 Welcome, everyone. We're so glad to have you with us for our installation of the Women in Gender. Oh, sorry. I just had the title of the series up here, Women in Gender in the Phoenician Homeland and Diaspora Lecture Series. We want to begin with a land statement. We'd like to acknowledge that Berkeley, California is on the territory of the Hooch Un, the ancestral and unceded land of the Chochenyo Ohlone. We respect the land and the people who have stewarded it through many generations, and we honor their elders and their ancestors. In particular, we're living in a moment that warrants deep reflection on our past and present. As a museum dedicated to advancing the knowledge of archaeology and history in the ancient Levant, the Bade Museum welcomes scholarly discussions across boundaries of nationality, religion and gender identity. And in many global contexts right now, equal access to healthcare, education, fair wages and human rights is contested on the basis of sex, gender and other identity categories. In an effort to bring light to these timely issues to serve a broader public audience online and to connect the local to the local community that it serves, the museum is taking action to become a more inclusive welcoming and equitable institution that practices the philosophy of radical inclusion adopted by its parent institution, Pacific School of Religion. One of these steps is the continued creation of public programming. And through this lecture series, we hope to highlight new and established scholars who are engaging with risky and marginalized topics concerning women, gender performance and sexuality in the past. We invite you to participate in these programs so that together we can listen, learn and work toward creating a more inclusive museum community. So thank you so much for joining us today. I would like to begin by introducing Erin Brody, who is the Robert and Catherine Riddell Professor of Archaeology and Bible and the director of the Bade Museum at the Pacific School of Religion, as well as the co organizer of this series on women and gender and the Phoenician homeland and diaspora. Erin, over to you. Thank you so much, Dr. Dixon, or Helen. And it's my distinct pleasure to introduce today's speaker, Dr. Becky Martin, and she is acting director of architectural studies and associate professor of Greek art and archaeology at Boston University. Professor Martin studies Greek and Phoenician art history and archaeology, and is co director of the tell door excavations. Her books are the art of contact comparative approaches to Greek and Phoenician art published by University of Pennsylvania Press in 2017, and a co edited volume entitled the tiny in the fragmented miniature broken and otherwise incomplete objects in the ancient world. And her co editor was Stephanie Langenhooper, and that's an Oxford University Press book out in 2018. She is currently working on tell door reports, and a book on the origins of the Greek firm. Her talk today is entitled gender representation on anthropoid coffins. And please welcome Dr. Becky Martin and the floor is yours. Thank you, Aaron. Sorry, Dr. Brody. Dr. Brody Aaron, I'm going to start by sharing my screen. And we can see it perfectly. Right. Thank you. Hi, everyone. As you now know, my name is Becky Martin, and I'm looking forward to talking to you today about gender representation on Phoenician. Anthropoids are coffee guy, or what I'll call coffins for the sake of simplicity. I'm grateful for the series focused on Phoenicians and gender and the opportunity to think more deeply about this specific group of objects in terms of gender presentation and representation. And I want to thank Aaron, Helen, Sarah, Brooke, and Melissa for inviting me and putting everything together. Let's see here. Okay, we should be on the second slide. Good. Okay. For several years, I've been interested in how representation works in Phoenician art, by which I mean how Phoenicians use material culture, the built environment and images to signal different parts of themselves on a group or individual level. As part of that work, I've been looking at anthropoid coffins, which as their name implies were coffins in human form, found in Phoenician or Punic cemeteries, or contexts we think relate to Phoenicians in some way. Most were made in stone, but there are also some in terracotta, and they all seem to have been elite objects. What's important about them for our purposes is how they center the representation of the body. And accordingly should tell us something about what Phoenicians thought about bodies and the relationship between bodies and identity, including, of course, gender identity. I'll focus on the perspectives that come from the appearance of these objects, their formal qualities. This form is the only important or interesting thing about them, far from it, but because it's the one I'm qualified to talk about. Although there's a lot of scholarship focused on interpreting the appearance of these objects, I think we still have a long ways to go before we can claim to understand what they actually show. So I want to acknowledge that there's no way a coffin alone could tell the whole story about the person buried inside of it, not least of all about their biological sex or gender identity. For the most part, I leave topics like the discussion of remains, contacts and burial goods to others so that I can focus on questions of form such as, What are we looking at when we're looking at Phoenician anthropoid coffins? Why do they look the way they do? And what were Phoenicians trying to say about themselves with these objects? So let's start at the beginning to review the origins of the Phoenician anthropoid group. Very briefly, we think the phenomenon starts with these two coffins that were found in Sidon and two different cemeteries. According to their style, materials and other features, these coffins were made in Egypt during the Seite period, so from about the middle of the 7th century to later in the 6th century BCE. Along with a third plain one, these were probably acquired in Egypt around 525 BCE, when the Sidonians were on campaign with the Persian king, Cambyses. Both coffins have Phoenician inscriptions identifying their last occupants as kings of Sidon, on the left of Tabnit, and on the right, Eshmenazir, usually thought to be Tabnit's son. For those of us who work in southern