Ancient Gate, part 1: Bronze Door Nails
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- Опубликовано: 9 июл 2024
- This time on Artifactually Speaking, I talk about a door that's no longer there. But it was a big double door and we know (largely) what it looked like from the evidence left behind when it burned 2600 years ago. Not only are there remains of mudbrick walls and stone threshold blocks, but also pieces of copper or bronze plates that fastened the wooden planks, and many, many nails.
We found around a hundred of these nails, all relatively similar, though some are bent from hammering and all are relatively warped with age, corrosion, and the heat of the fire that destroyed the door. The city was sacked and burned in 612 BCE and the evidence is quite clear here.
Similar Assyrian double door gates have been found elsewhere, particularly at Balawat. This site, known as Imgur-Enlil in ancient times, is not far from Nimrud and the door bands and nails found there allowed the British Museum to reconstruct the gate to a great degree. The reconstruction is on display in London. Our doors were very similar, about 4 meters (around 13 feet) tall and 3 meters (nearly 10 feet) wide. 
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Like dentists, archaeologists don't often encounter people at their happiest times.
This is the best thing I've read in ages.
I'm a dental hygienist and perhaps a little sensitive about your comment. I often see people on a self-improvement journey looking to get themselves healthy (after a bout of severe depression, for example) or more attractive (veneers, braces, etc) who actually want to be at the dentist's office. I think a more accurate analogy would be lawyers. I've never encountered one when my life was fabulously peachy keen. Anywho, I'll stop being butthurt now...
@@IKilledEarl I would not count recovery from a recent severe depression or having feelings of aesthetic inadequacy to the extent of seeking out medical intervention as the happiest times. A check-up with no problems is the best time to be had with a dentist.
@@pattheplanter Agree, we actually prefer boring in dentistry. If people took care of their teeth the way dental professionals told them to, we would only see them twice a year for cleanings and the occasional broken tooth and dentists/dental hygienists would be happier for it. A non-exciting trip to the dentist is always preferred. But I do often encounter people who are excited to make a positive change where coming to the dentist can make them feel good about themselves. The depressed person feels good that they got up, faced the world, and did something productive that makes them healthier. Someone with heavy staining on their teeth is self-conscious about it and after I remove it, they feel pretty or handsome again (this happens to me daily). So many people have horrible anxiety and antagonism about dentistry and it breaks my heart. Like I said, I'm just butthurt that my profession is generally disliked by the public and your comment hurt my pride. I just wanted to show that it's not all doom and gloom in dentistry and I still think lawyers, or even better, law enforcement, are better examples.
You should definitely do a video about bronze disease. Just spent a good twenty minutes reading about its formation, prevention and item restoration.
I'll second that! That sounds interesting, I've never heard of it.
You nailed it.
What a sight it must have been.
I love old doors
i live for learning, thanks doc
62 and still amazed every day by smart people saying smart things😊
I'm impressed by the amount of effort they put into those nails. The few hand made nails I've seen have only had simple rectangular cross sections.
Honestly I think my favorite part of this discussion is the door posts and their associated holes. I *love* thinking about these sorts of simple ancient mechanisms, how they worked, and what went into them. Modern interlocking knuckle hinges, which are ubiquitous and dirt cheap today, seem like they would be ludicrously hard to make with any kind of consistency in a time when everything was hand crafted. There are some alternate history books I sometimes read that are set in the early 17th century, and they occasionally mention leather hinges on doors, for example. The podcast Wittenburg to Westphalia also occasionally talks about how most of a peasant family's wealth in early medieval Europe would be vested in their cauldron and a big flat rock for cooking. It really gives you an appreciation for the modern manufactured world.
(And meanwhile, if you go to a museum dedicated to early 20th century industry, you can see the staggeringly large machines that built that manufactured world: the giant hands we built to swing our giant hammers.)
I live for these tiny details. Thank you 🙏
Much awaited, much appreciated looking forward to excellent insights as always from you.
Enjoyed this! Make more vids 🎉
Great stuff! That cracking almost looks like delamination. It would be cool if they were using it deliberately to improve the fastening like you mentioned!
How thrilling would it be for a research student (or a Cthulhu investigator) to come across your green notebook/ledger one or two hundred years from now?
They honestly look more like rivets that had a rounded head on both sides of the door. Especially for such a large door. Possibly the shorter head sheared/corroded off behind the band. The line or split down the side could be from the brass material being "folded "( from thinner material during the forging) and are now delaminating from each other from not being fully welding together.
They do look like rivets. I'm no specialist in such things, but I would expect the other end of the rivet to have a short hollow shaft to interface with the longer end. Not really sure how rivets are fastened together, but I think that cap of sorts is hammered onto the long end. If so, I would expect to find evidence of these ends. The fire would have melted them badly, but I would hope to find some indication of these rivet ends as well. Maybe we will find them.
