Henry P. Colburn

Just one talking head, actually: mine. Next month I’ll be giving three talks. The first (at Bryn Mawr on March 3) and third (at Ohio State on March 20) are on the Tell el-Maskhuta hoard. The hoard has been a pet project of mine for the last year, though thanks to my heavy teaching load and my refusal to turn down any invitation to write anything, I’ve not been able to work on it very steadily. Nevertheless, I now have a draft catalog of the hoard, as well as preliminary discussions of its deposition and discovery. I don’t have any articulated conclusions about the hoard yet, but I’ve already formulated a few in my head, which means it’s definitely time to take this show on the road.

My second talk (on March 6) will be at the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters in Copenhagen as part of the conference ‘Carving the Individual: Self-Representations in Rock-Cut Monuments in the Parthian, Roman, and Sasanian Near East (2nd c. BCE-3rd c. CE).’ As you may have surmised, I’ll be talking about Arsacid rock reliefs. I’m a little diffident about this topic, in no small part because these reliefs are difficult to make sense of. Rather than identifying specific individuals, I’ll focus instead on patterns, which may attest to shared concerns or elements of identity across the western Arsacid Empire.

Of course, the real reason I’m going to Denmark is the bread. I will lecture on any topic if it will get me to some Danish bread.

I just finished reading Roberta Mazza’s new book, Stolen Fragments: Black Markets, Bad Faith, and the Illicit Trade in Ancient Artefacts (Redwood Press, 2024), which she modestly describes as “a personal memoir about my profession and how it does a dangerous dance with collectors, dealers, auction houses, criminals, and those walking a fine line between what’s legal and what’s not” (7). It is riveting. Many a night I fought valiantly against the effects of my somniferous medications in order to read more about the sordid and often stupid actions of the Green family and the precipitous downfall of Dirk Obbink, previously renowned for his papyrological scholarship and funny name.

The merits of this book are numerous; I list some of them below in no particular order:

• One of the most important features of the book is the discussion of how dealers and collectors forge or otherwise obfuscate provenance. While the specific techniques described are relevant only to papyrus, the methodologies and aims surely apply to all antiquities. It makes it nigh on impossible to take any undocumented statement of provenance seriously.
• The chapter on Grenfell and Hunt and the origins of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri is a lucid description of late 19^th century archaeology and the colonialist and Eurocentric attitudes that informed it. I would readily assign this to students if I were ever to teach a class on papyri.
• Prof. Mazza exhibits real sympathy for many of her characters, including some embroiled in the Hobby Lobby scandal. The real villains of the piece are Obbink, Scott Carroll, Christie’s and the papyrus dealers on eBay. The Museum of the Bible is depicted as out of its depth rather than sinister, although Steve Green comes across (rightly in my view) as an evangelical huckster, for whom faith is a gateway to profit. She also excoriates her “academic colleagues who are still explaining that they publish unprovenanced and illegal papyri and other manuscripts ‘because scholarship comes first'” because “you are publishing undocumented, when not patently illegal, antiquities not for the sake of scholarship but in order to get your name out there” (216).
• The book is free of innuendo and ad hominem attacks. Prof. Mazza sticks to facts she can verify (there are nineteen pages of endnotes); when she makes assumptions, she is clear about them and they are very reasonable.
• I feel like I learned something about Prof. Mazza as a person, even though she is not the focus of the book. I have never met her personally (I’m sure we have some friends in common, though). I think I’d like her.

If I had written this book (and, to be clear, I couldn’t have), I would have used a title like The Papyrus Chase or The Great Gospel Robbery or The Taking of Mark 1-7. But despite this, I recommend this book unreservedly!

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 of 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.