Phoenicia, a key element of Eshmenazir's coffin inscription is that it records the annexation of the Charon Plain by Sidon, which was the most important precondition for the reoccupation of that area, which probably occurred starting around 500 BCE during the reign of his successor, Bodhisatt. In some, these earliest coffins were made in Egypt, buried in Sidon, contained kings, and seemed to be tied to the ascendancy of Sidon on the eastern Mediterranean stage. Although these are very clearly not portraits of Tabnit or Eshmenazir, we can still use these coffins to think about representation. So what do they tell us? First, you can understand why we call this kind of coffin anthropoid or person or human shape. As the human form dictates their overall shape, and it is nearly all that they show. At the same time, you'll notice that the body itself isn't very articulated. We can see heads, certainly, and in Tabnit's case, the knees, but not much else. This is deliberate, and in the Egyptian corpus we can infer that we're looking at the representation of the body of a deceased person who is wrapped tightly in a funeral shroud. The appearance of the heads is explained by the use of funeral masks on Egyptian elite mummies that show the deceased not only as youthful, but as though still alive. These are typically described as idealized representations of the deceased, but we need to understand that idealized doesn't mean something like your best self, or putting your selfie through face-tune, but more of an ideal of representation that's not driven by physical appearance but schema, schema related to social status, gender, and so forth. We can also note their lovely hair, which points to the Egyptian social practice of wearing wigs that was not gender restricted in this case. Sorry, that was not gender restricted. In this case, both coffins show long wigs with the hair worn down in front of the shoulder as a way to convey elite male power. Both masks also have the Egyptian false beard. You can see the strap attaching it to the mask in the detail image at top center. The false beard is also a status marker, one that is not always or necessarily restricted to representations of men. Finally, both are shown wearing jewelry, large pectoral necklaces, a detail of which you can also see in the top center image. Although these coffins were made for people and who are not buried in them, so for others, we can infer that Sidonian kings were using them to represent themselves and their role in Sidonian society. The elements that promoted the status would include the practice of burial in a stone coffin, perhaps with some stress put on their acquisition from Egypt, and visually with long wigs of hair worn down, false beards, pectoral necklaces, mostly unarticulated bodies, and inscriptions. We of course don't know what Sidonian kings looked like in life, although we know more about Tabneet than most thanks to the good preservation of his skeleton. The important point is that Egyptian coffins weren't meant to look like particular people, and the earliest use of them by Sidonian kings wasn't concerned about that either. We can also note that it was not apparently taboo to reuse sarcophagi made for other people, which is important to the way we make inferences about the human remains and grave goods we find with them. Here we get an idea of the tradition that comes out of it, a Phoenician art form that is explicitly derived from Egyptian art, but is also clearly different. Probably the anthropoid coffins begin in Sidon, like the two examples we see here, both of which are from the cemetery where Tabneet was found, and are likewise now part of the Istanbul Archaeological Museum collections. The one on the left is identified as a man, and the one at center and right is identified as a woman. Let's first focus on the connections and differences from the looted Egyptian prototypes. The group is very varied, but we can use these two to point out some repeating qualities. The coffin at left shows a similar representational logic. The form is anthropoid, but uninterested in articulating much of the body itself. We just really see kneecaps here. With emphasis on the head, which shows a youthful face looking front, eyes open, and false beard, wearing the hair in a kind of rough crown over the top of the face, with the ears exposed and some kind of longer material on the shoulders. That material that's covering the shoulders is clearly derived from the Egyptian clothed headdress, but no longer seems to be functioning, or at least not clearly, as a head covering. The coffin shown in profile at the center shows the two elements that make up the coffin as a whole. So we have the lid, which was made in one part, and the lower part that is sometimes called a tub or a basin. Notice how from the side this basin shows more of the body, from the shoulder to the feet. The same coffin is shown frontally, at right. The hair is worn in a similar shape to the coffin on the left, but notice how it has been sculpted into rough locks and is also worn down in front, stretching down onto the chest, with three curly strands on each side. There's no false beard on this example, but otherwise the facial features are very similar to the coffin on the left. Finally, both have rough bosses on the backs and sides of their lids in different positions, which would have made it easier to transport the sarcophagi or coffins and to raise and lower them. They're sometimes just called handles in the literature. Unlike their prototypes, however, neither of these coffins show the deceased wearing a pectoral. They also lack lengthy inscriptions, as do all other Phoenician anthropoid coffins. It's possible that some of these features were sometimes added in paint. Paint is found on several of the coffins, but at present we lack evidence of painted writing. This is a remarkable shift, I think, from Egyptian prototype to Phoenician practice. Here we see anthropoid coffins from still another Sedonian cemetery that are housed in the Beirut National Museum. Beirut has the largest collection, and another large group can be found besides an assemble in Paris at the Louvre. As you can see here, these coffins, like the two we just looked at previously, were made in marble. Although scholars disagree about the exact count of these objects, something like 150 are now known, most of which come from central