Visit to the UPenn Archaeology and Anthropology Museum

By Rook Hawkins

The university museum is not what one would expect to find nestled up close to a football stadium in the busy streets of South Philly. But believe it or not, next to the brilliant red-brick archways and Roman-engineered design of Franklin Field, is the illustrious University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Cast iron gates and more red-brick walls surround the three story building which upon first glance is humbling and curious. The bustle of south-street traffic make parking a chore, and the price of the parking itself costs more than an adult ticket for admittance into the museum, but $22 later you're walking through the foyer and towards the Amarna exhibit on the first floor.


Against the walls of this modern building the stele's and grand pillars, along with some pretty intense lighting, not only inspire but electrify. You come to realize that you are looking at creativity carved into stone as old as 3,300 years old. If you took the time to inspect the pillars, the inscribed stone tablets, the bases of statues, you can see the markings of the craftsman's tools as they would have chipped away at the rock by hand. Small indentations and groove marks are visible; if you could touch them, feel them, you would feel as though you stepped back three millennium in time.

You move along the walls, from stele to stele, or from column to doorway pillars, and try to decipher the hieroglyphs that line almost every inch of them. Some symbols you recognize. Water, a name like Merneptah or Amenhotep; Gods are also depicted or kings are shown ready to strike. Some of the pillars show soldiers in armor holding long spears, recalling images from the battle depictions of the Near East inscribed on temple walls.

"The troops consisted of every picked man of Egypt. They were like lions roaring upon the mountain tops....the horses were quivering in every part of their bodies, prepared to crush the foreign countries under their hoofs..." (From Ramses III's war against the Sea Peoples of Canaan and the Near East)

In one of the rooms is a small statues and tribute images of Horus and Isis, the now famous carving of the mother holding child, seen in the opening part of the film The DaVinci Code and in various pseudo-scholarly books by those attempting to show causation where on correlation is present. One room leads into another, and soon sarcophagi surround you. There are several preserved mummies placed in sand with a glass sheet on top for you you look in, and leave glares on pictures when the flash goes off. The mummies represent ancient Egyptian beliefs of the afterlife, preserving the body for its resurrection in another world. Similar, perhaps, to future Jewish Rabbinical teachings and later Catholic beliefs in the resurrection of the body to a heavenly realm.

A wooden plank, half corroded by time, is hanging in one of the display cases, still bearing hieroglyphics that were painted thousands of years ago, and carrying many of the bright colors that would have decorated the whole sarcophagus this belonged too--which once held a priest. It is hard to make out the script on the plant, and with good reason. It was written in a faster hand, although not necessarily hieratic or Demotic.

On the third floor also were the Canaanite and Ancient Israel exhibits. Although 'Ancient Israel' is itself a bit of a contradiction--or as it has come to be known as, an eponymic character of Persian, Hellenistic and late antiquity Jewish creativity--the information was surprisingly unbias, but that may have also been because it was so empty and small compared to other exhibits. The stelae present were all inscribed in Egyptian Hieroglyphs, a testament to the occupation of the region under the New Kingdom pharaohs. Many of the remnants on display were found at Beth Shean (later renamed Scythopolis when rebuilt by the Romans in 63 BCE). On display also were dozens of figurines representing Canaanite Gods, once also believed in by the early Israelites, when they migrated from the regions of Syria and the Transjordan, and had intermingled with the local Canaanite tribes. One goddess in particular was the most represented, that of Astarte; also known as Asherah-Athirat. The remains of a Canaanite human skeleton found in a burial tomb, some scarabs and amulets, and pottery were also showing. as well as a very elaborately created "daily life" wax display which took up a large portion of the exhibit.

Whether because of the profoundity of Roman influence on Judaism in late antiquity or because of some random logistical means, somebody had the not-so-ingenious idea of having the Ancient Israel exhibit blend in to the Roman exhibit, the two being separated only by an open doorway. However unsettling the idea may have been, the artifacts on display were nothing short of incredible. On both sides of the open doorway were two collections of beautifully crafted glass pieces. The museum has currently the largest selection of these glass artifacts from the Roman civilization, and they are quite exquisite. Glass making is a process that goes back farther than the Egyptian Empires, back to Tell el-Amarna, in the years of Akhenaten in the New Kingdom (probably as far back as the third millennium, although glass coloration seems to be something the Egyptians played with). However techniques are much different between the two great civilizations. The Egyptians would create molds by carving stones with shapes. A Kiln would be present, made of stone, with an open mouth used to funnel in the wind to bring in rich oxygen in order to heat the fire enough to fuse glass. Seaweed or alkali would be used to create a rich navy blue color, producing ingots when heated and cooled. These glass ingots would then be worked into whatever the craftsmen wanted. When Romans created ingots, their ingredients were slightly different. Sand, crushed sea shells, and soda were combined and then melted at low temperatures, then cooled, and finally reheated at high temperatures transforming the compound into glass. The Romans utilized a new form of working the glass called blowing, a skill invented in Jerusalem.

Among the glass displays were brilliantly carved statues, busts and oil lamps.  A Stele of three Roman soldiers in full dress greets you from the center of the room, and next to it on the right, a beautiful mosaic floor piece with a ship and crew, with the word (hotly disputed) VINCLVSVS repeated twice.  What is most notable about the statues, however, is that many had been vandalized by castration.  On almost all male statues of gods, nymphs or other, the genitalia are completely chopped off at the base.  This is not because of modern vandals but rather it came from an edict issued by the Catholic Church to remove all phallic symbolism in the empire.   Temples and households were overrun with Christians with tools.   On the reverse side of the block with the three Roman centurions, an inscription had been violently scribbled out as part of the damnatio memoriae, an edict issued by the Roman Senate expunging the name of Domitian and condemning it. 

The Roman exhibit appropriately blended in with the Etruscan and Greek ones, the origins of the Roman people, those who would eventually become one of the greatest civilizations in antiquity.  As if suggesting accurately that both Etruscan and Greek cultures merged in creation of the Romans, both cultures have their own sections joined together.   The origins of the Greeks starts with an explanation of the Minoan period, with which the language is still not deciphered and much about the civilization is unknown.  With the adaptation of the Phoenician alphabet including the addition of vowels, the Greek civilization takes on a mind of its own, including the eventual "Greek miracle" in which the exploration of science and philosophy begin in the 6th century BCE. 

With the look at these exhibits, the museum was closing, and long before I could explore more of the amazing things on display. But the day was full of incredible experiences which I will not soon forget, and hopefully my next trip there will yield up more exciting discoveries.  All the images from my visit can be seen in this blog post here (formatting could not be done right to include images on this site).