Lovecraftian Artefacts

You sound like HPL on the Fleur de Lys building, LOL.
I Googled it, he’s definitely got a point!

Why was that 'tombstone' shape typical of the stele? Or was it?

Do you know what, that’s a really good question! I’ve never actually thought about why they’re that shape. And yes the bulk of stelae, both wood and stone, are that rounded top tombstone sort of shape. There are some square ones, and there are even some square ones which have an internal section with the conventional shape, but the majority of the ones I have seen both in person and in pictures have been that rounded top shape.

Next time I’m talking to my curator friend I will ask him if he has an ideas why. Some of it will be down to ‘decorum’ and the ultra-conservatism that the ancient Egyptians had; they’re that shape because they’ve always been that shape so that is their shape. I would still think that there should have been a reason originally for it, but I can’t think of a good one…
 
After a rather long hiatus....

Artefact #2

20161130-CuneiformTablet.jpg

I wanted a version of my tablet which felt right, the Super Sculpey one looked authentic but didn’t feel right in the hand (and yes, I have handled ancient cuneiform tablets). I was going to mould and cast a clay version but I decided it was less work to just make a whole new clay version from scratch.

With this project I really wanted to stay as close to reality as I could whilst making these objects. For this one it not only needed to feel right but I wanted it to have some history and so I have created a historically accurate backstory with real places where these objects could have been found and real people who would have found and studied them, all mixed in with a bit of Lovecraftian mythos to create a slightly alternative reality.

As a part of the artefacts’ story I had to include where they physically are in the world, and I thought that they should all be in a museum somewhere. After looking at what museums were referenced by HPL in his books, I ultimately decided that they’re going to be stored in The Miskatonic University Museum. To go with that narrative I’ve created an accession numbering system for the Museum, so that I can assign a number to each one of my objects. It’s based on some of the systems I’m familiar with from my experience of museums such as the British Museum. The format of this system is:

RR.YYYY,MMDD.NNNN

R – Collection the object is being accessioned into, eg AE for ancient Egypt or ME for middle east
Y – Year of accession
M – Month of accession
D – Day of accession
N – Sequential number

As this is a cuneiform tablet written in Late Babylonian style script, I looked in the British Museum collection of cuneiform tablets for examples from a similar context. There were thousands of clay tablets found by Hormuzd Rassam in the ancient city of Sippar (modern day Tell Abu Habbah, in Iraq) during an 18 month excavation between 1880 and 1881, which were then accessioned into the British Museum in 1882. As Sippar has yielded thousands of clay tablets in this time, it seemed reasonable to have it yield one which could end up in the Miskatonic Museum’s collection.

This artefact has been accessioned into the Miskatonic Museum as ME.1882,0323.1925, which you might see written on the side of the tablet as museums tend to do. The hardcore Lovecraftians might notice that the 23rd of March was the date Henry Wilcox started his delirium in The Call of Cthulhu. I couldn’t really accession the object in 1925 and have it fit in with real world find dates, so instead it was accessioned into the Miskatonic Museum in 1882 and given the object number of 1925.

I’ve also created an additional story for the tablet where the Miskatonic Museum curator, a Dr H. A. Wilcox, has contacted one of the people who worked on the original translations of cuneiform – Sir Henry Creswicke Rawlinson. I’ve set the discourse between those two a few years after tablet’s accession in 1886 because it seemed that it might take a curator several years to look at an artefact after it’s been accessioned. At this time Rawlinson was acting as a part of the Council of India and based in London. In my alternative reality Rawlinson has transliterated but ultimately failed to translate the tablet, however he does have some interesting observations on what it says… PDF of the letter attached :D

To go with all the museum ephemera, I commissioned the extremely talented Mike J to make a seal for the Miskatonic Museum. There have been numerous logos and seals made for the Miskatonic University itself but as far as either Mike or I could find, nothing has been made for the Museum - until now! You’ll see that seal on all the Museum’s documents and assorted paper things I make for this project (and subsequent ones).
 

