If a picture is worth a thousand words, an artifact is worth a million...
Artifactually Speaking is history through objects. Its short videos analyze small artifacts, both ancient and modern. Some were recently uncovered in scientific excavation of ancient sites, some have long been in museums, and some came from antiques fairs or flea markets, including coins and paper money that tell us a lot about our modern world.
Every object has many stories: how it was made, who made it, how it was used, who used it, how it was abandoned, how it was collected, and many more; thus, it has a bearing on people and events of many time periods. By asking questions of the object, we can learn something about all of those stories and maybe even a bit about ourselves.
Ey! Here from Milo's channel! Still algorithmically surviving on RU-vid! Glad that he reacted to this video, so I may learn even more than just standing in Baghdad...... in Assassin's Creed: Mirage and /trust/ what the team tending to the process of developing the game added as archeological and historical detailing of the Abbasid period Baghdad.
Thank you for the work you are doing there. I am so fascinated by the story of the Assyrian empire . I also am currently studying the accounts in 2 Kings 19 about Sennacherib and his conquest of Israel and King Hezakiah. The Sennacherib prism is the cuneiform account. And the relief on the palace walls showed the siege of Lachish. From the High Desert in the great American Southwest I bid you all a great morning or evening as the case may be .
I remember the jewels from Nimrud being in the Iraq national bank after the Persian Gulf war when Suddam invaded Kuwait. Anyway after the war a reporter went and did a story on them getting uncovered again. The bank was flooded and the was a ton of Iraqi money in it that was used to pay the government workers for a couple months.
11:24 Even in the mould you can see the 'holder' where you hold it in one hand with your fingers and use the other hand to press the clay into. Pretty brilliant!
Great reading about the Great Kings, Scholars, Religious guys and so forth but, I have always been fascinated by how your average person lived their lives.. seeing their homes and neighborhood makes it so evident that they are just like Us...I love IT!
I find this so useful and informative, thank you! My great, great Grandfather ( a stone mason of Dorset, England UK) was part of the English workforce who transported and installed some of the artifacts to Canford Manor in Dorset, England on behalf of Sir John Guest and his architect, he noted in his diaries that Sir John (Joseph John Guest) had passed away shortly after the "Human Headed Lion" weighing approximately 10 tons, had been successfully installed in the British Museum, and that it had been one of a pair which guarded the doors of the throne room of the Nimrud palace, he spelt it as "Nimraud" . A later note/annotation to my G, G grandfather's diary states that, Sir John Guest's cousin in-law Henry Austen Layard was the archaeologist, and the ship that transported the artifacts was 'Apprentice' it also has another annotation (possibly by my mother) which states last piece sold by Canford Manor/Canford school 1994. I visited the Canford School website and it appears that that final piece was purchased at the cost of £7.7 million, there's a RU-vid video "The Highest Bidder - Canford's Assyrian Frieze", where it reveals that the frieze ended up in a museum in Japan. I saw the news about the destruction by ISIS, at the time not realising that it was the same place that my family had been interested in over several generations. Wishing you all the very best in your endeavours.
seems like these items being pressed into a mold would imply that they were essentially commercially mass produced and sold. I imagine a merchant or vendor selling these from a shop or on the street or from a cart. they would be touting the magical or mystical benefits of owning, worshiping, praying to, or praying through, or even ceremonially destroying one of these small effigies.
Agreed. Mould pressed articles does imply a 'market' for massed produced items. I'd be touting for a shop tho, maybe a shop front with home living in a commercial part of Ur. You pop in and buy your ritual artefact. But, maybe the 'dr' or shaman produces these as part of their ritual, like drs have produced tablets in the past to cure ills. There really needs to be more recognition of economy of scale and what that means as far as ritual and cultural morés in the archaeological record. Millions of broken votives on a trash heap doesn't mean that a culture is extra religious but it does mean someone is churning out artefacts for people to buy and a religious culture that relies on donations ie the votives.
I was at the Penn museum just a week ago and was so curious about the things I saw in this department. So cool to get more context. It’s a really hidden gem here in Philly. Keep doing what you’re doing it’s really inspiring!
Thanks! The museum has a really great collection and I'm always glad to hear that people are seeing it and learning from it. And of course I'm glad you like my videos too!
Great video, very informative. One question though: If the male figurine could be a physical aid to memorize a story, couldn't it be the other way around? People knew the stories of great heroes but most were illiterate. By adding hints to their stories to the figurines, maybe that made it possible for the average person to identify them?
