Naughty Pottery

Sunday, October 21, 2007

10 comments
Naughty Pottery
I took a couple friends to Petra this last week (my 15th trip) and was hiking off the beaten path when I happened upon a Bedouin lady and her table of wares. I was about to pass without a glance, as usual, when a certain piece of pottery – an oil lamp with a design of questionable nature – caught my eye.

This was one of those train wreck/car accident moments. You know, the ones where you are passing by and you can't help but gawk. I did a double take to make sure and, yup, there on the lamp was a naked couple...ahem...getting busy.

I decided that such a thing was so bizarre, I needed to take a picture of it; otherwise my friends would never believe it. But wouldn't you know it, this was the first trip to Petra (out of 15) where I had left my camera in the car. This artifact was too good to pass up, however, so what else was a guy to do but haggle for the best price.

As I walked away with my newly-purchased treasure, I imagined the scenario in which such a piece might be manufactured. Perhaps pottery lamps were the Nabatean voyeuristic equivalent to You Tube. So say a Nabatean young couple goes to the market to buy oil lamps when suddenly...

WOMAN: "Ooo...this one is nice. Wh...wait a minute! Look at the figures on this lamp. Do they look familiar?"

MAN: "Hey! That's us! What the heck?"

SHOP KEEPER: "Perhaps next time you should close the curtains of your cave windows before you decide to get frisky."

Then again, I may have just purchased an oil lamp with a Nabatean couple playing leap frog.

In the buff.

10 Comments:

Blogger Bridget said...

WOW! That is extremely bizarre.

I think the best part of the story is where you had to buy it to get a picture of it.

10/21/2007 4:55 PM  
Blogger Madi said...

I like the idea of YouTube hehe

but what's up with censoring dude?

10/21/2007 7:35 PM  
Blogger mm said...

LOL you censored the photo. and Dave, why is it when i entered your site today a window popped up that said "enter user name and password for "Restricted Area" at http://jordanpulse.com" ?

10/22/2007 4:11 AM  
Blogger Dave said...

Jad and MM, the censoring is to not offend those who don't want to view explicit pottery intercourse. If you would like a non-censored copy, send me and e-mail and I will happily send you one.

And MM, the Jordan Pulse thing comes from an embedded Flash object that I leeched from Jordan Pulse. I'll fix that shortly. Until then, just hit 'cancel' when the box pops up.

10/22/2007 6:24 AM  
Blogger Dave said...

Rather than having a bunch of people asking me for the uncensored version, I figured I would just make it available online. Here you go.

10/22/2007 6:32 AM  
Blogger eyad said...

lol, thats funny

10/22/2007 7:59 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

That is strange ... any idea how old the piece is? is it real? are these people allowed to sell authentic pieces like that? what is the role of the tourism ministry here?

sorry for the many questions, but I found the whole idea really amusing :)

Thanks for sharing

10/22/2007 1:49 PM  
Blogger Dave said...

Khalida, I have an archaeologist friend who could probably confirm its authenticity (and age, if applicable). Anyway, it was too good to pass up, so even if it is a fake, it was worth every dinar.

10/22/2007 3:53 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I think that i would like a oil lamp with a naked portrait of me found 2000 years from now. and i would have the guy who makes it draw me making love to a my computer in a very lewd manner, you know just to confuse the future archaeologists, they'll be like: man, those ancient Jordanians sure loved their primal technology!

10/24/2007 8:09 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

It looks like an animal next to the man.

12/04/2007 8:45 AM  

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