culture, AD 750-1375. 

Diam. 10.1cm. Museo 

Arqueològico 

Nacional 

Bruning, 

Lambayeque. 

sometimes fitted with golden gloves 

or gauntlets (Fig 7), while the hands 

might grip a golden cup decorated with 

motifs referring to the god Naymlap, 

mythical founder of a dynasty of Sicàn 

rulers. The manner in which the body 

was positioned also indicated social 

position in Sicàn society, with the elite 

always buried in a sitting posture. 

The ceremonial clothes of the ruling 

elite of the Sicàn and many of the other 

pre-Columbian cultures of Peru were 

covered with gold (Fig 5), while ornaments 

such as crowns and other elaborate 

headwear, ear-rings, necklaces and 

pectorals were fashioned from the high 

status metal. These and a great variety 

of other objects were used for the many 

religious ceremonies that guaranteed 

the equilibrium of the cosmos and a 

successful harvest (Figs 1, 6). So important 

was gold to the civilisations of the 

Andean region that even the mines 

and riverbeds from which the metal 

was extracted were regarded as sacred 

and worshipped accordingly. The significance 

of gold and silver to the Inca 

was far more than merely its material 

value. According to the mythology of 

the culture, gold represented the sun 

god, Inti, while silver was the manifestation 

of his sister/wife, the moon goddess 

Mama Quilla. According to one of 

the most common of Inca foundation 

legends, it was their son, Manco Capac, 

who was sent to Earth to teach humankind 

how to live in a civilised manner. 

He also established the Kingdom of 

Cusco, which would later expand into 

the Inca Empire, and was the progenitor 

of Inca royalty. Gold and silver 

therefore represented the sun and 

the moon, the primordial couple from 

whose union produced the founder of 

the Inca dynasty. 

Metal and mythology 

Through a dazzling display of gold and 

silver objects presented in the exhibition, 

visitors can explore the belief systems 

of the peoples of ancient Peru and 


4 

5 6

Inca Empire 

the mythologies that pervaded everyday 

life. Religious rituals guaranteed a 

balanced relationship between the sky 

gods, the earth, the world in between, 

and other worlds believed to be made 

of the ‘alter ego’ of all animate and 

inanimate things, guarding the knowledge 

of the present and the future. 

Gold was considered a living force that 

allowed contact with cosmic forces. 

It appears that the origin of many of 

the rituals, iconography and cosmological 

concepts shaping the cultures 

of the Andes originated on the northern 

and central coast of Peru, rather 

than in the Chavin culture (1500-200 

BC) of the central Andes, as previously 

believed. Religious rites were characterised 

by shamanistic practices and 

the ritual use of drugs, especially those 

derived from the San Pedro cactus 

(Trichocereus pachanois) as well as the 

widespread use of coca leaves. Sacred 

places focused the collective memory. 

These were often natural features 

such as mountains, rivers and springs, 

and could be provided with additional 

spiritual impact by the decoration 

of nearby rocks with petroglyphs. 

Here the shamans would communicate 

with the gods and with the spirits 

of the ancestors through the use of 

special objects and substances. Human 

sacrifices were also performed at such 

sacred places. The remarkably well preserved 

frozen body of a young girl aged 

about 14 years – the so-called ‘Lady of 

Ampato’– was discovered in 1995 near 

Arequipa, on Mount Ampato in the 

Andes Cordillera. She had been killed 

between AD 1440-1450 and, together 

with sculptures and foodstuffs, she had 

Fig 7. Gold and silver 

gloves. Sicàn culture, 

AD 750-1375. 55 x 

9.4cm, and 53.5 x 

8.7cm. Museos ‘Oro 

del Peru’-‘Armas del 

Mundo’- Fundacion 

Miguel Mujica Gallo, 

Lima. 

Fig 8. The Inca site of 

Machu Picchu situated 

above the Urubamba 

Valley. It was probably 

built as an estate 

for the emperor and 

occupied from 

c. AD 1400 until 1572. 

Fig 9. Silver cup with 

a rattle inside, Chimù 

Culture AD 1200- 

1470. 38.3 x 96.2cm. 

Museo Nacional 

de Arqueologia. 

7 

8 

been offered to the Inca gods. 

The most spectacular ritual landmarks 

from ancient Peru were those 

produced by the Nazca. In addition to 

creating beautiful polychrome ceramics 

and textiles, the Nazca culture is 

above all famous for the creation of 

the amazing geoglyphs that criss-cross 

the Nazca desert (Fig 11). Hundreds 

of geometric and stylised 

figural designs were produced 

by removing the 

loose red-brown gravel 

that covers the surface of 

the desert, exposing the 

lighter coloured earth below. 

The Nazca Lines cover an 

immense area of more than 400 

square kilometres, with the 

geoglyphs produced over a 

900 year period spanning 200 

BC - AD 700. The Nazca peoples 

were spread over a vast 

territory running along the 

dry southern coast of Peru. 

The culture appears to have 

been extremely theocratic in 

nature and had as its ceremonial 

centre a huge non-urban 

temple complex at Cahuachi, 

covering an area of 24 square 

kilometres. At this ceremonial 

site large-scale rituals were 

performed, including processions 

of mummified bodies of 

ancestors. 

Most of the civilisations 

of South America practised 

human sacrifice, and this 

unpleasant association with 

the societies that produced 

the artworks currently on 

display at Brescia can lead 

9 

to uncomfortable questions of how 

such exhibitions should be staged, and 

how visitors should approach them. 

Archaeological work at the pyramids 

erected by the Moche culture (AD 

100-800) in northern Peru proves 

that they sacrificed males, probably 

warriors from enemy states who had 

been captured in battle. The later Inca 

civilisation maintained ritual sacrifice 

as an integral part of 

religious observance. On 

the death of Atahualpa’s 

father, Huayna Capac, in 

1527, Nigel Davies believes 

that as many as 4000 slaves, 

servants, officials, and concubines 

were sacrificed in the 

Emperor’s honour (Human 

Sacrifice, 1981). Such sacrifices 

are glimpsed in the archaeological 

record and only last 

year 33 bodies dating to the 

decades before the collapse of 

the Inca Empire were found 

near the Peruvian coastal city 

of Chiclayo. Most were bodies 

of teenage girls, some still bearing 

cut marks on the neck and 

collarbone where the sacrificial 

blade had been drawn across 

their throats. There is thus a 

moral dilemma in appreciating 

the beautifully fashioned artefacts 

and the skills of the artisans 

who produced them, and 

the cruel and bloody context 

within which such artworks 

were created. 

Empire of the sun 

The Inca Empire, also known 

as the Tahuantinsuyo, evolved 


over many centuries, but its origins 

are still subject to scholarly debate. 

Foundation myths speak of a hypothetical 

first ruler, Manco Capac, 

emerging from the waters of Lake 

Titicaca holding a golden rod and gesturing 

towards the chosen location on 

which the sacred city of Cuzco would 

be built. By AD 1500, the theocratic 

Inca Empire stretched from the Pacific 

Ocean in the west to the rivers of the 

Amazon and Paraguay in the east; and 

from the region near Quito in modern 

Ecuador to the north, to Chile’s Maule 

River in the south (Fig 12). 

The capital of the Inca domains was 

the city of Cuzco. Like the uniquely 

located sacred site of Machu Picchu 

(Fig 8), it boasted impressive palaces, 

temples and astronomical observatories. 

