MIN, MINING & AN EMASCULATED MASTERPIECE
- Graham Walker
- 2 days ago
- 5 min read
This month in our ongoing work as consultant for the Egyptomania Museum we’ve been increasingly focused on mining and manufacturing, not only in the ancient world but in more modern times too. And with recent visits to two other wonderful museums, the World of Glass in St. Helens and the Land of Iron near Whitby where we discussed ancient mining, we’re continuing to gain a better understanding of ancient Egyptian practices and materials, and how they in turn inspired aspects of Egyptomania.
And this is certainly the case with the ‘Bretby Vase’. As one of the star objects in the Egyptomania Museum (as featured at: https://www.instagram.com/p/DKZ5cNasY08/), this 27cm tall glazed ceramic vessel is quite rare, the only other two known to us both with handles, one in the V&A (https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O67054/egyptian-vase-bretby-art-pottery/) and a second recently selling at auction.
With their shared design classic Art Deco, a shortened form of ‘Arts Décoratifs’ which formed the basis of the 1925 Paris exhibition ‘Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes’, it was a style building on the Tutmania craze following the 1922 discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb. Taking ancient Egypt’s influence into the cultural stratosphere, it was characterised by sleek lines, geometric forms and stylized ornamental patterns, as endlessly repeated across 1920s and 30s clothing, jewellery, architecture and art, including the entire surface of our Bretby Vase.
Featuring raised Egyptian motifs including a winged scarab adorning its lower section, the sides and upper parts of the vase are filled with hieroglyphic-style symbols. Yet the main scene is clearly based around the worship of the ancient Egyptian fertility god Min, so closely associated with the sprouting and harvesting of crops that the vase’s lustrous green glaze is most appropriate too.
Now with the finest version of Min worship featured within the stunning raised reliefs of the White Chapel of Sesostris I created c.1950 BC at Karnak (above, which we inspected on our recent Immortal Egypt tour repeated next February at: https://www.theculturalexperience.com/tours/ancient-egypt/), the king kneels before the god to offer him wine. Yet it is Min who dominates the scene in his tall crown of two feathers, his raised arm alluded to in the Pyramid Texts as “he whose arm is raised in the East” allowing him to support his flail sceptre (above right). But in the reimagined version on the vase, his flail appears to ‘float’ behind him and has been crossed with the royal crook for good measure (below left). And whereas a trio of upright Cos lettuces are portrayed beneath Sesostris’ wine vessels as another sacred offering, the vase designer preferred a giant lotus flower, incongruously placed outside its usual watery habitat to conveniently fill the space usually reserved for Min’s famously ‘ithyphallic credentials’…
The vital organ was also rendered invisible in a second scene Sesostris I commissioned at Min’s cult centre Koptos, as discovered by WMF Petrie and sent to London’s Petrie Museum whose rather large label was even retained in Petrie’s 1896 excavation report (above right). And it’s the same emasculated image on the vase, presumably allowing it to fit into the standard British home without causing undue offence.
Made between 1936 and 1940, the sunburst motif on its base identifies it as a piece of Bretby Art Pottery, founded in Woodville, Derbyshire, by William Ault and his colleague Henry Tooth who’d previously worked with famed designer Dr. Christopher Dresser. And as we’re currently looking into Dresser’s own interest in Egyptian art, this is also the subject of our next study day at Bolton, ‘Ancient Egypt’s Art and Artists’ not only looking at the original artisans but the archaeological artists who copied their work and the designers who’ve been influenced by it.
Yet we’ve also discovered that the vase has a less obvious if rather more profound connection with Egypt - and the most famous archaeological discovery of all time. For the potteries at Bretby were part of an industrial landscape which included the coalmines and brickworks of an estate once owned by George Edward Stanhope Molyneux Herbert (below). Better known to history as the 5th Earl of Carnarvon who discovered the tomb of Tutankhamun in 1922, Bretby’s bricks still stand at the entrance of the Valley of the Kings after the Earl commissioned a special batch to be shipped over to Egypt in 1910 to build a dig house for himself and his archaeologist Howard Carter.
As the current Countess of Carnarvon relates, “for his own amusement, Lord Carnarvon ensured that each brick was stamped ‘Made at Bretby England for Howard Carter AD Thebes 1910’, just as all the foundation deposits from ancient tombs they had found were similarly stamped” (‘The Earl and the Pharaoh’, p.179) (below left).
And after the two men had chosen their optimum spot at Dra Abu el-Naga close to where they’d been excavating, the Earl financed the building of the house designed by Carter and architect-turned-Egyptologist George Somers Clarke, to include a dark room where the Earl could process the many photographs he took. ‘Castle Carter’ then remained Carter’s HQ for the rest of his career.
Ideally located at the entrance to the Valley of the Kings from which he could best oversee the excavation of Tutankhamun’s tomb, the painstaking work conserving and photographing over 5,000 precious objects before their removal to Cairo Museum would take him and his team close to a decade, during which time each new object emerging from the tomb would feature in the world media, sending the public into an ever-increasing frenzy of Tutmania.
And of course so many of these spectacular objects were made of gold, much of which was acquired from Egypt’s Eastern Desert. As a region sacred to Min, whose aforementioned cult centre Koptos lay at the start of the desert’s main access route the Wadi Hammamat (above), the royal mining expeditions seeking out such valuable material would visit the Koptos temple to make offerings to the god, honoured by generations of successive pharaohs including Tutankhamun himself. For he not only commissioned statues of Min with his own youthful features (above centre) but appeared side-by-side with the god on a superb green stone ring found in his tomb, with even the linen wrappings prepared for his mummification referring to Tutankhamun ‘beloved of Min’.
With the excess linen then buried in an embalmer’s cache in the Valley of the Kings, it was discovered by archaeologist Edward Ayrton in 1907 although it was actually Ayrton’s colleague, Barnsley-born Harold Jones, who first recognised its significance. And so too all the other small finds naming the then little-known pharaoh some 15 years before his actual tomb was found by Carter and Carnarvon, triggering the huge wave of Egyptomania so wonderfully encapsulated in our splendid Bretby Vase.
Details of the Bolton Study Day ‘Ancient Egypt’s Art and Artists’ at: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/boltons-egypt-summer-study-day-ancient-egypts-art-artists-tickets-1469119087739; Jo’s research about Harold Jones is published in various places eg. https://www.historyextra.com/period/ancient-egypt/tutankhamun-unmasked-intriguing-truths-facts-about-pharaoh-treasures-exhibition/ and https://www.ees.ac.uk/resource/egyptian-archaeology-64.html with the exhibition she guest curated ‘Exploring Ancient Egypt: The Story of Harold Jones’ currently at Carmarthenshire Museum until 28th September: https://cofgar.wales/whats-on/exploring-ancient-egypt/
