The first part of our springtime edition of Unearthed! for 2025 features so many updates! There are also finds related to Egypt and artwork.
Research:
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V.
Wilson and I'm Holly Fry.
I'm not sure how time has already rolled us around to this point, but here we are with our quarterly Unearthed episodes. Again, if you're new to the show, this is when we talk about things that have been literally and figuratively unearthed over the last few months. And as usual, this Unearthed is a two parter, and this time around, I want to start by acknowledging that while I was working on these episodes, I was struggling. I'm still struggling, to be honest, and normally this is the kind of stuff that we would talk about in our Friday behind the scenes, but not today. It's not what we're doing today. First, the day I started working on these episodes, Plain closed, Federal agents grabbed PhD student Remesa oz Turk off the street in Somerville, Massachusetts, and as she was on her way to break her Ramadan fast. I lived in Somerville for five years and Tuft's University, which is where she was studying, that was in walking distance of my apartment in Somerville. So even though I don't live in Somerville anymore, she feels like my neighbor. So that happened on March twenty fifth. It was still weighing heavily on my mind on March twenty seventh, when President Trump issued an executive order called Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History, which among other things, characterizes the Smithsonian Institution in its museums as needing to be saved from quote improper ideology. Basically following the descriptions and the language in this executive order, our podcast is insane and full of improper ideology because we talk about ways that racism and sexism and oppression have always been part of American history. And that followed another executive order called Ending Radical Indoctrination in K through twelfth Schooling that was on January twenty ninth. Then those two executive orders have a lot of common themes. Based on that January twenty ninth one, our podcast is also not appropriate for use in K through twelve schools for pretty much the same reason that it's quote insane, and also because we recognize that trans people exist, and we try to talk about trans people with respect compassion and dignity. I sound angry because I am. The next thing that also happened just recently was the continuing the reduction of the Federal Bureaucracy executive order from March to the fourteenth. That one eliminated the Institute of Museum and Library Services to the maximum extent allowed by law. That's like a way to shut it down without going through Congress to shut it down, which would normally be how that would work. It was reported that the entire staff of the Institute of Museum and Library Services was placed on leave as I was doing the final read through of this outline before sending it to Holly last night. There've also been other executive orders and actions by the Department of Government Efficiency that have cut other funding for scientists and other researchers. And then there's the removing the names and accomplishments of black people and Indigenous people and Japanese Americans and women and LGBTQ people and others from an array of historical sites and museums and Arlington National Cemetery and on and on in the wake of executive orders about ending DEI. This is not even a tenth of what has been going on with this federal administration, and it might not even.
Be a tenth of only the things.
That have directly impacted my friends and family in negative ways. But this is some of what's been happening that has most directly been connected to our work, and it's made it kind of hard to focus. We do a lot of episodes that contextualize current political and social issues, and a lot of what we talk about is inherently political, but we have not really made a ton of explicitly political statements on the show. Even without explicitly political statements, it really should be obvious to anybody who listens to us that our approach is rooted in a core belief that oppression is bad, and we're all human beings and we all deserve dignity and equal rights, and a lot of history all over the world has not really lived up to that ideal. That is also true of the present. But this is a history podcast and not a current events show. These executive orders and other directives are calling for a view of history that is focused only on patriotism and the idea of American greatness. But you can only arrive at such an interpretation of history by willfully ign a lot of stuff. It is not anti American to acknowledge these realities, and it is absurd to try to pretend that they don't exist and don't still influence the world today. Executive orders are not laws, and we are not federal employees, So in terms of what we write and say on the show, we can just say no, we will not be doing that. But also we rely on the work of museums and libraries and researchers from a range of disciplines, including the sciences, for our show. That doesn't just apply to