The largest and 

most important of the 

temples in the city was 

that of the Coricancha 

13 

– the Golden 

Courtyard – dedicated 

to Inti, the god of the 

sun. It was filled with a 

staggering quantity of 

gold statuary, while floors 

and walls were covered in 

sheets of gold. While the 

Inca Empire was already in 

decline because of the civil 

war fought between rivals 

vying for the throne, it was the 

arrival of the Conquistadores 

under Francisco Pizzaro in 1532 

that would lead to the destruction 

of Inca civilisation. Following 

the capture of the last Inca 

king, Atahualpa, the Spanish 

demanded that an entire room 

10 

11 

Fig 10. Feather and 

silver crown, Chimù 

Culture, AD 1200-1470. 

35.6 x 14.5cm. Museos 

‘Oro del peru’-‘Armas 

del Mundo-Fundacion 

Miguel Mujica Gallo, 

Lima. 

Fig 11. A ‘Hummingbird’ 

geoglyph from the 

Nazca desert. 

c. AD 200-700. 

Fig 12. Map of the 

Inca Empire and the 

network of Inca roads. 

Fig 13 Ceremonial 

beaker made of wood 

(kero), Inca colonial 

transition period, 16th 

century AD. 21.7 x 16 

x 14cm. Museo Larco, 

Lima. 

be filled with objects of gold and two 

other rooms with silver, for the ransom 

of the king. Most of the precious metals 

that went into the futile attempt to free 

Atahualpa were probably obtained by 

stripping the Coricancha. The Spanish 

subsequently melted the objects into 

ingots for ease of transport back to 

Europe. The imprisonment and murder 

of Atahualpa by order of Francisco 

Pizarro is most famously and movingly 

portrayed in Peter Shaffer’s 1964 play, 

The Royal Hunt of the Sun. 

Italian intervention 

The exhibition catalogue, edited by 

Paloma Carcedo de Mufarech, includes 

two chapters on the investigations carried 

out by Italian scholars in Peru in 

the years following the founding of 

the Museo Preistorico Etnografico 

in Rome by Luigi Pigorini in 1875. 

Among the pioneers of Peruvian 

archaeology was the Italian naturalist 

and geographer Antonio 

Raimondi, who published El 

Perù. Historia y Geografia del 

Perù in 1874. 

In 1962, an official agreement 

was signed between Italy 

and Peru. This allowed for an 

Italian archaeological mission 

in the country, financed by the 

Ministry of Foreign Affairs and 

led by Pellegrino Claudio Sestieri. 

Until 1971, the Italian mission concentrated 

its activities on the site of 

Cajamarquilla, a large city built on 

the banks of the River Rìmac, near 

Lima. Located between the mountains 

and the coast, Cajamarquilla 

was spread over more than seven 

square kilometres and had a 

Inca Empire 

population numbering about 20,000 at 

its peak in the 8 th and 9 th centuries AD. 

The archaeological work of Sestieri 

was continued by Mario Polia and 

Claudio Cavatrunci who explored the 

extensive network of Inca roads in 

the Aypate region of north-west Peru, 

and in 1973 they discovered a fortress 

city buried under thick vegetation at 

a height of almost 3000m above sea 

level. This was followed in 1982 by the 

Nazca Project and the construction 

of the Museo Didàctico Antonini at 

the site following a private bequest of 

the Antonini family. Political unrest 

at the end of the 1980s directed the 

Italian investigations towards the 

safer regions of the valley of the river 

Tambo, south-west of Lake Titicaca. 

Italian archaeologists are currently 

investigating the coastal city of Chan 

Chan, capital of the Chimù kingdom 

(AD 1200-1470). Italian funding also 

made it possible to open the Museo 

de Sitio at the site of Sipàn, on Peru’s 

northern coast. The museum protects 

the richest tomb ever discovered in 

South America, which was unearthed 

in 1987. These Italian archaeological 

missions have also attempted to 

involve the local population in their 

activities and improve living conditions 

while opening remote areas to 

tourism. n 

Catalogue: Inca, origine e misteri 

delle civiltà dell’oro, edited by 

Palma Carcero de Mufarech. All 

colour illustrations. Marsilio, Venice, 

240pp. €30 at the exhibition, €38 

in bookshops. Information and 

bookings: + 39 (0) 800 775 083. 


12

COPYRIGHT NASA EARTH OBSERVATORY 

Egyptian heritage 

2010 marks the 50 th anniversary of 

the building of the Aswan High Dam. 

Georgina Read evaluates its impact 

on Egypt’s archaeology 

High stakes 

Since construction commenced 

50 years ago, the Aswan High 

Dam (Saad el Ali) has illustrated 

the tension between 

protecting a country’s archaeological 

heritage and serving the contemporary 

needs of its people. Every nation 

is faced with the challenge of balancing 

its ancient cultural heritage with the 

capacity of its people to prosper. It is 

interesting to consider with hindsight 

the e�ects of such a large-scale, and at 

the time, controversial construction on 

the ecology and archaeology of its surrounding 

area. 

� e original Aswan Dam, built by 

the British in 1902, was erected and 

heightened three times (in 1912, 1929, 

and 1933), but still failed to provide the 

necessary control against the �ooding 

of the Nile Valley. � e dam also lacked 

capacity, unable to provide su� cient 

electricity for the growing population, 

or irrigation to support the booming 

cotton industry. � e solution was to 

build a dam to control the variance in 

the annual Nile inundation, improve 

irrigation throughout the valley, and 

increase production of hydro-electric 

energy. Aswan in southern Egypt was 

originally chosen as an ideal location 

2 

Fig 1. Panoramic view 

of Lake Nasser and 

and the hydro-electric 

power plant located 

close to the Aswan 

High Dam. 

Fig 2. Relocated Temple 

of Debod, Parque 

de Rosales, Madrid. 

Originally built in the 

2 nd century BC. 

Fig 3. Satellite image 

of central Egypt. Inset: 

Aswan High Dam. 

3 

because the First Cataract of the Nile 

provided close parallel shorelines (Fig 

1). However, negotiations surrounding 

the location appeared to overlook the 

importance of the archaeological sites 

in areas further south. 

In 1952 Egypt’s Revolutionary 

Council decided to build a new larger 

dam instead of enlarging the old one 

for a fourth time. As well as generating 

a large volume of hydro-electric power 

to help meet some of the demands of 

the country’s population and industry, 

the dam would also alleviate the 

widespread �ooding of the Nile Valley 

from June to August, which devastated 

cotton crops and damaged residential 

areas. By 1960, Egypt’s population had 

grown rapidly to over 28 million and 

President Gamal Abdal Nasser (Fig 

7) saw the construction of a new dam 

as essential to the country’s economic 

development and political stability. 

� e project was eventually funded 

by the Soviet Union a�er Western 

countries withdrew their support 

owing to the perceived socialist reform 

agenda being pursued by Nasser’s government. 

Egypt and Sudan had signed 

the Nile Water Agreement in 1959 and 

work began on the dam the following 

year and, a�er several stages of construction, 

was completed in 1972. A 

total of 35,000 workers were employed 

in building the dam, the greatest building 

programme in Egypt since the construction 

of the pyramids. 

A dam of this size was always going 

to have a huge impact on the ecology 

and archaeology of the area. It 

was estimated that in the region of 

100,000 people were permanently displaced 

from Nubia by the rising waters 

of Lake Nasser, the vast reservoir that 

was formed behind the dam capable of 

holding 111 cubic kilometres of water 

(Fig 3). � e construction of the dam 

would also have a huge impact on the 

people of Egypt living far to the north. 

