Good afternoon, I'm Hartwig Fischer, director of the British Museum.
We are doing a series on objects from the collection of the British Museum
that in this moment of global health crisis speak of crises in the past.
Of how people have adapted to them, how they have come on top of them,
how they have tackled them to prevail or in some cases to falter.
And today I am speaking to Jonathan Tubb, Keeper of the Middle East Department since 2009
at the British Museum and before that curator of the ancient Levant at the British Museum.
Jonathan it is wonderful to see you today and to talk about an object that
you have chosen and I'm very curious to learn which object it is you have chosen
Well the object that I've chosen, it looks very modest and it's just a little oil lamp.
A very mundane oil lamp but it's one that tells a huge story
because when you can when you look at it you notice that it's got four spouts
most oil lamps, well most oil lamps only have one spout this has four
and it comes from a period at the end of the third millennium BC
when there was a major crisis which affected both Egypt and the southern Levant
to such an extent that the whole material culture changes
and this is one aspect of that change,
so it's a little lamp that tells a huge story, it tells a story of adaptation to a crisis
in this case a climate change it tells about the dislocation or a population
and the way that these people adapt to changed circumstances and changed lifestyle.
Do we know what brought about this climate crisis? What triggered it?
It is almost certainly to do with an oscillation in the Earth's orbit
certainly at this point it was not a man-made crisis in the way that we are
actually interfering with our own climate today.
It had a profound effect in the southern Levant because Canaan
supplied those things which Egypt really really wanted; wine, olive oil, honey and
from the shores of the Dead Sea, bitumen which they used for medicinal purposes
and of course waterproofing. So when this climate change kicked in the whole
economy of Canaan collapsed.
When you were there on the site during this excavation and finding this one object
during one of your campaigns, what did you think?
You know you chanced upon this object, you took it out of the ground,
you looked at it, did it tell you a story already or did you have to...
did it take much longer to analyze it's real meaning and what it actually told you?
Well yes and no to that one Hartwig! The type of lamp, this four spouted lamp was well known.
It is absolutely characteristic of this period of recession at the end of the third millennium
which lasted for perhaps no more than 200 years.
So it wasn't surprising to find that type of lamp.
What was surprising was the results that came out of analyzing these lamps for residue analysis
because when we actually analyzed, and we did a good number of them, about 10 15 of them,
what they showed is if they were not burning the traditional fuel; olive oil
they were burning fish oil of all things.
now in the context of this period of recession makes perfect sense
you know olive oil is in short supply and very difficult, no olive groves no olives
but the people were very, very clever adapting to this situation
finding another fuel which they could use.
you know fish you could catch at that time in the river Jordan.
We're not far from the River Jordan but
there's a very neat story around this because olive oil burns at four times
the intensity of fish oil, so in other words to get the same amount of light
for your house, for your tomb even, whatever it is, you needed four wicks
to be burning at the same time hence four spouts.
And if you look at my little lamp you'll see that all four spouts actually have signs of burning on them they were used in that way.
When you found that little vessel Jonathan was that already clear to you
that what had triggered this profound change was actually down to a climate change
or did you have other explanations of theories of that change? you know it's it's a massive change...
You know that had always been in my thinking for some time and one of the reasons that I chose this
site to excavate was to get more material to analyze and study
because you're quite right there had been other explanations for this really quite
profound change in the material culture people had said oh well you know there
are so many changes to have to have been new people coming in
and I had always been uncomfortable about this seeing more continuity, if you like, rather than change
but I couldn't actually put my finger on it but then with the excavations
at tiwal esh-sharqi, with my little lamps and the analyses a lot of things started to come together
and to fall into place and so it became clear to me then what we were talking about
was a change in lifestyle which affected the material culture
and I could explain almost everything in those terms even down to the burial customs
and so it all came together very nicely and really the the icing on the cake if
you like well it was it was the analysis of this lamp and the others like it
giving me that result of fish oil because that made sense
otherwise why on earth would you make a lamp with four spouts all of a sudden?
You know the thing that really blew my mind, apart from you know the fascination of the story
that this object encapsulates, it's a vessel of information you might say
What really blew my mind was when you said when you said it's the two hundred years crisis
you know we think of the crisis we are going through and
of course we all can't wait to get out of lockdown and go back to again and and
meet again and welcome our visitors and go back to our research and to planning
exhibitions and giving lectures and having debates and inviting the public
to events in the British Museum if we had to face a crisis that is 200 years long
I think we'd feel and think quite different
I think it's in the nature of crises that some of them are really quite short and sharp
and come and attack you almost and in ancient history there's any number of those
I mean the crisis of the the conquest of the Babylonians and the capture of Judah in the 7th century,
that was a crisis but a modern one I mean we think of
climate change today and it happens yes very slowly, it creeps up on you,
so you don't suddenly say oh gosh yes we got a crisis today
we've got a climate change coming it doesn't happen like that
and we're slow at learning that lesson
but it's more difficult to assess nowadays because there's so many mitigating factors
particularly with the sort of technology that we have to our hands
you know if you're in a position where a city let's say is noticeably warming up
what do you do? you put air conditioning on or you put a fan on
when we have all these devices which were simply not available in the in the ancient Levant
and if conditions became unbearable there you couldn't just reach for some device
to mitigate, you had to move, you had to move away.
So I think that covers a lot of ground and I'm really grateful to talk about this little object
I think it it does not only tell a fascinating story about the past but also about your research
and the work that you're doing at the British Museum but it also makes us
reflected, I think, on our present challenges.
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thank you so very much.