My Money On Zenobia

A new Zenobia coin!

At the Amsterdam All-Zenobia Day (which already feels like half a year ago. Oh, it is.... Sorry for the delay), Arjan Senden, a Dutch numismatist -- and specialist in Roman coins and medals -- presented a sensational new find: an addition to the very very limited and always rare coins minted for Zenobia.

Here she is (left), a simple bronze coin, but the title says it all:

S. ZENOBIA AUG

That's monetary shorthand for 'Septimia Zenobia Augusta', her brazen claim to the imperial throne. To hammer home the point, the reverse shows the goddess Juno with the text IUNO REGINA, Queen [of the gods] -- as imperial a reverse as she could possibly choose.

The coin was found somewhere in Israel, and its text in Latin (rather than Greek) suggests that it was struck in one of the three small-change mints in the neighbourhood: Berytus, Ptolemais (modern Acco), or Tyre. Although it's not sure that any of these civil mints were still in operation as late as the 270's AD, yet, as Arjan says, the nice black patina of the coin does have the look of these regional coins.

Well, I am willing to bet an equal weight of Euro-change (10.97 grams) that Zenobia's issuer will turn out to be Phoenician Tyre.

First, because the last Empress known to have had coins produced at Tyre with the title of Augusta was Salonina, wife of Gallienus, who died only a few years earlier (empress 253-268 AD). So, even if the local mint had closed for a dozen years or so, it could easily have been reopened. And the coin is made in a rude manner, which is consistent with the work of a secondary or 'auxiliary' mint: the edge shows at one place a rough little piece, cut from a series produced with a mould. This normally happens with coins of an auxiliary mint during a campaign, rapidly producing coins to pay the troops.

Badges of Honour

I would add that there is an interesting link between Tyre and Palmyra. An inscribed marble base found in Tyre may once have held a statue dedicated to Zenobia's husband. It reads (in Greek):

To Septimius Odenathus, the most illustrious (senator?). The Septimian colony of Tyre.

So, the great warrior prince Odenathus had earned public honours at Tyre during his lifetime. Zenobia was certainly sensible enough to have kept up these close ties. The moment that Tyrian coins acknowledged her as Empress might have come when Palmyran troops were moving through the area on their way into Egypt in the years 270-272 AD.

Coins of Honour

The closest parallel for the new coin must be the bronze piece found at Palmyra itself (left) in 1960. It was mistakenly classed as a tesserae, a token, but it is clearly a coin and also produced in an auxiliary mint (my amateur guess is Damascus). It too is in Latin and closely copies the finer, more familiar -- but still very rare -- Zenobia coinage of Antioch (in black & white below).

I don't know why anyone thinks these are real portraits of Zenobia. However many times the Syrian Tourist Office or Palmyran guidebooks reproduce these coins, they remain entirely stereotypical images of a mid-third century empress. Her bust is set on a crescent moon. Her features are youthful and regular. Even though the fleshiness of the nose or the roundness of the chin may change, such changes seem random rather than attempted portraiture. Her head is crowned by a diadem and the very characteristic hairstyle follows the pattern introduced by Tranquillina (empress 241-244), the wife of Gordian III: her wavy hair is divided into bands, leaving the ear free, and gathered into a braid pulled up from the neck to the forehead.




So what did Zenobia look like?

Two coins from Alexandria may hold the clue. The first (below, left) is another typical genre portrait, not much different -- except for language -- from the Antiochene coins: youthful regular features, with little individuality. The hairstyle follows another fixed pattern -- dating back to Julia Mamaea (so possibly a more authentically Syrian style), but also copied in the early Alexandrian coinage of Salonina (so you could argue that it's fashionable and nothing more) -- with longer waves and caught in a soft bun at the neck. In any case, this is another conventional portrait of an empress; the Alexandrian mint surely had no portrait of Zenobia to hand so they seem to have modelled her after a late Severan Syrian empress.

But a second Alexandrian issue (below, right) presents a very different picture. Probably struck not many months after the first, this Zenobia looks like another woman entirely.





















Is this the real portrait of Zenobia?

No longer youthful, but early middle-aged (as was likely to be true), the empress has strong, even sharp features, a high forehead, long aquiline nose, strong chin, and large ears. Her expression, too, is changed -- now having something (according to one expert*) of oriental solemnity about her. I'm not sure I'd go that far. But, yes, I otherwise agree: this is another woman, a far more realistic portrayal than the other, off-the-shelf imperial portraits.



Here's another view of the second Alexandrian issue, a modern mould taken from one of the coins (left).

If any picture is the real Zenobia, this is it!

Why else did the Alexandrian mint strike a second, quite distinct series of coins -- so soon after the first -- if they didn't mean to portray the new empress much more as she really was?

Readers, what do you think?






* E. Equini Schneider, Septimia Zenobia Sebaste (Rome 1993) 96-98, an excellent discussion of Zenobia's (and her son, Waballath's) coin imagery.

Thumbs Up For A Four-Star Uppity Woman, Sir!

