Archaeology

Some years ago I went to an exhibition at the British Museum in London about Ashurbanipal, ruler of the huge neo-Assyrian empire in the 7^th century BCE. Among the panels was part of the great king’s achievements, as declared by himself. It sounded just like a modern CV, or at least, the ones I was taught to write towards the end of my working life. Later I came across a similar declaration from the Norse period, by Rognald Kali Kollsson, Earl of Orkney in the mid-12th century CE. I was interested to see what the two leaders considered to be their qualifications for their jobs.

Ashurbanipal reigned between 669 – 631BCE. Although he was popular with his subjects, he was noted for his ruthlessness and cruelty to anyone who opposed him, even by the standards of his day. Some of the scenes recorded on the carved stone reliefs that decorated his palace at Nineveh record some nasty deeds. This one shows a peaceful scene where he is enjoying an al-fresco meal with his queen in a garden – until you notice the severed head hanging from the tree on the left.

He wasn’t shy about stating his qualifications for the job of king of Assyria. His CV proudly stated that he was good at maths, including complex multiplications and divisions – the Assyrians were advanced mathematicians. It’s nice to meet a head of state who considered being good at maths important for the job. He claimed to be good at ancient languages as well, (Greats at Oxford springs to mind) and could read difficult texts in both Akkadian and Sumerian. He himself would have spoken Assyrian, a Semitic language, for everyday use. Unusually for a monarch in those days, Ashurbanipal could read and write, and palace reliefs show him with long reed pens tucked into his belt, used for making the wedge-shaped impressions in soft clay of cuneiform, the earliest known writing in the world.  He was also good at sport, including archery, riding, throwing javelins and driving chariots.

The king had a passion for books and knowledge, and had a library which was famous for centuries afterwards, predating the famous library in Alexandria. He sent agents to temples all over his territory to collect copies of significant works on many subjects. These now form a priceless record of Assyrian civilisation, written at the time by the Assyrians themselves, among them the “Epic of Gilgamesh”, one of the oldest known works of literature in the world. The texts were preserved when the fire which eventually destroyed the palace at Nineveh baked the clay tablets hard, and they were protected when the walls collapsed on top of them. They were excavated in the mid-19^th century and many are now in the British Museum.

Rognvald Kali Kolsson (1136-58) didn’t rule an empire but he controlled a substantial earldom. He was the nephew of St Magnus Erlundson and built St Magnus Cathedral in Kirkwall during a power struggle with his cousin for the earldom. He later obtained control of Caithness on mainland Scotland as well.

The earl boasted of having nine skills. Like Ashurbanipal, he was proud of being able to read and write (the Vikings used runes), and compose poetry. The Orkneyingasaga describes a number of places and people he visited on his pilgrimage to the Holy Land in 1151. This included a famous visit to Ermengard, the beautiful princess of Narbonne, about whom he wrote a number of poems recorded in the Saga. He was clearly smitten with her, but did not accept an offer to stay and marry her and rule Narbonne with her.  

Rognvald was good at the courtly arts of 12^th century Europe, including chess and playing a musical instrument. Like Ashurbanipal, he was good at archery, and he could ski (he was born and brought up in Norway) and row, as a good Viking should. He doesn’t seem to have included advanced mathematics among his achievements though. Rognvald and his companions made it home to Orkney but he was killed in 1158, buried in St Magnus Cathedral and (probably) canonised in 1192 by Pope Celestine III.

So it appears that literacy and sport were important for a ruler hundreds or even thousands of years ago, but numeracy was an optional extra!

Primogeniture means inheritance by the eldest legitimate male child. The British monarchy was a good example (until the 21^st century and the 2013 Succession to the Crown Act). According to this rule, a daughter could only inherit if there was no male heir, and however useless the eldest son might be at the job of being king, his younger brothers just had to sit there and watch. Primogeniture did have the advantage of not dividing land and property into ever smaller shares. Also until post medieval times, the monarch was supposed to sit on a horse waving a sword if there was a war, so a male monarch was usually a more practical choice (which is not to say that women didn’t join in from time to time with the political side). It could result in some fairly useless kings. However, throughout history, people found a way round it if they really wanted to. Some examples follow.

