The History Blog

Because I found the best candidate by far. Ladies and gentlemen, meet Roman Elvis.

Roman Elvis is actually an acroterion, a decorative piece usually found on the corners of sarcophagi, and he’s going to be sold to the highest bidder in the Geddes Collection auction at Bonhams this October.

Other items going under the hammer include red and black-figure Attic and Apuglian vases, Roman mosaics, Egyptian artifacts, other classical sculptures like sarcophagus friezes.

Many of these items will sell for up to £90,000 each, and the bust, which even the collector has nicknamed ‘Elvis’, is estimated to make between £25,000 and £30,000.

It is to laugh. Elvis is going to make way, way more than that.

There was no mention that I could find on the Bonhams site or in the press about the ownership trail of these fantastical pieces. Mr. Geddes is Australian and has been collecting since the 70’s. Beyond that, who’s to know?

I cannot tell a lie, though. Shady provenance or no shady provenance, I would find it very, very hard to resist purchasing Roman Elvis if I had the funds. He’s ever so dreamy.

In 2000, Palaeontologist Paul Sereno was in Niger looking for dinosaur fossils in the Ténéré desert. He found animal remains alright, but they weren’t dinosaurs. They were people who lived and died there 10,000 - 5,000 years ago when the desert was lush with lakes, rivers and vegetation.

This map shows how the Gobero site was savannah for a while there, even as the Saharan sands still dominated. A shift in the winds brought monsoon rains to the Ténéré, making not just livable, but downright congenial as desert habitats go.

Two distinct peoples lived there at different times, first the Tiffian and then the Tenerian a few thousand years later. The former were taller and buried their dead most likely wrapped in shrouds. The latter smaller and leaner and buried their dead on their sides as if they were sleeping.

Harpoons and fishhooks found on the site suggest both peoples were fishermen, living off the lake that is now sand all the way down to the bedrock.

“At first glance, it’s hard to imagine two more biologically distinct groups of people burying their dead in the same place,” said team member Chris Stojanowski.

The Arizona State University bioarchaeologist added: “The biggest mystery is how they seemed to have done this without disturbing a single grave.”

Sereno did find him some dinosaurs, mind you. Good ones, too.

The site yielded fossils of huge crocodiles and dinosaurs including the complete skeleton of Sarcosuchus imperator, one of the biggest crocodiles that ever roamed the earth some 110 million years ago.

Sereno also unearthed the Nigersaurus, a plant-eating dinosaur with a huge jaw studded with 500 teeth that lived in the same geologic period, the Cretaceous, some 110 million years ago.

Read the full story and see all the gorgeous pictures on the National Geographic site.

Or if you’re really into it, you can read Sereno et al’s paper on their discovery. They’ve got tons more pics, graphs, data, you name it. Srsly fascinating stuff.

The Highland Council has created an incredibly nifty searchable, interactive online database of over 50,000 historical sites in Scotland. It’s called the Highland Historic Environment Record (HER) and is an invaluable tool for anyone planning to skip through the heather or even just for history nerds like me to spend hours clicking through.

The site, which went live yesterday, provides a database of more than 50,000 historic buildings, archaeological sites and finds dating from prehistory to the present day.

Developed by Highland Council’s planning department, the resource not only catalogues a diverse range of historical sites but also one or two more quirky attractions and items.

Take for example the 1950s petrol station at Brora, Sutherland. Users who stumble upon this “monument” are welcomed with a page of information including pictures, exact location and a blurb on the site which boasts two pumps. A group of World War II accommodation blocks can be found at Portmaculter and the miniature castle at Achmelvich is another curiosity.

WANT! I want a miniature castle!1

See, it’s already working on me. That’s how you promote local tourism right there. Forget the lame slogans and soft-focus commercials. Here’s the site: Highland Historic Environment Record.

The 2500-year-old shipwreck was discovered off the coast of Gela, Sicily, by divers 20 years ago, and the local archaeological authorities have been trying to recover it ever since.

Thanks to the Italian Coast Guard, they’ve now succeeded in raising the entire wreck which will be restored in Portsmouth before going back on display in a new maritime museum in Gela.

What makes this ship particularly remarkable is that it’s the largest, most intact vessel ever found to be constructed with a ancient technique known as “sewing”. Homer mentions this ship-building method in the Illiad.

The ship’s outer shell was built first, and the inner framework was added later. The wooden planks of the hull were sewn together with ropes, with pitch and resin used as sealant to keep out water. [...]

Beltrame, of the Università Ca’ Foscari, said the ship—”part of a family of archaic Greek vessels”—is something of a missing link in the evolution of naval engineering.

“It shows a mix of sewing and mortise-and-tenon joints—a different technique that later prevailed in shipbuilding,” Beltrame said, referring to joints in which a protrusion in one piece of wood inserts into a cavity in another.

