A History of the World in 100 Objects (33 page)

A slave boy peers around the door to look at the lovers

Silver cups of this date are now exceptionally rare, as so many were melted down, and among the survivors few can match the virtuoso skill of the Warren Cup. To buy a cup like this you would have had to be rich, for it would have cost somewhere around 250 denarii – and for that money you could have bought twenty-five jars of the best wine, two thirds of an acre of land, or even an unskilled slave like the one we see peering round the door. So this indulgent little dining piece places its owner firmly in the echelons of high society, the world that St Paul eloquently condemned for its drunkenness and its fornication.

We don’t know for certain, but it’s thought that the Warren Cup was found buried near Bittir, a town a few miles south-west of Jerusalem. How it got to this location is a mystery, but we can make a guess. We can date the making of the cup to around the year 10. About fifty years or so later, the Roman occupation of Jerusalem sparked tensions between the rulers and the Jewish community, which in
AD
66 exploded. The Jews took back the city by force. There were violent confrontations, and our cup may have been buried at this date by the owner before he fled from the fighting.

After this, the cup disappeared for almost 2,000 years, until it was bought by Edward Warren in Rome in 1911. For years after his death in 1928 it proved impossible to sell – the subject matter was just too shocking for any potential collector. In London, the British Museum declined to buy it, as did the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, and at one point it was even refused entry to the United States of America, when the explicit nature of its imagery offended a customs official. It was only in 1999, long after public attitudes to homosexuality had changed, that the British Museum bought the Warren Cup – then the most expensive acquisition it had ever made. A cartoon at the time showed a Roman barman saucily asking a customer, ‘Do you want a straight goblet or a gay goblet?’

A hundred years after he bought it, Warren’s cup is now on permanent public display here in the Museum, and it serves a very useful purpose. It’s not just a superb piece of Roman imperial metalwork: from party cup to scandalous vessel and finally to an iconic museum piece, this object reminds us that the way societies view sexual relationships is never fixed.

The British Museum can demonstrate the changing views of society on many matters, not just sex. Here we have an object that once carried enormous social significance but is now virtually banned from all public gatherings: the tobacco pipe. Smoking, with its pleasures and perils, has a long history, and this pipe shows that it was going strong 2,000 years ago in North America.

The pipe shown here is about the size and shape of a kazoo. It is not like a modern pipe, with a long stem and a bowl at one end; instead, it is carved in reddish stone and has a flat base about 10 centimetres (4 inches) long, so it’s almost exactly the colour and size of a bourbon biscuit. One end is carved with a small hole to serve as the mouth piece. The pipe bowl is halfway down, but it’s no simple hollow for holding the tobacco; it’s in the shape of the upper half of a swimming otter with its paws perched on the bank of a river, as if it’s just popped up out of the water to look around. The stone is smooth, and it beautifully suggests the sleek wet fur of the animal. The otter looks along the pipe so that, as you smoke it, you and the otter are gazing into each other’s eyes. But in fact the smoker is even closer to this animal than that suggests: if you put it to your mouth you discover that you are nose to nose with the otter. That contact would have been even more striking originally than it is now, because the empty eye sockets would have been inlaid with freshwater pearls. This wonderfully crafted and evocative object pinpoints in history the world’s earliest use of tobacco pipes. This is where the story of pipe-smoking begins.

Although smoking is now largely seen as a fatal vice, 2,000 years ago in North America pipe-smoking was a fundamental ceremonial and religious part of human life. Different groups of Native Americans lived across the continent, in ways much more varied than Hollywood westerns would suggest. Those Americans living in Middle America – the lands around the mighty Mississippi and Ohio rivers, from the Gulf of Mexico to the Great Lakes – were farmers. They had no cities, but they did reshape their vast landscape with extraordinary monuments. While their small farming and trading communities seem to have lived apart, they died together, joining forces to build enormous earthworks as gathering places for ceremonies and to bury their dead. Within the earthworks were graves rich with decorative objects and weapons crafted from exotic raw materials traded over huge distances: there were the teeth of grizzly bears from the Rocky Mountains, conch shells from the Gulf of Mexico, mica from the Appalachian Mountains and copper from the Great Lakes. These spectacular sculpted burial mounds would later astonish visiting Europeans. One group in particular, popularly known as ‘Mound City’, is in present-day Ohio – an enclosed 13-acre site with twenty-four separate burial mounds. In one of the mounds there were around 200 stone pipes, one of which is our otter pipe.

The pipe comes from the period from which we have the earliest evidence for tobacco use in North America. Tobacco was first cultivated in Central and South America, and smoked wrapped in the leaves of other plants, rather like a cigar. In the colder north, though, there were no wrapping leaves to be had through the long winters, and smokers had to find another way of containing their tobacco – so they made pipes. The cigar/pipe divide seems in part to have been a result of climate.

