Published Catalogue Text: Ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern Bronzes at the Harvard Art Museums
The bell’s wall gently tapers from a flat circular base to a dome offset by a step. Above the unfinished or more heavily corroded surface of the dome sits a kind of cap made from a thin sheet of metal. The large clapper consists of a solid cast head of a duck or swan. A bronze wire runs through a hole in the beak, forming a loop, and continuing through a hole at the top of the bell and through the sheet metal cap, where it ends in a knob.
The dome shape is not unusual and is found from early Urartian to later Roman bells, although in the Roman period it becomes rarer (1). Unique are the clapper and its method of attachment through an added “cap,” which was clearly an afterthought or quite possibly a later repair or amalgamation. The bird’s head clapper, too, most likely is a re-used part of another bronze implement. In its present state without a handle, there is no way to ring the bell. The handle might once have been attached separately, although there are no clear traces of it.
Bells (Greek: kodon; Latin: tintinnabulum) have been used by many cultures since antiquity, including in the first millennium BCE Near East and the Greek and Roman world (2). Usually made of cast copper alloy with an iron clapper, there are also examples in silver and gold (Persian, Greek, Roman, and Egyptian), iron (Roman), terracotta (Greek, Babylonian, and Egyptian), or faience (Egyptian); the latter was probably mostly symbolic rather than functional. For modern copper alloy bells, a ratio of c. 78% copper and 22% tin is considered ideal, but ancient bells usually contain less tin and more lead (3). Ancient bells functioned as signal instruments, but their sound could also have symbolic meaning. Roman bells are attested as announcing the opening of markets and baths and the spraying of streets with water; they awakened and summoned slaves, were worn by horses and other animals, functioned as apotropaic and fertility-related amulets, and played a role in Dionysiac cults especially (4).
NOTES:
1. N. Spear, jr., A Treasury of Archaeological Bells (New York, 1978) 110-11, fig. 118; A. Villing, “For Whom Did the Bell Toll in Ancient Greece? Archaic and Classical Greek Bells at Sparta and Beyond,” Annual of the British School at Athens 97 (2002): 223-95.
2. On the history of ancient bells and their uses, see Villing 2002 (supra 1); M. Trumpf-Lyritzaki, “Glocke,” Reallexikon für Antike und Christentum 11 (Stuttgart, 1981) 164-96; Spear 1978 (supra 1); M. Schatkin, “Idiophones of the Ancient World,” Jahrbuch für Antike und Christentum 21 (1978): 147-72; and P. Calmeyer, “Glocke,” Reallexikon der Assyriologie 3 (Berlin, 1969) 427-31.
3. For comparative analyses, see H. Drescher, “Rekonstruktionen und Versuche zu frühen Zimbeln und kleinen antiken Glocken,” Saalburg-Jahrbuch 49 (1998): 155-70; K. Bakay, Scythian Rattles in the Carpathian Basin and their Eastern Connections (Budapest, 1971) 93-96; and J. Riederer, “Die Bedeutung der Metallanalyse für die Archäologie,” in Antidoron: Festschrift für Jürgen Thimme (Karlsruhe, 1983) 159-64, esp. 160.
4. See references supra 2, as well as A. Villing, “Glocke,” Thesaurus Cultus et Rituum Antiquorum 5 (Los Angeles, 2005) 379-81; A. R. Furger and C. Schneider, “Die Bronzeglocke aus der Exedra des Tempelareals Sichelen 1,” Jahresberichte aus Augst und Kaiseraugst 14 (1993): 159-72, esp. 166-71; W. Nowakowski, “Metallglocken aus der römischen Kaiserzeit im europäischen Barbarikum,” Archaeologia Polona 27 (1988): 69-146, esp. 82-83 and 133-34; and V. Galliazzo, Bronzi romani del Museo civico di Treviso (Rome, 1979) 156-58.
Alexandra C. Villing