Phoenicia, especially Ceylin. Examples with known find spots stretch along the coast from Tardis to Gaza, while several others are found in places like Cyprus, Sicily, Malta, and as far west as Cadiz in Spain. For the purposes of today's talk, I mostly used the catalog produced by Katya Lemke that was published in 2001 and consulted other nearly contemporary major studies by Simone Frede published in 2000 and 2002. I also tried to take into account coffins that have been found since these major studies were published, most of which come from southern Syria. Another view of the Beirut collections allows us to summarize what we think is happening in general terms of representation in the Phoenician corpus. The anthropoid coffins show and only show the deceased following a vague outline of the body. Rough lifting bosses are not smoothed away in contrast to the usual high degree of polish everywhere else on the coffins with the occasional exception of the hair. Most seem to show the body wrapped tightly, I assume in a shroud, with limited or no articulation of the body itself on the lid. The faces are lively, as if the deceased were still living, but we can't easily say how people understood what they were seeing. Did Phoenicians think of these faces as representations of masks, of human faces? We don't know. Some of the coffins seem to show heads with necks and some don't. Sometimes the head seems logically attached to the body, at times simply emerging from the anthropoid form, and still others as though resting on a board. Hairstyles are varied and were clearly important, since, like the facial features, they were where most of the artist's effort was spent. We don't know if these hairstyles are representation in stone of hair, or of wigs, or of hairstyles worn in life, or only in the grave. Likewise, because we note that all the representations are youthful, and were made at a consistent although not identical size, we can't use the coffins on their own to understand the age of the deceased either. Finally, I want to point out that a very few coffins have other sculpted features, like the one in the foreground here, that show more of the body, in this case feet and arms. Just over half a dozen coffins show people holding things, staff, flowers, fruit, and oil vessel, and a few are shown wearing sculpted jewelry. Now we can really dive into the question of gender, identification, and representation. Let's start with three observations. First, as we've just seen, coffins represent their occupants in a way that was truly meaningful, but has an unclear relationship with likeness, by which I mean the physical appearance of the deceased. Even so, like many other images in the Phoenician repertoire, coffins are often treated as though they are portraits, documents of once living people. A related second point is that traditional scholarship has deemed it essential to classify coffins the human remains inside and the associated grave goods in terms of sex and gender. A binary of sex and gender is taken for granted in most of the scholarship, which is why the beard on this figure is used to support the idea that it shows a man. And third, most interpretations of gender have been driven by ideas that are both modern and stereotypical and that assume gender signaling was both desirable and unambiguous. Of course, many people who work on gender and representation in Phoenician material culture have already noted these problems, but I find it helpful to remind ourselves of them when dealing with images that are made at or near human scale and with a clear interest in naturalism. In other words, we need to be extra careful when talking about art that encourages us to think of images as real people. Although sex and gender have been considered fundamental to understanding how these coffins and their contents work, the formal qualities of the anthropoid coffins, at least insofar as they're preserved, do not seem especially concerned with gender representation. The body shown on your screen, like nearly every other body in the corpus, is in fact visually ambiguous in many ways. Is it alive or dead? Lying down or standing up? Male, female, both, neither? We don't know. And the ambiguity must be intentional. We need to pay attention to it. As has been noted recently by several scholars, when the representation of a person is restricted mostly or entirely to the head or face, the practice of assigning gender is much more difficult and might even be misguided. Even so, coffins are identified as men when they have a beard, either a false one is here or a natural one, or when hairstyles are short. Sometimes facial features are also used in the identification process, but as we've already seen, they're pretty unreliable. The traditional approach to the identification of women works in a similar way. In just two examples that I know about that we find physical markers, namely sculpted breasts, that can support the identification of the coffin as women, again, using these traditional approaches. One was found in Sicily and the other in Spain, which we'll see in a few minutes. Almost all other bodies and faces are ambiguous, making the primary factor for the identification of women long hair. We find a long hair worn down, either all the hair or just a few strands, or all the hair is worn up. Usually the long hair worn up is shown wavy, and sometimes it entirely covers the ears. For example, here, according to its excavators, we see a kind of long hair that had traces of red and blue paints. The coffin also contained a necklace, necklaces are often assumed to be gender signaling, and it also contained a skull that was said to be of a woman. Now, we can't know how correct these impressions are, especially of the bones, and I think we should think of them skeptically, but I just want to give you a picture of how all of the evidence can be used together to make these identifications. Looking now at a few coffins typically identified as women, we see how things go. At left, we have long wavy hair parted in the center, worn up and tied behind the head. At center, we have a hairstyle similar to the one on the last line, where there's a crown of hair, like over the face, with rough flocks, and presumably the rest of the hair was tied behind the head, except for a couple of wavy strands worn over the shoulder area and extending down onto the chest. At