 Okay, is this working now? Yes. Good afternoon everybody and thank you so much for coming today. It's been a great experience working on our exhibition about Sicily. It's something that was relatively new to me as a scholar of somebody who worked mostly in the eastern Mediterranean. So I was really thrilled to be asked to help out with this exhibition in the British Museum, along with my colleague Dirk Boones, who's only recently come back from Malaysia, so I think he says he's still jet lagged, I don't quite believe him, But anyway, he is also busy with various other events. It is wonderful having a co-curator, because they could share all the events although very few of them are ever chores and it was a pleasure because it's great to talk about the exhibitions we work so much on. I will concentrate perhaps more on the ancient side of it today because the exhibition that those of you have seen and that hopefully will go and see it is divided up into two major periods, when Cyslic was, we think, y chwynhau, y cynyddiant, ychydig, ac yn ymgyrgrifio dynnu newid edrych yn trwy teimlo tiwn. Dyma'r cyflawnwt y Pryd i'r rhanen, sydd i'r ffordd ffytai o'r cyflym o'r newid hwy teimlo. Mae'r cyflawnwt o'r cyflym o'r cyflym, i symud, yn y Creadl, ac mae'r cerddau a'r rhywfyrdd! Mae'ricannydd y Creadl yn nyeth o'r cyfrym, yn y Cerddau o'r cyfreunio awdraethau a'r cyfrannwt. y cyfnod nifer o'r 11 oed yn y 11 oed yn y 12 oed. Y cwnes yn oed yn deunydd y mae'n meddwl, a yn cael ei wneud yn ddiddorol o bobl iawn, dwi wedi cael y presidant yng Nghymru, y cysylltu bethau a'r casgau, yn y relachau yn y mig yma ar y Cysylltu Bryddoedd, ac mae'n bwysig i'n ddiddorol, ac i ddweud i'n ddiddorol o bobl iawn, ar y cyfnod ymgylch yn ymgylch ar gyflym yma, gyda'r brifhau a'r bwysig, Mae'r bwysig i'r cwmwysig yw'r ddoch yn ffyniad o'r objex. Mae'r objex' ar ychydig o'r hwn yn ymhwylu'r gynhyrch, sy'n gwybod i'w gwaith o'r rhain yma sy'n gwybod i'r Cyllid yn ymgyrch. Ddweud i'r bod yn ddweud eich gwybod i'r holl bwysig yw i'r ceisio i'r museum ac ydych chi'n ddweud i'r holl bwysig i'r holl bwysig? Roedd hyn ymlaen o'r objexau yn eich gwybod i'r holl bwysig, ac yn adrodd wrth wedi cael ei g innol, ac oes iawn i Gweinidol gyda'r Aelod, a'r hollu'r hyn dros teimlo yn mynd i gweld ar hynny o fynd i'r gweinidol. Haidd yn hynny i'ch gweinidol ac i gynnig allanodd, a'r hollu i'r hefyd rydw i Gweinidol. Ond y dylai allan ymlaen ni o'r meddoriaeth ac iawn, It allows for great agriculture of growing of grain, raising of livestock, and the ancient Sicilians were famous for raising livestock. Sheep, goats, horses, pigs, other animals, they raised horses on the island, they grew all kinds of different crops, and then later on in the Arab period they probably changed, transformed the island more into the island we see today with the citrus fruits, rice and other more exotic plants from North Africa and the east. But the fertility of the land is one of the most important reasons why people went there. There's this old view of course that many of us still fall into the trap of saying that the Greeks went around civilising everybody. This isn't true, I don't think. The archaeologists finding the remains of wonderfully rich and diverse cultures, sophisticated cultures on the island way before the Greeks or even the Phoenicians arrived. And they're often these cultures named after the site where they're most prominent or most prolific, named after by various archaeologists, the most famous of which was Paolo Orsi, who gives his name also to the museum in Syracuse. I mentioned earlier on that people tend not to go to museums in Sicily on the whole when they're doing general tours, but the museums there, particularly Syracuse, Agragento, they are arranged in such a wonderful way that you really get that feeling of chronology and time and different cultures on the island and they're very, very proud of all these different regions. They also are so proud that even when we suggest to them that yesterday we've learnt that these wonderful objects for Sicily, would you like an exhibition about Vikings or mummies or something? They always say, actually we like some of your Sicilian objects. It's like, come on, you know, you've got many of these already, but on the other hand, they're so proud of these. And this wonderful gold bowl, which is another item that Sir William Hamilton gave to our museum in 1772, comes from the site of St Angelo Muxaro in the south of the island near Agragento, ancient Acragas. And this was acquired via the Bishop of Gagenti at the time, Agragento, who gave it, apparently according to a French volume, to an Englishman. And at the time he said that it shouldn't really have been given to anybody. And alongside it were an almost identical bowl with bowls and two other plain gold cups and all those other three have disappeared. We don't know where they are. We're hoping that by advertising them through the exhibitions and talks that somebody might find them in their sock drawer somewhere, not knowing what they are or maybe one of them uses a candlestick. Who knows? But we're really hoping that in time these will turn up. But the importance of them is that they show a wonderful relationship between many of the different islands and people that shaped early Sicily. They have a kind of Phoenician shape, although very few of the Phoenician ones were gold. They're also connected with Cyprus, Crete Roads. And the people of Crete and Roads were some of the first settlers on Sicily and they created the settlement of Jailer in the southeast of