This object known as the Beatitudes casket
comes from the royal monastery of San Isidoro in Leon.
It was one of six that was brought here to form the new
Archeological Museum in 1869.
This object is well known because of its
iconography, which shows on three of the sides,
the Beatitudes that come from the Gospel of Matthew.
That is the blessed be the poor, for they will inherit the kingdom.
These symbols that we can recognize from the late 11th century
have been studied by many scholars, including Julie Harris,
who looked at them to identify the period that they were made
from, probably around 1080 because of the moment
when they switched from the Hispanic liturgy, became the Roman
Right.
John Williams and Angela Franco have studied the style of these figures,
and they also place them in the late 11th century.
The inscriptions
perhaps indicate
a slightly later moment, but really the 11th century is a nice
round period that we can identify them with.
They were once, as I said, in the treasury of San Isidoro de Leon.
And this object is useful because it exemplifies the way medieval
works of art change over time, according to their owners.
So from these three sites that include some of the Beatitudes,
the fourth side of the casket is what gives us a surprise.
When we look at that fourth side, we see not the completion
of the Beatitudes,
but rather different fragments with Arabic inscriptions.
Now, because of those fragments and because we are missing,
some of the Beatitudes, scholars have long recognized
that this cannot be the original, configuration of the box.
But it hasn't been so clear of how exactly it came together.
My team studied it both from the perspective
of thinking about the iconography, thinking about the inscriptions,
using the help of Maria Antonia Martínez
Nuñez to be able to read some of those Arabic inscriptions.
As you will see, they proceed from two different boxes
that have been broken up and then reused to form that fourth side.
One includes a named figure, Ismael, son of Al-Mamun,
he of the two glories, is what it reads in Arabic.
And we can identify this as Al-Mamun,
the ruler of Toledo from 1043 to 1075.
Therefore, we've got a nice firm date around the middle
of the 11th century for some of those pieces.
And also because we can recognize this
figural style of the animals as coming from the Cuenca workshop,
we can really situate that neatly in the second half of the 11th century.
The other four fragments are not so clear.
And in fact, it had been thought that this was pseudo Arabic, a sort of
pseudo-Kufic, decorative script that didn't mean anything
until María Antonia Martínez Nuñez started to study them.
What she has been able to read are just a few words that say
happiness, glory and is a gift to the owner.
So this is a generic box, one that would not be made
for an individual, but still for the very elite. With being able
to identify both the Christians side and the Islamic side
with the second half of the 11th century,
when my team began to study this box, we thought that
it must have been put together probably at about that time.
But we decided to do carbon 14 testing on the wooden frame
to see if we could narrow it down a bit.
We guessed that it would either be dated to the 11th century
when the ivories are from, or the 19th century
when the box arrived at the museum.
However, to our great surprise, what we discovered is that the wooden
core has a 95% probability of dating from the 14th century.
Now, this is what is exciting about doing research, but also terrible.
We didn't expect it at all,
and now it required us to do additional archival research
to see if we could figure out what was happening at San Isidoro
in the 14th century that led them to make this box.
What we discovered was an inventory
from 1331 of all of the relics
and all of the indulgences of the monastery.
The canons of San Isidoro put this together
because they needed funds.
They had to reconstruct part of their building,
and so they did an inventory of all of the relics of saints
that they had,
and all of the indulgences that is pardons
in order to ask for funds from people.
And we have a clear request
asking for funds for building or for laborers
to work on construction that comes from the 14th century.
So our idea about this box then, is that
San Isidoro had preserved these broken
fragments of beautiful ivory for two centuries
and then when they needed to make a public display
and a request for funding, they put all of them together
using the material as their main meaning.
As you will see,
the Arabic inscriptions are upside down and sideways and backwards.
But they weren't thinking about legibility.
They were thinking about the beauty and the glory of ivory
to make this box come together in the 14th century.
The document that San Isidro
sent out into the world said: To all the faithful of God,
whether clerics or knights and good men and good
ladies of whatever places in which this letter might be seen,
we order
that all those men and those women who joined this confraternity
and given an amount for construction work or for a laborer,
we will receive them as siblings in this confraternity.