This object, now in a musuem in Harare, Zumabwe, dates from 1300. Purely indigenous drum? Replica of the Ark of the Covenant? The ways we attach meaning to ancient objects tells us far more about the present than about the past.
This small bronze figure comes from 5th-century BCE Sparta, when the Ancient Greek polis was at the height of its power. Contemporaries and later Ancients…