the island. And the people of Jailer then sent a sub-colony, so to speak, of people to Agragento, further southwest along the coast. And it's near Agragento where these bowls were found. In this community of earlier peoples and St Angelo-Mexaro, in Tholos type tombs, similar but not related to the ones in Bronze Age, Crete and Mycini. Later on, two gold rings were found during more scientific excavations, or at least the one with the wolf was found still on the finger of the skeleton of which it was attached when it was buried. And all of these show the similar style. They show these wonderful lean cattle with their ribs strongly pronounced, parading round the side of the bowl. The cow there, suckling her young. The wolf over there. And it was almost by accident that we've actually put a huge amount of objects in our exhibition that relate to the natural world in both the Greek, or the early period and the Norman period. And this was by accident, or can it be? It's just that there are so much great connection between the Sicilians and their landscape. The raising of animals and the natural world was so important to them. Some of the earliest and some of the most striking of all ancient coins come from Sicily, and many of them show symbols from the natural world, signifying particular settlements. Because remember, the Greek settlements from the 8th century BC onwards were not unified policy of the Greeks. They were different towns, different city-states sending out colonists around the Mediterranean, around the Black Sea to discover new lands for the aristocracy to find new places to rule and also to find new trade routes and trade links. So it wasn't a unified policy, but these people, the Greeks shared a common language, religion, culture, but politically they were more or less always fragmented. And that was the same on Sicily until very late on. So these bulls show that wonderful mixture of cultures, but they were found in the grave at a local, earlier ruler, who is not Greek, not Phoenician. Were they a diplomatic gift? Who made them Greeks Phoenicians? We just don't know, but it's good to have them all together so people can make connections and they're a great talking point. Another weird object that we didn't manage to get into the exhibition because it wouldn't get into the lift, comes from near Ragusa, a wonderful town in southeast Sicily. And this is another example of this mix of local and Greek styles in the way that people are represented. What we see in 8th century BC Sicily is the start of hierarchies in societies. And many of these seem to be based on the agricultural world. Bulls are extremely important in the iconography, so are horses. Soon as somebody could afford a horse and put themselves on top of it, they've raised themselves up physically above everybody else. And horses in the aristocracy and the rise of the aristocracy are an important element of early Greek and other societies. Bulls are extremely important. Anybody with a bull in the community would be an extremely good person to know. Also, the number one sacrifice in the ancient world was a bull. If you could afford to offer a bull to a god, you must have more than one. So it's a great sign that people are starting to divide themselves up into levels. This peculiar object that comes from a lintel of a tomb has this weird-looking three-dimensional lumpy-looking head on the top. On one side it has a bull, which is perfectly understandable for these early communities, and a sphinx on the other side. But this man's head seems to be related to a horse in relief with a big shield, and you can actually see just a bouncy, if you've got very good eyesight. His leg's dangling down by the side of the horse. The shield covers most of the body of the horse, which is probably a good job because anatomically it's all rather strange. But it just looks like it was made and then changed and adapted and modeled over time. But it's a great example of how these early people on Sicily were taking in different ideas. They were using Greek and Phoenician ideas to push themselves up in their society. And there's a rather strange Greek inscription on the side, which is wonderful. It talks about who made it, who it was dedicated to, but we know nothing more about this person. But we know they were connected in some way with the early Greek settlers on the island. These rather strange-looking alien creatures here are actually much more delightful in the flesh than they are in any image. They are real representations of how the cult of Demeter and Persephone was preeminent on the island. Any island that relied on agricultural produce that relied on raising of livestock and using the land was going to rely on Demeter and Persephone's gift, which was that gift of creating this harvest, creating this fertility on the land. And they offered back in huge numbers in many different sanctuaries all over the island. You go to any museum in Sicily and there are huge amounts of dedications to these two goddesses. There are many lamps found amongst the dedications to show that some of these rituals or mysteries took place in semi-darkness. And they're often in places that aren't canonical-style Greek temples, not the kind of pediments and columns. There are a series of different rooms within a sanctuary where the mainly female worshippers would go and perform different rites in different places. But these wonderful cult statues also show a tradition in Sicily of mixing materials. And Sicily has no natural marble sources. So the Greeks frustrated at this very quickly