Now all the rounding up has been done and the website is up and running. On the site you will find a lovely photo gallery of the pups up for adoption (with the ones already adopted marked as such). They all have adorable Pompeiian names.

The best part of the site, though, is the backstory written by one Stella Pende for each dog. They tie each dog in to the city of Pompeii and its mythology. The anthropomorphic characterization is gloriously lurid at times.

Meet Polibia:

In the quarter of the ancient baths at Pompeii, where I roam freely, they call me Polibia. I am two years old and like each respectable member of my family, I am a freed-slave and when possible I choose this humid warmth area that gives body to my fur and soothe my poor tired paws. My doggy friends at Pompeii say that I am magic because, suddenly one morning, my tail awoke with a white wisp, but they don’t know the truth. One night at the bath I was immersed in the warmth of the pool, when, Apollo the Beautiful, revealed himself showing his muscles and vigour on the purple glitter coach, wrapped in a cloud of smoke. But he was also very annoyed to find a hairy freed-slave in his favourite waters. So, furious, he caught me by the tail and threw me out of the bath and this divine touch lightened my tail tip.

Mythological backstory animal abuse! Damn you, muscular and vigorous Apollo. Damn you and the purple glitter coach wrapped in a cloud of smoke you rode in on.

Sadly only the first page of the dog stories is translated into English. The rest of them are just as fabulous, so fire up Google Translate and go to town.

If you’re in Europe and/or able to get to Italy in person, you can apply to adopt one of these historic honies. The requirements and forms you need are on this page. If I could, I would snap them all up myself.

I missed the first challenge because I got all freaked out under pressure and went completely blank, so I’m hoping I can squeak in just under the deadline for The Most Important Ancient Site in London challenge.

For my most important ancient site in London I choose (drumroll please) Drapers Gardens. This soggy patch of land on Throgmorton Avenue had the great fortune of being deemed basically undevelopable until 1967, when the Drapers Company decided to build an office tower on their garden space.

When the eponymous skyscraper was demolished in 2007 in preparation for a new building to be erected on the spot, an archaeological survey stumbled on a massive treasure trove of daily life in Roman London from the 1st to the 4th century A.D.

Drapers Gardens’ sogginess had not only kept this mother lode from being obliterated by two millennia of development and redevelopment, but it also helped keep these objects in an exceptional state of preservation.

Among the treasures are 19 metal vessels from the mid to late 4th c., possibly hidden in a well by a wealthy family fleeing one of many Saxon raids on the city, or they may have been left behind intentionally as part of the ritual closing of the well. The vessels are made from copper and lead ore and include wine jugs, dishes, ladles, even a set of three nesting bowls. They’re in such spectacular condition that the articulating handles on some of them still swing.

A total of over 1100 artifacts were found at the site. Other remarkable finds include hundreds of brooches, a wood door with its original hinges, a roman road with wood footbridges over the ditches on both sides, a wooden ruler with the lines marking the Roman inches still visible, an infant burial site and the skull of a brown bear that probably died in the amphitheater nearby.

The dig uncovered not just rare and beautiful artifacts, but really the entire structure of the neighborhood for 300+ years of Roman life in London: streets, alleys, floors, clay and timber foundations of dwellings, waste disposal and plumbing systems. In Rome itself you don’t find this kind of staging because the city has been built and rebuilt so many times, and because timber or clay housing just doesn’t tend to last 2000 years.

The Drapers Garden find is a microcosm of Roman city life, not only a worthy candidate for the most important ancient site in London, but surely in the running for one of the most important discoveries of Roman social history, period.

Pictures courtesy Pre-Construct Archaeology

He gave the coins in their bronze box to the authorities, and they’re now being analyzed and cataloged.

[Youssef Kanjo, the head of archaeological excavations in the ancient city of Aleppo,] added that the box contained two groups of coins, 137 “tetra” drachmas (four drachmas) and 115 single drachma coins.

One side of the tetra drachma coins depicts Alexander the Great, while the other side shows the Greek god Zeus sitting on a throne with an eagle perched on his extended arm.

Some of the coins bear the inscription King Alexander in Greek, while others say Alexander or carry the name of King Philip, most likely referring to his father.

Alexander conquered Syria in 333 B.C., after his defeat of Darius III of Persia at the Battle of Issus. It and the rest of Alexander’s Asian empire became the Seleucid Empire after Alexander’s death and the splintering of his generals.

Alexander coins would have kept being produced under the Seleucid Empire, which would was finally toppled by Tigranes of Armenia 20 years or so before Pompey yoinked Syria for good for Rome in 64 B.C.

These fragments are 60,000 years old, far older than the earliest writing. The symbols engraved are regular lines and hatches and so many in number that archaeologists think they may be communicative, or at least symbolic, rather than just decorative.

“What is extraordinary at Diepkloof is that we have close to 300 pieces of such engravings, which is why we are speaking of a system of symbolic representation,” Dr Texier said.

The team, which includes Dr Guillaume Porraz from the University of Tubingen, tried themselves to recreate the markings using pieces of flint.

“Ostrich egg shells are quite hard. Doing such engravings is not so easy. You have to pass through the outer layer to get through to the middle layer,” Dr Texier explained.

Some of the engraved cross hatchings and parallel lines are similar to later known symbols for water. The ostrich eggs seem to have had spouts, which could indicate they were used for transporting water, a technological breakthrough for early man.

The fragments are also intentionally colored. They aren’t the natural color of the ostrich eggs nor is an external pigment applied. The team was able to reproduce some of the colors by baking fragments of shell in a fire.

Before these ostrich fragments, 30,000-year-old cave painting like those at the Lascaux Caves were thought to be the oldest evidence of written human communication. If we can confirm a communicative symbolism in these etchings, we’ll push that major milestone 30,000 years further back.

Measuring 2.5 metres, made from solid red granite and depicting Amenhotep III wearing the Upper Egyptian white crown, it has been described in a press statement by Secretary General of the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities Zahi Hawass as a “masterpiece of highly artistic quality”.

The head, added Hawass, is a “portrait of the king with very fine youthful sculptured features”. It was sheared from the body statue at the chin and neck. The body statue – fragments of which are currently in restoration – is believed to show Amenhotep III in a standing position, with his hands crossed over his chest and holding the royal insignia.

So far the team has uncovered 84 statues at Amenhotep’s funerary temple, including the giant head plus other depictions of Amenhotep III and his wife, Queen Tiye.

They’ll keep looking for more pieces of the colossal statue, but the site is so gigantic — 350,000 square meters (that’s over 3,767,000 square feet) — that who knows if they’ll be able to find them.

A unrelated but nonetheless neat little tidbit from the article:

Amenhotep was the wealthiest and most powerful of all the pharaohs of ancient Egypt. In a list compiled by American business and financial bible Forbes in 2008, he was ranked as the 12th richest person in human history.

I couldn’t find the Forbes article the factoid was allegedly derived from and other lists I’ve encountered don’t include pharaohs or Alexander the Great type people who “owned” basically everything.