a vile hunger

the office of the dead

illuminated page from a book of hours, flanders, late 15th c.

(Cylinder seal of First Dynasty of Ur Queen Puabi, found in her tomb, dated circa 2600 BC, with modern impression. Inscription: 𒅤𒀜 𒎏 - Pu3-abi(AD) Nin - Queen Pu-abi. Nicked straight off Wikipedia as it's a fab comparison of seal / relief.)

In the British Museum you can find "Lady Layard's jewellery". Austin Henry Layard is a guy whose academic efforts I'm admittedly very indebted to. He was passionate about Venetian and Roman glass and did a great job re-popularising both styles in the UK, but more importantly he was the assyriologist who excavated Nineveh and the Library of Ashurbanipal—where we've found the majority of the Gilgamesh tablets. Pioneer figure in terms of Near Eastern archaeology... but check this out:

This is a necklace Layard had made for his wife. It uses real cylinder seals.

To quote the British Museum's entry on the item: One cylinder seal is Akkadian (about 2200 BC) and four belong to the second millennium BC, but eight are late Assyrian (about 1000-612 BC). Late Babylonian and Achaemenid stamp seals (about 600-350 BC) are used for the pendants and clasp.

Enid later wrote in her diary that, when they dined with Queen Victoria in 1873, it was 'much admired'.

Ancient Near Eastern artefacts, repurposed as jewellery in a set that doesn't give a single fuck about accurately dating them, let alone treating them with the sort of respect you might perhaps expect of items over four thousand years old. Instead they've become a mark of elite colonial status, an Oriental curiosity utterly separated from their historical context. They're 'old'. They're non-descriptly 'other'. Time and place dissolve into an attractive and vague exoticism.

All while the place these seals have been appropriated from is busy being exploited by the very empire this "jewellery" is being shown off to!

"I wanted to post a little quick thing about... I was commenting about McCartney and Lennon and the beauty of their relationships and with "these guys were obviously in love", I meant creatively, as dear friends they went through this remarkable period together. I would never in a million light years expand any observation about other people's private life. I would never do that. But of course, this...Daily Beast, TMZ, all that tabloid garbage... And I would never suggest anything beyond that. I love their work, and I was making a comment about their friendship and their collaboration, creatively and as friends. So this idea that I'm gonna...make a remark about their private lives and the details of that is absurd. I would never do that. No matter what information I had [chuckles]...about anybody. Never. It's not something I would do." (You can watch the full video on his instragram account. The rest of it it's just him ranting about the tabloids)