Fascinating Ancient Artifacts

It is true that very little has survived from our classical past, but sometimes the objects that have survived can amaze us. When we see ancient artifacts in museums, we often like to imagine that they might have been touched by someone truly famous, but, with a few rare objects, we know that they were.

Museum of Engaldi-Nanna

Our first item is not a single artifact, but rather an entire collection of ancient artifacts – possibly the oldest such collection, in fact. I am talking about the Museum of Engaldi-Nanna, a museum founded in the former Sumerian city-state of Ur by King Nabonidus (reigned 556–539 BC) of the Neo-Babylonian Empire and curated by his daughter Engaldi-Nanna.

At the time of Nabonidus’s reign, Babylonian culture was in decline; he spent most of his reign excavating and restoring dilapidated temples and public monuments, leaving his eldest son Belshazzar to administer the city of Babylon in his absence. (And, yes, I am talking about that Belshazzar, the same one who later appears in the story about the moving finger from Daniel 5. The Book of Daniel incorrectly identifies him as the son of Nebuchadnezzar II, but Babylonian and Greek records independently confirm that he was actually the son of Nabonidus. He technically was not a king either, because he was only ruling as regent in his father’s absence.)

The museum is located a short distance away from the Great Ziggurat of Ur, which was originally built in the twenty-first century B.C. and was crumbling to pieces prior to Nabonidus’s restoration of it. His careful attention in excavating and restoring ancient buildings and even attempting to determine dates of construction for them have earned him a reputation as the “first archaeologist.” This description is not strictly accurate, however, because Nabonidus’s main concern in his excavations was showing his devotion to the moon-god Sin and any historical interest was purely secondary. He established the museum in order to showcase the glories of past Babylonian civilization.

Engaldi-Nanna is also a fascinating individual; in addition to being a curator for the museum, she was also a high priestess and a teacher for younger priestesses.

ABOVE: The ruins of the Museum of Engaldi-Nanna, which may be the oldest museum ever built

The artifacts in the museum were mostly Sumerian artifacts from southern Mesopotamia that were already over a thousand years old at the time of the museum’s construction. They were primarily collected by Nabonidus or Engaldi-Nanna during their excavations. All items were carefully labeled using clay cylinders. Among the objects in the museum were a kudurru, or boundary stone, carved with images of various deities, and part of a statue of the Sumerian King Shulgi, who ruled the city-state of Ur from 2029 BC – 1982 BC, over 1,500 years before Nabonidus.

ABOVE: One of the museum labels from Engaldi-Nanna’s museum. These clay cylinders accompanied various artifacts in the museum and indicated what they were and where they came from.

Nabonidus was the last ruler of the Neo-Babylonian Empire, which was conquered in 539 B.C. by Cyrus the Great, the first ruler of the Achaemenid Persian Empire. According to the Greek historian Xenophon, Cyrus killed Belshazzar, but it is unclear whether this testimony is accurate. Nabonidus surrendered and was mercifully deported to a different province of the Persian Empire, where he was even given a position in the Persian government.

The museum was excavated in modern times by the English archaeologist Sir Leonard Woolley during his excavation of the city of Ur in the 1920s. So, ironically, all the objects in the museum were actually excavated twice: first by Nabonidus and his daughter in the sixth century B.C., then again by Sir Leonard Woolley nearly 2,500 years later. This would be like archaeologists in the forty-fifth century uncovering the ruins of the Smithsonian with artifacts still in it!

Shop of Simon the Tailor

The Greek biographer Diogenes Laërtios, who lived in the third century A.D., roughly seven centuries after the death of Socrates, recorded in his Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers that Socrates used to sit in the shop of a shoemaker named Simon in the Athenian Agora, where they would often discuss philosophy. Diogenes cites thirty-three lost Socratic dialogues known as the skytikoi logoi, or “leather cutters’ talks,” of which he claims the first one was written by Simon.

Simon is never mentioned by Plato or Xenophon, our two best sources of information on the historical Socrates, so, for years, the idea that Simon the shoemaker even existed was doubted. Then archaeologists discovered a shop on the southwest end of the Agora dated to the time of Socrates containing remnants of shoemaking tools, including hobnails and eyelets for shoelaces. The shop also contained a pot inscribed with the name SIMONOS, or Simon. It turns out Diogenes’s account has more truth behind it than scholars initially assumed.

Prison of Socrates

Another location discovered in Athens associated with Socrates is the prison where he where executed in 399 B.C., forced to drink hemlock due to his conviction for the crimes of “corrupting the youth of the city” and “convincing people to worship foreign gods instead of the gods of the state.” The prison, which was built around 450 B.C., is located on the southwest corner of the Athenian Agora and contains twelve cells on the ground floor, as well as a possible second story. It is not known which of these cells Socrates died in.

Thirteen clay medicine bottles were found in the prison, which archaeologists believe were used to administer hemlock poison to prisoners such as Socrates who had been condemned to death. It is highly unlikely that any of these bottles is the one Socrates himself actually drank from, since the prison continued to be used after Socrates’s execution and they presumably would have changed the bottles at some point during the following decades. Nonetheless, they do provide us with valuable information about what the bottle might have looked like.

