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Let’s play.

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Because I want you to, that’s why.

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I know the easy joke would be my husband! but while his years are steadily advancing… he’s not nearly as old as this fascinating carved crystal oddity passed down from my father.

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It’s a bit of a weirdo and though we’ve tried repeatedly over the years, we’ve never been able to positively identify it.

Heck, we even took it to Sotheby’s in NYC a decade ago and if their experts were stumped? It may just have to remain a mystery.

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My paternal grandfather was a world traveler in the late 1800’s and brought this back from Egypt. It hung in my grandparent’s house, my parent’s house and now it hangs in mine. The family lore said it was ancient Egyptian but Sothebys said no, the skull was not used iconographically back then. They did think it could be early Coptic, and as they are the direct descendants… I suppose that’s close enough.

( Historical context. Copts believe themselves to be the descendants of Egypt’s ancient Pharaonic people. They were first converted to Christianity with the arrival of St Mark in Egypt in 62 CE. Egypt became part of the Byzantine Empire in 395 CE, and the Egyptian Church was separated from the Christian community in 451. )

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The famous auction house said the metal work was added later and in its present form could have been used as a talisman for pirates.

How cool is that?

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We never even bothered to ask what it was worth… which in hindsight was rather stupid. But no matter, it’s part of my father’s history and would never be for sale.

So how about you….

What’s the oldest thing in your house?

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30 thoughts on “Let’s play.”

  1. I don’t know what the oldest of my many old things is, but the oldest-LOOKING thing is a pair of shoes that look like they’re falling apart (because they are) — I can’t bear to part with them because they’re so comfy, though they will probably force the issue eventually (unless I can come up with something that holds them together better than tape and rubber bands).

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  2. Me? Close, but no, the oldest things in our house are some textbooks from my partner’s grandfather’s school days. Published in the later 1800s, circa 1870, I read them once thinking they would have some cool stuff in them. Boring as old paint! Poorly written, containing “facts” that are now disproved, they challenged my sense of what a person would have needed to learn to survive in those days. Some fool’s pretence at being “learned”! (Two syllables.) I can see some pompous ass sitting in a bar spouting this garbage, drunk to the gills, making like he knows everything worth knowing in the world. (Think Trump, the stable genius!)

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    2. I lied, but not intentionally. While doing a meditatoon on evolution, I encountered one cell in my brain, which yes, it renews itself every 7 or so years. but it has the memory of being in direct line from a cell that lived in the primordial “Soup of Life” which existed on Earth some 4.5 billion years ago. This cell just popped up again, saying “Don’t forget about me! I’m still here, and I’m not going anywhere!” So, being that I am in my house, and the cell is inside me, and that memory is inside that cell, i have to say it is the oldest thing in my house. You probably have one or two in your house too, being that it is part of a DNA cell, and I suspect every living thing has such a cell, if it is not indeed the cell itself as created by mitossis, the splitting of one cell into two exactly identicsl cells, and doing this every 7 or so years ever since, an ancestral line reaching back 642,857,714 lifetimes, give or take a few 100,000.

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  3. That’s impressive. I don’t have anything even nearly that old. I’ve got some old-ish coins and a couple Minie balls that are in the running, There’s also a Russian silver box that holds bits and pieces of my past. It once belonged to Cathy’s grandfather. After he passed away I had to be a bit more assertive than is my custom to keep Cathy’s father from selling it on eBay.

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  6. I have a Trifari brooch my mom bought at the age of 17 (1960) while she worked at a pharmacy/coffee shop. She passed it on to me a long time ago, but being so young and not that interested in heirlooms I put it in a box and left it there. That is until a couple of years ago when I began cataloging my vintage jewelry collection and rediscovered said brooch. It’s costume jewelry but it’s sentimental value is priceless.

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  7. The crystal oddity is a great conversation starter, if nothing else!

    I was going to say there’s a container of leftovers in the back of the fridge that might actually predate the house, but I’ll save that one for my standup routine. I guess I’d say a couple of painted rocks? They could be a million years old for all I know.

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  9. WHOA. That is really cool.

     I think it’s a glass pitcher passed down from my grandfather. I mentioned this pitcher in another comment section and promised the blogger that I would write about it. This must be a sign that I ought to write about it. 🤣

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