Transcript
Speaker: This is what we call a canopic jar.
Speaker: It's one of four jars that they would have that was used as part of the mummification process.
Speaker: And this one contained the liver.
Speaker: But it doesn't have the liver in it anymore.
Speaker: No, it doesn't, thank goodness.
Speaker: Hello, welcome to Curious Objects.
Speaker: I'm Ben Miller.
Speaker: And I'm Michael Diaz-Griffith.
Speaker: Michael, I was obsessed with Egypt as a child.
Speaker: Were you?
Speaker: Completely.
Speaker: That's probably why we're here today.
Speaker: I'm sure it has something to do with it.
Speaker: And...
Speaker: Lucky for us, today's guest is Karis Tyndall of Charles Eid, who's a specialist in, among other things, ancient Egypt.
Speaker: I adore Karis.
Speaker: She is a winter show exhibitor, and she's young and so enthusiastic about the material that she handles.
Speaker: Absolutely infectious enthusiasm and a great scholar to boot.
Speaker: And she's going to be telling us about a truly fascinating object, a canopic jar.
Speaker: Now, all I know about canopic jars is that they held human organs.
Speaker: That's right.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And in fact, there were four key organs, each one associated with a particular canopic jar.
Speaker: And Karis is going to tell us all about the cultural significance of those jars and the religious and spiritual significance.
Speaker: But there's something a little bit grisly about it, isn't there?
Speaker: There is.
Speaker: And I think, you know, it's fascinating to think about human viscera that sort of travels down through the ages in these objects all the way to the probably the 19th century when they would have been either recovered by archaeologists or perhaps, you
Speaker: robbed from the tombs in which they sat for so long.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: I mean, we know about early tomb robbers who are after precious jewels.
Speaker: But in the 19th century, you know, with Napoleonic conquests and flourishing of interest in Europe in these artifacts of ancient civilization, you know, there are huge numbers of pieces that are excavated and explored and documented and studied, including, of course,
Speaker: famously mummies.
Speaker: And there's a really interesting historiography here, right?
Speaker: I mean, these artifacts, including the mummies, are taken on world tours.
Speaker: They're seen by thousands of people.
Speaker: They're obsessed over, and still today, you know, as children in grade school, is there any period of history that's more exciting, that's more enthralling than ancient Egypt?
Speaker: What do you think it is, Michael, that gets us so excited about that?
Speaker: I think that there's the distance of time, but there's also the idea that that civilization was so advanced.
Speaker: I mean, we're fascinated by prehistoric objects, right?
Speaker: Some of which are, well, all of which are earlier than these Egyptian artifacts, but we only know so much about them.
Speaker: The fact that we know so much about Egypt makes it particularly compelling.
Speaker: Yeah, you can really paint a rich picture of what life looked like and what their culture looked like, even though it's separated by millennia and by time and geography.
Speaker: And it's...
Speaker: It's simultaneously hard to imagine ourselves there, but so interesting to think about what it was like.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And don't you feel like the West has always had a kind of obsession with Egypt, or at least over the past couple hundred years?
Speaker: It's like there's a dichotomy that's been set up between the West and Rome and Egypt.
Speaker: And we kind of grew up in that imaginary still.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, if you look at even, you know, early 19th century sculpture, and I know about this through the world of silver, the great motifs for silver sculpture in the 1820s, 1830s, 1840s are ancient Roman and Greek motifs and ancient Egyptian motifs.
Speaker: Those are sort of the pillars, if you will, of the subject matter.
Speaker: And I think there's a reason for it.
Speaker: I mean, these aesthetic ideas dating back to the very concept of a pyramid or of a pharaoh's headdress that translate through the centuries that have formed the foundations of a lot of our ideas around Egypt.
Speaker: of course proportion but also um geometry uh and ornaments are capable of doing right i mean the pyramids being one of the wonders of the world and critically being proximate to europe right so that europeans could travel to egypt and depending on your viewpoint um
Speaker: act as researchers or marauders, but it was there.
Speaker: I mean, when we think about it, you know, Japan wasn't opened up to the West until the second half of the 19th century.
Speaker: And Egypt had been open to the West for, you know, since the Napoleonic era and earlier.
Speaker: So it's just been close and yet distant from our experience for a while now.
Speaker: We explored this a little a few months ago in our conversation with Philip Hewitt-Jabor about an alabaster vase.
Speaker: But he talks about the mining and quarrying of materials out of Egypt that are then transferred across the Mediterranean and used...
Speaker: Byzantium and in Rome and sculptural works and architectural works.
Speaker: So yeah, there's been a cross pollination for millennia, very long time.
Speaker: And and I know that as a child, I was taken to exhibitions of Egyptian artifacts.
Speaker: I remember watching documentaries about Egypt when I was sick, at home from school, and it kind of ruled my imagination.
Speaker: So I can't wait to hear what you and Karis discuss today.
Speaker: Yeah, well, I'm excited to hear about these rather morbid objects.
