I got ruminating on material culture because of some discussion of how people blow it off as unimportant compared to written histories. (The trigger was the Marilyn Monroe dress, for the record.) It’s just stuff, right? Not important. (Which is hilarious in the profoundly materialistic culture that I’m surrounded by but let’s just set that over there to side-eye for the moment, while keeping in mind that less materialistically wealthy cultures valued their stuff more.)
One of the perpetual frustrations of reconstruction as a process is that the only people who reliably tell us about their lives are the elites. They were literate; they had durable goods; they defined and retold the stories that survived.
(I was talking to my oldest kid yesterday, actually, about the myth of Caeneus, who is an actual trans hero in Hellenic myth. Researching him, I could find three things about him: how he was turned into a man; that he was a participant in the Calydonian Boar Hunt, which was basically the Marvel crossover event of that era of Greek mythology, every polis and tribe’s two-bit hero went there so they could hob-nob with Theseus and Aesclepius and Atalanta; and the story of his death at his sister’s wedding, which probably survives because it’s a side story in the Theseus myths and thus Athenians recorded it. His exploits as a hero are not on the searchable-at-my-competence-level internet; I don’t know if anyone knows what they were. Here, the elites are “Athenians” rather than merely the literate, but the same principle holds.)
But anyway, this produces a lot of top-heavy stuff. Everyone wants to be a priest. (This isn’t helped by the general culture of paganism that says ‘everyone is a priest!’) People want to build temples before they have the infrastructure to support them. And some of this is the post-Christian “religion is what you do in an institutional religious building/organization” but some of it is also that this is what’s easy – not easy to do, but easy to think about.
Because digging into the material culture, how ordinary people lived, thinking through how they existed within their world and what that means is a lot harder than looking up some actual texts declaring how to do formal ritual.
But also, I think framing things through the elites is emotionally appealing at some level.
I think there’s a lot of looking at the ancient world and saying, “But really, I’m one of the elites.” I’m literate, right? I can get an entire strand of lapis lazuli beads for fifteen bucks, and what ancient hoer of onions could even dream of such wealth? My food variety available is beyond ancient imagining. Obviously, by those standards, I’m in the upper crust.
(Of course I can’t read hieroglyphics beyond a few characters, I know jack shit about temple administration, protocols of traditional Egyptian amulet crafting, and relevant herbal first aid accessible to them, and I don’t even know how to hoe onions. By ancient standards I’m actually pretty useless, and would be until I learned enough to do something. This is also obvious, but not the obvious that a lot of people think about.)
But I think there’s a certain amount of gravitating towards the elite things, the written down things, not just because they’re easy to work with, and not just because we can imagine doing ritual and being done rather than bringing the worldview into the world (as my now-retired senior minister at church used to proclaim, “The church has left the building!”), but because I think a lot of people don’t want to be humble.
Here is a mask, here is a small clay icon, here is a place where the ear of Amun was carved into a wall to hear prayers; here is a lamp, here is a loaf of bread, here are the flowers gathered at the waterfront. How do we live, from that? Because that is where we are, for the most part. Flowers gathered, small (often resin rather than clay) icons, a lamp, a loaf of bread. It’s hard to admit that that is what we genuinely have to hand, when we can dream of temples and recitations.
I keep coming back to the onion-hoers, though. Gotta go read about the Deir el-Medina village some more…
(Post title from the lyrics of “Standard White Jesus” by Timbuk3.)
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