#ancient art

[memories-of-ancients]

Carnelian frog amulet, Egypt, 18th Dynasty, 1540-1296 BC

from The Cleveland Museum of Art

[soap3r3nahue]

ancient minds seem to be smarter than modern minds now don’t they?

[winedarkgod]

have a photo dump of random pictures of Dionysus I just had on my phone

[blueiscoool]

Mummies with Golden Tongues Found in 2,500-Year-Old Egyptian Tomb

More than a dozen ancient gold tongues have been discovered in a cemetery at the site of Oxyrhynchus in Egypt.

Archaeologists in Egypt have discovered 13 ancient mummies with gold tongues and nails in a cemetery at the site of Oxyrhynchus.

The team made the finds when they dug down to the bottom of a burial shaft, revealing a hall with three chambers that held dozens of mummies. The human remains date to the Ptolemaic period (circa 304 to 30 B.C.), a time when a dynasty descended from one of Alexander the Great's generals ruled Egypt, according to two statements released by the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities.

Archaeologists had previously unearthed 16 gold tongues at Oxyrhynchus. The ancient Egyptians put gold tongues in mummies with the intention of helping the deceased speak in the afterlife, and because they believed that gold was "the flesh of the gods," Esther Pons Mellado and Maite Mascort, co-directors of the Spanish-Egyptian archaeological mission at Oxyrhynchus, said earlier this year. The same team made the new finds.

"The number of gold tongues here is high, which is interesting," Salima Ikram, an Egyptology professor at the American University in Cairo who was not involved with the latest excavation, said in an email. "Possibly the bodies belong to higher elites that were associated with the temple and animal cults that proliferated in the area," Ikram said, noting it's possible that gold tongues "might have been the vogue for the embalming house in the area."

During the latest dig, the archaeologists also found 29 amulets with the mummies. Some amulets are in the shape of scarab beetles, as the ancient Egyptians associated scarabs with the movement of the sun across the sky. Other amulets are in the shape of Egyptian deities, including Horus, Thoth and Isis. Some of them have forms that combine multiple deities together.

The excavation also revealed wall paintings, including one that depicts a tomb owner named "Wen-Nefer," who is shown being accompanied by several Egyptian deities. Another painting on the ceiling depicts the sky goddess Nut surrounded by the stars. There is also a painting of a boat that has multiple deities depicted on it.

"As for the paintings, the quality is really excellent and the freshness of colors is simply amazing," Francesco Tiradritti, an Egyptologist at D'Annunzio University of Chieti-Pescara in Italy who was not involved in the dig, said in an email.

By Owen Jarus.

[themuseumofwitchcraftandpaganism]

Did Christianity Steal From Paganism? Yes... No... It's Complicated. Part 2: Vikings

Tis the season so I figured I'd talk about the topic that's been the subject of debate for a long time, most recently with the 2024 Olympics. I will be discussing the visual aspect of these religions, not the theological aspects.

Short answer: Yes

Long answer: No

Let's get into it: The Viking era is from 800-1050 AD and can be divided into seven parts based off the style of visual art that was popular. The first style is called the Oseberg style (775-800 AD) and would be the basis of all the Viking styles of art after it. It was made of three forms that were derived from Pagan pre-Viking art: ribbon animals, gripping beasts, and ambiguous forms. You can see it on the bow of the ship below; the ship dates to the 9th century and was found in a burial mound in Tønsberg, Norway. Remember these forms because they're going to be important later.

The Vikings started coming into contact with Christian Anglo Saxon (modern day English) missionaries in the 700-800s, but they had little effect. The missionaries were well received by the kings but when their Pagan chieftains threatened to rescind their support, the missionaries were sent away. Another example of that is in 878 AD, the Christian king of the Anglo Saxons, Alfred the Great of Wessex, and the Pagan king of the Vikings, Guthrum the Old, were at war. King Alfred ended up winning and as part of the peace treaty, Guthrum had to get baptized into Christianity. He did so but maintained his Pagan worship and did not implement Christianity.

Besides the kings, common people had also started to slowly assimilate to Christianity. Christians had a rule that they couldn't trade with Pagans so Pagan Vikings began primsigning. Primsigning is an old Norse word meaning "to make the sign of the cross," the way to show you followed Christian beliefs before converting all the way through baptism. Even though they weren't being baptized and were still practicing Paganism, primsigning was enough for Christians to feel comfortable trading with them and brought the Vikings more into the world of Christianity.

An interesting example of this is in Kopparsvik, Sweden, where a large number of Viking individuals were buried in a prone position from 900-1050 AD. This is completely different from traditional Pagan Viking burials: there were no grave goods, no animal sacrifices, no mighty ships. Typically, a prone position is a sign of showing humility towards God and all the figures had notches carved into their teeth (below). Historians theorize that they used the notches to secretly signal to Christian merchants that they were also Christian to get discounts while not being alienated from their Pagan communities.

