 Hello and welcome to today's lecture in the Women and Gender Performance in the Phoenician Homeland and Diaspora series, which is co-sponsored by the Baudet Museum of Archaeology, Archaeological Research Facility at UC Berkeley and East Carolina University. My name is Melissa Craddock. I'm curator at the Baudet Museum. And before we get started today, I would like to begin by reading a brief statement on behalf of the Baudet Museum. We'd like to begin by acknowledging that Berkeley, California is on the territory of the Huchun, the ancestral and unceded land of the Chochenyo Ohlone. We respect the land and the people who have stewarded it throughout many generations and we honor their elders and their ancestors. We're living in a moment that warrants deep reflection on our past and our present. As a museum dedicated to advancing knowledge on the archaeology and history of the ancient Levant, the Baudet Museum welcomes scholarly discussions across boundaries of nationality, religion and gender identity. In many global contexts, 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 broad public audience online and to connect 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. 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. Thank you so much for joining us today. I would now like to invite my colleague, Dr. Helen Dixon to the floor to introduce today's speakers. Thank you so much, Melissa. We're so thrilled to be here together. It's my pleasure to introduce two scholars I have long admired. First, Agnes Garcia Ventura received her PhD in history from the Universitat Pompeo Fabra in Barcelona in 2012. Since then, she has been awarded several highly competitive postdoctoral fellowships to work at the University of Heidelberg in Germany, the University of Rome, La Sapienza in Italy, of course, and at the University of Barcelona in Spain. Currently, she is Ramon E. Cajal-Fello at the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona. And now she's also a visiting scholar at the University of California Berkeley at the Institute for Gender and Sexuality Research. Her main areas of interest are gender studies, especially their application to a seriology, historiography of ancient Western Asian studies in Spain, the organization of work in Mesopotamia and ancient musical performance in both Mesopotamia and the Phoenician impunet context, so this wonderful wide-ranging scholarship. She is the co-editor of several volumes linked to gender studies, including studying gender in the ancient Near East, published by Eisenbruns and Pennsylvania State University in 2018, and the very excitingly named the Mummy Under the Bed, essays on gender and methodology in the ancient Near East from 2022 through Za'fon. Second scholar we have with us today is Mireia Lopez Bertrand, Associate Professor at the Department of Art History at the Universitat de Valencia in Spain. She received her PhD degree in history from Universitat Pompeo Fabre in 2007. Between 2010 and 2012, she was postdoctoral researcher of the Spanish Ministry of Education and Culture, Fecit, and she worked as an honorary research fellow at the University Unit of the University of Glasgow. She was appointed Marie Curie postdoctoral fellow at the Universitat Pompeo Fabre in Barcelona between 2014 and 2016. She has participated in various national and international research projects that have allowed her, and I'm very jealous of all of this, to excavate in Phoenician or Punic sites like Taira Abbas in Lebanon, the Lyxus colonies at La Roche, Morocco, Cerro de Villar in Malaga in Spain, or the site of Sulqui, Saint Antioch in Sardinia. She has also been a visiting scholar at the University of Tübingen Brown University and at the Getty Research Institute, our international scholars all over the globe with us today. Currently Mireia is working on the art and iconography of the Iron Age Mediterranean from an embodied and gendered perspective. More specifically, she's specializing in choroplastic art from a material culture perspective. In fact, she's currently co-editing a book, I'm excited for its publication, Art as Material Culture to be published by Religion 2024. We're so grateful to have you with us. If you'll start sharing your screen, we cannot wait to hear about On Phoenician and Punic Music and Musicians, a gender approach. Thank you so much. The floor is yours. Well, good morning, afternoon, evening, depending on the part of the globe where you are now. First, we would like to begin by thanking the organizers of this lecture series to co-organize by the Vade Museum at the Pacific School of Religion, the Archaeological Research Facility at Berkeley and the Ace Carolina University. We really appreciate your invitation that has allowed us to revisit the topic of research that we began to explore together in 28. So it was really a long ago. And also let me thank especially Aaron Brody, who kindly agreed to host me today to deliver this lecture from the Pacific School of Religion. So thanks, Aaron, for making these logistics easier and also for your patience with all this process. So first of all, we want to share with you the outline of this lecture. You see that we will begin with an overview of the evidence we have to explore the musical phenomenon in the Venetian and Peony world. Then we will briefly describe the instruments in the second part. And from there, we will move to the third part of this session based mainly on the study of the terracotta figurines from the Western Mediterranean. We will analyze them in terms of their identification as women or goddesses. We will also deal with their connection to the rights, especially the funerary ones. And we will also apply an embodied perspective that highlights topics of class, age, and musical skills. Let's begin with the sources. The first thing to look at when talking about music, as you can imagine, is the instruments. But unfortunately, the number of preserved instruments in the Venetian and Peony cultures is very scarce. The ones that we know are made of non-perishable materials like bronze or bone, but unfortunately, the ones made of wood or animal skin have not been preserved. This is certainly true for the hand grams possibly made of wood and an organic membrane. However, the major evidence to study music is the visual repertoire. There are images of musicians and dances on different supports like terracotta statuettes and also images engraved on a stile or embolsting metal bowls or razors. As regards the written sources, there is a considerable lack of direct ones. But the important role of music in the lives of the Venetians and Peony people seems to be the direct continuation of the rich Canaanite musical tradition which is well documented in the text, especially the ones from Ugarit. The persistence of the Levantine musical