When old age shall this generation waste ….

I have an Egyptian scarab from the middle kingdom. It is has the name of the owner inscribed. For reasons I can’t articulate, I find the fact that it has writing on it incredibly powerful and moving, even though as an artistic object it is low value (it is very worn, and probably not a very good exemplar to begin with). As anyonr who watches Time Team knows, at the same time Egyptians were producing written records, the British were scraping a very marginal iron age existence.

Very cool, sir.

Wonderful,
As I struggle to make up several grand in property tax arrears it will be a salve to know someone has the means to preserve culture and class.

I strive by your example. Despite no work, no prospects and investment accounts halved in value, I’ll rush right out to buy something of lasting value.
Can’t aspire to a bit of rare china of course , but maybe a bit of brown rice at Trader Joes will do.

fcc

Anyone else reminded of Heinlein’s “–We Also Walk Dogs”?

One summer in the late ’90s I was on an archaeological dig in the White Mountains of New Hampshire – a Paleoindian site that (early work indicated – don’t know how things stand currently) seems to have been used at various times by one or more family bands somewhere around 11,000 years ago, as the last Ice Age was ending – glacial lakes, caribou, cold. The bulk of what we recovered was debitage, waste flakes from making or retouching stone tools; important to archaeologists, of admittedly less interest to others, but that’s what my story touches on.

Now, here’s the scene: we’re crouching in this big excavation block – think a rather large rectangle of ground that’s been excavated pretty evenly 2 feet or so down – slowly, carefully, painstakingly troweling away the dirt, hour after hour, interrupted on occasion by even more delicate brushing away of same. It’s a bit tiring. Luckily we’ve also uncovered (this being New England) some big rocks that make passable seats, albeit requiring some fairly careful positioning to be endurable. As time passes, each individual sitter happens to start noticing something interesting: they’re finding the highest concentration of waste flakes more or less right in front of them, and fading out somewhat to the sides in a kind of arc . . .

I don’t remember exactly how it happened, but at some point people realized what it was that they were seeing – that over 100 centuries before, other people had been sitting themselves down right in those same less-uncomfortable spots and getting to work, to the task at hand.

Roman glass is really quite cheap, too, if you value age, and thinking of that continuity is very moving. But Dan S. wins the thread.

… ne mæg weorþan wis
wer, ær he
wintra dæl in woruldrice.

Close to hand I have two trilobite fossils and a piece of a Campo del Cielo meteorite, and yet, by contemporary standards, my computer itself is antiquated. There’s a nice stainless steel mobile in the living room, with a bungee cord resting at its base so I can quickly bind it up to keep my toddler nephew from cracking his skull with it. He’s just noticed the parachute cloth mobile dangling from the ceiling in the studio, which is more than most of my former colleagues ever did when I had it in my office. I think he’ll do well.

It’s a beautiful piece. I made an effort to acquaint myself with Chinese archaeology over the Summer (heaven knows why…) and the artefacts they produced were simply extraordinary. I’m largely an old books person myself, because my father is, but I’ve always wanted something like that.
Re: Martin Wisse – I, for one, am pleased to see something non-economic/politics related on CT. It’s all interesting but sometimes you just need to take a step back, look at beautiful things and feel humanity resonate down the centuries.

Apologies for the cheesy final sentence! But it does make you feel connected, yet at the same time so distant from people so similar to us, yet so different.

It’s odd what strikes us viscerally about artefacts. In Wales the Roman ruins at Caerleon are wonderful, but what I recall best is a Roman roof tile with a footprint in it. We saw some fantastic illuminated manuscripts at the British Museum, but what struck me the most were some simple cartoonish illustrations where the artist’s brush or pen strokes were very obvious. The simplicity of those “material, tactile link[s]” gave them an immediacy I seldom feel with more sophisticated work.

jackd: I think it is the sense of brushing past someone who has gone, is finished. I’m always blown away by the monumentality of ruins, castles, cathedrals etc. But what touches you is the evidence of an individual, like that footprint or the immediacy of simply illustration. Another example, I find, is graffiti in old prisons, barracks, construction sites. Sometimes they are incredible pictures but often enough are just the marks of some individual who, at some particular moment, sometimes long gone, sometimes recent, expressed themselves, identified themselves as a person.