The coin below is from ~921 AD. It's a Viking coin from York, England and wonderfully shows the mixing of Pagan and Christian iconography. Coins like this typically had the name of the Viking king engraved on them but this one has "St. Peter." However, it also depicts the hammer of Thor on both the head (left) and reverse (right). It really demonstrates the visual mixing of religions.

Sometime between 940-1000 AD, the cross below was made. It was found in St Andrew's Church, Andreas, Isle of Man (between England and Ireland), and is another great example of the combination of Pagan and Christian art. On one side (left) it depicts Odin with one of his ravens fighting the wolf Fenrir at Ragnarök. The other side (right) depicts Christ triumphing over Satan. Both of these are stories of good vs evil and depict a god triumphing at the end of days. It would have drawn attention to the theological similarities between Christianity and Norse Paganism, making it easier for people to conflate the differing theologies.

Remember the Oseberg style from before? We're going to revisit it. By the 900s, Viking art was being done in the Mamman style; the ribbon animals and gripping beasts had combined into an icon called the Great Beast. The Great Beast was a symbol of power and strength, frequently put on longships and other Pagan items. In 986 AD, Viking King Bluetooth, a recent convert to Christianity, had the jelling stone below erected in honor of his deceased parents. On one side, he included a Great Beast; this was to show the strength and nobility of his parents and the nation they ruled. On the other side, he put an image of Christ Triumphant. This makes sense for a cenotaph as the promise of a resurrection is a comfort in the face of death. But the combination of a Pagan symbol of strength and an image of Christ is very interesting; it's doing more than pointing out the similarities between the two religions, it's uniting both Pagan and Christian subjects under his rule and proudly displaying the two different sources of the Viking's strength.

I can't end this without also talking about architecture. The last Viking art style is called the Urnes style and it's primarily because of the church below. It was built in 1132 AD in Urnes, Norway and is a stave church, meaning the whole thing was built without any nails!! The entire thing is self-supporting wood made using the post and lintel system. It's a Chrisitan church but has Pagan iconography on the sides: the last version of the Great Beast (right) and Pagan runes. It's fascinating how a Christian place of worship is decorated and protected by Pagan icons, once again showing the combination of visual cultures and methods of thought.

So, the answer everyone is looking for is NO.

The Christians didn't steal anything from the Pagans, they made an association. They produced art in the style that was popular and followed the artistic trends of the time. Christian and Pagan imagery was produced in the same medium and combined until Paganism was phased out over hundreds of years. They saw similar gods and iconography and combined them to make a message that was understandable to all audiences.

Happy Yule! Happy Winter Solstice!

Further reading:

Smarthistory – Art of the Viking Age

BBC - History - Ancient History in depth: Viking Religion

The Vikings and Christianity | History of Christian Vikings – Sons of Vikings

Treaty of Wedmore - Wikipedia

Manx runestones - Wikipedia

Prone Burials and Modified Teeth at the Viking Age Cemetery of Kopparsvik - Historische Beratung Dr. Matthias Toplak

Ancient Viking Art - Medievalists.net

Gamla Uppsala - Wikipedia

[arthistoryanimalia]

#FrogFriday 🐸:

#Frog Vase

Nazca, Peru 100 BCE - 600 CE

terracotta, paint 12.4 cm x 8.5 cm x 15 cm

Royal Museums of Art and History, Brussels AAM 00046.7.188

[sharksandjays]

I know this isn't ninjago guys but I finished this 17 hour painting for my art class and I was proud of it so...enjoy.

I love Egypt fun fact about me. :) [ID: a detailed, realistic painting of the hathor columns at the dendera temple complex in dendera, egypt. /end ID]

[anteregem]

Some fanart of this ancient figurine! Also got commissioned to draw her hanging out with a friend!

[kimiko24]

DOG MOSAICS (From Italy and Greece ××)

[memories-of-ancients]

Silver plate, Eastern Roman Empire, 4th century AD

from The Museum of Art and History Geneva

[ilookattextile]

1. 19th century sealskin thong, Greenland

2. Pazyryk swan made of felted reindeer wool, circa 400 BCE, Siberia

3. Child’s hat with bird, nalbound cotton and wool, 1000–1476 CE, Chancay culture, Peru

4. Knitted cotton sock from Egypt, 1000-1200 CE

5. Sidonian flask shaped like a date, 1st-2nd century CE, Syria or Palestine

6. World’s oldest surviving pants, woven wool, circa 1300-1000 BCE, China

[theancientwayoflife]

~ Crab Vessel with Double Spout.

Place of origin: Colombia, Calima Region

Period: Ilama Period

Date: 1500 B.C.-A.D. 100

Medium: Ceramics

[jbbartram-illu]

Did I ever post the finished Lascaux (& etc) horses here?!