tradition was appreciated for a long time and was widely renowned throughout the Peonic period. Indeed, contemporary Greek and Roman authors mentioned Peonic music and dance, highlighting both the relevance across the Mediterranean and the persistence of their Eastern roads. Finally, another arena to look at is the potentiality of studying the acoustic properties and the soundscapes of some specific sites, especially cave sanctuaries where musical sounds would have participated actively in the creation of a cultic and ritual atmosphere or the importance of other sounds in this context, such as the crackling of fire, the movement of the wind, human breathing, and so on. So as you can see, we take a multidisciplinary approach and use all the available data. Information to study the role of music and musicians is considerable, despite the limitations already pointed out. All the sources have been studied from the second cult of the 20th century with an increasing interest over the last 15 years. In 1961, Jean Ferron wrote a paper titled Les statuettes de Timpanon des hypocéptiques, a paper published in the journal Antiquité africaine. From that moment onwards, several scholars like Anna Chiara Fariselli, Angela Belia, Antonio Sair Romero, or ourselves dealt with this topic. And what is good news and token of good health of the field is that these studies began to be included in general overviews on music in antiquity. For instance, in the catalog of the IMAP project published in 2018 and titled Music and Sounds in Ancient Europe. This volume included a section devoted to music cultures in antiquity dealing with Greek, Roman, Etruscan, and also Phoenician and Pionic music. The same happened in the volume titled Musicians in Ancient Choreoplastic Art, published in 2016. Or more recently in the workshop hosted by the Museo Archeologico Nacional in Madrid, Spain, also covering a wide array of geographies and chronologies including definitions. In addition, it is all worth mentioning some of the fundamental references that have discussed music at the event in contemporary or in previous chronologies, as the ones you can see on the slide. The research by Joachim Brown, Theodor Berg, Anikovet, or Saripath, among others has been a source of inspiration to our investigations. Moving to the second point of our presentation, we want to show briefly the organological panorama. The Old Testament and the Imagery of Musicians are arguably the most important sources for this subject. They have allowed scholars to characterize the important role Hay-Bai Phoenician and Canaanite musicians as taking part of the, in the words of William Calican, and I quote, normal Semitic combination of flautist, harpist, and chimpanist, and quote. This has been also labeled as the Phoenician Orchestra by Joachim Brown. The Dak Phoenician Orchestra has a widely appealed with an enduring application in the scholarship. However, we advocate in state for a less controversial term such as Phoenician Ensemble, following Theodor Berg's terminology, as it seems to us that which is more flexible and less anachronistic. In what follows, we present the instruments involved in the so-called Phoenician Ensemble, and also the instruments not traditionally included in this group, but attested in the sources and therefore relevant as well. To present the instruments, we will proceed following the standardized classification proposed by Kurt Sacks and Eric Moritz von Hornbostel in 1914, and still widely used nowadays in music studies, despite variants and, of course, updates. Let's begin with the membrane orphans that is with percussion instruments, and more specifically with hand drums. These instruments are attested in terracotta, such as the ones you see in this slide, but also in images engraved in a steely or embossed in metal bowls or bronze razors. You have seen some examples in the previous slide. Following a visual analysis of the instruments, they have been labeled as frame drums, a percussion instrument consisting of a wooden frame hence its name, and one or two membranes that are used to cover it. Drawing from this rich visual repertoire, in our previous research, we identified three types of hand drums according to the position of the instrument in relation to the body of the drummer. In the first one, you see in the left-hand side of the slide, the drum is placed in front of and perpendicular to the body, and although its size can vary, it's normally a small drum. The second type, central image on the slide, shows the largest of the drums here attested, and the instrument is represented as placed beside the body but not actually connected to it. Such an iconography is widely attested in clay figurines, especially from the Western Mediterranean, and it seems to be related to similar Greek types. Unlike the former, the representations on clay figurines display a greater sense of movement as witnessed in the way the veil is spread out as if it were recreating the visual effect of movement, and the figures are also modelled with a dang knee as if they were dancing. Finally, in the third type, the one you can see in the right-hand side of the slide, the drum is shown attached to the body and parallel to it. This way of holding the hand drum is attested on metal bowls and clay statuettes, most of which have a hollow and conical body. This type seems to have an oriental and Cypriot origin, as it is rarely found in the Western Mediterranean and only one specimen is known from Carthage. Despite the slight differences in the shape of the drums, probably also in their materials, something we cannot know from just the Rakotas, all three types of figurines have in common that they are shown holding the instrument from below with the left hand, while the right hand is the one used to beat the drum. So far we have not found the Rakotas holding the drum with the right hand and playing it with the left, an issue which might be interesting to explore in more depth, maybe with comparative ethnographic analysis. Moving now to the aerophones that is to wind instruments, two kinds are recovered from excavations, Triton shells and Aulus or better pipes. We do not know the mouthpiece of these so-called Aulus instruments. Therefore, we are cautious with the work used to label them and you will see we prefer pipes. As you can see in the slide, double pipes are well represented in the Rakotas. However, we do not have examples of Terakotas holding Triton shells. Regarding the pipes, a fragmentary piece unearthed at the monumental tomb of Casa de Lobispo in Cadiz, Spain, stands out. It is a fragment of a metatarsal bone of a body interpreted to be an aerophone. Although it preserved the original physiognomy, it has three aligned holes of different diameters for the emission of different notes. The other