At a Pentagon promotion ceremony yesterday, Ann E. Dunwoody ascended to a peak never before reached by a woman in the U.S. military: four-star general, the U.S. army's highest rank.* By law, the Army is limited to 11 active-duty four-stars.

Through the Brass Ceiling

Ann E Dunwoody is now head of the Army Material Command, in charge of weapons, equipment and uniforms for the army. There's a lot of that stuff about.

She said she had never expected to rise so high in the ranks in her career.

In the U.S. army, there are 21 female generals, most of them one-star. The first female one-star was named in 1970, the first two-star in 1978 and the first three-star in 1996. Women make up 14% of the army's active-service strength of more than 500,000 soldiers.

Behind every successful woman there's an astonished man

"There is no one more surprised than I, except of course, my husband," she told an auditorium packed with the military's top brass.

Gen Dunwoody is married to Ret. Air Force Col. Craig Brotchie (on her right in the video below).

Gen. Ann Dunwoody takes over her service's Material Command amid efforts to repair, upgrade and replace huge amounts of weapons, vehicles and gear used in Iraq and Afghanistan. In an interview with Defence News, she says she plans to build on wartime advances in the way the service tracks, stores and manages its equipment. She's pretty sanguine about it. The U.S. taxpayer, maybe, less so.

A member of Dunwoody's family has served in every American war since the Revolution. Her 89-year-old father, Ret. Brig. General Harold H. Dunwoody, served in World War II, Korea and Vietnam and earned two Purple Hearts. Her niece just returned from a tour in Afghanistan as an Air Force pilot. And her brother-in-law was an Air Force veteran.

Not eligible to attend the then all-male U.S. Military Academy -- like her brothers, father, grandfather and great-grandfather -- Dunwoody graduated from the State University of New York and was commissioned into the Women's Army Corps in 1975.

"So I went down to Fort McClellan as a college junior for six weeks of training. It was kind of exciting. Truly, I thought this would be a two-year detour en route to my teaching profession, but I was also excited that someone was going to pay me to jump out of airplanes. Here we are, 33 years later."

So, what's it like to be the U.S. military's first female four-star general?

It is very humbling. I am very grateful to the generations of women who have gone before me and opened the doors through their determination and commitment. I keep telling people I have been so fortunate that I have worked for and with people who have given me opportunities throughout my career. You can be motivated and talented, but if people don't give you those opportunities, you may or may not be able to reach the potential that you have.

I know what she means. In 1975, an Army study found that both men and women in the military agreed the best role for a female soldier was as a cook.

Let's hear it for the cook!

When she was nominated as a four-star (a rank that must be confirmed by the U.S. Senate), Gen Dunwoody said:

“I grew up in a family that didn’t know what glass ceilings were. This nomination only reaffirms what I have known to be true about the military throughout my career, that the doors continue to open for men and women in uniform.”

Women soldiers throughout the crowd yesterday cheered, some as they wiped tears of joy. Gen Dunwood needs to be an inspiration for girls out there, too. Let's make sure that girls hear the news:

Yes, you can!

But the closet door is still closed for gays. Now, isn't it time that those doors opened as well?

* the "five-star general" or General of the Army is reserved for war-time use only and is not currently used in the 21st century U.S. military.

12,000-YEAR-OLD UPPITY ISRAELI WITCH

No, I am not not pointing a Grimm-like Hansel & Gretel finger at the Israeli archaeologist, Leore Grosman of Hebrew University of Jerusalem (shown left, setting out her wares). Although she is responsible for finding the uppity Israeli witch.

Her team recently discovered in a small Israeli cave a woman’s skeleton pinned down in an unusual position by large stones and accompanied by a rare collection of grave offerings -- including 50 complete tortoise shells , the pelvis of a leopard, the wing tip of a golden eagle, the tail of a wild cow, two marten skulls (a member of the weasel family), the forearm of a wild boar, and a large human foot belonging to another person entirely.

Of course, 'witch' is only the newspaper term applied to the woman (as in Tomb Raider Digs Up Witch). She's not a witch at all ... but a shaman. A Natufian (Middle Stone Age) shaman -- one of the earliest known from the archaeological record.

The Natufians were a people who lived 11,500 to 15,000 years ago in what is now Israel, Lebanon and Syria. Most archaeologists see Natufian culture as a transition between hunting and gathering and the sedentary lifestyles of early farmers. Finding an early shaman grave during this transition makes sense. These people are starting to live in more permanent communities; they're in more contact with one another from day to day. We start to see evidence for new ritualized behaviours at this point in time.

The Shaman

The word shaman is derived from the Vedic śram , meaning 'to heat oneself' or to practice austerities. But the type is much more archaic, being part of the prehistoric cultures of Siberian hunters and proto-historical peoples in almost all parts of the world, and shamanism continues to this day wherever hunter-gatherer bands still survive . The shaman is everywhere a mystical, priestly figure -- a healer, seer and visionary.

I am she who puts together, she who speaks, she who searches. I am she who looks for the spirit of the day. I search where there is fright and terror. I am she who fixes, she who cures the person that is sick.

