On Friday they took us down into the bowels of the British Museum to look at some 'artefacts'. There surrounded by rows of staggeringly beautiful Athenian vases, we looked at loom weights and perfume bottles, bits of text and jewellery. They asked us all to think about what they were and and how old they were. The idea was that we should get our hands on the material which is the bedrock of any arguments we might make. That theoretical interest is fine, but for me the overwhelming feeling was that I was finally confronting 'the stuff'. It was the same when in our first seminar about ancient Greek religion, we were confronted with a recently discovered inscription from Thessaly, and asked to construe it [not linguistically, as we had a translation, although even so there were words which nobody can understand]. After decades of trying to find out 'what the experts think' this was exhilarating; we were looking at the moment. when no-one knew. And weird it was: 'rules' for a a cult of an unnamed goddess, with strange gods, peculiar provisions, including a ban on sacrificing pigs, and a lot of stipulations about 'purity'. Here as at the BM, we were being asked to make our own judgments. And the devil, as always, is in the details...
So the BM stuff was calculated to jar our preconceptions: of 2 loomweights, the coarser was older, but more likely to produce fine cloth, while the Roman sealstone with the 'better' engraving was actually a more mundane object that the rock crystal Minoan version, which was clearly a top person's possession.
But I'm a romantic and always will be, so you can imagine how I felt when confronted with an iron arrowhead, from the beach at Marathon
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