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Awesome :)

When I was messing around with my brick cylinder of Kadatheron, I ended up fictionalizing a whole chronology / chain of custody for it, based loosely on what I saw on the British Museum's website for some of the cuneiform cylinders and prisms. Absolutely none of that ended up on the postcard, of course, but I frequently will hide dates in serial numbers, usually just writing the numerals in reverse order.
 
Artefact #1 - Cypriot Plank Figure


Much like with the cuneiform ‘Wilcox’ tablet; I wasn’t quite happy with the feel of the Sculpey version of my plank figure, originally it was going to be a maser to then make a mould and use that to pull clay versions. Ultimately I decided it was too much hassle and I used my master to make a new clay version by hand. Sadly I’ve not handled a real Cypriot plank figure, but I can guess what they would feel like from the size and material and my new clay version feels much more ‘right’ and has a nice amount of heft to it. I have also filled the incisions with gypsum, just as is seen on the original artefacts.

Here’s a glamour shot of the finished artefact:
PlankFigureGlamour.jpg

I have created a Miskatonic University Museum accession number fitting the artefact’s backstory. I painted a strip of Paraloid B-72 back of the artefact and then wrote the accession number on top of that. This is the exact same process that museums use to mark their collections, the B-72 is soluble with acetone and doesn’t leave any residue or mark the object. Here’s a couple of much less glamorous shot of the back:
PlankFigureBack.JPG PlankFigureAccessionNumber.JPG

At some point I will make a museum record card for it. That card will say the piece was found in a tomb in a cemetery in the village of Dhenia, which yielded other red polished plank figures. I used the wording of an actual plank figure’s record information to base mine on. The original excavations at Dhenia seem to have been in the later 40s to early 50s, the pieces in the Ashmolean Museum were accessioned in 1953 and recorded as discovered by H. Catling (eg AN1953.215). Lovecraft's poem "Hallowee'en in a Suburb" was cover-featured on the September 1952 Weird Tales, so I’ve used that as the basis for my Miskatonic University Museum accession number.

I’ve also imagined that the Miskatonic Museum will have an ‘Archivum Secretum’ (private archive), where it stores its more sensitive objects. I know that the British Museum had ‘The Secretum’ which it used in the 19th century to store things deemed too erotic to possibly have on display, where they remained until the 1960s when they finally started to be displayed in public galleries. The Vatican also has an ‘Archivum Secretum Apostolicum Vaticanum’, which houses the Pope’s private collection and which is only accessible to certain scholars once they have been approved for access. So I think that the Miskatonic University Museum can have a similar special collection for any Cthulian artefacts which it doesn’t want to have easily available to the public. I’ll get a rubber stamp for that made to stamp on the record card and object label.

The wording of my card is as follows:
EU.1952.09,30.7491

Large, intact, red polished ware plank-shaped figure. Alashiya, Philia phase, MBA I.

Found with multiple human remains and other grave goods in Tomb 789 of the Kafkalla cemetery, Dhenia.

Decoration: on lower body horizontal rows of zigzag incised lines and banding. On upper body, a two-strand necklace, comprised of curved lines and curved zigzag with further necklaces on lower neck. Long diagonal lines, with horizontal hatched design on each side, appearing to terminate in hand shaped curved lines. Four hatched diamond shaped designs on centre of upper body. Head has eyes framed with impressed dots, with two additional eye-like impressions per side may represent pierced ears. Dual necked, with dotted wavy lines running down both, terminating in points. Zigzag incisions representing hair on face, top of head and back of head. On back, alternate hatching on right shoulder, two half bands of horizontal zigzag staggered and separated by central stripe running from base of necks. Traces of white, possibly gypsum, in-fill to all incisions.
 
Artefact #3 – Ancient Egyptian Stela
I have actually been doing a little work on this one already. Essentially it will be a version of a typical funerary offering stela, featuring some figures in one register and hieroglyphs of the offering formula in another register. Usually the offerings made to the god Osiris, who is the god of the dead and the afterlife, however I’m going to swap him out for Cthulhu instead. I will also replace the usual god’s epithets, typically things like ‘the good god’, with more appropriate ones befitting a malevolent destroyer of worlds.