right, we have long wavy hair worn all the way down with the ears fully covered. To give you an idea of how common these hairstyles are, using Lemke's catalog of some 130 coffins, I found 19 examples total with long hair worn fully down or partially, and in this case, I excluded Tavneet and Eshmanazer who are wearing wigs. Of these 19-5 or terracotta coffins from Mamreet, which I'll only be mentioning in passing, because they seem to be mostly operating under their own logic. I'm especially interested in that center hairstyle, the one that mixes the hair crown with some strands worn down. In the literature, the hair in the front over the face is described a lot of different ways to convey the appearance of bumpy, rough curls or locks that are usually arranged in clear rows. The major studies of the anthropoid coffins are in German, and there we find this word used to describe hair, so buko, laken, frisor. I know that if German is not your native language, this might feel a little laborious, but honestly, it's better than the English word bumpy rows of locks or humpback lock hairstyle. So I'm going to refer to this particular feature as the buko, laken hairstyle. This hairstyle is going to help us think more about gender representation in this group and the success of traditional approaches to identifying gender. In order to get to the question of what this hairstyle might represent, we need to turn away briefly from Phoenicia, because buko, laken are not unique to Phoenician art. These are two Greek statues of a peculiar type we call the herm, in part because they sometimes represent the Greek god Hermes. Hermes have a few formal connections to the anthropoid coffins. Notice, for example, how these herms put most of their representational stress on the head and the hairstyles. On the left examples, the locks over the face are rough, while on the right they're carved to create what are usually called snail curls. The snail curls on the right tell us that the hair of the herm on the left is probably unfinished. You can also see how the finished term on the right has a few wavy strands flowing onto its front side over the shoulders down to where the chest would be if it were represented. In the back, we see the rest of the long hair. Notice also in the profile view how the crown of curls is a naturalistic response to a headband that pulls down and flattens the hair on the crown, creating the puffy curly hair in the front over the face. The use of headbands and a naturalistic treatment of the hair is typical in Greek art. Headbands and bows do sometimes appear on Phoenician coffins, but not consistently, which implies some borrowing a form without understanding of or concern for the particulars. This happens elsewhere in the anthropoid corpus too. We've already seen it with Egyptian headgear, the cloth, which can be rendered so that it looks more like a shawl than a head covering. It's not a criticism of Phoenician art to point out this kind of receptivity with the misunderstanding or even rejection of meaning. Since the meaning of form in the source material is also culturally specific, so it can just take on a new cultural specificity. Returning to the hairstyle. I'll also note that in Greek art, these curls are our cake, both in the sense of a period of Greek artistic production and in the sense of being deliberately old fashioned looking. In Phoenician art, we see examples of both kinds of curls. Tight curls framing the face, as in the terracotta example from on the right on the left, or rough bukkalokken in a similar position in the two examples on the right. In fact, all the two Phoenician examples of bukkalokken on stone sarcophagi are left rough. We could be looking at roughed out locks that were not fully carved or finished, but it seems just as likely that the rough look was deliberate or became so over time. Perhaps the locks were only roughed out to create a nice surface for paint that would help the artist finish the image, or perhaps the roughness itself was desirable. We don't know for sure. But I'll remind you that some other coffins have rough hair over the face that lack even locks like that first one we looked at with the false beard and the strangely rendered Egyptian cloth. So we know that rough hair is a feature that often turns up in the anthropoid corpus. In the examples on the screen, you'll also notice some of those very rare secondary characteristics that seem to signal that the two coffins in the front represent women. On the left, we see a headpiece of some sort plus earrings and a necklace. And on the right, we see sculpted breasts. The coffin on the right in the background shows the figure with a naturalistic beard. Let's take further note of those bukkalock and hairstyles, which, as you can see, is found on coffins traditionally identified as women, like the one in the foreground, and as men like the one in the back. Sometimes it seems as though all the hair is pulled forward and ends in those rough locks. But perhaps we should understand that some of the hair was worn forward and the other hair was kind of gathered at the back of the head and isn't shown. At other times, bukkalock and hairstyles show some of the hair worn partially down. When all we see are the bukkalocken, gender identification is traditionally split between men and women. When some strands are worn down, however, the coffins are traditionally identified as women. Very rarely, as in these examples from Cadiz, can we be confident in this identification in broad traditional terms as we have the accompanying representation of breasts and a natural beard. In total, I count around 15 bukkalocken hairstyles on stone coffins. 