instruments we show you in the slide comes from Motsia in Sicily. It was discovered inside a body deposit, a temple C4 of Astarte Aglaya. Among the variety of objects recorded in the deposit, the fragment of a goat metacarpal has been identified as a pipe because it has a hole at the end. Despite not being a test in Terakotas, we also want to mention here the Triton shells. Although most of them were cut for their edible parts, others present signs of modification or by the end of the apex was cut off and the shells were perforated with holes for modifying the pitch and or the attachment of corpse. They are tested at Motsia and also in the area around the Cadiz Bay where several specimens of Caronia molusks are known. The Triton shell aerophones have been documented so far dated between the 6th and the 3rd centuries BCE, mostly in contact related to fishing and fish salting activities, although they could be also linked to other activities, namely those of a mainly ritual nature. At Motsia, the instrument gives its name to building D3 or the so-called Casa del Corno de Conquilie from the 5th century BCE. It is a Caronia tritonis nodifera that has been modified at one of its ends and presents a hole at its center and it has been interpreted as votive. The third group of instruments we present here are the cordophones, which are well-attested iconographically in the Levant. The most famous examples are those represented on bowls from Idaleon, Sparta, and Olympia, which we have depictions of liars, such as the one shown here in the slide. However, if we move to the west, terracotta figurines with liars are scars and figures tend to hold another cordophon instead, the so-called Hellenistic chitra. This version developed during the 4th century BCE as a simplified version of the previous standard or concert chitra of the classical period. Bone and ivory implements presenting holes were interpreted as parts of string instruments recovered from some of the tomes of the two big seduce cemeteries in Calliari Sardinia. You can see them in the right-hand side of the slide. They have been interpreted as elements that were placed on the soundboard to keep the strings raised and transmit the vibrations and therefore the sound. Fourth and last group of instruments we present here are the idiophones. In this category, there are three documented instruments, clay rattles, bells, and cymbals. You can see examples of them from left to right in the slide. Clay rattles are only attested in the Levant so far. They are defined as indirectly struck idiophones because the sound is the result of the movement of clay pellets that are located inside the body of the instrument and either strike against each other, against the wall of the vessel, or against both. They are spool-shaped and perforated at both ends and the middle of the body is reduced and thinner that the ends to facilitate a firmer grip for the musician. In Sarepta, in Lebanon, one decorated specimen with perforations and incisions was identified in an industrial area of pottery workshops. Bells, you can see an example in the center of the slide, are scarcely documented in the Phoenician Levant. In contrast, they appear more abundantly in the western sides, where they have been documented from the archaic phase until the 3rd century BCE at Carthage and at Sardinia, Nora, Tharros, and Cagliari, Sicily, and Ibiza, mostly in the cemeteries and doffets. Mate of bronze, these bells are between six and four centimeter tall and almost all of them are conical or hemispherical shape with a suspension hole at the top. Exceptional, however, are two bells made of gold and glaze paste, the one from the slide, that were discovered at Carthage. They have an apotropaic role and would have been worn as pendants or soon into clothes. Finally, third type of idiophone, bronze symbols, have been abundantly recovered from the cemeteries and ritual deposits of the Western Mediterranean. The above mentioned bowls present some musicians performing with this instrument. Symbols have also been found in Punic tomes from Carthuan in Tunisia, Palermo, Sicily, and Ibiza. Moving on now to a funerary context, a voted deposit in temple C4 of Astartea Glaya at Mozia, Sicily, has produced a fragmented symbol dated in the 5th or beginning of the 4th century BCE. This is the same deposit as where the aforementioned pipe was also discovered. Well, after this organological overview, we move now to the third part of our presentation. This part will be based on the study of the musician that a culture figurines recovered from Ibiza, Spain, and Carthage, Tunisia. In the map you also see pointed out Gadith in Spain, as there is one specimen there we considered in previous studies. This specimen is included in some statistics we will show you below, but there are some problems linked to the context and access to this piece. Therefore, we are not going to discuss this one in detail today. Most of these specimens were recovered from funerary contexts. These figurines were located inside the funerary chambers and thus have a close relation to the funerary rites. We will come back to this point later. We are conscious that we have left aside statuettes from other areas, especially the Phoenician homeland, Sardinia and Sicily, but we want to highlight that the panorama of Ibiza and Carthage is in accordance with the 11-time choroplastic production. All in all, the study of these objects allowed us to put together music and gender as the terracottas are in the vast majority female light. Moreover, we applied an intersectional approach to these objects trying to elucidate why there is a major feminine imagery related to music. But therefore, before approaching this topic, let's describe the main formal features of these terracottes. Figurines are mold-made using univalve and bevalve molds and hence standardized. The size of the figurines between 18 and 30 centimeters makes them easy to hold and to touch, but most of them cannot be standing by themselves. Most of them are hollow at the rear and it has been suggested that they might be stick to some kind of support or amulet. So they were designed to be seen only by the front. Besides, some of them present a hollow on the heads as if the figurines were designed to be hung perhaps in buildings, jewels or tomes. Stylistically, two chronological phases have been distinguished. First, an archaic face left side of the screen dated from the 7th to the 5th centuries BCE. These figurines are exclusively holding hand-grams and only in one of the positions shown before, attached to the body and parallel to it. They are identified with oriental models from the areas of Beotsia and Samos. Although local specimens as well as imports are recorded. On the right side of the screen, we have types from Sicily and Magna Riz