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

hotwheelsearl · Jun 3, 2022

GinoLR said: ↑

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 :
View attachment 1485096

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.

View attachment 1485095

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.
Click to expand...

sometimes, it seems, the best solution is to slide things into your own pocket.

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robinjojo · Jun 3, 2022

I think that we need to be accountable to ourselves and to do what is right. After all, we can control how we behave and react even when we have no control over what others do, which is true for the vast majority of our encounters and experiences, at least in my case.

I am starting to read Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, and I find it very illuminating and insightful, often validating my view of life, but also shedding new light on what I thought of as Stoicism.

cmezner · Sep 14, 2023

Posted this in a different thread and @lordmarcovan suggested to post it here in this thread:

My latest acquisition: a ring for my husband

"Roman Bronze Ring with Carnelian Intaglio of Athena, ca. 2nd Century AD. The goddess, helmeted and draped, turned to the right, is holding a spear in her left hand and a shield (on the ground)."

Picture courtesy HJB:

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

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