Stone pipes are found consistently in the Ohio burial mounds, which indicates that they must have had some special place in the lives of the people who made and used them. Although archaeologists haven’t yet understood their precise meaning, we can make an informed guess about how they may have been regarded. Here’s the view of the Native American historian Dr Gabrielle Tayac, curator of the National Museum of the American Indian:

There’s a whole cosmology and theology that goes with pipes. They carry with them all of the meanings of religious teachings. They are definitely considered to be living beings that should be treated as such, rather than as just objects, or even sacred objects, that come alive and come into their own power when the bowl is united with the stem. For example, if a pipe is made of the red pipestone, it’s considered to be the blood and bones of buffalo. There are rituals and initiations and tremendous responsibilities that go along with being a pipe-carrier in particular places.

We know that 2,000 years ago only select members of the community were buried in the mounds. Many of them must have played a key part in rituals, because fragments of ceremonial costumes have been found with the bodies – headdresses made from bear, wolf and deer skulls. The animal world seems to have had a central role in the spiritual life of these people – our otter pipe is just one of a whole pipe menagerie: there are bowls shaped like wild cats, turtles, toads, squirrels, birds, fishes and even birds eating fishes. Perhaps the animals on the pipes had a role in some kind of shamanic ritual connecting the physical and spiritual worlds. The tobacco smoked at the time was
Nicotiana rustica
, which produces a heightened state of awareness and has a hallucinogenic effect: given that he or she would be eyeball to eyeball with the creature sculpted on it, we can imagine the smoker entering into a kind of transcendent state in which the animal would come to life. Perhaps each animal served as a spirit guide or totem to the person smoking; certainly for later Native American peoples it’s known that they might dream of an animal whose spirit would then protect them throughout their life. Gabrielle Tayac comments:

Native people still use tobacco, it’s a very sacred item. The usage of tobacco smoke is a way of transforming prayer and thought and community expression. Pipes could either be smoked individually or passed around a community or a family, so that it’s a way of unifying the mind and then sending up the power of the mind into the vast Universe or to the creator or intercessors. When you talk about the ‘peace pipe’ at a treaty negotiation, that is more meaningful than to sign a document. It’s a way of sealing a deal not just legally but by giving a vow and confirming that to the larger Universe, so it’s not just between humans, it’s between humans and the greater powers that are there.

Even today among Native Americans, smoking can still be a spiritual act – the smoke rises and mingles, bearing unified prayers skywards, and as it does so it combines the hopes and wishes of the whole community.

Europeans discovered smoking very late, in the sixteenth century. For them, smoking tobacco quickly became less about religion than about relaxation – though it has to be said that from the outset there were critics. No modern government health warning can begin to match the verve of the great
Counterblaste to Tobacco
published by King
James 1 in 1604, just months after he had come from Edinburgh to succeed Queen Elizabeth. The newly arrived king denounced smoking as ‘A custome lothsome to the eye, hatefull to the Nose, harmefull to the braine, dangerous to the Lungs, and in the blacke stinking fume thereof, neerest resembling the horrible Stigian smoke of the pit that is bottomelesse.’

But very soon tobacco began its association with money. When the British colonized Virginia the emerging tobacco market in Europe rapidly became of prime economic importance – Bremen and Bristol, Glasgow and Dieppe all grew rich on American tobacco. As Europeans penetrated deeper into the continent in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries tobacco became an article of trade and currency in its own right. The European acquisition of tobacco and European pipe-smoking symbolize for many Native Americans the expropriation of their homeland by intruders.

From then on, in Europe and most of the world, smoking became an activity associated with pure pleasure, daily habit and considerable cool. For most of the twentieth century, film stars puffed away on screen while their cinema audiences admired them through answering clouds of smoke. Smoking was not only sophisticated: it was intellectual and meditative, and Sherlock Holmes famously described one particularly testing case as ‘quite a three-pipe problem’. There was of course also the intensely enjoyable personal engagement with the physical object. The famous pipeman and politician Tony Benn fondly recalls those days:

Stanley Baldwin smoked a pipe, Harold Wilson smoked a pipe – it was a very normal thing to do, and of course there is the pipe of peace, pipes associated with friendships and sitting round together, and so on. So they do have a meaning over and above the satisfaction of smoking. It’s a sort of hobby in a way – you scrape it and clean it and fill it and tap it and light it, it goes out and you light it again, and if you were asked a question at a meeting – not that you can smoke in meetings any more – you could light your pipe and say ‘that’s a very good question’ – it gives you a little bit of time to think of the answer. But I wouldn’t recommend anybody else to start smoking.

The overthrow of smoking in the Western world in the past thirty years has been an extraordinary revolution. In Hollywood movies now, only the ‘baddies’ smoke, and the audience not at all; anybody caught smoking would be hounded out of the cinema. James I would be delighted. As we saw with the Warren Cup, what societies deem allowable as pleasure is constantly and unpredictably negotiated.