Kids Will Be Kids

I love it when archaeology gives us a glimpse into the everyday lives of past peoples and show us that some things just never change, thank goodness.

In the 1950s archaeologists made a great discovery near the city of Novgorod, Russia: they dug up hundreds of pieces of birch bark with all sorts of texts written on them. The 915 items are mostly letters, notes and receipts, all written between the 11th and 15th century

In the 13th century, young schoolboys learning to write filled these scraps with alphabets and short texts. Bark was ideal material for writing down things with such a short half-life. Then the pupils got bored and started to doodle, as kids do...

http://erikkwakkel.tumblr.com/post/67681966023/medieval-kids-doodles-on-birch-bark-heres

One of these doodling kids was a certain Onfim, who had dramatic daydreams indeed. You can read more about his artwork here: http://www.goldschp.net/SIG/onfim/onfim.html 

Onfim was being taught to write, but he was obviously restless with his lessons and when he could get away with it, he intermixed his assignments with doodlings. In this first example, he started to write out the first eleven letters of the alphabet in the upper right corner, but got bored and drew a picture of himself as a grown-up warrior impaling an enemy with his spear. To remove any doubt about the identity of the warrior, he even labelled the person on the horse as "Onfim."

I especially like the doodle with Onfim as a mini-warrior with his warrior Dad:

 Ah, kids. Give them a stick of chalk or a piece of bark...

No-Brainer

I love archaeology.

I love writing.

I've just discovered that Hadley Rille Books is calling for submissions for an archaeology themed, multi-genre anthology called Ruins Excavation, the fourth book in their series of Ruins anthologies.

As the title, and the series, implies, the story must feature ruins, real or otherwise, on Earth. Ruins! I love ruins! And I love stories with and/or about ruins!

You can read about the antho here.

Will I give it a shot?

Are you kidding? It's raining down hard outside, this is my wonderful Wednesday, catch-up day off, and there's already a WIP in my head wanting out.

This'll be fun.

Cat Post By Stealth

I'm going to use my love of archaeology (long ago, I studied Near Oriental Archaeology at the University of Copenhagen. We used to have the coolest tutorials in the back rooms of big, old museums surrounded by floor-to-high-ceiling-high stacked collections of colonial-era plunder. There's nothing like a few sarcophagi and statues of ancient deities staring at you to set the mood) to sneak in one of those often maligned cat posts by linking to this piece about how long before the Internet with its LOL cats and Grumpy Cat made the lives of dog folk and ailurophobes a wretched misery, ancient cultures had cat memes too.

No kidding? Perused any Ancient Egyptian stuff lately? I wonder if the good folk of the Upper and Lower Nile also made a fuss and went around groaning about the latest papyrus full of felines, mocking temple statues, cursing Bastet and all her fine arts incarnations, and shaking their heads in pity at painters who employed the ubiquitous feline motifs, to use the correct term.

Anyway, the author writes .:
Take a dour little kitty artifact that resides in the American Museum of Natural History. He is Grumpy Cat’s distant cousin. Let’s call him Old Grumpy Cat, or OGC. Museum officials call him a ceramic bottle, and say he probably came from Northern Peru. Created about 2,000 years ago, he was likely used for special ceremonies, then part of a burial.

Which is great, because I also get to add a photo of the cutie. On top of that, I now have an excuse to add the only LOL cat picture that made me laugh enough for me to want to save it.

Enjoy:

 

 

Archeological Gumption



So genuine looking...

The Jibaozhai Museum, a sterling institution in the northern Chinese province of Hebie, was closed a few days ago after claims hit the internet that most of its supposedly ancient relics are fakes. You can enjoy pictures of their not really very old at all vases here.

 All very terrible archeologically speaking, of course, but reading about it in the Age on the way home I had to giggle at one of the museum's chief consultants admitting that the museum did not in fact have the proper provincial authorisation to operate, and then going on to say he was "quite positive" at least 80 of the museum's 40,000 objects had been confirmed as authentic.

80. Out of 40,000. Well, that makes the whole thing go away, doesn't it?

Best of all, said consultant wants to sue the blogger who uncovered the scandal. Because, like, it's true, the museum is full of knock-offs. And mostly bad ones at that. So that's what you do when you're exposed as a criminal. You sue the accuser, even when you've admitted the accusation is true. Well, except for those 80 possibly genuine relics.

Viking Victory

Where would we be without the free spirits of the world pottering about doing their own thing? Archeology is the latest area to benefit from the exploring mind of a self-confessed nerd - Danish teenager Michael Stockbro Larsen and his trusty metal detector discovered a hoard of rare Viking coins with the cross motif of good old Harald Bluetooth and other spectacular items in a field in Northern Denmark.

 As I've said before, I love treasure hunt stories like this - the everyday triumph of someone being true to themselves and pursuing their vision, even if it means long lonely days roaming the freezing Scandinavian countryside, and reaping a fantastic reward.

I used to have a Thor's hammer like this one. I lost it a few years back. I miss it.

Spots before their eyes

Ancient artists 25,000 years ago were not abstract, symbolic, dadaist or post-paleolithic painters expressing some deeper truth about their inner workings, but realists who recreated what they saw in the natural world around them on cave walls, according to research which proves that the 'leopard' phenotype seen in modern horses did indeed exist in those distant days. Read here how our ancestors didn't willy-nilly daub black spots on their white horses simply because they thought it made them look pretty or wacky or magical or meaningful, but because dappled horseflesh was exactly what they saw trotting past their caves.

So, sometimes a spotted horse is just a spotted horse.

Blog Narcissus

Last night we did a double at the Star Cinema. First up was Submarine, which was amusing, but ever so self-consciously so.

The second feature was Werner Herzog’s amazing 2010 documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams about the stunning Chauvet Caves in France and the people who work there (you have to love an archeologist who used to be a circus performer). “With all those pictures of horses and cats, that cave is just like my blog,” I said afterwards, being amusing, but ever so self-consciously so.

Still, who knows? Perhaps on a distant future day, some intrepid cyber-archeologist spelunking through the remnants of our Paleolithic Internet will follow a tenuous link, squeeze through a narrow portal, fall through a deep darkness of corrupted information, land with a thump in a site that was blocked off millennia before by successive landslides of more fashionable social media, and turn on his/her torch-program to illuminate my cat photos, horse pics, and writerly blatherings.

One thing is absolutely certain - in 30,000 years, they'll seem a lot more interesting than they do now. :)

Return of the Cat Goddess

As a Cat Person /archeology buff from way back (in my youth, I studied Near Oriental Archeology at the University of Copenhagen, and I'll stick archeology into a story at the drop of a hat) I was excited to learn that the remains of a temple belonging to Queen Berenice II - wife of King Ptolemy III - have been discovered by archaeologists in the Kom el-Dekka area in Alexandria, Egypt.

As the excavation also unearthed a large collection of statues depicting the cat goddess Bastet, the goddess of protection and motherhood, archeologists think the 2200-year-old temple may in fact have been dedicated to this ancient Egyptian deity. This would indicate that the worship of Bastet continued during the later, Greek-influenced, Ptolemaic period.

And how cute are these statues? I want one.