The History Blog

A team of Cardiff University archaeologists working on an ancient industrial complex in Amarna, Egypt, have recreated a glassmaking furnace, proving for the first time that the ancient Egyptians had the means to create their own glass.

Up until now, archaeologists have thought Egyptians imported glass from the near east. This recreation shows that high-heat glass production from local sand was possible.

The whole site is neat.

The team have also discovered that the glassworks was part of an industrial complex which involved a number of other high temperature manufacturing processes. The site also contained a potter’s workshop and facilities for making blue pigment and faience – a material used in amulets and architectural inlays. The site was near one of the main temples at Amarna and may have been used to produce materials in state buildings.

… he sail’d on the Quedah Merchant. He left it behind in the Caribbean when he went to Boston to clear his name (instead he was turned in by one of his investors and sent off to face the gibbet music in England), and now, the Quedah Merchant seems to have been found off the cost of a small Dominican island.

Kidd left the Quedagh Merchant in the hands of a merchant called Henry Bolton, but the vessel was plundered and set ablaze and allowed to drift for 3 nautical miles to where it now lies below the waves.

After inspecting the wreck, Mr Beeker said said that it appeared to be a ship that was scuttled. Particularly significant are the barnacled cannons, which he believed were stacked in the hold when Kidd moved from the Adventure Galley to the Quedagh Merchant. “What you have is cannon stacked in the cargo hold in opposite directions,” he said. “This was not a wreck. There are no deployed cannons.”

There is also an empty area in the middle of the hold that might have contained 70 tons of sugar that was part of the ship’s cargo.

“As an archaeologist, I cannot say conclusively that it’s Captain Kidd’s ship, but as a betting man, I am betting on the ship,” Mr Beeker said. “The age of it is right; the stacking of the cannons; the missing section where the sugar may have been; no deployed cannons. Everything is adding up right. It’s his ship.”

Well, it didn’t. They knew perfectly well there were all sort of places far from their imperial reach. I don’t know how this silly meme got spread, but I blame crappy junior high school textbook sloganeering.

Rome did trade with all of the known world that cared to, though. See Pune, India.

The evidence suggests that Satavahanas, the earliest rulers of Maharashtra (230 Before Christ Era), who reigned from Junnar, were engaged in a flourishing import-export trade not just with the Romans but also with the Greeks and the Persians.

The port of Kalyan on the Konkan coast offered the link for the Romans touching the Indian shores at Bharuch, to reach Junnar via the western ghat pass of Naneghat.

The Satavahanas had a taste for wine, it seems, and the Mediterranean types had an ivory, spices and silk jones.

Grain of salt with this article, though. It makes the outlandish claim that the Roman traders sailed around Africa to get to the port of Kalyan. A combination of shorter sea voyages through the Mediterranean and Arabian seas and overland travel on the Arabian peninsula is what most likely went down.

Four years before Pearl Harbor, no less. I’d never heard of this before, but NPR has a story about Japanese warplanes attacking the USS Panay, a ship sent to rescue Americans from the Battle (aka Rape) of Nanking, on December 12, 1937.

The US was neutral and its military presence in China was solely to protect corporate interests, specifically Standard Oil tankers. Why the attack, then?

Spark says the chaos in Nanking created an opportunity for renegade factions within the Japanese army who wanted the United States and China to “get into an active conflict so that the Japanese could once and for all drive the United States out of China.”

Didn’t work that time — the attack was a PR disaster and the Japanese government had to apologize profusely — but those same factions got their way again four years later.

Lucky for us, there was a newreelist on board. Here’s a taste of the Uncensored!!! and Unedited!!! footage complete with awesome old timey newsreel announcer voiceover:

To watch the full documentary on the fighting in Nanking and the rescue, click here.

Colgate University archaeologist Dr. Albert J. Ammerman, is known for his work on the origins of Rome and Venice. He also discovered two ancient campsites on the coast of Cyprus which suggest some very ballsy Syrians and Turks hit the open sea for fishing thousands of years before the island was permanently inhabited.

To hear Dr. Ammerman talk about this find in detail and other work he’s done in Italy, check out this fantastic podcast from a Colgate series: Download

It’s a fascinating glimpse into the interdisciplinary, detailed and creative nature of archaeology.

Underwater treasure hunting is big business nowadays, with companies like Odyssey Marine Exploration making huge profits on shipwreck finds. Most recently, Odyssey scored 17 tons of silver and gold coin (an estimated $500 million value) from a ship it has codenamed Black Swan.