models, playing drum, pipe and also chitara, as we will show later on. Chronologically, they are dated between the 5th and the 3rd centuries BCE. Other aspects which help to better picture the corpus are gender, geographic distribution and also proportion of musical instruments represented. We share with you this data through the graphics you see in the slides. Where we summarize some of the results of the studies we have been developing these past years. In the first graphic up left in the slide, you can see female preeminence as 97% of the figurines analyzed can be identified as performing female bodies. In the second graphic up right in the slide, you can see that most statuettes are from Carthage where 47 specimens have been documented. In Ibiza, there are documented only 18. Finally, at the bottom of the slide, we summarize data linked to the musical instruments represented. The most represented instrument is the hand-run, then the double pipe and finally the chitara, being this last one only represented in 5% of the specimens. Now I give the floor to my colleague Mireia. Thank you. Okay, so after this overview, let's move now to the analysis of these figurines from a gender approach. Beginning with an issue that has been widely discussed by many sources, not only the ones under scrutiny here today. We refer to the interpretation of female imagery as goddesses or as mortal women. Since the publication of the Carthaginian figurine you see on the slide in 1920 by Alfred Merlin, these objects have been often interpreted as goddesses. This theory was also followed by Jean Ferron and assumes that the figurines holding the drums represented the goddess Astarte because one of her attributes is precisely this instrument. She not only plays the hand-run to work off evil spirits, but also due to the purifying properties of its sound. In the same vein, the hand-run has also been interpreted by Anna Maria Vissi as a symbol of the sun and eternal light associated again with Astarte. However, we should avoid the automatic identification of female figurines with deities because the evidence available isn't sufficient. The images could be either goddesses or real women. Considering only the divinization option is the result of a train which has been in vogue since the end of the 19th century, dismissing the possibility that ancient women might have held real earthly power. This view has been contested from approaches that highlight materiality, embodiment and gender methodologies, as well as perspective that emphasize the agency of the figurines. The basic assumption underlying these tenets is based on the idea that figurines are not just images or representations of somebody, humans, divinities or others, but they participated actively in the constitution of social relations. Keeping in mind these assumptions, these assumptions, our proposal for the figurines is that they could materialize the involvement of women in funerary rights, considering that most of these objects, as we have already said, came from tomes. The involvement of women in funerary rights is based on the pivotal role in the maintenance, creation and reproduction of life. Thus, the deposition of female musicians figurines in tomes can also materialize the presence of women in different tasks throughout the funeral with a central role in singing, lamenting and dancing. And as you can see in the slide, the most famous example of this feature is the famous Tom of the King Kajirama of Biblos. At both ends of the sarcophagus is a group of four women performing a rite of mourning consisting of tearing at their dresses and pulling their hair out. The arrangement of the women into groups of two performing the same activity is a visual strategy to indicate some coordination in movement. Thus, reinforcing the idea of the close relationship between mourning rites, music and dance. The association of music, dancing and death is explicitly seen also in the terracotta you see in this slide. The veils look like a wing and it is said that this way of representing veils is reproducing the idea of movement. All figurines playing double pipes present their veils in this form of wings. However, this is not the case for those with hand rams as we have already seen. Another example of the connection between women, death and dancing is the memorial stone from one of the cemeteries of Tarros in Sardinia. It shows a scene of four dancing individuals. The three women appear to be naked while the one man is wearing a skirt and a bull's mask. All of them are dancing around a palace like pillar stone. At this point, we live aside for a moment the figurines to focus on another support the Tofetz Stila. Images of hand rammers are abundant in the Tofetz especially in the Tofetz of Sulurki in Sardinia where the number of engraved females outnumber those of the males. Regardless of their gender identity the musicians might have had a significant role in reinforcing a sense of community and creating an extraordinary event through music, singing, dancing or praying. In the cases where the images of musicians are dancing are feminine the close link between hand rams, fertility and rebirth that we have already seen in the funeral rites can be also here pointed out. In addition, music can also stress the highly emotional role held by women, possibly as mothers or caregivers who express the feeling of losing a baby. Moreover, Greek and Roman authors focus on the question of child sacrifice and describe the presence of musicians in Carthaginian Tofetz. Plutarch, for instance, wrote that music was performed to silence the screams and the crying of both the children who were to be sacrificed and of their mothers as you can see from the expert in the slide. I read loud the last sentence where this is made explicit and I quote, the whole area before the statue was filled with a loud noise of flutes and rams so that the cries of whaling should not reach the ears of the people, end of quote. To finish the third part of this lecture we want to explore the application of an intersectional approach that contemplates features such as age, status and musical skills, allowing us to give more complexity to this corpus of figurines beyond their identification as female images, something which is of course relevant in itself. Beginning with the age, we have argued that the figurines could represent women of different ages according to the different hairdos. You may have noticed that hair styles are an important issue when discussing gender as shown in the previous talks in the series in the series, we see Becky Martin and Jessica Nietzsche talking about hair. So they show how important and also problematic is to analyze this feature. And hair styles are important to analyze age as well and the intersection between age and gender. In any case, all