Unearthed, but it especially applies to Unearthed because these episodes draw so heavily from newly published research. Basically, I tried to pull these episodes together while the institutions I rely on to do it and the people who work at those institutions were actively under attack. I don't know what will happen to these episodes as researchers in the US the United States lose their funding, and as that loss of funding ripples through the entire academic community here, and as universities and other institutions scale back on work that's focused on people who are not cisgender, straight white men. Because of these executive orders about Dei. It is obvious to me, though, that we will be poorer for it. That was the longest introduction I've ever written for one of our shows, and as far as what was unearthed this quarter, we're starting as we usually do with the updates. So in May of twenty twenty four, we did an episode on Filipino food scientist Maria Rosa, whose most famous food invention today is banana ketchup. That episode ends very sadly because Arosa was killed in the Battle of Manila in nineteen forty five. When we recorded that, her burial place was not exactly known because she was buried in a mass grave at Malate Catholic School with others who were killed over the course of the That has now changed after a five year project involving that mass grave, which was underway as we recorded our episode on her. On February thirteenth, Orosa and others were laid to rest in the crypt of the Sant Agustin Church in Manila after a funeral mass that honored her and other World War Two heroes. The other people who were re interred with her included a doctor at the hospital where she was working, along with hospital volunteers and civilian patients. The identity of Eurosa's remains had been confirmed through both DNA testing and physical examination. Also, thank you to listener Dandy for sending us this story. It was not really widely reported beyond the Philippines, and I don't really think I would would have heard about it without that listener email.
We did a two parter on Harriet Tubman in June of twenty sixteen, and in twenty twenty three we talked about archaeological work being done at the likely site of the home of her father Ben Ross. At the time that work was ongoing. Now, the Maryland Department of Transportation has launched a virtual museum detailing their findings and showcasing some of the objects from the site. It's an unwieldy URL to read off, but it's easily findable by searching Ben Ross home Place. This archaeological site is in Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge, and one of the reasons for a virtual museum is that the site of the home place is not an area that's accessible to the public. Also, the whole area is at risk of destruction due to sea level rise. They wanted to really preserve and document it. The virtual museum has pages for the home place, the archaeology, kitchen items, personal items, and Native people's artifacts. The Native people's artifacts are things that are mostly very very small. They're like fragments of pottery, projectile points, and flaked stones. Next, we talked about the Viking era Galloway Horde in one of last year's installments of Unearthed. A metal detectorist found this hord in Scotland back in twenty fourteen, and research into it has been ongoing. There's a lot that's still unknown, like why the horde of metal objects also includes wrapped balls of dirt. We don't know who it belonged to or why it was buried. This horde contains four armorings that are marked with runs, and that had led to some speculation that this was the combined wealth of.
Four different parties. But only three of those armbands had old English name elements in the runes. The fourth band, which has the longest runic inscription, had not been decipherable.
There's still some uncertainty about this fourth armband, but one possible interpretation is that they're basically saying the horde was community property. That interpretation only works though if part of the inscription is misspelled. But researchers have been pointing out that we shouldn't necessarily assume that every region and dialect was using the same spellings of words. We see this in English all the time.
Yeah, we've talked about times that spellings of things were not standardized, or sometimes people just misspell things when spellings are standardized. We're going to take us quick sponsor break and then have some more updates. There's been some new stuff unearthed at Pompeii, which was the subject of a two thousand and nine episode of the show and is just also a regular feature on Unearthed. First in Pompeii, homes with private baths were really only for the rich, and the bath complex that has just been discovered there was for the really rich. There are only three other villas in Pompeii that have been to discovered so far that have comparable bath facilities, and it's still being studied, but it's likely that this one is even bigger than those. It may have belonged to Alis Rustius Verus, who was a politician and would have hosted large numbers of guests at home.
