among myself

Madeleine, in her 30s, made of pearl powder

[petitworld]

Narborough Hall Gardens, Norfolk, England by Clive Nichols

[naldibutnice]

The Pink Dress by Lewis Baumer, c. 1926

[s-usans-blog]

Mull of Kintyre, Scotland

@landmarktrust

[midnightinshadow]

[xanaxfarts]

Japanese Wisteria (Wisteria floribunda 'Alba')

[fawnvelveteen]

1920 - Ostrich feather hand fan

[worldscoolest]

[gentlekiss]

source

[niurd]

instagram.com/p/Dauj4Gwh8AJ/

[04k96]

[theburialofstrawberries]

awesome awesome interview with Emily Wilson

[plumslices]

JAR (Joel Arthur Rosenthal) sheep head hair clip

Pearl, sapphire, aluminum, silver, gold

[h0niy]

[classicslesbianopinions]

it is like. i am deliberately not posting that much about the nolan odyssey because i don't have much genuine interest and i find the whole like outrage theater people do at adaptations to be exhausting and unproductive and often misguided + i don't really care what celebrities are doing. but zendaya's 3000-year-old iranian earrings are like. such an on-the-nose fuck you. like 1. you can practically feel the stylist going "oh, it's old, it must be on-theme!" without really considering that ancient cultures are not interchangeable. but also 2. there's a very clear and important difference between ancient greece and ancient iran, in that there's a reason zendaya isn't wearing ancient greek artifacts on her ears--ancient greece has a cultural cachet that ancient iran does not, by virtue of its position as the perceived origin point of "western" (white) civilization. they are just interchangeable enough that zendaya can wear the artifacts of one civilization to a premiere of a work based on the mythos of another, but just different enough that she can get away with one but not the other.

and of course there's 3. which is that modifying and wearing a cultural artifact of dubious provenance taken from a country the us is actively bombing (and in doing so presumably destroying plenty of historic buildings/artifacts) asserts a certain lack of respect for and/or sense of ownership over that country's people and culture. and obviously this is what makes it seem like such a specifically heinous move.

[perrenlore]

Really important to note when it comes to (3) that the elite (and frankly Orientalising) appropriation of ancient Near Eastern artefacts as jewellery has a long colonial history. Cylinder seals are these little cork-shaped cylinders with pictoral or written designs engraved on them, and work the same way as a signet ring in that you could roll them over wet clay to leave an impression of the engraved relief on the clay to dry. They look like this:

(Cylinder seal of First Dynasty of Ur Queen Puabi, found in her tomb, dated circa 2600 BC, with modern impression. Inscription: 𒅤𒀜 𒎏 - Pu3-abi(AD) Nin - Queen Pu-abi. Nicked straight off Wikipedia as it's a fab comparison of seal / relief.)

In the British Museum you can find "Lady Layard's jewellery". Austin Henry Layard is a guy whose academic efforts I'm admittedly very indebted to. He was passionate about Venetian and Roman glass and did a great job re-popularising both styles in the UK, but more importantly he was the assyriologist who excavated Nineveh and the Library of Ashurbanipal—where we've found the majority of the Gilgamesh tablets. Pioneer figure in terms of Near Eastern archaeology... but check this out:

This is a necklace Layard had made for his wife. It uses real cylinder seals.

To quote the British Museum's entry on the item: One cylinder seal is Akkadian (about 2200 BC) and four belong to the second millennium BC, but eight are late Assyrian (about 1000-612 BC). Late Babylonian and Achaemenid stamp seals (about 600-350 BC) are used for the pendants and clasp.

Enid later wrote in her diary that, when they dined with Queen Victoria in 1873, it was 'much admired'.

Ancient Near Eastern artefacts, repurposed as jewellery in a set that doesn't give a single fuck about accurately dating them, let alone treating them with the sort of respect you might perhaps expect of items over four thousand years old. Instead they've become a mark of elite colonial status, an Oriental curiosity utterly separated from their historical context. They're 'old'. They're non-descriptly 'other'. Time and place dissolve into an attractive and vague exoticism.

All while the place these seals have been appropriated from is busy being exploited by the very empire this "jewellery" is being shown off to!

So to bring it back to your third point: you're absolutely right!!! And this has precedence dating right back to the start of Western study (and plundering) of the Ancient Near East. It's a carelessness, it's an ignorance of historical context, and it's explicitly colonial.

[classicslesbianopinions]

thank you for the added context!

[evolutionsbedingt]

The irony here is that setting a cylinder seal in a gold cap and wearing it was definitely a thing that happened in the time where they were in active use. When I wrote my BA thesis there was only a handful of articles on it and I've admittedly not kept up with the topic, but golden seal caps where known for the first half of the second millennium BCE. (The Tell Leilan examples I studied specifically date to the 18th century). Also the reuse and, essentially, over-writing of older seals was common practice as well, making the jewellery somewhat in line with cultural practice.

It never should have been done like this, because it voids the seals of all meaning and turns them into a curiosity, but at least there's no significant damage to be expected and it retains the original intention to some degree.

Meanwhile, the medaillons Zendaya wore are, if I remember correctly, usually meant to be stitched to fabric or nailed to wood (you can see the holes intended for their application to something slightly to the viewer-left of the place the earring is attached). They're thin sheet metal and won't hold up well to hanging freely, attached only to a small point at the very edge of the disk, not to speak of the damage the attachment itself is bound to do.

So while Lady Layard's jewellery is in bad taste and undeniably orientalist, the damage done to the artefacts is likely minimal, while Zendaya's earrings actively altered the artifacts beyond their intended use and likely damaged them in the process.

Lady Layard showed off their exploitation of the western Asian peoples connected to these seals, but is bound to have known something about them thanks to her husband's work. Zendaya was given these earrings, likely with no intention or information beyond "They're old, sort of in the region and fit the outfit." which makes it, to me, the more egregiously orientalist piece.

[dollhair]

Something about the bastardization of the story time and time again proves that nobody in power really cares about the people who would resonate with King’s Carrie White. A girl so ugly and repulsive she’s been removed from her own story. The societal need for women and girls to be constantly perceived as attractive is what fuels a fair amount of her torment in the book, but that person isn’t even allowed to exist on the screen. We cannot empathize with her; it isn’t allowed. It’s fascinating to me.

[simena]

Louis ICART

[pnglove]