Delicious Pundit : I *really* hope no one judges me by my mugs!

And a very, very expensive one, let’s not forget that

Actually, about a hundred quid, given that it’s reasonably similar to the first result for a google search on “Qingbai bowl. It’s actually quite easy to check these things John, using search engines. While you’re using search engines, you might also search for terms like “academic blog”, which will pull up a whole list of alternative sites that you can read instead of Crooked Timber, I promise you that we won’t be hurt.

Actually, I don’t have much of an idea of scale from the photo above, and searching google for “small qingbai bowl” turns up a couple of examples at $60 or lower. So it could have cost no more than a decent cigar.

Dan S, that is a wonderful, wonderful story. Thanks.

I find it astonishing that readers of a social sciences & humanities blog are complaining about a post on material culture. Do they hate archaeologists who don’t shoot enough Nazis?

Beautiful artefact, beautiful post, Chris.

I tend to feel something like this for the few pretty old (over 100 years in a few cases, less than that but still old in some others) 1st edition books I have, and they are obviously both less old and less directly connected to the “maker”. It’s an interesting feeling.

Older books might be less obviously connected to the maker, but are so much more clearly connected to their past readers; thumbed pages give not just a visual but an immediate tactile (and olfactory) sense of their passage through time. No substitute, really, which is one reason the passing of interest in books these days is remarkable — weirdly, we’ll be returning eventually to a day in which well-bound books are specialty items.

An acquaintance of mine spent a fair while in hospital after going on an Army Cadets camp (this operated in high schools as a sort of preparation for military service) and finding an (until then) unexploded shell, which of course he and his mates played with.

“Being the hardcore economist at CT, I’m always fascinated by relative prices and perceptions of necessity and luxury.”

Me too, especially among those who profess a leftist politics, and argue fo greater distribution of wealth. Whenever we buy a luxury or positional good we are,eschewing a painless, cost-free (to us) opportunity to redistribute wealth that could, in many circumstances, change the life of a person or family. What, I wonder, does that reveal?

36 is roughly equivalent to saying “Well, if you believe there should be a higher top rate of income tax, why don’t you send more money to the Inland Revenue on your own then? Eh? Eh?”, and is also about as much fun.

“the very best use of your allocated time might have been looking for another blog to go and bother’

I disagree.

As JM would be the first to point out, every hour he spends threadjacking on blogs and detracting from the sum of human knowledge is an hour he could have spent working and giving the proceeds to the poor or, if that’s too much to ask, fixing broken links in Wikipedia or contributing to some similar project. But he prefers to be what he is. In the interests of learning about consequences, and since Chris hasn’t done it himself, I’ll advise JM that he is permanently banned from commenting on any thread of mine.

As a leftist, I don’t want a society in which there is more charity, I want one with higher taxes. I put my vote where my mouth is. Welfare should not be dependent on good hearts of individuals, but should be socially provided,

Nice bowl. I don’t treasure my own material possessions all that much, and I wouldn’t describe myself as a leftist, but I can still make myself a target of ridicule: the object that consistently gives me the most to ponder is a Qur’an stand I got from a madrasa far away from where I live, that was offered to me because I was the only person who’d come through in a year who seemed vaguely interested in Islam. The stand is too small for its stated function and is therefore clearly decorative/ornamental.

The madrasa operated a gift shop full of generic Ali Baba costumes made in India, targeted at the tourists that visited them in order to look at their building. The rather shamefaced guide ushered me out of this, following our conversation regarding the history of his insitution, into a workshop where, I was told, the madrasa students themselves made the Qur’an stands for their own use, enjoyment and exchange with other madrasas. The madrasa stands in a country seldom visited by Americans. I was funded by a university to go to there in order to research cultural monuments; I doubt I will ever return. I gave the equivalent of $11 for the object, in an exchange in which market value was not explicitly stated.

I offer this nicely complicated case study as fodder for a serious investigation of value. I would be unwilling to part with the object for less than 5 figures.