Shamans have mastered death. In visions and dreams, they entered the realm of the dead. Their intense suffering in this other world and their subsequent recovery establishes the shaman as one who has met death and been reborn. The spirit of light is now within: ''something that gleams like fire, that gives the power to see with closed eyes into the darkness, into the hidden things'. The shaman can communicate with the world of gods and spirits:

Slowly I perceived that a voice was trying to tell me something. It was a bird cry, but I tell you, I began to understand some of it. That happens sometimes. I know a lady who had a butterfuly sitting on her shoulder. That butterfly told her things. This made her become a great medicine woman.

The shaman's spirit ascends into the sky. The soul is transformed into a bird, the wings and body of the spirit-bird.

I heard a human voice, strange and high-pitched, which could not come from an ordinary living being. All at once I was way up there with the birds. I could look down even on the stars, and the moon was close to my left side. It seemed as though the earth and the stars were moving below me. A voice said, 'You are sacrificing yourself here to be a medicine man. In time you will be one. You will teach other medicine men . We are the bird people, the winged ones, the eagles and the owls.'

Inside Hilazon Tachtit Cave

The she-shaman's remains were discovered in a cave at Hilazon Tachtit, west of the Sea of Galilee. The cave functioned as a burial site for at least 28 other individuals. But only the shaman was treated differently. Her skeleton was separated from the other bodies by a circular wall of stones. In addition, at least 10 large stones had been placed on the head, pelvis and arms of the body, which the researchers suggest helped to protect the corpse and keep it in a specific position, or possibly to hold the body in its grave. She was also buried in an unusual position, lain on her side against the curved wall of the oval-shaped grave. Her legs were spread apart and folded inward at the knees.

Grosman said the elaborate nature of the burial rituals and the method used to construct and seal the grave suggest the woman had a very high standing within her community.

Analysis of the bones shows that the shaman was about 45 years old. The wearing of her teeth and other ageing signs on the bones suggested the woman was old for her time. She was 1.5 m in height [4' 9"] and had an unnatural, asymmetrical appearance due to a spinal disability -- a fusing of the coccyx and sacrum along with deformations of the pelvis and lower vertebrae -- that would have affected her gait, causing her to limp or drag her foot.

The Natufians went to great lengths to construct a unique grave at the top of a 150-meter (450') slope in order to bury a relatively old and disabled woman.

Many descriptions of shamanism have noted that healing and spiritual powers have often been attributed to physically disabled individuals. In 2006, researchers re-examined a 9,000-year–old woman’s skeleton and grave offerings from a German site and concluded that she had been a shaman. Skull abnormalities would have caused the woman to experience altered states of consciousness that were seen by others as signs of spiritual powers. The researchers based this idea on reports of similar skeletal deformities in modern people that cause numbness, itching, tingling and other unusual sensations.

"Clearly a great amount of time and energy was invested in the preparation, arrangement and sealing of the grave," Grosman said, adding that the burial site was unlike any other found in the Natufian or the preceding prehistoric periods. Hundreds of Natufian graves have been excavated in the Near East but, the she-shaman was not buried like others with everyday items and tools, as hunters, warriors, or political leaders were. Ancient community members must have perceived the woman as having a close relationship with the spirits of the animals buried with her -- hence, the arranged turtle shells and parts of wild pigs, eagles, cows, leopards, martens, not to mention that gory human foot.

All this sheds some light on Natufian rituals, says Grosman in this month's journal of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. For example, the tortoise shells were scattered around and beneath the body. Before arranging the shells inside the grave, humans cracked open the tortoise shells along the reptiles' bellies (so as not to crack the back part of the shell) and sucked out the meat, either as food or for an offering to the dead. They carefully took out the insides by breaking the belly, but left the back intact. The empty shells were then placed around the deceased woman. Pig bones were cracked open and their marrow removed before the bones were placed beneath the woman's hand.

Burials of shamans often reflected their role in life, incorporating healing kits and animals whose spirits were considered to have a special connection with the shaman. "Tortoises, cow tails, eagle wings, and fur-bearing animals continue to play important symbolic and shamanistic roles in the spiritual arena of human cultures worldwide today," Grosman writes.

WHICH CAME FIRST?

Did shamanism help set off the cultural upheavals that accompanied the agricultural revolution in the Near East?

Or was it (as we know of it today), rather, the result of the very same changes?

Such a profound transition from a nomadic, hunting-gathering culture to a sedentary, agriculture-based lifestyle was surely accompanied by new rules, rituals, and belief systems. That's only natural. When things change dramatically, people tend to try to re-establish the legitimate order of things by using ritual and religion to deal with change.

A little like Sarah Palin, really.

Perhaps in a strange way, too -- and a world away -- this Papua New Guinea shaman could be one of the last spiritual descendants of that Uppity Natufian witch of 12,000 years ago.



Credit for the artist's drawing of the burial: P. Groszman.

Shamanic quotations from Joan Halifax, Shamanic Voices, New York, 1979.

HAPPY ST. ZENOBIA DAY

Let us honor with inspired hymns the two martyrs for truth: the preachers of true devotion, Zenóbius and Zenobía; as brother and sister they lived and suffered together and through martyrdom received their incorruptible crowns.

