Field Notes

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Vegetus Buys Fortunata

An Ancient Receipt for a Slave-Girl

A waterlogged spot in London’s financial district has yielded a unique tablet—an ancient receipt for the purchase of a Gallic slave-girl by a senior slave in the imperial household.

Dating between 80 and 120 A.D., the tablet being studied below was found in a garbage dump beside a tributary of the Thames. The 5.5- by 4.25-inch tablet was made of fir wood and coated with black wax, on which text was incised with a stylus. The tablet records the purchase of a girl named Fortunata (Lucky) by a man named Vegetus, a slave serving as a Roman official under Domitian (81–96 A.D.) or Trajan (98–117 A.D.). The text reads:

“Vegetus, assistant slave of Montanus the slave of the August Emperor, has bought the girl Fortunata, by nationality a Diablintian [a member of a tribe from northern France], for 600 denarii. She is warranted healthy and not liable to run away.”

Were slaves, then, able to buy other slaves in Roman Britain? Roger Tomlin of Oxford University, who deciphered and translated the tablet, confirms that such purchases did take place: “A slave could own another slave, called his vicarius [deputy].” According to Tomlin, the Vegetus and Montanus mentioned in the document were “civil servants, probably with financial or middle-management duties.” Skilled imperial slaves enjoyed a lifestyle far superior to that of low-status slaves working in the fields or in mines. Many earned enough money to buy their own freedom.

The 600 denarii—about two years’ salary for a soldier—was a good price, Tomlin says, “so she was probably fairly young—18, 20. Presumably she was a domestic servant, or was bought specifically as a concubine.”

Being sold into slavery in the emperor’s household was not necessarily a hardship for Fortunata, and may have been a good opportunity: If she were Vegetus’s consort and he were eventually freed, he might free her in turn and marry her, as commonly happened.

The language used on the tablet is “fairly standard Latin legalese,” Tomlin says, and the handwriting is fluent. But the scratches in the wooden tablet are unusually deep. Curiously, it was the clumsy heavy-handedness of the scribe that allowed scholars to decipher the receipt nearly 2,000 years later.

012

Oscar-Winning Director Pushes the Envelope

Special from the online Rockall Times: Highly talented Hollywood all-rounder Mel Gibson is to direct a film version of James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake made entirely in the ancient Anatolian language of Hittite.

Respected linguist Gibson—whose flawless Scottish accent in 1995 epic Braveheart wowed audiences worldwide—has further stated that the film will carry no subtitles.

“Hopefully I’ll be able to transcend language barriers with visual storytelling,” he told a press conference. “People think I’m crazy, and maybe I am,” Gibson added. “But maybe I’m a genius.”

Hollywood agrees. “Take any project, stick Mel’s name on it and you’ve got a surefire blockbuster,” the film’s producer told the Rockall Times.

Academic reaction to the project has, however, been mixed.

“Hmmmmmm,” mused one linguistics professor, while another told the Rockall Times: “As the oldest attested Indo-European language, Hittite is certainly a bold choice.”

Gibson hopes that the success of Finnegan—Cry for Freedom will enable him to bankroll some of his other pet projects, including an Inuit remake of Bridget Jones’ Diary and his eagerly anticipated Macbeth, set in 1970s Belfast and spoken entirely in Etruscan.

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Thousands of Coins Uncovered

A Mysterious Hoard from Central England

More than 3,000 gold and silver coins have been unearthed at a farm near the city of Leicester in central England.

After being alerted by an amateur archaeologist in November 2000, authorities excavated the site, which contained coins minted in central and southeastern England, as well as coins from the Roman Republic (some dating to 30 B.C.).

“We’re not getting any coins beyond Tiberius [14–37 A.D.],” said Patrick Clay, director of the University of Leicester Archaeological Services. Although coins were first used in Lydia (in modern southwestern Turkey) as early as the seventh century B.C., coins were not produced in the British Isles until the first century B.C.

The hoard also included a silver Roman cavalry helmet of a kind worn by senior officers on parade. “If this helmet was in Britain before the conquest, it brings up lots of questions about how it got there,” Clay observed. One possibility, he said, is that the helmet belonged to a local British adventurer who served in the Roman cavalry.

The wealth of the hoard, Clay said, may indicate that it was an offering to the gods, an idea supported by the discovery of animal bones at the site.

The coins, helmet and animal bones offer intriguing clues to life in pre-Roman Britain, said J.D. Hill of the British Museum, which helped fund the excavations. “They tell us a story about a ritual that happened here 2,000 years ago, and force us to rethink just how important Leicestershire was before the Romans.”

