The History Blog

The debate over whether the British Museum should return the Parthenon Marbles to Greece is picking up steam in the wake of recent successful antiquities repatriation campaigns, and the opening of the new, state of the art Acropolis Museum.

The new museum eliminates one of the British Museum’s primary excuses for keeping the frieze sculptures removed by Lord Elgin in the first decade of the 19th century, ie, that they can preserve them better in London than the Greeks can in Athens.

Not that that contention was particularly valid even before the new museum opened, mind you.

The British Museum has a lot to answer for in terms of damage done to the marbles in various disastrous “cleanings” using tools like brass brushes and industrial abrasives which scoured off the precious traces of original paint and removed an estimated 1/8 of an inch of the marble surface.

The frieze sculptures that remained on the Parthenon, on the other hand, may have been caked in soot and pollution for thousands of years, but when they were taken down and restored in 1993, the careful double laser treatment revealed details like veins on the horses’ bellies and original chisel marks long gone from Elgin’s poor butchered ones.

So anyway, the new museum isn’t just a hint. The Greeks are out-and-out demanding that the frieze sculptures in England be returned to Athens to join their brothers and sisters.

An animated short directed by famed Greek-born auteur Costa-Gavras showing the damage done to the Parthenon over the centuries plays in the museum, making its return agenda very clear indeed.

The film caused some controversy because of a few seconds of footage in which figures in black are seen knocking chunks of marble off the frieze and replacing them with a cross. Although it’s a known fact that Christians used Parthenon marble for construction and destroyed pagan imagery to convert the structure into a church, the Greek Orthodox Church got mad and those 12 seconds of the film were cut.

Then everyone else got mad, including Costa-Gavras, so the footage was put back in after “clarifying” that the figures in black weren’t meant to be actual priests but just representatives of the people whodunit. (Pretty much all the figures in the short are black shadowy looking things anyway, so it was an obvious point, imo. Guilty conscience much?)

Now the entire short is on YouTube, and it’s astonishing to me that anyone could give a rat’s ass about the Christian destruction aspect given the rousing Elgin-and-Britain-bashing finale. The whole video is compelling, but the focus is definitely on Elgin’s removal of the frieze.

The only voice-over begins at the 4:30 mark, and it’s a recitation of excerpts from Lord Byron’s “The Curse of Minerva,” which he wrote in Athens in 1811, while Elgin was almost but not quite finished despoiling the place. (He removed the last of his marbles in 1812.)

Watch the whole thing because it’s awesome:

HARDCORE, RIGHT?! Here’s the full text from the video:

“Mortal!”—’twas thus [Athena] spake — “that blush of shame
Proclaims thee Briton, once a noble name;
First of the mighty, foremost of the free,
Now honoured ‘less’ by all, and ‘least’ by me:
Chief of thy foes shall Pallas still be found.
Seek’st thou the cause of loathing!—look around.
Lo! here, despite of war and wasting fire,
I saw successive Tyrannies expire;
‘Scaped from the ravage of the Turk and Goth,
Thy country sends a spoiler worse than both.
Survey this vacant, violated fane;
Recount the relics torn that yet remain:
‘These’ Cecrops placed, ‘this’ Pericles adorned,
[...]
What more I owe let Gratitude attest—
Know, Alaric and Elgin did the rest.
That all may learn from whence the plunderer came,
The insulted wall sustains his hated name:
[...]
Be ever hailed with equal honour here
The Gothic monarch and the Pictish peer:
Arms gave the first his right, the last had none,
But basely stole what less barbarians won.
So when the Lion quits his fell repast,
Next prowls the Wolf, the filthy Jackal last:
[...]

Some calm spectator, as he takes his view,
In silent indignation mixed with grief,
Admires the plunder, but abhors the thief.

That’s playing in the museum, y’all, and even with all the press over the religion controversy, nobody once mentioned this dramatic fuck you to Britain. Color my mind blown.

For a handy and entertaining presentation of the issues in the Elgin debate, see James Cuno (director of the Art Institute of Chicago and proponent of “universal museums” getting to keep all the stuff they stole/conquered/bought from thieves) and Christopher Hitchens (journalist and long-time advocate for the return of the Parthenon marbles) go at it on PBS.