This was a multi room complex. It had a changing room that could accommodate about thirty people, plus separate rooms for hot, warm, and cold bathing, which people would progress through from hot to cold. That final cold room had a plunge pool more than a meter deep, and of course all of these rooms were impressively decorated, including frescoed walls and inlaid marble floors. This bathing facility was also connected to the banquet hall, so it seems likely that if guests came for a banquet, they might also be treated to a luxury bathing experience. In another Pompeii discovery, a set of frescoes depicting the initiation rights of the cult of Dionysus has been found on the walls of a banquet hall. These frescoes are really enormous. They're depicted at almost life size and they cover three walls of the room. They depict the person who's being initiated into the cult, as well as several women. Some of the women are dancing, and some of them are dressed as hunters. The hunters carry a goat and its entrails, and there are also satyrs with flutes and wine. These depictions were probably created sometime between forty and thirty BCE, and they are similar to those at Pompey's Villa of the Mysteries, which is not very far away. While they're shown in these frescoes, these rites were also secret, so these newly discovered frescoes corroborate some of what we know about religious practices in the cult of Dionysus.
Moving on, in March of twenty twenty, we talked about the discovery of some glassy matter at Pompeii, which turned out to be part of a person's brain. Subsequent research concluded that this glassy matter contained neurons, and research that was published in February offers a hypothesis on how that glassy material came to be, like how does someone's brain turn into glass? According to the researchers, the only way this could have happened would have been for the person's brains who have been exposed to extremely high temperatures hotter than the pyroclastic flow that buried the city, But that could only be exposed to those temperatures for an extremely short time. So their hypothesis is that this person was exposed to a cloud of superheated ash ahead of that pyroclastic flow with that ash then dissipating and everything cooling off very quickly.
This is very different from my guess that a James Bond's era villain was somehow involved and in Pompeii adjacent news, Archaia working in the Salerno area have found footprints of people and animals running away from the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, not from the eruption that destroyed Pompeii, but from one that happened around the year two thousand BCE. The footprints included those of adults and children, some in bare feet and some wearing shoes, moving on from Pompeii. Previous hosts of the show did an episode on the Bayou Tapestry, which is really an embroidery that was back in twenty eleven, and it's also come up on Unearthed, including in our Year End twenty twenty four episodes. Two of the scenes depicted in the Tapestry show King Harold Godwinson at his residence in West Sussex. Archaeologists working there believe they may have found the location of that residence. This conclusion follows a lot of different work, including analysis of historical maps and re examination of the findings of some archaeological that happens back in two thousand and six. One of the things that was unearthed in that archaeological work was a private latrine, which would not have been common at the time, and helps back up the idea that this might have been one of the structures at Harold's residence, because who else besides the king would have had a private latrine. There's also a piece of the Bio Tapestry that has been rediscovered in state archives in northern Germany that's now being repatriated to France. While this embroidery depicts the Norman conquest of Britain, it is considered to be a French cultural asset. The Bayou Tapestry is currently undergoing a major conservation project, and it's going to be taken off display later this year because the museum where it is housed will be undergoing its own renovation. The museum is going to close on August thirty first, twenty twenty five, and it's expected to reopen in twenty twenty seven next. There's graffiti in the basement of the Lincoln Memorial, also called the Undercroft. This was first found in nineteen eighty four, and according to statements given to The Washington Post earlier this year, the subject of that graffiti might be past podcast subject Theta Bara. We covered her on May fourth, twenty twenty two. The evidence that this is who is being depicted is described as compelling but circumstantial. This is a drawing done in Carpenter's pencil. It shows someone in profile smoking a cigarette with curly hair and pretty pronounced makeup. Considering that it's done in Carpenter's pencil, including dramatic lipstick and blush and I makeup, and the next to that image is the word vamp in loopy script. Next in our Spring twenty twenty four on Earth, we talked about the discovery of a bog body in Ballachy, Northern Ireland, which was nicknamed the Blachy Boy. When this body was first discovered, people thought it was a recent murder victim, but it was estimated to actually be somewhere around two thousand years old. Subsequent research has confirmed that approximate date, but osteological study suggests that the person was female. A significant majority of bog bodies that have been found from this period are male, which makes this one unusual. They also found cut marks at the neck vertebrae that suggest that this person was intentionally decapitated before being put in the bog. The skull is not present. Researchers are now calling this bog body the Bally Maccombs more woman and in our last update this time around, Josephine Baker, who prior hosts it, an episode about on March eighth, twenty ten, wrote a memoir which was originally published in French in nineteen forty nine. This is not available in English until now. It is titled Fearless and Free. It's been translated, as I said, into English for the first time. It has been published by Tiny Reparations Books, which is an imprint of Penguin Books. Moving along, we have quite a few findes related to Egypt in some way. First, a four one hundred year old burial in the Sacara Necropolis appears to be that of a royal doctor. It's possible that this doctor served under Pharaoh Peppi the Second, who was also entombed at Sakara. Like many other tombs at Sacara, this one had been looted long before archaeologists found it, but its intricately painted walls have led to its being described as an exceptional discovery. In addition to being a royal doctor, this person was also a dentist and an expert in medicinal plants and venomous bites.
