The History Blog

The authorities found it because looters starting digging it up hoping to score fancy funerary artifacts, but it’s not that kind of necropolis.

In fact, the very reason looters would find this burial ground useless is what makes it so special a find: it’s full of labourers who bear the marks of a lifetime of hard work on their bones, not the rich people one usually finds in Roman necropolises.

Not that the deceased weren’t buried with stuff for the afterlife because they were. The children’s tombs held necklaces of figurines and amber chunks (want!), bronze rings, gold earrings. They’re just not the big ticket items the antiquities trade craves.

Most of the 300 skeletons unearthed were male, and many of them showed signs of years of heavy work: joint and tendon inflammation, compressed vertebrae, hernias and spinal problems, archaeologists said. Sandy sediment helped preserve the remains well.

Judging by the condition of the skeletons, archaeologists concluded that the men likely carried loads on their backs at a nearby port during the early years of Imperial Rome, said Gabriella Gatto, a spokeswoman for the archaeology office.

Many ailments “seem to hark back to work as laborers, in transport and carrying of heavy loads, in an especially humid environment, circumstances that makes one think of the burial of individuals who worked in port areas of the city,” the office said in a statement.

One of the skeletons was of a 30-year-old man whose upper and lower jaw bones were fused together. Apparently his family cared for him for 30 years feeding him a liquid diet via a hole in his teeth.

That’s a major find. Romans were not keen on birth defects. It would have been perfectly acceptable, even expected, for the infant to have been thrown off the Tarpeian rock.

It’s sort of bodiless too, truth be told (it’s been little more than a foundation since at least the the mid-19th century), but it was lost under Saharan sands, and now has been found again.

The pyramid is thought to house the tomb of King Menkauhor, who is believed to have ruled in Egypt’s 5th dynasty for eight years in the mid-2400s B.C. [...]

“After Lepsius the location of the pyramid was lost and the substructure of [the] pyramid never known,” said Zahi Hawass, secretary general of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities.

“It was forgotten by people until we began to search this area and a hill of sand, maybe 25 feet [7.6 meters] high.”

I guess people didn’t think the decapitated structure was worth keeping exposed, or even pinpointed for tourists.

They’ve also uncovered a Ptolemaic segment of the sacred road in Saqqara, which is notable because it suggests people were still angling to be buried there two thousand years after Menkauhor got his headless eternal resting place.

Arthur Sackler donated a huge collection of 3000 or so Asian antiquities to Columbia University in 1970. Out of that group, 22 particularly notable Chinese stone sculptures ended up uninventoried and unloved in the basement until collector and Columbia donor Leopold Swergold was allowed access.

The display includes steles, Buddha heads, standing bodhisattvas, tomb doors, a large section of a mortuary bed and smaller icons. Their startling diversity makes the show feel much bigger than it is, and it reflects the unstable, culturally up-for-grabs phase of China’s history from the fall of the Han Dynasty in the early third century to the rise of the Tang in the early seventh century, sometimes likened to the Middle Ages in Europe.

Over those four centuries China was especially porous. Nomadic peoples from Inner Mongolia took turns invading and setting up kingdoms, sometimes being absorbed by local populations and sometimes being repulsed. Buddhism and its artistic styles, traveling along the Silk Road with monks from India and Central Asia, were part of that flux. The thirst for stone images of Buddha and bodhisattvas gave stone sculpture a boost, as did Indian traditions of carving figures and entire temples out of walls and caves of living rock.

You can get a sense of the range of sculptural styles and techniques from the pieces on exhibit. They testify to the cultural changes of the period.

A 6th c. Northern Wei dynasty funerary stele is a glorious mixture of Buddhism, ancestor worship, dragons and images of partying in the afterlife. An Eastern Wei votive stele made just a few decades after that is all about the Buddha, indicating a major religious shift in a short period of time.

The sculptures are now on display at the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Gallery at Columbia University through June 21.

The story as we know it gives Yale University explorer Hiram Bingham III the honor of having been the first Westerner to exploit the Inca ruins in 1911, but a team of historians say one Augusto Berns, a German adventurer and con man, got there way earlier.

Berns made a (sucker’s) deal with the Peruvian government to grab as much loot as he could from Machu Picchu back in 1867.