We have all kinds of artifacts engraved with the hieroglyphic script of the Indus Valley civilization, but so far nobody has been able to decipher the language.

Researchers from the University of Washington and the Institute of Fundamental Research and Centre for Excellence in Basic Sciences in Mumbai are using computers to find patterns in the placement and order of the hieroglyphics. The patterns can then be extrapolated into a statistical model that reveal the grammatical underpinnings of the language.

“The statistical model provides insights into the underlying grammatical structure of the Indus script,” said lead author Rajesh Rao, a UW associate professor of computer science. “Such a model can be valuable for decipherment, because any meaning ascribed to a symbol must make sense in the context of other symbols that precede or follow it.”

The new study looks for mathematical patterns in the sequence of symbols. Calculations show that the order of symbols is meaningful; taking one symbol from a sequence found on an artifact and changing its position produces a new sequence that has a much lower probability of belonging to the hypothetical language. The authors said the presence of such distinct rules for sequencing symbols provides further support for the group’s previous findings, reported earlier this year in the journal Science, that the unknown script might represent a language.

“These results give us confidence that there is a clear underlying logic in Indus writing,” Vahia said.

The examples of the script we have are just 5 or 6 symbols long, so there’s been some question as to whether it’s a language system at all. The fact that researchers have found syntactical patterns indicates that it is indeed a language and not just a collection of religious or political pictograms.

A 1st c. BC Green statue found off the coast of Croatia in 1998 may provide scientists with new ways to combat biofouling, the accumulation of barnacles and other hull encrustations that damage ships.

The statue of an athlete (serendipitously posed scraping himself with a strigil) was found covered with biomineralizing organisms, creatures like barnacles that create their own shells from ingesting whatever they’re stuck on.

Croatian scientists restoring the statue said that the once crusty athlete can offer clues to how marine organisms absorb metals to form minerals for their shells.

Even creatures not in direct contact with the figure’s surface took up some of its metals, Medakovic’s team noted in their study.

What’s more, the study has shown the huge impact and disruption that this metal uptake had on the organisms’ metabolic pathways, and that caused the distressed organisms to produce untypical minerals in their shells, Medakovic said.

Living on a steady diet of copper and tin, the organisms on the statue had digested the metals to produce shells with unusual ratios of magnesium calcite and aragonite, for example, as well as traces of feldspar and quartz.

Scientists are hoping that by finding out exactly which metals caused which reactions in the beasties, they can develop metals that are more resistant to biofouling.

And now, the moment we’ve all been waiting for, the before and after pics:

On the left is Apoxyomenos’ head after the crusties were removed, on the right is his encrusted head.

His lips are that beautiful shade of red because they were made out of pure tin which turns red when oxidized, just like bronze oxidizes green because of its high copper content.

A University of Toronto archaeological team excavating a 2,700-year old Turkish temple near the border with Syria have uncovered thousands of artifacts, including a cache of cuneiform tablets dating to between 1200 and 600 BC, suggesting that a period considered to be a “dark age” between Bronze and Iron may not have been quite as dark as we thought.

“We think that these tablets actually have significant historical information in them that we don’t have available anywhere else,” [University of Toronto archeologist Timothy] Harrison said in an interview from the dig site at Reyhanli, Turkey.

“We may begin to fill in political history, some of the local kingdoms, maybe more understanding about how the Assyrians were administrating and ruling and controlling their empire.”

The professor of near eastern archeology said little is known about the “dark age,” a 300-year transitional time period between the collapse of the Bronze Age and the rise of the Iron Age, but it was thought to be a violent period when little writing was done. But the tablets he and his team have found may challenge that assumption, he suggested.

The tablets haven’t been deciphered yet, so archaeologists don’t know what information they’ll eventually glean. Since it was a temple, Harrison suspects the tablets are archives or documents pertaining to the local rituals.

Many are fragile, some falling apart. They’ll need careful conservation before the transcription and translation can even begin. Other tablets are still in fairly sturdy shape. We can expect translations of those tablets within just a few weeks.

The UoT team actually discovered the temple building last year, but the dig went on hiatus before they could get inside of it. This summer they made it through to the inner sanctum and found a huge treasure trove of ceramics, jewelry, gold foil, chalices, lamps, silver and bronze objects as well as the cuneiform tablets.

