Lovecraftian Artefacts

RobertMuldoon

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As those of you who know me in real life know, I love history and archaeology as much as I love films and books. That's lead me to wonder, what if the Lovecraftian mythos was real and Cthulhu visited the ancient cultures of the Earth, what sort of artefacts and effigies might we find?

To that end I've thought up a few Cthulhu inspired artefacts for the cultures I've studied.

Artefact #1 - Cypriot Plank Figure
This type of figure dates back as far as the bronze age, around 2100BCE-1900BCE. They are flat (hence the 'plank') stylised anthropoid figures usually made out of terracotta, with incised details sometimes with arms carrying children but equally as often without any sculpted detail on the body section.

Here are some examples of artefacts from various museums:
26920605ef4a53a7076190c9910b685b.jpg498869237.jpgDP101875.jpgAN00541694_001_l.jpg


I've started to make my version out of Super Sculpey. This will actually be the master and the finished version will be more authentic, but more on that later...

This is my work so far:
00001.JPG00002.JPG00003.JPG00004.JPG

I still need to add all the incised details, and I'm also debating giving him clawed arms.
 
Thanks guys!

My day job is getting in the way, but here's a little update; I've started on the incised details:
DSC_0991.JPG

I did try out some arms on him, but I wasn't happy with them so the body will be an incised design. I need to do a little more research to see if I can find an artefact which has incised arms, and if I can then I will do something similar. I'm also hoping to work wings into the design somehow...

Update
That didn't take as long as I expected.

Here are some examples with possible arms from the Cyprus Museum, Smothsonian and an antiquities seller (respectively)
image.jpg86c1c7a33a4cd6c810f12512a9937f5d.jpg3226-35.jpg

It's a bit debatable if they really are arms or clothing/jewellery, but it's good enough for my purpose and adding some incised arms to my sculpt feels authentic enough.
 
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Wow, love the idea. :D
Are you going to make a terracotta version of the figure? I think it would add to the overall look of the artifact and also "feel" right when touched.
 
I don’t have a kiln, and don’t really want to pay to use someone else’s, so technically no terracotta. However I will be making a red clay version, using oven baking clay which should look and feel very close to real terracotta (I hope!).

I pretty much spent the weekend in the cinema so I’ve not paid Cthulhu much attention aside from tweaking the sculpt a little, there was a detail from HPL’s Cthulhu drawing I wanted to work in:
DSC_0998.JPG


Once I’ve finished tweaking the sculpt and actually get it baked my next step in the project will be to make a plaster mould. Once I have that mould I want to use it for slip casting, that should mean that I will be able to repeatedly make very authentic looking and feeling clay pieces. From the research I’ve done into the original artefacts, the incisions were usually filled with gypsum to give them the white colour.

This is my first time sculpting (unless you count art class in school when I was a kid) and will also be my first time moulding and casting, so expect some trial and error posts soonish :D
 
Once I’ve finished tweaking the sculpt and actually get it baked my next step in the project will be to make a plaster mould. Once I have that mould I want to use it for slip casting, that should mean that I will be able to repeatedly make very authentic looking and feeling clay pieces. From the research I’ve done into the original artefacts, the incisions were usually filled with gypsum to give them the white colour.

This is my first time sculpting (unless you count art class in school when I was a kid) and will also be my first time moulding and casting, so expect some trial and error posts soonish :D

Make a silicone mold of it first, I'm thinking that a plaster mold could get stuck in some of the small details and break off when removing.
 
Make a silicone mold of it first

Thanks for the advice, and you're right it most certainly could get stuck. The problem with that is silicon wont work very well for slip casting, you need the plaster to absorb some of the water from the slip to help it dry out faster (a lot like casting latex).

Plaster is a whole lot cheaper than silicone too, so I can try that out and see if I can make it work first and if all else fails fall back on silicone and try and slip cast in that.
 
Here’s some progress; I’ve had some time off work, and have been touring museums and working a bit on my artefacts.

Artefact #1 - Cypriot Plank Figure
The Ashmolean Museum, in Oxford, has these three plank figures on display:
AshmoleanPlankFigures.JPG

I really liked the idea of the multiple necked versions, I thought they fitted the brief of ‘a monster of vaguely anthropoid outline’ more than the (more common) single necked version. So I have updated my sculpt a bit:
Head.JPGResculptedPlank.JPGResculptedPlankAndHeadSherd.JPG

I think I’ll fire the head too and have him as just a little sherd broken from a full piece.

Whilst travelling around I’ve also been doing some research work for my #2 and #3 artefacts.

Artefact #2 – Cuneiform Tablet
For anyone who doesn’t know, Cuneiform was a very early form of writing which came out of the Sumeria in Mesopotamia in around 3500-3000 BCE. It started more pictographic (for instance heads or reed shaped symbols) and eventually evolved into a much more complex system with the letters represented by combinations of triangles. The most famous example is probably the flood tablet.