10 of these have been identified according to standard criteria as women. Let's look at a chart. It's not very aesthetic, but helpful, I hope. To better understand how hairstyles and hair length have been used to identify women in the anthropoid corpus. This was made with reference to Lemkis catalog plus two new discoveries from Cyprus and southern Syria. Most of these coffins were identified as women because they have long wavy hair that was shown worn up. I've noted other criteria in the right column if it seemed interesting. But perhaps the most important point is that you'll find 66 examples listed here, which is fully half of the coffins in Lemkis study and nearly half of all known anthropoid coffins, creating an impressive picture of gender parity that would be another notable departure from the use of the anthropoids in Egypt. As Lemkis suggests, the corpus thus interpreted indicates a very high status for women within the elite funerary realm. In the last part of our time today, I want to take a closer look at one very specific use of bukkalocken, what I'm called, and please forgive me for this term, the up-down with bukkalocken hairstyle, as you can see on the screen. So what I mean is that some hairs worn up and some down, and in the front we find that rough row of curls, the bukkalocken, and that it's shown all together. So at the sides of this slide we have two now familiar examples from Siden, and now in Istanbul at left, and the one from Lebanon now in Paris at right. The right coffin in Paris is a really good example of when the sculptors expressed very little interest in showing the body, the head just kind of emerges from a vague, tubular form. In the center we have a coffin that's now in the New York Metropolitan Museum that comes from Kidion and Cyprus, it's part of that museum's Chesnola collection. Notice how there's a lot of variation in the approach to sculpting the coffin lid. It's clear that the same artists did not produce these examples, but we can say that they share a distinct and easily recognizable hairstyle. There are five coffins total with this hairstyle, two from Siden, one of which has a secure fine spot, that's the one on the left, two come from Kidion including the one at the center. The other one has a secure fine spot, and again that one from Lebanon with a disputed fine spot on the right. Those that have been known for a while are all dated from 475 to 450 BCE, but the most recent fine from Kidion has been downdated a bit, that's already been disputed, it doesn't matter for our purposes. They seem to have been made in the 5th century BCE. Moving on to two new examples while retaining the Istanbul coffin for comparison. We see at the bottom and right the example from Kidion, so that's the new find, now in the Archaeological Museum of the Larnica, and at top center a fragmentary example now in Copenhagen that said to come from Siden. The coffin from Kidion was excavated just in 2008, and it's the 10th anthropoid from the island that has been published. You can see that it has remarkably well preserved paint. In fact, both of these examples of the up-down with bukulak and hairstyle have interesting features. The coffin in Copenhagen has finished snail curls, and you might also have noted the preserved stump of a false beard. The long hair and the false beard have led to its identification both as a man and some publications and as a woman and others. It's different in other ways too, including the manner in which the curly hair frames the face. The new coffin from Kidion, on the other hand, clearly has the same hairstyle as the others. It also has the very rare articulation of the body, the secondary characteristics we see in only a few of the coffins. Here we have a sculpted tunic, arms and feet. Its wonderfully preserved polychromy shows golden color on the hair and the eyes, presumably just one part of the original paint that covered its surface. As well on its fine tunic it shows borders in purple and blue. It seems fitting to me at least that this coffin is now appearing on the advertising for the Museum of the Larnica. But still more interesting is that the new Kidion coffin has purple paint on its face. Purple paint that shows the face with a stubbly beard and a mustache. I can't show you these in color detail because I don't have the image rights and its current setup in the Museum does make photography a little bit difficult. But I hope you get the idea here from the photographs and the drawings that I was able to provide. So at the bottom I've added a purple arrow where you can sort of see his mustache and it left in a drawing I made from published photographs. The stippling that you see over the upper lip and around the face is an indication of where that purple paint can be found on this coffin. In this case it's also worthwhile mentioning the associated human remains and grave goods. The coffin contained the skeleton of a young adult aged over 25 years that was identified by excavators as most likely a man. Although the burial was disturbed it was still associated with grave goods including a golden necklace of beads in the heads of the Gorgon Medusa. So taken all together we seem to have a natural if perhaps fancifully colored beard that doesn't conflict with the interpretation of the human remains or the grave goods that tells us according to traditional criteria the up-down Bukalocan hairstyle represents a man. The traditional approach has been upended by new evidence. What can we then conclude about gender representation in this corpus? First some things that we can be pretty confident about. One, Bukalocan hairstyles represent more than one gender. We've known that for a pretty long time. For example, we've known that a beard could be worn with this hairstyle since the bearded Kadiz coffin was excavated in the 1880s. When the coffin with breasts was found in the same city in 1980, so like a century later, the so-called Lady of Kadiz, we find the identical hairstyle. Since the 2008 discovery of the coffin from Kideon with the up-down Bukalocan hairstyle and painted beard, we have further confirmation that a more elaborate variation of this hairstyle could be paired with a natural beard. Moving to point two, we can infer according to traditional binary-driven approaches that some adult men were shown wearing the up-down Bukalocan hairstyle. So, men appear in this corpus with long hair, long hair that can be worn partially down. That might mean the Kopenhagen coffin that I showed before with the false beard really fits with this group more than it at first seems. It does seem possible to me that all the figures in the up-down Bukalocan group represent men according to traditional approaches. But even if we make that assumption, the social significance of the hairstyle is as yet undetermined, and it's not yet clear what that means in terms of gender presentation. I think the search for parallel should continue with the goal of at least laying out the possibilities. There are some other questions raised by the case study, too. First is straightforward one. We need to be open to