This first batch of them will be available in my next shop update, but there are more getting bisque-fired tomorrow that should be going into the shop in mid-April alongside a couple more cave painting mugs :)

[blueiscoool]

New Terracotta Discovery at First Emperor’s Mausoleum in China

Archaeologists excavating the mausoleum of Qin Shi Huang have uncovered a terracotta warrior depicting a high-ranking commander.

The Mausoleum of the First Emperor is the burial complex and mausoleum of Qin Shi Huang, the architect of China’s unification and founder of the Qin Dynasty.

Situated in Xi’an’s Lintong District, the mausoleum was built over a span of 38 years by a workforce of 700,000 labourers, as recorded in historical texts. The main burial chamber is located beneath a 76-metre-tall hillock (mound) shaped like a truncated pyramid.

What is known about the tomb interior comes from the “Records of the Grand Historian” by Sima Qian, who describes a vast chamber containing palaces and scenic towers, a coffin cast from bronze, and rare artefacts from across China.

Previous excavations around the complex have discovered thousands of warriors, horses, officials, acrobats, strongmen, musicians made from terracotta, and around 100 wooden battle chariots.

Archaeologists excavating Pit No. 2 (thought to contain a military guard) have recently uncovered a terracotta warrior depicting a high-ranking commander. According to experts, this marks the first discovery of a commander since the pit was first opened for excavations in 1994.

Archaeologists also found two high-level officer figurines, and five figurines dressed in contemporary armour accompanying the terracotta commander.

To date, only 10 high-level officer figurines have been discovered among the Terracotta Warriors, making this find a significant contribution to the study of Qin Dynasty military organisation and systems.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the archaeological excavation of the Qin Terracotta Warriors.

By Mark Milligan.

[themuseumofwitchcraftandpaganism]

Did Christianity Steal From Paganism? Yes... No... It's Complicated. Part 1: Rome

Tis the season so I figured I'd talk about the topic that's been the subject of debate for a long time, most recently with the 2024 Olympics. I will be discussing the visual aspect of these religions, not the theological aspects.

Short answer: Yes

Long answer: No

Let's get into it: It took about a hundred years after the death of Christ for Christianity to start gaining popularity in the Roman Empire. At around 100 AD the first congregations secretly started meeting in basements and had to be very subtle with their worship. Being Christian at this time was a crime; they refused to pay the federal taxes that exalted the emperor as a god. At this point, after the Roman Emperor died, the Senate would vote to either add them to the pantheon or erase their legacy from public consciousness. Some emperors weren't very lucky but most of them got deified. The Christian citizens of Rome refused to offer sacrifices to the emperor because it broke the first of the Ten Commandments, "Thou shalt not have no other gods before me." There isn't much Christian art from this time, and they were definitely the religious minority.

Skip forward to 306 AD, there's yet another civil war over the throne of the Empire. The two men fighting for it were Constantine I and Maxentius. In addition to battles, the two of them funded public projects to gain the approval of the people. They both built baths, aqueducts, and basilicas. Basilicas were the Roman equivalent of city halls: the local government operated out of them, trials and town meetings were held there, and there were small niches in the walls dedicated to different gods. Maxentius built the basilica on the left (below) and Constantine built the one on the right (below). Constatine's basilica, Aula Palatina, is still the largest remaining Roman structure that's a single room.

Maxentius' basilica was bigger but in 310 AD Constatine beat him and took the throne, partly because of the support he got from the Christian citizens. In 312 AD, Constatine converted to Christianity and enacted the Edict of Milan which made Christianity legal.

But look at Aula Palatina. It looks like our modern idea of a church. It has rows of benches, which would've been used for town meetings, and a semicircular niche at the end called an apse. In a Christian church, the apse is where the altar goes just like the niches in the Roman Pagan basilicas where different gods would be worshiped. Constantine didn't change the design from a Pagan basilica at all --because why fix what isn't broken? -- and just placed it into a Christian context.

For the next hundred years, Roman citizens started to mix Christian and Pagan imagery.

Families would bury both Christian and Pagan members in the same catacomb and decorated it accordingly. The fresco below (320-340 AD) is from the Catacombs of Priscilla (200-400 AD). It has an image of Christ as the Good Shepard in the middle, but the birds along the outside represent the four seasons; an image that featured commonly in Pagan catacomb frescos. Christ's clothing and contrapposto posing is also reminiscent of Pagan statues, particularly of the god Apollo.

The fresco on the left (below) from the Catacombs of Saints Marcellinus and Peter (~300 AD), is visually similar to the last one fresco we looked at. Christ is in the middle and around him are the four Evangelists and Bible stories like Jonah and the whale. In the four corners again, there are personifications of the four seasons. Elsewhere in the Catacomb, there's a depiction of Christ as Orpheus (right, below), again combining these Pagan and Christian icons. In the Bible, it says that Christ will tame all the wild animals, and the artist is likening that to the Roman Pagan story of Orpheus taming animals with his music.