@@artifactuallyspeaking no not that kind of rivet...a brass solid rivet which has head on one end, put thru the wood then the other end is hammered over to create a second head...if they did it while the brass was hot it could be the earliest example of hot riveting...look up hot riveting on skyscrapers, bridges or steamengines etc
@@artifactuallyspeaking hot riveting you put the brass rivet thru the wood and the hinge strap while hot ...peen/ hammer over the other end...then the brass shrinks when it cools pulling the wood and strap tight together
@@artifactuallyspeakingthe style you are thinking of is a modern tube rivet
Thanks for the info!
Would the hot bands and rivets damage the wood, though?
With such a large door it also seems logistically difficult to put all this in while hot, but might have been possible. I wonder if there is a way we can test the nails/rivets to see if they were worked in this way?
Must have been very impressive.
I am really interested in trade patterns, for example the use of Lebanese cedar trees on the construction.
Has there been any analysis of the bronze nails to determine where the constituent copper and tin came from? Would that be beneficial, or is this information already well known?
My (non-professional) understanding is that copper is pretty ubiquitous across the Mediterranean meta-civilization, so that trade was probably relatively local. Tin, though, is much rarer, and those trade routes were very important to the bronze age. I'm pretty sure "Albion" as a name for England/Britain originates with its importance as a source of tin, for example. (Tin is linguistically associated with the color white in much the same way that iron is linguistically associated with black.)
Testing copper in hopes of finding its source and thus delineating trade routes has often been tried for the Bronze Age, but copper objects were frequently melted down and combined into new objects. This mixes the isotope signatures and makes it difficult. The expanding networks in the Iron Age makes narrowing sources down even trickier.
Still we do know of important copper sources in various regions, like Cyprus and Oman, that supplied a lot of copper in certain periods. And there are definitely more sources for copper than for tin, but you only need about 10% tin and 90% copper for a bronze object.
You'd think someone would have collected all of the nails after the burning. Was the temple rebuilt after it was burned?
probably the running for your life or the beserker running amok attitudes were over ruling the “ oh look at those nails, bet u could use them later” mind set 😅
I have demolished plenty of homes and public buildings. Never once did I collect the nails after the job was done.
I guess a door that size probably had a lot more than 50 nails in it. Someone probably did collect them and just didn't get them all. Copper being so valuable back then, the door was basically held together with money.
The temple in this case was not rebuilt, so the burned door remained on the floor and was covered by burned roof and collapsing walls. This largely sealed the context, though it is true that there would have been more nails than we have found, so some may have been scavenged for their material.
@@4quallYou also come into contact with more aluminum than a person would have 150 years ago.
In fact, 150 years ago aluminum was more expensive than gold so you would be considered a mad man for using aluminum as a disposable product.
I think you're overlooking the importance of industrial production and its impact on history and today.
I wonder how they made the nails. I've made traditional iron nails (blacksmithing) and wonder if the process is similar. I would also think that the wood had to be pre drilled as if the wood was green to any degree, it would shrink over time and the wood would compress around the more cylindrical nail body.
I think you're right about drilling the wood first, at least for these larger nails. We have found some much thinner nails that might be directly hammered in, but the thicker ones would have to have a starter hole at least.
I'm not sure how they were made. We're bringing a metals specialist in hopefully next season who will be able to analyze them more closely to find out.
@@artifactuallyspeaking I was looking at the pictures of the gates you provided in the video. I would suggest that there should be a diagonal support on the rear of each door. If you have vertical slats to make up the door body, then it will (eventually) sag on the inward edge so practically they would have had an attached beam to strengthen them. If you find any metal attachments that don't seem to fit the understood pattern, then it may be that they were used to affix the diagonals. If anyone is interested in the blacksmith method of making nails then this is a good example: ruclips.net/video/ECxwkPWra4s/видео.html It's possible that a similar method was used to make the bronze nails found at the site - the metals specialist view would be interesting once that can be arranged.
do we know it was locked? and what type of lock would they use? - or am i confusing "locked" with "barred"?
Whats the difference in a time without locks as we know it?
Though lock and key devices are quite old, we don't have evidence of one on this door. We do have evidence that it could be barred, though. The divot in the stone behind the door took an iron support that would effectively stop the door from opening. It would have been operated by a door guard.
frickin indiana jones! reconstructing history, yo!
Milo sent me.
Leave it up to a regime to destroy ancient wonders 🤦
ISIS? Or the Medes?
Or both? Nothing new under the Sun :/
Why is ISIS so awful?
Sterling Archer has a lot to answer for.
They just can't be a fking nail. Has to be. A door nail ?
Why don't you watch the whole video and he'll tell you why.