Next, an international interdisciplinary team of researchers has concluded that skeletal remains that were speculated to be that of Arsenoway the Fourth, the half sister of Cleopatra, belonged to someone else. This person does seem to have died at around the same time that Arsnoway did, but it's more likely that the skull belongs to a male child, likely between the ages of eleven and fourteen, with what the paper described as showing evidence of developmental disturbances. Those disturbances included asymmetry in the bones, which could have come from a variety of different causes. This person also likely came from Italy or Sardinia rather than Northern Africa. In February, a team led by British archaeologist Peers Lytherland discovered the rock cut tomb of Tutmos the Second. The tomb itself was largely empty because it had been flooded at some point. It was built under a waterfall, and this probably happened within a few years of it being built, but there is still a lot of debris inside, including chunks that have fallen from the ceiling, pieces of wall decorations, fragments of wooden shafts, and other objects. This includes some alabaster fragments with Tutmos's name on them. Tutmos the Second was both half brother and husband to Hedge Shepsit, and we talked about both of them in our episode on Hudspsit and the Voyage to Punt. Not long after that find was announced, Lytherland announced that he may have discovered another tomb, also belonging to Tutmos the Second, which may have been the one where his mummy and grave goods were housed. I wasn't able to find more updates about that second discovery.
And speaking of HUDs Sheepsit, archaeologists and Luxor have found more than one thousand intricately decorated blocks at the entrance to her funeral complex, as well as a collection of limestone and quartzite tablets. These blocks are brightly decorated with paint that is still vivid and are described as showing the artistic mastery of this era. In addition to those tomb discoveries. A different team working at the ancient necropolis of a Nubis Mountain and Abydos have found a pharaoh's tomb, but which pharaoh is not yet known. This tomb is about thirty six hundred years old and excavations there are ongoing. Tracy had really thought that we talked about some research similar to what we're about to mention recently on the show, but looking back, she did not see any such thing. I know, I talked about it on a different project not that long back. Researchers at University College London have investigated the aroma of well preserved Egyptian mummies, finding that they smell, in the words of the news release, pretty good. They were characterized with words like woody, spicy, and sweet, as well as having some floral notes. This work involved chemical analysis and human beings just smelling the mummies. This of course doesn't necessarily reflect what they smelled like at the time they were mummified.
