This striking item is all that survives of the fabled Bone Bell of ancient Mesopotamia. The bell itself would not have been bone, of course, only this jawless human skull purportedly used as the clapper.
Lift the skull and you will get a feel for both its age and its weight, filled as it is with the same green-tinged bronze that would have made up the shaft, poured in through the unknown donor’s eye sockets presumably after death.
What little we know of the Bone Bell now comes to us from Sumerian myth. Housed high in a hilltop shrine, it was said to summon the workers of the netherworld across endless grey fields to pay tribute. Imagine, if you can, a life spent looking towards this future: to toil in twilight and end each day in procession beneath the terrible bell, there to offer memory as sacrifice. How else to endure the hundred thousand days of purgatory?
Where this piece of history you hold in your hand was used in the corporeal world, we no longer know. Even filled and sealed with bronze, it would have been too fragile for its alleged purpose. It was likely fashioned by the high-ranking devout to help control the common folk, encouraging a life lived piously before the inescapable descent into what would come next.
Leigh Loveday (he/him) grew up in industrial south Wales and now lives in the English Midlands, editing videogame blurb by day and writing fiction aggressively slowly by night. Find him clinging to the dry husk of Twitter/X @MrLovelyday.