Today the Orthodox church calendar commemorates the martyrdom of Saint Zenobia and her brother, Zenobius.

Since this is an annual event, I won't repeat the story but point you to last year's post of 31 October (I was a day late in 2007. Shame!). Their history is complex -- not to say confused -- and it's all the fault of the 10th C Byzantine monk, Symeon Metaphrastes. Click over to that post -- Zenobia: Martyr Saint of Celicia and her brother -- and see what you can make of it. A year's reflection has not made me any wiser. You might be luckier.

There are not many images of Zenobia and Zenobius -- and one icon is uglier than the other. Here they are, though, with St Eutropia, who also met a sticky end -- and the Apostle Kleopas, one of the Seventy; he of 'the road to Emmaus' fame (Luke 24:13-33). All are celebrated on 30 October.

Speaking of icons, my next post will finally get back to Queen Zenobia. I'll be publishing a new coin find with our dear queen's image. So, lots of pictures ... and back on topic: coming soon.

Mourning Zenobia Hikes

I was shocked to open my inbox and find that Zenobia Hikes had died during the night. She was only 53.

She died of complications following multiple heart surgeries.

As vice-president for student affairs at Virginia Tech, she helped shepherd the university through the days following the campus massacre on 16 April 2007.

She was a member of the group of Tech executives known as the policy group that gathered on the morning of April 16 2007 to deal with the shooting deaths of two students in a dormitory. As they were meeting, gunman Seung-Hui Cho entered a nearby hall and killed another 30 victims.

Of course, I never met her but, like millions of others, I watched her on television at the convocation held the following day. Her warmth, courage, and compassion helped rally the spirits of grieving students. And seemed to give some meaning to the madness that had happened.

Ed Spencer, interim vice-president, says, "I remember walking over to the convocation on April 17 and realizing how remarkably calm and reassuring she was, knowing what she was about to say as the moderator of ceremonies for the convocation, and we all know what an incredible job she really did for that."

And John Gray Williams, a student, remembers this: I'll never forget how inspired she made me feel when, only days after I'd met her back during my first semester here at Tech, I passed her on the Drillfield and she called out to me by name, "Oh, hello, John Gray." Really!? Did a vice president of this university of 30,000 really just remember my name? But that's how she was. If you took the time to seek her out and talk to her about any sort of student issues, she took the time to remember your name -- and the issue. She took the concerns I (and others) brought to her to heart.

Another student, Mohawk-John Woods, writes in his Live Journal, "This won't matter much to most of you non-Hokies [Virginia Tech folk], but it matters to us. Zenobia Hikes was one of the few administrators I still felt I could trust after the shooting -- and I suspect that to be true for others, too. She always worked so hard for us, and always listened."

I meant to write a blog post about her one day -- under the rubric Zenobia's Hall of Fame (21st C. AD) [sadly, I noted this morning that the link has stopped working].

I never imagined it would be a R.I.P.

But I can tell you, John Woods, her death does matter to most of us. As you said, Zenobia Hikes, you are sorely missed.


More information on this vibrant woman at In Memoriam: Dr. Zenobia Lawrence Hikes

Athenian Ladies in New York

Worshipping Women: Ritual and Reality in Classical Athens (with Update)

An exhibition at the Onassis Cultural Center in New York will soon explore the many ways in which women’s religious worship contributed not just to their personal fulfilment but to the civic identity of the leading city of the Classical Greek world as well.

Worshipping Women seeks to correct "the unremittingly bleak picture that the lives of Athenian women were highly restricted when it came to the public sphere and participation in the political process. The involvement of women in cults and festivals ... was as essential for the successful functioning of the polis as that of any member of society."

I wish them luck.

Of course, a woman's life wasn't 'unremittingly bleak' but it was certainly unremittingly patriarchal. The idea of women taking part in the public business of the polis would have seemed inherently comical to Athenian citizens (males only, of course). That's what's behind Aristophanes, in some of his surviving plays, where he chuckles, gurgles, and snorts at women pretending to take on the roles of men instead of staying at home. The women are well aware of what men think about them:

Men never speak a good word, never one, for the feminine gender,
Everyone says we're a Plague,the source of all evils to man,
war, dissension, and strife

Still, as Onassis knows, the only area in which women had any power at all was in religion. Public ritual gave a woman the only chance she had (if she were respectable) to get out of the house and even, sometimes, to mingle with men. And that made husbands nervous. Especially in Dionysus’ cult, women had an outlet for worship equal or greater to that afforded to men. In the spirit of Dionysian revelry, women could become his priestesses or 'Bacchae' simply by drinking, dancing, singing, and releasing their inhibitions.

Then, there were also women-only festivals where men were excluded. Naturally, they didn't like being excluded -- but they were stuck: such rites were sanctioned by ancestral tradition. There are anecdotes and legends about men who tried to spy on women's secret rituals. After all, they had to know. They had a right to know. Unsurprisingly, the spied-upon sometimes responded with lethal fury. But not always.

