LA SCIENCE!! Center (Part 2)
Jan. 9th, 2013 03:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tanarillAfter the Endeavour, it was time for Cleopatra, Queen of De Nile. Actually, aside from that thing where her religion said she was the mortal avatar of the goddess Isis, she seemed actually to have been pretty realistic in her views. She just took a big gamble in the whole war of succession following Caesar's death, and unfortunately she gambled on the wrong side.
Actually, her entire career was based on big gambles, starting with being declared pharaoh at all. The Egyptians didn't have female monarchs, period. (Okay, there was that one time Hatshepsut declared herself to be a man, and despite that huge breach of logic, ruled quite well. But even then the whole country maintained a polite fiction that she didn't have boobs for two decades.) Anyway. When Cleopatra's father died, the male heir was eleven years old. He was declared pharaoh, and Cleopatra his queen.
This went about as well as you might expect, considering that she was older, cleverer, literate in two languages, conversationally fluent in another three, and had charisma out the wazoo. In short order, she 'invited' Caesar, as a 'neutral' third party, to come decide who was going to be the king. Also of note: she was quite aware that the Egyptian armies could not hope to stand against the Roman legions if they should invade. She was also aware that an army marches on its stomach - and Egypt was the only consistently fertile land on the Mediterranean basin. Undoubtedly, it was at first a purely political allaince, in which Cleopatra got Egpyt and Rome got to trade for all of that excess wheat.
These are practical everyday grain-processing items. The mortar and pestle are fairly self explanatory. The other thing is another type of mortal - specially shaped so you could roll the carved pestle like a rolling pin to grind grain. Both of these are strictly small-scale, probably used by a single household. They had <i>massive</i> mills for large-scale grain processing. The result was wheat, for making bread.
Amphorae. These were made by hand, but in an assembly-line setup so a factory could turn out hundreds of these. They were shaped so that they'd stack, the long bottom-y bit sticking in the gaps between jars in the layer below. We know this because of recovered Roman-era merchant ships found in the coastal Mediterranean waters. These were probably used not for wine, but for olive oil, which was and still is a staple of most Mediterranean diets. Egypt did not have many olive groves - those belonged to Greece at this time, and later production shifted into Iberia (modern Spain). This is what the Romans were using to pay for all that wheat.
The situation got complicated when Cleopatra had Cesarion. In Egypt, there definitely had been a stigma associated with foreigners - but I doubt it lasted very long after the Ptolemies took over the country, three hundred years earlier. So from the Egyptians' point-of-view, Cesarion was totally the rightful heir. The Romans . . . did have a stigma against foreigners. To put it mildly. As far as they were concerned, Cesarion was a bastard son of a pretty bad usurper (remember, up until Cesar there had been a competition among Imperators to see who could resolve the crisis and turn power back over to the Senate fastest. The record at that time was measured in days). They did not want a half-foreign bastard son of a woman with the gall to call herself queen on the imperial throne, no way! But they were fine with his existence, as long as he stayed in Egypt with his weird mother.
Also, there was that wacko Egyptian religion. The Romans hadn't quite gotten around to the part where they deified dead emperors; there was only one thus far. This bit where he was wandering around in Egypt participating in pagan rites where he didn't just dress up as a god, but was actually supposed to be said god, did not sit well with them. Calling yourself a god incarnated might be fine there, but the Romans wanted no part of it, thank you very much.
This is a set of ritual tools. The ladle-y type thing is an incense pan; the crown-y thing is an incense burner. The other diskish thing was probably a mirror; when polished, it would have been bright and shiny, representative of the sun disk.
A verry blurry image of a ritual hat. It has cow-horns and flowers on top, so the wearer was probably meant to be Hathor during festivals. Also, have a sore neck after.
Finally, there were quite a few culture clashes. In Egypt, wealthy people showed it off in gaudy, ostentatious displays. In Rome, wealthy people showed it off by wearing Tyrian purple. Throwing bacchanalia where you actually put pearls in you wine and then drank the whole thing was more than a little gauche. Cleopatra reportedly did this at a party.
Cleopatra-era jewelry. It's not classic Egyptian faience - you can definitely see Greek and Roman influences. The gems are probably carnelian. It is nice jewelry, if a little gaudy. I'd wear it.
