A colleague told me he had heard good things about an article I wrote on incense burners. I was a little surprised and asked, "Does he read Chinese?" because the only article about incense burners I had written was published solely in that language. Mind you, I didn't write it in Chinese, but it was translated because I wrote it and five other articles for the Beijing World Art Museum, more specifically for the exhibit we at Penn sent there more than a year ago.

It turns out that the Beijing Museum has now put those articles up on their website, in English. We had sent them the full text to translate, but I thought we'd kept the English publication rights. I'm not sure about that, but I'm relatively pleased they did put the articles up because now more people can read them. In my entries I tried to go into the significance of the individual artifact, to do much more than simply describe the particular piece but to tell about what it might mean for the people who made and used it. Thus, I see this writing as much more than catalogue entries in a museum, and as a whole we wanted our exhibit and our catalogue to be an overview of Mesopotamian culture seen through its material objects. It turned out that of the six cultural regions represented in the larger museum exhibit, our text was by far the most detailed.

So it was nice to hear that someone had seen one of these entries and thought it was worth reading. I link to one of the articles below, one about 'lizard' figurines from the Ubaid period (Image at left is of the object on loan from Penn to BWAM). These are very interesting artifacts that are quite distinctive, with large eyes, high hair and broad sholders. The fringe elements out there, the ones who believe in mass conspiracy and abductions, etc. (crazies, pyramidiots, or whatever you want to call them) want to see these figurines as representations of extraterrestrials, but the funniest correlation I've heard is that they look a little like Sarah Palin.

You can read my interpretation and summary of the scholarly ideas on these 'lizard' people if you feel so inclined. And if you go to the page on Mesopotamia for the BWAM, you'll find my entires are the first five objects as well as the very last one (the incense burner).