thought, okay, we'll use limestone as the predominant sculptural material. Also terracotta, they have rich clay sources. And they made some of the bodies out of limestone. The exquisite drapery carved into this figure on the left here is just magnificently done and it compares them, the best of the marble sculptures from the later 5th centuries BC. But they've added a marble face, a marble, sorry, the flesh parts of the female figure are added in imported marble. And you can see most, well, one arm and one foot doesn't survive, but the rest of it is there. The hair may have been real hair. It may have been a wig of some sort. It may have been gilded wood. It may have been limestone or even black marble. The Greeks, when we think about Greek sculpture, we often talk about marble. We talk about bronze, occasionally clay. But if you just really prosaene, yes, there are different materials that were used in sculptures, in sanctuaries all over the Greek world. And the two on the right are slightly earlier in date. They come from the 6th century BC and have been dressed by a current fashion designer in Sicily and give an idea about how some of these sculptures actually looked when they were dressed in real clothes. You may not like them, but it does evoke that strength of how different materials work so well together. And the hands are beautifully but very simply modelled. We have also been holding some items associated with the cult of Demeter and Persephone. And one object we have in the exhibition which really burst into life when we lit it in the gallery was this wonderful terracotta painted, I call it an altar, that comes from Jailer, again in the southeast of the island, found with two other similar altars of a type that we found nowhere else. They were found in a building that seems to be part of an emporium or trading post and they may have been intended to be exported somewhere. But shortly after they were put into the building it seems to have collapsed around them, protecting them from ever being used. And they have holes in the side where you can put wooden posts to lift them and I call them my glorified trestle table legs because they... I should have taken a picture of the other side but when you look at them in the exhibition they're slightly triangular in shape, there's a little shelf at the back and I imagine one of these at either end plants of wood put across onto which you put your offerings, your piglets may be the number one sacrifice to Demeter and Persephone and other fruits and vegetables and different offerings to the goddesses. But they're wonderfully portable, fortunately they were never actually used, they've been preserved. The goddess in the middle also has this wonderful kind of corn-like tresses of hair that she's parting for you to see. She may be Demeter and Persephone but it's very difficult in this period where you have this mixture of Greek Phoenician and other styles knowing exactly what they're supposed to be, but the idea of fertility is also shown by the panther at the top who's clearly got milk and she's feeding her young through devouring a bull and this scene of animal attacks or one beast devouring another is a very common scene in Greek art on the island. The political system on the island, as you know, was mostly the Greek so-called Sicilian tyrants and this isn't alien to Sicily. Unique to Sicily is a form of government found all over the Mediterranean in the 6th century BC. The word tyrant of course has different connotations today although the Sicilian tyrants were notorious in later literature and I stress later literature as being amongst the cruelest and most barbaric of all rulers in the ancient world. This is one of their terrible, apparently one of their terrible devices in which you could execute people. It's a brazen bull, like a huge oven in the form of a bull into which you put your victim like a fire underneath and even cruder is the fact that the engineer had put into the muzzle of the bull a system of pipes that would transmute the screams into a kind of soft bellowing sound. It's absolutely terrible but you'll be pleased to know that the first one, maybe not pleased to know but the first person put inside was the inventor himself, Periloas, the bronze caster. Whether it was actually ever made, who knows but these sort of mostly Roman traditions writing about earlier Greek tyrants who they didn't particularly admire and they even turned up the tyrants in Dante's Inferno as some of the cruelest people in history. Some of the stories may or may not be true. Who knows? I'm not going to read out everything here but the expression better the devil, you know, kind of relates back to Dionysius I, the tyrant of Syracuse in the later 5th century BC who apparently was particularly terrible to the people of Sugesta when he was asking for taxis and money to pay for his military campaigns and it's that wonderful idea that better the devil, you know, he tells him, I don't want you dead, your predecessor was awful, you are really really bad but whoever comes after you is going to be even worse so I'd rather you stayed alive. Again, who knows if these are true but they're lovely stories and they're the kind of stories that really kind of revolve around an exhibition about particular places or particular people it's often very difficult to present a historical event and some of the most important historical events in Sicilian ancient history like the Battle of Hmera against the Carthaginians in 480 BC the Athenian expedition between 415 and 413 BC and some of