Speaker: Let us know what happened to those livers and see you soon.
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Speaker: So, Karis Tindall, thank you so much for joining me for Curious Objects.
Speaker: KARIS TINDALL- Well, thank you for having me.
Speaker: And we're going to talk about an object that is
Speaker: I believe the oldest object that has ever been featured on Curious Objects.
Speaker: Oh, I like that.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I didn't know that.
Speaker: It's a real distinction.
Speaker: And that's because you deal in antiquities.
Speaker: And in this case, specifically, we're talking about ancient Egypt.
Speaker: So why don't you start out by telling me what this piece is and what it looks like?
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: Well, this is what we call a canopic jar.
Speaker: It's made of calcite or alabaster, as people more often know it.
Speaker: It's a kind of creamy coloured banded stone.
Speaker: And the Egyptians used it quite a lot.
Speaker: It was very luminous, especially when light hitting it.
Speaker: So a canopic jar was one of four jars that they would have that was used as part of the mummification process.
Speaker: And so it's probably easiest to, when describing what this was, is to start right at the beginning, being the point of death.
Speaker: The beginning, right, or the end.
Speaker: The beginning of the Canopic Jars purpose, exactly.
Speaker: So the point at which... And it's what, two and a half feet tall?
Speaker: It is 32 centimeters.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Foot and a half tall.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So they come in, I mean, generally they're roughly about this size, but you're talking, you know, they use them for a few thousand years.
Speaker: So these have varied in the material that was used for them, from different stones to terracotta to faience, even that wonderful, brilliant blue material.
Speaker: Yeah, right.
Speaker: And the burial was very important for Egyptians because they believed in reincarnation.
Speaker: Thank you.
Speaker: And as a lot of cultures and societies do, when your life is particularly fraught, you have to think, well, there's got to be more than this.
Speaker: I have to work forward to something.
Speaker: Exactly, exactly.
Speaker: And the Egyptians felt this especially strongly.
Speaker: And they had sort of the lord of the underworld was, he was the good guy.
Speaker: You know, he was the person who, if he thought that you behaved well in the afterlife, he was the one who brought you back to life.
Speaker: So he was the ultimate person you wanted to please.
Speaker: And his name exactly was Osiris.
Speaker: And so these canopic jars, each one was sort of represented by one of the four sons of Horus.
Speaker: Now, Horus was the son of Osiris.
Speaker: It's all very complicated.
Speaker: And the Egyptian pantheon, you know, has all these different layers, but they move about a lot.
Speaker: You know, who's married to who, who had a child with whom, you know, whose sister and wife.
Speaker: There's no Bible with a consistent genealogy of it.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, there's a reasonably given structure, but of course, what people, exactly why people worship, you're talking about 3,000 years of history and belief, and Egypt was united and split up several times over those 3,000 years.
Speaker: So beliefs, you see veins running through that are consistent, but they of course change a bit when you have Ethiopians ruling as pharaohs or Persians ruling as pharaohs.
Speaker: They're all Egyptian in inverted commas.
Speaker: But of course they've brought their own... That's apostrophes for, or quotation marks for American listeners.
Speaker: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker: I'm doing the two fingers up by my head when I say that.
Speaker: So yes, so you can, you know, you see the way that people are represented change as well.
Speaker: But anyway, sorry, to go back.
Speaker: So when somebody died, you had 70 days with which to prepare them for burial and put them under the ground.
Speaker: What happened at the end of 70 days?
Speaker: you were in the ground.
Speaker: It had to be done.
Speaker: And if it wasn't done by 70 days, you might not.
Speaker: Well, no one writes about that.
Speaker: You probably pretended that it hadn't been that long.
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: But that's the rule.
Speaker: 70 days.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: I've not heard of someone go, oh, whoops, sorry, and scratch out.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: I think they're just pretend.
Speaker: But anyway, so the idea was you had 70 days in which to embalm the body and complete all the rituals and to mourn and to bury them.
Speaker: So part of the process of mummification was the removal of the most important organs within the body and the preservation of them.
Speaker: The organs they didn't deem important, they disposed of.
Speaker: Including the brain.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: Which they hoiked out through the nose.
Speaker: They thought it was a load of mush and they just, in essence, disposed of it.
Speaker: That's so contrary to common popular perception of today.
Speaker: I know.
Speaker: But what's rather romantic, though, is they understood the notion of a brain, but what they thought drove you and your decision-making was your heart, which is rather beautiful, actually.
Speaker: So the heart...
Speaker: They believe to be the most important organ because they believe that's where your soul lived and that's what made you make the decisions you do in life.
Speaker: I think that's that that's very beautiful.
Speaker: It is a little philosophically interesting about locating the core of yourself somewhere other than where your eyes are.
Speaker: Yeah, that's true.
Speaker: I hadn't thought about that.
Speaker: Anyway, not to get off subject here.
