If so, you might want to read this book review on H-Travel. The book is about the encounters between souvenir sellers in Sumatra and Western tourists, and sounds like many a scene that I’ve seen.

In fact as I write, eight masks, from eight countries look down from the wall at me. Those are Indonesia, Cambodia, Sri Lanka, China, Tibet (although bought in India), Egypt, Thailand and southern India. I know they’re tourist “tat”, but they’re still evocative!

A lot of what I read is about gender issues, sexuality and similar, and an email exchange off-blog recently made me think about why these are valuable beyond simply the information they contain. Studying these areas provides a continual reminder that other cultures, other times, other people don’t see the world in the same way you do and make you realise the unthinking assumptions that underlie anyone’s world view.

Looking at Lovemaking: Constructions of Sexuality in Roman Art 100BC – AD 250, by John R Clarke certainly does that. It examines artistic representations of sex in Roman art, rejecting in general a reliance on texts, invariably written by elite males, and tries to use the details in the art, its nature and distribution, to get at an understanding of how other Roman groups saw sex.

One possible reaction was laughter, although a very different laughter to the embarrassed titters of a school group when sex-ed comes around. So the famous Pompeii Priapus has an apotropaic function at the entrance to the passageway into the house, to ward off the Evil Eye.

Since a small penis was considered beautiful, a large penis, as with a dark skin, blonde hair, deformities and other departures from the Roman ideal, was a cause for mocking, powerful laughter. (For the Romans compassion for difference or disability was not an admirable characteristic.) “”Art from both the Hellenic and Roman period frequently represented dwarfs, hunchbacks, or people with enlarged heads; such use of malformations in art for the sake of comedy is quite common”. (p. 238)

Talking about a similar figure from the Timgad Northwest Baths, of a macrophallic Ethiopian: “Levi points out that in antiquity people believed that atopia or unbecomingness dispelled the Evil Eye, … as well as normal beings represented in indecent attitudes, making vulgar gestures or noises … Laughter is the opposite pole of the anguish produced by the dark forces of evil”. (p. 131)

Priapus is also seen often, for the same reason, at crossroads.

So that was perhaps the main reason for “unbecoming” depictions of lovemaking, a category that would not correspond in any way to our classifications, or indeed, as Clarke points out, our ideas of “explicitness” or “soft-core/hard-core”. Priapus was “nothing core”.

Clarke argues that the Suburban Baths at Pompeii, where containers for clothes left by customers were identified by a series of explicit little paintings, provide an escalating scale of Roman shock. Pretty bad was anything that affected the purity of the mouth, particularly for men. “It was the organ of speech and above all the organ of public oratory. Social interactions also focused on the clean mouth, since it was customary for social equals to kiss when greeting each other … In invective literature, the worst possible insult is to accuse a man of fellating another man, and the worst possible threat against a man is that of forcing him to fellate someone.” Even worse was providing the same service for a woman. (p. 224)

A male accepting penetration was even worse, although there was no shame in being the penetrator. (Much like in many Middle Eastern cultures today.) The most extreme painting in the baths has five participants combining all of these, supposed, on Clarke’s reading, to provoke helpless laughter.

But sexual depictions could also have other readings. Clarke suggests that the paintings in many of the Pompeii villas, up to the richest, often mixed more or less indiscriminately with non-sexual images, were simply reading sexual art as part of the expected range in an educated, discerning collection. As the gift of Venus, sexual pleasure was something a rich person might expect to enjoy in abundance.

Even in the famous Pompeii Lupanar (brothel), he argues the depictions of sex, usually read as being indications of services offered, are actually depictions of luxurious aristocratic lovemaking in a place where nothing like that was on offer. “The profile of the sex-for-sale business that emerges is one of freedmen buying slaves (both male and female) specifically for use as prostitutes…. The range of prices for these prostitutes’ sexual services varied from 2 asses (the cost of a cup of common wine) to 16 asses.”

The paintings are also a reminder that the Romans had almost no concept of privacy as we understand it. Clarke argues that in the famous Warren Cup, the young servant boy looking out of the scene probably represents the viewer, but in other cases servants are shown in rooms where lovemaking is occurring, going about their business and ignoring the sex. He argues that this is again an indication of luxury – the servants, usually young and beautiful, adding to that.

This is not a very readable work (anyone looking for titillation will be seriously disappointed); the author is setting out a detailed academic arguments, but I found it well worth ploughing through, for the understanding it gives for ancient objects that are still treated with discomfort, disdain, and even disgust, in academic contexts that should know better.

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I might note as a postscript that the book presents some lovely examples of Victorian utter misreadings, some of which persist until today. So a room with a painting of a couple on a bed on one side and on the other showing three women is interpretted as “on the right a woman consults a female panderer; on the left she gets her wish – a male prostitute. At best, this interpretation rests on flimsy visual evidence; at worst, it reveals Victorian notions that prostitution must be at the root of any representation of a man and woman enjoying sex.” (p. 105)

Similar the House at IX, 5, 16 at Pompei… August Mau supposed that “the four erotic paintings of room ft (a fifth is destroyed) could be put only in a room of a building where sex was for sale. He implies that no decent person would have such pictures in his bedroom. Mau’s construction of ‘decency’ for the Pompeian owner and his guests is, of course, highly suspect. As a 19th-century Christian gentleman of the Victorian period, Mau was the product of an acculturation with regard to sex that could find even the glimpse of a woman’s ankles ‘indecent’.” (p. 178-9)

Scholarship since then has, I think, in general greatly improved, although I’m rather less confident about popular understanding.

Just found a fascinating new e-text, Making Both Ends Meet: The Income and Outlay of New York Working Girls, by Sue Ainslie Clark and Edith Wyatt, New York, The Macmillan Company, 1911.