the figurines we show you here are veiled but some of them present the hair tied up whereas others present the hair untied. It has been suggested that this was perhaps pointing out the difference between married and unmarried women. However, we are not combined of this idea due to two main reasons. First, morning is usually in hands of mature women because they have experience in looking after people but also since presumably they have had already children and they cannot be contaminated by the disease. In addition, Donatella Salvi has recently published some terms of the Sardinian Cementary of the Tubic Cedo where the term of an adult woman you can see on this line, contain a rich sample of great goods and important for this topic, a pair of bronze symbols. So there is an association between musical instrument and adult women. Certainly the intersection between musical performance and age deserves more attention and studies. The association between women and symbols and symbols brings us to another topic which is the status. The figurines could be seen as priestesses of Asterte or other divinities. Their corporality points out to this idea. First, figurines were jewelry, necklaces in groups of two or three with pendants, bracelets and earrings. A second element besides jewelry is the use of color. Traces of red color on the figurines reinforced the hypothesis of the objects and representing priestesses or high rank women. As in Britain sources is explained that Phoenician and Punic priestesses wore purple red tunics and bands. Although many figurines have lost all the pigments, some of them present traces of ochre on the veil and on the instrument. As a consequence, we propose that using red to paint some parts of the figurines, including their musical instruments, would be linked to their use in funerary rituals and probably they're used by some ritual specialists. So in relation to the elites. But the presence of red is not the only element which links the figurines with the elites. Fortunately, some of them still retain traces of red, ochre, black, blue, and yellow and green. The last example is the figurine you can see on the slide, which is the number 125, published by Zora Sharif in his catalog in 1997. Found in the Dormel Cemetery in Carthage and dated to the 6th century BCE, it is known as the hundred goddess due to its rich decoration. The figurine holds a herbal decorated with blue and black flowers. The hair, colored red, in red is wavy curly and long, falling over the rest in three plates on each side. The face is decorated with four red circles, two on each check, one on the forehead and the other on the chin. Black eyebrows and red lips complete the facial colors. The musician has a necklace made of three chains, two are red and the other and the one in the middle comprises red and light blue pendants and also holds two black painted bracelets on each wrist. The body has a horizontal braid with black triangles and its colors alternate between red and light blue. The waist is concave and is formed by rectangles and vertical stripes also black painted in red and blue. The rest of the dress follows a pattern of a long red strip containing four red and black rosettes. The colored patterns of this figurine would make reference to the multicolored fabrics, probably linen clothes, decorated with colored wool embroideries or woven patterns. These colorful textiles were considered a luxury wood, achieved not only through the use of purple but also by the growing number of shining dyes that gave to the garments a loose truce, glimmering and vivid aspect. The interest in showing embroidered garments may be connected to issues of status, especially in relation to the preeminence of red as the color of the royalty and priesthood but it can also be associated to the powerful significance of this colorful in relation to its substance and shine, attributes related to the presence of the divine and the afterlife. Let's move now to the last topic of our intersectional approach, which will be also used as a concluding remark, the musical skills we are referring to. Playing or even dancing with the array of dresses and adornments might have some difficulties so that it is possible that female musicians were trained. In fact, in this respect, the importance of musical education among the elite seems to have had, especially among young girls, should be noted. In fact, musical instruction is presented as a symbol of distinction and power as well as an important element in the construction of the femininity in the young female citizens. It should be noted how one of the most relevant and seductive attributes of Sofonisba as Drupal's daughter and an important character during the Second Plumic War was her great education in arts and music. These are two qualities that seem to reiterate how the musical education of elite maidens was considered to be a critical feature of their upbringing, both as a symbol of distinction and of their own femininity. In the slide you see a reconstruction of Sofonisba just produced and published a few months ago in a calendar we designed with my research group team which is called Ars Maya at the University of Valencia. I will come back to this picture in a couple of weeks in my lecture in this series on March 21st. To conclude, we would like to insist on the relevance of the multisensory approach to these feelings. Analyzing the interaction between movement, music and body decoration helps to help us to hide the effect of playing musical instruments wearing not only veins, but jewellery and different types of herding. This would have had bodily and sonorist implications influencing the musical performance. In other words, we suggest that there were other sounds like the jingle of the jewellery or the movement of fabrics that accompanied those produced by the musical instruments. Furthermore, color addresses also participated actively in the creation of a multisensorial experience and seeing the shiny garments movements in movement, sorry, would have created an aesthetic experience. And all this was performed by women specifically trained with high musical skills. Something which alone per se is worth highlighting even more in a month like March when we celebrate women's active roles in society. Thanks for your attention. Fantastic, thank you so much. I love this tie-in to International Women's Month or Women's Day this coming week. I hadn't even put that together. So I encourage anyone who is watching live on YouTube to add your questions into the YouTube chat so that our moderator behind the scenes can feed those to us. And in the meantime, we already have quite a few generated just among the organizers here. So if you'll indulge us, I wanted to start with just a clarifying question because so many of us learned