Here’s a work in progress photo for this one, showing my transliteration of the Cthulhu Fhtagn chant into as close an approximation of sounds as I could represent in cuneiform:
CuneiformFhtagn.JPG

Some tablets had figures as well as text, and some have text on the figures, so I might think about adding a figure to the tablet and maybe making this my version of the ‘Wilcox Tablet’.

Artefact #3 – Ancient Egyptian Stela
As the few of you who know me in the real world know; I love ancient Egypt and so I had to do something based in that culture as a part of this project. I’m currently planning on making a stela, although that may change. Whatever I do make will definitely have hieroglyphics on it though.

Unlike the cuneiform on object #2 this one won’t be transliterated English and instead it will actually be written in ancient Egyptian. I’m going to be using the ‘offering formula’ as a base and then extend it a bit, to swap out the usual gods for Cthulhu and also swap out the king’s name for HPL instead. I’ve made a start on making an updated offering formula which:
OfferingFormula.JPG

It’s quite tricky turning ‘Cthulhu’ into a version which sounds roughly the same but uses the sounds available in the ancient Egyptian language, and I wasn’t happy with the first attempt so I redid it based on the Old Kingdom era king Khufu (who was buried in the Great Pyramid at Giza):
Khufukhu.JPG

There will also be a few paper props to go with this one, such as letters and translations from historically accurate figures of course. More on that later though, I’m still researching addresses and signatures and other stuff like that.
 
Ha! Awesome :) I saw in the paper that we just passed the anniversary of the discovery of the Rosetta stone; July 15, 1799.

I will note that HPL's long phrase (Phnglui etc) isn't English, and neither is the name "Cthulhu." They were always approximations of whatever 'enigmatical sense-impacts' The Great Old Ones could 'speak' to the 'fleshly minds of mammals.' Additionally, you will sometimes see HPL or other mythos writers transcribe it differently as well, for different cultures in different parts of the world: Tulu, etc. HPL wrote a list of the very awkward phonemes he thought were 'closest' to the 'correct' pronunciation, if that would help with your transcription:

“The actual sound - as nearly as human organs could imitate it or human letters record it - may be taken as something like Khlul’-hloo, with the first syllable pronounced gutturally and very thickly.”


“The best approximation one can make is to grunt, bark, or cough the imperfectly formed syllables Cluh-Luh with the tip of the tongue firmly affixed to the roof of the mouth. That is, if one is a human being. Directions for other entities are naturally different.”

http://www.hplovecraft.com/internet/ahcfaq/general.aspx

That being said, I love to see this transcribed into hieroglyphs :) Much like the Greeks transcribing 'Khufu' as 'Cheops,' we must do our best with the sounds & letters available to us :)

Those multiple-necked plank figures look really odd; they don't look like human figures at all.

And thanks for doing the three eyes.


-MJ
 
Those multiple-necked plank figures look really odd; they don't look like human figures at all.

That's what I thought and why I swapped my sculpt to something similar, it just felt more appropriate to the 'vaguely anthopoid' theme.

And thanks for doing the three eyes.

But of course!

Thanks for the pronunciation guide, I had seen a whole slew of various spellings/soundings for it and made my versions as close as I could with the sounds of those particular languages. I have a new found empathy for anyone trying to turn a proper noun form one language into an equivalent of their own!
 
I’ve been busy with other things, but here are some updates on this project.

Artefact #1
I’ve finally got around to firing my full plank figure and the head sherd. It’s really tactile, I can see why the original artefacts are all of a similar hand-filling dimension!
PlankFigureBaking.JPG PlankFigureInHand.JPG

Next up on this one, moulding and casting! The SuperSculpey is good, but it doesn’t feel quite right and so I want a more ceramic version.

Artefact #2
This one was a quick build and once I’d worked out the cuneiform for the Cthulhu Fhtagn chant the sculpt was pretty quick to get done. Here’s a work in progress shot:
CuneiformTabletWIP.JPG

And the finished, baked, tablet with the transliteration of what it says (and a celebratory whiskey old fashioned):
FinishedCuneiform.jpg

This also will get a mould made and proper clay versions made. The dimensions are about to say that this could almost be my take on the 'Wilcox Tablet' too.


Artefact #3
This one is a bit less sculpty than the other two. It’s going to be an Ancient Egyptian style wooden offering stela, and I’m going to be making the paints in the traditional manner. I’ve done a bucket load of research (I posted the hieroglyphics previously) and I’ve now started to make the green pigment – by grinding malachite (with some quartz veined basalt rocks):
MalachiteGrinding.jpg

Ultimately it’ll look a lot like this piece (which is in the British Museum):
AN00774604_001_l.jpg
 
I thought those cuneiform tablets were much more bulgy, pillow-shaped lumps?