the later battles we cannot show very easily with objects. The Greeks love showing battle scenes but they don't seem to show specific ones as you know, they don't say underneath each freeze which battle this is representing they're often very generic and often mythological or legendary rather than real so it's very difficult to illustrate these in exhibitions so we do that through other events talks, lectures, publications, whatever it might be. There's another horrible story here just in case you haven't had enough of them yet Agathocles was one of the few Sicilian tyrants who tried to make kind of games, territorial games outside of Sicily most of the Sicilian tyrants in their different cities tried to kind of just keep Sicily from other people Agathocles had managed to do that so he started to try and attack various places in North Africa but again the poor people of Sugesta were attacked by Agathocles who according to some myths and legends because they wouldn't pay any taxes and paying money towards his campaigns he catapulted the entire city into a ravine one by one over a period of three days it's probably not a very difficult thing to do Other people say they only catapulted a few people that's pretty bad some people apparently had to run for their lives with their heels cut off all horrific stories but it just shows how so many people over time tried to kind of bring down the stories of these successful Sicilian kings by saying that they're bringing up all their bad points all the time yes they're horrific but they don't mention many of the great things they did many of the great courts that they built up over time and the achievements that they made but the Sicilian tyrants did show off on a world stage in antiquity and they made many dedications at the pan-Hellenic sanctuaries of Olympia and Delphi really showing off to people on that world stage and they were famous for chariot racing and other equestrian events particularly in the first few decades of the 5th century BC the events that they won chariot races were considered the most spectacular and dangerous of all events the tyrants themselves probably didn't drive the chariots they got charioteers to do that but they showed chariots on so many of their coins in so many of their dedicated statues including the wonderful statue of the Mocia charioteer found at that small Venetian island just off the west coast of Sicily which we borrowed for the olympic year four years ago and the Delphi charioteer which is still in Del, is now in Delphi museum that some think is associated with the inscribed base of Polid Sarlos of Jaila, the Tyrant of Jaila again from the 470s BC it's not always clear whether these monuments actually are related to a specific event but they do seem to show how important it was to show off on a world stage for these Sicilian tyrants one wonderful relief we have in the exhibition is this small marble relief a dedication within Sicily showing a successful victorious charioteer who's driving doing a kind of victory lap around the course driving past the turning post represented by a column here and the reins of his horses would have been added in paint and there's the famous Delphi charioteer again just to show he's not an individual statue there are fragments of horses and also a smaller arm of a groom who was shown in the same group but they show many of these successful events on coins chariot events some of them where the horses are being crowned by victory which is a lovely touch I think rather than the victor being crowned by the horses get all the recognition recognition they deserve mule cart races next to it sounds like a strange event and then fully blown kind of fast moving chariot scenes with hovering eagles above so throughout different periods from the 6th down to the 4th century BC the Greeks tyrants were showing their victories on coins they also did that and they commissioned famous poets like Pindar to come to the island and praise both their city and themselves for military and sporting victories and Pindar of course was one of the most famous of these and writes about one of the battles that higher on the 1st where he beat the the Etruscans at the battle of Kumai in 474 BC and dedicated a helmet in honour of this others are dedicated sorry, dedicate commemorate victories in battles and also in chariot racing but the helmet on the left is one in the British Museum's collections that is in the exhibition with the dedication from higher on to Zeus in honour of this battle and there's an almost identical inscription this is an Etruscan style helmet on the left, an italic one and then on the right a Corinthian one and that helmet is still in Olympia museum today they also built some of the most enormous of all Greek style Doric temples, the biggest ever Doric building was at Agragento at Agragas in southern Sicily dedicated to Zeus and apparently dedicated with some of the funds appropriated from the losing Carthaginians after the battle of Amara in 480 BC other great temple stood at Celenunte at Agragas and also this wonderful one that suggested again that the Sicilian Ministry of Tourism keep telling us to show you in every single talk that we do to encourage people to go to Sicily in springtime with all these wonderful spring flowers around it the temple at Sugesta seems to have been built almost as a folly though for the Athenians to be impressed by because it was built in the later 5th century BC when the people of Sugesta were keen to get Athenian help in trying to crush the might of Syracuse that was rapidly