Rare Ogham inscription found on Pictish stone

Ancient

The remains of a Pictish carved stone cross slab with a rare inscription in the early medieval ogham language have been discovered in Old Kilmadock Kirkyard near Doune in Scotland. It is one of only 30 known ogham inscriptions found in all of Scotland, and the first discovered in the Forth Valley.

The surface of the stone was first uncovered by volunteers from the Rescuers of Old Kilmadock (ROOK) in 2019, but it wasn’t until September of this year that volunteers and archaeologists were able to fully excavate the slab, exposing its edges and the ogham symbols. The stone is 47 inches high and 32 inches wide with a rounded top. The surface of the stone is carved with a knotted cross. The terminals of the enlaced scrolls are shaped like bird heads. They have sharply curved beaks like flamingos, but if they are representations of actual birds rather than stylized abstractions, they are probably pelicans in piety, popular symbols of Christ’s sacrifice.

Kilmadock is one of central Scotland’s oldest graveyards. It dates to the 9th century, but the Pictish cross slab predates the kirkyard. It was raised between 500 and 700 A.D. on a mound overlooking the Rover Teith. Archaeologists believe there was a monastery on the site at the time. The presence of ogham characters on the cross slab suggests the monks may have been literate.

Dr Kelly Kilpatrick, an historian and Celticist who specialises in epigraphy, will attempt to decipher the newly discovered inscription using photogrammetry to create a 3D model of the stone. She said: “It’s a hugely important find. It tells us that in the early medieval period there were literate people here who could read and write, potentially in Latin, but who were also familiar with the ogham alphabet.

“As soon as it was found I took one look and said ‘that’s ogham’. The inscription is likely to go all the way around, although I can’t be certain until the stone is lifted. They tend to say personal names. I can say with reasonable confidence we’ve got some e’s and t’s in there.”

ROOK has started a fundraiser with a goal of £5,000 for the conservation of the stone. It has to be raised before experts can even begin to translate the inscription, for one thing. The slab is fragile with heavy fragmentation of the carved surface requires specialist care to remove it from the kirkyard, clean it, dry it and sterilize it to kill all plant/moss/root material before puzzling the fragments back together. Click here  to donate to the cause.

Oldest book in the Americas at the Getty

Museums

The Códice Maya de México, also known as the Grolier Codex, is the oldest surviving book in the Americas. It is one of only four known Maya codices that survived the book-burning zealotry of the Spanish occupiers, and the only one to have survived the centuries since the conquest on the continent where it was made. It is now on display at the Getty Center Museum, its first return to the United States since it made its public debut at the Grolier Club in New York in 1971.

The book was painted by a single artist on paper created from the inner bark of fig trees (amate paper) then coated with gesso to prep the surface for painting. It is painted on only one sideThe text records the movements of Venus over its 584-day cycle as the Morning and Evening Star.

The story behind its discovery reads like fiction. It involves a mysterious plane ride to an unnamed destination somewhere in Chiapas where the codex was sold to a Mexican collector by looters who claimed to have found it in a cave. Because of its extreme rarity, some unusual characteristics not seen in other codices and a find story so implausible it would make Indiana Jones blush, the Grolier Codex was long believed to be a forgery.

Mexican authorities restricted access to the fragile codex and scholars had to rely on photographs to study the book. In 2017, Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) enlisted an international team of researchers to do the first scientific analysis and testing of the codex. Tiny samples of the pages confirmed that the bark paper was made of authentic amate fibers, and that the edges were not cut with metal tools, so it wasn’t ancient paper that was reused by forgers. A section of Maya blue pigment extracted from indigo plants with a local clay confirmed that the painting was ancient too. (The secret to Maya blue was lost after the Spanish conquest and the pigment was only synthetically recreated in the 1980s.) Finally, the study dated the book to between 1021 and 1154, older than the three Maya codices now in European museums and therefore the oldest surviving book in the Americas.

The Códice Maya de México is one of the greatest and most delicate treasures in Mexico City’s Biblioteca Nacional de Antropología e Historia. It almost never leaves the safety of its room.  A year after it was first exhibited in public at the Grolier Club in New York City in 1971, the Mexican government confiscated the codex. After that, it was exhibited exactly twice at the Museo Nacional de Antropología in Mexico City. It hadn’t been to the United States since and it had never been to Los Angeles before it went on display at the Getty Center Museum last month. The exhibition runs through January 15, 2023.

In conjunction with the exhibition, the Getty has created a fascinating video about the codex’s creation with a focus on the traditional Maya craft of making amate paper from the bark of fig trees.

Oil sketch dismissed as bad copy is by Rembrandt

Modern(ish), Museums

An oil sketch in the Museum Bredius in The Hague discounted as a copy has been revealed to be an autograph work by Rembrandt. The Raising of the Cross, once widely accepted as a real Rembrandt, had been dismissed as a bad copy for 50 years until art historian and former museum curator Jeroen Giltaij began to investigate it for a book he was writing on Rembrandt’s oeuvre. He thought the quality of painting marked it as a work by the master. Museum Bredius conservators cleaned and restored the work, removing discolored varnish layers and later overpainting to reveal the painting in its “naked” unretouched state. Rembrandt’s distinctive brushstrokes are now clearly visible.

