Tuesday 10 March 2015

More on Devilish Images and Coin Dealers




What is the matter with these people? On Dealer Dave's " Ancient Coins" blog there is a curious post 'It's A Good Idea To Know What You Are Talking About Before You Say It' which begins:
A certain "archaeologist" in Warsaw recently included the following coin image in his blog: "Vignette: Ancient discs with devilish images for titillation of kuffar" 
and then proceeds to explain to his less literate readers who Kuffar are before then berating me that I do not take into account the US coiney "Golden Bough" vision of the past ( [all] "Thracian tribes practiced ritual abduction as part of their marriage ceremonies").

The problem here is the apparent coiney predisposition for drawing conclusions from just looking at pictures. Dealer Dave has not read the text of what I wrote nor determined the relationship of the decorative vignette to the actual content (let alone thought behind). It is w-a-a-a-y above his head. This is pretty typical of the kneejerk reactions of a whole group of airheads collecting ancient coins resulting from the trashing of archaeological assemblages. About three minutes of the slowest reader's attention span would suffice to see that the text ("Devil-Worshippers and Ancient Art Collecting") was about fundamentalist Moslem attitudes to those who venerate antiquities which lies behind their destruction of the objects of that veneration. The "titillation" referred to is not the opinion of the archaeologist, but what one may surmise the fundamentalist (in fact of many 'religions of The Book') would make of that coin and the people that collect them. The second point is that the coins of Thasos showing a naked satyr and a nymph do not - pace what Dealer Dave asserts following the received wisdom of the websites he cites - represent scenes of everyday life in Thracian society for the simple reason that both satyrs and nymphs are imaginary creatures. Rather like coin fairies.

UPDATE 10th March 2015
No child left behind...? I can only repeat my exasperation, what is the matter with these people? I struggle to understand how any student set an essay topic "attitudes to figurative imagery in modern fundamentalist Islam" would imagine they were answering it by writing about "polytheistic religion in ancient Greece and Thrace" and have the cheek to call it "More on Knowing What You Are Talking About". To repeat the mistake after it has been explained in plain English is just another example of sheer coiney stupidity and inability to follow a thread of discussion in a logical manner, and illustrative of the problems one would have trying to explain complex concepts such as "export licences" to some of these people. 

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