The most venerable women-only rite in Athens, the Thesmophoria, held in autumn at the time of sowing, included hurling pigs into snake-filled crevices, and strict observance of sexual abstinence. Women left their homes to set up a tent city close to the site of the public Assembly of men.

Let us now devote ourselves to the sports which the women are
accustomed to celebrate here, when time has again brought round the
mighty Mysteries of the great goddesses, the sacred days....

But all they really did at such festivals, so men feared, was give vent to their legendary potential for defiance and subversiveness. And drink undiluted wine -- as Aristophanes reported, they took an oath sworn over cups of the best rich, dark wine never to mix their wine with water!

Oh! you wanton, you tippling women, who think of nothing but wine; you are a fortune to the drinking-shops and are our ruin; for the sake of drink, you neglect both your household and your [weaving] shuttle!

Men of ancient Athens surely laughed at Aristophanes' plays and this lampooning of women, but it may have been uneasy laughter. Did they really fear that their wives were secret alcoholic nymphomanics -- adulterous, lecherous, bibulous, treacherous and garrulous to boot! All vice, in short, and the curse of their husbands.

There is but one thing in the world worse than a shameless woman,
and that's another woman.

Ladies, I offer terms...

Aristophanes finally made his peace with women. At the end of his play about the Thesmophoria, he tells the troublesome matrons:

If well and truly, your honourable sex befriend me now, I won't abuse your honourable sex from this time forth for ever.


Non-abusive banter only, I am sure, at the Onassis Cultural Center 10 December 2008 t0 9 May 2009. It may well be worth a trip to the city since Greek newspapers say that many objects will be seen for the first time in New York.

Does that mean that Ladies are usually relegated to the storerooms? Surely not.



With thanks to the blog Tropaion for this alert.

Illustrations:

Above: Statue of the Goddess Artemis,ca. 100 B.C. From Delos (found in the House of the Diadoumenos). Athens, National Archaeological Museum.

Below: A Spartan woman victor in the foot-race at the Heraean Games, ca. 460 B.C., Vatican Museum, fitting a description by Pausanias, which says that the girls competed divided into three teams according to their age. During events their hair was allowed to fall loose on their shoulders and they wore a short chiton tunic which reached down to their knees but left bare their left shoulder and breast. As in the case of male Olympic winners, the prize for them too was a wreath of wild olive as well as the right to dedicate a tablet depicting themselves at the temple of Hera.

Updated 19 December 2008:

The show has opened. See the review in the New York Times.

Caves Weren't Painted in a Day!

I've heard of artists being late with their commissions, but 15,000 years to finish a painting job seems a trifle over the top.

Scientists are revolutionising our understanding of early human societies with a more precise way of dating cave art.

In several caves in Spain -- where it had been assumed that the art all dated to the same period -- new dating techniques reveal that the paintings were done in several phases, sometimes as much as over 15,000 years (25,000 years ago to just 10,000 BCE).

The dating method involves a technique called uranium series dating. It works on any carbonate substance, such as coral or limestone, and involves measuring the balance between a uranium isotope and the form of thorium that it decays into. The process is lengthy and painstaking -- researchers must scrape off enough of the calcite crust for an accurate dating, while taking care not to harm the art underneath, or even contaminate the sample with the older limestone behind the art.

"This lets us challenge assumptions about the age of cave art," says Alistair Pike, senior lecturer in archaeological sciences at Bristol University, who has helped develop the technique.

Dr Pike and his research team spent two weeks in Spain last year testing the new method in caves, and have just returned from another fortnight's expedition to sample nine more caves, including the so called 'Sistine Chapel of the Palaeolithic', Altamira cave (from which come the bison above and the animals below). The elaborate works in Altamira were thought to date from around 14,000 years ago.

It may have taken Michelangelo four long years to paint his fresco on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, but his earliest predecessors spent considerably longer perfecting their own masterpieces.

Rather than being created in one session, as archaeologists previously thought, many of the works discovered across Europe were produced over hundreds of generations who added to, refreshed and painted over the original pieces of art.

In new research published by the Natural Environment Research Council's website Planet Earth, Dr Pike reports that some of the paintings were between 25,000 and 35,000 years old. The youngest paintings in the cave were 11,000 years old.

"We have found that most of these caves were not painted in one go, but the painting spanned up to 20,000 years. This goes against what the archaeologists who excavated in the caves and found archaeology for just one period.

"It is probably the case that people did not live in the caves they painted. It seems the caves they lived in were elsewhere and there was something special about the painted caves."

Given that the researchers often had to crawl through tiny fissures to take their samples, and that some of the art is virtually inaccessible except with modern spelunking equipment, I'd say that something special is a bit of an understatement.

(Left) Black and violet painted horses overlying red figures at Tito Bustillo Cave, Asturias, Spain: it's staggering to think that the horses may be separated from the red signs -- and conceivably even from each other -- by thousands of years.

When we really absorb this new information, it must also change entirely how we look at cave painting* -- and especially its puzzling mix of representational and geometric, sign-like imagery. One single explanation -- whether shamanistic hallucinations or gender-coded bursts of consciousness -- is unlikely to stretch over so many painters over such unimaginably long periods of time.

