Henry P. Colburn

The publishing house of Messrs. Springer and Company proudly present for your consideration in their esteemed periodical Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences (Volume 17) “Sasanian and early Islamic copper-base metalworking at Qasr-e Abu Nasr, south-central Iran,” by Drs. Omid Oudbashi, Federico Carò and my humble self, containing the results of scientific analyses of thirty-three metal objects excavated at Qasr-e Abu Nasr in Iran by the stout fellows of the Persian Expedition of the Metropolitan Museum of Art between 1932 and 1935 and since that time in the keeping of the same institution, including splint armor with scales of brass, a lamp stand of a type widely known in the Mediterranean but infrequently discovered through excavation, and a most curious and unusual piece of Sasanian pewter. Available in full on this Internet web-site.

In honor a holiday that I never knew existed, I wish to share a picture of a toilet. But not just any toilet; it’s an ancient toilet from Teotihuacán, probably dating to about 250 CE.

I know next to nothing about Teotihuacán, but I’ve had to brush up on it because I’m lecturing about ancient Mesoamerica tomorrow (I’m a substitute teacher in a global history course). As I understand, this particular commode was part of an extensive set of rather nice apartment complexes constructed as part of an urban renewal project of some kind. It certainly points to an organized bureaucracy, perhaps even a sort of nascent public health department, to recognize the value of proper bathroom facilities in a city that was at point as large as 80,000 people.

Of course, it also reminds me of a cautionary tale about toilets that appears in Aelian’s On the Characteristics of Animals (13.6). According to Aelian, a giant octopus swam up a sewer in Puteoli and entered a house where some Iberian merchants were storing pickled fish, which the octopus promptly devoured. So there are drawbacks to plumbing as well. And I think we can all agree that the moral of this story is to always check your toilet for octopuses.

Almost ten years ago Anna Garvey came up with a term that actually describes my generation, wedged between the Gen-Xers and the Millennials: the Oregon Trail Generation.

I knew all about caulking my digital wagon and hunting bears with the arrow keys, and I even asked my doctor how one gets dysentery. Imagine my surprise, then, when I went to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford last week, and discovered that the Conestoga wagon was not in fact the product of American ingenuity and pioneer spirit, but rather a feature of Bronze Age Syria:

I can only assume this is what the Amorites used to migrate into southern Mesopotamia.

Next month I’ll be giving a paper entitled “Greek Style and the Problem of Parthian Art” at the conference Parthian Art and the Graeco-Roman World, the poster for which is below. (I’m very impressed with myself that I managed to put a pdf in this post.)

The conference is in honor Vesta Sarkhosh Curtis, whose scholarship on Parthian art and coins especially has been essential to my own. As I have only recently come to this topic (in the last decade), I have been dependent on the foundations she (and other scholars, of course) has laid. The program looks very interesting, and I am looking forward to it a great deal, not least because it will be my first ever visit to Oxford.

As of yesterday, one of my stable of email accounts is no more: hpc4476@nyu.edu. I haven’t taught there in a while, so I am hardly surprised. Never fear, though; my Michigan, Cooper Union, Hofstra and Bard emails all still function, and I will soon have another, from Baruch College, because this fall I am teaching in the history department there. In fact, I’ve already started teaching there, but my new email hasn’t caught up with me yet. It is, sadly, another example of how teaching as an adjunct can be far more difficult than teaching as a fulltime (if only temporary) faculty member: you tend to fall through the cracks of college administration. It’s a nuisance to be sure, but I can handle it. The ones who really suffer are the students.

Today is a special day. Not just because there is a tornado warning here in northern New Jersey, but because at long last a very hefty volume entitled In Search of Cultural Identities in West and Central Asia: A Festschrift for Prudence Oliver Harper, edited by Betty Hensellek, Judith Lerner and me, now sits on my overflow desk/dining room table.

When I say the book is hefty, I mean it. Its surface area is equal to three and one-third Loeb volumes (in this case, Herodotus), and it is more than one Loeb thick (Herodotus again). I estimate that it weighs as much as ten Loebs (Herodotus + Pausanias + Thucydides vol. 1).

