Precious

July 11, 2020 1:42 PM

A stranger than fiction Roman ring mystery thread. In which a golden signet ring portraying the Goddess Venus and belonging to one Silvianus is (allegedly) stolen by one Senicianus, a curse tablet to that effect deposited at the Temple of Nodens, and the ring subsequently lost and found again, possibly inspiring one of the greatest tales of all time.
posted by heatherlogan (18 comments total)

That ring is gorgeous!
posted by sallybrown at 1:50 PM on July 11, 2020 [2 favorites]

Given that our own reality has become intangible digital objects, what of our lives will be found 1500 years from now that could spark such a mystery and possibly art in the future?
posted by njohnson23 at 2:13 PM on July 11, 2020

How amazing that both the ring and the curse tablet were found! And that Tolkien was involved! All the exclamation marks!!!
Seriously, this is SLTwitter post but it is lovely.
posted by mumimor at 2:23 PM on July 11, 2020

That's really cool.
posted by LobsterMitten at 2:26 PM on July 11, 2020

What a mind-blowing coincidence!
posted by Wretch729 at 2:48 PM on July 11, 2020

I've read a bit about the Lydney temple site recently, as it's not far from where I live: alas it's been closed to visitors this year due to the pandemic. The dog figurines found there are also very interesting.
posted by misteraitch at 2:54 PM on July 11, 2020 [5 favorites]

And now you know... The Rest Of The Story.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 3:20 PM on July 11, 2020 [11 favorites]

I hope Senicianus got what he deserved from the curse tablet. What an amazing story, reminds me of The Dectectorists, one of my favorite shows, gold in the field.

misteraich, those dog figurines are just beautiful!
posted by mermayd at 3:53 PM on July 11, 2020 [2 favorites]

Senicianus always was a jerk.
posted by GenjiandProust at 4:17 PM on July 11, 2020 [7 favorites]

Given that our own reality has become intangible digital objects, what of our lives will be found 1500 years from now that could spark such a mystery and possibly art in the future?

Fidget spinners.
posted by smithsmith at 4:27 PM on July 11, 2020 [9 favorites]

The ring of Silvianus also has a connection with Arthur Machen's Great God Pan.
posted by Ashwagandha at 4:28 PM on July 11, 2020 [2 favorites]

Best of the Web, good find.
posted by j_curiouser at 8:45 PM on July 11, 2020

Another perspective on the link to Tolkien, who views that piece of this story as a reach that's not well supported based on the timelines of Tolkien's writing.
posted by heresiarch at 9:01 PM on July 11, 2020 [6 favorites]

Precious indeed!
posted by TedW at 4:38 AM on July 12, 2020

I always figured The One Ring was cribbed from The Ring of Gyges. It's got the invisibility, the creeping corruption of power, the whole bit.
posted by threecheesetrees at 6:32 AM on July 12, 2020 [5 favorites]

or from Wagner.
posted by vacapinta at 9:07 AM on July 12, 2020 [1 favorite]

Tolkein was drawing from the same sources that Wagner was, so much so that The Hobbit/Lord of the Rings can resemble a reordered Ring Cycle if you just kind of look lightly at synopses. The magic ring was just as baked into the setting as the dragon. But this is a cool story even if you take Tolkein out of it.
posted by rikschell at 12:03 PM on July 12, 2020

> The dog figurines found there are also very interesting.

Poking around the https://www.csad.ox.ac.uk/ site:

At the core of the Centre’s holdings lies a rich archive of notebooks, drawings and photographs, and one of the world’s largest collections of squeezes - a unique resource for palaeographic enquiry - donated by some of the great figures in the field. It includes the squeeze collections of George Forrest, Peter Fraser and Susan Sherwin-White, as well as the archives of Sir Christopher Cox, Michael Ballance, Anne Jeffery and David Lewis.

(This took me a minute to figure out):

http://fromstonetoscreen.com/squeeze-collection/

“Squeeze. This is one of epigraphy’s less choice technical terms: the irreverent have been known to affect a misunderstanding or misinterpretation of it, and some better noun ought long ago to have been adopted. Official reports often refer, for the sake of clarity, to ‘epigraphic squeezes’.”

In my background research for this project, I’ve come across A.G. Woodhead’s 1959 publication, The Study of Greek Inscriptions. He covers the main topics related to epigraphy and has a delightful way of describing both the mundane and the wonderful aspects of classical research; I’m going to quote him frequently as I describe what a squeeze is, simply because his phrasing makes a potentially dull topic suddenly charming.

An epigraphic squeeze, then, is an impression of an inscription. These are generally made using filter paper, a stiff horsehair brush and some water. It’s all very technical. Two of the FSTS team, Chelsea Gardner and David Assaf, were excavating in the Agora in the summer of 2013 when a visiting scholar was given a permit to make squeezes; they asked, and received permission, to watch him make squeezes and got to make their own.

“The brush should be stout and fairly weighty, should have a handle well adapted to a firm grasp, and should be in general shape rather like a lady’s hairbrush, although with a head more rectangular than such brushes are apt to have.”

The paper used is generally chemical filter paper, which has a high wet strength meaning getting it wet and pounding it onto stone with a horsehair brush isn’t going to destroy the paper. Once it’s dry, the paper can be peeled off the inscription and you have a perfect mirror image of the writing impressed on the paper.

“When thoroughly dry it will retain permanently the impression of the surface with which it was in contact, and so offers a valuable means of preserving the record of the stone itself for future use.”

The beauty of a paper impression, if you haven’t guessed, is that you can tuck it in your suitcase and bring it back to your office for study; for some reason governments frown on archaeologists attempting to do the same with the original stones. Just like traditional archaeologists, an epigraphist might spend a summer in the field collecting data and the fall, winter and spring in their office trying to make sense of it all.

posted by sebastienbailard at 11:09 PM on July 12, 2020 [2 favorites]