Glass Dildos and Palaeolithic Bronzes: Why Private Collections Are Not Always a Good Idea

Here's my first dispatch from Gaziantep, which I visited for 10 days this month. Gaziantep is an up-and-coming metropolis in southeast Turkey that's been making a lot of money off of industry (a lot of European firms make products for the Middle Eastern market in factories there), and also investing a lot of money in parks, museums, and restoration of historic buildings. Since our research was on exactly that, we stopped by some neat places like the new city museum, the Emine Gögüs Kitchen Museum, and the new Zeugma Mosaic Museum (all very cool).

We also stopped by the Medusa Glass Museum, which is a stunning private collection of ancient glass hosted in a charmingly restored Antep house.

It's hard to overstate the quality of the materials - the place is packed with Roman glass and jewelry. It's all completely unprovenienced, of course, and no doubt was all pulled from tombs by looters not too long ago. Not sure how they got the collection legalized.

Seriously, check it out. There's three floors of it: perfume bottles, wine jars, oil bottles, and water jars, all in ancient glass. The quantity and quality is stunning.

Despite the quality of the stuff on display, but there's a total lack of quality control on the labels, with hilarious results. This one is labeled  'ROMAN TIME SEXUAL OBJECT'.

Here's a close up, cause I know you want one.

Now look, I'm willing to call a dong a dong, as in the Swedish archaeo-dildo controversy last year. But these aren't phallus-shaped at all, and believe me, the Romans were not shy about realistic depictions of the phallus. (And, I gotta point out that this looks like a real uncomfortable dildo.) In fact, these look to me like the glass rods used as raw material in glassblowing, given a little 'extra imagination'.

Then we have this thing here, which is labeled 'BREAST PUMP, 2nd Century AD'. I have no idea what this particular vessel is for, but I'm pretty sure it's not a breast pump.

Here's another howler, though you have to be a nerd to laugh really hard: 'PALAEOLITHIC TIME AXE, 3500 BC'. It's made of METAL, dumbass! The Palaeolithic is the 'old stone age'! There was no metal stuff! Plus, it ended about 20,000 years ago in this area. Obviously whoever wrote this got confused with the  Bronze Age, but even then 3500 BC is still way too early.

 
And that axe head doesn't even fit the mold! Who knows, it could be modern, or a fake. There's no way to know.

Though I commend the creators of this museum for having information panels, they apparently used Google translate or something for the English, because it's hilariously incomprehensible. In all, I was left both thrilled by the stuff on the shelf and horrified by the inanity of the people who own it.

Now, I'm not saying this to rag on Gaziantep or Turkey, but rather to point out that private collections are prone to this kind of thing. When I was a kid I remember going with my grandfather to a lot of private galleries and homes with large collections of cool, weird, sometimes ancient artifacts. Inevitably these things were put together by super-enthusiastic collectors who loved the objects but had no idea about their history, and so just made up their own interpretations.

Now there's lots of art market types out there, like say the Getty Foundation's new director, who would like to make it easier to buy and sell antiquities. They run under the assumption that private collectors are all smart, sophisticated, fancy people who are just as good stewards of the past as a public institution or nation-state - therefore we should jettisoning protections against looting and loosening the scrutiny of stolen antiquities. Now, I'm a critic of the mania for state ownership of cultural property too, but let's be real. For every collector who is a highly educated aesthete with impeccable knowledge of ancient history, there's an uninformed dumbasses who can't tell a dildo from a doorknob. With these people you get bad conservation conditions, poor information for visitors (if visitors are even allowed to see the stuff), and ample room for the kind of hilariously ignorant fantasy we see here.

As I've said before, it's not just a question of being pedantic about ancient history. The truth about the past is COOLER than bullshit, and it can mean something to people. Letting random people make up whatever they want about history might be a good business model (see the 'History' channel), but it's a disservice to the future.

Mesolithic Dildosity: Ancient 'Sex Toy' found in Sweden

Last month excavations at the Mesolithic site of Motala in Östergötland, Sweden, turned up this, ah, stimulating artifact made of antler bone:

Swedish National Heritage Board

Martin Rundqvist at ScienceBlogs describes the dig:

Excavations in waterlogged sediment along River Motala ström have produced great numbers of bone and wood objects that have rarely been preserved elsewhere. Most are harpoon and leister points, but now a bone dildo (a boner?) has joined the growing collection. Measuring twelve by two centimetres, its size is perhaps not very impressive, and there are many non-dildoish uses for which it may have been intended.

The articles note that relatively few phalluses are known from the stone age (mesolithic, neolithic) compared to the number of artifacts showing voluptuous female forms. Of course, if phalluses were usually carved in bone or wood, they wouldn't survive like clay or stone. The site at Motala is unusual because organic material is preserved so well.

Was it used for chipping stone tools? As a dildo? Both?!?!?! The coverage is very cautious:

"Your mind and my mind wanders away to make this interpretation about what it looks like – for you and me, it signals this erected-penis-like shape," said archaeologist Gšran Gruber of the National Heritage Board in Sweden, who worked on the excavation. "But if that's the way the Stone Age people thought about it, I can't say."

Part of science is not jumping to conclusions, but jeez, let's not overdo it.


Another look (SNHB).

Whether it's a dildo or not is a different story. Dildos have a pedigree going back at least to Classical Greece - see the jokes about lost dildos in Aristophanes' Lysistrata, or Herodas Mime 6, where we learn that shoemakers sometimes also took orders for custom-made toys (red leather!)¹ I find the idea of much older dildos totally unsurprising perhaps because I assume that ancient people were just as creative (and sex-obsessed) as we are. Another instance of archaeological optimism, if you will!

Of course, any kind of decoration is a problem for archaeologists. Does the decoration mean it was 'symbolic' and not functional? If we're not sure what it was, it must be a ritual item! At least the archaeologists here have a functional hypothesis - or as one commenter jokes, maybe using a dildo for flint-knapping gave the owner 'plausible deniability'. It's true that we can't say for sure. But the guys interviewed in this Livescience article sure are trying hard to avoid the idea that this thing is even penis-shaped, much less a sex toy.

That seems kind of weird to me. But of course, most of the world's archaeologists come from cultures with a strange attitude toward representations of sex. By which I mean the Judeo-Christian-Islamic strain of monotheism, which has a conspicuous lack of festivals celebrating giant penises. In a lot of cultures such things are normal and fun: a Dionysian phallus-fest in a modern Greek village, various Japanese fertility festivals, or the veneration of the lingam of Shiva are just things people do. And then there's this unforgettable description of a Dionysian procession in Alexandria sponsored by Ptolemy II (mid-200s BC):

In another [cart] was a gold phallus one hundred and eighty feet (55m) long, painted in various colours and bound with fillets of gold; it had at the extremity a gold star, the perimeter of which was nine feet.²

Oops, not supposed to see that.

It might be stretching the article too much to say that the dildo-skepticism is part of some kind of Christian cultural baggage. But how much does cultural 'common sense' affect our interpretation of objects, archaeologically? Would Japanese or Indian archaeologists approach this find less cautiously? Would it even be newsworthy in a culture that wasn't still afraid of sex? Given that relatively few countries dominate world archaeology, how much of what we think we know about the past is colored by our cultural conditioning?

1 One could do a blog full of nothing but archaeological penises. I'll even let you claim credit for the idea if you start it.
2 From Callixeinos of Rhodes, quoted in Athenaeus' Deipnosophistae 413D.