The Declaration of Arbroath

Some people just said straight out that they would choose their own king. The Declaration of Arbroath was a letter written to the Pope in 1320 during the Scottish Wars of Independence. It was sealed by fifty-one Scottish barons and freeholders, and asked the Pope to confirm Robert the Bruce as their sovereign, and Scotland as an independent country. But it goes on to say that they wouldn’t agree to any king who gave in to the English. They would choose someone else.

The Princes in the Tower

Another method, if you happened to be a royal relation who wanted to grab the throne, was to claim that your sovereign was illegitimate. A “pre-contract” or legally-binding betrothal was a handy device in these circumstances. One famous example was Richard III, who claimed that his elder brother, King Edward IV, hadn’t really been married to Elizabeth Woodville, mother of the Princes in the Tower, because Edward had been pre-contracted to Lady Eleanor Butler. Therefore his nephews and nieces were illegitimate and disqualified from inheriting the throne. It ended on Bosworth Field, with a distant relative winning the battle and consolidating his claim by marrying the eldest sister of the two now deceased male heirs, who had conveniently been declared legitimate again.

Hacking and smiting

Winning the throne by brute force was popular in the Middle Ages. The “Wars of the Roses” were a struggle for the crown between the descendants of Edward III.  The crown changed hands a number of times following a successful battle.

(i)  Richard II/Henry IV: Edward III died in 1377 and was succeeded by his grandson Richard II, son of his eldest son. However Richard II made himself so unpopular that he was forced to abdicate in favour of his cousin Henry Bolingbroke (Henry IV) in 1399. Henry was the eldest son of John of Gaunt, Edward III’s third son, and John’s first wife, Blanche of Lancaster. John had an elder brother Lionel, Edward III’s second son, but Lionel only had a daughter. Her grandson, Edmund Mortimer, earl of March, was considered by many to be Richard’s heir, but he was only eight years old when Richard was deposed. He became a faithful supporter of Henry V and VI. However, he died without children and his sister Anne succeeded to the claim (see below)

(ii)  Henry VI/Edward IV:  Henry IV was succeeded by his son and grandson, Henrys V and VI. Unfortunately Henry VI was not a success. He was regarded as a weak king, dominated by his wife, and had attacks of mental illness. So he too was challenged by a cousin, the Duke of York. The Duke of York was descended from Edward III via two of his sons. His mother, Anne Mortimer, was descended from Lionel the second son through the daughter. On his father’s side he was descended from Edward’s fifth son.  So his claim depended on (a) whether a female had a claim to the throne and (b) hacking and smiting – lots of battles of the Wars of the Roses.  Brute force won the day, although the Duke of York was dead before the Yorkists won. His eldest son Edward took the throne as Edward IV.

(iii)  Richard III/Henry VII Edward had two younger brothers. George, Duke of Clarence, and Richard, Duke of York. George died before Edward, leaving a son and a daughter. He had been attainted for treason. Richard survived his brother Edward who died while his sons were still children. Uncle Richard declared Edward’s children illegitimate (see above) and took the throne as Richard III.  The princes disappeared at some point. Whether it was Richard who killed them is still an unsettled question. Clarence’s son was bypassed on the excuse that he was disbarred by his father’s attainder.

The last Lancastrian heir was Henry Tudor, who managed to defeat Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth, marry Edward IV’s eldest daughter and take the throne. His personal claim to it was weak. He was descended through his mother, Margaret Beaufort, from John of Gaunt. However, his descent was not from the marriage with Blanche but from John of Gaunt’s adulterous affair with Catherine Swynford. John and Catherine later married and the Pope legitimised their offspring after the event. Parliament during the reigns of both Richard II and Henry IV confirmed this. However, Henry IV then made a legal decree that his half-siblings should not have a claim to the throne, although people argued about whether he was allowed to do this.

