IL 'PASSO DOPPIO' DI TARRAGONA
Tarragona Two-Step
The "Hercules Sarcophagus" is quickly debunked,
but 60 years later a fragment resurfaces as genuine in a prominent academic
journal
On March 9, 1850, workers quarrying stone for a harbor project at
Tarragona, Spain, found a marble sarcophagus with strange carvings and
inscriptions. The diggers had broken the sarcophagus before they noticed the
depictions on it, but local antiquarian Don Buenaventura Hernández y Sanahuja
collected and studied the surviving pieces.
On one large panel Hercules stands astride the Strait of Gibraltar, a
zodiac arching over his head. To his right, a procession of colonists and their
animals head from Egypt (identifiable by a crocodile and palms) to Spain. These
images seemed to match well with legends about Hercules.
In his tenth labor, stealing the cattle of the three-headed monster
Geryon, Hercules split into two a mountain at the junction of Africa and
Europe, opening the Strait of Gibraltar and creating the Pillars of Hercules.
Ancient authors preserve other traditions that meld the Greco-Roman hero with
the Phoenician god Melqart as "Egyptian hercules." These say Hercules
led an army into Spain and died there (Sallust) and that his bones were buried
at Gades, ancient Cadiz (Pomponius Mela).
The sarcophagus imagery implied a cultural link to Hercules and the
land of the pharaohs, something that would please 19th-century Spanish
patriots. Hernández Sanahuja published the carvings as
"Ibero-Egyptian" in his Resumen
Historico-Critico de la Cuidad de Tarragona Desde su Fundacion Hasta la Epoca
Romana (1855).
Hernández Sanahuja claimed the Hyksos moved to Spain after being
driven out of Egypt and built Tarragona's early walls. The Egyptians pursued
them, however, and joined with the natives against the Hyksos. The tomb had
been "constructed to receive the remains of the leader who had brought the
Egyptians colonists to Spain, or perhaps one of his descendants" (quoted
in Padró i Parcerisa 1980).
"This theory, which is in agreement with Spanish traditions, with
the theognony and myths of the Egyptians, with the ancient writers and
geographers, and finally with the general histories of all the peoples of the
Mediterranean shores, is to be found explicitly confirmed in these sarcophagus
fragments, in the teeth of modern critics, who in envy of our glories and the
priority of Iberian civilization in Europe have sought by sophistry to annul a
fact which cannot be doubted, as I have proved" (quoted in Padró i
Parcerisa 1980).
Scholars outside Spain quickly rejected them as an obvious hoax (E.
Hubner, Die Antike Bildwerke
in Madrid, 1862). The cartoon-like
nature of these carvings is best captured by a fragment that shows an elephant
headed-god wearing a kilt and holding a mummy in its trunk while standing on a
boat with an owl. Oddly, a ushabti or servant figurine published by Hernández
Sanahuja as found in the Egyptian tomb appears to be authentic, "though
brought from heaven knows where" (Padró i Parcerisa 1980).
Was Hernández Sanahuja responsible for the sarcophagus with its
crudely executed carvings and inscriptions? And possibly put a real ushabti
with it? Maybe not. His Resumen
Historico-Critico de la Cuidad de Tarragona is now rare because he destroyed every copy he could get (Moffitt
1994).
Nonetheless, almost 60 years afterward, a piece of the sarcophagus
enjoyed a second life. In 1916, A.L. Frothingham published an article in the American Journal of Archaeology using an end piece of the sarcophagus as evidence
of Phoenician iconography. The Phoenician Tablet of Tarragona, as he called the
fragment, shows two figures, one male and one female, standing between two palm
trees with snake-like figures on either side of them "The Phoenician
Tablet of Tarragona." Frothingham interpreted the two figures as Baal and
Tanit, two deities in the Phoenician pantheon and the sources of other life,
asserting that the spiraling mass between the two figures was essentially an
embryo fed with fire and water from them. And although it is clear that he had
some understanding of the origin of the piece (thus: "of Tarragona"),
it would seem that he did not know its exact origin, since he describes the
fragment as part of a circular artifact and not part of the bogus sarcophagus.
In 1921, Pierre Paris published a scathing commentary in Revue archéologique, denouncing the sarcophagus as nothing but
"une enfantine parodie" of Egyptian art.
The Sarcophagus of Tarragona is impressive, but not because it was
technologically complex or because it was believed to be genuine for any length
of time.
It shows how nationalism can look to the past--or even fake the past--in search of powerful symbols, here attempting to link Spain with the glories of ancient Egypt. In this regard, the sarcophagus may have a close parallel in the recent "finds" at the Roman city of Iruna-Veleia in northern Spain, from a depiction of Christ's crucifixion, to Nefertiti's name, to the earliest written messages in the Basque language.
But it also shows that hoaxes can have a second life when a fragment is separated from the "original" and later scholars are taken in--until someone recognizes it and condemns it once more.
Come si vede bene, il malinteso senso identitario può condurre a comportamenti aberranti, ovunque.
It shows how nationalism can look to the past--or even fake the past--in search of powerful symbols, here attempting to link Spain with the glories of ancient Egypt. In this regard, the sarcophagus may have a close parallel in the recent "finds" at the Roman city of Iruna-Veleia in northern Spain, from a depiction of Christ's crucifixion, to Nefertiti's name, to the earliest written messages in the Basque language.
But it also shows that hoaxes can have a second life when a fragment is separated from the "original" and later scholars are taken in--until someone recognizes it and condemns it once more.
Come si vede bene, il malinteso senso identitario può condurre a comportamenti aberranti, ovunque.
© 2009 by the
Archaeological Institute of America
archive.archaeology.org/online/features/hoaxes/tarragona.html
