Ancient Pueblan vs Ancient Greek pots ...

On my latest travels I visited Utah and Arizona in the United States. Among other incidental excitements (like the Grand Canyon, Monument Valley, and Bryce Canyon - wow!), I saw some of the pottery made by the Kayenta and Navajo peoples about a thousand years ago. I was reminded of other pots I’ve seen from Ancient Greece. 

Assuming you are as geeky as I am about such things, dear reader (Themis, my Boy with Two Heads, was a painter on terracotta as well as an athlete...), I thought you might be amused by a picture puzzle. Can you tell which of the pots in the pictures below are from what is now the USA, and which are from various periods in Ancient Greece and Etruria? I wouldn't have been sure of all of them if I hadn’t already known, so to speak. The explanations are below the last picture.

It's pleasing to know that human beings can make simple but elegant things whatever their culture.

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Captions:

1

Large bowl about 35cms diametre, Kayenta? black on white, c900AD. Tusayan Museum, Arizona (link 1)

2

Barrel-shaped jug, Cyprus, c1000BC, terracotta decorated in white and black. British Museum.

3

Jar in ‘white on red’ chequer pattern, Etruscan, made in Etruria about 700BC. British Museum.

4

Large vessel about 30cms diametre, Kayenta? black on red, c900AD. Tusayan Museum, Arizona (link 2 - youtube amateur video of a very hurried visit with almost no pots shown, but worth a quick look for the timeline at about 1min 30 seconds in)

5

Bowl or cup about 15cms diametre, Kayenta black on white, c900AD. Tusayan Museum, Arizona

6

Bowl or cup, Cyprus ?1300BC, sometimes called a ‘milk bowl’, terracotta coated in white ‘slip’ and decorated with dark brown. Art Institute of Chicago

7

Bowl or cup about 20cms diametre, Kayenta black on white, c900AD. Tusayan Museum, Arizona

8

Large pottery cup, Minoan c1500BC, from Gulf of Mirabello in northern Crete. British Museum

9

Pottery jug with dark on light decoration, Minoan c2000BC, found at Knossos in Crete. British Museum. (see this link for more sophisticated variant)

10

Vessel about 30cms diametre, Kayenta? black on red, Tusayan Museum, Arizona

11

Bowl, ?Cyprus ?800BC. British Museum

12

Large bowl about 35cms diametre, Kayenta? black on white, c900AD. Tusayan Museum, Arizona

photographs all © Julia M Newsome

Ancient Greece lives on in London Marathon

This is Blackheath in south-east London this morning at the start of the London Marathon.

    And this is the Marathon plain in Greece where the battle between the Persians disembarking from their ships and the Greeks was fought in 490 BC.

The runner with the news that the Persians had been defeated by the Greeks in the Battle of Marathon in 490BC would have set off around the bay and then between the mountains to the left of this picture. 

There is a museum in the modern town of Marathon (behind the hill to the right of this picture) where the whole history of this race is celebrated.

                  

Modern sculptures of marathon runners outside the Marathon Run Museum, Attica, Greece, remind me of the vase paintings of the ancient runners who ran such distances as a matter of course - see below. There was no long distance running race in the Olympic or other Games in ancient times. Running was just how they got from place to place, and they would keep up the pace by beating out a rhythm or singing or playing music. I read on Twitter today about a suggested playlist for Marathon runners! 

In The Boy with Two Heads, Themis has to cover the distance between Olympia and the small village of Pylos near Elis (?40 kms) with his sidekick Frog and a guard called Xenon. "Once they had run until they were tired, he got out a flute ..."

 

I am also reminded of the mural made in 2012 at Providence College, Rhode Island, USA, (as mentioned in this blog in April 2012) that links Then and Now.

My congratulations to all those who took/are taking part in this year's London Marathon. I heard it was the 127th official marathon. What courage and determination in so many good causes! 

Was any of my readers also there at the beginning or the finish?

Two Heads: from Ancient Greece to Scotland ...

Does this sculpture remind you of anything? It seems the idea of the two-headed man is not only connected to my Boy with Two Heads!








This sculpture is by Peter Dowden. It is called 'Nippon ma hied'. We found him/them unexpectedly in the sculpture garden at Threave Estate in Dumfries and Galloway where we were daffodil hunting at the weekend.

narcissi in the woods at Threave Gardens, March 30th 2014

Then again, sculptures of people are not the only design features with two heads. Later, in a greenhouse, I saw one of Nature's own. It, too, echoes Ancient Greek motifs.

This fern is a tree fern from Australasia, but all ferns uncurl their new leaves in this way. Not always in perfect symmetry, however, like this one. 

The vase border motif is from 450BC. The complete vase (a volute-krater for mixing wine and water) is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Fifth Avenue in New York and was painted in about 450BC in Attica, by a painter who has been given the memorable name of the Painter of the Woolly Satyrs ...

Please be in touch if you see any other two-headed statues anywhere. (Woolly Satyrs are probably beyond the scope of this blog..!)

all photographs ©JuliaMNewsome except the vase-border (detail from an Attic red-figure bell-krater by the Villa Giulia Painter, in the British Museum) and the volute-krater (Metropolitan Museum of Art).