Infrared reflectography (IRR) and X-ray scans of the sketch performed by Rotterdam-based art restorer Johanneke Verhave reveal that its composition initially matched that of the Munich version. During the painting process of the sketch, the composition changed to move the horseman from left of the cross facing the viewer to the bottom right corner with the horseman looking up at the cross, his and his horse’s backs to the viewer. The horseman took the place of a dog that was in the original design. An almost identical rider appears in a 1629 etching by Rembrandt.

From the first half of the 19th century, the work was believed to be an authentic painting by Rembrandt. At the time, art historians thought it was a study for Rembrandt’s 1633 The Raising of the Cross , a piece almost double the size of the sketch that is now in the Alte Pinakothek museum in Munich. When the oil sketch was acquired by collector and museum founder/director Abraham Bredius in 1921, he had no doubt that it was painted by the master’s hand, but he thought it was made around 1640, a new and improved version of the Munich piece rather than a preparatory sketch for it.

The attribution to Rembrandt was cast into doubt by scholars in the 1960s and by the end of the decade it had been removed from the artist’s catalogue raisonné and downgraded in status to, as art historian Horst Gerson described it in 1969, a “crude imitation, vaguely based on Rembrandt” made by a nameless follower.

Well the joke’s on Horst, because it is neither crude nor an imitation. Experts from the Rijksmuseum have also performed a technical study of the painting and they too concluded it is an autograph work by Rembrandt. Dendrochronological analysis of the wood panel it was painted on dates the felling of the tree to 1634. The plank had to be seasoned before use, so it was probably painted between 1642 and 1645. It could not have been a preparatory sketch for The Raising of the Cross Rembrandt painted in 1633.

The re-authenticated Rembrandt is now on display at the Museum Bredius in a short exhibition dedicated to the oil sketch and the research that restored it to its birthright.

Secrets of largest Roman coin hoard in Spain revealed

Ancient, Treasures

Six years after the discovery of a massive treasure of Roman coins in Tomares, a suburb of Seville, Spain, the first report of the findings has been released by archaeologists and numismatists from the University of Seville.

The hoard was discovered during city work on the El Zaudín public park. A mechanical digger unearthed 19 large amphorae filled with Roman coins, breaking 10 of them in the process. Workers alerted authorities and archaeologists were promptly dispatched to salvage the coins from the broken amphorae and recover the intact amphorae without damaging them.

All of the amphorae, intact and broken, and the coins were transported to the Provincial Archaeological Museum of Seville for documentation and conservation. From their discovery in 2016 through 2019, experts cleaned, conserved and stored the treasure. The nine intact amphorae were numbered and set aside and are still unopened as of now, although a microcamera was threaded into them to confirm they are indeed filled with the same quantity and types of coins as the others. Amphorae 10 and 11 were broken but their coin content remained intact within. the microexcavation of the coin groups from 10 and 11 found they contain a similar number coins: around 2,800. The coins from the eight amphorae that were completely fragmented tallied up to 22,288. Another 102 coins were found in a later exploration of the find site. They were scattered, but given the context, they are likely to have been part of the hoard.

Archaeologists estimate that the total number of coins in the 19 amphorae is more than 53,000. They are tetrarchic nummi, issued after Diocletian’s financial and monetary reform in 294, but before the reform of 313. A selection of 3,000 coins from the broken amphorae, plus the 2,798 coins in amphora 11 and the 102 scattered coins were cleaned, numbered, photographed, catalogued and underwent metal composition analysis. This sample is more than 10% of the total coinage estimate, giving archaeologists a sufficiently reliable basis for observations that can be extrapolated to the entire hoard.

The excavation of the two broken amphorae with largely undisturbed contents revealed that they were both filled in the same manner. The coins were dropped in, forming horizontal layers that stopped before reaching the neck. To ensure there were as few gaps as possible in the layers, the upright amphorae were shaken side-to-side. Coins shifted into the lateral spaces, creating quasi-vertical lines around the edges of the horizontal layers. This strongly suggests that they were filled in a single operation, rather than gradually accumulated. This is confirmed by the absence of any chronological order of coins in the layers. The newest coins were frequently found in the deepest layers, in fact.

The coins date to between 294 and 311 A.D. All of the emperors — both Augustuses and Caesars — of the tetrarchic period are represented on the coinage: Diocletian, Maximian, Constantius, Galerius, Constantine, Severus, Maximinus, Licinius and Maxentius. Diocletian’s coins are by far the most common in the hoard. The empire’s main mints are all represented as well: Rome, Carthage, Aquileia, Treveris, Ticinum, Lugdunum, Londinium, Siscia, Ostia, Alexandria, Cyzicus, Thessalonika, Heraklea, Nicomedia, Antioch.

