Philobiblon

The mainstream media is of course calling her “King Tut’s grandmother”, but Amenhotep III’s queen, whose statue has just been found in Egypt, was more important in her own right than as the relative of that very minor figure. (Tutankhamen’s tomb survived unrobbed surely at least in part because he was so insignificant.)

The dig team says:

The statue’Â’s back pillar was unearthed first and led [the expedition’Â’s director, Betsy] Bryan to believe briefly that it dated from a far later period, since an inscription there was clearly made in the 21st Dynasty, about 1000 B.C.E., for a very powerful queen Henuttawy.
“The statue, however, when it was removed, revealed itself as a queen of Amenhotep III, whose name appears repeatedly on the statue’s crown,” Bryan said. She said she theorizes that perhaps this statue is of the great Queen Tiy, wife of Amenhotep III and mother of the so-called heretic king Akhenaten, who came to the throne as Amenhotep IV but later changed his name because of his rejection of the god Amen in favor of the sun disk Aten.
“Tiy was so powerful that, as a widow, she was the recipient of foreign diplomatic letters sent to her from the king of Babylonia in hopes that she would intercede with her son on behalf of the foreign interests,” Bryan said. “Some indications, such as her own portraits in art, suggest that Tiy may have ruled briefly after her husband’s death, but this is uncertain.”

When you think about it, it seems unlikely that Hatshepsut would be the only woman who ever tried to rule Egypt in her own right.

You can watch Tiy emerging from the ground here. (This is a great ongoing diary of the dig, a day by day account, highly pictorial.)

(Via Alun’s blog (which used to be called Archaeoastronomy).)

In other discoveries, the “world’s smallest vertebrate” (well that we know of) has been found in a Sumatran peat swamp.

The newly discovered species, Paedocypris progenetica, is a member of the carp family … The female … from head to tail measures 7.9mm (0.3in) when fully mature. …
The male, reaching a typical 1cm in length, is an extraordinary creature. Its over-sized dorsal fins are beefed up with hard pads of skin and a hook that can be forced forward by powerful muscles in a grasping action. Until scientists can retrieve live samples to observe, they can only speculate on the fins’ purpose.”

Of course, however, like just about everything else on the extraordinary zoo that is the island, its future is far from assured. “”I hope we’ll have time to find out more about them before their habitat disappears completely,” said Dr Britz.”

When I started to learn about feminism, and the fight for abortion rights, in the mid-1980s, the Western world at least thought that accounts of women swallowing noxious chemicals, or introducing them into their uterus in an attempt to end a pregnancy, was merely a nasty historical lesson, a cautionary tale.

Yet it is not just that this is now threatening to return, but in America, it has already returned:

Jen (not her real name) is administrator of a women’s health clinic in the South that provides abortions. She has noted with alarm the recent rise in illegal abortion in her community. For some of the women she sees — after their initial attempts at abortion fail — whether Roe v. Wade is technically still the law of the land is beside the point. The combination of the procedure’s cost, the numerous regulations that her state imposes and the stigma surrounding abortion is leading a growing number of women to choose self-abortion or an untrained practitioner over legal abortion.
…A doctor from the hospital … contacted her. He asked for her help in setting up a special ward for the treatment of illegal abortions when Roe is overturned, because he knows the caseload will mushroom then. “He didn’t say ‘if’ — he said ‘when,'” Jen said. “Chills ran down my spine.”

And mine. There’s the inevitable hideous human suffering, so clearly epitomised by the coathangar, but there’s also the thought of the return of the fear of pregnancy that has haunted women for millennia. Will freedom be so quickly snuffed out?

When you walk around London, beneath your feet are layers and layers of history. There are also, so we’re told, millions and millions of rats, massive but leaking Victorian sewers, and more than the odd plague pit. These are the aspects of the city that captured the imagination of Stephen Smith, and in his Underground London: Travels Beneath the City Streets he seeks to find all of these and more.

He’s a journalist, and has the journalist’s knack of talking his way into the oddest places and situations, from the crypt of St Andrew’s Holborn as workmen clear out a noxious mix of bodies, coffins and maybe the odd anthrax spoor, to a river boat from which a small boy is being dangled by his ankles while he beats the water with a cane. (No, we’re not talking hideous Satanist ceremonies there; rather an old City tradition.)

He starts out in the Tube – noting that in 2002 a new record for visiting all 272 stations was set (19 hours, 18 minutes and 45 seconds) – and ends up at the Thames Barrier, (the definition of underground sometimes being rather loose), with a nasty reminder that the foundations of the city might be less secure than they seem, its use having risen from only nine times between 1982 and 1991, to 14 times in one week in 2002.

Smith writes with brio, if sometimes self-conscious brio. He’s setting himself up as a character, and that “personality” side of his writing, like those TV archaeologists who leap around like Archimedes on his best day just because they’ve found a pot sherd, can get annoying. But the writing moves fast enough that this is only a momentary irritation.