the possibility that other figures in the corpus with long hair represent men. We accordingly need to recognize the limits of our understanding of the group and the current perception of its gender parity. We don't know how gendered hairstyles were in this corpus, which means that for now it would be very difficult to use this corpus that is so focused on the head to make inferences about specific gender roles and gender presentation in Phoenician funerary art and society. And by way of conclusion, I want to suggest that we should also be thinking about how much sex and gender mattered in other ways and what it means that we're struggling to make accurate gender distinctions. Is it because we don't know what to look for? That answer is clearly yes, as we've just seen in our case study of that up-down Bukalakian hairstyle. But we might be struggling mostly because the coffins deliberately place very little emphasis on the representation of gender, and it's possible that gender representation was not a very important part of what Phoenician anthropoid coffins were meant to do. And with that, I thank you very much for listening and look forward to hearing your thoughts. Thank you very much, Becky, for a really fascinating presentation. Yeah, if you could stop sharing, that would be helpful and hopefully we'll have a few questions coming in from our live audience soon via the chat. I think, all right, so we already have one to kick off and I'll just relay it here from our audience. The question is, in terms of the Larnica example, does the jewelry found with the male sex skeleton seem similar to the jewelry in other anthropoid sarcophagi? At this stage, would you argue jewelry is undiagnostic of gender in most contexts within the Phoenician Levant? What a great question, and I'm going to do my best to answer it according to what I know and what my gut suggests. So I should say, first of all, that the association between that burial and the necklaces somewhat disputed, but this is what the excavators put forward. And there is a parallel from Lebanon that has been associated with the male burial. And I think that in the case of this type of jewelry, necklaces in particular, that they are likely to not be gendered in this material. This is, again, coming more from my gut, but also we can think about the way that certain kinds of jewelry appeared on the tub need and Ashmenazer sarcophagi or coffins as well. I do think that some jewelry is more indicative of gender than others. I'm really not an expert here. So if there is one at the talk, I'd love to hear from you. But so far as I know with, for example, the Omri sarcophagi coffins, those larger earrings that they wear do seem to be indicative of the personal adornment of women. I think we have a long ways to go here. And it's not a problem just for Phoenician art. We can see it with, for example, a Trescan art and the new handbook that has appeared. The specific issue of the gendering of jewelry was also addressed. So I think we have room to do good work. I love to your emphasis on all the ambiguity. But anyway, it's so worth investigating. And with earlier work, what one finds is so many times these assumptions just don't play out. And also one would hope that in the future, we also get really good bioarchaeological assessment of the skeletal men. Other than just sort of assumptions, I'm thinking of things where in the past where skeletons would have been sexed simply by the accompanying grave goods. And this is sort of universal. And they're now finding with DNA studies that a male warrior actually ends up being an elite woman, et cetera, et cetera. So we really need to kind of check on our assumptions as your study has shown. I'm just going to add to that, although I am not qualified to talk about the skeletal remains. I will say that the I think two issues in play. One is that with the older burials, when they were studied, the techniques that were used are not up to modern standards. And the Humdy Rhinox publication of the skeletal remains is also quite racist in many respects. So gender is not the only problem that we're seeing with the treatment of the material. The other serious problem that we have is that it is not always possible to know if the burials we find are primary in the sarcophagi, and that can complicate how things work. That has been an issue with the Cadiz, the lady of Cadiz as well. So it'll be interesting to sort of see when people, not me, who are qualified are able to gather together the evidence to see if we can really find for ourselves a path forward. Thank you. There's a follow up question. I believe this actually comes from Ellen. She says, if you had to guess, do you guess that these bukkin lock and hairstyles were worn in life, or were they unique to the dead or representations in tomb contexts? Yeah, always a fair question with funerary jewelry as well and hairstyles if we're looking at something that was really impractical for daily life. I think what's tough about the hairstyles in particular? Well, there are a few things before I answer your actual question. The gendering of hair length is a really, there's a general, I want to have a general sympathy for the impulse to classification. It's how our fields sort of came to be, and it's nice that classification was emphasized so that we can now get away from it a little bit. But the gendering of long hair is feminine is a sort of strange, I would say, approach to take in West Asia or in the Greek world. I mean, hair length relates to gender sometimes, but also age, class, foreignness and other kinds of status. And it certainly isn't unusual in the Eastern Mediterranean to see long hair be associated with masculinity. With the hairstyles themselves, I would just say, although I suppose my perspective is really informed by Roman art, that hair in funerary art is a place to really demonstrate conspicuous consumption. And the more elaborate the hairstyles are sort of the clear your status is because it requires the input of servants or whatever it might be. So I could imagine that elite women and men would have worn their hair in this way in everyday life as well since hair continues to be a status marker in the world of the living. So I can't say whether Boko Lakan are only funerary or not. But so far as I know, we don't find that hairstyle in other contexts or have descriptions of it. We do get