This was not just for fun, even though that to me does sound like kind of a fun project getting people to and if mummies, but odors can help researchers determine how well preserved a money is without invasive testing. And oders can also help pinpoint which substances were used in the mummification. And our last Egypt find is kind of more Egypt adjacent. A leather suitcase belonging to Howard Carter has been rediscovered in England. Carter is the person who's credited with finding the tomb of King tut. After its rediscovery, this leather suitcase sold at auction in February for twelve thousand pounds. That's roughly fifteen thousand dollars. Let's take another little sponsor break, and then we're going to talk about some art. There is so much artwork to talk about in this installment of Unearthed, just so much. I love art, so it's great, so much art to talk about that it's going to be the entire rest of this episode. First, a painting that was bought for ten dollars at a thrift store outside of Philadelphia has turned out to be the work of William Henry Dorsey. Dorsey was a free black man born in Philadelphia in eighteen thirty seven, and in addition to being an artist, he was a coin collector and a scrapbooker and an art collector, especially focused on the work of other Black artists. I have put him on the list for a future episode of his own because he sounds very interesting to me. This painting depicts a black man fishing by the edge of a river next to a mill with its own water wheel attached. Andy Robbins, who bought this painting at the thrift store, has given it to the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, where it is now on display. A double sided portrait by eighteenth century artist Ammy Phillips was discovered in an abandoned storage unit back in twenty twenty four, but it made headlines at the start of this year when it went up for auction. It's not known who the sitter is, but it's believed that the same person is shown on both sides of the painting. Her pose is similar on both sides, and there's a small birthmark on her face in each of them. She's sitting in the same chair, wearing the same dress and the same necklace, with her left arm on the same book, but the face doesn't look the same between the two portraits. On one side, blondish hair is covered by a bonnet and on the other, brown hair is up in a bun. The face shapes and mouth shapes are different. Are these two different people or two different versions of the same person. It's a bit of a mystery. This artist was an itinerant portrait painter who worked in a range of portrait styles, and his career spanned for more than fifty years, in that time, producing as many a two thousand portraits.
It could be the original Doublemint twins.
I was looking at it. I was like, are these sisters cousin right? They're just friends, I don't know, or the same person in two different drafts.
Back in twenty twenty three, we did an episode on Venetian painter Caniletto, who was known for his large scale city scapes which are spectacularly beautiful, and we talked about how one of his assistants was his nephew, Bernardo Belotto, and how Blotto became really skilled at copying Caniletto's technique and would sometimes even signed Caniletto's name to his own work. Well, one of the paintings that had been attributed to Caniletto has now been reattributed to his nephew, that is the Grand Canal with San Simeon Piccolo from seventeen thirty seven.
This determination came through research for a new book called Caniletto and Guardi Views of Venice, which was published by the Wallace collect Part of this attribution about who actually did the painting came from the way the painting uses color and light, because Belotto was known for being sort of colder and less vibrant in the color that he used than his uncle was.
Speaking of artists that we have covered on the show, we are now to Lavinia Fontana, who we covered in twenty twenty two. A miniature portrait of an Italian noble woman came up for auction in Texas, which used to belong to another past podcast subject, Horace Walpole. Walpole displayed the painting at Strawberry Hillhouse. It is believed to depict Bianca Cappello, grand Duchess, consort of Tuscany and wife of Francesco, the first de Medici, who Walpole had a fascination with.
Walpole also believed this painting had been created by a different artist, mannerist painter Bronzino, who lived in the sixteenth century, But after this portrait was found at auction, it was reattributed to Lavinia Fontana. This miniature has been loaned to Strawberry Hill House and it will be on display there until April twenty third of this year, which is twenty twenty five if you're listening when this episode is actually publishing. Also, another painting has also been reattributed to Lavinia Fontana. This one was previously attributed to Flemish Renaissance artist Peter Porbuss, but it was reattributed after an expert spotted the painting in a storage room at the Musee de la Chartreuse in Duay, France. This one depicts a family with a girl passing flowers to her father and a servant behind them with a basket of fruit. This painting is going to go through restoration before becoming part of the museum's permanent collection. Next up, conservators in France have digitized and analyzed a set of cathedral wall paintings that have been hidden for centuries. These date back to the thirteenth century and they cover seven bays in the apse of Algers Cathedral, and