Still, the whole situation held until Caesar was assassinated. Then suddenly Ceasarion's very existence was a threat - to Octavian Augustus, Ceasar's legally declared heir. It wouldn't have been, except that Octavian was not Caesar's son, but his nephew; and so it could be argued that Cesarion had a better claim to inherit. Mark Antony certainly meant to argue so. In reality, had he succeeded, Cesarion would probably have lasted just long enough for Antony to secure his claim to rulership as 'regent' for the then-child.
Cleopatra was, apparently, kind of a mama bear in this sense. So, probably in order to make sure he didn't use and then discard his alliance with Cleopatra, she seduced him. Or they seduced each other. Antony was definitely married to someone else at the time, and everyone knew it, so . . . Whatever. It's one thing to discard the weird foreign queen; quite another to discard the mother of your children, for whom you definitely have certain feelings. The children were twins Cleopatra Selene and Alexander Helios, followed by a younger brother, Ptolemy Philadelphius. Had they won, Antony probably still would have killed Cesarion, or at least had him killed. Even so, Cleopatra would have had to have lived with it, because two of her three sons in direct line for the imperial throne in Rome, and a daughter probably married to a powerful senator, is better than having all four of her kids dead.
Like I said. Pragmatic.
But Antony lost, and due to false information he got from Octavian's spies, thought Cleopatra was dead as well. In Rome at the time, it was considered more honorable to commit suicide than be taken prisoner to stand trial in a kangaroo court, so that is what Antony did. Cleopatra lived to be taken prisoner, and was said to have killed herself with an asp. The whole asp-biting thing is somewhat suspect, since she was a strong-willed independent woman, and queen in her own right. Although she had financed Antony's campaign, she hadn't committed Egyptian troops; and now that Rome had spent itself in a civil war, the smaller army probably could have defended the country.
Octavian was also pragmatic, though, so Cleopatra definitely ended up dead in short order. He also had Cesarion killed, thus ending any possible dispute over Ceasar's successor. But he was not a monster, and sent Cleopatra's other children back to Rome, where his wife raised them.
So ends the history lesson.
For reasons totally unrelated to any of this, shortly after Cleoptra's death, a pretty big earthquake and accompanying tsunami sank half of Alexandria. Alexandria was a pretty low-lying port in the Nile delta anyway, and building a city on thixatropic silt is generally a bad idea. But it turned out to be fortunate, because underwater is generally a pretty calm place. It was especially calm for the Egyptian statues during the early Christian years, when anything vaguely pagan was torn down and ground to gravel.
Most of the artifacts in this exhibit were recovered from the Bay of Alexandria, where much of Cleopatra's Alexandria still lies buried in the shallow water. The metal has corroded, and even the stone is pocked and pitted as a result of two thousand years underwater. On the other hand, these objects survived.
Statues! These were probably official statues of a Ptolomeic pharaoh and his wife, not necessarily Cleopatra and her brother Ptolemy. These are big; standing right next to her, the top of my head would probably be about even with her fingertips. They are beautiful rose granite.
A sphinx. It is about the size of a coffee table. Probably used to line a boulevard on the way into a temple or the palace, as it was a sign or royal authority and protection for evil spirits.
A headless lady. This has the classic Egyptian pose, but shows Greek influences in the wonderfully carved diaphanous dress, and the realistic abdominal musculature. Also, this is probably meant to be Cleopatra, so don't believe this is what she actually looked like.
Another (probable) Cleopatra statue, this time done in fancy native Egyptian style. She'd more stylized here, but shown with an (expensive) pleated gown and (expensive) braided wig, and looking a lot like Isis. Note that she has a more motherly figure, because Isis was the divine mother. She's missing her hat, which was probably carved as a separate piece. Actual Cleopatra did not look like this, either.
Random alabaster cup. It is this enough that you could float a wick inside and use it like a lamp. I just liked the striations.
Mirror! This one was probably used by some wealthy Egyptian to do their makeup. Since all Egyptians wore kohl at the least (it was necessary to gut down on sun glare) its owner was quite possibly male.
Home objects. A metal pitcher, a statuette of Isis, and an incense-burner. These belonged to a Wealthy Person; no one else would have been wasting metal for making a jug, and no one else could have afforded the expensive imported incense.