Some 95 percent of the population of 

the country lived within 20 kilometres 

of the River Nile, many working 

as farmers and reliant upon the annual 

�oods to deposit nutrient-rich silt on 

the land. With the building of the dam 

this material would instead end up at 

the bottom of the reservoir, necessitating 

the widespread use of arti�cial 

fertilisers to enrich the farmland lying 

either side of the Nile. � e steady buildup 

of silt behind the dam would also 

steadily decrease the capacity of the 

reservoir. Furthermore, the relatively 

calm waters of Lake Nasser proved 

to be the ideal environment for water 

snails which carry the Bilharzia parasite 

which can cause serious damage to 

the internal organs of anyone who contracts 

the disease from infected water, 

leading to chronic illness and sometimes 

death. 

� e threat to Egypt’s heritage posed 

by the construction of the dam and 

the creation of the vast reservoir 

behind prompted an international 

outcry. UNESCO’s ‘Nubia Campaign’ 


1

mobilised funds to ensure the relocation 

of 22 monuments and architectural 

complexes, saving them from the 

rising waters of Lake Nasser. The international 

effort was carried out with 

the assistance of 40 technical missions 

drawn from five continents. This provided 

the expertise that allowed the 

dismantling and accurate reassembly 

of the huge and complex structures. 

Not only were monuments moved 

to new sites, some were even relocated 

to new countries. The Temple of 

Debod (Fig 2), originally constructed 

at the beginning of the 2 nd century BC 

and added to by the Ptolemaic kings, 

was dismantled and shipped to Spain 

where it was rebuilt in the Parque de 

Rosales in Madrid. (The gateways of 

the temple have, however, been reassembled 

differently to the order in 

which they originally stood when 

14km south of Aswan.) The Temple 

of Dendur, which had been erected by 

Petronius, the Governor of the Roman 

province of Egypt at the beginning of 

the Roman Principate, originally stood 

some 75km south of Aswan where it 

faced submergence under the waters of 

Lake Nasser. The temple was therefore 

presented as a gift by the Egyptians to 

the United States of America and was 

shipped across the Atlantic and reerected 

in the Metropolitan Museum 

of Art, New York (Fig 4). 

Even monuments not originally 

thought to be at risk from the rising 

water levels, including some of 

the structures that were relocated as 

part of the international effort, have 

since come under threat from salination. 

The rising water table that inevitably 

resulted from the creation of the 

huge reservoir, has released salts into 

the sandstone and limestone of monuments 

all across Egypt, leading to 


4 

Fig 4. Temple of Dendur 

relocated in the 

Metropolitan Museum, 

New York. Originally 

built c. 27 BC – AD 

14. Copyright Xan 

Rosemaninovich. 

flaking of external reliefs and hieroglyphs, 

while also weakening the stone, 

resulting in the crumbling of some 

structures. 

The largest and most famous of the 

monuments relocated in the 1960s was 

the twin temple site at Abu Simbel (Fig 

6). Originally built in the mid-1240s, 

with construction running for more 

than 20 years, the impressive main 

temple, dedicated to the four universal 

gods – Re-Harakhte, Amun-Re, 

Ptah, and Ramses II – has a facade 

30 metres high, 35 metres wide, and 


with four seated statues almost 20 

metres high, all wearing the Double 

Crown. The statues are taller than the 

Colossi of Memnon at Thebes, and 

were all originally carved from the 

solid cliff face. Since its discovery in 

1813 by the famous Swiss orientalist 

J.L. Burckhardt, Abu Simbel has 

been one of the most popular tourist 

attractions in Egypt. Not only is it 

a magnificent example of monumental 

Egyptian craftsmanship, but the 

Temple of Nefertari, one of the two 

Great Royal Wives of the pharaoh, is 

the only example from Egyptian history 

in which the queen was carved 

to the same size as the pharaoh, signalling 

her as his equal. Over four 

years (1964-68), and at a total cost of 

$40 million, engineers and archaeologists 

dismantled the colossal temples 

of Ramses II and Nefertari, reassembling 

them 90m above and 120m to the 

north of the original location. What 

was once a mysterious, partly sandsubmerged 

temple is now a lake-side 

tourist hotspot. 

Also included in the UNESCO 

relocation project was the spectacular 

Philae Temple complex (Figs 5, 8), 

which had formerly been located on 

an island dedicated to Isis. Revered for 

centuries, the island witnessed most 

phases of temple construction during 

the Late Period of Pharaonic history, 

and especially during Ptolemaic and 

Roman control of Egypt. However, following 

construction of the Aswan Low 

Dam, the temples on Philae were partly 

submerged for many months of the 

year. Before the 27,000 tons of stone 

which made up the temple complex on 

the island could be relocated in the face 

of the higher water levels that would 

follow the building of the High Dam 

in 1960, Philae was protected with a 

45


coffer dam constructed around the site 

and which allowed the monuments to 

be thoroughly dismantled. 

At the same time, attention was paid 

to landscaping the site to which the 

monuments would be relocated. The 

original setting of Philae was therefore 

replicated on Agilkia Island, a little 

over half a kilometre away (Fig 8). The 

various shrines, sanctuaries, colonnades, 

and huge pylons which constitute 

the magnificent site were carefully 

dismantled before being relocated, a 

process that took more than two years 

to complete. 

The creation of the Aswan High Dam 

is not a unique example of the way in 

which large-scale reservoir projects 

can threaten a country’s cultural heritage. 

Similar programmes of construction 

are still a threat, and many lessons 

are still to be learned from the experiences 

that accompanied the building of 

the High Dam. 

In Turkey, the creation of the Ilisu 

Dam, part of a network of reservoirs in 

south-eastern Anatolia, is due for completion 

in 2013. The massive construction 

project has been prompted by the 

same motivations as those which led to 

the building of the Aswan High Dam 

50 years earlier: power is needed for the 

country’s industries, and irrigation is 

required for the farmland. The project 

also promises increased employment 

prospects for the population of the 

region, offering greater prosperity and 

reduced political instability. However, 

in the same way that the Aswan Dam 

drowned so much of the heritage of 

ancient Egypt, and threatening many 

important monuments and architectural 

treasures, so the ancient town of 

Hasankeyf, which dates back almost 

four millennia, also faces drowning 

beneath the waters of the Tigris if the 

Ilisu Reservoir project goes ahead. The 

dam also threatens to destroy as many 

as 80 towns and villages, and force the 

relocation of between 50,000 to 80,000 

people. 

Countries like Egypt and Turkey 

have been bequeathed an incalculably 

rich legacy from the ancient past, but 

lack the modern financial resources to 

46 

5 

Fig 5. Trajan’s Kiosk 

(‘Pharaoh’s Bed’), built 

by the Roman emperor 

(r. AD 98-117) as 

part of the Philae 

temple complex. With 

construction of the 

Aswan Low Dam in 

1902, the structure, 

like the other 

monuments on Philae, 

was partly submerged 

for much of the year. 

Fig 6. The relocated 

façade of the main 

temple of Abu Simbel, 

dedicated to Re- 

Harakhte, Amun-Re, 

Ptah, and Ramses II. 

1240s – 1220s BC. 

The Aswan High Dam in numbers 

l The Aswan High Dam is 3,830m long, 980m wide at the base, 40m wide 

at the crest, and 111m tall. 

l It contains 43 million cubic metres of material. 

l 11,000 cubic metres of water can pass through the dam every second. 

l There are emergency spillways for an extra 5000 cubic metres per second. 

l Lake Nasser is 550km long and 35km at its widest point with a surface 

area of 5,250 square kilometres. It holds 111 cubic kilometres of water. 

l Lake Nasser is one of the main tourist attractions on the River Nile. The 

dam wall, a vast barrier of concrete overlooking the Sudanese and 

Nubian borders, merits the same level of visits as the ancient 

temples that were once sited there. 