It is, in other words, a hefty work of scholarship! But, of course, that has as much to do with the wonderful contributions as it does the book’s physical properties. As a great admirer of Prudence Harper, I am honored to have been part of the editorial team for this volume.

My latest publication Parthian art, that is, has just been published by Brepols in an open access volume entitled Palmyra in Perspective, edited by the indefatigable Rubina Raja. It stems from a conference in Copenhagen back in 2022, at which we were asked to look at Palmyra from our own perspective, in my case a) as someone who knows nothing about it, and b) as an expert on ancient Iranian art. My contribution is called ‘Palmyra and the Problem of Parthian Art’ (not very original, I know), and in it I argue that some people at Palmyra made decisions about material culture that reflected Parthian identities (while not excluding simultaneous other identities, as Palmyerenes, for example).

This sourpuss, for example, looks mighty Palmyrene, with his reclining banquet, giant hands, stubby-legged attendants and Lego-man helmet hair. But at the same time he is wearing trousers, which in Parthian context indicate Parthian or Iranian identity. So he has found a way to depict himself that captured some of the complexity of his identity. Or so I think, anyway.

This is part of my effort to find Parthian art all over the place, including in places that were never ruled by the Parthians, so that maybe some day I’ll be able to explain what Parthian art is.

For a number of years I have carried this handy item with my lunch:

Technically, it’s not actually a spork because it’s fork and spoon ends are on different sides rather than combined as is customary. This is really only when I eat an especially messy curry (is there any other kind?) with the fork, and then have to switch to the spoon for my yogurt.

But this post isn’t about me. No, it’s about my pseudo-spork’s distant ancestor, whose existent I recently learned of. I have been working (after much procrastination) on a follow-up study to my paper (co-authored with Omid Oudbashi and Federico Carò) on the coins from Qasr-e Abu Nasr, near modern Shiraz, Iran, which were excavated by the Met in the 1930s. This study is on other bronzes from the site, of which the Met has a small selection, with the rest having gone to Tehran as a result of the partage agreement. One of these spoons in Tehran, pictured in a report on the excavations in the Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin (29/12, December, 1934, 19, fig. 32), appears to have the same double function as mine:

This implement probably dates to the Sasanian era (3rd-7th century CE). What’s especially interesting to me is the fact that utensils like forks and spoons were rare in antiquity; in fact, they’re a fairly modern phenomenon. Most people ate with their hands. So whoever invented this thing was an unsung pioneer in the world of eating, whose enormous contribution is still with us today.

This morning I read in the New York Times about the discovery of some previously unknown murals in Pompeii. This is exciting, of course, and not surprisingly I was especially drawn to this painting of Helen and Paris, who have been helpfully labeled in Greek:

The journalist writing about this story identified the other two figures as Helen’s handmaiden and “a despondent-looking dog.”

I must object to this characterization. Facial expresses are not universal. They do not always have consistent meanings across different cultures, let alone different species. To claim that this dog is despondent is to anthropomorphize it. I read this dog’s mood quite differently. To me, it appears to be alert, yet relaxed, a posture discernible in other images of dogs, such as this Roman bronze statuette in the Met:

Or in this early 21st century CE image of a dog in my living room, who, if memory serves, had only recently woken up:

His tongue is hanging out of his mouth because it dries out when he’s asleep and gets stuck that way, at least until he tries to lick something. Anyway, all this is to say that we must take species into account when interpreting ancient (and modern) facial expressions in any medium.

I saw this ostracon at the Brooklyn Museum today:

According to the label, it dates to the late New Kingdom, and depicts a mouse seated on a chair holding a flower and a bowl, while a cat fans it, and offers it a cooked goose and a napkin (not bad for someone without opposable thumbs). The label further suggests that this is a satire on Ramesside society, or perhaps reflects a now-lost folktale.

These are both quite possible, of course, but I would like to offer a third interpretation: this is the work of a bored schoolboy who cannot face the prospect of copying out The Tale of Sinuhe yet again.