The death knell of a universal theory for the origins of art, perhaps?


* If, that is to say, these great time differences are confirmed by future work (which may not be taken for granted: I've seen too many scientific flip-flops in archaeology to be sanguine).

And, yes, I know I'm wildly off topic but this was too good to miss. My thanks once again to The Ridger at The Greenbelt , whose Monday Science Links alerted me to this exciting story, first picked up on the blog Pro-Science.

Will the Great Cleopatra Please Stand Up? (Updated)

The controversy rages on: is this Cleopatra VII in the nude, or not?

As always, there are two schools of thought on such serious matters. One school says 'Yes' and the other says 'No'. Luckily Zenobia is at hand to settle the isssue.

But, first, the story so far.

This beauty (left) is known as the Esquiline Venus, a marble statue dating to the middle of the first century AD, found in Rome in 1874 in the grounds of the imperial Lamian gardens on the Esquiline hill (hence her name). In trying to account for several peculiarities of the statue -- like her un-Roman curly hair and the Egyptian-looking rearing snake winding around the vase beside her (below right) -- the Italian historian Licinio Glori proposed to identify this Venus as Cleopatra.*

Important evidence were remarks by Appian (Civil Wars 2, 102) and Cassius Dio (51) about a "beautiful statue" of Cleopatra in the temple of Venus put on display by Julius Caesar about 46 BC, the year of the inauguration of the Temple of Venus on the Forum Iulium (remember, the Julian family believed that their house descended from Venus). Appian, writing around 150 AD adds that the statue still was visible on the spot -- "next to Venus", he says -- in his day.

The statue may originally have shown a woman binding her hair with a strip of fabric in preparation for a bath, because the remains of the little finger of her left hand are visible on the back of her head, suggesting her left arm was raised to hold her hair in place, while the right hand wound the fabric. She is, in any case, at least two removes from the original source of inspiration, a lost classical Greek bronze. As Kenneth Clark put it in his famous book on The Nude,

“...there was produced a bronze figure of a nude girl, perhaps a priestess of Isis, binding her hair, which must have been a masterpiece. It is known to us in two marble replicas, of which the more complete is the statue in Rome known as the Esquiline Venus ....

No doubt the original has been changed and elaborated by translation into marble, yet the copies have not lost the unity of the first idea. Somewhere not very far behind them is the work of [a 5th C BC] individual artist who, on the surviving evidence, must be reckoned the creator of the female nude. Not that the Esquiline girl represents an evolved notion of feminine beauty [emphasis mine]. She is short and square, with high pelvis and small breasts far apart, a stocky little peasant such as might be found still in any Mediterranean village....

But she is solidly desirable, compact, proportionate, and in fact, her proportions have been calculated on a simple mathematical scale. The unit of measurement is her head. She is seven heads tall, there is a length of one head between her breasts, one from breast to navel, and one from the navel to the division of her legs. More important than these calculations... the sculptor has discovered what we may call the plastic essentials of the female body. Breasts will become fuller, waists narrower, and hips will describe a more generous arc; but fundamentally this is the architecture of the body that will control the observations of classically minded artists till the end of the nineteenth century.

Yes, but is she Cleopatra?

Yes! she is! Now another eminent art historian, Bernard Andreae, has taken up the cudgels on Cleopatra's behalf: ** Andreae argues that 1. the statue of the Esquiline Venus is not an ordinary Venus but must be interpreted as representing an individual, and that 2. Cleopatra must be this individual.

No! she's not! "Die Venus vom Esquilin ist nicht Kleopatra", says Guy Weill Goudchaux in the very same book.**

One of the strongest arguments against the identification is that no Queen of Egypt would ever have let herself be pictured naked in public, not even if Julius Caesar had gone down on his knees and begged her. Nudity is against all norms of Egyptian decorum.

Or so we thought, until this statue of Queen Arsinoe II (3rd C BC), represented as Isis-Aphrodite, came out of the water in the harbour of Alexandria in 2000. Sculpted in black granite, the life-size headless statue appears as if wearing a diaphanous cloth held together by knots at her breast. It is a magnificent example of Graeco-Egyptian art , mingling Greek-style draped clothing and traditional pharaonic posture. Her robes fall off her shoulders so easily, the characteristic Isis knot is tied so elegantly over her half-covered breast, the cloth drapes over the navel, hips and knees so subtly that the stony dress seems almost transparent. The gown folds over her sensuous body like a wet translucent slip, casting a sheen on the hard black granite that makes it appear as voluptuous as folds of silk.

So that argument goes 'plop' in the water. While Andreae's theory gets a specific- gravity boost since he can now maintain that Cleopatra may actually be clothed in an invisible sheer garment on the model of Ptolemaic queens.

What's a perfect female nude?

The idealized nude can be traced to the Aphrodite of Cnidus by Praxiteles (330 B.C.). In this scheme of things, the Esquiline Venus is not the ideal of feminine beauty but a starting point. At only seven heads tall, she is indeed a stocky little figure. Praxiteles' Aphrodite, on the other hand, was made to accentuate these same proportions, and became the standard mathematical formula for representing the figure whether male or female

The proportions haven't changed much through the centuries:

- An average person is generally 7-and-a-half heads tall.