And thus we end our sojourn in Egypt. I hope you enjoyed my storylesson, and that portion of the pictures that cam out okay.
Actually, her entire career was based on big gambles, starting with being declared pharaoh at all. The Egyptians didn't have female monarchs, period. (Okay, there was that one time Hatshepsut declared herself to be a man, and despite that huge breach of logic, ruled quite well. But even then the whole country maintained a polite fiction that she didn't have boobs for two decades.) Anyway. When Cleopatra's father died, the male heir was eleven years old. He was declared pharaoh, and Cleopatra his queen.
This went about as well as you might expect, considering that she was older, cleverer, literate in two languages, conversationally fluent in another three, and had charisma out the wazoo. In short order, she 'invited' Caesar, as a 'neutral' third party, to come decide who was going to be the king. Also of note: she was quite aware that the Egyptian armies could not hope to stand against the Roman legions if they should invade. She was also aware that an army marches on its stomach - and Egypt was the only consistently fertile land on the Mediterranean basin. Undoubtedly, it was at first a purely political allaince, in which Cleopatra got Egpyt and Rome got to trade for all of that excess wheat.
These are practical everyday grain-processing items. The mortar and pestle are fairly self explanatory. The other thing is another type of mortal - specially shaped so you could roll the carved pestle like a rolling pin to grind grain. Both of these are strictly small-scale, probably used by a single household. They had <i>massive</i> mills for large-scale grain processing. The result was wheat, for making bread.
Amphorae. These were made by hand, but in an assembly-line setup so a factory could turn out hundreds of these. They were shaped so that they'd stack, the long bottom-y bit sticking in the gaps between jars in the layer below. We know this because of recovered Roman-era merchant ships found in the coastal Mediterranean waters. These were probably used not for wine, but for olive oil, which was and still is a staple of most Mediterranean diets. Egypt did not have many olive groves - those belonged to Greece at this time, and later production shifted into Iberia (modern Spain). This is what the Romans were using to pay for all that wheat.
The situation got complicated when Cleopatra had Cesarion. In Egypt, there definitely had been a stigma associated with foreigners - but I doubt it lasted very long after the Ptolemies took over the country, three hundred years earlier. So from the Egyptians' point-of-view, Cesarion was totally the rightful heir. The Romans . . . did have a stigma against foreigners. To put it mildly. As far as they were concerned, Cesarion was a bastard son of a pretty bad usurper (remember, up until Cesar there had been a competition among Imperators to see who could resolve the crisis and turn power back over to the Senate fastest. The record at that time was measured in days). They did not want a half-foreign bastard son of a woman with the gall to call herself queen on the imperial throne, no way! But they were fine with his existence, as long as he stayed in Egypt with his weird mother.
Also, there was that wacko Egyptian religion. The Romans hadn't quite gotten around to the part where they deified dead emperors; there was only one thus far. This bit where he was wandering around in Egypt participating in pagan rites where he didn't just dress up as a god, but was actually supposed to be said god, did not sit well with them. Calling yourself a god incarnated might be fine there, but the Romans wanted no part of it, thank you very much.
This is a set of ritual tools. The ladle-y type thing is an incense pan; the crown-y thing is an incense burner. The other diskish thing was probably a mirror; when polished, it would have been bright and shiny, representative of the sun disk.
A verry blurry image of a ritual hat. It has cow-horns and flowers on top, so the wearer was probably meant to be Hathor during festivals. Also, have a sore neck after.
Finally, there were quite a few culture clashes. In Egypt, wealthy people showed it off in gaudy, ostentatious displays. In Rome, wealthy people showed it off by wearing Tyrian purple. Throwing bacchanalia where you actually put pearls in you wine and then drank the whole thing was more than a little gauche. Cleopatra reportedly did this at a party.
Cleopatra-era jewelry. It's not classic Egyptian faience - you can definitely see Greek and Roman influences. The gems are probably carnelian. It is nice jewelry, if a little gaudy. I'd wear it.
