Pasts Imperfect (10.7.21)

Ancient Nubia, Repatriation, and More

Winged Isis pectoral found on the Mummy of Nubian King Amaninatakilebte (538-519 BCE). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA (Image via Wikimedia).

This week, Egyptologist Solange Ashby provides a starting point for the study of ancient Nubia, repatriating a sculpture to Nepal, a list of cultural heritage crimes committed by the Museum of the Bible, a free handbook for Latin everyday writing, and more

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Solange Ashby is an expert in Egyptian language and religion who specializes in Demotic and late period pharaonic religion, Nubian religion, Hathoric priestesses, Ethiopic/Ge’ez, and Kushite royal women. Her dissertation and then book, Calling Out to Isis: the Enduring Nubian Presence at Philae, explores Nubian involvement in the Cult of Isis. For those wishing to get started in the study of Ancient Nubia, Prof. Ashby has curated a short bibliography.

For stunning pictures, maps, and a gazetteer of Nubian sites, look to Ancient Nubia: African Kingdoms On The Nile, edited by Marjorie M. Fisher, Peter Lacovara, Salima Ikram and Sue D’Auria with photographs by Chester Higgins. For another Higgins photographic tour, see Sacred Nile, by Chester Higgins and Betsy Kissam, which brings readers on a path through the kingdoms of Kush (Kerma, Napata, Meroe) and then Egypt as connected to the waters of the Nile.

For those interested in religion, keeping going from Late Antiquity until the 15th century to discover how Nubian Christianity was fundamentally African, in Salim Faraji’s Roots of Nubian Christianity Uncovered: The Triumph of the Last Pharaoh. Finally, for the art of Nubia, see David Bindman and Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s The Image of the Black in Western Art, Volume I: From the Pharaohs to the Fall of the Roman Empire Vol. I (there are V total volumes of the series) and Arts of Ancient Nubia: MFA Highlights. You can search the Boston MFA’s Nubia art here. As per usual, this is but a start point to reading on the subject of Ancient Nubia.

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Seen in the Twitterverse

Following a provenance review, The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York announced that it will be returning a 10th-century CE sculpture of Shiva to Nepal. The work comes from a shrine in Kathmandu, called the Kankeswari Temple. See Zachary Small's piece for The New York Times:

Zachary Small @ZacharyHSmall

Repatriation rolls on at @metmuseum, which is returning a 10th century sculpture to Nepal today. Our @nytimesarts scoop.

nytimes.comMet Museum to Return Ancient Sculpture to NepalThree years after returning two stone sculptures, the museum has decided to give back another artwork to Nepal, this one thought to have been stolen from a temple in the Kathmandu Valley.

Since we are talking repatriation: according to Greek Culture Minister Lina Mendoni, UNESCO is now urging the return of the Parthenon Marbles to Greece.

At Slate, Erin Thompson, a professor of art crime, tallies up all the heritage crimes and items bought (and, ahem, returned) by the Museum of the Bible whilst engaged in their “Robby Hobby.”

Erin L. Thompson @artcrimeprof

I collected all the examples of cultural heritage crimes I could find involving the collections of the Museum of the Bible. There are... a lot.

slate.comThe Museum of the Bible Forgot That One CommandmentAnd no, it’s not “anti-Christian” to say so.

The work of Morag Kersel is pivotal to this research as well. Make sure to read her article in Museum Management and Curatorship, “Redemption for the Museum of the Bible? Artifacts, provenance, the display of Dead Sea Scrolls, and bias in the contact zone”.

At the SCS Blog, Christopher Stedman Parmenter discusses his dissertation on “Racialized Commodities: Thinking about Trade, Mobility, and Race in the Archaic Mediterranean”.

Over at the ERC-funded project LatinNow, the team is finishing the Manual of Roman Everyday Writing for digital publication. Volume II, by Anna Willi, is already out and open access: Writing Equipment, Manual of Roman Everyday Writing Vol. 2. Volume I, by Alex Mullen and Alan Bowman will be out soon. Until then, they now have a series of videos introducing epigraphers to Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI) in the study of inscriptions.

LatinNow @LatinNowERC

We've made some videos on RTI for our Open Access Manual of Roman Everyday Writing Vol 1 Scripts and texts, which is coming very soon. You can see the introductory videos here on our blog: latinnow.eu/2021/09/30/rea…

There is a new open access book on Ancient Glass of South Asia. Editors Alok Kumar Kanungo and Laure Dussubieux provide a thorough introduction and review of ancient glass from South Asia. Of particular note for those interested in trade routes in antiquity is the chapter by Joanna Then-Obłuska on “Indian Glass Beads in Northeast Africa Between the First and Sixth Centuries CE”, which maintains that beads are an important trace artifact for reconstructing commerce.

Lectures we’d attend

Today at 5:30 pm ET, Stephanie McCarter is speaking about Ovid, feminism, & translation prior to the release of her new translation of the Metamorphoses. Zoom on in here.

Mark Letteney and Matthew Larsen will be speaking on late antique incarceration next week for the University of Birmingham. Get online tickets here.

Mark Letteney @mdlett

Next Wednesday, @MatthewDCLarsen and I will speak at the University of Birmingham on the topic of our forthcoming book. 5PM Europe/4PM UK/11AM NY/8AM LA. Registration here:

eventbrite.co.ukMatthew Larsen and Mark Letteney: Seeing Incarceration in AntiquitySeeing Incarceration in Antiquity: Two Case Studies

New Online Journal Issues curated by @YaleClassicsLib

Acta Classica Vol. 64 (2021)
NB: Michael Lambert “Anthropology, comparative studies, and the Classics: Receptions of the 'savage' in metropole and periphery”
Studies in Late Antiquity Vol. 5, No. 3 (Fall 2021 ) Entanglements of Religion and Empire
Digital Scholarship in the Humanities Vol. 36, No. 2 (June 2021)
Antiquity Vol. 95, Iss. 383 (October 2021)
NB: “The earliest Chinese ceramics in Europe?” by Alejandra Gutiérrez, et al.
Cuadernos de Filología Clásica. Estudios Latinos Vol. 41, No. 1 (2021) #openaccess
Early Christianity Vol. 12, No. 3 (2021)
Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus Vol. 19, No. 2 (2021)
Revue de philologie, de littérature et d'histoire anciennes Vol. 93, No. 2 (2019)
American Journal of Philology Vol. 142, No. 3 (Fall 2021)
NB: “Dissecting a Forgery: Petronius, Dante, and the Incas” by Erika Valdivieso
James Uden wins AJP best article prize for "The Margins of Satire: Suetonius, Satura, and Scholarly Outsiders in Ancient Rome," AJP 141.4 (Winter 2020): 575–601

Thanks for reading and see you next week!