Ancient Greek Gods with Barbara Graziosi

Landing stages at Theatre by the Lake, Keswick, March 2014

This is the last of my three posts about Words by the Water (a festival of Words and Ideas, staged by Ways with Words) (#WBTW14), which finished yesterday at Theatre by the Lake in Keswick, Cumbria.

During the festival, I chaired three speakers, and my last was Professor Barbara Graziosi of the University of Durham. She was talking about her book The Gods of Olympus, A History, which came out last year.


The very first sentence of her book is: “This book is a history of the Olympian gods - the most uncivilised ambassadors of classical civilisation.” This sets the tone for an erudite but fast-paced romp through history in the wake of the "multifaceted, migrating Olympian gods". Even when they have been banned and relegated to hidden altars or the role of demons in nursery stories, they have survived and reappeared again and again.

Barbara was great company and we swopped stories about our careers and our kids over lunch before her talk. She was wearing unremarkable dark clothes, just as my two male speakers had. But, unlike them, she changed into a pair of brightly mottled red, green and white platform heels just as we went through to the stage. For me, that summed up her sense of fun against a serious and well researched background. 

The audience were very attentive, especially when she explained how Arabic translations of Ancient Greek texts were made at the House of Wisdom, started by caliph al-Ma'mun and his father in what is now Iran (see page 2 of the link). This institute of learning in Baghdad kept the Ancient Greek texts alive during the European 'Dark Ages' and itself survived for 400 years until 1258 AD. 
 

Barbara Graziosi in discussion

From her book I learned that in Plato's ideal city (see The Republic), "Homer and Hesiod would have no place, because their poems spread false and degenerate rumours about the deities"; and that "In Renaissance art, the gods of Olympus tended to appear in lush settings: fresh meadows, riverbanks, shady woods, the seaside. In that respect too they were exploiting a gap in the market, for Christianity was essentially a city religion," a thought that had not occurred to me.

Barbara Graziosi sharing a joke

Afterwards, I gave Barbara a copy of The Boy with Two Heads as she said she was interested in my descriptions of Zeus and his statue at Olympia. For me, her book has made it easier to imagine how the Ancient Greeks saw their gods, how they felt about them and the many ways in which they questioned their existence. 

It also poses and partly answers the question of why we are still conscious of them, still writing stories about them, and some people still worship them. I haven't found an answer that completely satisfies me, in spite of Barbara's help. Perhaps, like so many others in the course of more than two and a half millennia, I never will ...




photographs © Julia M Newsome

Ancient Greeks with Tom Holland, by the Lake

Landing stages at Theatre by the Lake, Keswick, March 2014

As mentioned in my last, Words by the Water (a festival of Words and Ideas, staged by Ways with Words) (#WBTW14) finished today at Theatre by the Lake in Keswick, Cumbria.

The second speaker I chaired was Tom Holland. His new translation of the Histories of Herodotus came out in September last year, and he was talking about this on March 11th. 

Tom has a vivid sense of fun and is interested in a wide variety of subjects, from owls, to cricket, to fossils, to - oh, just about everything! And so was Herodotus. He tells us about flying snakes, sheep with tails so long and heavy they had to be supported by little trailers, methods of building pyramids, love matches, dismemberments, stonings, soldiers who lasso-ed their opponents to pull them onto their daggers, family feuds, the Egyptian version of what happened to Helen of Troy, and - after many fascinating travels and stories - finally the wars between the Persians and the Greeks. 

So listening to such things re-told by Tom gave the audience lots to laugh at and think about. Tom's translation, as I said in my introduction of him, is in an easy-to-read, colourful style (as are his other books). An example is:

Older translation:  “The Phoenicians took them on to their ship and sailed away for Egypt.”   

Tom's translation: “Into the hold went the captives, up came the anchor, and off sailed the ship to Egypt.”

Tom told us, upon questioning, that Herodotus is the longest Ancient Greek text surviving. It took him six years - translating a paragraph a day, every day (sometimes two pages, sometimes a couple of lines) - to complete. He was asked to do this by an editor at Penguin Classics who saw him presenting his own take on the Persian Wars in Persian Fire some years ago, at - of course - Words by the Water! 

I dip into Herodotus often. In The Boy with Two Heads, I use one of his stories. It is about Arion, who was saved from drowning by dolphins (my chapter 18). Herodotus himself appears for a second in chapter 45, sitting on a box under a tree in Olympia, reading his own histories from a scroll to the milling crowds that have come to witness the Olympic Games. Perhaps he sold copies of short extracts.

Herodotus underpins so much of what we know about Ancient Greece. Scholars think his writings must have been preserved because they are so interesting, conversational and, at times, funny. As he says himself, he can only be sure of what he has seen with his own eyes. As for what he has been told, all he can do is write it down. He cannot vouch for its truth.

That's all any of us can do, isn't it?



All photographs © Julia M Newsome.