I spent a while trying to decide which king should be making the offering. I did contemplate making it HPL himself and then ultimately thought about using the ‘Black pharaoh’ Nephren-Ka from The Haunter of the Dark story. Unfortunately Nepheren-Ka isn’t quite right as an ancient Egyptian name, the ph wasn’t in their language and is more a Greek construct. For example the city former capital city normally referred to as Memphis; whose New Kingdom period Egyptian name was Men-nefer, which turned into Menfe when it was represented in Coptic and then Memphis was the Greek adaptation. However you can get close to this with Neferenka [nfr n k3]. That also literally translates to ‘beautiful water spirit’, which I think fits nicely and is reminiscent of Cthulthu (ancient Egyptian kings often named themselves after their favourite gods).

I had thought about making this as a painted wooden stela, however wood was exclusively used for female stelae and so a king’s stela would be made from carved stone. As much as I’d like to learn stone carving, this isn’t the right project to be a vehicle for that and so I’m cheating and making this out of polymer clay over wood which I will then mould and cast in a limestone analogue (tinted cement probably). I have a few plans for the casts too, but I am going to keep them under my hat for now ;)

The Haunter of the Dark said that ‘Prof. Enoch Bowen [returned] home from Egypt May 1844’, assumedly with the Shining Trapezohedron and in my narrative he’s also found this stela and donated it to the Miskatonic Museum a couple of months after he got back in the US. Following my previous scheme for accessioning an object into the museum; I’ve given this an accession number of AE.1844,0616.6391 (I picked the 16th of June because that was actually when the first roller coaster opened in the US), the sequential number is the original publication date of The Haunter of the Dark in reverse (forward was too similar to my cuneiform tablet and as it’s half way through the year it felt more likely that a lot of artefacts would have been accessioned).

I’ve been studying relief carved limestone stelae in museums to look at the chisel marks left by the original craftsman. I’m hoping to be able to replicate something very similar in my clayed version. Here are a couple of nice examples from the British Museum’s collection (I can’t remember their accession numbers but if anyone cares ask me and I’ll look when I’m next there):
LimestoneCarving01.JPG LimestoneCarving00.JPG

Here’s a page from my journal showing my adapted version of the standard ‘hotep di nesu’ offering formula:
HotepDiNesu.JPG


In English that’s:
An offering which the king gives to Khfulkhu, lord of R’Lyeh, the great god, revered one, lord of water, given life, like Ra, forever, the bringer of darkness, the mighty one, destroyer of all, so that he may have a voice offering in bread, beer, ox, fowl, alabaster and linen, everything good and pure on which a god lives, for the ka of the revered one Neferenka.
 
Artefact #4 – Mycenaean Vessel

This one was a little bit unexpected; I randomly felt like playing with some clay, and so I made a little coil built vessel. Once it had dried to ‘leather hard’ I used pebbles to burnish it to a shine and did some final polishing with a piece of raw linen. That’s the same process used in ancient times which means that the light scratch pattern left from the burnishing looks just the same as you see on polished ware artefacts. I don’t have any good photos showing the scratch pattern on authentic artefacts, but having handled certain pieced and seen others in museum galleries I can say that they’re very similar!

Following on with another authentic ancient technique; I made my own paint to apply to the vessel. I made the paint from a gum Arabic base (I used pre-made from an art shop, although I do have some raw resin to make my own for an upcoming project), I have then mixed in ‘lamp black’ (very fine sooty carbon deposits) to form a black paint. I cheated and used a modern paintbrush to apply it. The Mycenaean people seemed to like squid and octopus designs, as did the ancient Greeks after them, so I chose to put one of those on my vessel. Traditionally the squids are drawn body down and tentacles up, and usually only with two eyes. However I swapped the design around to make it more Cthulhuian, and of course added in the requisite extra 4 eyes!