these figurines as tambourine players, the ones you're calling hand drum players. Could you come back to that and just clarify for us, would you say that all of these circular instruments are hand drums or do you see the idea of there being a symbol in a drum that tambourine as still plausible in some of the cases? Well, thanks very much, Helen, for this question. We have been really struggling to choose the specific words for each instrument. And of course, there is the possibility of having tambourines in some of these statuettes. But the issue is that we try to choose the most generic words. So the same happens, for example, with the Aulós versus Pipes. Of course, Pipes is a too generic word, probably, but it works for everything. So because we don't know the mouthpiece. In this case for the drums, as we don't know if we have one or two membranes, if we have these metallic pieces around. So as we cannot grasp this for all cases, we prefer to use this hand drum, frame drum, just as a generic duck. But of course, it is another issue. And then when you come to another point that is the translation into different languages. So as you know, there are lots of secondary literature in Spanish and Italian and French. When you come to the translation in all these languages of these instruments, it's a complete mess, we might say. So that's also why we try to use these more generic terms, also thinking about the translation and the understanding in different languages. Because if not, it gets more confusing. Even more if we take into account that for some cases, for example, we already mentioned that we have biblical sources, for instance, more complexity to the way these instruments are presented. So more terminology. So that's why we choose these words. But of course, there is this possibility. Perfect, no, that's very helpful. I think the idea that it's percussive, that's the thing that we're emphasizing with hand drum. I think that's very useful. All right, second question. I really appreciated the intertextual reference to another talk in this series about the hair locks. If we can return to that interesting point, I agree that it sounds very convincing that these are not a marker of marital status, that maybe there's an indication of age, but possibly not. Would you all think as an indicator of mourning status that your hair is somehow awry if it is down? Or does it feel too neat in its beautiful tendrils to be a marker of mourning in and of itself? Well, I think that they look too neat, because when you read some written sources, they tear up. So it doesn't look like you need to comb your hair when you are in the mourning process. So what it makes reference, we don't know, but I really don't know. And we really have to think about it, because there's a hair in general, it's a big topic. And there's a lot to do more research. So we have to think more about it. That's right, yeah. Yes, I may write something here, just as a general reference for the audience, which might be interested on the topic. There are several volumes, I'm sure you know, this cultural history of hair in antiquity, modern age, in contemporary world. So several volumes devoted to this cultural history of hair. So it's a terrific series, and I only can recommend it to the audience who also want to think about most of these elements. Yeah, that's perfect. It reminds me of these legendary sessions that were held at the Society for Biblical Literature meeting where they recreated Roman hairstyles on live models to see how the technology would work and how they could get the, this is next for Phoenician and Punic studies, okay. Our next question we have here, okay, I'm gonna read this one. This rich dataset paints a picture of culturally shared practices around women's roles in music movement and dress across the Phoenician and Punic worlds. Has your research drawn out significant regional or chronological differences or identified locally distinctive practices in specific areas of the Phoenician cultural sphere? So this comes from Melissa Craddock. Like, do we have a really an Iberian tradition or do you see any other localized manifestations that are, that are attractable? It looks sounds like no. Can you elaborate? When we talk about figurines with musical instruments, we don't see regional difference. It's a general Mediterranean trend. Perhaps in Ibiza, we have some, there are two or three really locally made figurines. And you can see because of the style, the garment they represent, but in general, they are serious, they are more main also. They were traveling all across the Mediterranean. So you can find, especially with the Greek type ones with the hand-drawn tool or playing the double pipe or the guitar, you can find the same, absolutely the same type in Ibiza or in Carthage. So, but that would be nice, but no, not for now. Not yet. Yeah. We have another question from Becky Martin who's watching on YouTube. She begins her question, wonderful exclamation point. She wants to talk a little more about the contemporary morning women sarcophagus from Sidon. Those women are not pictured with instruments or dancing, but she wonders if we can now place the image of gendered mourning from that sarcophagus in this broader Phoenician context. If you see ties with the pulled fabric, maybe, or some of the other postures, if you can picture that sarcophagus at the moment. So Helen, do you refer to the... The morning women. The morning women. Morning women, the later one, yeah. Well, yeah, we have read some ethnography, Agnes, about this topic. And certainly it's quite common. And these exaggerated gestures everywhere. And it's a kind of period, the morning period where you will transform into a specific community. And all the rules that are applied in everyday life are completely broken. So not only in relation to your gestures, but also to your hygienics, to your beauty practices or your food. So we really believe that this morning, it's not only related to these physical gestures, but there are other issues that conform this morning community. Yeah, I think that's so striking. I've never thought this way before, but what you point out on the figurines with the veil looking like wings, I wonder, could we indulge, could we actually bring back up the slide with the quote from Plutarch on it? Maybe the, you had some of the, Steely from Mozia and Sulki on the slide, and that one in the top left of your examples, yes. Which really looks like a kind of, at least an American idea of an angel, right? Like we've got these kind of triangular wings ready to take off, maybe a cape or something. But I think your point about this, really intentional showing the movement of the garment as part of that playing scene is a really convincing way to read this image. You wanna say anything more about that? Do