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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.

I once read a book written by Canadian zoologist and author, Farley Mowatt, who spent some time living in the Arctic with a group of Inuit just after WWII (Farley Mowatt, 1952 “People of the Deer”). At the beginning of chapter VII he described a meal in which his hosts presented boiled meat and gravy in a large communal tray. They ate the meat using fingers and knives, but conveyed the ‘soup’ to their mouths by using their cupped hands. It was apparently a messy procedure as lots of the soup dripped down the front of their clothes. I was much struck by this. It had never occurred to me that any human would attempt to eat soup without a spoon, or some substitute such as a seashell. It just goes to show that you cannot take anything for granted when studying human behaviour.

Most cultures use spoons for sloshy foods. So when did people start using them? There are apparently rare examples of spoons carved from antler and ivory which date back to the later part of the Ice Age, up to 20,000 years ago. They come from Palaeolithic hunter-gatherer sites in Russia and France. Were they used for eating or serving or, as happened millennia later (think communion spoons), for religious rituals? Before the invention of pottery, how much food was cooked by boiling in liquid? There are methods of doing so, but were they used? (and how could you detect it if they were?).

There are many finds of spoons from the Neolithic, when farming and pottery were introduced, and people began to boil things in pottery vessels. Wooden spoons have been found in waterlogged sites such as the Sweet Track in the Somerset Levels, the lake villages of Egolzwil and Niederwil in Switzerland, the French lake village of Charavines, and the Danish bog of Christiansholms Mose near Copenhagen. There are ceramic spoons from Dikili Tash in Greece and bone ones from Barcin Hoyuk in Turkey.

But I think my favourite Neolithic spoons are the small bone spoons from the Balkans and Turkey which have been found to bear the tiny marks of baby’s milk teeth. They are considered to show that during the Neolithic, babies were weaned earlier than before, as their mothers could now boil up cereals to make porridge and feed it to them with a spoon. Cute!

Strangely enough, sometimes a gardener can enjoy the almost total absence of vegetation. As in karesansui, the Japanese Zen dry garden.

Karesansui are composed almost entirely of sand, carefully raked to give the effect of ripples on water, surrounding a few rocks. Occasionally there might be moss, a shrub, or a water feature. The gardens are small, and usually surrounded by buildings or a wall. The extreme simplicity and lack of colour are intended to be symbolic of the essence of nature and the world. They are intended to aid meditation or contemplation.

This is a very old form of garden, dating back to the 12^th to 14^th centuries, usually associated with Zen Buddhist temples and cared for as part of their duties by the monks. The outstanding example usually cited is the dry garden at the Ryoanji (‘Peaceful Dragon’) temple in Kyoto, a Unesco World Heritage Site. Here carefully raked sand is arranged around fifteen stones which are placed in small groups, each set in a small patch of moss. It is considered important that you cannot see all of the stones from any one viewpoint. The garden is surrounded by a wall on three sides and by one of the temple buildings on the fourth side.

Karesansui are popular outside Japan. There are a number in the UK, including one at Kew Gardens in London. They are even found in Scotland. The best known example is part of the Japanese Garden at Cowden castle near Dollar in Clackmannanshire. This garden was designed in the early 20^th century for a wealthy woman, Isabella Christie, a traveller and Fellow of the Royal Geographic Society. It was unusual in being designed by a Japanese woman designer, and was largely maintained by Japanese gardeners. Cowden’s Japanese garden was closed in 1955 after vandalism and neglect, but has been restored and is now open to the public again.

The natural world sometimes offers a similar ‘garden' experience. Around the cliffs and beaches of Orkney, a few dwarf plants often grow among the rocks and sand giving a very pleasing aesthetic effect, a spare beauty almost like a wild karesansui.

I tend to enjoy the simplest and most minimal in art of any kind. I find these gardens very peaceful and satisfying.

Earlier this year I read a book called “Sampans, Banyans and Rambutans;  A Childhood in Singapore and Malaya” ⁽¹⁾ by a man called Derek Tait. I enjoyed it very much. The author spent several years of his early childhood in the 1960s living in Johore in Malaya and frequently visited the city of Singapore close by. I visited Singapore in 2017, so it was interesting to compare the city today with the city of half a century ago.

The Republic of Singapore consists of a group of islands off the southern tip of Malaysia in South-east Asia. There is one main island and a large number of smaller islets. Singapore lies only one degree north of the Equator and has a tropical climate. Tait mentions the heavy monsoon rains and violent thunderstorms. There is a long history of settlement on the site, but the modern city has its origins in 1819, when it was acquired by Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles for the British East India Trading Company.  

In 1867 Singapore came under direct rule from Britain. During World War II it was taken over by Japan between 1942 and 1945. It became self-governing in 1959, and from 1963 until 1965 was part of the Malaysian federation. Singapore became an independent city state in 1965, and Derek Tait’s family moved there that year. His father was in the British Navy. The Singapore River provides a natural harbour and it was an important naval base, with the British navy stationed there until 1971.