They estimate they’ve found something in the neighborhood of 100,000 artifacts in that one room.

No “Vespasian Wuz Here” inscriptions have been found to confirm its ownership, but a magnificent 2000-year-old villa next to the insignificant village where Vespasian was born is most likely his.

“We’ve found a monumental villa with elaborate floors made of marble brought from quarries in Greece and North Africa,” said Dr Helen Patterson, of the British School at Rome, the archaeological institute involved in the excavation.

“There’s also a very extensive bath complex which is just beginning to emerge. It’s the only large villa in the area, and the size and dating fits in perfectly with Vespasian.

“Until we find a stone or marble inscription saying ‘Vespasian lived here’, we can’t be 100 per cent certain, but it seems very likely. It’s in a perfect position, overlooking a river and the old Via Salaria trade route.”

So was it the summer house in which Vespasian died, or was it his wealthy banker father’s house in which the future emperor was born? The Italian newspaper La Stampa says the former, Agence France-Press the latter.

Suetonius mentions he had a summer villa outside Rieti (then Reate) and that that’s where he died.

I’m rooting for the summer villa theory just because the stories about his death are so cool.

He did not cease his jokes even when in apprehension of death and in extreme danger; for when among other portents the Mausoleum [of Augustus] opened on a sudden and a comet appeared in the heavens, he declared that the former applied to Junia Calvina of the family of Augustus, and the latter to the king of the Parthians, who wore his hair long; and as death drew near, he said: “Woe’s me. Methinks I’m turning into a god.”

That’s an awesome little dig at the Imperial cult that had started with the deification of Julius Caesar in 42 BC, 2 years after Caesar’s assassination. Even on his deathbed Vespasian was a joker.

Not to mention a tough old bird:

[...]Taken on a sudden with such an attack of diarrhoea that he all but swooned, he said: “An emperor ought to die standing,” and while he was struggling to get on his feet, he died in the arms of those who tried to help him, on the ninth day before the Kalends of July, at the age of sixty-nine years, seven months and seven days

Billy the Kid wrote to New Mexico’s territorial governor Lew Wallace twice asking for a pardon.

In the first letter, he offers to turn state’s witness on a murder he didn’t commit in order to secure a pardon for the murders he did commit.

In the second, he threatens to reveal that the governor’s been making deals with him if he doesn’t get that pardon.

They were written in the aftermath of the so-called Lincoln County war, a bloody, five-month feud in 1878 between mercantile interests in the southern New Mexico village of Lincoln. The Kid, a ranch hand, was aligned with one of the factions.

In the first letter, undated but believed to have been written in March 1879, the Kid tells Wallace he was a witness to a murder the previous month that had shattered the peace in the county.

He says he will testify in court if he’s protected from his enemies, and indictments against him stemming from the Lincoln County War are annulled. [...]

After the governor and the young outlaw met a few days later, there was a carefully arranged, staged arrest and the Kid testified. But no pardon ever materialized.

Hence the second letter in which an imprisoned and condemned Billy suggests the governor to make good on the deal or face public revelation. Billy the Kid seems to have been a bit of snitch.

He managed to break out of jail, killing both his guards, before his scheduled execution, but just 4 months after writing the second letter, he met his end at Pat Garrett’s hand. Since then, the letters have remained in the Wallace family or with private historical societies.

Now they’ve been donated to the Fray Angelico Chavez History Library in Santa Fe where they are open to the viewing public, much to the delight of all Wild West aficionados.

Retired boat builder John Hodgson found a bar shot, two cannon balls connected by a metal bar, wedged between two walls of an old farm on his property in Morven, Scotland.

It doesn’t have any marks to confirm which ship may have fired it and when, but the area was under attack by the Royal Navy in the mid-18th century during the Jacobite rebellion.

Before the Battle of Culloden, near Inverness, in April 1746, HMS Terror and HMS Princess Anne landed men in Morven to destroy the homes and possessions of suspected supporters of Charles Edward Stuart – Bonnie Prince Charlie.

Mr Hodgson’s home at Fiunary is half a mile from the Sound of Mull.

His find may suggest the vessels also played a more direct role in the attack.

