Download PDF | Ahmet Arı - The Sion Treasure Reconsidered_ The Biographies and Multivalence of Sacred Silver Objects in Sixth-Century Byzantium-Routledge (2024).
213 Pages
The Sion Treasure Reconsidered
In 1963 a collection of fifty-seven silver vessels was discovered during illegal excavations by villagers in Antalya Province, Turkey. The Sion Treasure, named after the inscription ‘Holy Sion’ on several vessels in the hoard, is now divided between five collections: Antalya Museum (Turkey), Dumbarton Oaks (United States), a private collection in Geneva, the Digby-Jones collection and Hewett collection (United Kingdom).
This book builds on the studies of the Sion Treasure and examines questions regarding silver mining, manufacture, and the economic and cultural role of the silver vessels. It considers the treasure using the concept of the cultural biography of objects. The vessels from the Sion Treasure have not previously been considered in this context and the book highlights the fact that the value and significance of the objects at the time they were created does not lie exclusively in their visual characteristics and aesthetics since their relationship to, and with, people is also significant.
While their functionality lends them one life story, another biography is gained through their users: the producers, patrons and individuals within the church, not only the clergy, who engaged with the objects. The Sion Treasure Reconsidered will appeal to students and scholars alike interested in Byzantine cultural and material history and medieval material history in general.
Ahmet Arı is a lecturer in Byzantine Studies at Nevsehir Hacı Bektas Veli University, Turkey.
Acknowledgements
This book has its origin in my PhD dissertation “The Biography and Multivalence of Sacred Silver Objects in the Sixth-Century Sion Treasure” which I completed in 2019 (University of Sussex). Since then, I have conducted further research on this subject to revise the thesis and turn it into a book which examines the Sion objects with more comprehensive study. I have revisited collections and re-examined the objects, especially the objects in Antalya Museum. I have also conducted research on the elemental composition of Sion objects to add to the information given by Dumbarton Oaks scholars who carried out research on the elemental compositions of objects from Dumbarton Oaks.
As a result of this new study, I was able to revise and rewrite my doctoral dissertation in these three years. Although the research was suspended and interrupted many times owing to the pandemic, I was able to finish research on objects from the Byzantine Collection at Dumbarton Oaks and the Antalya Museum. During these three years a lot of people and institutions made this manuscript possible. Therefore, I am in debt to many individuals and institutions. My greatest gratitude is to two people who gave the greatest support to this project. First of all, I should like to thank Liz James who read through various drafts of this book and gave really important feedback on turning the thesis into a book. Whenever I had queries about the book or needed someone to read my drafts, she was always happy to help me.
She read the drafts much faster than I had expected, giving me more time to work on her comments. This book would not be possible without her help. And my other angel, who helped and supported me during the preparation of the manuscript is my wife Büşra Mercan Ari. She always tried to calm me when I was anxious and worried about the book. She always had time to hear about the progress of the book. I am also grateful to her for helping me to design the photographs which I have used in the book. I give special thanks to Antalya Museum Director Mustafa Demirel, archaeologists Süleyman Atalay, Fatma Nur Direr Konukman and Mehmet Ali Saçi and restorer Özgür Gemici for their kindness and help during the examination of objects in Antalya Museum and for giving permission to use the photographs of objects in the book.
I should also like to thank the Museum staff in Dumbarton Oaks, especially Gudrun Bühl, Elizabeth Dospel Williams and Carla Galfano, since they provided me with all the necessary photographs and information on the objects for the book and permission to reproduce the photographs of these objects in my book. I am also grateful to my colleagues Tolga Uyar, Ayşe Budak, Savaş Marașli, Alper Altin, Enes Kavalçalan and Can Erpek. This book would not have been possible without the financial support provided by anonymous donors who sponsored the color illustrations. Finally, I am grateful to Margaret Mullett for her helpful feedback on both thesis and several versions of the manuscript for the book. She was one of the people who advised me to turn the thesis into book.
Introduction
The ‘Sion Treasure’, a collection of fifty-seven silver vessels, alongside various unidentified fragments and pieces, was discovered during illegal excavations in 1963 in Büyük Asar Hill in the north of Hacıveliler village of the Kumluca district of Antalya Province in Turkey.1 This place where the objects were found is an ancient town in Lycia called Korydalla during the Roman and Byzantine era. Following the discovery of the objects, some were taken to Antalya Museum, but others were sold to private collections, which means that the Treasure is now divided between five collections: Antalya Museum in Turkey; Dumbarton Oaks in the United States of America; George Ortiz collection in Geneva; and the Digby-Jones and Hewett Collection in London. This book presents a record of the pieces of the Sion Treasure in Antalya Museum and in the Dumbarton Oaks collection.