Berns purchased land across from Machu Picchu in 1867, and an 1887 document even shows he set up a company to plunder the site, Greer told The Associated Press.

Berns wrote that Machu Picchu “‘will undoubtedly contain objects of great value, and form part of those treasures of the Incas,’” Greer said.

Peruvian historian Mariana Mould de Pease backs Greer’s claim. She said she found in Yale University archives a letter of understanding between Berns and Peru’s then-president to pillage the site, as long as the Peruvian government received 10 percent of the profits.

See what I mean about the sucker’s deal? Because, damn, 10 percent is just embarrassing. If you’re going to let foreigners take your country’s cultural patrimony and run, shouldn’t you at least get a decent cut?

This insensate generosity flummoxes me. “Sure, buddeh. Go ahead and take all the piles of painstakingly worked ancient gold you can find. Just leave me a Krugerrand in the tip jar on your way out. Oh, and don’t forget to tell your friends about our great selection and rock-bottom prices!”

Who knows were the stuff Berns took has ended up. We know that Bingham’s loot, a massive collection of over 4000 artifacts ranging from mummies to ceramics to gold jewelry, ended up on display at Yale where it remains to this day, although after much negotiation it is finally slated to return to Peru in 2011.

A gravedigger in the Shetland town of Cunningsburgh during the course of his duties discovered a Pictish stone engraved with symbols and dating back to 700 A.D.

Not only is it extremely cool-looking, but it turns out to be a witness to a crucial period in Shetland history.

The 18×11 inch sandstone slab, which is broken from a bigger stone, is inscribed with symbols on one side.

Most striking are two discs with crosses, which are connected together with a band and crossed over by a Z-shaped figure with ornate terminals.

The motifs on the latest stone are known by archaeologists as “double-disc and Z-rod”, one of the commonest motifs.

Double-discs often have circles within them, and sometimes spirals, but this is the only one with crosses.

If this is a Christian cross it indicates a mixed belief between the Picts’ indigenous religion, and their new Christian faith.

The Vikings invaded Shetland starting in the late 8th century, so this stone was carved less than a hundred years before Norse culture began to dominate, which it would do quite thoroughly until the Scots, using a clever pawnshop maneuver rather than a boring old war, snagged Shetland back from the Danes in 1469.

The Pictish symbols carved on the stone would have been illegible within a couple of hundred years, and so they remain.

Two thousand years, burial, erosion, oxidation, thieves and well-meaning bumblers couldn’t defeat Emperor Qin Shihuang Ling’s terracotta warriors, so why should the Sichuan earthquake be any different?

There were no fatalities and only 7 minor injuries.

It looks disconcerting, though, seeing them in what the Chinese press calls “disarray“:

I think the damage to their faces is erosion rather than quakechips. It seems more like a chemical peel gone bad than the cracking or shattering caused by tectonic plate movement.

I could well be talking complete bollocks, though.

The obelisk is one of seven 80-foot high basalt monoliths erected in the Ethiopian city of Axum to celebrate their adoption of Christianity in the 4th c. A.D.

Mussolini stole it in 1937 and erected it near the Circus Maximus to celebrate his 15th anniversary in power, and although Italy signed a UN treaty in 1947 promising to return the monument, many successive Italian governments had something better to do until 2005.

But even when Italy did get around to it 50 years late, the obelisk’s return to Axum would not be an easy one. They had to cut it into three pieces and commission a specially-built cargo plane to ship them one at a time.

Then once the eagles finally landed, the Ethiopian authorities had to figure out how to put them together and restore the obelisk to its former glory as a royal grave marker without damaging the grave it marks.

Now, at long last, the moment has come. By the end of June, the obelisk should be back in its place.

Fromelles is not a very well known battle. It was only engaged to act as a diversion for the German troops busy with the much showier carnage at the Somme, but as was so horrifyingly common in the history of “Someone had blundered” warfare, British General Richard Haking decided that the fake offensive should be an actual frontal attack on the German position.

The weather was crystalline on July 19, 1916. The advancing Australian and British troops were clearly visible running down their own trenches by the German artillery, perched atop a concrete tower. Many died before they reached the battlefield.

It only got worse after that. The 5th Division Australian Imperial Force, fresh troops who had just arrived in France a week before, and the British 61st Division were slaughtered and most lie in unmarked graves.