Speaker: So the brain is not important, but the four critical organs are... Yes, well, the heart was removed, preserved, and put back in the body because they needed to make sure that when the soul... They knew when you died, the soul would leave your body, but they needed to make sure that in the afterlife it knew to come back to your body.
Speaker: So it needed to go back to that resting place in essence.
Speaker: So anyway, then the four organs that they deemed the most important were the lungs, liver, stomach and intestines.
Speaker: And each one of those were then treated, preserved and put in one of the four canopic jars.
Speaker: And one of the four sons of Horus looked after, each one had a specific organ that they looked after.
Speaker: Gosh, what a bad lot for Horace's sons.
Speaker: I know, a bit of a grim loss, isn't it?
Speaker: I mean, can you imagine being born into the job of looking after everyone's livers?
Speaker: Yeah, I know.
Speaker: I know.
Speaker: And what I rather like about it as well is that they all had a different physical appearance.
Speaker: So up until around the 19th dynasty, which is the new kingdom.
Speaker: Can you give me a date range here?
Speaker: Oh, until about, gosh, what are we looking at?
Speaker: About sort of 1200 BC, 1300, 1200 BC.
Speaker: So just 3,300 years ago, give or take.
Speaker: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker: The four sons of Horus were human-headed.
Speaker: And then they started being represented as, and I'll give you the different names.
Speaker: So there was Imseti, who stayed human-headed, and he contained the liver.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Kebisenref was falcon-headed, and he contained the intestines.
Speaker: Happy.
Speaker: Happy.
Speaker: H-A-P-I.
Speaker: Got it.
Speaker: Yeah, an important distinction.
Speaker: Quite sweet, though, anyway.
Speaker: Sounds like a cheerful one.
Speaker: Yep.
Speaker: Happy was the baboon-headed.
Speaker: He looked after the lungs.
Speaker: Duamutef was the jackal-headed and looked after the stomach.
Speaker: Got it.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: And so there were four jars, each one dedicated to one of these organs, and each one looked after by one of the sons of Horus, the grandsons of Osiris.
Speaker: And they were kept separate from the body for what reason?
Speaker: Well, the body needed to be, in order for it to be preserved, and of course when you find mummies now, you know, the hairs there, the teeth there, I mean, it's amazing how successfully they preserved these bodies.
Speaker: They had to remove all of the moisture from them.
Speaker: And they actually, in fact, then padded out the body, so they kept their form, having removed all the moisture, and left them out in the sun as well to really dry them out.
Speaker: They then padded them out with straw or linen, and then wrapped them, so you know that way you see them now in the kind of wrapped mummies form
Speaker: yeah i've seen those movies yeah exactly sort of like loo roll dangling off arms that kind of thing um yes so they exactly so they the um they would then be put in a sarcophagus and separate to the sarcophagus but in the tomb would be these canopic jars um and they're buried with all sorts of other things um you know to help them in the afterlife um
Speaker: And anyway, so yes, so these jars, and in fact, in later periods, when you get to the late period, sometimes you even see in late periods starting from 664 BC up until 332 BC when King, well, Alexander the Great and Ptolemy came into Egypt.
Speaker: And then you start to see things changing a bit because, of course, they brought, and then the aristocracy with them, of course, brought their own beliefs.
Speaker: And they certainly didn't believe in animal-headed deities.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: But some of them you'd even see, they became symbolic.
Speaker: So yeah, they actually didn't contain anything in the latter part sometimes.
Speaker: Oh, interesting.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But this one, however, is hollow and it did contain.
Speaker: So it was Imseti.
Speaker: And which one is the Imseti?
Speaker: Human-headed, okay.
Speaker: And contained the liver.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: But it doesn't have the liver in it anymore.
Speaker: No, it doesn't, thank goodness.
Speaker: I think that would be far too gory.
Speaker: I'm not sure I'd feel this comfortable going near it.
Speaker: In fact, when a lot of these, I mean, this was discovered a long time ago, and I think when people did rediscover them, I think they tended to be cleaned out.
Speaker: You know, these things, you know, Egyptomania started, you know, so back when, well, really in a major scale when Napoleon conquered Egypt.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And so from then, of course, their practices of excavation were very different to what we do now.
Speaker: Of course, nothing excavated now would leave Egypt.
Speaker: And they would preserve and that, you know, they probably wouldn't even open them.
Speaker: You know, you want to look after what you can there.
Speaker: But of course, back then they were, you know, these things were being sent off.
Speaker: It was the Wild West, East, as you will.
Speaker: Well, and a lot, you know, and in a way it's good these things are dispersed because now all major museums can be filled with these things and private collections, but it's led the greater world to understand ancient Egypt.
Speaker: You know, we all know that it's part of world culture is the dissemination of knowledge and that one of the best ways to do that is through material objects.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So let's come back in a minute to the question of provenance and dispersion and distribution and so on.
Speaker: But I want to focus on this specific object for the moment.
Speaker: How do you know that this particular pot is dedicated to Imseti?
