Month: November 2008

Herod’s Tomb?

Ancient

Archaeologists digging in the Herodium complex on the West Bank have uncovered unusually lavish and Romanate remains in the mausoleum, bolstering the theory that Herod the Great and his family may have been buried there.

Herod built Herodium as a massive complex, complete with his winter palace, administrative buildings and this tomb.

“What we found here, spread all around, are architectural fragments that enable us to restore a monument of 25 meters high, 75 feet high, very elegant, which fits Herod’s taste and status,” he told The Associated Press in an interview at the hillside dig in an Israeli-controlled part of the West Bank, south of Jerusalem.

Three intricately carved sarcophagi indicate that more than one person was buried in the mausoleum, but so far they’ve not found any explicit evidence that one of them was Herod himself.

That’s why the style of architecture and art is so significant: Herod’s Romanophilia was unique for his time and place.

The Google is LIFE

Multimedia

LIFE magazine, that is. Google is hosting a searchable archive of historical photographs from the LIFE magazine vault.

We’re not just talking the major VJ-day-navy-dude-kisses-nurse cover shots either, but a complete set of everything in LIFE’s archive, including pictures that were never published, all in as high a resolution as you could hope for.

That’s millions of photographs, even some as early as 1750. I don’t know how that could be exactly, because as far as I know the first permanent photograph was taken in 1826, the first really useable system coming a decade later with the daguerreotype.

The browse by decades feature starts with the 1860’s, so I’m guessing the 18th c. material is more recent photography of period paintings.

Item of note: there are 148 photographs in the LIFE archive from 1860. No other decade beats that number until the 1910’s. Slaughter inspires art, I suppose.

To search the LIFE archives, just type “source:life” after your keyword in the Google Images search box.

A 2,800-year-old monument to a soul

Ancient

In 800 B.C., a royal official in the city of Sam’al in what is now Turkey, ordered a stone monument be inscribed after his death directing his mourners commemorate his soul.

Archaeologists who found the stele last summer believe it’s evidence the locals believed in an eternal soul separate from the body, which is notable for the time and the area.

“Normally, in the Semitic cultures, the soul of a person, their vital essence, adheres to the bones of the deceased,” said David Schloen, an archaeologist at the university’s Oriental Institute and director of the excavations. “But here we have a culture that believed the soul is not in the corpse but has been transferred to the mortuary stone.”

A translation of the inscription by Dennis Pardee, a professor of Near Eastern languages and civilization at Chicago, reads in part: “I, Kuttamuwa, servant of [the king] Panamuwa, am the one who oversaw the production of this stele for myself while still living. I placed it in an eternal chamber [?] and established a feast at this chamber: a bull for [the god] Hadad, a ram for [the god] Shamash and a ram for my soul that is in this stele.”

There might be an Egyptian influence in this theology. An Egyptologist cited in the article notes that the ancient Egyptians broke our notion of a soul up into two parts, one of which, the bit that includes personal characteristics, leaves the body after death.

There’s no evidence of direct Egyptian influence, though, and there were all kinds of cultures interacting in the area at that time.

The are in which the stele was found has a fascinating history:

The site, near the town of Islahiye in Gaziantep province, was controlled at one time by the Hittite Empire in central Turkey, then became the capital of a small independent kingdom. In the eighth century, the city was still the seat of kings, including Panamuwa, but they were by then apparently subservient to the Assyrian Empire. After that empire’s collapse, the city’s fortunes declined, and the place was abandoned late in the seventh century.

It wasn’t until the post-Schliemann Germans excavated the area at the turn of the century that the rich history of the city began to be revealed, and after that was another 100 years of neglect until the University of Chicago archaeologists began excavations in 2006.

Ancient Celtic coin cache found in Netherlands

Ancient, Treasures

Man, those Celts really got around: Ireland, Scotland, England, France, Spain, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands.

Caches of Celtic coin have been found in Germany and Belgium before, and now in the Netherlands.

Archaeologists say the trove of 39 gold and 70 silver coins was minted in the middle of the first century B.C. as the future Roman ruler Julius Caesar led a campaign against Celtic tribes in the area.[…]

Nico Roymans, the archaeologist who led the academic investigation of the find, believes the gold coins in the cache were minted by a tribe called the Eburones that Caesar claimed to have wiped out in 53 B.C. after they conspired with other groups in an attack that killed 6,000 Roman soldiers.

The Eburones “put up strong resistance to Caesar’s journeys of conquest,” Roymans said.

The silver coins were made by tribes further to the north — possible evidence of cooperation against Caesar, he said.

The dating is notable not only because of the (tenuous) link to Caesar, but because by early in the first century A.D., the Celts had been chased off the European mainland by the growing Roman Empire and Germanic migrations. So this first century B.C. cache is sort of a last hurrah for continental Celts.

Go to Florence the first Sunday of the month

Ancient, Medieval, Museums

Then wake up at the crack of dawn and head to the Palazzo Vecchio, where 50 people will be allowed to view the archaeological dig in progress underneath the storied building. It’s like a club sandwich of Florentine history on display for you and 98 other eyes.

Visitors enter through a side door of the Palazzo, where a copy of the statue of David sits in front. They enter a cavernous room, where there’s a series of trenches, metres deep, and criss-crossed by wooden planks.

Archaeologists have spent the past few years unearthing the remains of an ancient Roman theatre — known as the Commune — discovering how the city evolved over 2,000 years.

“The Palazzo Vecchio has preserved all of the structures, whether Roman, medieval and even up to the renaissance, in its foundations,” says archeologist Lorenzo Spezzi, who has been working at the site since 2004.

“Here you see all of the ages of the city, from its establishment to the renaissance. That’s the wonderful thing about this area. You see, even from one room, the evolution of the city of Florence.”

The Commune was one of the first structures built after the Romans settled the town and was in continuous use for the 500-600 years. Then there’s a medieval street, complete with cesspit and all the facades of the buildings lining it still intact.

The dig is scheduled to be finished in a few months. After that, the city is planning to make available a permanent guided tour of the site.