So Henry VII’s claim that the Lancastrians had the better claim to the throne involved both inheritance via a female – he could therefore not object to the Yorkists’ claim to inheritance via a female – and a rather dodgy situation as regarded legitimacy. If he wanted to rule by right of his Yorkist wife, she was another female and had a male cousin living (the Duke of Clarence’ son), although Henry eventually got rid of him. In the end, it just depended on hacking and smiting – Henry won the Battle of Bosworth.

The Hanoverian Succession

And there is the Hanoverian succession, where the English Parliament chose a king on religious grounds. King James II was removed (without violence) from the thrones of England and Scotland in the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688 because of his attempts to rule without Parliament, and because he had converted to Catholicism, married a Catholic queen and announced that his son would be raised as a Catholic. They gave the throne to James’ elder daughter by his first, Protestant marriage. This was Mary, who was married to her cousin, William, Prince of Orange. She and William died childless and were succeeded by her younger sister, Anne.

Alas, Anne also died without children in 1714. The 1707 Act of Succession expressly forbade Anne to be succeeded by a Catholic monarch. Estimates of how many alternative candidates for the throne existed at that point range wildly from around fifty to six. There do appear to have been six definite contenders alive in 1714 who were more closely related to Queen Anne than the Elector of Hanover. But he was the closest Protestant relative.

To begin with there was Queen Anne’s half-brother, James Stuart, the “Old Pretender". Had it not been for the Act of Succession, James and his two sons, Charles (“Bonnie Prince Charlie, the Young Pretender) and Henry, Cardinal Stuart would have inherited the throne. Not everybody in the by-then United Kingdom supported the exclusion of James and his descendants. There was trouble over this for years, culminating in the 1745 rebellion. Outside Britain itself, France, Spain, the Papal States and Modena all regarded James and Charles Stuart as the king of England, Scotland and Ireland.

In 1714, the next heir after Charles Stuart was Anne Marie d’Orléans. She was the daughter of Henrietta of England, Charles II’s sister, so Anne-Marie was Anne’s first cousin. Henrietta had married Phillippe Duc d’Orléans, younger brother of the king of France. She had converted to Catholicism on her marriage and her daughter was naturally Catholic as well.

Anne Marie d’Orleans married the King of Sardinia, Victor Amadeus II of Savoy. She had two surviving sons in 1714. Also Catholics….

Next were two granddaughters of Elizabeth of Bohemia, daughter of James I. They were the daughters of her son Edward and were Anne’s second cousins. However, Edward had also converted to Catholicism, and his daughters were Catholics as well.  Oh dear…

So after Anne’s death the throne was offered to the nearest Protestant relative, the son of Elizabeth of Bohemia’s youngest daughter. This was another of Anne’s second cousins, the Elector of Hanover, a small principality in north-west Germany. An elector was a head of state entitled to vote in the election of the Holy Roman Emperor. He became George I, first of the Hanoverian line. The Electorate (later kingdom) of Hanover was ruled by the kings of Britain until the accession of Queen Victoria in 1837.

So in practice, primogeniture does NOT rule, OK.  You can always tweak it a bit if it seems advisable!

Heroines in Jane Austin novels are always in need of sal volatile. “Young ladies are delicate plants,” as Mr Woodhouse said in “Emma”. They react to any distressing situation with a genteel faint, so they always carry a pretty little bottle of smelling salts. I’m afraid that I am not very genteel. Sal volatile always reminds me of a disastrous experiment I carried out while I was an archaeology student.