The first thing Derek Tait mentions about Singapore in the 1960s is the distinctive smell of rotting rubbish and raw sewage. A filthy canal ran down the centre of the city, and the Singapore River was full of rubbish, raw sewage and rats. When I visited, I was particularly struck by how clean the city was, far cleaner than London or Edinburgh. There were no bad smells at all and I noticed the large number of people employed as cleaners in public areas. I don’t remember seeing the canal, but the river mouth has been dammed and is being used as a freshwater reservoir for some of the city’s water supply. Tait mentions rats and dead dogs in the water; David Attenborough in his 2016 documentary about wildlife in big cities (part of Planet Earth II)  mentions the return of smooth-coated otters as a result of the cleaning of the waterways.

Tait’s photos show streets full of cars and rickshaws and rickety buses. In an effort to combat air pollution in the densely-populated city (7,797 people per square km), the authorities now discourage private car ownership and encourage people to travel using a very good modern bus and Metro (underground) service. I used the Metro all the time during my visit, it was clean, safe and easy to follow. None of my son’s friends drove cars, and neither of us can remember seeing a single rickshaw.

In the 1960s the mosquitos were so bad that people had to sleep under nets and burn coils of mosquito repellent at night. Mosquitos often carry dengue fever, a dangerous tropical disease, and the authorities are trying to control them. Posters on the walls of the Metro system urge people to get rid of stagnant water around their houses, where mosquitos breed. It seems to be a successful program. I only got bitten once in Singapore, on the Night Safari at the Zoo, and in the centre of town I never saw or heard a single mosquito.

Tait’s photographs show very few multi-storey buildings, but it is a city of skyscrapers today. To house the huge population, people not only have to live in small spaces, but homes and offices tend to be in tall tower blocks, except for the very wealthy indeed. One of the most expensive hotels is in two enormous slender towers linked by a roof platform containing a garden with palm trees and an infinity pool. My son lived in a shared flat in a gorgeous tower, one of a group of three towers set in a gated garden with a gym and a swimming pool. Out of the city centre there were tower blocks that looked more utilitarian, from the train at least. I did much of my shopping in excellent shopping malls, which weren’t there in the 1960s.

The authorities are committed to making it a green city.  The roads are lined with trees, grass and flowerbeds, and there are gardens everywhere, from the Singapore Botanical Gardens, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, to the rooftops of tower blocks. During Lockdown, I followed the Singapore National Parks Board on Twitter, and was fascinated by their program to encourage everybody to grow food, even if it was just a pot of salad greens beside their front door, to improve the city’s food security. It cheered me up all through Lockdown, and inspired my own micro-food-growing efforts.

One thing that hasn’t changed is the lively street life. Since accommodation even for the relatively well-off tends to be cramped and often has minimal cooking facilities, people eat out a lot at restaurants and food halls. Food halls are open areas with tables and chairs surrounded by stalls selling food and drinks. Sometimes vendors come round with carts offering drinks at your table. I personally found them great.

Given that the world is now drastically overpopulated and most of us are likely to end up living in places as densely populated as Singapore, it’s heartening to see a city making such a positive effort to make it a good place to live for humans and wildlife. How a tiny city-state with a no land or natural resources and a huge population has managed to evolve the sort of economy which can support all this is beyond me to understand. I am no economist. But from what I can pick up on an internet trawl they seem to have been rather clever.

And it’s fascinating to see how things have changed well within my lifetime. Thank you, Mr Tait.

⁽¹⁾ “Sampans, Banyans and Rambutans  A Childhood in Singapore and Malaya” Derek Tait 2006 Driftwood Coast Publishing PO Box 7, West Park, Plymouth, England, PL5 2YS ISBN 978-0-9554277-0-1

I saw this mosaic pavement every day of my working life for many years, every time I crossed the main gallery of the Verulamium museum. All of the mosaics in the museum are beautiful, but the Dahlia mosaic particularly appealed to me, I don’t know why. It comes from a townhouse in the Roman city of Verulamium, and probably dates from around 175 – 200CE. It would have been on the floor in Roman times, although it is now fixed to the wall of the museum.

It is made of black, red and white tesserae, and has a large central flower in a square with small motifs in each corner of that square. The flower is set within a circle and the whole mosaic is overlaid by a grid of nine squares surrounded by a pattern known as” three-strand guilloche”. There are flowers in the four corner squares of the grid. The excavator, Sir Mortimer Wheeler, referred to the large central flower as a dahlia and the four corner flowers as roses, but to me it looks more like a water lily or lotus, set in a stylised circular pond indicated by the wave pattern of the innermost circle surrounding it.

The mosaic was in one room of a small second-century CE house in Insula IV. The house was L-shaped and surrounded almost all the way round by a veranda. There were five rooms, an extra one projecting from one arm of the L, and two small buildings close by which might have been for cooking. At least two of its rooms had mosaic floors and the veranda had a red tessellated pavement (little brick cubes). The veranda also had painted wall plaster coloured green, white and black. Unfortunately this nice little residence was built over a swallow-hole, not uncommon in chalk areas like St Albans, and partly collapsed before the end of the third century CE. It happens even today. The site was levelled around 300CE when this area of the town was redeveloped.

Wheeler (1936, page 146 (2) considered it to be a “good example of careful pedestrian work.” I think it is very pretty. I would have chosen it for my floor any day.

(1) Image by Carole Raddato from FRANKFURT, Germany, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

(2) Report of the Research Committee of the Society of Antiquaries of London No.XI Wheeler, Verulamium: A Belgic & 2 Roman Cities  p146 Pl XLIVB  REM Wheeler, D.Lit., V.P.S.A. andT.V. Wheeler FSA  1936