Yes, it could be a memory device in many ways, for recognizing figures or events or legends/stories. We often don't see the nuance that the original creators of the items would have; in other words, maybe these were much more distinct story references to people back then than seems possible to us when we see them today.
When you mentioned the figurines being discarded, it reminds me of a superstition in some Caribbean cultures that if a family is beset by bad luck, they can blacken a penny (usually by the head of the family holding it over a candle with tongs) and the entire family grasps the penny at the same time. They picture their bad luck migrating to the penny they then toss the penny into the street. If someone picks up the penny before the blackening wears all of that family's bad luck will transfer to the new owner of the penny. A friend got angry at a store clerk for attempting to hand me a blackened penny. When asked, he told me about this belief.
even modern madonna and child; heck! what are they going to make of the thousands upon thousands of gaunt bleeding figures in pain on a cross hung up everywhere? Are we barbarians who love pain?
I came here from Milo's video. It;s really neat to see your clarifications and additional information. That end ritual example was well done too, nice work!
At the library of Alexardia Huron invented the steam engine and probably the Antikythera mechanism came from the same. The maker of the Baghdad battery might just have been experimenting to see what happened. Static electricity would have been a known phamonenen even back then and copper is a great conductor. Just because someone invented or discovered something doesn't mean they found a use for it..
I've been thinking about this all day because it prompted a memory...... Many years ago I was watching something about aid workers distributing food (I can't remember exactly where in the world or why they needed to). They had grain poured out on a large tarp and were measuring the allotted ration by scooping the grain with their hands into a large tin with both the ends cut out and resting on a small board, this was filled to overflowing and then patted down before being struck off level with a short flat stick. The measure would then be lifted up on the board and the person collecting their ration would hold a bag or other container underneath before the board was pulled away dumping the grain into the sack. I remember it so clearly because it seemed to be a laborious way of doing the job, thinking about it I realised that using this method there can be no accusations of being cheated. You see the measure being filled, you see that there measure is overfilled and levelled off and then you see that everything that was in the measure falls into your bag.
UK shoe sizes are still measured using the barleycorn length. And from 1300 to 1824 the inch was defined as "3 barly corns dry and rounde" which meant that you yanks sre still using the barleycorn as a base for your measurement system.
Small weights amongst ley humans nowadays often equate to the drug trade. In the UK we're lucky because a 2p coin 7g or a ¼ Oz, a 1p coin is 3.5g or ⅛Oz and the sadly discontinued ½p coin was 1.75g or a ¹/16 Oz (all approx.) buy for accuracy ir countries without such useful coinage a set of weights and a set of scales is necessary. I should think opium would've been a cure-all medicine as we've had a symbiotic relationship with Papaver somniferum for millions of years. So much so that the Cytochrome P450 enzyme array in the liver to break down alkaloids has actually evolved to change the alkaloids in P. somniferum into ones that not only stay available in our bloodstream longer but pass through the blood/brain barrier more easily. That's a long relationship. Plus, if you imagine hunter gatherers using poppy pods, the many thousands of seeds that are always spilled could well have been the "Wow! I dropped those poppy seeds here last year and now look! Poppies everywhere!" plant that tipped us off about agriculture. Scattering poppy seed in traditional camping spots on the yearly cycle would mean we were farming whilst still hunter gatherers... But, I digress, couldn't opium be the regularly needed, valuable in small amounts, reason why every house had at least one weight? I think widespread silver trading is too lofty and expensive for widespread use in and out of the protection of the city walls. But opium would've been much more likely.
Very cool! This reminds me of a question I’ve had for a while about the Puabi display. Some of the beads and pendants are noted to be ‘gold leaf over bitumen’. Did they mold bitumen, or use it as an adhesive for the gold leaf, maybe on a clay core?
Bitumen had many uses. It could be used as an adhesive and as a waterproofing material, but in this case, it was mixed with other materials to help it harden and made into a core that thin gold sheet was wrapped around.
We spend much of our time writing grant proposals to federal agencies such as the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. We also work with other countries; for example, at Lagash we work with Italian archaeologists who write grant proposals to the European Union. So, there are typically many funding angles and only small amounts come from the universities involved.
It was used to remember their family and their culture, without carrying 15 different statues. They found a way to put 15 different images on one stone, which modern minds have a hard time understanding until about three or four weeks of study. The photo realistic portraits that are found in North Carolina are the most modern of a dying art and that’s why we are able to decipher and understand the code. There are hundreds of us over the United States who have been able to show that this stone art is on every single rock that you see just about… That wasn’t mined with modern equipment.