It presents a good argument to be thankful for living in the 21st century:

“Lucy Cleaver, a young American woman of twenty-five, … had entered one of the New York department stores at the age of twenty, at a salary of $4.50 a week.

In the course of the five years of her employment her salary had been raised one dollar. She stood for nine hours every day. If, in dull moments of trade, when no customers were near, she made use of the seats lawfully provided for employees, she was at once ordered by a floor-walker to do something that required standing.

During the week before Christmas, she worked standing over fourteen hours every day, from eight to twelve-fifteen in the morning, one to six in the afternoon, and half past six in the evening till half past eleven at night. So painful to the feet becomes the act of standing for these long periods that some of the girls forego eating at noon in order to give themselves the temporary relief of a foot-bath. For this overtime the store gave her $20, presented to her, not as payment, but as a Christmas gift.

The management also allowed a week’s vacation with pay in the summer-time and presented a gift of $10.

After five years in this position she had a disagreement with the floor-walker and was summarily dismissed.

She then spent over a month in futile searching for employment, and finally obtained a position as a stock girl in a Sixth Avenue suit store at $4 a week, a sum less than the wage for which she had begun work five years before. Within a few weeks, dullness of trade had caused her dismissal. She was again facing indefinite unemployment.

Her income for the year had been $281. She lived in a large, pleasant home for girls, where she paid only $2.50 a week for board and a room shared with her sister. Without the philanthropy of the home, she could not have made both ends meet.

It was fifteen minutes’ walk from the store, and by taking this walk twice a day she saved carfare and the price of luncheon. She did her own washing, and as she could not spend any further energy in sewing, she bought cheap ready-made clothes. This she found a great expense. …

After giving practically all her time and force to her work, she had not received a return sufficient to conserve her health in the future, or even to support her in the present without the help of philanthropy. She was ill, anæmic, nervous, and broken in health.”

I have been reasonably restrained this month, but did splash out at the OUP sale, which produced the following bargains:

* England: an archaeological guide, Timothy Darvill, Paul Stamper and Jane Timby, which reminds me that one of these days I must get to Grime’s Graves in Norfolk, which are not burial places but Neolithic flint mines. Worked between 3,000BC and 1,900BC, there are traces of at least 350 shafts spread over nine hectares, the guide says.

“Calculations suggest that 1,000 tons of overburden was removed to create a single shaft, which yielded approximately 8 tons of nodular flint. The exploitation of the mine could have been undertaken over a period of two to three months by a workforce of 15 to 16 people. If all the flint won from the mine was converted into axes in an efficient manner something like 10,250 blades could have been produced; even at worst over 6,000 axes could have been made. The whole site may have produced between 2.5 million and 5 million axes during its working life.” (p. 232-3)

That’s what you call an industry, at a time well before you’d expect to be using the word.

* Oxford Archaeological Guides: Southern France, Henry Cleere

* The Enigma of Easter Island, John Flenley and Paul Bahn

* The Renaissance Bazaar: From the Silk Road to Michelangelo, Jerry Brotton. The blurb says it “explodes the myth of the European Renaissance as a founding moment of cultural superiority; it was the time when East and West encountered each other as equals”. Sounds like it should be a good companion to the Turks exhibition.

* A Land of Liberty: England 1689-1727 Julian Hoppit (because I’m unable to resist a cheap reference book).

* Agnew Bowker’s Cat: Travesties and Transgressions in Tudor and Stuart England, David Cressy. (More on this soon.)

Purchased elsewhere:

* Behsharam (Shameless), a play by Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti, bought as a small gesture of solidarity for the author, whose latest production was stopped by Sikh religious protests. A Guardian review of this play here.

* North Korea: Another Country, Bruce Cumings, because having been there around 10 years ago, I want to catch up on the latest.

* Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism, by Susan Jacoby, because it would be nice to think there was one.

… so just a couple of quick offerings:

Since Alexander the Great keeps popping up, I’ll note an interesting website, “Beyond Renault”, which looks at fictional representations of him after you-know-who. (Hat-tip to The Little Professor.)

And since I’m in this part of the world, I have to mention a fascinating post on Rhine River about Catalhoyuk, the famous Neolithic settlement in Turkey. It suggests the village/town was not a place you’d want to spend your holidays.

On a feminist note, Picturing Women “explores how women are figured, fashioned, turned into portraits, and told about in words and pictorial narrative”. The online version of a gallery show, it has some fearfully vicious images – check out particularly the caricatures. Some can be sent as e-postcards. (Hat-tip to Scribbling Woman.)

Finally, some advice from Mark Twain: “Write without pay until somebody offers pay. If nobody offers within three years the candidate may look upon his circumstances with the most implicit confidence as a sign that sawing wood is what he was intended for.” (From the Freelance daily newsletter)

The second part of the RA Turks exhibition that particularly took my fancy was the gallery dedicated to Mehmet II, the conqueror of Constantinople. It is one of those cases when you realise turning your historical lens around 180 degrees produces interesting thoughts. Usually, of course, we are thinking about 1453 as the end, final and definitive, of the “Roman” empire, but what happened was the expansion of a culturally rich, booming empire across an important psychological point.

The commentary says that with the city repopulated with a multicultural, multi-ethnic mix, it resumed its place as a great cultural centre.

There is evidence of this in display of a few of the books that Mehmet commissioned, written in Greek, Latin, Arabic and Persian. Notable is a gorgeous map of Europe (pretty accurate) based on Ptolemy’s Geography, by a Greek scholar who had converted to Islam, and two histories, one by another Greek Kritoboulos and the other by one of Mehmet’s secretaries, Turstan Bey, both of which compare the Ottoman Sultan to Alexander the Great.