Susan Boyd also recorded one paten in a private collection in Geneva (the George Ortiz Collection), an openwork lamp in the Digby-Jones Collection and a few fragmentary pieces of silverware in the Hewett Collection, both in London.2 The paten has been published in the exhibition called Byzance En Suisse held in Rath Museum in Geneva from 4 December 2015 to 13 March 2016 which has gathered together 600 pieces of Byzantine art, covering a large proportion of public and private collections in Switzerland.3 A large number of the silver vessels from the Sion Treasure were published in 1992 in a Dumbarton Oaks symposium book Ecclesiastical Silver Plate in Sixth-Century Byzantium. 4
This was an incomplete publication as it did not include many of the material in Antalya. Since then, nothing new on the Sion Treasure has been published. By building on these studies, this book provides fresh information about the vessels in the Sion Treasure. It brings into the discussion the pieces in the Antalya Museum as well as Dumbarton Oaks, providing detailed information about the objects in both collections in detail, considering their form, condition, measurements, elemental compositions and manufacturing process, bringing new information about the fragments of silverware and about the weights of the objects. It also suggests a revised number of the pieces of silverware found, as a result of my being able to marry together fragments across the collections and discovering new objects which were not mentioned earlier. I shall also take a different approach to the silverware from that of the Dumbarton Oaks publication, one which considers it in material culture terms. In order to understand the value of the objects in the Byzantine era, I shall show that these objects had lives as people do and had multiple values.
In their life, these objects moved from one context to another context: in these different settings they carried different values. Ideas about the cultural biography of objects, material culture, agency and cognition enable me to approach the Treasure as made up of objects with social lives, and with biographies that changed in different contexts, social, political and economic.5 However, these factors were only one element, as the functions of the vessels, and their functionality in certain performances, also had an important effect on their biography. In this context, I consider what the objects were really for, how they came into existence, their function, how they were used, and how all of these aspects affected the different functions of the silverware.6 The vessels from the Sion Treasure have not previously been considered in this way. They can give us clues and empirical evidence to discuss the value given to the silverware by its producers and donors and those who came into contact with it inside the church of Holy Sion.
This book highlights the fact that the value and significance of the objects at the time when they were created and used does not lie only in their visual characteristics and sensual affordances, since their relationship to and with people is also significant; while their functionality lends them one life story, another biography is gained through their users, in terms of their producers, patrons, and the individuals within the church, not only the clergy, who engaged with them. The silverware also possessed a biography in certain contexts that affected both their usage, and individuals’ perception. Therefore, this book will highlight three main aspects, all of which are closely related. One is the question of the changing functions of the silverware: as commodities for sale; as gifts to God; as items used within the church during the liturgical performance; or as functional and decorative church revetments.
The second is the interrelationship between people and objects and how this affected the biography of the silverware. The third is that these objects were used in different contexts: their production; their usage as gifts to God; and their role as liturgical objects or church revetments inside the church. These varying contexts enabled the users of the Treasure to perceive the vessels in different ways, and to give them life-stories, or biographies. When a worshipper in church engaged with a paten, the function and value of that paten was not the same as that which the donors believed it had when they gave it as a gift. I shall argue that a study of the form and morphological features of the objects alone does not provide a sufficient understanding of the biographies and value of objects placed on them by their contemporaries.
Rather, it is necessary to align their morphological features with their functions and materiality, and to consider the intentions behind their creation and use, in order to understand the value given to these objects by their contemporaries. This book first examines the objects in the Sion Treasure with their form, measurements, inscriptions, stamps and their circulation and monetary value, and then moves on to discuss how we can use the concept of ‘cultural biography’ of objects as a way to understand the value of the Sion Treasure. The aim of this book then is twofold: an updating, emending, correcting and expansion of the original checklist; and a discussion of the Treasure and its changing biography during its lives in Chapter 5. In this context, my key questions are: what happens when we examine these objects in three stages of their life, from their production, through their usage as a gift to God, to their use in the church context? And what happens when we examine the objects in the different contexts of their production, donation and usage in church?
What was the purpose of these silver objects? What did they mean to their producers? What did they mean to their donors? And what was their value and biography for worshippers? Did their biography change throughout their life, or by gaining new biographies, did they become multivalent, and gain multi-biographies? What are the implications that lie behind saying ‘these objects were to be used in a church’, or ‘they were given as a gift’? This book seeks to understand the value and life story of these silver vessels in early Byzantium by examining the value given to them by the early Byzantine Christians who created and donated the objects, and engaged with them within the church.
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