ABOVE: The Death of Socrates (1789) by Jacques-Louis David, a Neoclassical imagining of what Socrates’s execution might have looked like. The cell in this painting is much larger and more impressive than any of the cells in the actual Athenian state prison.

Pheidias’s workshop

Pheidias was, by all accounts, the greatest Athenian sculptor of the fifth century B.C. He created the Athena Parthenos, the giant chryselephantine sculpture of the goddess Athena that originally stood inside the Parthenon on the Athenian Akropolis. He also created the Statue of Zeus at Olympia, which was so stunning that later writers included it as one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.

Tragically, however, the originals of all Pheidias’s most famous works have all been destroyed and it is unclear whether any of Pheidias’s original sculptures survive at all. The Parthenon frieze in the British Museum was produced under his direction, although it is unclear whether he carved any part of the frieze himself or if it was carved entirely by his students. Numerous other works in Pheidias’s style have also survived, but these may be works of his students or copies of his lost originals made by later sculptors.

We do, however, have Pheidias’s workshop at Olympia where he carved the Statue of Zeus. Located west of the site of the ruined Temple of Zeus, scholars have long been aware of the workshop’s existence, since it is mentioned by the Greek travel writer Pausanias in the second century A.D. Between 1954 and 1958, archaeologists excavated the workshop.

At the workshop, the archaeologists uncovered carving tools and terracotta molds used to cast gold for the statue. The most stunning and definitive evidence that this was indeed the workshop used by Pheidias was a small black oinochoe, or wine-cup, with two words inscribed on the bottom: Φειδίου εἰμί. This literally translates as, “I belong to Pheidias.”

ABOVE: The workshop of the Greek sculptor Pheidias at Olympia, where he carved the now-lost Statue of Zeus at Olympia

It is perhaps the pinnacle of irony that, while the Statue of Zeus was destroyed over a millennium ago, the workshop where it was made still survives to the present day. The tools used to make the statue have outlived the statue itself.

Alleged cups of Herodotos

The Greek historian Herodotos of Halikarnassos is known for his book The Histories, the second book of which deals with the history of Egypt, where he is supposed to have visited. Archaeologists excavating the Egyptian city of Naukratis, which Herodotos wrote about and which was a major center of Greek activity in Egypt, discovered two fragments of cups dedicated at sanctuaries inscribed with the name “Herodotos” in Greek.

Herodotos was a very common name and, in the absence of any other corroborating evidence, there is no reason to conclude that either of the cups necessarily belonged to the famous historian of that name, but both of them date to roughly the same time period when Herodotos is thought to have visited Egypt and one of them comes from Athens, where Herodotos is known to have lived most of his adult life. Both cup fragments are now held in the Ashmolean Museum in England.

Cleopatra’s signature

Very few original documents have survived from antiquity and our earliest surviving manuscripts of texts almost always date to centuries after they were originally written. There is perhaps one truly famous person from the ancient world whose actual handwriting has been preserved: Cleopatra VII Philopator of Egypt, the last pharaoh of the Ptolemaic dynasty, the same Cleopatra whose life and tragic demise have become cemented in popular culture as legend.

The story of how her signature was discovered is as bizarre and fascinating as the signature itself. The ancients were never very sentimental about trying to preserve old documents, because, in their eyes, once a decree had been carried out, there was no longer any point in holding onto it. Fortunately, however, old papyri were often reused for other purposes rather than being simply thrown out.

In ancient Egypt, it was common for old documents to be used to make cartonnage for mummies; the papyrus would be wetted and wrapped around the irregularly-shaped portions of the mummy’s body to make a kind of papier-mâché covering onto which the embalmer could paint decorative motifs. Because of this, Egyptian mummy wrappings can sometimes provide us with previously unknown ancient documents.

In the year 2000, archaeologists discovered a royal decree dated to February 33 B.C. issued by none other than Cleopatra VII Philopator. The decree grants Publius Canidius Crassus, an ally of Cleopatra’s lover Marcus Antonius, exemption from certain taxes. What is most astounding, however, is a single word in ancient Greek scrawled at the bottom right hand of the document in a different hand from the rest of the document: γινέσθωι (ginesthō), which means, “Let it be so.”

While decrees themselves were dictated to scribes, it was standard policy for the ruler him or herself to sign the decree at the bottom to prevent forgery. This means that the word ginesthō was almost certainly written by Cleopatra herself.

ABOVE: Royal decree from 33 B.C. with the signature of Cleopatra VII at the bottom of the fragment on the right

It is nearly impossible to overstate how incredibly rare this is. Most Greek literary works survive only through manuscripts copied in the Middle Ages; surviving autograph copies are virtually unheard of. Only two other royal signatures survive from classical antiquity: those of Ptolemy X and Theodosius II, neither of whom are well known today. The existence of a surviving signature for a ruler as famous as Cleopatra is simply astonishing.

“I am a bucket”

Greek pottery-painters are rather notorious for their vanity; they were known to frequently inscribe the phrase ΚΑΛΟΣ ΕΙΜΙ (kalos eimi), meaning “I am handsome” on their pots. The inscription on one bucket discovered in Athens, however, instead reads ΚΑΔΟΣ ΕΙΜΙ (kados eimi), which means, “I am a bucket.” The difference between the two phrases is only one line, differentiating the letter Λ (lambda) from the letter Δ (delta).