Studenda Mira

Via Alun Salt's nifty Historyscape feed comes this LiveScience article about Rhakotis , a town on the site of what would later become Alexandria. Sediment cores from the harbor suggest that there was a "flourishing urban settlement" more than 700 years before Alexander marked out his city's limits. Archaeology is usually a grimy business, but the Smithsonian's Jean-Daniel Stanley says that getting these cores set a new standard in that regard: Collecting these samples underwater proved challenging. "Alexandria now is home to as many as 4 million people, and we were in the unfortunate position of having to deal with their discharge—human waste, municipal waste, industrial waste—which got released into the harbor," Stanley said. "It's not funny, but you have to sort of laugh." The Smithsonian's magazine ran a more extensive piece on this dig back in April. ETA: Apologies to David Meadows for inadvertently stealing the title of his ent...

Ruins of the Serapeum, Alexandria. Photo by Bernt Rostad . Serapis stood alone. The statue of Alexandria's patron god wore the same expression of divine detachment as it had for seven hundred years, with a grain measure balanced on his head to symbolize his blessings of plenty upon his city. But the people assembled before him now were not his followers. They were gone, fled or hidden after the imperial herald read a pronouncement from the Emperor Theodosius: The Hellenes, as the Christians called anyone who followed the old gods, would receive amnesty for their role in the bloody siege that had paralyzed "the crown of all cities" for weeks, but their cult was now illegal. Serapis had become deus non gratis in his own city, and this was his reckoning. As his followers scattered, the soldiers had marched confidently into the massive temple, but now they paused. Declaring a cult illegal and driving off its adherents was one thing. Raising arms against a god ...

There is news from India today on continued archaeological efforts to identify the site of the ancient Indian city of Muziris, one of the most important ports for trade between India and Rome. Traders from Alexandria and the rest of Roman Egypt would wait until July to set out for India. Under typical conditions, it was a two month journey, but departing any sooner would place a ship off India's southwest coast during the most dangerous sailing conditions of the year—even modern maritime insurers are reluctant to offer summer coverage in the area. For the wealthy, high-powered Alexandrian merchants who could afford to underwrite such expensive voyages, the payoff was enormous. Arriving in India in September and leaving in December, the traders would ride home on the winds of the northeast monsoon, hulls packed with incense, myrrh, ivory, spices, silk, wild animals, pearls, and other luxuries of the Far East. After they docked at the Red Sea ports of Berenice or Myos Hormos, cara...