The company won’t share the ship name or location, to spare this inestimable archaelogical find from crass looters who wouldn’t love it as tenderly as they do, donchaknow.

Here they are tenderly loving 17 tons of coin off a plane to store at an undisclosed location. An undisclosed location of love:

Anyhoozle, Spain is suspicious. They think the ship is Spanish and have filed suit to force Odyssey to cough up the info so they can claim the wreck and all its goodies back for Spain.

The problem is, Spain has spent a couple of centuries not giving a rat’s ass about the thousands of specie-laden ships decorating the ocean floor, so it may be too little too late for Spain to claim ownership, even to protect its cultural patrimony.

Past Spanish attempts to stop the extraction of treasure from Spanish ships have foundered on the country’s own lack of energy in protecting underwater sites.

In 1983, a Florida court ruled that treasure-hunter Mel Fischer was entitled to keep the booty he found at the site of the sunken ship Santa Margarita because “the ship was abandoned … and the Spanish government hasn’t expressed interest in declaring itself a successive owner.”

The Ministry of Culture is determined not to let that happen again. Its new Plan for Subaquatic Archaeology calls for a comprehensive mapping of known shipwreck sites, and requires that important ones be granted protected status just like historic churches and monuments.

Even if the plan does work, however, it will only apply to sites within Spanish territorial waters, and that territory is hellasmaller now than it was when them silver ships were cruising the oceans, giving the superfluous third sons of British and French nobility a fun new hobby in the form of “privateering”.

Three and a quarter inches of limestone sold for $57.2 million at a Sotheby’s auction last week, a record for any sculpture. The Guennol Lioness, from Iran via Long Island, beat out the previous record holder (some guy named Picasso) by double.

I like the description of the bidder:

The successful bidder, who stood at the back of the saleroom wearing a grey check suit and reading glasses, was described by Sotheby’s as English, and told reporters that he was an archaeologist. However, he was not thought to be bidding for himself.

He he… Ya no. I don’t think it’s likely the nice archaeologist standing in the back with the checked suit and the glasses had 60 million dollars on him either.

A huge stash of ancient Roman medical instruments go on display in the seaside town of Rimini today.

Perhaps the most unexpected find was a piece of equipment that would delight a modern podiatrist: a ceramic hot water bottle in the shape of a foot, into which oil or water could be poured when the foot was inserted.

“One of the most exciting finds was a lenticular, a small chisel used for opening the skull safely after gouging a channel into it with another instrument,” said Dr Jackson.

While sorting through the collection of the late baseball historian Al Kermish, auction appraisers came across a document of astonishing naughtiness dating from 1898. It includes the earliest known uses of the term “cocksucker” and “go fuck yourself” (thereby giving Deadwood even more cred than it had before).

That such brutal language as “You cock-sucking son of a bitch!” “You prick-eating bastard!” “You cunt-lapping dog!” “Kiss my ass, you son of a bitch!” “A dog must have fucked your mother when she made you!” “I fucked your mother, your sister, your wife!” “I’ll make you suck my ass!” “You cock-sucker!” and many other revolting terms are used by a limited number of players to intimidate umpires and opposing players, and are promiscuously used upon the ball field, is vouched for by the almost unanimous assertion of those invited to speak, and who are competent to speak from personal knowledge.

There is some debate about the authenticity of the document. Some historians consider it ludicrous that the National League in 1898 would send out a memo packed with such shocking profanity. Even “damn” would have been written “d____” at the time.
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I’ve always enjoyed Herodotus’ peripatetic ways and investigative curiosity, not to mention his gift for, erm, let’s just call it embellishment. His histories can be hard to follow, though, packed as they are with unfamiliar locations and meandering references.

Well, there’s a new Herodotus in town: The Landmark Herodotus.

Maps — 127 of them — outline Herodotus’ world; even the text is clearly mapped out, with wide margins offering summaries of each paragraph and identifying the time period.

The headings, index and footnotes let you know precisely where you are in this notoriously winding narrative, providing a set of landmarks far more detailed than anything Herodotus could have found during his tours. The appendices, nonjargony bits of scholarship by various authors, come at Herodotus from as many perspectives as he brings to his inquiries: Herodotus and Athenian government, Herodotus and tyranny, Herodotus and the poets. Photographs of artifacts and statues, most as little worn by the intervening millenniums as Herodotus’ conversational prose, help make history’s abstractions concrete.