Artifacts - Tumblr Posts
it’s… frankly a little tear-jerking to realize I can read the writing on this 2200 year old coin. we’re so different but so many things are the same.
Seleucid Kings of Syria: Antiochos Hierax, 246-227 BCE. AR Tetradrachm. Troy Mint.
Roman rock-crystal icosahedron (20-sided dice) used in fortune-telling. Each face has a Latin letter on it and a corresponding Roman numeral, then matched with pre-prepared oracle answers in a divination handbook. Currently at the Louvre.
See more: https://thetravelbible.com/top-artifacts-from-ancient-rome/
Why can’t the British Museum repatriate anything?
Something I see a lot in museum discourse in public spaces is people wondering why museums don’t just do repatriation/decolonization. The argument is that if museums had an interest in restorative justice, they’d initiate these procedures on their own, and they’d do so immediately. Failure to initiate indicates disregard for marginalized and exploited societies and reinforces colonial power structures, which makes museums nothing more than a tool for capitalist/colonial entities.
And… this isn’t exactly wrong! But it’s not a particularly well-informed take because it assumes that museums exist independently of other governing bodies (and a lot of other stuff but we’re going to focus on that right now). Museums do not exist independently of other governing bodies. Tonight, we’re going to talk about everybody’s least-favorite marble-stealing museum, the British Museum, and how it’s not just museum policy keeping its holdings there.
The British Museum is famous for a lot of things, including:
-stealing the Parthenon marbles
-stealing the Rosetta stone
-stealing a ton of artifacts from what is now Nigeria thanks to the Punitive Expedition of 1897
and many other things! But here is something important to remember about the British Museum: They did not commission these thefts! Rather, they are an entity essentially formed to house military spoils. (Well, sort of- in its earliest incarnation in the 1750s it was mostly Hans Sloane’s cool natural history stuff. It was really post-1800 where the military campaigns started looting things, but the point remains that the primary sources of artifacts were a.) military expansion and b.) colonial resource extraction.) The museum itself didn’t steal the stuff. Primarily, they just received the stolen goods. And that’s actually an important distinction to make! It doesn’t release them of any culpability, mind you. What it does do is give you some context for why they behave the way they do as an educational entity and as a political organization.
Another thing that will help explain what is going on in Britain is a piece of legislature called the British Museum Act of 1963 (which I’ll be calling the BMA 63 from here on out). (Also, that link is to the full text of the act. I won’t be reproducing the whole thing here, but it’s worth looking at to understand the depth of control the British government has over the British Museum.)
BMA 63 is an update to the original legislature of BMA 1753, which is the act that brought the museum into being. There have been updates between then and now, but BMA 63 made some massive changes to the way the collection is managed. One thing it did was to split the museum into Natural History and the British Museum. Another thing was it wrote the provisions for collection divestment into law in Section 5 of the act:
5 Disposal of objects (1) The Trustees of the British Museum may sell, exchange, give away or otherwise dispose of any object vested in them and comprised in their collection if - (a) the object is duplicate of another object, or (b) the object appears to the Trustees to have been made not earlier than the year 1850, and substantially consists of printed matter of which a copy made by photography or a process akin to photography is held by the Trustees, or © in the opinion of the Trustees the object is unfit to be retained in the collections of the Museum and can be disposed of without detriment to the interests of students. Provided that where an object has become vested in the Trustees by virtue of a gift or bequest the powers conferred by this subsection shall not be exercisable as respects that object in a manner inconsistent with any condition attached to the gift or bequest.
In plain English, that means that an object can ONLY leave the British Museum’s collection if it’s a copy of something, if it’s paper material written after 1850, or if the object is damaged substantially enough that it can’t be studied. The British government has intentionally made repatriation impossible. And notice that says in the opinion of the trustees. NOT the curators, but rather this board of 25 people who are appointed by the British government to further British interests. Does this deck seem a little stacked to you?
So let’s say that the British Museum wanted to give the Parthenon Marbles back.
Simply put… they couldn’t. They legally could not. There is no way for them to divest their collection thanks to the provisions of BMA 63. The stuff in the British Museum… isn’t really owned by the British Museum. The Board of Trustees owns and controls everything in the museum. The linked comments from their current chair are indicative of their attitude- they see their role primarily as a way to keep the entire collection in Britain on a permanent basis. The curators, the museum staff? They honestly don’t have control over what’s going on with the stuff in the collection. They’re allowed to set up loans, but they cannot transfer ownership of anything away from the museum. This is not an accident. This was a way to reinforce a certain type of colonial power and to ensure that war trophies remained where they were: in London. This law was upheld in court as recently as 2005, when the high court ruled that no, actually, the British Museum was not allowed to return art stolen by the Nazis. DESPITE the fact that the museum WANTED to give the looted art to the family from whom it was stolen, they were barred from doing so by the British government. This is not an accident. The court ruled that “the British Museum Act - which protects the collections for posterity - cannot be overridden by a “moral obligation” to return works known to have been plundered.” Or in other words, the court knew that it was the right thing to do to return the work, but because the law is the way it is, they couldn’t do the right thing. The museum tried for years to give the pieces back but they were stopped from doing so. This is one major way that the government of the UK furthers their own national interests. By insisting that the looted artifacts don’t belong to an educational institution but instead to a primarily government-appointed board of trustees who benefit from the prestige and aren’t beholden to public consequences, the British government has essentially incorporated the British Museum as a colonial treasure-house and they’re not even trying to hide it. This means that while Berlin’s Ethnological Museum can just straight-up give the Benin Bronzes back, the British Museum cannot.