Fig 7. Gamal Abdel 

Nasser (1918-1970). 

As President of Egypt, 

from 1956 until his 

death, Nasser was 

instrumental in 

pushing through the 

development and 

construction of the 

Aswan High Dam. 

Fig 8. Trajan’s Kiosk 

relocated on Agilkia 

Island, viewed from 

the waters of Lake 

Nasser. 

6 

8 

preserve it. Industrial and economic 

development therefore usually takes 

preceedence over conserving heritage. 

While tourist dollars provide an 

increasingly lucrative source of revenue 

in the economies of such countries, 

such income will only continue 

7 

for as long as the monuments and 

archaeological sites are visible. It therefore 

falls to the international community 

and bodies like UNESCO to 

intervene, and, where possible, ensure 

that these treasures are preserved for 

future generations. n 


Interview 

Rome 

Our man in 

In the first of a series of interviews with prominent 

figures in the world of archaeology and antiquities, James 

Beresford talks to Prof Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, recently 

elected as Master of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, 

and formerly Director of the British School at Rome 

Andrew Wallace-Hadrill’s fascination 

with the ancient world began in his 

teenage years when his father, the 

eminent medieval historian John 

Michael Wallace-Hadrill, introduced him to 

Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. 

‘I absolutely loved it,’ he remembers. ‘While you 

do get the personalities coming through, above 

all else Gibbon gives you the long drive of history: 

the idea of a Roman world endlessly transforming 

itself and of antiquity moving into the 

Middle Ages.’ 

With the British general election rapidly 

approaching at the time of our interview, Prof 

Wallace-Hadrill is quick to express concern 

whenever political leaders draw parallels with 

their ancient predecessors. ‘I tend to feel that 

modern politicians often like reading lessons 

from the past and applying them to the present. 

By contrast, I’m more aware of the enormous 

gulf that separates the ancient world from 

that of the modern. I personally feel a sense of 

frustration with earlier generations of ancient 

historians who, in order to serve as a model 

48 

for the British Empire, tried to turn the Roman 

Empire into a smoothly operating bureaucratic 

machine, when it was nothing of the sort. I’m 

therefore much happier focusing on emperors 

like Caligula and Nero and the corruption, 

incompetence, and madness, and how people 

coped with that,’ he says. 

‘Although the Romans produced an imperial 

system that sustained itself for 400 years – an 

outstanding achievement for such a geographically 

and culturally diverse area – that does 

not mean the Romans got things right, or that 

we should follow their example. The Romans 

certainly had to deal with some of the same 

problems that currently face modern societies, 

such as immigration and cultural integration. 

However, while there are some similar underlying 

forces, they’re not the same because history 

is specific and we are in a very different place 

and time from the ancient Romans.’ 

Rather than a foundation on which modern 

society is based, Prof Wallace-Hadrill prefers to 

see the past as a mirror in which we can look at 

ourselves. ‘While there are points of similarity, 

it allows us to reflect on what makes the modern 

world so different. If we just looked at the past 

and found a reproduction of the present, then 

it would be incredibly boring. It is the combination 

of the differences and similarities that 

makes civilisations like that of Rome so interesting 

to us today.’ 

Although Prof Wallace-Hadrill is best 

known for his work at the archaeological sites 

of Pompeii and Herculaneum, he does not 

regard himself primarily as an archaeologist. ‘I 

am an ancient historian, that is what I trained 

as. I have therefore recently carried out sociopolitical 

work on the functioning of the Roman 

Imperial court, and been looking at how imperial 

politics was very different to the modern 

political systems with which we are familiar 

today. It is, however, tedious to limit one’s activities 

to the initial area of your training, and I’m 

certainly going to interest myself in neighbouring 

disciplines. I’m therefore still concentrating 

on archaeological work at Herculaneum at the 

moment. 

‘Although we are slowly beginning to build 

up a picture of what the city was like, and we 

now have a good idea of what the sea-front section 

of the site looked like, there is still so much 

that we don’t understand about the town. It’s 

far too easy to focus on what we do know and 

forget about all the blanks that remain in our 

knowledge. One of the big unknowns is where 

is the town’s forum? It should be such an obvious 

thing, occupying a large area in the middle 

of the site as it would in all other Roman settlements, 

except that in Herculaneum, we simply 

cannot find it, and we don’t really know quite 

where to look for it!’ 

This and other unanswered questions mean 

that there is still much work to be done at 

Herculaneum and elsewhere on the Bay of 

Chapel Court at Sidney 

Sussex College, Cambridge 


Photo courtesy of richard Leinstein.

Photo courtesy of Beth roweLL. 

Naples, and Prof Wallace-Hadrill regularly 

returns to the site. ‘I never quite lose touch 

with either the sunshine or with a good bowl 

of pasta! One thing I love about working at 

both Herculaneum and Pompeii is that there 

are an unbelievable number of new angles you 

can turn up on such well known sites. During 

our work at Pompeii, Mike Fulford [University 

of Reading] discovered remains of the 6 th century 

BC, and to find archaic material was quite 

extraordinary because we had felt confident 

that the occupation of that area of the site only 

went back to the 3 rd century BC. 

‘I’m particularly keen on the work currently 

being done by Prof Mark Robinson from 

Oxford University. While he’s an environmental 

archaeologist looking particularly at the 

Paved street 

in Pompeii 

Fresco depicting the reading of 

the rituals of the bridal mysteries 

Villa of the Mysteries, Pompeii 

contents of sewers, he kept on noticing that 

there was much older evidence from a prehistoric 

Pompeii, and he has pushed activity at the 

site well back into the 3 rd millennium BC. It’s 

fantastic how much more we still have to learn 

about the prehistory of Pompeii. That is not to 

say we are going to stop studying the Roman 

settlement that came to a dramatic end in AD 

79, but that’s not all there is. I like the intellectual 

adventure and the excitement of realising 

that, just when you thought you knew what the 

story was, you suddenly realise there is a whole 

new part of it that you hadn’t been looking at. 

Of course archaeologists should seek to answer 

questions, but at the same time they should be 

prepared for surprises.’ 

Prof Wallace-Hadrill also remains as Director 

Photo courtesy of attiLio ivan. 

The Bay of Naples 

with Mount 

Vesuvius 

in the distance 

of the Herculaneum Project, which is very much 

focused on the conservation of the ancient 

town. The project is currently reaching the end 

of the ‘primary conservation’ phase, which has 

concentrated on basics such as removing water 

from the site and re-roofing some of the surviving 

ancient structures. Conservation has 

also been central to his work in Pompeii, and 

he believes that young archaeologists should 

receive better training in the importance of 

conservation. 

‘When we started our project in Pompeii in 

1995, we deliberately set out a programme that 

did not involve further excavation, but which 

looked more deeply at what had already been 

excavated. Large-scale excavation further magnifies 

the problems of conservation, and there 

is still so much that needs to be examined without 

the need for new digging; instead we should 

be looking after what has already been found. It 

is scandalous to spend millions on new excavations 

when we already need millions to preserve 

the fantastic buildings and artefacts that have 

previously been excavated. Excavation undertaken 

without consideration or conservation 

simply creates a massive problem for the future. 

‘I’m not saying there should be no excavation, 

indeed the conservation of the site itself 

demands some excavation. When we were 

attempting to provide better drainage for 

Pompeii, we cleared an ancient system of sewers 

which offered the best means of getting water 

away from the site. However, to do so we had to 

excavate through a large ancient cesspit. We dug 

it away precisely to provide a route for water 

but we obviously could not simply leave it to 

degrade and so it had to be properly excavated. 

