it is like. i am deliberately not posting that much about the nolan odyssey because i don't have much genuine interest and i find the whole like outrage theater people do at adaptations to be exhausting and unproductive and often misguided + i don't really care what celebrities are doing. but zendaya's 3000-year-old iranian earrings are like. such an on-the-nose fuck you. like 1. you can practically feel the stylist going "oh, it's old, it must be on-theme!" without really considering that ancient cultures are not interchangeable. but also 2. there's a very clear and important difference between ancient greece and ancient iran, in that there's a reason zendaya isn't wearing ancient greek artifacts on her ears--ancient greece has a cultural cachet that ancient iran does not, by virtue of its position as the perceived origin point of "western" (white) civilization. they are just interchangeable enough that zendaya can wear the artifacts of one civilization to a premiere of a work based on the mythos of another, but just different enough that she can get away with one but not the other.

and of course there's 3. which is that modifying and wearing a cultural artifact of dubious provenance taken from a country the us is actively bombing (and in doing so presumably destroying plenty of historic buildings/artifacts) asserts a certain lack of respect for and/or sense of ownership over that country's people and culture. and obviously this is what makes it seem like such a specifically heinous move.

Really important to note when it comes to (3) that the elite (and frankly Orientalising) appropriation of ancient Near Eastern artefacts as jewellery has a long colonial history. Cylinder seals are these little cork-shaped cylinders with pictoral or written designs engraved on them, and work the same way as a signet ring in that you could roll them over wet clay to leave an impression of the engraved relief on the clay to dry. They look like this:

(Cylinder seal of First Dynasty of Ur Queen Puabi, found in her tomb, dated circa 2600 BC, with modern impression. Inscription: 𒅤𒀜 𒎏 - Pu3-abi(AD) Nin - Queen Pu-abi. Nicked straight off Wikipedia as it's a fab comparison of seal / relief.)

In the British Museum you can find "Lady Layard's jewellery". Austin Henry Layard is a guy whose academic efforts I'm admittedly very indebted to. He was passionate about Venetian and Roman glass and did a great job re-popularising both styles in the UK, but more importantly he was the assyriologist who excavated Nineveh and the Library of Ashurbanipal—where we've found the majority of the Gilgamesh tablets. Pioneer figure in terms of Near Eastern archaeology... but check this out:

This is a necklace Layard had made for his wife. It uses real cylinder seals.

To quote the British Museum's entry on the item: One cylinder seal is Akkadian (about 2200 BC) and four belong to the second millennium BC, but eight are late Assyrian (about 1000-612 BC). Late Babylonian and Achaemenid stamp seals (about 600-350 BC) are used for the pendants and clasp.

Enid later wrote in her diary that, when they dined with Queen Victoria in 1873, it was 'much admired'.

Ancient Near Eastern artefacts, repurposed as jewellery in a set that doesn't give a single fuck about accurately dating them, let alone treating them with the sort of respect you might perhaps expect of items over four thousand years old. Instead they've become a mark of elite colonial status, an Oriental curiosity utterly separated from their historical context. They're 'old'. They're non-descriptly 'other'. Time and place dissolve into an attractive and vague exoticism.

All while the place these seals have been appropriated from is busy being exploited by the very empire this "jewellery" is being shown off to!

So to bring it back to your third point: you're absolutely right!!! And this has precedence dating right back to the start of Western study (and plundering) of the Ancient Near East. It's a carelessness, it's an ignorance of historical context, and it's explicitly colonial.

the green knight sketches because this film just turned 5 :-) 🌱🍃🌲

Man and owl, 1920s, Sweden

Vladimir Nabokov’s note card, c. 1969.

“[March 21 1951]

Student explaining to me (after getting 55) that when reading a novel (’Ulysses’ in this case) he likes to skip ‘passages and pages’ so as ‘to get his own idea, you know, about the book and not be influenced by the author’.”

this is such a source of anger for me in particular because so many restrictive policies are justified as being about "protecting children". oh we'll ban them from social media but we won't ban them from the fucking military. absolutely not they can't be trusted to consent to transition healthcare but yes let's have them in the goddamn army!!

i'm like. i will not believe a SINGLE WORD YOU SAY about protecting children until you listen to what human rights and children's rights campaigners have been saying for decades and stop recruiting children into the fucking army. why do you listen to the people trying to ban them from instagram and not the ones wanting you to raise the military recruitment age to 18, huh?? worried about running out of naive cannon fodder?

it's also just weirdly invisible as a problem! so normal to us that we don't realise it's weird and completely hidden to non-brits! when i lived in ireland i remember talking to irish quakers about it and i was astonished at how many of them, who were active in peace movements and demilitarisation movements, did not even know that their next-door neighbours were recruiting that young. like ???? it makes me feel insane that this is just so hidden away

Fifteen years and seven months, for the non-Brits. That's how old you have to be to start the application process, which is just so timed so that you can then go to Assessment at 15 years and 9 months, so that you can start Army Foundation College bang on your sixteenth birthday. My brother-in-law went that route and now in his 40s it feels really obvious that his whole adult self has been defined by what the military made him into, he's never had a chance to be anything that wasn't first and foremost someone's dog.

taking this out of the replies bc it feels important that people know it:

the standard contract you sign when you join up is 12 years. 12 years' dedicated service in the Armed Forces. if you join up at not-quite-16, you will be legally tied to serve in the Armed Forces until you are twenty-eight years old.

you can get out of that service contract, with difficulty, from four years. you have to have been in active service for at least three years. you may owe them money in lieu of service. this still cannot happen until you are already in your 20s.

a child who is 15 years and 7 months old cannot legally have sex, vote, drink, drive (they can get a provisional licence at 15 years and 9 months but can't sit the driving test until they turn 17), smoke, or buy paracetamol. they will not be able to use social media after spring next year (thanks, kier). they cannot open a bank account or sign any other legal paperwork without a responsible adult cosignatory. they cannot leave school, because they are not viewed as capable of deciding their future responsibly at 15.

except, apparently, if that future is a binding legal contract to serve in the armed forces for nearly as long as they've been alive.

I don't think enough people realise just how insidious the child recruitment in this country is. and while we're making all this handwringing fuss about how we can't let the youth have mobile phones or Twitter or access to adult content in case they're traumatised by it, there's a hell of a loud silence around sending them into a system designed to traumatise the conscience and individuality out of you.

Sky Ladder by Cai Guo-Qiang. The Sky Ladder was unveiled in 2016 over Quanzhou, China. It burned for 2 minutes and 30 seconds. It was the artist’s fourth and final attempt, as previous attempts had met only varying degrees of success. The artist says he had dreamt of a fire ladder 21 years prior and was very excited to see it come to life.

Decorative mermaids from Harley MS 4972 f. 20r, 1275-1325

Wyatt Hayes noticing that notorious ladies man Ilya Rozanov added a fancy ring to his necklace:

various groups of people from this manuscript

the last jedi director’s cut

yoda: train rey you must

luke: i dont know if i can do that. i’m scared i’ll mess up again.

yoda: hmmh. that’s nothin a little music can’t help

yoda: 

yoda: rockin