Speaker: Well, because we know the period that it was made, both stylistically but also because of the hieroglyphic inscription on the front, it says it was for Henat, who was a priest of Tar, Tar being the sort of the god of creators and craftsmen, architects, that kind of thing, he was very important for it.
Speaker: And this name is known and attested to in other, you know, in the role that he had.
Speaker: And so we know that he was from the 26th dynasty.
Speaker: And so, and that's of 664 to 525 BC.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: And so because of that we know during this period that the canopic jars all had the heads depending on which son of Horus they were.
Speaker: Of course prior to the 19th dynasty you might not know because they were all human headed.
Speaker: So because this is the human headed one from the late period, 26th dynasty, we know it must be in Seti.
Speaker: And in fact there's an old collection label on the underside of the lid where he's called as Kebesenwerf which was the falcon headed one which is in fact incorrect.
Speaker: So when it was discovered, of course, people have been... Our understanding of these objects has massively changed over time.
Speaker: As, you know, for example, the discovery of the Rosetta Stone, you know, people couldn't even translate this stuff for such a long time, you know, and so people would still try and say, oh, this dates to this, or this belonged to this person.
Speaker: So obviously when this, you know, in the 19th century, when it was first given whoever it was that said...
Speaker: and it's a 19th century hand that has written this on it, they just got it wrong, it happens.
Speaker: I have to say, looking at it, it's hard to imagine that this head is that of a falcon.
Speaker: No, but that's what I mean.
Speaker: The person didn't know.
Speaker: Whoever wrote that was not aware that at this period it would have had a falcon head if it were the individual, the sum that they thought it was.
Speaker: And so that person misinterpreted the hieroglyphic text perhaps or just made a guess and got it wrong or something like that.
Speaker: Whatever.
Speaker: Maybe he just stuck the wrong label to the wrong vase.
Speaker: I mean, there's a whole load of reasons why they might have put it on incorrectly.
Speaker: Fair enough.
Speaker: But now we know this to be Imseti.
Speaker: Yes, and it is certainly a recognisable human.
Speaker: It most definitely is.
Speaker: And a very fine one as well, we might add.
Speaker: The form of the head actually resemble other depictions of Imseti and other media.
Speaker: Is it a well-defined face or is it just a face that...
Speaker: It's a face wearing a wig, a plain bag wig, and it's tucked behind the ears.
Speaker: And as you can see, it stops being a wig and turns into a lid, and so it tucks up right under the chin.
Speaker: The head, it's just a human head.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Him said he didn't have a specific head or a specific facial features.
Speaker: No, exactly, nothing abnormal notes of third eye or anything that means you can pick them out.
Speaker: No, it was just in whatever way that the, I guess, whoever the craftsman was, you know, put a face on this lid, there you go, this is going to be the god.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So what do you know or what can you deduce about where it came from, who or what kind of person might have had his or her liver put in this?
Speaker: Well, we know, and it would both men and women underwent this process of mummification.
Speaker: And
Speaker: you know, the richer you were, the more money you would put in to, and the more importance of your social standing, that was often equated with wealth.
Speaker: And so you would want your, sort of, all of the things you're buried with to,
Speaker: be as lavish as possible, really, in the richest materials.
Speaker: It's the opposite of the idea that you can't take it with you, right?
Speaker: Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker: You really did take it with you.
Speaker: And we see people being buried with things that were clearly, because they have no signs of use whatsoever, they were obviously made for burial.
Speaker: For burial, right.
Speaker: Because they said, right, I want this.
Speaker: And they also believed that, you know, the more times your name was seen and read by people, that the greater the chance was that you would live on.
Speaker: I mean,
Speaker: And again, I think quite philosophically, they believed that so long as your name is uttered or people know your name or your name said by people, that your memory is alive and therefore you are alive.
Speaker: And actually that's quite beautiful because you can get into the idea of what is life and death and it's something that we all actually in a modern age battle with all the time.
Speaker: You know, the idea of someone being brain dead, but their body's still alive.
Speaker: At what point is someone alive?
Speaker: dead and they had this idea that so long as you said their name so people would would try and make sure that people still richly sacrificed them or would still celebrate them because so long as people knew them they were alive in some element and some form yeah and until they were reincarnated by um osiris they needed that right right um so this man
Speaker: And of course we know who he is because he wrote all about it on the Canopic Jar and indeed on the others and, you know, shabtis have been found as well.
Speaker: And so we know these important roles that he had within society, in essence, what his job was.
Speaker: You know, being a priest was a really, it was a powerful position to have and you would have ended up, you know,
Speaker: acquiring quite a lot of wealth and quite a few assets with it at the time.
Speaker: And so certainly, and obviously because you would have been deeply religious, you would put all of that or as much as you could into your burial.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So I've got, I don't know if you're interested, do you want me to read out what it says?
Speaker: The inscription?
Speaker: I'd love to hear what it says.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So the inscription on the front in hieroglyphs, and it's been carved and then picked out in a black pigment, says words spoken by Isis.
Speaker: Isis was the sister wife of Osiris.