It was conservation leading to excavation, and it 

yielded hugely important information about the 

nature of the ancient diet.’ 

Herculaneum is often regarded as a resort 

town for the elite of Roman society, but Prof 

Wallace-Hadrill is unhappy with this interpretation. 

‘There are some interesting ways in 

which Herculaneum is “posher” than Pompeii. 

The use of decorative marble in the walling and 

flooring creates a clear impression that there is 

an extra level of luxury in the town that is not 

quite reached in Pompeii. But there are also 

the remains of blocks of flats constructed from 

Minerva May/June 2010 49

Photo courtesy of the British schooL at rome. 

Interview 

brick and concrete which rise up to four or 

five storeys – just like those found at Rome or 

Ostia – undoubtedly where lots of less well-off 

people lived. An inscription found in the town, 

which has fragments of 500 names preserved, 

while there were at least another 500 on missing 

parts, was also probably a list of the Roman 

citizens resident in Herculaneum. Of the names 

that do survive, about two-thirds are those of 

former slaves – a strong indication that this was 

not just a town for the upper classes.’ 

As a result of his frequent appearances on 

television, Prof Wallace-Hadrill has become 

one of Britain’s best known academics. It is a 

role with which he has something of a love-hate 

relationship. ‘I have greatly enjoyed doing TV 

documentaries,’ he says. ‘I feel it’s important to 

communicate the importance and enjoyment 

of our subject more widely, and questions and 

feedback from the general public have enriched 

my own understanding. I do, however, find the 

editing process for television massively frustrating, 

especially when something you have said 

on camera gets placed in a different context. Yet 

there’s absolutely nothing an academic can do 

to protect oneself against this, and I’ve therefore 

just resigned myself to it happening. 

‘I am, however, tired of doing the same thing 

again and again. There was a recent obsession 

with gladiators, that started with the release of 

the Hollywood film, and I appeared on at least 

five different documentaries that all asked me to 

go and stand in the Colosseum and say something 

dumb about ancient gladiators! I’m far 

more enthusiastic when talking about recent 

work that really does contribute something new 

to our understanding of the ancient world.’ 

He does, however, take a positive view of 

recent television depictions featuring the eruption 

of Vesuvius and the destruction of Pompeii 

and Herculaneum. ‘Such programmes are wonderful. 

Whether they focus on plaster casts of 

dead people killed in the eruption; the cartwheel 

tracks running through the streets; the 

wonderfully preserved frescoes which decorate 

the rooms of the ancient houses; the tiny 

details such as looking at how the ancient doors 

worked, or the magnificence of public buildings 

like the amphitheatre, the site presents ancient 

life before our modern eyes. Your imagination 

has to be seriously impaired not to be transported 

at least a little into the Roman world.’ 

The British School at Rome 

50 

Basilica of 

Pompeii 

‘I appeared on at least five different documentaries that 

all asked me to go and stand in the Colosseum and say 

something dumb about ancient gladiators!’ 

Another effect of programmes like these is to 

inspire viewers to book a flight and see the sites 

for themselves. Which would Prof Wallace- 

Hadrill urge Minerva readers to visit? ‘It’s 

often very frustrating to tell people of the hidden 

gems of Pompeii because the general visitor 

won’t be able to see them. For example, the 

House of Fabius Rufus on the western edge of 

the site, which was excavated in the 1960s and 

70s, is still not available to the public. However, 

the House of the Chaste Lovers has recently 

been opened to visitors as a chance to watch an 

excavation in progress. The great hope is that, in 

time, many more of the buildings will open to 

the public. But I would urge people to look outside 

Pompeii. Only about a tenth of the visitors 

who go to Pompeii visit Herculaneum, a town 

that is every bit as interesting. But there are 

also other fascinating and enormously rewarding 

archaeological sites nearby – the Villa of 

Oplontis; the three fabulous Roman villas at 

Stabiae, or the Villa Boscoreale, which provides 

visitors with a chance to see a working Roman 

farmstead in action.’ 

Recent natural disasters, such as the earthquakes 

in Haiti or Chile, or the tsunami which 

raced across the Indian Ocean in 2004, have 

also sparked renewed interest in sites like 

Pompeii and Herculaneum, reminding people 

of the disaster that befell both settlements in 

AD 79. Prof Wallace-Hadrill believes that our 

awareness of the impact of natural disasters 

makes the consideration of one specific historic 

catastrophe all the more awesome, and serves 

to emphasise the destructive impact of these 

events. ‘While scholars have tended to focus on 

the volcanic eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79, we 

now know that the Bay of Naples was subject 

to very serious earthquakes in the run-up to 

the eruption and the population of the area was 

therefore constantly living with catastrophe. Of 

course it’s only a matter of time before Vesuvius 

erupts again. But it’s completely unpredictable 

and when it next happens, we don’t know the 

scale or the type of eruption it will be. If there’s 

a major eruption that flows over Naples then it 

may prove to be a major human catastrophe. 

However, when I think of the volcano I regard 

it more with fascination than fear and I very 

much hope I am in the area when Vesuvius next 

erupts to have the chance to see such a spectacular 

and fascinating event.’ n 

For further information on the work of the 

British School at Rome, see www.bsr.ac.uk 

For more details on Sidney Sussex College, 

Cambridge, see www.sid.cam.ac.uk/ 


Photo courtesy of aschwin Prein.

Numismatic sales 

International dealers and collectors gathered for the 38 th 

New York International Numismatic Annual Convention 

staged on 3-10 January, and David Miller reviews 

some of the notable coins that went under the hammer 

Triton 

The largest of the eight sales held during 

the convention was the Classical 

Numismatic Group’s Triton sale on 

5-6 January. This consisted of 2257 

lots, of which the great majority were ancient 

coins struck by the Greeks, Romans, and 

Byzantines, along with others of contemporary 

civilisations such as the Celts, the Indian 

kingdoms of the Guptas and Kushans, and the 

Empire of the Persians. The remaining 371 lots 

covered European coins from the 6 th century 

AD through to the Victorian period. 

A silver tetradrachm of Katane in Sicily, showing 

a facing head of Apollo and signed by the 

Fig 1. Silver tetradrachm of Katane, c. 405 BC. 

Fig 2. Silver drachm of Naxos, c. 461-430 BC. 

Fig 3. Cleopatra VII of Egypt. Bronze coin of Paphos, c. 47 BC. 

die engraver Herakleidas, was struck around 

405 BC (Fig 1). Considered among the finest 

examples of Greek numismatic art, this particular 

coin is one of the best specimens to have 

come on the market and fetched double the estimate 

at $60,000. A slightly earlier Sicilian piece, 

a silver drachm of Naxos, also went for slightly 

more than twice the estimate fetching $65,000 

(Fig 2). The obverse of the coin portrays an ivywreathed 

and bearded Dionysos, while on the 

reverse his drunken companion Silenos squats, 

gazing pensively into his wine cup, hoping for 

a refill. This wonderful little coin has a provenance 

dating back to 1859, when it was sold in 

London by Sotheby’s as part of Lord Northwick’s 

collection. 

As one of the most famous women in history, 

coins depicting Cleopatra VII of Egypt (r. 

51-30 BC) always inspire interest. An extremely 

rare bronze coin found at Paphos in Cyprus 

(the island had recently been restored to the 

Egyptian throne by Cleopatra’s lover, Julius 

Caesar) fetched $10,000 against the estimate of 

$3000 (Fig 3). The coin depicts Cleopatra in the 

guise of Aphrodite, holding Caesarion, her son 

by the Roman warlord, the infant portrayed as 

Cupid. Whereas Cleopatra and Caesarion perished 

in 30 BC following the defeat of Egyptian 

Fig 4. Juba II with Cleopatra Selene silver denarius, AD 11-23. 

