Community: bloggers@brooklynmuseum

In the final dig diary posting for 2009, I talked about the importance of publishing the results of our work at the site. The first phase of publication is the preliminary report (in English and Arabic) that we are required to submit to Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA) each season describing that year’s work. These reports eventually appear in the journal, Annales du Service des Antiquités de l’Egypte.

With the gracious permission of Dr. Zahi Hawass, Secretary General of the SCA, we are now able to make the English and Arabic reports for the 1996 through 2009 seasons available online as well through the museum’s website.  We hope the reports will be a useful resource for anyone interested in the Mut Precinct and the museum’s work there.

We are in the midst of planning for the next season of fieldwork, scheduled for January-March 2010. Watch for the 2010 Dig Diary, starting in mid-January.

Hieroglyphs for Mut and Sakhmet on the Propylon (main gate) of the Mut Precinct.

You better believe we are going to be watching the True Blood season two finale, which is airing on HBO this Sunday night at 9pm! If you read the blog, you saw Madeleine blogging about the discovery that our Bird Lady statue was spotted in the first episode of the season.  Soon after, the awesome people at HBO got us in touch with Production Designer, Suzuki Ingerslev, who answered our questions about why this object was selected and they gave us some subtle hints as to the significance. Throughout the season we’ve continued to see various references to our object, but things started to really heat up again in episode ten…

Here’s the character Maryann creating a “meat tree”…see the resemblance to the Bird Lady? Michelle Forbes (the actress who plays Maryann) gave an interview for TV Guide in which she talks about the tree: “It was filled with real meat and reeked as the weeks wore on. There are bobcats and coyotes roaming around that ranch where we shoot, so they had someone sit by the tree with a gun at night to protect it.”  Love that—all bird ladies warrant protection.

(Conservators please avert your eyes!)  Bird Lady is spotted several times in Sookie’s house where Maryann is squatting.  Seen here in episode ten, she’s covered in eggs and eggshells and if you watched episode eleven those eggs have even more meaning. Now, as we *try* to wait patiently for Sunday’s season finale, we’ll leave you with a few things to ponder….

…this quote we found from Michelle Forbes:

…this awesome finale still shot (!!!!!)  sent to us from the fabulous people we’ve been speaking with at HBO:

…lastly, don’t forget to stop by and see our Bird Lady—she’s 5,500 years old and waiting for you on our third floor in Egypt Reborn….

Those of you who are 1stfans got an introduction to the animal mummy research project being done at the Museum when we held an informal presentation about the project to look at some x-radiographs and see some animal mummies up close and personal.

In the months that have followed this presentation, the conservation lab has continued to examine and x-ray the collection which consists of about 60 animals in all.  We have enlisted the help of a radiologist at The Animal Medical Center Dr. Anthony Fischetti, DVM, MS.  Recently Anthony and a colleague came to the museum specifically to look at the x-radiographs of our cat mummies.

The wrappings and coffins, when present, represent a huge range of styles and levels of complexity.  The collection consists of a young cat wrapped with simple pieces of linen to larger cats with very complex patterning of dyed linens cut into fine strips.  The coffins themselves can be simple stone boxes with polychrome designs, to wooden forms in the shape of seated cats with sometimes elaborate polychrome and gilt decoration.

In examining the radiographs, the veterinarians were able to confirm that the animals in the x-rays were in fact cats, and were able to give us information regarding possible age.  Depending on the size and shape of the skull and teeth, they were sometimes able to suggest whether the mummified cat was more likely a species of domesticated cat (Felis silvestris) or a wild species (Felis chaus).

As more institutions begin to study their collections of ancient animal mummies, there seems to only be more questions as to what these differences in mummification styles and animal species might actually mean.  The Department of Veterinary Medicine at the University of California, Davis is heading a feline genome project.

The project is looking into what ancient DNA can tell us about current domestic cat populations.  Due to the condition of two of Brooklyn’s cat mummies, long bones were able to be sent to Dr. Leslie Lyons for inclusion in the genome project.

Many thanks are due to our faithful community. Their tweets helped us get in touch with @TrueBloodHBO, the official True Blood twitter feed and they set up a coast-to-coast conference call Tuesday evening between Suzuki Ingerslev, Production Designer for the show, Shelley (who has seen every episode), and me (who has read the books and will now go out and rent Season 1).