A geomagnetic and stratigraphic survey of the site found the remains of a 3rd-4th century brick building (opus latericium) with buttressed walls typical of warehouses of rural agricultural estates. The structure had a front portico supported by columns that was paved with a lime floor. The 19 amphorae crammed full of coins appear to have been cached under the floor and the lime layer used to seal them in. The building was abandoned in the 4th century and it was dismantled for reuse of its construction materials in the 6th century. Nobody noticed there was a gigantic treasure hidden under the floor.

The amphorae had been placed with perfect regularity standing upright one next to the other. The vessels are all of the same type and origin: olive oil storage and transport amphorae of local production, the agricultural lifeblood of the area and the likely function of the rural estate where the coins were collected and stashed.

The prevalence of coins from the reign of Diocletian may be an important clue to why they were hoarded in the first place.

The answer could be because as the emperors went by and inflation grew, the weight of the pieces and their percentage of silver fell. In the year 294, a pound of silver was used to mint 32 coins; in 307 this number grew to 40, between 307 and 309 a pound of silver went into making 48 coins, and between 310 and 311, the figure had shot up to 72. In other words, the owner of the treasure preferred to hoard Diocletian’s money, with more silver in it. On average, the coins were made with an alloy of 88% bronze, 4% silver, 3.7% tin and 3.3% lead.

And why so many in the same hands? The researchers explain that Diocletian’s reform triggered “political uncertainty and conflicts between the rulers.” Added to this were territorial and social clashes that would gradually lead to a concentration of property and a devaluation of this type of currency against gold. “These and other factors explain the large amount of coins that were found, as only in large numbers could payments of a certain level be undertaken.” In other words, to make any important financial transaction, a huge number of coins was necessary. And more so if you owned a villa that functioned as an agri-food center.

The Tomares Treasure is one of the largest coin collections from the Tetrarchy (a system of government introduced by Diocletian that involved two emperors and their successors ruling at the same time) in the entire imperial territory. “It is only surpassed in size by that of Misurata, in Libya, and constitutes a top-tier testimony of monetary circulation at the beginning of the 4th century AD in the south of the Iberian Peninsula. Its composition is also an immense archive in which to study the vicissitudes (devaluations, changes in weight) of the economic policy of the emperors of the Tetrarchy, a time when the manipulation of currency was an important economic resource in the hands of public authorities.”

Rural necropolis from Late Antiquity found in France

Ancient

Burial 1064 with grave goods of pottery, from 5th century rural necropolis. Photo © S. Viller, Inrap.A small rural necropolis from the late 5th century has been discovered in Sainte-Marie-aux-Chênes, northeastern France. Located along an ancient road, the necropolis contains the remains of cremation structures and several richly furnished inhumations. The burial ground is likely connected to a nearby ancient Roman villa whose remains were discovered more than a decade ago.

A survey of the site before construction of a subdivision in 2009 found evidence of archaeological material. In the two seasons of excavations that followed, archaeologists unearthed the remains of the pars rustica (the farm buildings) of a 1st century Roman villa and a Medieval hamlet occupied through the 12th century. Three Merovingian-era (mid-5th-8th c.) tombs containing the remains of seven people, all from the same family, were found in the ruins of a barn from the Roman estate.

Excavations resumed in 2020 when the subdivision planned to expand towards the former Ida mine and factory. Test pits discovered the first early Iron Age remains at the site attesting that the area was settled earlier than previously realized and a continuation of the Medieval hamlet into the valley. A cremation pit and a secondary deposit from the Gallo-Roman era were also uncovered. They date to the 1st century A.D.

The 2020 excavation explored the opposite side of the valley to the 2009-10 digs. The soil there has been heavily eroded, but that had the felicitous archaeological side-effect of accumulating sediment layers over the necropolis which helped preserve the remains. Digging through those layers, archaeologists unearthed about 10 cremation structures. Fragments of charred bone remains were found in carefully cut quadrangular pits and in much rougher round niches that look like postholes but aren’t. There are no cinerary urns and very little surviving bone material. A few nails were found, perhaps from a casket, and a square pit containing a deposit of blacksmithing tools and forge remnants (tongs, metal scraps, slag).

Ten tombs from Late Antiquity were found in this same space. The pits were dug with deliberation in parallel rows. All of the graves contained a single inhumed individual in supine position, adults of both sexes and four confirmed young children. Two adult women were identified by their hairpins and necklaces. While no coffins or burial beds were found in the graves, iron nails and wood traces suggest the bodies were originally buried in or on wooden biers.

The deceased were laid to rest with a variety of grave goods. Ceramic vessels made of local Argonne clay were found at the head and/or the foot of the bodies. They are believed to have contained food offerings now long decomposed. Glassware of high quality and diversity was also buried with the dead: cups, bottles, flasks, goblets, bowls, dishes. Jewelry — mostly copper alloy pieces with beads, amber and glass paste — adorned the deceased. There were coins in the graves as well, some individual, some in groups that were probably held in purses of organic material. Last but least, two bone combs were discovered and one miniature axe interred next to the head of a child.

The remains recovered from the excavation are still being studied. Researchers hope to learn more about the sex, ages and health records of the deceased. The necropolis itself is also still undergoing analysis to explore how it was organized and used, and to shed new light on the funerary practices of the people who lived and died there in Late Antiquity.