Again, this does NOT mean the museum itself is innocent! It does not mean that they’re heroes who would loooove to give stuff back but they’re being thwarted by the evil government! This whole scenario here is just an illustration of some of the complexities behind museum policies. Hopefully what I’ve done here is shown you that museums are political entities. The people who make the decisions aren’t always the people you think they are. When you are thinking about looted artifacts, you have to look up the chain. Museums have a lot of power as institutions, but when they’re backed by a national government, they lose a lot of their autonomy towards more equitable ideals. Just saying that the British Museum is racist/colonialist/capitalist isn’t enough- we need to look at it as what it is. A tool of the UK government to further the narrative they want to tell.
And this is important because in the US and in online spaces, museum discourse is really bad at understanding the logistics of repatriation. Which is completely understandable, because there are a lot of moving parts when it comes to safely and equitably restoring cultural sovereignty! But at the same time it’s also frustrating because there’s a lot of demand to just give stuff back. What I hope people realize after reading this little essay is that when you’re calling for repatriation, the situation might be legally messier than you think. That doesn’t mean you should give up, and it doesn’t mean you’re wrong- it just means that you need to strategize and think carefully about how you go about it.
(PS: Sources are linked in the text. I highly recommend reading them!)
chinese fan tuanshan by 佳冉工作室 jiaran studio
These are a couple of GIFs from our gameplay video of the museum game, Old Souls. It was a collaboration project between bachelors and master game-students at KADK. I was the Art Director on the project, but I also ended up producing some assets (but I love doing that).
Art Deco compact (1920s)
Bowl with Fish, Iran, probably Kashan (late 13th–mid-14th century).
‧𓍢ִ໋☕ ׂ 𓈒 ⋆⋆˚✿˖° ۪ Antique findings today 📚₊˚⊹♡﹒⋆˚✿˖°
Tragically, Yorkshire Museum's Curator Battles have come to an end. Here are some highlights from the grand finale subject of Best Object.
Tragically, Yorkshire Museum's Curator Battles have come to an end. Here are some highlights from the grand finale subject of Best Object.
Artifacts and Politics
Langdon Winner pointed out that technical things have political qualities in his notable essay, "Do Artifacts have Politics?".
Two ways in which technical artifacts can contain political properties are:
(1)"a technical device or system is used to settle a community issue", (2)"man-made systems requiring or compatible with certain types of political relations."
The most cited example in his essay is the height of overpasses on Long Island in NY. Robert Moses, who has a class-bias and racial prejudice, designed the overpasses discouraging the presence of buses on his parkways. Automobile owing whites of "upper" and "comfortable middle" classes would be free to use the parkways. The poor and racial minorities who normally used public transit were kept off the road because of the height of overpasses (Winner 1980). Without verbal signs and making laws, artifacts can perform human group formation and segregation.
In 2020, his statue and his design" became controversial in the growth of Black Lives Matter movement. Residents in Babylon have been advocating for the removal of a statue of Robert Moses and a petition started by Vanessa Cardino, Long Island now has over 12,600 signatures (Young 2020).
Winner, Langdon
1980 Do Artifacts have Politics? Daedalus. 109 (1):121-136.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/20024652
Young, Michelle.
2020 There’s a Statue of Robert Moses in Babylon, Long Island. untapped new york. June 17th.
This 14th century door at Exeter Cathedral, UK, is thought to be the oldest existing cat flap.
A cat was paid a penny each week, to keep down the rats and mice in the north tower, and a cat flap was cut into the door below the astronomical clock to allow the cat to carry out its duties.
Records of payments were entered in the Cathedral archives from 1305 to 1467, the penny a week being enough to buy food to supplement a heavy diet of rodents.
See More: https://artifactsmuseumhistory.blogspot.com
The Cloths of Christ: Holy Relics or Fakes?
Eli Kittim
Don’t be naive. Fakes, forgeries, and frauds are much more prevalent than you might think. Just as the “post-2002” Dead Sea Scrolls are fake, so are many Christian relics. For instance, take the “Titulus Crucis,” a piece of wood. Christian tradition claims that the relic contains a portion of the True Cross. Scientists, however, consider it to be a medieval forgery:
In 2002, the University of Arizona
conducted radiocarbon dating tests on the
artifact, and it was shown to have been
made between 980 and 1146 AD. The
carbon dating results were published in the
peer-reviewed journal Radiocarbon.
