Archives

I have been involved with the Romans one way or another for over 60 years, and when I finally visited Rome itself it was one of the great experiences of my life. It was like coming home. It is difficult to choose which of the things I saw on that visit made the greatest impression on me, but I think that the equestrian statue of the emperor Marcus Aurelius, in the Capitoline Museum, was very near the top. Not only is it a statue of my favourite emperor, but the lively pose of the horse is a beautiful piece of art.

Marcus Aurelius was born in 121CE and was emperor from 161 to 180CE, at first ruling jointly with his brother Lucius Verus until Verus’ death in 169CE. He succeeded his adoptive father, Antoninus Pius, and is often referred to as the last of the five “good emperors”. His reign was the last in a long period of peace and stability for the Roman Empire.

Marcus Aurelius had been deeply interested in philosophy since his childhood, adopting the Stoic ideal. In his later years he jotted down his private thoughts on various subjects, which survive today and are known as the “Meditations”. For the most part they are very gloomy, perhaps because of his solemn character and his poor health, but probably also because a long period of ‘pax Romana’ was ending, and the empire was entering a troubled period, with continuous war on both frontiers, invasions, civil disobedience, and outbreaks of a devastating pandemic. The ‘Antonine Plague’ also known as the ‘Plague of Galen’, is believed to have been either smallpox or measles, spread by soldiers returning from war in the Middle East.

The larger-than-life-size statue of the emperor on horseback is made of gilded bronze. Its date is not certain; it probably dates from early in his reign, to honour a victory, but possibly from just after his death. He is shown without armour or weapons to signify his peaceful role, his right hand is outstretched and his left hand may have originally held just the reins, or an object such as a globe surmounted by a figure of the goddess of Victory. He rides without stirrups, not yet in use in the western world, but with a fringed Sarmatian saddle cloth, possibly a reference to victory over the Sarmatians.

It is suggested that the statue survived when so many other masterpieces of Roman art were melted down to re-use the metal because it was believed for many years to show the Christian emperor Constantine. It is now in the Capitoline Museum, on the Capitoline Hill. A replica stands outside in the courtyard and the statue itself is preserved inside.

This drawing of a fish is based on the decoration of a 9th century CE Chinese bowl. One of the places I enjoyed visiting most on my holiday in Singapore in 2017 was the Asian Civilisations Museum, and the exhibit I enjoyed most was the Tang shipwreck, also known as the Belitung shipwreck.

The stoneware bowl with the fish decoration was found on the wreck of an Arab dhow, discovered by fishermen in 1998 off the shores of Sumatra at Belitung Island. It was dated to the 9^th century CE by radiocarbon dating of star anise preserved on the wreck, and by a bowl inscribed with a date which is equivalent to 826CE. The dhow was on the return journey from Canton in China to the Middle East, carrying luxury goods which included over 60,000 ceramic objects. The majority of the cargo was hand-painted stoneware bowls, made at Changsha in Hunan Province, packed for the journey inside large jars or straw bundles.  

China’s Tang Dynasty is dated between 618-907 CE. It is regarded as having been a golden age, when China was well-governed, prosperous and cosmopolitan, and poetry and art flourished. Foreign trade expanded, with merchants from all over the Near and Far East coming to China, overland by the Silk Road, but also by sea, including the long-distance export of mass-produced ceramics.

The Chinese character for “fish” is a homophone for prosperity or abundance, so fish are considered to be lucky. The arowana or dragon fish is considered to be particularly auspicious. I have been unable to access any detailed information or images on the subject, but perhaps this fish, which has a dragon-like appearance, was painted onto the bowl as a good-luck symbol. I shall continue my researches!

I particularly loved this perky little fish as an attractive piece of art. But I was also stunned to think that at the time when the 9^th century Saxons were making handmade, low-fired, grass-tempered pottery in Southern England, and the 9^th century Viking occupants of Orkney were mostly not making pottery at all, on the other side of the world people were making wheel-thrown, high-fired stonewares with coloured decoration!

I have already mentioned that moderately famous almost-Tudor, Robert Stewart, earl of Orkney, great-nephew of Henry VIII. Another of Henry’s great-nephews also had a connection with Orkney. Earl Robert’s half-brother, Lord Adam Stewart, is buried in St Magnus Cathedral in Kirkwall.

Adam Stewart was, like Earl Robert, the illegitimate son of James V and a half-sibling of Mary Queen of Scots. He is thought to have been born in 1535 and died in 1575, at the age of around 40. His mother was one of the daughters of Sir John Stewart, 3rd Earl of Lennox and 1st Earl of Atholl, but there is some confusion as to whether it was Lady Helen Stewart or Lady Elizabeth Stewart.

His life is poorly documented and little is known about him. Unlike several of his half-brothers, there is no record of the king having given him the commendatorship of an abbey as a source of income. He seems to have been a monk at the Carthusian Charterhouse in Perth, from which he was allotted a pension in 1561, but he was almost certainly not the prior, although he sometimes claimed to be.

The Charterhouse in Perth, built around 1429, was the only Carthusian foundation in Scotland. Known as “Domus Vallis Virtutis" – House of the Valley of Virtue – it was the burial place of James I of Scotland, who instigated its foundation shortly before his death and contributed financially. His queen Joan Beaufort, and Adam Stewart’s grandmother, Margaret Tudor, widow of James IV and sister of Henry VIII of England, were also buried there.

