GILGA-POSTING

(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!

— then it's art nouveau

and if the sexy lady has a bob cut or a hair cap and is wearing a column or flapper dress; there's a lot of geometry like rectangles, arches, rays, and diamonds; angels have super sharp wings and a lot of muscles; everything is steel, concrete, marble, gold, and red velvet seats; everything is VERY angular; and all the foliage is basically papyrus fronds; things feel vaguely Egyptian or Turkish or Mesopotamian; the fonts play with being very skinny or very thick and are sans serif with extra lines; or Gatsby would be found floating dead in that pool

— with lots of lush flora, tiny insects (like dragonflies) or graceful birds, stained glass, iron, warm golden lighting, lots of wood and wood carving (but now it's more wood paneling), a stylistic fondness for Japan, line weight variation in the font, and tile (but this time it's carved or sculpted on, not tiny mosaic)

but you're worried it's art deco

— because the forms (especially foliage) are very symmetrical and slightly more angular or blocky and graphic looking, things are more rectangular than circular or curvy in architecture, the patterns repeat more often, and more of the lamps are pyramids or rectangular, and there are nods to Egyptian or Ottoman style, and they used the color red (probably in an accent chair or carpet rug)

BUT there's no steel, concrete, gold plating or gilding, marble, big muscles, spiky or radiating diamond shapes, angular people, or flappers,

AND the vibes are jacobean, gothic, or spanish mission revival; they love some brick and stone; the wallpaper is an explosion of colorful pattern that could give you arsenic poisoning or help depict a descent into postpartum psychosis in a famous short story; but there are NO people to be seen, not even sexy ladies,

They are also that! And it comes from the same place.

Since 2009, the billionaire owners of Hobby Lobby started taking advantage of the wars in Iraq to buy stolen and looted cuneiform tablets and clay artifacts from ancient Mesopotamia. A lot of them were suspected to have been stolen from the National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad in the chaos of the US invasion in 2003. The Hobby Lobby owners used HL profits to smuggle these artifacts into the US (taking them out of Iraq is illegal so they listed them as tile samples from Turkey and Israel, more friendly nations to the US). Eventually the customs officials seized them, and the US Department of Justice filed a lawsuit in 2017 when the news really broke about just how many ancient Middle Eastern artifacts were smuggled into the country. They were doing this to stock their "Museum of the Bible" that purports to prove the literal truth of the Bible... using stolen Mesopotamian cuneiform tablets, somehow. Idk.

They also had sixteen Dead Sea Scrolls that turned out to be forgeries but that's only tangentially related.

Hobby Lobby and its owners were fined and ordered to return, again, thousands of artifacts back to Iraq. For years they KEPT finding more artifacts of Hobby Lobby's that turned out to be stolen, looted, and smuggled. It's one of the biggest artifact smuggling scandals in recent history. And it separated artifacts from their context and permanently damaged the ability to learn new things from them, even though archaeologists subsequently have been trying.

"immortality sucks because you forget who you are" we always forget who we are. do you remember who you were at four years of age? who you were at fourteen? "who i am" is a shadow cast on the wall.

academy

adventurer's guild

alchemist

apiary

apothecary

aquarium

armory

art gallery

bakery

bank

barber

barracks

bathhouse

blacksmith

boathouse

book store

bookbinder

botanical garden

brothel

butcher

carpenter

cartographer

casino

castle

cobbler

coffee shop

council chamber

court house

crypt for the noble family