Fig 5. Julius Caesar silver denarius, 43 BC. 

Fig 6. Magnus Maximus silver siliqua, AD 383. 


Triton 

forces at the Battle of Actium, the daughter of 

Cleopatra and Antony, Cleopatra Selene (c. 40-6 

BC), survived and was taken back to Rome, 

eventually marrying Juba II of Mauretania (c. 

52-23 BC). A very rare denarius struck by her 

husband shows her diademed portrait on the 

reverse with her husband on the obverse (Fig 

4). In extremely fine condition, this coin depicting 

a little-known daughter of an internationally 

famous mother, was estimated at $1000 and 

sold for $5000. 

Julius Caesar was also represented in his own 

right in the Triton sale. Described as the finest 

known portrait denarius of Julius Caesar, lot 

291 shows a bust of the Roman general wearing 

a wreath within a border of pellets (Fig 5). 

Within 18 months of his assassination in March 

44 BC, the coin was struck by a supporter of 

Caesar’s young grand-nephew Octavian, to help 

legitimise his claim to be the dictator’s true heir. 

The reverse shows a standing figure of Venus, 

from whom the family of Caesar claimed to be 

descended. This magnificent coin went from a 

starting estimate of $75,000 to a record bid of 

$160,000. 

Towards the end of the Roman Empire, 

Magnus Maximus, the commander of the 

armies in Britain, proclaimed himself emperor 

and, on seizing power in AD 383, he re-opened 

the mint of London to strike new coins in his 

own image. The mint was only in operation 

for a few months before Maximus took himself 

and his troops off to the Continent, where he 

defeated Gratian, the legitimate emperor. His 

coins from London are exceedingly rare, but a 

previously unpublished silver siliqua, showing 

Victory seated right inscribing a shield held up 

by Cupid, was bought by a British collector for 

$5500 and is now back in the land of its origin 

(Fig 6). 

The final total of the Triton sale was 

$5,023,650 excluding the 15 percent buyer’s premium 

against a pre-sale estimate of $3,785, 575, 

with only 3 percent unsold. 

AH Baldwin 

The London firm of A.H. Baldwin & Son, in 

conjunction with Dimitry Markov of New York 

and M & M Numismatics of Washington, combined 

to produce the New York Sale on the 

evenings of 6 and 7 January. Alongside Greek, 

Roman, and Byzantine coins, there was also 

a group of Islamic and Indian coins, as well 

as a selection of nearly 300 lots of medieval 

European and world coins, altogether totalling 

758 lots. The cover coin was a sestertius struck 

in the reign of Tiberius (AD 14-37) showing a 

winged caduceus between two cornucopiae surmounted 

by the heads of the emperor’s twin 

grandsons, Gemellus and Germanicus (Fig 11). 

The reverse carries the name and titles of their 

father Drusus, who became heir apparent to his 

father Tiberius in AD 22, when the coin was 


Freeman & Sear 

Fig 7. Athens silver tetradrachm, c. 500 BC. 

Fig 8. Berenice II gold pentadrachm, c. 220s BC. 

Freeman & Sear’s Manhattan sale on 5 

January was a smaller affair, though not without 

some highly important pieces. It consisted 

of 470 lots of ancient coins and ten lots 

of medieval coins, most of which were very 

high quality pieces. 

An archaic silver tetradrachm of Athens, 

dating to c. 500 BC and struck on an unusually 

full flan, normally partially lost on 

most examples, allowing the full design to 

be seen and enjoyed, made $52,000 (Fig 7). 

Gold coins continued to show strong prices. 

An example of this was a pentadrachm of 

Berenice II (c. 266-221 BC), wife of Ptolemy 

III of Egypt (r. 246-222 BC) (Fig 8). Struck in 

Alexandria, the coin depicts the veiled head 

of the queen looking right, while the reverse 

features a cornucopia surrounded by her 

name and title. The condition of the coin was 

exceptionally good and it fetched just under 

estimate at $52,000. 

A large section of the sale consisted of the 

collection of Aloysius Lynn. Consisting primarily 

of Roman Imperial silver and gold 

minted. But within a year, Drusus had been poisoned, 

an act committed by his wife Livilla and 

her lover, the Praetorian prefect Sejanus, if the 

historian Tacitus is to be believed (Annals, 4.7- 

8). Of the twins, Germanicus was dead before 

his fifth birthday, and his brother was executed 

in the first year of his cousin Caligula’s reign (r. 

AD 37-41). This souvenir of a doomed dynasty 

is one of the most beautiful coins of the Roman 

Empire. Hotly contested, it fetched $15,000 

against an estimate of $8500. 

As already mentioned, Roman gold coins are 

extremely popular at the moment. An aureus of 

Nero (r. AD 54-68), struck in Rome around AD 

64, with the reverse of an enthroned Salus, goddess 

of health, made nearly three times its estimate 

at $16,000 (Fig 12). From the late Empire, 

Fig 9. Vespasian gold aureus, AD 76. 

Fig 10. Constantius III gold solidus, AD 421. 

coins of high quality, there was predictably 

strong bidding. An aureus of Vespasian (r. 

AD 69-79) fetched $20,000 (Fig 9). Struck 

in Rome in AD 76, the gold coin shows 

Aeternitas, the personification of Stability, 

holding the heads of the Sun and Moon. An 

extremely fine denarius of Augustus, showing 

the comet that foretold the death of Caesar, 

made $10,250 against an estimate of $6000. 

A gold solidus of the short-reigned emperor 

Constantius III (r. AD 421) saw brisk bidding 

(Fig 10). Constantius had been made 

co-emperor of the Western Empire by his 

brother-in-law, the emperor Honorius (r. AD 

393-395). This move drew the enmity of the 

Eastern Emperor, Theodosius II (r. AD 408- 

450), who threatened war. However, before 

hostilities could break out, Constantius conveniently 

died of natural causes. This rare 

specimen from Ravenna fetched $67,000. 

Overall the Freeman & Sear’s auction 

made more than $1,600,000, including the 18 

percent premium, with only 5 percent of the 

lots remaining unsold. 

Fig 11. Drusus bronze sestertius, AD 14-37. 

Fig 12. Nero gold aureus, c. AD 64. 

53

AH Baldwin 

a solidus of Constantine III (r. AD 407-411), 

struck in Trier around AD 408, created some 

lively bids (Fig 13). Constantine seized power 

in Britain in 407, and is remembered for withdrawing 

the last Roman troops from the island 

province when he made his bid to seize the 

throne of the Western Empire. His coins are 

rare and the solidus, estimated at $4500, finally 

fetched $7000. 

Indian coins have also become highly 

sought-after, and there were nearly 100 lots in 

this section of the sale. One is especially worthy 

of mention: a gold quarter dinar of the 

Kushan king Kanishka I, who ruled in Bactria 

and northern India between AD 130-158 (Fig 

Gemini 

On the last day of the convention, 

10 January, the Gemini sale 

was held. As the name implies, the 

sale was originally the joint effort 

of two dealers, but now there are 

three: Harlan Berk of Chicago; 

Herb Kreindler of Melville, New 

York; and David Hendin, author 

and dealer in Jewish coins. 