I was working on chipped stone tools from the very earliest part of the Stone Age, around 300,000 years ago. For some reason that I can’t remember now, I wanted to take photographs of the details on the surfaces of a lot of these flakes. Flint is very shiny and I couldn’t get good photos because the camera flash reflected so badly off the surface of the flakes. One of my more scientific colleagues suggested coating the flakes with a matt film. He produced a nifty little device which allowed me to heat crystals of ammonium chloride i.e. sal volatile in a glass bulb over a Bunsen burner. This produced curls of grey vapour which could be blown gently over the flints through a rubber tube, coating them with a non-reflective grey film. I felt like a real scientist with my Bunsen and my tubes of chemicals. It’s a pity that the experiment was a complete failure. However, I probably inhaled enough smelling salts to prevent me fainting for the rest of my life.

“Diamonds are forever” goes the song. Not quite true, as I proved during an even more disastrous experiment with flint tools. Another part of the project involved trying to replicate the effect on flint flakes of being tumbled along in a river. Tumbling wears down the edges of the flakes and smooths the surfaces.

I bought a little machine used by gemstone enthusiasts, which had a drum turned by an electric motor.  You put the flint flakes into the drum and tumbled them for different periods of time with different combinations of sand and water and pebbles. However my little tumbler proved inadequate and I somehow got permission to use a bigger one at the Geological Museum in South Kensington. The staff there suggested that I should number the individual flakes and kindly lent me a diamond-tipped drill to do it with. Flint is mostly silica, which is an extremely hard substance, although in theory not as hard as diamond. In theory. I must be the only student ever to have worn all the diamonds off the end of an expensive diamond-tipped drill. I slunk from the laboratory in shame, and my days as that kind of experimental scientist ended there.

Recently I spent two days in Lerwick, the capital of Shetland. It’s an attractive old town, looking eastwards over the anchorage of Bressay Sound, and the museum is lovely. One of the most interesting walks is along the south end of Commercial Street. Here there is a row of picturesque old stone houses which front onto the street and project at the back into the sea. They have small private piers attached to them, known as ‘lodberries’, from an Old Norse word for a flat stone used as a natural quay. These houses were merchant’s dwellings with a landing place, later a built pier, where goods could be brought ashore from ships anchored in the Sound. During the late 17^th C to early 19^th C they lined the entire Lerwick seafront.

A good example is “The Lodberry” at 20 Commercial Street, also known as Robertson’s Lodberry after Baillie John Robertson. It is an A-listed 18C building or rather a group of buildings around a small courtyard, including a shop fronting onto the street, a two-storey house behind it, and a storehouse with a door to the lodberry and a wall crane.

Shetland’s main export for centuries, from the Norse period onwards, was dried and salted fish. Knitted woollen goods, particularly coarse woollen stockings, were another important commodity. “Grease butter” ie. butter of such poor quality that it could only be used for greasing carts was recorded as a trade item by German merchants in the 17C, who incidentally also bought it from Iceland and the Faroe Islands. Grease butter was one of the main items tenants paid as rent to the lairds. Never having used a wooden cart pulled by a horse, I had never considered that milking cows to provide axle grease could be so important. The Shetlanders got beer, meal, salt and linen cloth in return.

Shetland had close ties with Norway. The islands had been settled by Norwegian Vikings and were part of Norway until the late 15C. The Norwegian dialect, Norn, was spoken in Shetland until the 19C. Initially Shetland traded with Norway mainly through the city of Bergen. Bergen and Lerwick are both on virtually the same latitude (round about 60 degrees north) and are only 358km apart. For comparison,  Lerwick and Aberdeen are 361km apart, only 3km difference. Between the 15^th and 17^th centuries, trade around the North Sea was mainly in the hands of the Hanseatic League, a confederation of north German merchant cities, who, like multinational companies today, had more power than many sovereign states. One of their major trading centres or ‘kontors’ was in Bergen. After the mid 15C many German merchants started trading directly with Shetland rather than through the kontor at Bergen, against the rules of the Hanse. At the end of the 16C large numbers of Dutch fishing boats came to Shetland waters every year for herring. They anchored in Bressay Sound, living and processing the fish on board, held a fair every year near Lerwick, and traded with the Shetlanders for fresh food and woollen stockings. This is when Lerwick first started to become a town rather than a collection of shoreside booths.

