Margaret

A photograph of the entrance to an ancient Egyptian tomb set into a cliff face. The entrance itself is in the top right hand quarter of the photo, and there are steps carved into the cliff leading towards the entrance. About the centre of the photo, where the stairs turn a corner, a woman dressed in blue stands next to a signpost waiting to guide you into the tomb. The whole scene is pale yellow-y grey except for the woman.

These are the last of my photos from my trip to Egypt in 2016, and I’ve got two small albums here from travelling back towards Cairo from Middle Egypt. First we visited a small set of tombs called the Fraser Tombs: photos.talesfromthetwolands.org/index.php?/c...

🧵1/5

#Egyptology

Easter Sunday always reminds me of the gift shop at a cathedral near Palermo, when the woman in front of me said: 'Oh, and a man on a stick, please.'

A light blue diagram depicting the sea, with the water's surface at the top, and just below it is an outline of the Mary Rose, with the depth (12m, 40ft or 6.7 fathoms). There is a line showing the seabed, which takes a rapid dive into the vertical...

On the anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic, we thought we'd answer a question that's often asked,

"If they raised the Mary Rose, why not raise the Titanic?"

Allow our scaled diagram to explain...

A photograph of a piece of an ancient Egyptian coffin. This a single slightly curved board from the side of a coffin set upright with the decorated face towards us as if it were still part of a whole item. The background of the decoration is yellow, and the motifs are painted on to it in blue, black, white & red. At the top of the piece is a strip with alternating feathers & snakes. Below this is a rather busy scene with 7 deities, 6 of them standing or sitting on a boat and one behind the boat. They all face to the right, and as we look that way we see 2 rows of 4 ba birds one above the other pulling two ropes attached to the front of the boat to pull it along towards the right. A ba bird is a bird with a human head, and all of these birds are drawn with their bodies facing to the right but their heads craned round looking back towards the boat. The birds have bird legs, but as well as their wings (which are folded on their backs) they have little human arms which extend up & backward to pull the ropes. The are several short bits of hieroglyphic text above the heads of the deities.

This is a piece of one of those busily decorated yellow 21st Dynasty coffins, with every bit of it covered in vignettes and protective symbols. It has no provenance, but it is now in the Ashmolean Museum (or at least it was when I photographed it in 2018). 🧵1/6

#Egyptology

A felted shrew drawing in a tiny book with a tiny pencil. They are sitting in the banks for the river Wye

Little shrew likes to sketch all the small joys they see while out on a walk.
(And yes I did actually make a tiny pencil that actually writes this morning)

"Barry, we're kings of the jungle, mate, you're embarrassing us both"

You can still buy curlywurlies in the UK (I suspect they've shrunk since the 80s when I used buy them as a kid tho).

A photograph of an ancient Egyptian statue. The statue is made of black granite, and is photographed slightly from below so presents an imposing image. The man is portrayed sitting in a squat with his knees up in front of him and his arms folded on top of his knees, we are seeing him face on. The arms are about ⅓ of the way down from the top of the photo, and the head behind them is slightly out of focus due to a fairly narrow depth of focus. This adds to the sense of presence. In front of his legs he has a sistrum, which is an ancient Egyptian instrument that is like a rattle. The instrument stands to the full height of his lower legs, and the handle is shaped like a female face with cow ears and a long wig. Above the face the sides of the sistrum curve like cow horns.

This rather imposing looking gentleman was called Roy (or Roma-Roy) and he was the high priest of Amun during the later part of Ramesses II’s reign & into the reigns of the next Pharaohs. His brother Bakenkhonsu and his father Roma had been high priests before him. 🧵1/5

#Egyptology

I have tariffed
the penguins
that are on
Heard Island

and which
you were probably
assuming
did not export goods

forgive me
they were taking advantage of us
so cunning
and so cold

A photograph of a predynastic Egyptian vase. The vase is made of clay which is a dark terracotta colour, and is decorated with a design in white. It is a tall slender vase which narrows towards the neck then flares out again. At the narrowest point and at the base the decoration consists of two rings of white triangles, one pointing up and the other pointing down. In between on the face we see are animals. The central animal is a Barbary sheep, which has a cross hatched body, a long neck with long hair on its underside, a head with a long nose and two long horns coming from the top of the head between the ears. Around it we can see three other animals, which are dogs. These are smaller than the sheep and have shorter neck with no long fur. Their ears are longer and perky, and their tails are short and also perky. Each dog is shown wearing a collar with a knot that protrudes at the front of the neck. The pot is displayed in front of a replica of a rough contemporaneous wall painting, and the object is positioned so that 3 gazelles on the background seem to stand within the vase.

I rather like the way the Ashmolean had this beaker displayed in 2011, it’s against a replica of a piece of Predynastic Egyptian art (from Hierakonpolis Tomb 100 I think) and lined up with gazelles of some sort surrounding the beaker with its central Barbary sheep. 🧵1/6

#Egyptology

A six panel comic. In panel 1, a yellow warbler says "Hey, so I'm going to go out on a limb here". For the next four panels, it hops down along a branch. In the last panel, at the end of the branch, it sings a little song. I'm sorry.

Look I have zero excuses for this, but the idea popped into my head and now it's in your head, sorry

A photograph of a cookery book called "Victory in the Kitchen Wartime Recipes"

A propaganda poster reproduced in a cookery book reading "Help win the war on the kitchen front. Above all avoid waste"

Bought this as a joke in the Imperial War Museum... perhaps going to be more practical than I realised!

