Going Back in Time
We all know that time travel is a load of crap. But you don’t have to jumble your molecular structure and go all H.G. Wells (He published The Time Machine in 1895) to take your mind back to ancient times. I have always had a thing about antiquities, probably due to growing up for a few years in Costa Rica, where pre-Colombian art was on most everyone’s mind in the late 1950’s when I was there. This was a time before the concern over the national patrimony of antiquities came into focus, so there were no meaningful laws about taking antiquities out of the country. Today, almost every country has laws prohibiting anything of historical value being taken out of its jurisdiction. In post-War Costa Rica, there were bigger issues than some old clay pottery and pumice figurines dug up from indigenous burial grounds. My mother was all over the archeological value of these burial mounds and what lay within them. Itinerant people would come to our door from the banana plantation and unwrap old rags to show us what they had unearthed. It was never the fancy gold or silver stuff, but there was a wide array of pre-Colombian glazed pottery and pumice pieces that had been crafted out of the soft volcanic rock that covered the landscape from one of the many volcanoes (6 active and another 50 inactive), with Arenal being the most famous and most active.
We were so stupid in that we only bought the best pieces and turned our noses up to the rest. Naturally, we should have bought every piece offered, but at the time, that seemed excessive. We ended up with four pumice pieces that I still own. One is a 15’ chafing dish on legs that looks like something used to grind grain or maize. There is an 18” high statue of a naked woman that has a bit of a sexual connotation to it since her genitals are clearly carved and visible (she has taken a bit of beating over the years, but is Gorilla glued together). I also have a 7” high head that looks particularly indigenous with a broad face and a small flat nose. The last piece is a small. Lemon-sized roughly carved head with a protuberant nose. The other pieces we have are mostly glazed terracotta colored pottery in the form of small footed dishes where the legs of the dish are sometimes hollowed and have little bits of balled clay in them to rattle around. They are actually quite ornate, implying that functionality was only part of the pre-Columbian life experience. All of these artifacts had been buried as part of the burial mound rituals of the native population. Since many were perfectly in tact, I have to assume that the tradition was like the ancient Egyptians wherein the dead were expected to need some of their utensils in the afterlife.
I carried on my interest in archeology when we moved to Rome in 1968 and I was directed to a place called Testaccio Hill. It was an earthen hill by the Tiber River, which was ostensibly an ancient trash heap created by the unloading of grains and oils from the amphorae in which they were transported, which were discarded due to some local sanitation regulation. Those amphorae were not to be reused, but they were allowed to be tossed by the dockside and there they accumulated over the centuries until the Tiber lost its navigability. For many more centuries Testaccio Hill was nothing more than a trash heap, but then people came to realize it housed some historically meaningful pieces of antiquities. The wheels of regulation sometimes move slowly and in 1968 the site was still open to the public, so I gathered up a box full of terracotta handles, necks and marked pieces of the broken amphorae. Since the site was closed and made a historical dig the next year, I am presuming that I have some of the last antiquities extracted from the place. They sit in an ash wood tray filled with black sand under a glass-topped table in my study, where they are effectively displayed for anyone who visits and has an interest. Amongst the amphorae bits I have scattered some of the broken pre-Columbia’s pottery pieces and a series of stone pyramids I have collected from my travels. It is my homage to the ancient world.
This love of antiquities has stayed with me to the point where I have saved and proudly displayed all the pieces I have mentioned acquiring over the years. I have gone to the pre-Colombian national museum in San Jose and must say, nothing I have would qualify as being worthy of inclusion in that collection, or probably any other. But you see, having personally collected these pieces makes them very special to me, as you can imagine. I have collected a few pieces over my working life, but only a few. There have been a few from Israel, Jordan, the Amazon and a few odd places in West Africa. But none of them do for me what my pre-Columbian pumice and Testaccio terracotta do. I can stare at them for long periods of time and imagine the Central American funeral or the unloading Phoenician sailing ship and I have effectively transported myself in time.
On Monday, Kim and Mike and Melisa and I are flying off on vacation. We start with a four day stop in Rome. As most of my readers know very well, I know Rome pretty well. Not only did I live there for three years of high school, but I have revisited the Eternal City countless times since, including a few years ago when we rented a house just north of Rome during the summer that my youngest son, Thomas, spent a college summer taking courses in Rome and living the life of my own youth in Trastevere. There is very little in Rome that I have not visited, but that’s not stopping me from yet again revisiting my favorite city in the world. When I think about Rome, I think about antiquities. No other European cities do that to me, but there are lots of others like Jerusalem, Istanbul and a few others that have that feel.
I feel like this trip is about traveling back in time in stages. We will start by going back 1,500 – 2,000 years to the Holy Roman Empire. We will spend time at Castel Sant’Angelo and in Piazza Navona under the watchful gaze of Bernini’s famous fountains and then on to The Spanish Steps and Trevi Fountain. Then we will go to La Boca de Verita, inching our way back to the days of the Pantheon, the Foro Italico, the Capitoline Hill and the Coliseum. We will also spend a day with a local tour guide walking the streets of the Testaccio and Ostiense areas before heading into Trastevere for a food tour. If that doesn’t take me back to the Phoenicians, I don’t know what will.
I will not be boarding a sailing ship to cross the Mediterranean, but will then fly to Cairo to spend a few days in the Valley of the Kings and Giza to thrust me back to 2,000 B.C. We will also fly to Luxor, float down the Nile (technically floating up the Nile as we head south to Aswan). We might even squeeze in a day trip down to Abu Simbel, we’ll see. We will do some more time in Cairo in the Coptic and Muslim areas before flying off to Amman. The Jordan leg of the trip is all about seeing the antiquities of Petra, Wadi Rum and finally the Dead Sea. By the end of the two weeks, I will feel as though I have been living in the ancient world (other than the air conditioning, iPad and cold Coca Cola Lite’s). That’s my kind of going back in time.