Speaker: So words spoken by Isis.
Speaker: I seize the enemy, I give protection to Imceti who is in me.
Speaker: The protection of the God's Father, Priest, Scribe of the Temple of Tar, Henat born to Tar-Shirt-Ihet, true of voice, is the protection of Imceti.
Speaker: The Osiris, God's Father, Priest, Scribe of the Temple of Tar, Henat born to Tar-Shirt-Ihet, true of voice, is Imceti.
Speaker: So you can see there, again, the repetition, this idea, you want to constantly repeat your name and the important people's names because it really drills it on home.
Speaker: That's more of an epitaph than most people get today.
Speaker: That's just for his liver.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: But when you see these, whenever you see sarcophagi, they've just got line after line after line.
Speaker: And a lot of it's actually very formulaic, true voice, words like that.
Speaker: You see that kind of thing repeated over and over.
Speaker: So people say to me, oh, can you read hieroglyphs?
Speaker: And I'm, you know...
Speaker: Of course, I've done courses on it, some things, but this is a language that changed over 3,000 years.
Speaker: It's like saying, oh, yes, you know, Chaucer is the same as if you go to Glasgow, and someone will read Trainspotting.
Speaker: Do you know what I mean?
Speaker: It's the same language, but it changes drastically with time.
Speaker: But because there are little set phrases that they still use, I can understand, say, what all the different individual hieroglyphs, what letter it might mean, but how exactly you translate it might change.
Speaker: But things like this...
Speaker: are quite formulaic and they do tend to stay with time.
Speaker: They don't change massively.
Speaker: So he was a priest and therefore wealthy and interested in preserving his legacy and in carrying a certain number of his possessions with him into the afterlife.
Speaker: Where would he have been buried?
Speaker: Where did this vessel come from?
Speaker: So this one, I believe, was at Saqqara.
Speaker: You get these huge...
Speaker: sort of areas where people would all just be buried.
Speaker: I mean, they'd have to be just outside of major cities.
Speaker: Of course, that's really always been the case.
Speaker: It's, you know, they make it for religious reasons, but the practicalities are you don't want decomposing bodies too near cities.
Speaker: It's just, it's bad, you know, in sort of the wilderness and the wildness of a desert.
Speaker: You don't want to be attracting all the bad animals.
Speaker: And they also needed space.
Speaker: And, you know, there was...
Speaker: And they were all buried together.
Speaker: There'd be whole infrastructure around it as well.
Speaker: And you see, I mean, next to these huge sort of precincts and mortuary temples and that kind of thing, you can see entire villages set up where everybody who was there had some role in funerary rites or the embalming process.
Speaker: And that's really interesting when people rediscover this.
Speaker: And we've learned so much from when they discover even just like the dumping ground outside of these, you know, the pits where we chuck now.
Speaker: You think of, in essence, landfill.
Speaker: And so with little things that you see outside of these areas, you know, where people have written, you know, their scrap paper of the time would just be, you know, either bits of particularly flat rock that they might have got or shards, mainly what we call ostraca, shards of terracotta, of pottery, where they'd write things on and people would take notes.
Speaker: And these things have all been dumped in these sites.
Speaker: And actually it's taught us a lot about the areas where people have been buried and, you know, sort of what the purpose was of the people who lived on the outskirts of that.
Speaker: We'll be back in just a minute.
Speaker: Just a quick reminder, as always, you can see photos of the Canopic Jar online at themagazineantiques.com slash podcast or on my Instagram at Objective Interest or Michael's at Michael Diaz Griffith.
Speaker: Also, wherever you're listening right now, it would be fantastic if you subscribe if you haven't already and leave a rating and review.
Speaker: That really helps people to find us.
Speaker: Thanks.
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Speaker: We're talking burial in the 13th century BC.
Speaker: Well, so this guy was buried 7th century.
Speaker: Oh, sorry.
Speaker: So he was 26th dynasty.
Speaker: OK.
Speaker: Which is late dynastic period.
Speaker: Right, right, right.
Speaker: Which was the last hurrah before everything changed and the Ptolemies came in and then the Romans conquered.
Speaker: OK.
Speaker: So he's living on the cusp of major change in Egypt.
Speaker: Yeah, he did, absolutely.
Speaker: I mean, you get four times in Egyptian history where Upper and Lower Egypt were unified.
Speaker: And this was the final time.
Speaker: And it was, you know, Old Kingdom, then you have your first intermediate period where it all split up again.
Speaker: And then you have Middle Kingdom, second intermediate period, New Kingdom, third intermediate period, and then the late dynastic period.
Speaker: And so this was the 26th dynasty.
Speaker: Some say 25th is kind of at the beginning, but it was different rulers.
Speaker: It was, say, this is 26th dynasty where...
Speaker: yeah in essence where the the wealth and power there is a center of it again in egypt and um and it lasted for about 300 years until alexander the great and all his wondrousness came in and and conquered you know most of what was their known world certainly um and then yeah and he he ruled it for a very short period of time before he died and of course ptolemy took over
Speaker: Sure, and the rest is history.