Up until now it was thought the ships brought troops to harry the locals, not that the ships actually shot buildings down.

This one bar shot may suggest otherwise, especially since it was found wedged in a weird place, not just dragged and dropped somewhere.

Dr Martin, a reader of maritime studies at the University of Andrews, said it could not be proved conclusively that the weapon was from HMS Terror or HMS Princess Anne.

However, he added that the shot was of the right size of calibre and, given where it was dug up, it made for an interesting find.

He said: “That kind of ammunition was used in the 16th to 18th and early 19th Centuries by ships primarily as a means of disabling the enemy before boarding them.”

Specifically, the shot would be aimed at the rigging. The bar-and-balls design would tear and jumble the ropes making them unusable and the ship therefore hard to maneuver.

The Antikythera mechanism, an astonishingly complex device of gears found in a shipwreck full of Greek loot by sponge divers in 1900, has never been precisely dated.

The wreck itself is dated to between 70 and 60 BC, but the items in the ship’s cargo range from 340 BC for the Antikythera Ephebe (a bronze statue of a handsome youth) to contemporary 1st c. BC common objects.

It was Yale professor Derek de Solla Price who in 1974 first argued convincingly that the inscriptions on the gears suggested a 87 BC date. Since then, Price’s dating has been considered the standard, but one Alexander Jones thinks it may be a hundred or so years older than that.

[T]here are six sets of games named on the [Olympiad] dial, five of which have been deciphered so far. Four of them, including the Olympics, were major games known across the Greek world. But the fifth, Naa, was much smaller, and would only have been of local interest.

The Naa games were held in Dodona in northwestern Greece, so Alexander Jones of the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World in New York has suggested that the mechanism must have been made by or for someone from that area.

Intriguingly, this could mean the device is even older than thought. The inscriptions have been dated to around 100 BC, but according to Jones the device may have been made at latest in the early second century BC, because after that the Romans devastated or took over the Greek colonies in the region, so it’s unlikely that people would still have been using the Greek calendar there.

Intriguing notion. It’s speculative, of course, but certainly plausible.

For more about this calculator par excellence and its Olympic connection, see this video from the journal Nature:

anti_low1

To get an even closer look at how the mechanism may have operated, check out this amazing 3D rendering by Massimo Mogi Vicentini:

Twenty of them, this time, uncovered during city works in Cholula in the Mexican state of Puebla.

They’re pre-Columbian and were buried with a variety of offerings like vases and wind instruments.

Human rests were found in seating position with the arms closed in front of the chest, most of them facing north; others were found lying down.

The remains were part of some of the last Tolteca-Chichimeca seigniories; fragments of decorated ceramics were found with them, as well as pots and plates, a black bead necklace, and obsidian arrowheads.

Musical instruments found with bone concentrations integrated by inferior jawbones, are zoomorphic and anthropomorphic whistles, flutes and 3 ocarinas with the forms of a dog, a monkey and an owl.

The skeletons and artifacts have all been moved to the Cholula Site Museum lab for further examination and conservation, along with an adobe block found at the scene with the remains of a mural still visible on it.

The remains of a wall and foundation were not movable, so they were covered up for their own security and will be protected for later study.

Archaeologists have found an ancient skeleton in a flooded tomb in the bushes on the public beach of Nettuno.

(World War II buffs might recognize Nettuno as one of the landing points along with Anzio of the Allied forces’ invasion of Italy in 1944.)

At first they assumed it was Roman because, you know, Rome, but he turns out to be way, way older, like 5000 years old. That makes him just a few hundred years younger than Otzi the Iceman.

Archaeologists believe the warrior was likely killed by an arrow, part of which was found among his ribs, [Carabinieri art squad official Raffaele] Mancino said. There was also a hole in the back of the skull, and six vases and two daggers were found buried nearby.

He’s been named “Nello” after the archaeologist who found him.

They suspect this tomb is part of a larger necropolis in the area instead of a one-off burial of a warrior who died on the spot, so more research in the area is sure to follow.

On a side note, props again to the Carabinieri art squad who busted antiquities fences like Giacomo Medici and former Getty curator Marion True, protected ancient sites in Iraq when the US military had no interest in so doing, and have now stumbled on this rare find while on a “routine check” of archaeological spots.