Atenociticus at the Hancock, Great North Museum, Newcastle!

Hello and a Happy Thursday to you!

I was so delighted around a week ago when I left Aberdeenshire to drive down to Malton, East Yorkshire, to be a participant at the Malton Roman Festival 2024. It was going to be an exciting new venue for me but there was something else I'd planned to do before reaching Malton. 

During the last few years, I'd tried a number of times to fit in a visit to the Hancock, Great North Museum in Newcastle, but was unsuccessful. The Covid lockdown in 2020 was just one reason that an overnight stay in Newcastle was abandoned but since I had intended to drive all the way to the Roman Festival in Malton, stopping for a night in Newcastle was very doable.

I've been to Newcastle before, though not for decades, but time was tight for exploring more of the city centre on this visit. Since the distance to Newcastle from my home is more than 260 miles, it takes a chunk of the day just to arrive there. I'm so delighted that 'Mrs. Google Maps' is very efficient, she got me right to my hotel which was about a 40 minute walk from the museum. I knew that I'd not have time on arrival on the Friday to visit but I spent a wonderful 3 + hours on the Saturday before I headed on south to Malton.

Atenociticus -Benwell Fort

Why was I so keen to visit Hancock Great North museum?

More than a decade ago I saw an image in a research book that caught my attention. It was the image of a native god, thought to have been worshipped around the Benwell Fort (Hadrian's Wall) area and a god which was 'adopted' by some of the Roman soldiers who were stationed along the wall. When I first set eyes on it I was enraptured - it is just so different somehow from the typical Roman or Greek god images. There is also the fact that it is so well executed, unlike some other representations of native gods which are relatively crudely made. 

I knew that the head of Atenociticus was part of the Hancock museum collections of items found along Hadrian's Wall forts and had to see it right there in front of me! It's actually larger than I thought it would be and would love to see an interpretation of what the complete figure may have been like. (some body parts have been found )

The whole collection on show in the Hadrian's Wall exhibition area is absolutely stunning and I especially love the way they have positioned a number of funerary stones together in a display which shows how they might have originally been painted. The concept of the stones being highly coloured is one that I find quite breathtaking. I first read of this some years ago and was enthralled. I adore  looking at some of the 3D imagery videos of places like Ancient Rome in all its coloured glory.

I think that the native Britons who first encountered painted altar stones, or other coloured epigraphy, must have been quite daunted by the sights. To live and worship Celtic gods who generally 'had no face' believing that their gods inhabited the earth, and the trees and the foliage, would have meant natives may have been quite stunned by painted god images.

I'd love to know when the god worship of the Atenociticus figure first began. Was he a god figure that had been revered by the local tribes for centuries, but till the Roman invasions of AD 71 had had 'no face'? Could it have been seeing statues of Roman gods that gave a gifted local stone mason the courage and ingenuity to create his own god image of Atenociticus? And was that image then seen as a powerful inspiration for the units at Benwell fort? And...was the god Atenociticus figure ever painted?

I'm so glad I've seen Atenociticus in person but I'm also delighted to have experienced the whole Hancock Great North Museum, though I did focus almost entirely on the Roman collections.

If you love museums, I definitely recommend a visit to Hancock Great North Museum. An additional bonus is that it's FREE though giving a donation, as I did, is advisable to show appreciation of the availability of seeing the wonderful collection. 

My next post will be about my visit to...Malton.

Till then...happy reading!

Slainte!