Footnotes in history: Three overlooked treasures in the National Museum of Scotland

Outside the British Museum there are very few places where a greater number of treasures are packed into less space and millions have now come face to face with cultural icons like Dolly the Sheep, as well as more recent additions like the Viking-age St Ninian’s Isle treasure.

But museums are like people. Meet them once and you’ll only have the slightest sense of what sits beneath the surface – the true depth of their character is something you can only find with time.

Some of the most fascinating stories within the NMS are contained within objects most people pass by or don’t even think to visit, fragmentary legacies of lost worlds. This is a selection of just a few of them.

The Deskford carnyx

1. The Skara Brae necklace

The best part of 5000 years ago, someone in the Neolithic village of Skara Brae in Orkney wore their new necklace for the first time. At that stage in prehistory the pyramids of Giza had yet to be built and the concept of farming had only crossed to the British Isles a millennium earlier. That person lived at a time when Orkney was one of the cultural centres of Scotland and perhaps even Europe, with great stone circles being raised and evidence of vast trade networks crossing the North Sea.

The necklace itself is a symbol of one person’s power within that society, made up of 26 beads of painstakingly drilled bone and ivory and two tusk pendants.

It’s a remarkable survivor from an age where almost all evidence of human occupation beyond stone tools either decomposed or was washed away by rain and the sea – and it survives because Skara Brae was seemingly buried suddenly by a sandstorm around 2500 BC. That, and the fact that for want of trees in Orkney the villagers made their walls and furniture from stone, kept the necklace locked in a time capsule until the day it was found.

Metal stamp of Provincialis

In the 50 centuries since, jewellery has served exactly the same purpose: to reflect the character of its owner and their role in society. Skara Brae’s necklace of bones and tusks was no different and it provides a small window into how one individual, all that time ago, wanted to be seen.

2. The Deskford carnyx

The haunting sound of the carnyx, the musical instrument favoured by Celtic warlords, must have terrified many a Roman soldier as they marched through Gaul and Britain. Half trumpet and half animal cry, carnyxes were prized objects in Iron Age Europe and extraordinary workmanship went into crafting them as shining bronze animal heads with staring eyes. Despite their renown – Roman writers described their effect in battle – very few have survived, which makes the Deskford carnyx all the more special.

Pulled from a Banffshire peat bog in 1816 by a ditch digger, it is crafted as a stylised boar’s head with a tongue designed to move as the instrument was played. Mounted on a pole up to seven feet long, it would have been both a visual and auditory display of intimidation.

The Skara Brae necklace

Today the Deskford carnyx sits on the lower ground floor gallery of the NMS, having passed through numerous owners since its initial discovery, and it is now thought that it may have been left in the bog as part of a long tradition of offerings to the gods. It’s easy to see why they would have wanted it.

3. Stamp of Provincialis, freedman of Tertullus

Most of the people who populate history are anonymous. They leave traces, clues about their lives, but it’s rare that the names of ordinary people survive down the centuries. Provincialis, then, is one of a few.

Long ago in Roman Britain, he commissioned this stamp with his name on it to signify his property. We don’t know what it was applied to, whether objects, animals or people – but Provincialis must have felt a stronger need than most to mark out that he was the property-owning type. The stamp says that he was the freedman, or ex-slave, of Tertullus, who would now have been his patron and potentially his employer.

There's more to the NMS than meets the eye.

Provincialis knew what it was like to be property and to be unable to have his own, and so the day he had this stamp made must have mattered. It tells us a great deal about the relationship between masters and their former slaves two thousand years ago, but Provincialis’ stamp does more than that. It gives us an insight into who he was and what he considered his place in the world to be.