Tony Pollard, director of Glasgow University’s centre for battlefield archaeology, is excavating the battle site to recover and hopefully identify some of the remains of the fallen.

Some of the bodies were recovered by the allies, more rotted in no man’s land until after the war, but the site of a mass grave dug by the Germans for hundreds of soldiers who fell within their lines was lost. It was wrongly marked on maps and missed in the postwar recovery and reburial of bodies by both sides.

The futile battle, for 400 metres of ground defended by a concrete tower of German machine guns which hours of allied artillery fire had barely scarred, has been called the worst 24 hours in Australian history, with more than 5,500 killed, injured or imprisoned, more casualties than the country lost in the Boer war, Korea and Vietnam combined.

So far he’s found the remains of 6 bodies crammed into a square meter. He expects to find hundreds more in the same area.

“[The Germans] had to work very fast – this was the height of summer, and the bodies were scattered in the open air all across their lines, decomposing very rapidly.”

They have found skeletal remains and webbing from uniforms, and believe that lower in the pits, protected from air in the sodden mud, complete uniforms and human tissue may be preserved.

So far, they have found nothing to identify individuals or allow them to distinguish Australian from British. They know from the records that the Germans removed identifying material from the bodies before burial, but hope they may find cap and shoulder badges.

One Australian soldier, Harry Willis, has been positively identified. The lucky medallion his hometown gave to him when he joined up was found at the site, so even though his remains may never be specifically identified, his grand-nephew Tim Whitford, visiting Fromelle now with his daughter, now knows where his uncle was buried.

A large boulder that lived for centuries in the middle of the Ohio river serving both Kentuckians and Ohioans as a navigation marker and graffiti carving canvas, has turned out to be a powder keg.

Last September, an Ohio historian decided the rock needed rescuing from its watery bed, so he hauled it out and lovingly placed it in a safe environment for historical preservation: on top of some tires in a corner of the Portsmouth city maintenance garage.

The fact that the rock was a registered protected archaeological object with the state of Kentucky doesn’t seem to trouble our intrepid Ohioan.

The historian, Steve Shaffer of Ironton, Ohio, said people are overreacting. The rock, he said, was neglected and in danger of being damaged or lost forever. [...]

Shaffer says he deserves praise for saving the rock.

“They want to punish Portsmouth and they want to punish me and they want to put this rock back in the river,” Shaffer said.

Yeah! Meanie peanie fo-feanie Kentuckians with their anti-tireyardism and desire to preserve a protected object in its proper context. They’ll have to tell it to the judge.

Kentucky’s elected officials also insist that the rock belongs to their state. A Kentucky grand jury is investigating whether criminal charges should be filed and Portsmouth Mayor James Kalb has been subpoenaed to testify. Earlier this spring, Kentucky lawmakers adopted a resolution condemning the rock’s removal and demanding its return.

Ohio lawmakers are considering a counter-resolution calling on Kentucky to abandon its claim to the rock.

For that price I’d expect it to have been a newly discovered Michelangelo original, or at least personally written by the reanimated corpse of Michelangelo himself, but no, it’s just a coffee table book about his work. And it doesn’t even have color pictures!

Using the high standards of the privately published books in the 19th century — an ideal known as the “book beautiful” — as a starting point, FMR sought expert artisans from various fields to create something Ms. Ferrari described as “a work of art in itself.”

Aurelio Amendola’s black-and-white photographs were printed on paper made exclusively for the project. There are detachable reproductions of Michelangelo drawings on handmade folios created according to centuries-old traditions. And then there’s the cover: a scale reproduction in marble of the “Madonna della Scala” (“Madonna of the Steps”), a bas-relief of the Virgin and Child sculptured by Michelangelo when he was still in his teens. The original is housed in the Casa Buonarroti in Florence.

It took two white-gloved attendants to lug around the 46.2-pound book at its City Hall debut.

The dimensions (45×70, 5×8 cm) are inspired by a Fibonacci sequence whose first and final terms approach the golden ratio. The publishers were going for that full-on ancient harmony in the visual arts thing.

There are only 99 copies in the first limited edition, and since it takes 6 months to make one of these books, so you can’t run out and buy me a copy. Better plan ahead for my birthday instead.

You can find more details (in Italian) and film of the book itself on the publishers’ site.