A couple of snakes

This is the sort of post that really should have footnotes. But this is my blog, not my book; I'd rather blather on in a stream-of-consciousness way, rarely slowing to even look up spelling.

Evans and Schliemann. It is odd how Evans gets more of a pass these days, considering how many deep similarities there really were between the two. It is sort of surprising these days when you run into a mention of Schliemann that takes him at face value; the "Discoverer of Troy" and all that. The guilding has rubbed off that one.

Both bought the land they excavated. Typical and accepted practice for the day. Schliemann does come off worse because he had an arrangement with the Turks to split the loot (non-western countries were catching up to the value, financial and nationalistic, in museum-worthy cultural artifacts) but he hid the good stuff and smuggled it out of the country anyhow.

Both essentially hired forgers, although Schliemann feels more underhanded about it (some people still think the "Mask of Agamemnon" is a modern forgery). Evans happily described his concrete-cast pillars and the frescoes painted by French artist friends of his with a term that hints the work is less "restoration" and more "recreation."

In the end, both came out of a specific cultural understanding of the cultures they unearthed, an understanding strongly colored by their own life stories, and both shaped not just how they interpreted the cultural materials they found but how they proceeded (in both cases, often destructively) in their investigations.

(Just to add to the problem of reconstructed "Minoan" palaces and repainted "Minoan" frescoes -- as none other than Evelyn Waugh put it, apparently the Minoans had a great fondness for the cover of Vogue -- another recent and exhaustive study of forgeries made for the antiquities trade found the vast majority of those so enigmatic and suggestive Snake Goddess figurines showed no sign of having ever been near Minoan hands.)




Two odd statuary tidbits. First is Venus figurines. Perfect name, really. It jumps right up and cuts off the instinct to view them according to modern standards of beauty and makes you consider that there are many plausible options as to how the culture that created them, saw them.

The name, alas, has two origins. The class artifact, the Venus of Willendorf, was named thus inspired by the appearance of Sara Baartman, a Khoikhoi woman who was exhibited on the London stage in the early 1800's under the name "The Hottentot Venus."

(After her death in essentially slavery she was dissected by Georges Cuvier...in that era's toxic atmosphere of scientific racism, and her corpse remained on exhibit until the 1970's. Her remains were finally repatriated to South Africa in 2002 and there was a nice ceremony to welcome her home.)




On a much brighter note, a recent anatomical reconstruction of the missing arms of the Venus de Milo suggests that she held a pose that would have been familiar to women of all classes from the Bronze Age out to Chaucer's time (where whilst spinning wheels were available, the distaff and drop-spindle were still in use).

She is, in short, spinning.

(Just a note for those not up on the social context. Spinning and weaving were necessary and time-consuming activities for pre-industrial societies but they were not class-restricted. One of the qualities of a well-bred woman of the nobility was weaving. Weaving finer clothes and more delicate patterns than the hoi polloi, of course, but still hand weaving. In Homer, Helen weaves. Penelope weaves -- and, as famously, unravels.)