On the reverse side I scratched in a version of the Cthulhu Fhtagn, transliterated into Linear B. For anyone who doesn’t know, Linear B was the script used by the Mycenaean people to represent their language, in the late Bronze age around 1600–1100 BCE. Linear B is based on syllables rather than individual letters, so each symbol will typically represent a syllabic sound made by a two (or sometimes three) letter combination.

There are two words scratched onto the vessel. The first word is:
View attachment 724111

In Linear B, the R series can be either an r or an l phoneme. So this could represent the syllables ki-tu-lu or ki-tu-ru, which is as close as I could get to ‘Cthulhu’.

The second word is then:
View attachment 724112

Which represents pu[SUB]2[/SUB]-ta-qo-ne and would be read as phu-ta-go-ne, and that’s the closest I got to ‘fhtagn’. So all in all, the vessel has a six eyed squiddly faced painting on one side with ‘Cthulhu waits’ scratched in ancient Linear B on the reverse, built using traditional materials and technologies.

I’ve given this piece the Miskatonic University Museum accession number of EU.1938,01,08.0751. I wasn’t feeling as inspired as usual so the date component is ‘borrowed’ from a Mycenaean piece accessioned into the British Museum and the sequential number was the time when I was making the number up.

Here are a couple of photos of the finished artefact, with its museum record card:
IMG_20170423_201355_719.jpg IMG_20170423_201429_369.jpg
 

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When I was in Spain, I came across El Hechciro de Los Letrenos. It fits all the criteria one could have for creepy archaeological stuff.
You may want to check it out.
Also, correct hieroglyphs, nice. Have some digital bonus points :D
 
When I was in Spain, I came across El Hechciro de Los Letrenos. It fits all the criteria one could have for creepy archaeological stuff.
You may want to check it out.
Good call! Maybe something like that painted on a rock would work...

Also, correct hieroglyphs, nice. Have some digital bonus points :D
Thank you! The detail is important to me, so the hieroglyphs, cuneiform and linear B all say something and aren't just gibberish :D
 
This work is utterly magnificent. I cannot praise it highly enough. Incidentally, can you recommend manuals (I have access to Latin and Classical Greek grammars only) on the Sumerian, Linear B, Hieroglyphics and grammars on the appropriate (Linear B is the only one familiar to me, Mycenaean Greek and the concept of a Minoan-Mycenaean dynasty at Knossos in the latter days)? I am confined to my house with illness and always eager to study.

Your works avoid the cheap, vulgar rubbish usually produced for the Mythos and stand as models of scholarship and subtlety, the crude Cypriot idol is far more chilling than an overrendered computer depiction as we cannot truly perceive the Old Ones -- our perception is not an infallible measuring-stick, it merely evolved because it made one mob of apes more likely to survive than another mob, it is an imperfect tool that exists merely because it is better than any opposing tool. Heisenberg, Schroedinger and De Broglie have shown us how little we can perceive or understand our own paltry three dimensions, what of the great voids of other dimensions and other matter? Only in the approximations of art blindly trying to depict what it cannot understand, in memory, suggestion, half memory and analogy, in idols and in dream-scrawls, can we perceive them. Our own feeble inability to see clearly, and the mad terror that our clearing vision brings us, the blind rolling purposeless planets and our own utter insignificance in an immense void, as opposed to the comforting nonsense of religion, fire-smoke and incense smoke and comfortable myths, is the essence of cosmic horror.
 
I must say that a voice offering sounds a bit benign for an Old one.
You say that, but in the books we have people chanting rituals and so is reading a stela that different? Plus don’t forget the Egyptians liked to have multiple layers of everything, so in a tomb context they could have stelae, reliefs, models, statues. It’s quite surprising we don’t see the depictions of their kilts being held up by both belts and braces (http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/belt-and-braces) :D In addition you’d have your priests and/or cult perform rituals too, in this case I think it’s probably a safe assumption that those rituals would involve sacrifice too! This has given me a few ideas though, I might put a usual heaped offering table on the stela but have it include bound slaves in addition to the normal foods and beer. I’m also planning on having the king holding an incense offering, since it’s meant to have been used to appease the gods and I think that you’d want to try to appease Cthulhu!