Carthusian monasteries were small, and usually had only a prior and around twelve monks.  The Carthusian rule was extremely strict, and the life was something like that of a hermit. The monks lived a relatively solitary life of silent meditation, in individual cells, dressed in white habits with uncomfortable hair shirts next to the skin. The cells were small houses with several rooms, individual cloisters for meditation, and walled gardens where the monks could grow food. There was a small hatch beside the entrance door through which their meals were passed. Most of the daily eight offices, including Mass, were celebrated alone in their cells. They only came together for communal prayer, eating and business discussions on Sundays and feast days. The monks worked at various occupations, such as weaving and illuminating manuscripts, in work rooms in their cells. They were supported by lay brothers who handled necessary contact with the outside world and communal activities such as food preparation and cleaning. It seems odd to imagine a son of James V living a life of such austerity, considering the lives of wealth and political involvement led by his half-brothers Earl Robert and Earl James of Moray.

In 1559 the Charterhouse was attacked by Protestant reformers, following a sermon by John Knox in the burgh kirk of St John the Baptist. As well as the Charterhouse, the Perth mob attacked the monasteries of the Greyfriars and Blackfriars and destroyed the altars in St John’s Kirk. Only six monks remained at the Charterhouse afterwards; two of them then fled abroad. Adam is said to have been one of the four monks who remained there. The Charterhouse was suppressed ten years later in 1569 and the king gave the buildings and gardens to the burgh of Perth, although until 1602 commendators held the monastery.

In 1560 after the Scottish Reformation, Adam Stewart, no longer a monk required to be celibate, married Janet Ruthven, daughter of William Ruthven, in Edinburgh. They had least one son and seven daughters. Janet died in 1606 in Perth at the age of 86. Perhaps they lived in Perth, familiar to Lord Adam, during their married life.

In 1572 there is a record that Adam Stewart was in Edinburgh where he witnessed a contract between three of his half-brother Robert’s servants and two of his Edinburgh agents.

In 1575 Adam died and was buried in Orkney, but I can find no information about what he was doing there. There is no record of his wife having been in Orkney; it might be remembered that Earl Robert’s wife never came to Orkney either. One of Adam and Janet’s daughters, Barbara Stewart, had married an Orkney landowner, Henry Halcro, and she dedicated a memorial stone to her father (described by J. Clouston in 1919 in the Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland 53), in the cathedral in Kirkwall, naming him as the son of King James V.

From time to time, many museums create small exhibitions, trails, or blog posts, by asking all their staff to write a short piece about their favourite object. They usually call these “Curator’s Choice”. I have been thinking about some of my own favourite objects from the historical and archaeological world all over the planet. This little statuette of a frog is one of them. You might call this a “Curator's Choice" – look out for more!

I have never seen the actual object myself, and I don’t expect I ever will. Nevertheless, from the three images I have seen, it is one of my favourite pieces of art. It has the complete simplicity I like so much, and makes excellent use of the natural colouring of the stone it is carved from. Also I happen to be fond of frogs.

It is a religious object from around the turn of the 3^rd millennium BCE, i.e. during the Predynastic period in Egypt. The frog was an ancient symbol of fertility, relating to the annual flooding of the Nile which allowed the crops to grow, and which naturally encouraged the breeding of millions of frogs in its mud. It was later known to have been associated with rebirth and life after death, with childbirth and with the fertility goddess Heket or Heqet, who was identified with the goddess Hathor. Heqet was the wife of Khnum, the potter-god who shaped human beings on his wheel. She was sometimes represented as a woman with the head of a frog; sometimes as a frog.

This statuette has no provenance, i.e.no-one knows where it was found. It is made of travertine/alabaster and is 154mm tall. The clever use of the stone’s natural veining was probably intentional, as it was not intended to be painted.

It is now in the Cleveland Museum of Art.

When I was a young woman, the systematic study of Palaeolithic (Old Stone Age) stone tools was just taking off. At that point, experiments to replicate the objects found on excavations were crucial in distinguishing deliberately-shaped tools from natural objects which just looked as if they ought to be tools. My fellow students and I were encouraged to practice flint-knapping and we were allowed part of the college basement for practising our knapping. There were a lot of cut fingers and rude words, and I don’t like to think about the amount of silica dust we probably inhaled, but we did learn how just one small flake could tell you a lot about the tools the Stone Age people were making.

Like the prehistoric tool-makers we were trying to understand, we didn’t only use the flint found in the chalk of southeast England and across the Channel. You can use any rock or man-made substance that is fine-grained and fractures equally in all directions. I have tried glass (highly dangerous, the fine splinters go everywhere); porcelain insulators from electricity cables (works very well); Greek obsidian (lovely) and red chert, also from Greece (good but a little tough). I have a row of rocks on my mantelpiece dating from various parts of my life, which includes pieces I have knapped, or pieces knapped by others more expert than myself.

One of the most interesting pieces on my mantelpiece is a small flake of silicified sandstone. It is a handaxe trimming flake (the handaxe was a modern replica) and it has a characteristic thin, slightly curved shape. If you find these at a site, they show that someone was making the tools often referred to as “handaxes” (bifaces), even if you don’t find any handaxes. “Handaxes” are large bifacial tools which are given their final flat shape by removing a series of these very thin flakes with a bar of bone or antler. They are extremely difficult for a beginner to make, although I have seen an expert polish one off in about two minutes. I stood amazed as he did it – it usually took me half an hour to make a rather clumsy replica, and I had to plan every blow of my hammerstone. He didn’t even look, just kept chatting to us as he worked.

Making stone tools ourselves taught us not only how to classify the tools we were digging up more accurately, but also that sometimes you can infer the presence of a particular kind of Stone Age tool from the shape of the waste produced during its manufacture, even if the tool itself wasn't there. What you have found can tell you about what you haven’t found.

**Drawing of handaxe is from “Man the Primeval Savage”, Worthington G Smith 1894 fig. 151