becoming the most important Greek city on the island and the people of Sugesta asked Athens to come over, invade conquist Syracuse and try and kind of push them down they were getting too big for their boots they didn't quite build it they didn't fruit the columns they left all the lifting bosses on the stone they may not have ever roofed it they may not have dedicated to a particular deity but it was there to impress the Athenian embassy when they came over the Athenians of course did come over and famously lost fleet and many of their soldiers the famous Sicilian invasion or adventure that took place between 415 and 413 BC another event very difficult to show but very important in the history of Sicily some of the Sicilian temples built again in honour of some of the battles particularly the battle of Amera with these funds from Carthage include the wonderful temple of Athena that's now encased in the Duomo the cathedral in Otigia on the Syracuse and you can see just at the top the Doric Fries still there from the building the columns at the side and they filled in the gaps with stone but inside they cut through the walls of the temple to make these arches you can still see the columns inside it's a wonderful way of preserving these ancient buildings the best preserved Greek temples usually were the ones that were turned into churches and cathedrals and there's the temple of Amera a more typical Greek temple more or less only the base remaining this wonderful series of lion head spouts decorated the exterior of the temple and still preserved much of their ancient colour because remember these are mostly limestones so the colour soaks into them more and is often much better preserved than on marble sculptures but some of these sort of harsh lines from these kind of angular temples that you see so much of in the ruiness of the very romantic ruins in the landscape but they were softened in antiquity by wonderful terracotta plaques and revetments they were both functional and decorative and the Greeks needed to drain water off their buildings we also forget about the roofs on Greek temples that they are kind of like we don't even think about we just see birds flying through them we imagine them all being open air but they had roofs, they had tiled roofs they find many tiles in excavations of Greek sites but they very rarely ever reconstruct roofs on buildings but these terracotta revetments the Sicilian Greeks became famous for making over time were amongst the best in the Mediterranean by putting these wonderful kind of tear shop tear drop shaped devices with parmets all the circular water spouts have different designs and then you have these wonderful patterns that create circular and fluid designs over these very sharp angles for some reason the Greeks never invented downpipes because all the drainage comes through these water spouts at the side but they also made temples to be buried in almost those people who wanted to aspire to be amongst the ranks of the gods would do that and one object that I would have kind of swam over to Sicily to collect and swam back on my own if I was allowed to borrow it but unfortunately it was too fragile is this wonderful terracotta sarcophagus please go and see it in the museum in Ravenousa in the province of Agragento on the island that basically has zero visitors a year it's a wonderful museum and this is one of my favourite ever ancient objects it is a temple in the form sorry sarcophagus in the form of a Doric temple it has beautifully preserved colour on it and it has kind of graffiti engravings of helmets and goblets and all kinds of material that may or may not have been buried within the sarcophagus itself but also this wonderful tombstone cap which we do have in the exhibition this one made of limestone which would be on a high pillow and scribed with the name of the deceased but it's a wonderful way of showing the early Greek building that we often like I said lose the Doric Frees is shown beautifully all the elements around them a column in the pediment but I should have shown another picture but beside that have a look in the exhibition it shows the tiles in great detail and it helps us to put some of the objects in the exhibition that come from architecture into a kind of contextual space this terracotta model here of an early Greek temple shows a horseman on the top and also these kind of gorgons and satyrs where their face puffed out sorry the cheeks puffed out as if they're blowing the bad spirits away from the sanctity of the sanctuary that they're protecting horsemen were a really common device on early Sicilian buildings here's a wonderful relatively complete one in terms of the Greek world that's relatively complete but this wonderful horses head that we have in the exhibition comes from one of these equestrian groups that kind of emerge from the roofs of the buildings that are dominant on the island are gorgons sometimes they're Medusa sometimes they're male but often they are there as a decorative device sometimes just a face other times the full figure and it's wonderful kind of running pose some of them the one at the top are over a metre high others at this little gold plaque are only the size of a postage stamp but gorgons were predominant on the island they seem to be everywhere you find them a lot in the eastern Mediterranean as well but on early Sicilian buildings and many of the architectural devices on early Sicilian buildings are kind of almost perhaps there to kind of assert Greek identity on the island is a difficult thing to talk