They actually came in an assortment of sizes and shapes, some of them were even fired inside of clay ‘envelopes’. Some of them were really nicely shaped pieces, while others were much more (literally) rough around the edges. There are also cones which were used to mark the boundary of buildings out. Then of course there were all the little tags, bigger stamps (used for making bricks and siuch like) and full size tablets carved out of stone.

This is an example of quite a skinny (written in one of the earlier forms of cuneiform than I used) one from the British Museum:
cuneiform_660.jpg

You could also find them used in book form, which were not fired and used like a notebook which could be erased and re-used. These only survive today because when cities were sacked and burned the heat from the flames fired the clay.

Now all that said, the main reason my one is quite skinny is because that’s all the clay I had left. When I mould and cast it, I will most likely bulk it up a little bit. I like the rougher edge though because I think it looks more like a deeply tortured mind just wanted something to write on and didn’t really care for making that pretty.

What's the story with those Egyptian offering stele? They look nice.

The concept of a large of the ancient Egyptian belief was based on reciprocity. The nutshell version of the translation on the offering stelae was they had the king saying essentially says to the god ‘if I give you all these nice offerings, you’ll then look after me in the afterlife and give me food and other nice things’. That same concept can be found on all the funerary objects, like statues, coffins or tomb paintings for example. If you want to learn to spot it, look out for the ‘hotep di nesu’ which means ‘an offering given by the king’:
htp-di-nsw.png

That’ll usually be followed by a god’s name (for funerary items that would typically be Osirs), then all the gods titles, then what is actually offered and is expected in return.

My one offering formula deviates a fair bit from the original one, mostly because they usually talk about the god being all nice and that didn’t really seem fitting for Cthulhu….
 
The nutshell version of the translation on the offering stelae was they had the king saying essentially says to the god ‘if I give you all these nice offerings, you’ll then look after me in the afterlife and give me food and other nice things’. That same concept can be found on all the funerary objects, like statues, coffins or tomb paintings for example. If you want to learn to spot it, look out for the ‘hotep di nesu’ which means ‘an offering given by the king’

The wood seemed like a 'budget' material to me, like something an upper-middle-class person might have commissioned. It made me think of those encaustic portraits made for mummies (much later, I think).
 
The wood seemed like a 'budget' material to me, like something an upper-middle-class person might have commissioned.
Often yes and they particularly popular with the elites like scribes, but not exclusively.

Wood was actually incredibly valuable and expensive because it was so hard to get a hold of big pieces. For that reason a lot of earlier coffins were destroyed to be re-used in later times, which ultimately led to the introduction of cartonage coffins as they couldn't be reused.

As an example, this is the stela from Djedjehutyiuefankh ‘s tomb at Deir el Bahri near Thebes and has been dated to the 25th Dynasty (~770-712 BCE), which now lives in the Ashmolean museum in Oxford with the rest of the tomb group:
1265630-painted-wooden-stele-from-the-tomb-of-djedjehutyiuefankh-from-the-great-temple-at-deir-.jpeg

If you look in the hieroglyphics in the bottom register, under the figures, you should be able to see the ‘hotep di nesu’ written right to left (the grammar is a little different to the one I posted above, but all the same symbols are there only in a different order). Which means that Djedjehutyiuefankh was definitely a king, rather than a very rich elite. The rest of the ‘offering formula’ goes on to say the king is making an offering to Osiris, who this stela says is the lord of the two lands (upper and lower Egypt) and the lord of Thebes rather than his usual title of the lord of Djedu.

The stela is made out of sycamore fig (Ficus sycomorus), which is a tree native to the middle east. I’m making mine out of European sycamore, because I live in Europe and it’s a lot easier to get than the more accurate wood. Having the same name is good enough for me on this one :D I would like to try my hand at stone carving, but I didn't really want to tackle that for this particular project. This is more a vehicle to learn about paints and their techniques.

It made me think of those encaustic portraits made for mummies (much later, I think).
They were Roman period. I really hate Romano-Egyptian pieces, you won’t find me making any of them! Don’t even get me started on the abominations that are Roman sphinxes!
 
I really hate Romano-Egyptian pieces, you won’t find me making any of them! Don’t even get me started on the abominations that are Roman sphinxes!

You sound like HPL on the Fleur de Lys building, LOL.

...the Fleur-de-Lys Building in Thomas Street, a hideous Victorian imitation of seventeenth-century Breton architecture which flaunts its stuccoed front amidst the lovely colonial houses on the ancient hill, and under the very shadow of the finest Georgian steeple in America.

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


-MJ
 
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