some descriptions, not great ones of hair from Herodotus, for example, and there's an association between things like bows and ribbons and certain kinds of femininity such as prostitution. But there are all sorts of reasons why we should be cautious about that example. That was a long way of saying, Helen, I don't know, but I would love to find out. Thank you. You know, anyway, so many of the things we deal with are ambiguous. And also, I think I love the highlighting of the fact that we can't translate, right? Something that's, you know, a representation in death, you know, how did that really map on to life? And the answer is most of the time, we don't really know. But I think that's of course why Helen was asking about your best guess. Thank you. Yeah. And I think some of it also just to make it more art historical and focus has to do with what we understand to be the process of purchasing of acquiring and purchasing these objects. And if we see them made to order or if they were to some degree ready made, it would be hard to imagine these being fully ready made, given that they're like a unique Phoenician art form, at least the Marble and Terracotta ones. But it is possible that there was a roughing out of the form while you were alive and that the details were added later. So that could mean that patrons had some input into the appearance, but it might mean that they did not have that much. There was sort of an understanding of what was generally wanted and they picked what was on offer. So, so interesting. And I'm trying to go through my mental Rolodex to remember, you know, some perhaps parallels on, you know, the corpus of masks. And I'm forgetting the other technical term for masks that weren't masks. And yet, because they didn't have any ice that's but are there are their hair representations. And anyway, this is neither here nor there because it wasn't part of your presentation. But I think that I'm glad you brought it up. So I think someone wrote in the chat pro tomes, a proto my since I've also work in the Greek world. Um, right. So a lot of the scholarship I was referencing in the talk is coming from people who work on Phoenician and Punic Terracotta's. And as people who work on Terracotta's know the impulse to classification couldn't be stronger in that class of objects, and has been in some respects pretty detrimental to our understanding of what those objects show and what they were meant to do. And again, one of the impulses of classification has to do with gender. And there in particular you will have this kind of mask or proton phenomenon where there's no body and ideas about what is happening in terms of gender have not been very reliable. I don't know that it necessarily means I don't know exactly what it means for our study, whether we should continue to try to refine it or if we should recognize that we're actually asking the wrong questions. But I wonder if maybe it's not somewhere in between, because the deliberate ambiguity of the objects is important. It could be that the users knew what was happening or it could be again that it doesn't matter. It's true. And I believe later in the spring we'll have a talk particularly focused on masks from Adriana Orsinger. So we look forward to perhaps some of these issues being addressed. There is another question. I'll feed to you. Can you talk more about what you think was valuable about the premade adornment on the Egyptian anthropoid sarcophagi in the eyes of Tavneet and Ashmonazar. The second, who reused these? Just the things that were carried into the other anthropoids from Phoenician context or do you think some of the futures might have been reserved as royal? Yeah. I think as I mentioned, albeit briefly in the talk that the egyptianness of the objects probably did matter quite a bit. That sort of appropriation, or in this case like theft, was an important way of signaling power. And it is part of a much more complicated set of questions and historical circumstances. But the rise of the practice of using sarcophagi apparently stemming from this initial moment of looting. And as I mentioned again, just in passing with the ascendancy of Sidon in the Eastern Mediterranean is all important. And so the connections to royal power I think are very important, both Egyptian and non-Egyptian. But the Ashmonazar sarcophagus is probably both in the sort of general recognition of the use of those kinds of sarcophagi for elites and for Egyptian kings, and then also the mentioning of the great king in the inscription. So if the question is sort of what was valuable about them, I think having the objects as objects was really important. But I was trying to emphasize that it's not that they just took things from Egypt, it's what they took that matters and how they use it to place their bodies inside of these Egyptians sarcophagi or coffin, sorry, is quite significant. And so I think the visual qualities, the materiality probably mattered as well. Just the sort of second question about, you know, things that were carried into the other anthropoids. It's a really interesting one. The use of Egyptian iconography is uneven and clearly not required for the coffins to be effective. So even some of the coffins that are considered quite early don't have Egyptian qualities. And as I noted, not all of the features on the Egyptian types show up on the Phoenician ones, including the pectoral, unless it was painted. I think though one of the most significant differences is inscriptions. Assuming we know what we're talking about, according to the objects we have and that they weren't painted on. It is interesting to me that both Tubneet and Ashmenazar added pretty lengthy inscriptions, especially the latter to the sarcophagi. And it was important to them as Phoenicians or Sedonians to do so. And that that practice apparently didn't carry over in the other anthropoids. So what do we infer from that? Does it have something to do with Phoenician ritual, the role of writing, the importance or not of including the specific name of the deceased on the sarcophagus or coffin? I can't be sure. But I feel like in some respects, it's the most interesting change that we witness. The formal ones are to be expected because they're being made out of different material by different artists. Who knows how that process worked? And they are expected but interesting to investigate. But that change is