Military History Photo Friday: Sixteenth Century Ivory Powder Horns

Sometimes even the most common objects can be turned into works of art. Here are some powder horns from the sixteenth century, intricately carved in ivory. This was the age of wheellock firearms, and these powder horns, used to hold gunpowder, would have been carried by the nobility on hunting expeditions. Common soldiers had to settle for more basic models.

I discovered these beauties at the Museo Lazaro Galdiano here in Madrid, the same place I saw that amazing roll top desk from my last post. They have a large collection of art, arms and armor, sculpture, even retro toys!

To see more of the museum's collection, check out my post on the Black Gate blog on the Museo Lazaro Galdiano.

This one seems to have been carved out of an animal leg bone. Nothing went to waste in those days!

Military History Photo Friday: African Shields

A variety of shields. The small round ones in the center are Ethiopian. One on the left has decorated brass fittings. The one next to it is made of hippopotamus hide. I believe the other shields are from the Sudan and Kenya, but I'm not sure. That skinny one on the lower left is a Dinka shield. The Dinka are from south Sudan and their shields only covered the hand, with the rod being used to parry blows. The shield on the right just above the elephant tusk is made of a turtle shell.

One of the more unusual museums I visited on my recent trip to Cairo was the Ethnological Museum. This is a very old-school museum with displays that don't look like they've been changed much in the past fifty years. It contains a good collection of costume, day-to-day objects, and weapons and armor. This includes an impressive array of East African shields that I'm showing here. In the upper floor is the Ethnographic Society with a lovely Victorian lecture hall and a sizeable library.

Located just off Tahrir Square, the heart of the famous 2011 revolution, it's one of the best guarded museums I have ever seen. Part of the grounds have been converted into a police headquarters. To get onto the property I had to go through a metal detector and show my passport. Then a cop with a machine gun escorted me to the museum. From there a museum official followed me from room to room until I left. No one is stealing these shields!

I'm far from an expert on African shields, although I am familiar with the Ethiopian forms. Unfortunately there was no signage in this room to help me. My identifications should thus be taken with a grain of salt. Any help identifying these fascinating pieces of African militaria would be highly appreciated!

The top shield is made of the plastron (belly part of the shell) of a giant turtle.

Two more shields. Like the vast majority of the shields in this collection, they are made of animal hide, which was strong enough to counter blows from clubs, arrows, and spears, but useless against bullets.

Two Ethiopian style shields. They may actually be from Sudan as this shield type was used there as well. They may, in fact, have been captured during the Anglo-Sudan War, when the British fought the Mahdi from 1896-99. Several weapons in the collection certainly come from the Mahdist army. I'll be showing those in a later post.

Travel Tuesday: Ancient Egyptian Shabtis

A variety of shabtis from the 19th and 20th dynasties (1292-1075 BC)

If you've spent much time in the Egyptology section of any good museum, you've probably seen a collection of little figurines that look like miniature mummies. These are called "shabtis", meaning "answerer". They were put in tombs in order to answer the call to work in the afterlife so that the deceased could relax. They'd come to life and do whatever labor the gods called on them to do.

Some shabtis got their own coffin and larger collections were put in decorated boxes like the one on the left.

Shabtis come in a variety of styles and quality and are made of wood, faience, wax, terracotta, or stone. Some tombs had hundreds of them, and they are one of the most common artifacts to find in museums. These are from the archaeological museum in Bologna, Italy.

I recently did a blog post over on Black Gate about shabtis in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo that goes into more detail about these remarkable artifacts. I've also done a post right here on a rare double shabti.

Travel Tuesday: Old Kingdom Death Mask from the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities in Cairo

My recent trip to Egypt was actually the second time I visited that fascinating country. The first was way back in 1991. As I wandered around the sights, I was occasionally hit by deja vu. Other sights I remember clearly from my first visit. One of the latter is this arresting Old Kingdom death mask in the national museum in Cairo.

It stuck in my mind from my first visit because the face looks just like people you see in Egypt today. Indeed, despite Egypt being popularly perceived (and officially titled) an Arab nation, only 17% of the genetic makeup of the modern population is Arabic. A recent study by National Geographic found that the Egyptian population is genetically 68% North African, 17% Arab, 4% Jewish Diaspora, 3% East African, 3% from Asia Minor, and 3% southern European. Thus the modern Egyptian population is much the same as the ancient Egyptian population, and this 4,000 year old mask shows a face that can still be seen on the streets of Cairo today.