you think it always indicates dancing? Well, also this is, yeah, sorry, sorry, go, go, go, go ahead. No, no, no, I'm there, go, go. I was just going to say that, well, music is quite elusive to study in antiquity many times. So we began just pointing out to the scarcity of the sources. But finally we get some sources. When it comes to dance and dancing, it is more elusive even. So that's why we have been also trying to put this on the table. Even though we began with our interest on music and musical performance, then you realize that, of course, dancing and movement is completely tied together. And we try to point out to all these tiny things that also make this visible. And then also because of this, because if you are studying dancing, and you also try to do something in this direction, and studies on dancing antiquity are even more scarce. Because, of course, these sources are more scarce. So that's one of the reasons why we pointed out on this. Yeah, Mireya, please, sorry. And no, no, I wanted to ask, to totally agree with you, obviously. But whenever we see wings in relation to divinities, for instance, I am thinking of the Esquiaran figurines. They are images of goddesses in that sense. The wings are not open, they are closed. So the idea that they are open will reinforce us, this idea of movement. And, I mean, in that sense, it makes it almost more surprising to see these mold-made figurines where the drum holder has no movement. Where they're sort of, I mean, to me, it really evokes those anthropoids or kafekai, the sort of legs together, the arms, maybe a little detail, except, of course, you have the rich polychromy and jewelry indicated. Even later, when you're pointing out the hand-drawn goddess of Carthage, the 6th century one, yeah, it's... I mean, do you want to comment on that? Why do you think there's almost no movement shown in those images? In fact, they are called mumifoam or mumifoam. I don't know how to pronounce them properly. I think that's something, a stylistically, a kind of fashion. I'm not sure if giving more significance, just from a period of time, which is the more archived, this iconography is in bulk and then it changed. We can add more information about the... If the women were more... has less movement in that period and then they move more, I think it's very speculative, you know? And well, I'm not sure how to give it more significance. Agnes, please speculate. Yes, well, try not to speculate more. So I always agree with Mireia, at least publicly, right? She does with me. So, Joseph, in this case, so linking again this question to your first one, Helen, it is also the issue as if there are different kinds of instruments represented here. So this is another... Well, yes, I'm a bit speculative here. So this is one of the possible speculations that is not only something stylistically linked and friends and so on and so forth, but also something that has to do with the kind of instrument represented. Because this one, as we presented at the beginning, is the smallest instrument of these percussion instruments we have here. So maybe this is also something that has a clue to understand why they are represented in a different position with different conventions. But again, we kind of know. Yeah, I think that's a question. I mean, I'm sure you all are writing about this already, but I feel like the metal bowl from Olympia on your court of phone slide was actually surprising. I had never noticed the figure you circle that has sort of the small handheld liar, very, very teeny little plucked. Yeah, this one on the bottom left. I mean, first of all, it's hard for me to imagine anyone being able to hear that if you're plucking something that small in a group of percussion and other like louder tinier sounds. But I also just, I don't think of the liar as something played under duress, like to emphasize emotion. I think of that as probably my own stereotypes, right? You sit in a hall and listen to a harp. But I wonder if you could say anything more about how you see court of phones in terms of distribution. I mean, I assume the images also come from graves, but what do you think of that little handheld plucker? Well, I was expecting me to begin. So sorry. Gorda von Tornheim. Gorda von Tornheim, okay. So no, in this case, so it's clear that court of phones are the less represented instruments. So here there are several issues. So at the very end we were talking about musical skills. Maybe there is also something there about musical skills, training needed and the amount of people able to play one or the other instrument. So maybe there is something there. Also the, let's say the value, the price of the instrument. So it's not the same kind of instrument. So maybe it also has something to do with distribution and proportion of this kind of instruments we have there. And in this case, so as you say also, the issue of the sound and the balance among the different instruments. Well, I have to admit it's something I have not been considering so far. So I will think more about this. But it's also true that, well, as we pointed out always taking for granted that this is the stable group. So this Venetian ensemble, Venetian orchestra, Venetian something. So this is the stable group and I don't know if it's more kind of conventional group because it's representing three instruments from different kinds and different groups of instruments. So kind of sample and not really stable group. This could be maybe it's just showcasing what do you have there? So one of each and then it's quite a convention and not a real performance group. This is one of the options. So something to help to answer also the issue of sound and balance or maybe yes, maybe there is one of these groups. And I also think from the ethnographic point of view and now I go back to my home country to Catalonia. We also have some strange combinations here where you have mostly wind instruments, few percussion instruments quite small but quite easy to hear from long distances. So also depends on the pitch, not only on the size of the instrument and also combination with one or two string instruments. In wind ensembles, for example, usually you have string instruments barely heard because of course the wind instruments have more power in this sense. But maybe this is something that has sense from the ethnographic point of view. So no conclusive answer at all, but thanks for the insight. I will think more about this in the show of the balance. This is another vote in favor of some experimental archeology where we have to put on a procession and see who can be heard. Where do so? Yes, good. Too many is for archeology, it's my imagination. Well, and I think this speaks to Aaron Brody's question in the chat about different sized drums producing different sounds, right? I'm