about some people say it's not a propaganda exercise it's just they're showing tales from Greek legend but some of them are there I think and I believe to kind of just show that the Greeks are there they've arrived looking over the Phoenician cities kind of building these colossal temples and saying we're Greeks we miss around with us too much but one of the wonderful objects we have in the exhibition is being affectionately perhaps to her detriment now called Thomas the Tank Engine because she has this wonderful kind of face that's kind of emerging almost from a tunnel and it's one of the gorgons that's perhaps less frightening than the others but of course anything when you have added colour it always adds kind of an extra dimension of perhaps terror although perhaps more comedy with this one but anyway it's a functional piece it's a tile ridge cover and you can see this kind of domed element that goes over the ridge tiles at the top of the building and also the lateral tiles would have been accommodated through these gaps at the side and her face would have stuck out over the pediment roof trying to again scare off evil spirits they have more traditional forms of Greek sculpture on early Sicilian temples though very rare pedimental figures are extremely rare but metopes particularly from the site of Seleninte in the south west of the island was rich with an early series of metopes and some of these may in fact have ended up in the British Museum I'm quite glad they didn't but it would have caused even more trouble but two English architects in the early 19th century went to Sicily, Angel and Harris and they started digging at Seleninte and they were moving huge tonnes of stone that's a site where some of the largest ancient Sicilian buildings were and they found a series of wonderful archaic Greek metopes of a type that we don't have in the British Museum we're very rich in other periods of Greek art but not of these early archaic architectural sculptures they're richly decorated the colour is well preserved again it's soaked into the limestone but many of them show excerpts from Greek myths and Greek legends it's not like a narrative that runs throughout the building it's almost like they are trying to drum into the Greeks who look at the building this is a legend about Medusa this is one about Perseus, Theseus, Aphrodite whoever it might be there on the buildings just almost staring out at you as if they're having their photographs taken this is a rather brutal scene showing Perseus decapitating Medusa Pegasus her son has already appeared at the site which is a bit out of sequence a theme is standing beside him and this wonderful drawing by Harris from the original drawings that are in the British Museum hopefully some of which we're going to lend to the Museum in Palermo in the next year show just the state that they were in that they were found but they are extremely animated they're not a kind of sculpture that had been seen before in the early 19th century most of the sculptures have been relatively heavily restored Roman marble sculptures this was a kind of sculpture that was unique Sicilian authorities very quickly kind of commandeered the sculptures and set up some of the earliest laws of antiquity in the Mediterranean and now you can see these in the Museum in Palermo or you could if they ever opened up the galleries again they've been sort of closed down for several years now but we've borrowed a few of the pieces from Sicily, from Salomon including this wonderful chariot seeing of two deities we don't know quite who they are gently patting the heads of these rearing horses who are restless they want to get the chariot moving they want to be in one of these races it's some kind of mythological event is it Persephone being bought from the underworld by Hermes or Hades or Demeter who we don't know but it's a wonderful scene and again it's frontal style of sculpture which is typical of the 6th century BC on the island here's a whole series of them Heracles and the Cacopies there's Medusa again a wonderful chariot seen there later ones from the later sort of early 5th century BC ones show a very kind of moving scene always between a male and a female figure you have Heracles and the Queen of the Amazons maybe Zeus and Hera or perhaps Hades and Persephone you have Actaeon being devoured by his own hounds this is the most lively of all the scenes by Artemis and then Athena and then Coladas the giant who she battled with between the Olympians and the Titans these are stuck into the walls of Palermo we'll never be able to get these they'll never agree to move these but we did borrow some of the smaller portable objects the wonderful thing about these limestone sculptures is that they use like a local limestone for the main panel the male figures are all carved out of limestones so are the dogs and other animals seats but the female faces and flesh parts like those big statues of Demeter earlier on were made of marble imported marble it was almost as if they were using marble as a precious stone in a cheaper material and it's that wonderful effect you can imagine them completely coloured with bronze attachments, metal attachments but the female faces perhaps kept slightly paler almost the colour of the marble maybe just with some kind of protective layer but glowing and really predominating in these scenes the other form of architectural sculpture very dominant and prominent on the island these huge figures that are affectionately known as telemons though some of them are actually male not always female