FASHION TIPS FOR ARCHAEOLOGISTS No. 10

HIDEY HOLES / CONCEALING ANTIQUITIES


Many years heretofore, when I was a dewy cheeked student of archaeology, the importance of keeping a furtive compartment within ones nethergarments was often impressed on me by my doting mentors. Such pockets of concealment were seen as imperative should one be desirous of smuggling a choice antiquity (or two) out of foreign lands to help swell the national cachet of purloined overseas goodies.

Although Doctor Franc Myles is now no more than a withered prune on the swelling heap of coffin-dodging archaeologists, his own underclothes were, at one time, seen as a textbook example of what an educated gentleman's kegs should look like. To this day Doctor Myles still has a strapping bruise across both buttocks from the legendary smuggling shelf he installed in his nylon Y-fronts. See fig.1 above. He still gamely displays this bruise as a party piece. (To rapturous applause - it might be added.)

The trade in smuggled antiquities was (and this is a fact attested by several friends of friends of mine) initiated by impecunious Egyptians in the late 1700s. These shameless cads came in their busloads to Ireland and began remorselessly thieving precious monuments from the Emerald Isle. Our limited resources were plundered as the Cairo Museum bloated itself with crannogs, stone circles and passage tombs. Part of this nefarious trade involved taking log boats and grinding them up as an aphrodisiac for impotent potentates - see fig. 3.

At this point the British Government (always a stalwart supporter of Irish Nationalist Interests) stepped in and decided it was time to show Egpyt a thing or two about misappropriation. So in 1910 the legendary antiquities 'mule' Mike the Museum Cat, was dispatched to Aswan (at the behest of no less a man than E.A. Wallis Budge) where he began smuggling 'sugar' back to Blighty in his own body cavity. 

Mike's reign of terror among Egyptian customs officials was however, cut short in 1929 when Budge stuffed him with a Mummy case not realising it was of the rare 'Cairo' variety (see fig. 5) and the case accidentally sprang open renting poor Mike asunder. Mike's pelt is, to this day, still proudly displayed at the entrance to the British Museum (albeit as a doormat.)

Today, such unfortunate internal eruptions are no longer to be feared among artefact 'mules' thanks to cutting edge 'Shrinky Sphinx' technology: The artefact to be filched simply has all the ego driven theories (stuffed into it by pompous archaeologists) freeze dried out. This reduces the object to a conceptually small size and it can be downed easily with a gallon of fig syrup. Speaking of figs, see fig. 6.

To finish, seeing as we are already in Northern African climes, a few words about Gordon of Khartoum. Quite a chap, wrote frequent vitriolic dispatches to the British newspapers regarding the Egyptian withdrawal from the Sudan, indeed, when one thinks about it, it could be suggested he was a Victorian Era Blogger!

And the name he gave to his ill-judged, malicious, jaundiced, badly structured, smug dispatches?

You know for a second there I thought this blog was never going to end.

TOODLES!