Between them they put together a 

most interesting sale drawn from a 

number of sources, which included 

an impressive group of Jewish 

and Palestinian issues, mainly 

from the collection of Dr Stephen 

Gerson and duplicates from 

Boston Museum of Fine Arts and 

the American Numismatic Society 

in New York. Prices were fairly 

strong, although a few major items 

failed to sell and others were somewhat 

below estimate. Examples of 

this were lot 14, a truly beautiful 

Akragas tetradrachm, estimated at 

$110,000 but knocked down for 

$88,000 (Fig 15), and another silver 

tetradrachm of Naxos in Sicily, 

struck in 410 BC, which went for 

Fig 15. Akragas silver tetradrachm, c. 410-406 BC. 

Fig 16. Naxos silver tetradrachm, 410 BC. 

Fig 17. First Jewish Revolt Year 5 shekel, AD 70. 

14). It shows the standing figure of the king 

holding a standard and sprinkling incense 

over an altar. On the reverse is the standing 

figure of the Buddha with a nimbus or halo 

around his head, and dressed in a long pleated 

tunic and performing a blessing with his right 

hand. Around him the Greek legend just says 

‘Buddha’. This is the earliest depiction of the 

Buddha on coinage, with only three other 

specimens known. The coin was provisionally 

estimated at $70,000, but was knocked down 

at $60,000. 

The final total of the two evening sales was 

$4,815,136 inclusive of the 15 percent buyer’s 

fee. 

$100,000 – $25,000 below the estimate 

(Fig 16). 

However, many other pieces did 

exceptionally well. The Year Five 

shekel – of which only 24 exist – 

depicts a pearled, rimmed cup 

with a palaeo-Hebrew inscription 

(‘Shekel of Israel’), with a reverse 

proclaiming ‘Jerusalem the Holy’ 

around a stem of three pomegranates 

(Fig 17). These coins were 

struck in AD 70 during the final 

days of the Roman siege commanded 

by the future emperor 

Titus (r. AD 79-81), which had 

invested Jerusalem on 21 March 

and would continue until the city 

finally fell to the Romans on 4 

August. The Jewish authorities continued 

to strike silver shekels dated 

from the beginning of the revolt 

five years before. This rare and 

important coin fetched $85,000 

against an estimate of $65,000. 

A Roman gold solidus of Licinius 

Fig 13. Constantine III gold solidus, c. AD 408. 

Fig 14. Kanishka I gold quarter dinar, c. AD 130-158. 

Fig 18. Licinius II gold solidus, AD 320. 

II, who ruled as Caesar of the 

Eastern Empire from AD 317- 

324 achieved a high price. Struck 

at Nicomedia in AD 320, the coin 

shows a bust of a young boy, bareheaded 

and wearing a cuirass while 

staring directly ahead (Fig 18). 

Facing portraits of Roman emperors 

were rare until this point, but 

this issue began what was to be a 

popular type in the Late Roman 

and Byzantine periods. In mint 

condition, the aureus made nearly 

double its estimate at $37,000. 

Finally, from the Dr John Gullick 

collection, a silver penny of Alfred 

the Great (r. AD 871-899) made 

$24,000, well above its estimate 

of $15,000 (Fig 19). Struck at 

London, it shows a portrait bust 

of the Anglo-Saxon king, while 

on the reverse is the monogram of 

‘Londonia’. 

The Gemini sales made a total of 

$2,883,703. 

Fig 19. Alfred the Great silver penny of London, AD 871-899. 


ookreviews 

Ancient Canaan and Israel. An Introduction 

Jonathan M. Golden 

Oxford University Press, 2009. 411pp. 

87 b/w illus. 

First published in hardback in 2004, this is an 

intriguing book that tackles the thorny issues of 

Biblical Archaeology. In the preface the author 

observes that modern politics play a major role 

in shaping perceptions of the past, so it is curious 

that the modern geopolitical situation in 

the region is not mentioned. The circumvention 

of this reality is more implicit of the objective 

investigation of a period in the southern Levant 

spanning the Chalcolithic period (c. 4700- 

3500 BC) to the end of the Iron Age (586 BC) 

through careful scrutiny of a welter of archaeological 

and textual material. 

Interpreting this evidence inevitably demands 

any humanist to attempt reconciliation between 

information derived from archaeological fieldwork 

and the scriptures of the Hebrew Bible 

(Old Testament). This is perhaps the most 

daunting challenge in social science and the 

stakes are considerable in the face of intense 

political and religious ramifications. Ideologies 

are skilfully put aside in a well crafted examination 

of Cananite, Israelite, and Philistine 

cultures, which are understood against broad 

trends in settlement patterns. This is defined as 

a three-phase rise and fall of urban civilisation: 

beginning in the Early Bronze Age and terminating 

at the end of the 3 rd millennium BC, the 

early and late parts of the 2 nd millennium BC, 

and the early part of the 1 st millennium to the 

Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem. 

A most fascinating part of this book is the 

author’s discourse on monotheism. Generally 

associated in the region corresponding to 

ancient Israel and the modern Palestinian 

Territories with the worship of the single god 

YHWH (‘Yahweh’) – compelling evidence 

for polytheism is assessed. This is gleaned 

from passages in the Old Testament that refer 

to Baal, Anat, and El, extra-biblical inscriptions, 

and archaeological finds (a painted ewer 

from Lachish; a representation of the goddess 

from Samaria; ‘Asherah figurines’) that suggest 

Asherah may have been the consort of YHWH 

at a relatively late period in Israelite history (7 th 

century BC). 

Of fundamental interest is the extent to which 

people, places, and events described in the Old 

Testament can be borne out by archaeological 

evidence. This is especially the case with the 

biblical account of the Exodus, which is difficult 

The Making of Bronze Age Eurasia 

Philip L. Kohl 

Cambridge University Press, 2009, 320pp. 

120 b/w illus 

Paperback £18.99 

This book – now available in paperback – will 

serve as a sourcebook for archaeologists interested 

in the region for the foreseeable future. An 

impressive array of evidence has been fused into 

a synthetic whole that generates a huge number 

of questions and provides an excellent platform 

for future research. Although the book is well 

illustrated with finds of various kinds, it is not a 

typological description of material culture. The 

particular methodology, as stated by the author, 

is post-processual archaeology. To this reviewer, 

the term post-processual raises alarm bells, but 

there are only a few areas where this approach 

appears constraining. The question of ethnicity 

is not addressed. As the author states: ‘Quests 

to make such identifications have a sorry and, 

to relate to physical remains in the manner 

described in 1 Kings (6:1) as a broad and swift 

conquest. Theories discussed here range from 

the latter, as suggested by what W.F. Albright 

(1939), G.E. Wright (1961), and Y. Yadin (1979) 

construed as destruction levels from the presumed 

time of Joshua’s conquest; to the more 

gradual and peaceful infiltration of Israelites 

in the region based on the work of Y. Aharoni 

(1957). Whatever the truth, it is pointed out 

that archaeological evidence does indicate that 

the Israelites were established in the highlands 

of the region by the 10 th century BC. 

As may be expected, Golden also grapples 

with the conundrum of the ‘United Monarchy’ 

– the Israelite Kingdom of Saul, David, and 

Solomon as attested in the Old Testament. 

An important aspect of this is that in 1 Kings 

(9:15, 17-18), Solomon is credited with major 

construction projects at several urban locations 

such as Baalath, Beth Horon, Megiddo 

and elsewhere, but radiocarbon evidence places 

the inauguration of these sites to a later period. 

This is tempered with fascinating evidence from 

inscriptions attesting to the existence of David, 

including the Dan Inscription and the ‘Meshe 

Stele’. It is sensibly concluded that ‘although 

much of the archaeological evidence demonstrates 

that the Hebrew Bible cannot in most 

cases be taken literally, many of the people, 

places, and things probably did exist at some 

time or another’. 