sorry if I missed this, but we don't have a single material remain of a drum that has been identified, right? I mean, it makes sense, there's animal skin, there's wood, but it would be thin wood. Yeah, okay. Yeah, and I'm wondering too, I mean, just to press you to speculate all the way to discomfort. Do you think that the reason we have so many of these figurines, especially in tombs but instruments themselves? I mean, in a strange way, my mind is like, don't you want the sound in real life when you're burying someone, right? As part of this cathartic mourning in a community. But why leave these objects behind in the tomb when it's sealed? What is the need for the instruments beyond the funeral itself? And I'm wondering if you, like if pressed, do you see these as sort of magically enhancing the procession or needed in the afterlife in some way? I know we have no evidence one way or the other, but what do you think in your heart of hearts? Well, I agree with you, Helen, that it's a way of having music knowing the afterlife because music is important in earthly world. So it is also important in the other world or in the other world, but also it can be another reason which is more related to pollution, because all the objects you have been using in the funeral or in the mourning ceremonies. So they are polluted or they cannot come back to home, not to the household. So they remain there. So I think anyway, both reasons are in relation to the pathology or the ideology of the afterlife. That's intriguing. I hadn't thought about that, that these items are now they in a way belong to the tomb because they can't be used for other performances. Wow. Are there any instruments from your catalog in your mind that do not come from funerary contexts that are of the same type as those that come from funerary contexts? Or do we have a real bifurcation of maybe certain types of rattles, certain types of drums, certain types of bells come from tombs and others that might be different? The triton shells, triton shells so far, as far as I know, they are not found in tombs yet. I think at least in the western Mediterranean, I'm not controlling the Venetian homeland, but triton shells are mostly associated to temples or sanctuaries and which is very interesting to working spaces, which is also interesting because you see music always, we associate music with ritual and religions as fears, but music would be also important in daily tasks Milling, we have already analyzed the milling songs in Mesopotamia, because they have the lyrics, they are very lacking in Mesopotamia, they have the lyrics, we don't have the lyrics, we don't have the lyrics, it's less documentation. So yeah, we have to open our mind, I'm trying to imagine music everywhere. It's a form of communication. Exactly, and I was hoping Erin would weigh in, he just put into the chat, in the Bronze Age Levant, triton shell instruments also typically have ritual context, so this is a long-standing pattern. And I couldn't remember Erin, if in your book you also talk about the conch shell as something associated with maritime religion, because it can be heard for long distances. I mean, it hasn't been a while since I read it, but I've read a lot of stuff since then, so let me see if we have time for Erin to weigh in by chat. I know he has a sound issue and can't speak, but maybe Agnes can convey his thoughts for us. Well, in the meantime, yeah, something that you were now talking about, this long-distance communication, this is something that has been also discussed for some of these findings in Spain, for example, and with some experimental archaeology, so standing from one hill to another and trying to see if there is the possibility of communicating from these different settlements where these Cito shells have been found. So indeed, this is one of the points. And as Mireia was also pointing out, and we have to say we were tempted to include it for the lecture today, the issue of words and sound and soundscapes, but we realized that maybe it was too much. So we are so happy that you asked about this, because this was one of the topics. We are now in Charestitón, and of course, this is another avenue for research. Yeah, I saw that on your initial slide with Gorham's Cave and all of this incredible work that's happening in archaeocoustics. I think about this all the time now after reading some of your work. Yeah, and we have Erin weighing in now in the chat that I got it wrong, so there are no Triton shells and maritime rituals to his knowledge, but with funerals, presumably, there were lamentations sung by mourners adding to the music at burials. Yeah, I mean, in a way, the human voice is an instrument that adds that element of the long-distance travel sound, I agree. Yeah. What do you think, Helen, about the voice? This is something we have not been discussing, and of course, this would be the other group of musical instruments to prepare the table. So we have been referring slightly to voice and several moments in mourning when, of course, voice is important, but we have to say that we haven't explicitly thought about this, and of course, this is another musical instrument to consider, so... Yeah, absolutely. And so many sounds, as we know from ethnography, that you can make with your voice specific for the mourning soundtrack, eulation, or really guttural sounds that can make the hair stand up on the body quickly. Well, I could keep talking about this forever, but I am conscious of our time. This has been an incredible conversation. I thank you both for your courage. You're always so courageous in your research. And I'm always... I feel behind whenever I read one of your new pieces. I feel like, gosh, I should have been thinking ahead in this way, but you're an inspiration and coming into this series. I feel every person who has spoken in this series is reticent. We don't know. We don't know. We don't know what we think we know. So thank you for sharing some work in progress with us. And I will turn it over to Melissa Craddick who has a couple more announcements for the rest of the series. Yeah, I would like to very warmly thank today's speakers, Dr. Agnes Garcia-Ventura and Dr. Mireia Lopez-Bartron for sharing such a fascinating talk that has given us so much food for thought and very strongly second this idea for an experimental approach in a future research context. And luckily for all of us, part of this conversation is to be continued next time. Our next event in this series is on March 21st, also presented by Dr. Mireia Lopez-Bartron who has very generously agreed to contribute twice to this series and she will be presenting on Punic Women as Ritual Agents, Evidence from Material and Visual Culture. So we thank everyone for tuning in today and hope that you will join us next time. Thank you.