Featured Ancient ... but not a coin! Artifacts thread! Post 'em!

A mere shard I found on the ground when hiking in Greece, in Eretria. Attic red figures pottery, 5th c. BC. The fragment represents an ephebe wearing a chlamys.


Another pottery shard. This one I bought it in Tunisia when I was a teen. African late Roman red slip pottery, dated 340-440 AD. It represents the sacrifice of Abraham.

 

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You mean the first one was just sitting on the surface? I wonder what happened to bring it there: I doubt that it sat on the ground without anyone noticing for 2,500 years! I am surprised that one is allowed to keep such things in Greece.

 

It was under trees, in the early seventies, in the hills overlooking Eretria, there were stones on the path and also small pottery shards. I just stopped to turn some of them on the ground, some were just orange, some had a side painted black, some had traces of designs like palmettes but I remember I thought they did not seem to belong to the same pottery. And there was this one ! What should I have done? I confess I put it in my pocket... This is illegal, I know very well it is, but I did it. I just could not leave it on the ground. For my penitence I learnt the first verses of the Iliad, I am now able to recite them in Greek like Boris Johnson... Menin aeide thea peleaideos akhileos oulomenen etc...

 

From here, it looks as if we're on the same paragraph of the same page.
...Until someone wants to say anything better.

 

The bracelet weighs nearly 25 g. I didn't expect it to be so old (Celtic). Thanks for your kind comments and IDing. Hope it's valuable anyway. Cheers.

 

The jug looks Syrian, Roman or Byzantine period. I suppose the bracelet, if it is silver, has the same kind of Levantine provenance. Maybe it is celtic, I don't know, but there are silver bracelets like this one in the Middle-East. And they can be early modern.

 

Thanks for that, @GinoLR. I had no idea similar bracelets existed anywhere else.

 

Donna I could take you to at least 50 different places in Spain where you can find the red type Roman pottery shown in the second image and all on the ground, its not that uncommon. Now finding it with something detailed is a little harder.

 

Ancient, they say... Well, it's not so ancient, but it is African and historical - and, you know, in Africa, traditional craftsmanship looks very old after a few decades.


It is a bronze bell from Chad, made with the lost wax technique. There is a clapper inside, the bell rings when you shake it. It's called a "digol". There are inscriptions in relief : "France libre" (Free France) and "18 Juin 1940 / 8 Mai 1945".

It represents the General De Gaulle raising arms (he loved to do this). The dates are 18 June 1940, the day after Marshall Pétain surrendered to Germany, when De Gaulle aired a speech from London on the BBC calling French servicemen to join him and fight on. 8 May 1945 is the day when Germany surrendered. Chad, then a French colony, was the first territory to pledge allegiance to De Gaulle on 26 August 1940, and launched the first French counter-attack led by General Leclerc against Italy in Libya in January 1941. Most of Leclerc's modest column (a few hundred men) were Chadian soldiers.



This "digol" bell was probably made in the late 1940s (after 1945 of course) or in the 1950s. I have seen recent specimens, but more schematic and without inscriptions. I have been told (I don't know if it's true) that these bells are or were used in some animist ritual (Chadians are supposed to be Muslims or Christians but Animism is deeply rooted in both communities).

 

You missed one @GinoLR

 

@GinoLR, thanks for all of this great stuff. Very (may I say, in a broader context; beyond my skin color, and descent, if you go back far enough) enlightening.

 

I don't think it's in any of my books but I found an overview of the types in this guide to finger rings: https://finds.org.uk/counties/finds...ifications_and_sub-classifications_to_be_used

 

This must be a page of a famous fake, a bronze codex allegedly from Jordan. The inscriptions mean nothing. On other pages they were copied from ancient inscriptions which are in museums.

 

This is a very small copper vessel that I have owned since winning it in a Sedwick auction in 2017.

I cannot place a date on it, but it might be Incan. It is from Peru, so it might also be from another indigenous group. The style is in the grotesque, with the surface a reddish brown patina and green deposits.

I still need to do more research....

The vessel weighs 31.07 grams and it is 34.92mm inches tall.

 

Just got this original bronze piece weighing 33.5 g. It represents a person riding a camel. Hope you enjoy it.

 

Here it is.

 

Nice! Liking it a lot. What can be known about when and where it's from?

 

It was found recently with the following carved stone. Coins were also found. They are strange. I got two of them and shall post them today for identification

 

A strange clay statuette from Chad

Roughly 25 years ago I was in Chad for some business with a local university. One day, a group of professors proposed to show me the "Sao mounds" north of N'djamena. They are low clay mounds made of debris of adobe ancient villages or towns, exactly like the "tells" in the Middle-East. But unlike in the Middle-East, very few archaeological research has been undertaken there. Only two of these mounds had been dug in the 1940s and 1960s, but there are dozens others nearby. All are entirely covered with pottery shards.

When I say entirely covered, here is what it looks like :


When visiting one of these mounds, I noticed something different half-buried among the shards. We took it, it was a 20 cm baked clay statuette. I did some research about it: it is a typical "Sao" statuette much like some others that had been excavated from a nearby mound c. 1948 and are now in the Quai Branly Museum in Paris. Archaeologists think they date back to the 9th-15th c. "Sao" means nothing historical, it is just a popular local term for "ancient", before islamisation (in the 16th c.).

I took 2 pictures of it and the day after I went to the local national museum. They used to have a lot of "Sao" pottery and clay figurines and statuettes, but nearly all had been looted during civil wars and unrest in the 1970s or 1980s. I met with a curator and gave him this statuette, with all its whereabouts (where precisely it was found, the known parallels, etc.). He looked at me as if I was nuts but accepted it, thanked me, etc.

A few years after I went back in N'djamena. I wanted to see this statuette, but no trace of it. I was told the curator I had met had retired and now lived in some remote village very far from there. No trace of this artefact in the registers. Vanished. Maybe someday it will resurface in some collection or auction...

Here are pics of this lost statuette.



I could look down on Third World ordinary corruption... But when I read that the very former director of the Louvre Museum in Paris has been accused of antiquities trafficking those last days, and that the Metropolitan Museum in New York is involved too, I feel truly embarrassed.