This work is utterly magnificent. I cannot praise it highly enough... Your works avoid the cheap, vulgar rubbish usually produced for the Mythos and stand as models of scholarship and subtlety
Thank you very much! I’m honestly glad that you like it, I’m really enjoying this project myself. I still have a good number of other cultures I want to make things for, but I should really finish the ones I’ve already started before I start any new ones…

Incidentally, can you recommend manuals (I have access to Latin and Classical Greek grammars only) on the Sumerian, Linear B, Hieroglyphics and grammars on the appropriate (Linear B is the only one familiar to me, Mycenaean Greek and the concept of a Minoan-Mycenaean dynasty at Knossos in the latter days)?

Yes and no :D The hieroglyphs absolutely; the slightly old but still well regarded manual for the Egyptian grammar is Alan Gardiner’s ‘Egyptian Grammar’ (ISBN 978-0900416354), I also recommend you try out the much more recent ‘Egyptian Hieroglyphs for Complete Beginners’ by Bill Manley (ISBN 978-0500051726), there was a precursor to that book (ISBN 978-0520239494) which is worth a look too. I’ve done a short course will Bill and I really got on well with his teaching method, it was actually what got me into Egyptology because after a couple of afternoons’ study I started to be able to understand the things I saw in the museums. If you ever have the opportunity to do a course with him I’d recommend it!

I can’t really help with grammar for Sumerian, as I only wanted to re-create the Cthulhu Fhtagn chant I didn’t actually need to know the underlying grammar for the language, just how to represent the syllables. I just used Finkel and Taylor’s ‘Cuneiform’ (ISBN 978-0714111889) book which has a very handy phonetic guide in the back, and is an interesting book overall. However a quick Amazon search suggests we should extend our libraries with ISBN 978-1589832527 and ISBN 978-1500724269, they seem well reviewed.

Unfortunately the same is true for Linear-B, which you’re right was used by the Mycenaeans, and I just wanted to represent ‘Cthulhu’ on a quick unplanned afternoon project. I didn’t have a book for that on hand and used the Internet instead, Wikipedia actually has a decent phonetic guide to Linear-B: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_B#Syllabic_signs That said, ISBN 978-0906515624 looks like a good reference.
 
You say that, but in the books we have people chanting rituals and so is reading a stela that different? Plus don’t forget the Egyptians liked to have multiple layers of everything, so in a tomb context they could have stelae, reliefs, models, statues. It’s quite surprising we don’t see the depictions of their kilts being held up by both belts and braces (http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/belt-and-braces) :D In addition you’d have your priests and/or cult perform rituals too, in this case I think it’s probably a safe assumption that those rituals would involve sacrifice too! This has given me a few ideas though, I might put a usual heaped offering table on the stela but have it include bound slaves in addition to the normal foods and beer. I’m also planning on having the king holding an incense offering, since it’s meant to have been used to appease the gods and I think that you’d want to try to appease Cthulu
You're right about the belt and braces :) but what I meant is that the king is now preforming an offering, so that he may benefit from a voice offering in the afterlife. But I gather that he mostly wants to appease the god/ excape his wrath (i.e. Cthulu). You could for example change the voice offering of bread, beer etc. to something like: contentment in the sky with Re, Power on earth with Geb, seeing of the sun every day, the not being hindered when fleeing because of your anger. 'Htp m p.t xr ra wsr m tA xr gb mA itn ra-nb nn Sna.tw Hr ifd r Ad=k
Or you could look at private piety stela like the one from Neferabu, where he warns people about the power of Ptah.
Anyway, I really look forward to seeing what you come up with. Egyptian art is notoriously hard to duplicate (see all the crappy souvenirs in bazars in Egypt)
 
Awesome artifact!!! Is it possible to have a better look on that Miskatonic Museum seal? It looks amazing, but the details are hard to make out on the picture!
 
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