Getting to ask Suzuki our questions directly was incredibly exciting and the answers we got were pretty thrilling too! How cool is this…

How True Blood found the “Bird Lady”

The script for Episode 1 of Season 2 called for “a primitive piece of art; like a dancing girl” to be placed on the character Maryann’s coffee table. Suzuki and Cat Smith, Art Director, went to Google to look for images that fit these requirements, hoping to find something that inspired them. They looked at many different types of ancient images including Mycenaean, Etruscan, and Minoan examples. Entering search terms something like “Egyptian female statues,” they came across our very own “Bird Lady.” They printed out a selection of appropriate images and presented them to Alan Ball, the show’s creator.

He was immediately drawn to the “Bird Lady,” seeing something so elegant, beautiful and perfect in her form that she became the obvious choice. As Suzuki pointed out, though she is not the first to do so, this ancient figure looks both modern and primitive at the same time. In terms of the show, she said using it helped to emphasize that Maryann’s character is timeless.

We also found it interesting that Suzuki said they looked at a lot of Egyptian images and chose this one precisely because it is not a “typical” ancient Egyptian representation. This was precisely the thinking behind curator James F. Romano’s choice of the “Bird Lady” as the signature image for the reinstalled Egyptian galleries, which opened in April 2003. As usual, he wanted to get people to stop, look and think twice.

How True Blood created their “Bird Lady”

As part of Alan Ball’s vision for the show, which involves going the distance to add a level of authenticity, an artist was hired to make a version of the “Bird Lady” based on renderings off the web. Cindy Jackson made three statues in case one got broken during filming. Suzuki wanted a base that let the figure float and emphasized its sense of movement. So the artist drilled a rod into the bottom of the statue that connects to a flat base. We explained that we obviously couldn’t do that to a 5,500 year old object but we do have a special mount that safely produces the same floating effect.

HBO’s version of “Bird Lady” made for the series True Blood by artist Cindy Jackson from a mold she created and casting plaster.  Images courtesy Suzuki Ingerslev. 

Lastly, a few final bits of “Bird Lady” and True Blood trivia.

One of the characters refers to the statue as “Mycenean or something.” Maryann intentionally raises her arms in the same pose during the episode; this gesture was directly inspired by the choice of the “Bird Lady” for the statue. And yes, the “Bird Lady” can be read as a clue to Maryann’s eternal nature, but no, there is not necessarily any further connection.

Many thanks to HBO’s True Blood team for responding so quickly and warmly to our questions. We are glad you love the “Bird Lady” as much as we do.

We were first notified of this surprise appearance from a comment in our online collection by Marlene F. Emmett, who spotted a statue that sure looks like our “Bird Lady” in the first episode of the second season of the HBO series True Blood. When I heard about it from Shelley via e-mail, I began to search the web and found an art history shout-out to us at this blog.

Great eye, ladies, and thanks for letting us know about it! Shelley meanwhile got some screenshots to me so I could study them:

Sam Trammell with “Bird Lady” in the second season premiere of the HBO series True Blood.

Of course, this is not our actual “Bird Lady,” but the prop in the pictures is clearly based on our most complete examples, like the one on our website. I know this because we included two fragmentary “Bird Lady figurines” in our recently closed exhibition, The Fertile Goddess and I did a lot of research on Predynastic female figurines from Egypt in order to write the labels.

Close-up of “Bird Lady” from True Blood.

Like the figure used in True Blood, the Brooklyn Museum figurines have white paint on their lower halves, representing a skirt, and their legs are not indicated. They were all excavated from graves at one site in Egypt in the early twentieth century. Other Predynastic figurines with raised arms and beak-like faces exist but they don’t have the skirt and their legs are indicated.  For an example of this type see this figure at the British Museum.

I would love to know how True Blood got the idea for this prop! Did someone from the show come to Brooklyn and see ours? Did they see it online or in a book? It is certainly an iconic and much reproduced image but not necessarily one I’d expect to turn up in a television show.

I am also very curious about where they found the replica that is used in the show. I did find a few websites that sell replicas based on our “Bird Lady” (here, here and here) and even a photo of one of these replicas on Flickr. However, these have very different bases from the one on True Blood. Maybe they had a different base made or even commissioned an artist to make a replica. I’d be grateful to hear from anyone who might know the answers to these questions.