The research is somewhat scanty in places, but its breadth is its redeeming feature. So a visit to Berry Brothers, the “Italian warehouse” set up by the Widow Bourn in 1698, opposite the royal tennis court in St James’s Palace provokes reflections on everything from Pitt the Younger and Napoleon III weighing themselves in the basement to a 1991 cause celebre when six Barclay Bank employs got themselves into hot water by spending £44,000 on one lunch. Then he joins in a wine tasting at the firm (that’s now their specialty):

“To the accompaniment of the silky, ship’s-screw noise of air conditioning, tipplers circulated among damask-draped tables, accepting the equivalent of an optic or so of the ruby-coloured stuff from the Berry staff. The punters glugged and spat – or swallowed, at their discretion – before jotting down their thoughts on the ports. The illusion that these smartly dressed men and women were fastidiously keeping dance-cards reinforced an impression that the evening belonged to a bygone age.”

The focus on being below soil produces some surprising results. I don’t know that under the Merton Abbey Savacentre – in the southwest corner of the Tube map – there is indeed the remains of an abbey – one that once rivalled Westminster in size and wealth. Nor did I know that fragments of Henry VIII’s tennis court survive in the Cabinet Office, and can be viewed on the London Open House weekend. (Something got the diary there.)

As a potted introductory history to the city for the neophyte, or as a reminder to a jaundiced veteran that there are still many things to discover, Underground London digs in nicely.

It might be as much fashion as real action, but interesting to learn that second-hand hybrid cars are appreciating in value:

A few days ago I got a call from one of my hybrid-owning friends, who is about to trade in her 2003 Honda Civic hybrid for a new one. Apparently her Honda, which has low mileage and no dings or scratches, is worth $21,000, because demand for the new models cannot be met by the manufacturers. Not bad, given that she bought it three years ago for $18,600.
“I can’t believe it,” gloated my friend. “Houses are supposed to appreciate, not cars.” So, it seems, conspicuous thrift can actually result in a conspicuous profit.

Then, more cheery news, on cancer – yes really – a fascinating analysis of increasing evidence of the role of infections in cancer. Which presents the possibility, as in the case of cervical cancer, of a vaccine against it.

If conscience is to be your guide, is it actually possible to live in the world? If you put every action, every dependency, to intense moral questioning, how can you act at all? In today’s secular world that’s a question with which many individuals wrestle, and it is one that Quakers, and religious groups that like them put the focus on a guiding inner light, have been grappling for centuries.

These are the questions facing the two central characters in Elizabeth Kuti’s The Sugar Wife, which has just transferred from Dublin, the setting of the play, to the Soho Theatre in London. But this is the 1840s Irish city, in a nation already on the edge of economic and social collapse.

Hannah Tewkley (Jane Brennan), an intense, mid-30s, childless Quaker wife almost consumed by a career in “good works”, has an uneasy relationship with her own body, but an even more uncomfortable relationship with her husband Samuel (Barry Barnes). He is a tea, coffee and sugar merchant who plans to branch out into oriental tea-houses. He squares his own rather flexible conscience in using America – slave-grown – sugar, amidst other moral “crimes”, by funding his wife’s philanthropy and pointing to the likely fate of his employees were he to go out of business.

Into this volatile, uncomfortable house are invited – at the insistence of Hannah – two visiting anti-slavery campaigners, the former slave Sarah Worth (Susan Salmon) and the man who bought her out of slavery, the rich-boy turned rebel Alfred Darby (Robert Price). The latter has apparently solved the problem of conscience by living entirely by his principles – to the point, it emerges, of living on Sarah’s earnings so he can devote himself to his “work” and to “art” (producing daguerreotypes). READ MORE

“House of Commons] On Saturday the 12th day of December [43 Eliz., 1601]. . . . An Act for redress of certain abuses used in Painting was read the third time.”

Mr Heyward Townsend … shewed, that in the statute of 25 Ed. 3 Cap. 3 Plaisterers were not then so called but Dawbers and Mudwall-Makers, who had for their Wages by the day three pence, and their Knave three half-pence (for so was his Labourer called) they so continued till King Henry the Sevenths time, who brought into England with him out of France certain men that used Plaister of Paris about the Kings Sieling and Walls, whose Statute Labourers these Dawbers were. These Statute Labourers learned in short time the use of Plaister of Paris, and did it for the King …

… They renewed their Patent in King Henry the Eighths time, and called themselves Plaisterers aliàs Morter-Makers, for the use of Loam and Lyme.

… In all their Corporations at no time had they the word Colours, nor yet in their Ordinances. … The Plaisterers never laid any Colour upon any of the Kings Houses, nor in the Sheriffs of London, but this Year. … They have been suffered to lay Alehouse Colours as red Lead and Oaker with such like and now intrude themselves to all Colours; Thus they take not only their own work but Painting also, and leave nothing to do for the Painter.”

Reading between the lines, it seems the debate in the lower house lapsed without agreement, the subject went to the Lords, who appointed a few members to try to mediate in the dispute. And people complain about modern-day regulation!

From Tudor Economic Documents: Being Select Documents Illustrating the Economic and Social History of Tudor England by (eds) Eileen Power, R. H. Tawney; Longmans, Green and Co., 1924, p. 136-39.