Portrait of Machiavelli, wearing his little black hat and looking like a sweetie pie (this one is less reproduced than the one where he's in red and looks sinister, since people prefer to remember Machiavelli the schemer not Machiavelli the pancake nerd!

It's Pancake Day! Time to EAT PANCAKES in HONOR OF MACHIAVELLI!

What do pancakes have to do with the founder of modern political science?

Our boy Nick was obsessed with pancakes! & wrote about them at length in his "Art of War." Why pancakes? He'd been studying the ancients of course! 1/?

Worst. Episode. EVER.

A photograph of some ancient Egyptian ruins. None of the remaining pieces of wall are more than 10 courses of mud brick high and a lot is picked out in modern limestone set into the sand. In the foreground is a rectangular room with a few column bases in a row across the long axis. The long wall further away from us has a door that leads to a bigger rectangular room with about 20 columns in in 4 rows across the long axis. A door from that room leads out of the building. To the left of the photo towards the background we can see another part of the building but a bit too far away to pick out the details. To the right of the background in front of the door I mentioned earlier is a straight-edged depression that contains some greenery with some palm trees growing in the grassy area.

This is a photo of a small part of the North Palace at Amarna. I’m standing taking the photo behind the back of the building zoomed in quite a lot, you can just see a bit of the barbed wire fence along the top of the shot, which is keeping passersby out of the archaeology. 🧵1/7

#Egyptology

A photograph of an ancient Egyptian pottery bowl with a pottery hippo on the rim. The photo is taken quite close in so you only see about half the side of the bowl. The hippo was modelled separately and then stuck on to the rim so it looks like one of those clip on toys you can get to decorate the side of a shelf or something like that. The bowl and hippo are a bright orange-ish brown, and the hippo is decorated with white zig zag lines on its back and more lines on its snout. You can just about see that the bowl has white lines decorating the interior, but that's only just visible at the rim of the bowl.

I’ve posted pictures of this bowl previously, but it’s been a while so I think it’s time for another one. I like how from this angle you can see that the hippos have been modelled separately and then added on to the rim of the bowl, so he looks like he’s clinging on to it! 🧵1/7

#egyptology

The Way Things Ought To Be The Egyptian worldview is full of dualities – Upper & Lower Egypt, the living world and the world of the dead, the cultivated land and the desert, Horus and Seth, and so on and so forth. …

"Stand out"?? "Don’t obey in advance"?? The proper order of things requires one to conform and not rock the boat. Which would make it that much more difficult to say "but this is wrong" in any meaningful way. 6/6

talesfromthetwolands.org/2020/06/01/t...

On a tangent, it reminded me that this is the baby of our valorisation of the individual that shouldn't be chucked out with the bathwater of the selfishness it can enable. To an ancient Egyptian, with a primary dichotomy of order vs. chaos then much of the book would've seemed incomprehensible. 5/6

A little bit of hope after a terrible week A survival guide to the next four years.

Nicely complemented by Ian Dunt's latest substack post which I read the same day: iandunt.substack.com/p/a-little-b... 4/6

I'm not personally living under tyranny, the rule of law and democracy exist here as they should, but it's still full of things that feel actionable, that things I do can bolster the good in our community rather than feeling helplessly hopeless. 3/6

Each lesson is a phrase, followed by a paragraph that gives you more context, followed by a couple of pages of examples from the 20th Century which concretise it. Things like "Believe in truth", "Stand out", "Don’t obey in advance", "Contribute to good causes". 2/6

On Tyranny **NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER** ‘A sort of survival book, a sort of symptom-diagnosis manual in terms of losing your democracy and what tyranny and authoritarianism look like up close’ Rachel Maddow ...

I read Timothy Snyder's "On Tyranny: 20 Lessons from the 20th Century" at the weekend, in a single day. It's a short book, because it says what it needs to say in an economical fashion rather than waffling on. 1/6

www.penguin.co.uk/books/436481...

Didn't last time round, the soldiers at Hadrian's Wall wrote home to whinge about it!

Happy New Year! :)

It's not true for everywhere tho! The UK (and associated bits & pieces) didn't do it till September of 1752 coz they were having none of that Papish nonsense. (OK, so I had to look the precise date up, but I did remember it was quite a bit later for religious reasons).

In a Manger, MLP 23/12/24: A drawing of a nativity scene. There is a baby wrapped in tight white swaddling clothes in a manger, between two figures. The left hand figure is a man standing in a brown cloak, the right hand figure is a kneeling woman in a blue cloak. Above you see the roof of the manger, with a small brown bird sitting on the left hand corner. Above that is a star. Drawn a day early as Christmas Eve is a busy day. Ink & coloured pencil.

#ArtAdventCalendar day 24/24: In a Manger

Festive, MLP 23/12/24: A drawing of three strings of coloured light. There are 7 little brown birds sitting on top of them, and one little brown bird who's fluffed his landing somewhat and is hanging below the bottom string clinging on by his feet and flapping his wings. Ink & coloured pencil.

#ArtAdventCalendar day 23/24: Festive

Food Chain, MLP 22/12/24: A drawing of four fish in a line all swimming towards the right, increasing in size from left to right. The front fish has his mouth shut, but each of the others has jaws wide open revealing pointy teeth. The rearmost fish is so large he doesn't fit on the page. Ink & coloured pencil.

#ArtAdventCalendar day 22/24: Food Chain