Happy Valentine's Day from Ancient Egypt!

This happy couple is a rare example of a double shabti. A shabti was a figurine placed in an ancient Egyptian tomb that would act as a servant in the afterlife. They come in a remarkable number and variety, but seeing double ones like this are rare. In fact I don't think I've seen one before. This example dates from the 19th or 20th dynasties (1295-1069 BC) and is made of faience. I spotted it in the archaeological museum of Bologna, which also has an incredible Etruscan collection that I've written about over on Black Gate. You can see some more examples of shabtis in a post I did about London's Petrie Museum on the same blog.

It kind of sucks that this happy couple has to labor ceaselessly for all eternity for some dead Egyptian noble but hey, at least they have each other!

Travel Tuesday: Archaeological Museum of Cuenca, Spain

The coolest artifact in the collection, a Roman brick that a couple of people stepped on while it was still wet. You can imagine the bricklayer screaming at the clueless pedestrian as he walked on it two thousand years ago, only to have a second person do the same thing!

Last weekend we got away from Madrid and spent some time in Cuenca, an hour's train ride from the capital. I'll be writing up this historic town more thoroughly in my usual Wednesday post over at Black Gate. In the meantime, here are some photos from the city's excellent little archaeological museum.

The museum has modest collections from the Neolithic, Medieval, and Early Modern periods and some impressive items from the Iron Age and Roman times. The province of Cuenca has three major Roman towns--Ercávica, Segóbriga, and Valeria, so the Roman section was especially good.

Roman feet!

Maybe the hipsters will make this style popular again.

This little guy is an Iron Age figurine, one of many in the museum's collection.

Travel Tuesday: National Poo Museum Opens in England

Yes, this is exactly what it looks like. It's a fox turd preserved in a resin sphere. I'm not a big fan of fox poo. It's sticky and smelly and is all over my son's skate park every morning. You see, the older kids who skate there at night leave food wrappers all over the place and the foxes nibble at whatever is left inside. Then the foxes dump right where they found the food, often pinning the wrapper to the pavement.

Perhaps this odd behavior will be explored in the new National Poo Museum at the Isle of Wight Zoo in England. This museum is a work in progress. Right now it's a "Poo at the Zoo" exhibition that will go on national tour in the fall. The focus is on crap, both human and animal, encapsulated in resin spheres in order to make them more visitor friendly. There's human poo, a tawny owl pellet containing the bones and teeth of its prey, 140 million year old fossil poo (called a coprolite by paleontologists) and a child’s shoe with a cat poo inside it.

The exhibition is lined with retro toilets. Visitors can lift the lids to discover amazing poo facts such as:

Probiotic foods are produced using healthy bacteria originally isolated from human feces.
If you take a dump on a train in Britain, there’s a 25% chance it will drop directly onto the tracks, because many carriages have never been fitted with sewage holding tanks.
Wombats are the only animal known to produce cubic poos, probably to prevent their territory-marking poos from rolling off the rocks where they are deposited.

There's also some more serious information about the need for proper waste treatment in developing countries. Poor sanitation leads to disease and is a major killer in some regions.

To read more about my personal experiences crapping around the world, see my guide to squat toilets post I did for blogger buddy Alex Cavanaugh a while back. And go visit the National Poo Museum!

Photo courtesy National Poo Museum.

Military History Photo Friday: What's this Bizarre Contraption?

Photo courtesy Marcin Szala

This photo was taken in the Bundeswehr Military History Museum in Dresden, Germany. What do you think it is? An old boiler they took out of the basement and were too lazy to send to the scrapheap? An unfinished Panzer tank? The world's ugliest recycling bin?

Nope, it's one of the world's first submarines. It's the Brandtaucher (“Incendiary Diver”), built in 1850 by the Germans to stop the Danish Navy from blockading German ports. It's as big and clunky as it looks, measuring 26 ft. 6 in. (8 meters) in length, with a beam of 6 ft. 8 in. (2 meters) and a height of 8 ft. 8 in. (2.6 meters).