This is an engaging book that provides a lucid 

overview of a fascinating period in a region 

characterised by a time depth of turbulence. It is 

a shame that many of the illustrations are of low 

quality but this should not detract from the way 

this complex history has been weaved together 

into a skilful tapestry of understanding. 


at times, even dangerous history. From the perspective 

adopted in this study, the archaeology 

of ethnicity is a mistaken enterprise; indeed 

the term itself is an oxymoron.’ (p. 19). It is the 

study of the Indo-Europeans that faces particular 

hurdles. It is somewhat disconcerting that 

there is no discussion, even at a basic level, of 

skeletal evidence. Surely a sober and scientific 

discussion of Indo-Europeans is possible in an 

era when National Socialism is long dead? 

The author also makes it clear that technological 

innovation should be appreciated in 

light of the diffusion of ideas. When discussing 

the metalworking practices of the 5 th millennium 

BC in the Carpathian-Balkan region, he 

states: ‘If one anachronistically wishes to accord 

‘Europe’ due credit for these innovations, then 

one can consider the development of copperbased 

metallurgy in south-eastern Europe as 

an indigenous process – though with its roots 

firmly planted in the early agricultural soil of 

Anatolia.’ (p. 31). Sadly the book is not long 


Refugees for Eternity. The Royal Mummies 

of Thebes. 

Part Four. Identifying The Royal Mummies 

Dylan Bickerstaffe 

Canopus Press, 2009. 200pp, 16 b/w pls, tables. 

Paperback, £22.50. 

Rather curiously this book is Part Four of a 

series where Parts 1 to 3 have yet to appear. The 

author says that the earlier numbered volumes 

will follow and they will stand on their own 

although the whole series will be complementary; 

subsequent volumes will cover ‘Finding 

the Pharaohs’; ‘The Rise and Fall of the Theban 

Royal Necropolis’, and ‘Clues from the Caches’. 

These volumes are promised to follow in order 

but the author felt it best to present the current 

enough to provide evidence for every assertion. 

Indeed, for this reviewer at least, theories about 

the origins of technology, who first used it and 

why, are some of the most interesting questions 

in archaeology. These criticisms aside, there is 

more than enough of real interest. Special attention 

is devoted to the diffusion of metalworking 

in Eurasia, the rise of elites, and the many 

problems associated with the domestication of 

the horse. It is in these areas where a number of 

different theories are raised. Interestingly, as the 

author notes, there are instances where cultures 

seem to appear from nothing. For example, 

there are few Chalcolithic and Early Bronze age 

remains from Bactria and Margiana, and even 

fewer remains before this period. While this 

has been ascribed to a lack of research or burial 

under deep alluvium, it should not be assumed 

that change and diffusion must happen simultaneously 

across a broad region. 

Painting with a broad brush, the author 

finds long periods of gradual and continuous 


volume as it had been completed in advance of 

the other three. 

The book opens with ‘Methods of identifying 

the Royal Mummies’ and covers the pose of 

the bodies, mummification techniques, X-rays 

and age at death. The latter section particularly 

addresses the given estimated ages and, by reference 

to the London Spitalfields Project, suggests 

that the use of standard anatomical methods 

would indicate that mature individuals might 

be older than generally thought: ‘Thus the 

Spitalfields Limehouse evidence together with 

that of present-day, non-Westernised populations, 

suggests that the age at death estimated 

by standard anatomical methods probably 

needs to be raised for royal mummies in all 

age groups, and by at least ten years for mature 

individuals. It might also be observed that the 

privileged few in modern society tend to “wear 

rather well” and that this was probably equally 

true of the royal families in ancient Egypt, possibly 

leading to a still greater discrepancy’ (p. 69). 

An interesting tabulation of the Royal mummies’ 

estimated ages from Maspero, Smith, and 

X-rays also reveals sometimes widely variant 

estimates. 

The second major section of the book concerns 

the question of doubtful identities and the 

balance of evidence relating to the Royal mummies. 

It must be remembered that the bodies 

had been despoiled by robbers, rewrapped by 

priests who might add an identifying docket to 

the body, or a note on the bandages, and several 

were placed in coffins that were not their own. 

In many instances it has left the field open for 

positive identification – in fact, Tutankhamen 

is the sole positively identifiable Royal mummy. 

Amongst the bodies found in the two Royal 

caches (Deir el Bahari tomb DB 320 and Valley 

of the Kings KV 35, the tomb of Amenhotep 

assimilation of cultures. While the author 

notes that in historical times groups such as the 

Mongols impacted upon settled communities in 

less than subtle ways, he stresses the opposite 

in his archaeological discussion: ‘There were 

no Bronze Age Genghis Khans or Timurs, but 

just cattle herders who utilized bronze tools and 

weapons and moved principally west to east 

across the steppes on wheeled vehicles from the 

late fourth millennium on and probably rode or 

at least harnessed horses by the late third millennium 

B.C.’ (pp. 244-245). Taking a more pessimistic 

view of human nature, it seems unlikely 

that figures such as Genghis Khan were absent 

in prehistory any more than they were during 

more recent periods of human history. 

The book is excellently provided with maps, 

and the author sets the stage with an exhaustive 

description of how the environment and 

geography may have shaped the local culture. 

This is especially important given the primacy 

of the environment when considering nomads 

II) were several that lacked any identification. 

Speculation regarding their identity, especially 

concerning the female corpses – possibly Queen 

Tiye and/or Nefertiti – continues, and none 

more so than ‘Unknown Man E’ (from KV 35). 

There are many theories regarding his identity 

and death, and all are considered here. There is 

the mystery of the Ramesses I mummy (from 

the Niagara Falls Museum, now repatriated to 

the Luxor Museum) and the evidence against 

this identification. It is therefore noted that 

‘Ramesses I has not certainly been identified... 

in summary it may be said that the mummy that 

was purchased from the Niagara Falls Museum 

in 2000, and returned in 2003 to Egypt on the 

basis that it was Ramesses I, almost certainly is 

not that pharaoh’ (p. 100). Instead there is the 

‘wry observation’ that Ramesses XI falls within 

the C14 range for this mummy. 

This book is hugely useful in that it draws 

so much of the material and evidence relating 

to the Royal mummies together in a convenient 

form, especially the long quotations from 

original sources that are difficult to come by 

(or translate). The lists and comparative tables 

with commentaries on the contents of the two 

caches, and the detailed comparison of excerebration 

and evisceration of the New Kingdom 

royalty are particularly useful. The illustrations 

are largely taken from Grafton Elliot Smith’s 

publication of The Royal Mummies (1912) and 

from Georges Daressy’s Cercueils des cachettes 

Royales (1909); although reproduced quite 

small it is, nevertheless, useful to have them 

together. 

It is obvious that a great deal of research over 

time has gone into compiling and producing 

this book, and the follow-up volumes will be of 

great interest. 

Peter A. Clayton 

and how they interacted with settled communities, 

and environmental evidence has often 

remained overlooked in specialist journals and 

too rarely integrated into a general archaeological 

discussion. The book also gives special consideration 

to radiocarbon dating, along with 

some of the problems associated with using 

dates derived from various sources. In sum the 

author has provided a work that is a mine of 

facts and detail and, for this reviewer at least, 

will remain close at hand to answer any number 

of questions. In an era where much is written 

on the narrowest of topics, this book provides 

an excellent general synthesis examining a vast 

region over a broad span of time. 

Dr Murray Eiland 

Please send books for review to: 

Dr James Beresford, 20 Orange Street, London, 

WC2H 7EF. 

Email editorial@minervamagazine.com. 

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