Museum finds 8-inch ancient Roman bone penis in unopened box
You probably have boxes full of things you never unpacked from your last move. But I’m willing to bet that one of those boxes doesn’t contain an ancient Roman penis carved from bone.
Seam Popular Science reports, that’s a claim a Dutch museum can make: The Valkhof Museum in Nijmegen recently found one such eight-inch-long ancient carved penis while cataloging the roughly 16,000 unopened boxes of artifacts collected over the past 70 years. So far, they’ve only opened about 300 of these boxes, and they already seem to have won the grand prize for the ancient Roman bone penis.
The penis itself dates back around 1800 to 2000 years, to the time when present-day Nijmegen in the Netherlands was called Noviomagus. This city was a central Roman military hub near the northern edge of the empire. If you know anything about ancient Roman history, you’ll know that the discovery of a giant carved phallus isn’t exactly out of the norm. What is slightly unusual is the material it is carved from.
Museum opens old box, finds ancient Roman bone penis inside
Ancient Romans loved to carve phallic symbols out of stone, metal, and sometimes wood, but this bone penis is a major discovery not just because it’s hysterical, but because it’s the first known example of a phallic symbol carved from bone, likely sourced from local livestock such as cattle or goats.
A penis cut was not an obscenity in Roman culture. It was a symbol of protection, fertility and luck, which is why doorways were adorned with carved penises, and why some people wore penis-shaped amulets to ward off the dreaded “evil eye”. What elicits giggles today was once a sacred symbol with deep spiritual meaning.
Bone penises aren’t all they’ve found in those boxes. The researchers found tons of ancient pottery, including an ancient drinking cup known as a “face cup,” so-called because it had a human face scrawled on it.
All told, both penis and pottery tell a story of a sprawling civilization whose reach was not just geographical, but worm-eaten deep into cultures far beyond its origins. Ancient Romans carved spiritually meaningful penises out of a set of preferred materials, so of course parts of Roman civilization far beyond its reach did the same with whatever they could get their hands on, even as far away as the Netherlands.
The museum still has over 15,000 boxes open, so who knows which troves are still left to uncover and how many penises are left to unpack.