— Wiki
The same holds true for many other relics. Yet despite these setbacks, Christian archaeologists continue to make sensational claims that they have found the burning bush, the tomb of Jesus, the house of Peter, the Veil of Veronica (which btw is never mentioned in the canonical Gospels), and the like. They’re doing a great disservice to Christianity by promoting sensationalism and fake news. By advertizing hoaxes, fakes, and forgeries, they’re setting up Christianity to be mocked and ridiculed, and ultimately rejected. Once people realize that these relics are nothing more than fakes, frauds, and forgeries, they would want nothing to do with Christianity. In other words, the veracity of the Christian message is at stake. They’re setting people up to apostatize and deconstruct their faith. This is actually an attack on——not a support of——the Christian faith!
Pious Frauds
The Sudarium of Oviedo cloth——which is believed to be the post-mortem cloth that was wrapped around Jesus’ head, as mentioned in John 20:6–7——has been dated to around 700 AD by radiocarbon dating:
It’s a hoax!
The Manoppello Image of Jesus Christ’s face on a cloth is also a fake:
Most researchers state that, despite fringe
claims of divine origins, the face on the veil
at Manoppello clearly conforms in
appearance to the characteristics of an
artificially-made image and that stylistically
it is similar to images dating to the late
Middle Ages or early Renaissance.
— Wiki
The Shroud of Turin is also a 13th to 14th century hoax:
In 1988, radiocarbon dating by three
different laboratories established that the
shroud's linen material was produced
between the years 1260 and 1390 (to a
95% confidence level). Defenders of the
authenticity of the shroud have questioned
those results, usually on the basis that the
samples tested might have been
contaminated or taken from a medieval
repair to the original fabric. Such fringe
hypotheses have been refuted by carbon-
dating experts and others based on
evidence from the shroud itself, including
the medieval repair hypothesis, the bio-
contamination hypothesis and the carbon
monoxide hypothesis.
— Wiki
However, there was a recent research study on the Shroud of Turin (April 2022) by Dr. Liberato De Caro’s team which used the new “Wide-Angle X-ray Scattering” or WAXS method to determine the age of the shroud. They claim that they found a match with a piece of fabric from c. AD 55-74 from the siege of Masada in Israel. However, it is as yet unknown whether or not the findings are accurate. As far as I know, they have not been independently confirmed or multiply-attested by other laboratories. Dr. De Caro himself noted that his work was simply “evaluated and peer-reviewed by three other independent experts,” including the editor of the journal “Heritage,” which published his findings. But that doesn’t mean that the results were correct, multiply attested, or independently confirmed. It just means that a couple of editors thought that the experiment was worthy of publication. In fact, Dr. Liberato De Caro himself expressed the need for further research, especially “blind” tests to “avoid any possible bias in the data analysis by the authors of the research.” Bottom line, this new study has not yet conclusively refuted the 1988 radiocarbon dating findings by three different laboratories which established that the shroud is a medieval hoax.
As early as 1390, about 35 years after the
Shroud first emerged in France, Pierre
d'Arcis, the Catholic bishop in Troyes, wrote
to Pope Clement VII that the shroud was ‘a
clever sleight of hand’ by someone ‘falsely
declaring this was the actual shroud in
which Jesus was enfolded in the tomb to
attract the multitude so that money might
cunningly be wrung from them.’
— NBC News
The Roman Catholic Church considers the
Shroud to be an icon, not a holy relic.
— NBC News
Now, a new study using modern forensic
techniques suggests the bloodstains on the
shroud are completely unrealistic,
supporting arguments that it is a fake.
— Livescience
‘If you look at the bloodstains as a whole,
just as you would when working at a crime
scene, you realize they contradict each
other,’ Borrini said. ‘That points to the
artificial origin of these stains.’
— Livescience
Enough already with the hoaxes and the
fake news!
#HalloweenSeason
... so they say we're the hosts for this Halloween Season's Party. OK! That means we're also in charge of the decorations and we decided to start today with some outdoor/indoor artifacts; it was getting a bit quiet around here anyway. But decoration here, is at l a r g e s c a l e.
Anyone around here from Tumblr that still has the Halloween Spirit?; or are you too old, too busy, too tired, have too much work, or think it's only for kids. I know that for most people it's a big entertainment week. For others attempts are made to break the bond, which is keeping the doors to the "underworld" closed while for some other people a way bit more serious, a time for the High Unholy Ceremonies day. Blood communions, sexual rituals, the beltane incubus, necromancies, the famous Satanic Mass... whatever! But hey, what are your plans? Just kidding.
Anyway,
Our Halloween Season's party was cancelled last year due to the famous Corona Virus second wave and people around here are now more thirsty than ever. The Halloween Spirit is even more present this year, so decorations will be. It's going to be a giant party with at least one hundred people.
Now everyone knows that Halloween is celebrated on October 31st, where the nights are longer than days, and while the frontier between the dead and the living is at its thiner. So people around here have the habit of making Wooden Stickman as part of Halloween's artifacts.
Well this is our Giant Wooden Stickman and if you're not familiar with them, well these guys are representative of the Spirits of the dead and if you hang them from the trees, they will provide a way for the Spirits to travel between Worlds.
So meet one of our Giant 8' Wooden Stickman.
Happy Halloween Season guys.