REVIEW BY CH
The latest issue of Ash-sharq includes a particularly thought-provoking contribution by Dr St John Simpson, senior curator in the British Museum’s Department of the Middle East, which focuses on artefacts from Anglo-Saxon England.
Among the lavish grave goods of the ‘princely’ burials at Sutton Hoo (Suffolk), Taplow (Buckinghamshire), and Broomfield and Prittlewell (both Essex), a number of objects have eastern Mediterranean origins. They are traditionally interpreted as trade goods or diplomatic gifts, but Simpson argues for a more direct route, setting the artefacts in the context of the late 6th-century wars between the Byzantine and Sasanian Empires, and wondering whether they might be souvenirs brought back by Anglo-Saxon mercenaries.
Simpson’s discussions include detailed references to Dr Helen Gittos’ forthcoming paper (in The English Historical Review) on the same topic, combined with insightful analysis drawing on his own excavations and expertise in the Sasanian Empire’s material culture. He highlights how the mundane materials of many of the eastern artefacts seem at odds with their elite burial context, highlighting in particular a copper-alloy flagon from Prittlewell (he includes an interesting and well-illustrated comparison of its imagery with Sasanian artistic traditions); a small, lop-sided bottle from Sutton Hoo (the only clay item in Mound 1’s famous ship burial); and lumps of Syrian bitumen from the same grave, which he compares with examples from his own excavations in Iraq.