If you look at the middle of this complex fresco on the left (below) from the Catacomb of Commodilla (100-800 AD), it has a depiction of Jesus and three of the apostles dressed like Roman senators (300-400 AD). On the right is a depiction of St. Paul as a Roman philosopher from the same Catacomb.

But this interest in combining artistic traditions extended to the sarcophagi that people were buried in too. Roman Pagans usually opted to be cremated rather than buried but when they did choose to be buried, they liked to carve scenes of their gods into their sarcophagi. Roman Christians, who almost always chose to be buried, did the same. The sarcophagus on the left (below) belonged to a woman named Arria (b.~350 -- d.~400 AD) and depicts a story about the Roman Pagan moon goddess Selene. The one on the right (below) belonged to a Senator named Junius Bassus (b. 317 -- d.359 AD) depicts difference scenes from the Bible like Adam and Eve and Jesus entering Jerusalem. Do you see the visual similarities? Both sarcophagi are also carved from marble.

The mosaic below is perhaps the best example of how Christian and Pagan imagery and theologies were mixed. It used to be the floor in a wealthy Roman's villa and was found in Hinton St Mary, Dorset, England; it's the furthest north Roman mosaic ever found. The bottom panel depicts a beardless Christ with a chi-rho behind his head. (The chi-rho, XP, came from the first two letters of Christ's name in Latin. It's a Christian symbol that's still used to denote that a figure is Christ.) On either side of him is a pomegranate. Pomegranates were sacred to the goddess Persephone; Roman Pagan religion taught that she went down to the Underworld for half the year and then up to the mortal world for half the year, fueling the changing seasons. Persephone and Christ are both gods that went to the afterlife and then came back to bring new life to humans; it's not hard to see how they got conflated on this mosaic. In the corners around Christ there are four men. Their imagery is reminiscent of both the four Evangelists and the gods of the four winds, again doubling Pagan and Christian imagery. In the upper panel, there's a scene portraying the Pagan story of Bellerophon spearing the Chimæra while flying on Pegasus. That story is frequently understood to be the "Good triumphing over Evil" story archetype, much like the story of Christ triumphing over death/sin is. Whoever owned this villa literally mixing both the visual and theological elements of both Paganism and Christianity.

In the late 300s, the Emperors (who were all Christian now) started introducing laws that made it harder for Pagans to practice. They banned animal sacrifices eventually Christianity was officially declared the religion of Rome in the late 400s. However, the enforcement of these laws wasn't applied very well and people continued to practice Roman Paganism until the fall of the Empire.

But even after the fall of Rome, Roman Pagan imagery persisted in a Christian context. In the West, Emperor Charlemagne of the Holy Roman Empire, which was Christian, purposely copied the imagery of the Roman Emperors. He used equestrian statues and coinage of him wearing a Roman laurel to demonstrate his power. The top two images below are of the Chrisitan Emperor Charlemagne and the bottom two are of the Pagan Emperor Marcus Aurelius.

In the East, the early Byzantine Empire were still interested in Roman drapery and architecture. Below is Archangel Michael (left) as well as Emperor Justinian and Theodora (right) preparing the Eucharist. Both images display Roman architecture and drapery. Byzantine would eventually move away from Roman influences but in its early days, they were definitely inspired by it.

So, the answer everyone is looking for is NO.

The Christians didn't steal anything from the Pagans, they made an association. They produced art in the style that was popular and followed the artistic trends of the time. Christian and Pagan imagery was produced in the same medium and combined until Paganism was phased out over hundreds of years. They saw similar gods and iconography and combined them to make a message that was understandable to all audiences.

Happy Yule! Happy Winter Solstice!

Further readings:

The Deification of Roman Emperors (Chapter 4) - Invented History, Fabricated Power

BBC - History - Ancient History in depth: Roman Religion GalleryThe Paleochristian Art of the Roman Catacombs ~ Liturgical Arts Journal

Chi Rho - Wikipedia

History of Christianity - Wikipedia

Anglicanism: a Gift in Christ – Part 1: An Ancient Church

Constantine the Great - Wikipedia

Maxentius - Wikipedia

Sarcophagus of Junius Bassus - Wikipedia

Marble sarcophagus with the myth of Selene and Endymion | Roman | Severan | The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Smarthistory – Equestrian Statue of Marcus Aurelius

Persecution of pagans in the late Roman Empire - Wikipedia

Equestrian statuette of Charlemagne - Wikipedia

Smarthistory – San Vitale and the Justinian and Theodora Mosaics

ARH1000 Early Christian & Byzantine Art.pdf | Free Download

The image of Christ in Late Antiquity | Semantic Scholar

mosaic floor | British Museum