Below is a sketch from an 1896 book showing how it operated. The crew walked on a treadmill to turn the propeller, while ballast came from letting water into the space below them. This made the sub heavier than the surrounding water and let it submerge. The water could then be pumped out, reducing the weight and making the submarine go to the surface.

One fault of the design was not having sealed ballast tanks. Instead the water sloshed around at the bottom of the interior, causing the sub to become unstable. This is what probably made it sink before it could attack any ships. The crew was able to escape and swim to safety by opening the hatch. This caused water to rush in, increasing the air pressure and shooting them out of the hatch, from where they could swim to the surface. The sub was raised in 1887 and has been on display ever since.

Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons

Dinosaurs and weird cures at the Oxfordshire Museum

"Physicians agree" this steam bath cabinet is absolutely safe and good for the health!

I may be back in Spain, but I still have plenty of photos from England to share with you! In our last week in England we went to Woodstock, Oxfordshire, to visit the newly opened Soldiers of Oxfordshire Museum. I'm pitching that story to a magazine, so I'll keep those photos for a while Instead here are some shots of the Oxfordshire Museum, a local history museum next door.
Jump the cut for more photos!

Military History Photo Friday: Grave of a Celtiberian Warrior

As I mentioned in my previous post, I just visited the recently remodeled Museo Arqueológico Nacional. I have a series about the museum's collections coming up on the Black Gate blog, but in the meantime here's an interesting reconstructed grave of a Celtiberian warrior.

The Celtiberians were a mix of Celtic and native Iberian cultures. This grave dates to the 3rd century BC and was found near Zaragoza. It's a cist marked by a stela and contains an iron sword with silver damascening, the remains of a baton, a spear, tweezers, and a razor. You have to look good in the afterlife! There was also a spindle whorl and a clay ball of uncertain use. A pot contained the warriors cremated remains.

Military History Photo Friday: German Armor from the Sixteenth Century

These two lovely suits of armor are in the Royal Museum of the Armed Forces and of Military History, in Brussels, Belgium. They have a splendid collection of medieval arms and armor that will be the subject of an upcoming post on the Black Gate blog. I'll give you the link when it goes live next week.

The suit on the left was made in Germany in the third quarter of the 16th century, while the one on the right was made in the famous workshop of Michael Witz of Innsbruck around 1555. The helmet in between is also German from the mid-16th century.

Sadly I can't tell you more because the signage was all in French and Dutch. I puzzled out as much as I could and came to the odd discovery that while I studied both French and German many years ago, I had an easier time reading the Dutch because it was close to German and my German was always better than my French!

Oh, and what's that gauntlet on the lower right getting up to?

The Fin de Siecle Museum, Brussels

Mask of Cleo de Merode, by Georges Despret, c. 1907

Sorry for the silence last week. I was on a press trip touring the battlefields of Belgium and was kept very busy during a fascinating and enjoyable week. We focused on World War One sites but also took in Bastogne and Waterloo. Expect several articles about the trip on this and other blogs!

On my last morning before flying back to Spain I was left to my own devices and decided to check out the newest museum in Brussels--The Fin de Siècle Museum. It looks at Belgian art from 1868 to the disaster of 1914. While Art Nouveau will be the biggest attraction here, there's also a lot of works from the Realist, Impressionist, Symbolist, and other movements. I've focused on the Art Nouveau here because it's my wife's favorite art style and she doesn't read my blog enough.

Enjoy!

A weekend of writing and art in Madrid

Last weekend was a long weekend here in Spain, so we left Santander and headed down to our old stomping grounds of Madrid to see family and soak up some culture.

One big event was hooking up with my old writer's group. They'd organized a write-a-thon for the first day of National Novel Writing Month. We took over the back room of one of my favorite cafes and wrote like mad! It was very cool to sit with a room full of people all writing novels.

My wife and I also got to see some art exhibitions, something that's sadly lacking in Santander. Many of the best shows are at private galleries owned by banks. The Fundación Mapfre has two exhibitions on currently. One is called MACCHIAIOLI: Impressionistic Realism in Italy. This was a mid-nineteenth century movement that broke away from the strictures of Classical painting and paved the way for Impressionism. Here's a bunch of them enjoying themselves in true Italian style.

They were against the snobbery of the establishment and to prove their point often painted their work on the backs of cigar boxes and other found objects, like this nice landscape.