Disgraceful Archaeology Read Free

coarse, peasant humour and were very rude.’ Even some of the 250 or so that were already published had been mistranslated to give them a more comforting and more moral tone.

    One example of an untranslated fable is about the beaver:
    A beaver’s genitals serve, it is said, to cure certain ailments. So when the beaver is spotted and pursued to be mutilated — since he knows why he is being hunted — he will run for a certain distance, and he will use the speed of his feet to remain intact. But when he sees himself about to be caught, he will bite off his own parts, throw them, and thus save his own life. The moral: is that wise men will, if attacked for their money, sacrifice it rather than lose their lives.
    One, entitled ‘The camel who shat in the river’, goes as follows:
    A camel was crossing a swiftly flowing river. He shat and immediately saw his own dung floating in front of him, carried by the rapidity of the current. ‘What is that there?’ he asked himself. ‘That which was behind me I now see pass in front of me.’ The moral: This applies to a situation where the rabble and the idiots hold sway, rather than the eminent and the sensible ( 6 ).
    The asses appealing to Zeus:
    One day, the asses tired of suffering and carrying heavy burdens and they sent some representatives to Zeus, asking him to put a limit on their workload. Wanting to show them that this was impossible, Zeus told them that they would be delivered from their misery only when they could make a river from their piss. The asses took this reply seriously and, from that day until now, whenever they see ass piss anywhere they stop in their tracks to piss too. The moral: This fable shows that one can do nothing to change one’s destiny.

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    The Hyenas:
    They say that hyenas change their sex each year and become males and females alternately. Now, one day a male hyena attempted an unnatural sex act with a female hyena. The female responded ‘If you do that, friend, remember that what you do to me will soon be done to you.’ The moral: This is what one could say to the judge concerning his successor, if he had to suffer some indignity from him.
    The British Museum recently spent £1.8m on the Warren Cup, a Roman silver drinking cup from around AD 50, depicting two scenes, each set indoors: one of two males copulating on a mattress, the other of homosexual paedophilia. This is a rarity, because much of the homosexual imagery of the time was either hidden or destroyed.

WHAT A WAY TO GO!
    Around 1260, ‘at Tewkesbury, a Jew fell into a privy, and out of respect for his sabbath, on which day the accident happened, would not allow himself to be extricated till the following day, which was Sunday; and in consequence he died, being suffocated by the foul stench.’

    In early imperial times, a very nasty Roman gentleman pushed his long-suffering slaves too far, and they decided to murder him in the bathhouse by shoving the sponge-stick (used for wiping the backside) down his throat — presumably to leave no trace of cause of death, as well as to really stick it to him. When he stopped kicking, they threw him down on the burning-hot floor to make sure he was dead. Unfortunately he recovered consciousness and lived long enough to see them suitably punished .…

    In 1326 in England, Richard the Raker was drowned — he entered a privy, seated himself, and the rotten planks of the floor gave way, letting him fall into the deep cesspool filth. There his body was found by a fellow raker.

    Another fatal accident occurred in Bread Street Ward: in the courtyard of a house, two men had dug a privy well to the depth of five casks — they had cribbed it with a pile of five casks in which new wine had been kept. As one of the boards from the end of one of the casks had fallen to the bottom of the well, one of the men put down a ladder and began to descend, but was overcome by fumes (carbon dioxide) from the wine-soaked staves, and dropped unconscious to the