I do not think we have many artefacts in our collection, which can claim to have a whiff of royalty about them. The camel bag in the picture above is one of those few. It was given to Lieutenant Colonel Harold Richard Patrick Dickson by […]
All posts filed under: Middle East
A timeless design: Qatari bracteate
Isn’t it wonderful, how some designs survive practically unchanged for thousands of years, across vast distances of time and space? I still remember the first time I saw the ‘Huldremose woman’, and Iron Age bog body, in the Danish National Museum. After approximately 2000 years […]
’Artefact lottery’: Afghan woman’s hat
A while ago, on a particularly unimaginative Monday, I was trying to come up with an idea for a blog post, at I came up with the idea of the ‘artefact lottery’: closing my eyes, scrolling through the database, and clicking on something random. Back […]
Bringing Syria to Denmark: Brass tea pot
Mohammed has always been a strong man. A caring father and a hard worker, who loves to cook for his family. When Syria descended into war, he and his family decided that it was not safe to remain any longer. Mohammed went ahead and journeyed […]
The long journey of a pair of Syrian sunglasses
Sometimes, the most mundane artefacts hide within them the most poignant stories. What would you, for example, consider to be the value of these sunglasses? They are not some fancy brand, nor have they belonged to someone famous. Indeed, one side bar has broken off […]
Lighting up the Ramadan – and the World Cup?
The World Cup has come to an end – at long last to some and way too quickly for others. It has been a year of surprises – England making it to the semifinals for the first time in 28 years, Lionel Messi missing a […]
Threadened history: Palestinian dress
Threads in green, yellow, red, blue, pink, orange, all colours imaginable. Stitched into massive and connected patterns covering almost the entirety of the dark dress. Hands working over the fabric and the elegant embroidery thread for hours, days, years to make the dress more than […]
A little extra luck for 2018—we need it!
I think most of us will agree that 2017 has been a bit of a crazy year. It has been the year of Trump and his Twitter wars on everything from North Korea to Meryl Streep to his own White House staff. There has been […]
Capturing the moment: An intimate scene in an al-Na’im Bedouin camp
Although ethnographic artefacts form the backbone of ethnographic collections, there is much more material qualifying as ‘ethnographic material’. Ethnographic photos are often used in exhibitions as a sort of supplement to what is considered the really significant material: the artefacts. In this and the following […]
The importance of representation: Ghanaian doll
When I was a girl, I wasn’t much into dolls. I was the kind of kid who fell asleep with my box of books next to me in my bed (along with about a 75 stuffed animals). When I, at the age of two, had […]
The Sound of Battle: A Viking Moot Special
How many of us really know how it sounds when two armies, fighting with shields, spears, and swords, collide? We have seen it in the movies, when Roman soldiers in shiny helmets slaughter their Pictish enemies, when the warriors of Rohan collide with ranks of […]
In Other Shoes: Turkish Harem Shoes
Previously, ethnographica.net has showcased shoes from the wonderful shoe collection made by Søren L. Tuxen, zoologist and shoe enthusiast. You can read about him in our previous post here: https://ethnographica.net/2015/04/14/tuxen/ In his collection of almost 250 pairs are shoes and other footwear from all over […]
