Month: September 2008

1400 graves under the Salonika subway

Ancient

Worked building a subway line in Salonika, Greece, have unconverted an enormous grave complex with over 1400 graves ranging in date from the 4th c. B.C. to the 4th c. A.D.

The finds range from humble pits and altar tombs of stone to marble sarcophagi, the ministry said.

One in five burial sites were found to contain offerings including Roman-era gold coins from Persia, jewellery made of gold, silver and copper, clay vessels and glass perfume-holders.

It looks like such a jumble. I can’t figure out from the article or the picture if these graves were all found in one spot, or if this is some sort of collection area for sarcophagi. I can’t imagine they’d move them around already, so I’m going to go with the on-site theory.

The subway also passes underneath the Jewish cemetery, incidentally, which was one of the largest in Europe and is thought to have contained 300,000 graves at its peak. Suprisingly huge, neh?

A little more about Amenhotep’s eye

Ancient, Looting, Museums

This article adds some juice to the dry announcement of the eye’s return.

Zawi Hawass himself apparently saw it while he was in town for the Tut exhibit, recognized it right away and negotiated directly with the collector to get it back.

Notice the use of the standard “in good faith” clause. Whenever you see that in conjunction with a returned antiquities, what that actually means is that the originating country won’t prosecute the collector for buying stolen goods.

It’s not a genuine assessment of the collector’s approach to purchasing antiquities, which more often that not is better described as “avoiding the dirty reality because they like old stuff.”

Warrior gold found in Alexander’s birthplace

Ancient, Treasures

Archaeologists have discovered 43 richly laden graves of warriors in Pella, northern Greece, the birthplace of Alexander the Great.

The graves range in age from 650-279 B.C., including 9 that date to Alexander’s time (320 B.C.). There are even 11 bejeweled women buried among them.

Some were buried in bronze helmets alongside iron swords and knives. Their eyes, mouths and chests were covered in gold foil richly decorated with drawings of lions and other animals symbolizing royal power.

“The discovery is rich in historical importance, shedding light on Macedonian culture during the Archaic period,” Pavlos Chrysostomou, who headed the eight-year project that investigated a total of 900 graves, told Reuters.

Pavlas said the graves confirmed evidence of an ancient Macedonian society organized along militaristic lines and with overseas trade as early as the second half of the seventh century BC.

Amenhotep III gets his eye back

Ancient, Looting, Museums

It was stolen from the temple in Luxor during a fire in 1972. The looters found the usual willing buyer: a greedy antiquities dealer willing to purchase to loot no questions asked.

The greedy antiquities dealer found the usual willing fence in Sotheby’s, where a German dealer bought it at auction.

From there, the eye traveled to a museum in Basel, Switzerland, and now that Switzerland has signed a memo of understanding with Egypt to return illegally exported antiquities, it’s finally going back home, only 35 years after it was stolen.

There are going to be lots more stories like these as Switzerland confronts its long history of warehousing looted goods.

Google microfiches 200 years of newspapers

Modern(ish), Multimedia

The days of having to rely on newspapers’ online archives or, heaven forfend, actual physical archives in libraries, will soon be over.

Today, we’re launching an initiative to make more old newspapers accessible and searchable online by partnering with newspaper publishers to digitize millions of pages of news archives. Let’s say you want to learn more about the landing on the Moon. Try a search for [Americans walk on moon], and you’ll be able to find and read an original article from a 1969 edition of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Not only will you be able to search these newspapers, you’ll also be able to browse through them exactly as they were printed — photographs, headlines, articles, advertisements and all.

That’s a major deal right there. Even the big papers with extensive archives available online don’t offer the full print experience. For pop culture fans, that’s a barely explored treasure trove of information at their fingerprints.

I haven’t quite gotten the hang of how to scare up the good stuff. They seem to be starting with major events (the moon landing and the discovery of the wreck of the Titanic, for instance), but the blog entry also links to full issues of old papers turned up after a search for “Ford Model T.”

(That particular paper, incidentally, is the April 6,1912 edition of The Evening Independent, which covers the filling passenger rolls for Titanic’s maiden voyage, Taft’s likely nomination, a flood in Tennessee and an anthracite miners’ strike in Philadelphia.)

I want to see Victorian ads for some quack medicine or vibrators called Electromatic Hysteria Theraputalyzers, dammit!