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Showing posts from February, 2007

Open House

Two rooms in the House of Augustus on the Palatine Hill will be reopened to the public later this year, acccording to this tourism story . Of course, if you talk to the right people, you can get in right now . The Italy Magazine piece says the site is being "reopened" for the first time since 1961, but if that's accurate, the first opening must have been a very limited engagement. Time Magazine's online archive includes a 1961 story on the discovery and original excavations .

Maxentius's treasure revealed

Artifacts from the recent find of Maxentius's treasure hoard went on display today at the National Roman Museum in Rome.

"600 years of godless, inhuman behavior?"

This is premiering on the History Channel next weekend. So much for the mostly-benign Christian metamorphoses of Late Antiquity, huh?

Desert flower

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Ruins of Palmyra Photo courtesy of Hovic . Palmyra had never really wanted or needed to be part of anyone's empire. Located on the largest oasis in the Syrian desert, it had been inhabited by Bedouins and similar nomadic peoples since before 1000 B.C.. Its position near the western end of the Silk Road provided access to all the best trade routes to Persia, India and the Far East, and local families did a brisk business in outfitting caravans for the perilous journey. This specialization came in handy in 41 B.C., when Mark Antony, learning of Palmyra's wealth, tried to raid the city. The Palmyrans got wind of his approach, and easily spirited their treasure across the Euphrates until the danger passed. Palmyra improbably persisted as an quasi-independent state on the border between two mutually antagonistic superpowers. But the city's situation remained precarious. In A.D. 18, an envoy from the Emperor Tiberius arrived, probably to make the usual imperial offe

Deva redux

Mary Beard has some additional observations on the Chester amphitheatre buzz, and I found myself nodding to this excerpt: "But my main argument was that historians and archaeologists, as well as journalists, have wildly over-estimated the importance of gladiators in the ancient world. It’s us who is obsessed with the arena, not (so much) the Romans...The inhabitants of Roman Chester would have been lucky to see a handful of B team gladiators twice a year. The more interesting question for us is what went on in these amphitheatres on the other 360 or so days." I think this rings true, but on the other hand, we wouldn't make such a big deal of the Super Bowl (the annual American football championship game) if it were held on a monthly basis. Infrequency doesn't translate to a lack of interest, and it may have had the exact opposite effect, ensuring that the place was packed to the rafters with excited fans when those poor B-team gladiators filed in. ETA : Tony Keen co

Belisarius's last command

By the final years of Justinian's reign, the heady era of Belisarius's western reconquests was only a memory. In 542, a devastating plague—very likely an earlier strain of Y. pestis , the bacterium behind the medieval Black Death—swept through the East and killed a third or more of the population. It took the economic and military stuffing out of the Empire, forcing it to buy an expensive peace from the Sassanid king Khosro I in 545 and leaving it unable to check the ravages of the nascent Slavs and Bulgars in the Balkans. Constantinople was on the defensive. The emperor himself hadn't been the same since his wife Theodora had died, probably from ovarian cancer, in 548. Without the counsel and support of the woman who had convinced him not to abandon his throne during the Nika riots in 532, Justinian showed little interest in governing his shrinking, increasingly destitute empire. He instead preoccupied himself with the theological disputes for which Byzantium would be

Sassanids in New York

Late Rome's great nemesis, Sassanian Persia, tends to get overlooked in favor of its Achaemenid and Parthian predecessors. The Asia Society is giving them some time in the spotlight with their new exhibit, "Glass, Gilding, and Grand Design: Art of Sasanian Iran (224–642)." The New York Sun has a review up. The New York Times review is better but, of course, requires a login. ETA : Additional coverage with pretty pictures over at PhDiva .

Seating for 10,000 and free parking to boot

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The Roman amphitheatre in Deva (modern Chester, England), constructed in the late first century, was the largest amphitheatre (that we know of) in Roman Britain. It may have been used for as little as 20 years before being converted into a municipal trash pit, then enjoyed a renovation and brief period of reuse in the late third century. Local amateur historians have entertained the idea that the site hosted gladiatorial combat, but this morning, the Telegraph reports official confirmation of that purpose from the archaeological team that's been digging up the site for the past couple of years. I was fortunate enough to be able to visit the site last summer, and I took the photos below. Please compare them with the artist's conception in the Telegraph story; it's a good study in the kind of imagination one needs to use when visiting some of these sites.

Remnants of Carrhae in western China

In 1955, Homer Dubs, a professor of Chinese at Oxford, posited the idea that in 36 BC, Han China installed about 145 Roman mercenaries—recaptured remnants of the forces defeated by the Parthians at the Battle of Carrhae in 53—at the frontier town of Liqian, in what is today China's Gansu province. For years, the only "evidence" for Dubs's theory was the continued persistence of oddly Western features in the local population. Then, in 2003, a 5' 11" male skeleton with straight teeth and long lower limbs—i.e., not a local—was found in a 2,000 year old tomb near ancient Liqian. Fox News reports that scientists have now taken blood samples from 93 people in an attempt to substantiate their Roman genetic heritage. Professor Xie Xiaodong, a Lanzhou University geneticist, was appropriately cautious about his description of the exercise when he was quoted in the Sydney Morning Herald: "Even if they are descendants of the Roman Empire, it doesn't mean they

March of progress

Last weekend's Wall Street Journal had a piece about the recent truce between Rome's subway operator, Roma Metropolitane SpA, and the city's preservation office. Metro wants to provide subway service to the tourist-clogged old city, but in most of that district, you can't plant a sapling without hitting a piece of antiquity with your spade. In the past, city planners got things done by trying to hide projects from the archaeological community until it was too late to do anything about it. In the most egregious example, under Mussolini, builders of a canal alongside the ruins of the Forum trucked out their excavated dirt, artifacts and all, without pausing to examine any of it. Then they clipped a corner off the foundation of the Colosseum. Work continued uninterrupted. When city preservationists asserted themselves in the 1950s, the result was gridlock. When construction of the Metro A line began in 1962, it ran smack into the Baths of Diocletian (much of which we

Neato stuff roundup

Maxentius, the Roman usurper primarily known for his defeat at the hands of Constantine (another usurper) in 312, hid his treasure on the Palatine Hill before heading off to the fateful battle at the Milvian Bridge. This week, archaeologists announced that they've found it . *** Lars Brownworth's lectures on Byzantine history are free on iTunes, and are apparently quite good. So far, I've only listened to the introductory episode, but he has an appealing mixture of familiarity, enthusiasm and humility which I appreciate. *** The thousand-year-old library of the Abbey of St. Gall is being digitized and put online for free . I don't have the expertise to appreciate the full significance of the material available there, but the fact that it's now available for blokes like me to closely examine—no cotton gloves, academic credentials or letters of recommendation necessary—is really exciting. (Lifted from Gypsy Scholar )