Speaker: But in the meantime, we have our priest's liver sitting in this pot in a tomb in Saqqara, you said?
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: And then centuries pass, and what happens?
Speaker: What happens to this pot, and how does it end up in London and in New York City?
Speaker: For this exact vase, I wish we knew.
Speaker: One of the things is, of course, people have been... You had tomb robbers.
Speaker: At the time, I mean, when they knew that there had been a great burial and there was a lot of welfare, you know, people would go in and nick everything they could back out of it.
Speaker: Of course, there were people trying to stop that from happening.
Speaker: Rolling big boulders down their hallways.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: Cursing everyone who stands and goes within a square marble.
Speaker: No, exactly.
Speaker: It clearly did happen in antiquity.
Speaker: Mainly the tombs that were ransacked in antiquity and robbed were of pharaohs.
Speaker: They seemed to be the great ones.
Speaker: But when these things are rediscovered now, we can't tell at what point always when they will have already been, whether they were looted.
Speaker: And we know now whether or not it's been a proper excavation.
Speaker: However, people have been excavating, as I say, in a major way since Napoleon.
Speaker: and records are kept but when you know that the state would allow excavations both by private individuals, by other nations were allowed to come in and then there was a system called partage, which was very common.
Speaker: So say, and in fact a lot of the MET's collection now, they would go, they would gather funds
Speaker: They would say to the Egyptians, right, can we go and excavate this area?
Speaker: They would agree.
Speaker: They'd go in, excavate, and then they would split what was found, and they'd keep all the records.
Speaker: And that's how a lot of this stuff has historically got onto the market, because it either came back to the institution, but also a lot of these things were privately funded too, and so they just let the people take those away.
Speaker: And that's what happens with Carter and Tutankhamen's tomb, right?
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: Famously.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: But another way that things got onto the market, and this is sort of the way that is perhaps less well known and less spoken about, is that, you know, Egypt had a flourishing antiquities trade until 1983, which is incredibly recently.
Speaker: You know, the government gave licences to, you know, a lot of vendors within sort of the...
Speaker: around Cairo Museum and even within Cairo Museum you could buy antiquities and so there's very little record of exactly what they sold from these and if the records exist I don't know how you know people don't you know can't really get their hands on it so how exactly this left the country we don't know we know how long it's
Speaker: It's been around for, but a lot of pieces could have, up until 1983, there was, as I say, this flourishing trade.
Speaker: And those things aren't as well recorded because there were a lot of excavations in Egypt.
Speaker: Something was discovered, or even there would be a sandstorm, and it would blow the sand off.
Speaker: And you just see amulets.
Speaker: I mean, people, and you hear travellers talking about this during the Grand Tour, them walking through Egypt, walking, sort of going in one of those caravan trips and...
Speaker: and they look down and they just see amulets in the sand wow you know and and so what do you do well you pick them up don't you or you just leave them there because you know back then especially oh it's just an amulet that you know they were discovering great huge you know um sort of sculptures and and temples and things that were much more exciting um but a lot of people of course did collect them and keep them but it's because of this it's all you know it's
Speaker: It's wonderful if you know the exact fine spot of something, but it's not always possible.
Speaker: However, if you know when you have an object like this that has a name, sometimes it's possible to go back and you can find if the tomb has been discovered and there can be writings on tomb walls.
Speaker: And so you can say, OK, like with shabtis, a lot of shabtis, we know exactly when the tomb was discovered.
Speaker: And so say you've got a shabti.
Speaker: The recent provenance has been lost because somebody didn't keep their paperwork and they died and their ancestors inherited it.
Speaker: And they come to you and say, look, we've got the shabti.
Speaker: And you go, well, OK, great.
Speaker: What's the provenance?
Speaker: And they go, well, we don't know.
Speaker: But you know the shabti.
Speaker: It's very specific.
Speaker: And it's one of, you know, several.
Speaker: Like we have one at the moment.
Speaker: And we know that 332 were discovered.
Speaker: We know all about the excavation.
Speaker: But then guess what?
Speaker: These were dispersed all across Europe and America.
Speaker: And it came back to us, you know, with a provenance to, I think, just the 80s.
Speaker: They didn't know more than that.
Speaker: But of course, we know when it left.
Speaker: We know exactly what tomb it's come from.
Speaker: And we know that that's where they went.
Speaker: So there are really interesting ways.
Speaker: And a lot of what you have to do is try and track back and just find out where these things have come from.
Speaker: It's kind of like the modern way, you know, the way you're sort of in a library, you do your own version of archaeology.
Speaker: Because you're just trying to work out.
Speaker: And it makes these pieces more important and more interesting.
Speaker: And what happened in 1983?
Speaker: Oh, they just decided not that the internal laws on cultural heritage changed.
Speaker: And they said no more exporting of these goods without licenses.
Speaker: And they stopped granting licenses and they shut down all of the vendors.