the giant ones from the Temple of Zeus at Acragas this one reconstructed in the museum are up to eight metres high you can see a drawing here by Cockrell when he first went to the site how he's used a bit of artistic licence here making them far more beautiful than they do today but just showing them just kind of effortlessly holding up the building some people think they might represent the Carthaginian prisoners some ancient sources even tell us that who were taken after the Battle of Femera and some people think again this may be a temple built using the funds taken from the Carthaginians we have though in the exhibition fortunately one that comes in three sections so she came in three separate crates and could fit in our lift and she's a limestone one from the theatre building at Monte Yato near Palermo up in the north west of the island this was a non-Greek settlement at the beginning but over time they absorbed Greek elements and built this Greek-style theatre with this wonderful relaxed looking mean ad who has a little cushion behind her head on top of which she supports a building she was joined as you'll be pleased to know by another companion and two woolly satas to help kind of take the strain but she is a wonderful kind of example of this typical kind of figure that was so preeminent on the island they made them out of terracotta and they made them out of other materials as well this is how they may have been on the building these are some of the remains of the temple of Zeus the fluting between each of these the flutes on these column capitals here you can actually stand comfortably between I can stand between them they're so enormous but much of the site was actually looted and used to build the harbour down south of the site and this is one of the best preserved of all the faces extremely charming representation of either a prisoner we don't know who it is an atmosphere figure but made as you can see in several sections Telemond are also used on one of the greatest inventions on the greatest kind of engineering feats from the whole of the ancient period I believe and this is the so called Syracuse this enormous boat that was sent off on a mission around the Mediterranean and designed apparently by Archimedes the patronage of Hieron II the Tyrant of Syracuse in the third century BC who was really the tyrant who brought together the Greeks on Sicily not necessarily in a friendly way but he did match to actually unite them he also managed to keep the Romans at bay because this is the period when the Romans and the Carthaginians were fighting over the supremacy of the Mediterranean Sicily was a focal point a key point, strategic point there were Phoenicians on the island, Greeks everybody wanted a slice of the island so many of the battles took place around the island but this boat, the Syracuse was really sent out to take Sicilian produce around the Mediterranean to show it off to the rest of the Mediterranean people but the only port apparently it could dock in was at Alexandria and the boat itself had Telemond's around the side it had salted fish, tons of salted fish it had horses, it had livestock it had grain lots of people who were going on a cruise around the Mediterranean as well they were all on this ship that apparently could float because of Archimedes various principles which I'm not going to go into because they're far too scientific for me but he was the man who was thought to have invented this giant claw that could lift ships out of the water or create a lens that could burn the sails of ships and he was born on the island and he died at the hand of a Roman soldier who was meant to take him alive because of course he'd have been extremely useful to the invading Roman army but this really marks the end of the Greeks on the island the iron managed to carve himself out this little kingdom he created a kind of sense of independence from the Romans because he sided with them rather than the Carthaginians his success is unfortunately sided with Carthage and so Rome decided enough enough to build all of the island into 11 BC the connection with the Ptolemaic dynasty is extremely strong in the way that they were represented the first coin showing rulers real people on the island was the coin of Hyron and the coin of Philistus his wife who was also the first female ruler to appear on any coin in Sicily and the first that we ever really hear about in any prominence in terms of her political power but she bases very much we think her image on coins on that of Berenike II who she may have met if she had gone on the Syracuse to Alexandria in the third century BC and this thing is very nicely I'm going to plug another one of our exhibitions now with Sunken Cities which is on show also at the museum within an exhibition about the Ptolemaic rule in Egypt at the time and how these different rulers represented themselves in different guises they may have been Greeks or a Greek descent represented themselves in different guises to appeal to different sections of the population and it's there I want to end today I hope you've enjoyed it I hope that Dirk can also carry on the story one day there are various different events in the museum many different lectures and talks that cover the whole of Sicilian history not just the ancient or medieval period many of the stories that we can't tell through objects or through presentations like this or we're not the right people to tell them so we've invited many different specialists along I hope you've enjoyed this afternoon thank you very much for coming