based on research that was involved in this project, two different groups originally created them. Then back in fourteen fifty one, the cathedral was damaged by a fire and the walls were whitewashed That's probably why these paintings were not destroyed during the French Wars of Religion. Then in the eighteenth century, wooden choir stalls were built in front of those whitewashed walls. These wall paintings were rediscovered back in the nineteen eighties, but it took a decade just to remove the whitewash before they could be conserved. This whole process was made more difficult and time consuming because the choir stalls are backed by tall wooden panels which cannot be removed, so everything had to happen in this very narrow space between the wood panels and the wall. It sounds very awkward and tedious the descriptions. It sounds like that whole thing of like building your spite house an inch from the house next to it, Like how do you get anything done in there? How are you going to repaint that? While ever never h Digitizing these paintings involved taking more than eight thousand total photographs, which then had to be stitched together into one image, and that was a whole other, multi year process. These paintings depict the life and works of Saint Mauria, who was the Bishop of Algier in the fifth century. Next, researchers working with a thirteenth century fresco in Ferrara, Italy, have published research suggesting that one of the things depicted in the fresco is a tent from the Islamic world. The fresco is in the apse of a church, and it's believed that it depicts a real tent that was used in that church to conceal the altar, either all the time or during particular parts of the liturgical year. This tent is brightly colored, it's covered in jewels, and the round shape it matches the curve of the apse. Its borders feature sort of a pseudo Arabic style of inscription, and there are color combinations that were really popular in thirteenth century and to Lucy's silks. The depiction in the fresco is similar to surviving fragments of those silks and to artistic representations of tents like these being used in the Islamic world.
This research suggests that textiles made their way from the Islamic world to Christian churches, possibly through the textiles being taken as spoils of war and then gifted to churches or church leaders. Popes are known to have gifted altar curtains to churches going back to at least the ninth century, so it's possible that this tent was a gift to the church from the pope or another high ranking person within the church, or this also could have been a gift from a wealthy family. Moving on, we have kind of a saga about art attribute.
Back in twenty eighteen, someone who had bought a painting at a garage sale in Minnesota for fifty dollars submitted an inquiry to the Vang Museum in Amsterdam about whether this painting might be that artist's work. The following year, the museum said no, it wasn't quote based on stylistic features. From there, a data science company called LMI Group bought the painting and did its own analysis of it. LMI Group was co founded by Maxwell L. Anderson, who's an art historian and has served as the director of a number of museums.
LMI Group concluded that the painting was Van Goes work. The name Elmar is in one corner of the canvas, which has been adopted as the painting's name, and LMI Group speculates that it's a reference to a character in Hans Christian Anderson's eighteen forty eight novel The Two Baronesses. LMI sent its conclusion to the Vango Museum, which maintained that it still did not believe that this work was van Goes. On January thirty first, LMI Group gave a statement that read, in part quote, we are puzzled why the Vango Museum invested less than one working day to summarily reject the facts presented in our four hundred and fifty six page report without offering any explanation, let alone studying the painting directly rather than looking at it reproduced as a JPEG. LMI Group has published this report on its website, and that PDF is indeed more than four hundred and fifty pages long. Obviously we cannot go through a document that long here, but it looks at where the painting would fit in Vango's ouvre, material science DNA analysis, including on a hair found on the painting, and the comparison of the handwriting used to write Elmar to other words that appear on Vango's paintings.
This is currently unresolved, but there are other experts who have offered a completely different alternative explanation. And that is that Elmar is not a reference to a Hans Christian Andersen character, but is the name of the artist who made the painting. That's Danish artist Henning Elmar, who died in nineteen eighty nine.
Mysteries, Uh, hopefully we'll find out. A man in northern Greece found a headless statue in the trash and turned it over to authorities, and that statue has been confirmed to be roughly two thousand years old, dating back to the Hellenistic period. It's made of marble, and it's about thirty inches tall, and it is missing its head and arms. It depicts a woman in flowing garments, and since statues of human women during this period were more likely to be made of other materials like wood, this likely represented a goddess. Based on its size, it may have been a votive statue from a temple. Authorities in Greek including the Cultural Heritage Protection Office, are trying to learn more about the statue and find out how it came to be in the trash.