Unfortunately, at the beginning of the 18C, climate changes associated with the Little Ice Age, plus major political changes had an adverse effect on Shetland’s trade with Scandinavia. The Shetland islands were by that time part of Scotland, and the Act of Union between Scotland and England in 1707 led to an increase in the tax on salt which was vital for the trade in fish, as well as increased customs dues. This was a difficult period for the ordinary folk in Shetland, as the merchant lairds took over foreign trade and their tenants became virtual serfs, until the 1886 crofters act. However, in the 19C Lerwick became a centre for the highly profitable herring fishery which reached its peak in the early days of the 20^th century before dying out as the over-exploited fish stocks dwindled in the 1920s.

Fishing and fish farming still contribute a third of Shetland’s economic output. The few surviving lodberries are a reminder of the long history of fishing in the islands.

Just after Christmas I went to see the recent hieroglyphics exhibition at the British Museum. I enjoyed it very much. Although I have never formally studied the ancient Egyptians, I was involved in planning schools sessions to go with exhibitions in the museum where I worked for so many years. The museum had a small collection of artefacts brought back from Egypt by the usual Victorian traveller. We only needed to borrow a few more exhibits from other museums, such as a mummy +case, to make a temporary exhibition which fitted nicely with the National Curriculum of the time. I never became very interested in hieroglyphics and hieratic, although I knew what they were. I preferred the exquisite paintings of gardens and everyday life from the walls of rock-cut tombs, the house models and the jewellery. But the recent exhibition at the BM drew my attention to a form of statue that I had never noticed before – block statues. They had a showcase full of them.

Block statues were a plain cube of stone, with only the head, feet, arms or sometimes just hands sculpted. The person, almost always male, was portrayed sitting on the ground in a squatting position, draped with a long robe or cloak which retained the cube form. Sometimes as little of the person as the head and hands were portrayed, sometimes the square block was shaped to suggest the line of arms or legs under the robe, or the limbs might be fully portrayed although still part of the block. Because there were large flat areas, much of the block could be carved with hieroglyphic texts.

It sounds like a clumsy idea, very utilitarian, yet many of these statues seem to me to be well-proportioned and quite graceful. In fact, I prefer the very minimalist ones, where only the head and hands and feet are visible, to those where more of the limbs are shown.

Block statues first appear in temples in the Middle Kingdom/12^th dynasty. By the Late period they had become the most common type of statue portraying non-royal but important personages. They were memorials to people such as priests, high-ranked soldiers, and officials such as scribes and treasurers. The limestone statue shown above, which is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, is of an official called Ankhwennefer (690 – 650 BCE), who was a sem-priest, associated with funerary rituals, and also a scribe and court official. CAVEAT INTERNET: he is not to be confused with the Ankhwennefer who was vizier to a pharaoh, probably Psamtik I (664 – 610BCE), and whose damaged statue, known only from a 1960 sighting on the art market in Cairo, showed a smaller statue of the god Ptah standing in front of him.  There was also a pharaoh called Ankhwennefer or Ankhmatis, who ruled Upper Egypt during the Ptolemaic period (200 – 186BCE) 

Sometimes there was a second head or a complete body carved into the same block. For example, the block statue of the architect and court official Senenmut in the Egyptian Museum in Berlin has a small head of Queen Hatshepsut’s daughter Neferure, whose tutor he was, just in front of Senenmut’s own head. A statue of Senwosret-senebefny in the Brooklyn Museum has a tiny statuette of a woman, perhaps his wife, carved into the front of the block between his legs.

The statues were placed in temples where they could share in offerings and witness religious ceremonies. The posture may have been intended to represent a guardian at the temple gateway. The lap of the statue could have offerings placed on it, and the text might ask passers-bye to pray for the individual, thus safeguarding his immortality.