- An ideal figure, used when aiming for an impression of nobility or grace, is 8 heads tall.

- An heroic figure, used for depicting gods and superheroes, is eight-and-a-half heads tall (which is why giant figures sometimes look like pinheads!).

The ideal figure, then, has a noticeably smaller head -- one eighth instead of one seventh of the total height of the figure: smaller head plus longer legs make the figure appear more elegant. Longer legs are sadly lacking in the Esquiline Venus. Is she perhaps a little quirky because she is partly modelled on a real human being, not quite the divine ideal but a Cleopatra/Isis/Venus?

Even if not a fully-fledged goddess, she does not deserve Kenneth Clark's rebuke that her notion of female beauty is 'not evolved' . We are so used to see the statue reproduced from the front that perhaps we do not fully appreciate her charms.

[All the luscious photographs of the Esquiline Venus are made by Kalervo Koskimies].

Go see her yourself. You can explore her every angle in the huge new Julius Caesar show -- from 24 October to 5 April 5 2009 -- in Rome at the Chiostro del Bramante.

Caesar To Dazzle Rome Once More

Rome is celebrating one of its most famous political and military leaders, Julius Caesar (100-44 BC). A sweeping exhibition in the Chiostro del Bramante commemorates the life, times and achievements of Ancient Rome's best known figure.

The first ever exhibit to focus solely on Caesar, it showcases just about everything related to Caesar: 180 items of archaeological, artistic and cultural interest, from ancient times until the 20th century.

The Esquiline Venus is on the spot, just in case it is Cleopatra.

And what does Zenobia say? Is she modelled on Cleopatra or not?

"Maybe, decidedly maybe. There's simply no way of knowing."

But that's no reason not to think she might be.


Photo credits for the statue of Arsinoe: Franck Goddio/Hilti Foundation - Photos: Christophe Gerigk.

* Cleopatra, Venere Esquilina (Rome 1955).

** Bernard Andreae, Karin Rhein, Kleopatra und die Caesaren. Katalog einer Ausstellung des Bucerius Kunst Forums, Hamburg, 28. Oktober 2006 bis 4. Februar 2007 ( Munich 2006). Reviewed by Miguel John Versluys at BMCR 28/09/2008.


Update 2 October 2008: Speaking of Arsinoe II, it looks like she might have a new home when she gets back to Alexandria (she's on a world tour at the moment, now temporarily residing in Madrid; see comment on this post by 100Swallows).

Underwater Museum for Egypt Sunken Treasures?

Evoking sails of Nile feluccas (left, lit in the distance) and the cardinal directions, the glassy, towering "four points will be like the Lighthouse of Alexandria that illuminated the ancient library and the world," said Jacques Rougerie, lead architect for the feasibility study. "I want to do the same thing with this museum."

Fiberglass tunnels would connect above-ground galleries, near the New Library of Alexandria to the underwater facility, where antiquities would be visible in their natural resting places (as in the artist's conception, bottom left) at the site of Cleopatra's now sunken palace.

The proposed museum's underwater facility will be difficult and expensive to build and is the focus of the just launched two-year feasibility study aided by the UN. But planners believe that the benefits of plunging visitors into the historical context of the objects -- on the sunken island that once held Cleopatra's palace -- will be worth the trouble. It would certainly be memorable!

Wonderful photographs and more information at the National Geographic News (with thanks to Robert Blau, via imperialrome2@yahoogroups.co.uk).

Illustration courtesy Jacques Rougerie

First Uppity Woman (Updated)

This angry-looking Neanderthal woman had pale skin, freckles, and was a fiery red-head too.

This is the first reconstruction of a female Neanderthal to be based in part on ancient DNA evidence. Anthropologists have now gone beyond fossils and are reading the actual genes of an extinct species of human.

Neanderthals appeared in Europe about 300,000 years ago but mysteriously vanished ca. 35,000 years ago, shortly after the arrival of modern humans in Europe.

Meet Wilma*

Artists and scientists created Wilma (cutely named for the Flintstones character) using analysis of DNA from 43,000-year-old bones that had been cannibalized. No wonder she looks so peeved. Who wants to go down in history as a half-chewed bone?

The genes associated with pigmentation suggest that at least some Neanderthals would have had red hair, pale skin, and possibly freckles. The traits were likely more common in European Neanderthals, just as they are often seen in modern humans of European descent.

Wilma's genes showed an unknown mutation in a key gene called MC1R, also present in modern humans, said the study's lead author Carles Lalueza-Fox of the University of Barcelona. MC1R regulates a protein that guides the production of melanin, which pigments hair and skin and protects from UV rays.

"European [humans] have quite a lot of variation in this gene — not only red hair variants but also others," he explained, adding that humans have been in Europe for only about 40,000 years. "The Neanderthals, being there at least 400,000 [years], likely accumulated ten times more variation."

Wilma Didn't Mate with Modern Humans

Wilma's particular mutation is not known to occur in modern humans so it gives no evidence of interbreeding between Neanderthals and modern humans.