one that we see actual Sedonians making. And so I would pay attention to that probably, most of all, in some respects. How royal they understood the writing to be? Interesting question. Were kings buried in the anthropoids? Probably. We think so. It's tough to answer these questions. Maybe in the cemetery that includes Tabni, we can say with some confidence that it's a royal cemetery. So presumably some of the anthropoids contained kings. But those questions get a lot harder to answer. Right. It's certainly elite. Yeah. So interesting. Yeah. And I say, well, this is maybe more of a question for Helen, but I remember from the inscriptions too that there is some very specific mentions about not disturbing the burial. And of course, most of the vast majority of these don't have inscriptions, but it gives us a tiny bit of insight into other aspects, non-visual related to burial, and also the desire, sort of not to be messed with, post-interment, which is kind of ironic because both of... It didn't go so well, yeah. But also both of those sarcophagi were presumably taken from Egypt. They might have been, I guess, in the process of manufacture, but they might have also had previous burials. Probably not Tabnitz because the name of the original occupant is on the sarcophagus and hieroglyphs. I mean, Ashwin Nazar wasn't, so we could say maybe he came from a workshop, but I think Tabnitz was, yeah, taking something out and putting something in. I'll just say it sounds like Helen's going to jump in, which I welcome. I'll just say it's possible conceptually to think of the sarcophagus not needing to have text that say protect the body because sort of faith is being put in the form of the materiality. That's all I was going to say, Helen, though, if you want to jump on. It's sort of like a classic very early example of do what I say and not what I do. And also sort of that appropriation of Egyptian power as well. It's worth pointing out that there are some non-human remains also found in sarcophagi, including dog bones. So how that worked is also not super clear to me at least. Thank you. I think we have one perhaps final question, and just as a theme for today, it's also a bit speculative, but speculate away. Do you have any idea why these anthropoid coffins seem to have died out, so to speak, or why the practice ended? I think there are a couple of ways to answer this. One is that they're pretty clearly a phenomenon of what we call the Persian period. So basically the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, that's true of the other stone coffins that are used in the Phoenician repertoire that are more architectural in their format. So they seem to have something to do with, as Helen has written about, ritual and belief in this period. As other scholars have written about, maybe it has to do with some ideas about Persian religion and an effect that it might be having inside in. I am not qualified to talk about that though, so I won't. And I'm also not sure I understand it. But I will say that I think because of my tendencies as a scholar would tend to view it a little bit more politically. It is not unimportant that Sidonians tie the practice of stone sarcophagi apparently, in my view, to their political control over southern Phoenicia. I'm biased, I work in southern Phoenicia. But it is interesting to me that for as long as they seem to have that control, they're using the sarcophagi when they lose that immediate power with the conquest of Alexander, they seem to die out. Not completely. We have some indications that perhaps they're still being used. But it might have been a kind of elite social signaling that had to do with Sidon's role within the Achaemenid Empire, and that when that comes to an end, the impulse to continue making and using these objects in that way did as well. Very good, very fascinating subject and really appreciate your approach. And it started me thinking about this sort of almost like chen a patoir to all these like all these various stages, right? It was also really fascinating. And I mean, I don't need to take up airtime right now, but this idea of the possibility and it'd be great to involve at another time Helen in this conversation, but of like, you know, of having some sort of funerary shroud. And then, you know, perhaps this sort of notion that the in stone that those faces actually are, you know, it's more representative of actually of a mask or a proton than it is of the individual who's in the sarcophagus. I think that's right. And I think that the reason why you see more articulation of the body on the backside is because there's still some conceptual link to the shroud really tightly like wrapping up the body. It's just not the part of the body we typically think of is particularly important for gender presentation. Yeah, thank you for addressing that. We had one question we didn't get to about the ones that show the butt. So thank you for addressing that in our parting words. Happy to do it. And I'll just say that just quickly, that part of the difficulty of addressing some of these questions is the way that the sarcophagi or coffins are typically displayed in museum settings. It's hard to see those areas. They're not even always out. And particularly with the say it's coffins. It's not unusual to only have the lids, which I understand because you need to have your museum enforced, I think to have very many of those out. But that is something that's worth thinking about more. It is interesting that the logic of representation, the idea of a body is restricted always from the shoulder to the feet. They don't seem to show like there's not interest in the head area in the same way. Okay, Helen, you want to take us out? Yeah, thank you so much. I personally want to thank Dr. Martin for being willing to go on air and just just throw out some ideas about these objects that we have on the one hand been studying for so long and on the other hand have limited ourselves in how we study them. So thank you so much. Our next talk in this series will be February 22. We'll sort of pick up the pace with more lectures this spring. Dr. Jessica Nitschke, Dress and Representation of Women in Visual Culture, a real nice talking point to sort of bookend our thinking about visual representations of gender or not. So thank you all for being here. See you in February. See you February 22. Thanks everyone.