Speaker: They said they don't want to do that anymore.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And so for almost 40 years now, there's been no export trade of antiquities from Egypt.
Speaker: No, exactly.
Speaker: At least not legally.
Speaker: Well, yeah, I mean, that's a very contentious thing.
Speaker: There is no trade.
Speaker: I mean, whether something happens or not, who knows that site, but it's certainly not legal, definitely.
Speaker: And when you asked me that, I was sitting there trying to think, because a lot of countries have these laws, but they still let things out sometimes.
Speaker: Italy will still grant export licenses, even though you're not allowed to just buy things and take them out of the country.
Speaker: You can apply for a license.
Speaker: And I was trying to think, but I don't know of Egyptian pieces that have been granted licenses since then.
Speaker: I've seen licenses up until that period and pieces that are still on the market of people who are still dealing, you know, they've kept their paperwork.
Speaker: um because occasionally the egyptians will try and say that they um deny that they granted export licenses for objects and so i know some people have gone well here it is in the interest of trying to repatriate exactly which is now an uh an issue that's been in the news um recent months um efforts to repatriate egyptian antiquities yes absolutely and and you know and i it's
Speaker: there's a fine line between what people believe should happen morally and what can happen legally.
Speaker: And turning around to a museum and asking for an object back because you don't really like that they own it and you say they might have taken it in a time of war or something.
Speaker: That's a very hot topic at the moment.
Speaker: Which the Egyptian government is doing.
Speaker: Yes, and a lot of people are doing it and it's very much for those bodies involved to decide what they want to do, really.
Speaker: It's sort of hard for...
Speaker: for us to cast too much judgment on these things really.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Tell me about, I want to turn to you for a minute, because you're an anomaly in our field, which is to say a young dealer who's a deep and serious specialist in an area that
Speaker: You know, the antiquities trade is not exactly friendly to newcomers.
Speaker: I mean, in other words, it's a capital intensive business.
Speaker: It's an education intensive business.
Speaker: How did you...
Speaker: How did you come to decide to invest your time and your energy into these particular objects?
Speaker: Gosh, it was a very, very natural thing, really.
Speaker: I think as with a lot of children, you know, I was very...
Speaker: fascinated by the ancient world.
Speaker: I mean, the stories are just amazing, aren't they?
Speaker: You know, whether it's Greek, Roman, Egyptian, all of it, these, you know, everything was very sort of grand armies and huge amounts of wealth and these sort of incredible gods and goddesses that did the most wild things, you know, and... Jackal heads and livers in pots.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: Who isn't sort of enthralled by that as a youngster?
Speaker: And, you know, getting a formal education is becoming rarer and rarer.
Speaker: And although I, you know, I studied Latin from a young age, you know, and you hear a lot of the stories with that, you know, when you go to senior school, a lot of that falls by the wayside.
Speaker: But I decided to do ancient history and classical archaeology at university.
Speaker: And so my love of the ancient world was strengthened and I started to actually properly understand it.
Speaker: It wasn't just, you know, gosh, aren't these buildings wonderful, you know, and weren't these philosophers doing, weren't they sort of pioneering and being amazed at how people, you know, the crossover between science and religion and power and how all the ways are all intertwined.
Speaker: And you started to understand it more and more.
Speaker: And I mean, after my first year at university, I met Jamie Eade, who took over the company from his father, Charles Eade, who was the founder of the company, who'd previously founded Folio Society, became Folio Fine Arts.
Speaker: Oh, I didn't realize that.
Speaker: Yes, yeah, yeah.
Speaker: And he, so he started- Busy guy.
Speaker: Yeah, very busy and incredibly knowledgeable.
Speaker: I mean, an amazing man.
Speaker: And as is Jamie.
Speaker: And Jamie started working for his father when he was 23, actually, and has done nothing since other than, I mean, that, you know,
Speaker: You just fall in love with this world and it's very, very difficult to leave.
Speaker: Why would you?
Speaker: You have to be driven away from it.
Speaker: Even now, Jamie, you know, sort of officially retired, but absolutely, you know, we chat all the time and he's still constantly looking at objects and learning and doing work.
Speaker: You know, you never leave, you know, you never leave these industries really.
Speaker: But anyway, so I met Jamie and I suddenly found, you know, oh my goodness, these things, it's still a thriving market.
Speaker: Of course it is.
Speaker: Collections need to be added to, and as soon as they stop being added to, things become stagnant and people stop going to see them and people stop academic research.
Speaker: It sort of halts in a lot of these fields.
Speaker: And the excitement of being able to own these objects and hold them, and I have to say in the time that I worked with Jamie, after, I then worked with him throughout my undergraduate and then my master's degree in specialising ancient Rome.
Speaker: And within my first year of working full-time at Charles Ede, I knew so much more than I'd learned in four years of full-time education because handling these objects and spending your time day in, day out with them, it does that.
Speaker: And I just thought, so long as I'm allowed to do this, you know, that's it, I absolutely will.