Other Neanderthal enthusiasts have come to the same conclusion: Wilma didn't mix with the new guys in the neighbourhood. So, we'll have to remove the third figure in the famous cartoon (left) -- whether ascent or descent of Man or Ape.

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology have now sequenced the complete mitochondrial genome — genetic information passed down from mothers — of a 38,000-year-old Neanderthal thigh bone found in a cave in Croatia. The sequence contains 16,565 DNA bases, or "letters," representing 13 genes, making it the longest stretch of Neanderthal DNA ever examined.

The new study shows that at least for the maternal lineage, there are no traceable genetic markers that suggest admixture of Neanderthals and modern humans.

The study author, Richard Green, points out that Neanderthals exhibited a greater number of letter substitutions than modern humans due to mutations in their mitochondrial DNA, although they seem to have undergone fewer evolutionary changes overall. The fact that so many mutations — some of which may have been harmful — persisted in the Neanderthal genome could indicate the species suffered from a limited gene pool. This might be because the Neanderthal population was smaller than that of Homo sapiens living in Europe at the time.

The researchers estimate the Neanderthal population living in Europe 38,000 years ago never reached more than 10,000 at any one time.

"If there were only a few, small bands of Neanderthals, barely hanging on, then any change to their way of life could have been enough to drive them to extinction," Green said. "One obvious change would have been the introduction of another large hominid—modern humans." And he added, "a small population size can diminish the power of natural selection to remove slightly deleterious evolutionary changes."

In short, inbreeding.

Wilma is more than just a token thigh bone.

Created for an October 2008 National Geographic magazine article, Wilma has a skeleton made from replicas of pelvis and skull bones from Neanderthal females. Copies of male Neanderthal bones — resized to female dimensions — filled in the gaps. She is thus the first full-size Neanderthal female reconstructed using the latest information from genetics, fossil evidence, and archaeology.

The shape of her eyes rings especially true: like many modern cold-adapted populations, they seem to have an extra fold of skin which produces a hooded eye appearance: in Asians the fold spreads from the nose side of the eye outward, and in NW Europeans, it spreads from the outside of the eye inward. Wilma is also chubby-cheeked: her facial padding is another cold-adapted feature.

Was her pelvis the death of her?

Meanwhile, at the University of Zurich, Marcia Ponce de León and colleagues pieced together three Neanderthal baby skeletons: one newborn from a cave in Russia and two infants aged 19 and 24 months,from a Syrian cave. In addition, the scientists reconstructed the pelvis of an adult female Neanderthal skeleton found in Israel.

By analysing the skeletons, the team found that Neanderthal babies were born with similar-size skulls to those of modern human babies. However, the shape of the face was different. Even in a newborn baby, the conspicuous protrusion of the forehead that distinguishes Neanderthals was evident.

Putting the baby and the mother together, the birthing process would have been at the limit of what was possible, and the baby's head would have had to turn by a quarter … in order to get through the narrow lower pelvis. According to the scientists, this may explain why modern humans eventually trumped Neanderthals.

Poor Wilma.

Cannibalism wouldn't have helped either!

Update: 24 September 2008

(Left) A National Geographer puts the finishing touches to Wilma's reconstruction. The October 2008 issue of National Geographic is now available on-line and it should not be missed by anyone keen on Neanderthals. From this issue:

Since 2000, some 1,500 bone fragments have been unearthed from this side gallery [of El Sidrón cave], representing the remains of at least nine Neanderthals—five young adults, two adolescents, a child of about eight, and a three-year-old toddler. All showed signs of nutritional stress in their teeth—not unusual in young Neanderthals late in their time on Earth. But a deeper desperation is etched in their bones. Antonio Rosas [of the National Museum of Natural Sciences, Madrid] picked up a recently unearthed fragment of a skull and another of a long bone of an arm, both with jagged edges.

"These fractures were— clop— made by humans," Rosas said, imitating the blow of a stone tool. "It means these fellows went after the brains and into long bones for the marrow."

In addition to the fractures, cut marks left on the bones by stone tools clearly indicate that the individuals were cannibalized. Whoever ate their flesh, and for whatever reason—starvation? ritual?—the subsequent fate of their remains bestowed upon them a distinct and marvelous kind of immortality.

See also Chris Sloan's blog, Stones, Bones 'n Things (Chris was for 12 years Art Director and Paleontology specialist at National Geographic; he's now "responsible for for keeping track of a bunch of scientists" on Society-funded projects). On his blog today, he talks about some of the pitfalls -- and pleasures -- of reconstructing how ancient people looked from their bare bones. In Wilma's case, of course, we now have added genetic information which gives real life to her skin colour and hair. He has this to say about her body reconstruction:

The model's beat up appearance and "hunting" pose is consistent with the notion that Neandertal life was rough, injuries were high, and we have no reason to believe that females did not participate in hunts, in one way or the other.

A game old girl -- beat-up but immortal: that's Wilma for you.



* First read about on Dienekes' Anthropology Blog (with interesting comments by Kosmo).