Speaking of things found in the trash, an eighteenth century sketch by English portrait painter George Romney was pulled out of a dumpster in Hudson, New York last year. The id on who made this one was not all that difficult. In addition to having Romney's signature on it, his studio stamp is on the reverse side of the sketch. A private collector bought this at auction in March.
This sketch is believed to be of Henrietta Greville, Countess of Warwick, possibly in preparation for the oil painting of her and her children that he painted in the late eighteen seventies. This doesn't look at all like the oil painting, though, since it's a very basic sketch, a person who didn't recognize the name would probably think this was just scribbles. Yeah, if you don't sort of know the context of what his work sketches looked like, you could look at it and think a child did this, a small child just learning how to hold a crayon. It absolutely does not surprise me that it would have wound up in the trash. In nineteen seventy four, a painting called Woman Carrying the Embers by Peter Breugel the Younger was discovered to have been stolen from the National Museum in Danks, Poland. It had been replaced with a magazine cutout, which was discovered when a worker accidentally knocked it off the wall. Now that painting has been found in the Gouda Museum, where it was being described as being on loan from a private collection. This discovery was made with the help of art detective Arthur Brand and it started after the Dutch arts magazine VIND covered an exhibition at the museum. A photo of the painting in Vinn looked like a photo from an article about the theft, which also involved another painting, which i'd been published back in nineteen seventy four. It is not currently clear how the theft originally happened or how the painting wound up on loan to the Gouda Museum. I have thoughts.
Yeah, it does seem very lucky or very lucky that somebody recognized the similarity to something from a publication from back in the seventies. Next, a portrait that has gone on display at Rest Park in England may depict Lady Jane Gray and if so, it may be the only portrait painted of her before she was executed. Our episode on Lady Jane Gray and the nine days she spent as Queen ran on March fifth of twenty seventeen. This painting was added to the collection at Rest Park Way back in the early eighteenth century, and at that time it was described as a painting of Lady Jane Gray, who had died in fifteen fifty four, but eventually that identity was called into question. The English Herita website frames this return to the interpretation that it does depict Lady Jane Gray as still somewhat speculative. This conclusion has involved tree ring dating of the wood panels it was painted on, X ray, fluorescent studies, and infrared reflexology, plus the work of historical experts who have pointed out similarities between the painting and portraits that were painted after her death, and they use words like compelling and possible. And lastly, we have previously talked about how in the ancient Greek world marble statues that appear white today were painted in vibrant colors. They were also clothed and adorned with jewelry, and according to recent research, some of them were perfumed. So people's experiences with these statues would have been both visual and olfactory. That sounds lovely, yeah, would have spelled nice, not overwhelming. I could be a little sensitive to fragrances this is, so whether I would enjoy that would kind of depend on what the fragrances were. So that is the first part of our two parter on Unearthed for Today, and I have a little listener mail. This is from Joni. Joni wrote after our episode on exem Clement and said, hello, Holly and Tracy. I love your show and I'm a longtime listener. While not a first time writer, I am definitely an infrequent one. While I was listening to the March tenth episode on exem Clement, you made a comment about being a bit confused by her being referred to as brother Exam by the other legislators. I don't know the real story behind the brother reference, but I do have a story from my own past that may or may not be relevant. When I was in college, I joined a fraternity called Alpha Fi Omega APO is a national co ed service fraternity that is focused on leadership, friendship, and community serus. All members were called brothers as opposed to brothers and sisters, in the spirit of acknowledging that we are all equal members. As a woman, I appreciated and preferred being called a brother. I have no idea if exem Clement would have felt the same way, or if the rationale behind her being called brother was the same. I just wanted to share that perspective. Thank you so much for everything you do. Your podcast is among my favorites. I often listen when I am working out or doing chores around the house. All the best, Joni, Thank you so much for this email. I like that a little bit of perspective.
Yeah, we kind of talked about a similar thing, but from a fictional world, because I think I have mentioned how on Star Trek people call even the women captain sir.
Everyone's sir. Yeah, so yes.
Kind of fundamentally the same concept.
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