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Recent Finds

Dancing Satyr

Sicily, Italy
4th century B.C.
Bronze

Seemingly aloft, this larger-than-life-size depiction of a dancing satyr is now on display in the small fishing village of Mazara del Vallo in western Sicily. The bronze statue was found five years ago in 1,600 feet of water. Though remarkably well preserved, it needed four years of work (it was cleaned and fitted with an internal steel armature) to be restored it to its present condition. The satyr’s sensuous form—notwithstanding the loss of both arms and one leg—and artistic sophistication have led some art historians to attribute the work to the fourth-century B.C. sculptor Praxiteles.

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First Cities

New Met Exhibit Explores the Birth of Western Civilization

For three days last April, looters raided one of the world’s most significant collections of Mesopotamian art, the National Museum in Baghdad, leaving empty galleries and a trail of broken glass and debris.

The job of assessing the damage—figuring out what exactly was taken and how it might be recovered—is now underway (see Francis Deblauwe, “Plundering the Past”). Although nobody can know for certain when—or if—many of the museum’s treasures might resurface, a current exhibition at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art gives us some idea of what we are in danger of losing.

Running until August 17, “Art of the First Cities: The Third Millennium B.C. from the Mediterranean to the Indus” features some 400 works of art, including sculptures, cylinder seals, inlays and jewelry from Mesopotamia and its neighbors. (Although Mesopotamia lay within present-day Iraq, the timing of the exhibit—coming in the aftermath of the war—is mere coincidence; the show has been in the works since 1997.)

The world’s first cities arose in southern Mesopotamia around the end of the fourth millennium B.C. One important urban center was Uruk, modern Warka. According to ancient Sumerian king lists, Uruk was ruled in the mid-third millennium B.C. by the legendary king Gilgamesh, the eponymous hero of the Gilgamesh Epic.

Another early city was Ur, modern Tell el-Muqayyar, the birthplace of the biblical Abraham. In the 1920s and 1930s British archaeologist Leonard Woolley excavated Ur’s Royal Cemetery, where he uncovered more than 1,000 graves dating to around 2500 B.C. The burial goods from the cemetery are spectacular: ornate jewelry, elaborate works in copper and gold, exquisitely carved stone statues. One figurine (above) shows a goat standing on its hind legs and peering with wide, frightened eyes through the branches of a gold-leafed plant. The 17-inch-high “Ram Caught in 015a Thicket,” as Woolley named the statue, has a golden face and golden legs, and its belly is fashioned out of silver. Its horns and eyes are made of lapis lazuli, and its fleece is pieced together with shells.

In the Royal Cemetery, Woolley also found the so-called Standard of Ur (above)—a 20-inch-long trapezoidal wooden box that probably served as the sounding box of a musical instrument. (When Woolley found the box, its wood had completely deteriorated; the box was later reconstructed from surviving fragments.) Both of the long outer sides of the box were decorated with inlaid shells, lapis lazuli and red limestone; one side presents the Sumerians marching off to war, while the other side (shown here) depicts them in a victory celebration, as they carry off the spoils of war (bottom two registers) and banquet to the music of a lyre (top register). A lyre mounted with a bull’s head (below), almost identical to the one depicted on the Royal Standard of Ur, was also found in the cemetery.

Not only did ancient Mesopotamia give birth to the first cities, it also witnessed the rise of the first empire, ruled from the city of Akkad. The Akkadian kings, the first of whom was the mighty Sargon, ruled from 2300 to 2100 B.C., unifying Mesopotamia and extending the empire’s influence to Syria, Anatolia, Iran and Arabia.

As the great Mesopotamian city-states and kingdoms grew in prestige and power, they established trade routes that stretched over great distances, into mainland Greece and the Aegean islands to the west, and Iran and Central Asia to the east. “Art of the First Cities” devotes much space to contemporaneous civilizations, such as the Harappa, which arose in the Indus River valley to the east of Mesopotamia. Among the Harappan artifacts on display is a 7-inch-high soapstone figure (below) depicting a priest-king with full lips and a sharply chiseled beard.

Not surprisingly, the objects on display at the Met exhibit are luxury items, often made of precious gold, carnelian and lapis lazuli. These artifacts illuminate the lives of the wealthy, the important, the powerful—those associated with palaces and temples. The common man from third-millennium B.C. Mesopotamia remains largely a mystery; presumably, like us, he could only look on all this fabulous wealth and beauty from a distance.

Vegetus Buys Fortunata
An Ancient Receipt for a Slave-Girl