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2k-year-old wine and the uncanny immediacy of the past
Why artifacts like the Carmona Wine Urn, the Pazyryk Rug, and the Sword of Goujian are so important
To make sense of something like the Carmona Wine Urn, you need to triangulate between the results produced by exquisitely complex machines (in this case, a “Sciex 7500 QTrap Triple Quadruple analyser,” a form of mass spectrometer), the careful scientific work of archaeologists, and the archival research of historians. The three millennia of ancient Egypt become personified by the Great Pyramid and King Tut’s death mask; the Ming Dynasty collapses into a blur of blue-and-white porcelain; the whole of Elizabethan England is remembered chiefly from the rather distinct perspective of a single person named William Shakespeare. The Carmona wine urn belongs to this select group, alongside artifacts like the 2,500-year-old Pazyryk carpet which Soviet archaeologists discovered in a Siberian tomb, its blood reds and acid greens still vibrant after over two millennia frozen in ice:
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