Still, the whole situation held until Caesar was assassinated. Then suddenly Ceasarion's very existence was a threat - to Octavian Augustus, Ceasar's legally declared heir. It wouldn't have been, except that Octavian was not Caesar's son, but his nephew; and so it could be argued that Cesarion had a better claim to inherit. Mark Antony certainly meant to argue so. In reality, had he succeeded, Cesarion would probably have lasted just long enough for Antony to secure his claim to rulership as 'regent' for the then-child.
Cleopatra was, apparently, kind of a mama bear in this sense. So, probably in order to make sure he didn't use and then discard his alliance with Cleopatra, she seduced him. Or they seduced each other. Antony was definitely married to someone else at the time, and everyone knew it, so . . . Whatever. It's one thing to discard the weird foreign queen; quite another to discard the mother of your children, for whom you definitely have certain feelings. The children were twins Cleopatra Selene and Alexander Helios, followed by a younger brother, Ptolemy Philadelphius. Had they won, Antony probably still would have killed Cesarion, or at least had him killed. Even so, Cleopatra would have had to have lived with it, because two of her three sons in direct line for the imperial throne in Rome, and a daughter probably married to a powerful senator, is better than having all four of her kids dead.
Like I said. Pragmatic.
But Antony lost, and due to false information he got from Octavian's spies, thought Cleopatra was dead as well. In Rome at the time, it was considered more honorable to commit suicide than be taken prisoner to stand trial in a kangaroo court, so that is what Antony did. Cleopatra lived to be taken prisoner, and was said to have killed herself with an asp. The whole asp-biting thing is somewhat suspect, since she was a strong-willed independent woman, and queen in her own right. Although she had financed Antony's campaign, she hadn't committed Egyptian troops; and now that Rome had spent itself in a civil war, the smaller army probably could have defended the country.
Octavian was also pragmatic, though, so Cleopatra definitely ended up dead in short order. He also had Cesarion killed, thus ending any possible dispute over Ceasar's successor. But he was not a monster, and sent Cleopatra's other children back to Rome, where his wife raised them.
So ends the history lesson.
For reasons totally unrelated to any of this, shortly after Cleoptra's death, a pretty big earthquake and accompanying tsunami sank half of Alexandria. Alexandria was a pretty low-lying port in the Nile delta anyway, and building a city on thixatropic silt is generally a bad idea. But it turned out to be fortunate, because underwater is generally a pretty calm place. It was especially calm for the Egyptian statues during the early Christian years, when anything vaguely pagan was torn down and ground to gravel.
Most of the artifacts in this exhibit were recovered from the Bay of Alexandria, where much of Cleopatra's Alexandria still lies buried in the shallow water. The metal has corroded, and even the stone is pocked and pitted as a result of two thousand years underwater. On the other hand, these objects survived.
Statues! These were probably official statues of a Ptolomeic pharaoh and his wife, not necessarily Cleopatra and her brother Ptolemy. These are big; standing right next to her, the top of my head would probably be about even with her fingertips. They are beautiful rose granite.
A sphinx. It is about the size of a coffee table. Probably used to line a boulevard on the way into a temple or the palace, as it was a sign or royal authority and protection for evil spirits.
A headless lady. This has the classic Egyptian pose, but shows Greek influences in the wonderfully carved diaphanous dress, and the realistic abdominal musculature. Also, this is probably meant to be Cleopatra, so don't believe this is what she actually looked like.
Another (probable) Cleopatra statue, this time done in fancy native Egyptian style. She'd more stylized here, but shown with an (expensive) pleated gown and (expensive) braided wig, and looking a lot like Isis. Note that she has a more motherly figure, because Isis was the divine mother. She's missing her hat, which was probably carved as a separate piece. Actual Cleopatra did not look like this, either.
Random alabaster cup. It is this enough that you could float a wick inside and use it like a lamp. I just liked the striations.
Mirror! This one was probably used by some wealthy Egyptian to do their makeup. Since all Egyptians wore kohl at the least (it was necessary to gut down on sun glare) its owner was quite possibly male.
Home objects. A metal pitcher, a statuette of Isis, and an incense-burner. These belonged to a Wealthy Person; no one else would have been wasting metal for making a jug, and no one else could have afforded the expensive imported incense.
And thus we end our sojourn in Egypt. I hope you enjoyed my storylesson, and that portion of the pictures that cam out okay.