Speaker: I mean, it's a wonderful... And you're still all out.
Speaker: It's academic and it's aesthetic.
Speaker: You know, and I think it's still art and it's history at the same time.
Speaker: I mean, what I love about these things is that they can appeal to a whole raft of people for a whole load of reasons.
Speaker: You know, I know a lot of what we said and when we go into all the nitty gritties of this vase and what makes it important.
Speaker: What's also wonderful as you look at it, it's a beautiful work of art.
Speaker: You can stop there if you want to.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: You know, you can say, oh, it's, you know, two and a half thousand years old and I love the look of it.
Speaker: You know, you can stop there.
Speaker: You can think, oh, I love what it represents.
Speaker: You can love the material.
Speaker: You can love the craftsmanship.
Speaker: You know, you think, gosh, what tools they use to make that.
Speaker: You know, there are so many ways in.
Speaker: Maybe you just need a pot to put your liver in.
Speaker: Maybe you've got great plans for your own burial.
Speaker: But it's wonderful.
Speaker: And the people you meet as well because of it are so varied.
Speaker: And I really enjoy that, you know, from sort of teachers who collect amulets because they love inspiring their students, you know, whether they're teaching eight year olds or 18 year olds, you know, or actually as I found it at university, my most inspiring lecturer,
Speaker: was the man who taught me, I did the origins of numismatics and he collected coins.
Speaker: And he every, there were only four of us in the class.
Speaker: And he would bring in anywhere between five and 20 coins every single glass.
Speaker: And that's what we would be learning.
Speaker: And it's thrilling to hold these things in your hand and to turn them about and understand them.
Speaker: And so knowing that you're adding to that, but also being able to experience it every day, I love it.
Speaker: People coming onto the stand, you know, someone collects glass, for example, you know, Venetian glass, and they come and say, gosh, what?
Speaker: what's this?
Speaker: I feel like I recognise it, but it's not quite right.
Speaker: And suddenly they learn, oh, it's Roman glass.
Speaker: And they have an understanding of it and looking at it through a set of eyes and with their own knowledge and expertise in a way that I've probably never looked at it.
Speaker: And I love what then happens, the interaction between you and this object and what they're saying and they can teach you as well is fantastic.
Speaker: And I like that these people who are coming at it from different angles as well
Speaker: It shows you how broad something like antiquities can be in terms of who wants to collect them.
Speaker: You know, we do, as you know, we also do the spring tefaf, the contemporary one out here in the armory.
Speaker: And there's, you know, we thought, oh, gosh, I wonder how this is going to go.
Speaker: You know, it's very new for us.
Speaker: Very old things and a very contemporary show.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: It's not just modern, it's contemporary.
Speaker: And people love it.
Speaker: It's so well received.
Speaker: It's almost there's nothing more new than something that's 5,000 years old.
Speaker: Or is it more exciting?
Speaker: And if Christie's can sell a Leonardo at a contemporary auction, then why can't you show Antiquities at a contemporary art fair?
Speaker: Because there are things about these, about whether it's a fragment of an inscription or even if it's a piece of jewellery, there can be something immediate about it.
Speaker: There can also be something deeply romantic about it.
Speaker: And people can see a lot of it because we deal in a lot of fragments as well.
Speaker: A fragment of a face that shows an eye and maybe the corner of a mouth can be much more alluring sometimes than a complete sculpture.
Speaker: And that can appeal to lots of different people as well.
Speaker: Of course, that's why they always used to knock the heads off of Roman statues.
Speaker: Well, yeah, I mean... Sculpture is much more appealing than... Whoever the proverbial they are, you know, I think, yeah, I hope they're rolling in their graves.
Speaker: No doubt.
Speaker: Well, Karis, thank you so much.
Speaker: Have we missed anything?
Speaker: What else would you like our listeners to know about this canoptic vase?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I think we've covered our bases.
Speaker: I think we've about covered it.
Speaker: How about that?
Speaker: Yeah, I hope that's all.
Speaker: I know I probably jumped back and forth quite a bit when describing these things.
Speaker: No, I think that's probably it.
Speaker: Well, thank you so much.
Speaker: It was a pleasure.
Speaker: Yeah, well, it's a pleasure.
Speaker: Thank you.
Speaker: Thank you.
Speaker: that's a wrap for today.
Speaker: Thanks so much for listening.
Speaker: Hope you enjoyed it.
Speaker: And stay tuned for next episode when Michael and I are going to take a dive into the Morgan Library and try to untangle some of the mysteries around a particular bronze bust of an infant with the help of their curator, Jennifer Tonkovich.
Speaker: It's going to be a pretty exciting one.
Speaker: Meanwhile, a huge thank you to Karis Tindall of Charles Ede for being my guest today and to you for listening.
Speaker: Today's episode was edited and produced by Sammy Delati.
Speaker: Our music is by Trap Rabbit.
Speaker: My co-host is Michael Diaz-Griffith, and I'm your host, Ben Miller.
