Ancient Egyptian snakes in the Spotlight!

Woo-hoo! The cobras and I are in the spotlight on the homepage of the Swansea University Research Institute for Arts and Humanities this week!

High Impact Research!

Here is a teaser video made by Rich Johnston of one of the cobras falling onto the mud-brick floor.... "High-speed (slow-mo) footage of one of the breakage experiments carried out at Swansea University as part of a collaborative project between Egyptology and Materials Science. This is one of many clay cobras that were dropped onto a replica of an egyptian flooring material, and their fractures recorded and analysed. The research was sponsored by EPSRC Bridging the Gaps programme at Swansea University, and the high-speed camera equipment was from the EPSRC/STFC Loan Pool."

Teaser of breakage footage!

 Well, it was interesting to say the least! It will be a while until we process the results, but in the meantime, here are some brief glimpses as to what it was like. This is a pilot project, and we have already learned a great deal to improve upon for the next round. We photographed every step, and video taped. This is just a taster while I work on preparing the full version.  In the meantime, enjoy!

One of the replicas based on one from Amarna, now in the Berlin Museum ÄM 21961

All boxed up and ready to fall

This one looked painful

Another cobra fell...

but it didn't break!

Today, at 2:45, 35 clay cobra figurines start biting the dust, literally! The will be dropped 5 and broken 5 different ways. It will all be recorded on hi-speed film so we can check it out later in slooooowwwww-motion.... pieces will all be collected and compared to original breaks. Let's see what we can see!

So Excited!! Looks like the tomorrow is the big day—let the cobras fall and break as they may!

Having come across some rather tacky imitations of "Egyptian" cobras, reminded me that in fact, all the figurines that I work with, and indeed all of the uraei are shown with closed mouths instead, as in this beauty at the British Museum...

Making a mudbrick floor

Well, things are really heating up now! Last week I moved 35 clay cobras to Engineering where Josh, our 3rd year student working on this project, began to number them, photograph each from a number of angles (with a number and scale in each shot), and placed each into a box. The box is so that when the pieces are broken, the sherds can separately collected.

This weekend, he also worked on making a mudbrick floor. For this, we relied on information from Reg, one our PhD students. For a level 3 project for my class on Problems and Practice in Egyptian Material Culture, he became an expert on mudbrick and in particular the Lahun brick mould. From what I hear, Josh has returned triumphantly from Swansea Beach with a load of mud and clay. There are also rumours of him needing harvest mouse straw ... !!!