Sewn-together planks isn’t so far from the first vessels people made to cross the water. It’s a transitional form where you can still see the Robin Crusoe raft inside the oil tanker. Very cool.

City of Rome plans ancient theme park outside of town.

“The model is Euro-Disney in Paris,” said Deputy Mayor Mauro Cutrufo, announcing plans to build a vast ancient Rome theme park just outside the city which he says could be up and running within three to four years.

The park would provide family-friendly attractions to show visitors what life was like in the Rome of 2,000 years ago.

To be built on an as yet unspecified 1,000-1,200 acre site, it would put a Roman twist on rides like Disneyland’s Pirates of the Caribbean, in which visitors float on boats through a fantasy pirate world.

“You would relive scenes from the Colosseum, from ancient Rome, gladiators or maybe Julius Caesar or other things,” a Rome city official said.

There aren’t enough puking emoticons in the world to describe what I’m feeling.

Hopefully the regional government of Lazio will end this tortured madness before it begins in earnest.

Would you look at this:

That is a pure gold 7th c. cross of Anglo-Saxon manufacture and it was found in a muddy field by yet another British dude with a metal detector.

I swear to God it’s like people just tossed huge loot around for people to find under a few of inches of dirt 1300 years later. And England was a backwoods for centuries! Yet still they score and score. I never hear of a metal detector turning up shit in Rome.

The stunning Anglo Saxon artefact was set with red gemstones and might have originally held a relic such as bone from a Disciple or fragment of the Cross.

Measuring just over an inch long, the 18 carat gold has been decorated with fine detail and is thought to have been worn as a pendant.

It is English made with gold that was probably melted down from Merovingian French coins.

The metal detector fellow actually sounds like he knows what he’s doing. There’s a great passage in the article where he describes his process and the discovery.

Belgian Archaeologists digging in Turkey have found the head of a colossal statue of the empress Faustina, wife of Roman emperor Antonius Pius.

She was found just a few meters from where another colossus, this one of Hadrian and currently on exhibit in the British Museum, was discovered last year: in the frigidarium of the Roman Baths at Sagalassos.

Last year’s discoveries suggested more statues of people belonging to the circles around Hadrian, such as his wife Vibia Sabina or his male lover Antinoüs, might be found here. The team even initially thought that this year’s find was probably Vibia Sabina, who was only 14 years old when she was forced into marriage with Hadrian. But it was clear once the head, which was face down, was turned over, that it represented a woman more mature than as Sabina was usually portrayed.

The head has large, almond-shaped eyes (only the tear ducts are rendered, not the iris or pupils as became usual during the reign of Hadrian) and fleshy thick lips. Its hair is parted in the middle of the front and taken in wavy strains below and around the ears toward the back. The rendering of the hair was done with only sparing sparing use of the drill, a feature characteristic for portraits of empresses in this, the Antonine, dynasty, in sharp contrast with the beards and curly hairs of their husbands. On top of the head is a circlet, a feature typical for most of Sabina’s portraits, yet in this case the whole physiognomy of the face clearly indicates it is the empress Faustina the Elder, wife of Hadrian’s successor Antoninus Pius.

Faustina and Antonius Pius were married for 31 years and had 4 children, only one of whom — a daughter and future empress — survived to adulthood. By all accounts their marriage was a very happy one. Antonius Pius deified her upon her death in 141 A.D., struck several coins dedicated to the Divine Faustina, built a temple in her name and started a charity for orphans called “Faustina’s Girls”.

Sweet, neh?

The good folks over at the Orwell Prize are doing a cool thing reminscent of that WWI letters blog I posted about a while ago. They’re reposting all of George Orwell’s diary entries in real time, exactly 70 years after Orwell first wrote them.

The August entries are from his domestic diaries. The political ones kick off on September 7th. I don’t know if that’s a convention Orwell himself used, or if it’s just how they classify them at the Orwell Prize.

So far the entries are relatively mundane stuff about the weather and George catching snakes, although I don’t mean that dismissively. It’s refreshingly genuine, and I’m glad George Orwell bucked the trend and didn’t kill snakes.

The footnotes are money, complete with Shakespeare quotes to explain a passing reference.

Pardon my impromptu hiatus there. I’m back with 2 new fans and replaced DC jack. I had actually forgotten my computer could be this neat. As is usual with technology these days, I could have bought a new laptop with what I paid for the hardware fixes, but it wouldn’t be as pimped out as this one. Besides, this is my laptop. There are many like it but this one is mine. /Full Metal Jacket

As I catch up on my news alerts, I might just write up an ante-dated story or two, so if you see stories appear from a week ago, you’re not crazy. Not because of that anyway.

But enough about me. This week the internets bring us Executed Today, an engrossing blog which discusses the circumstances behind one execution which took place on that day. Some of them were cause célèbres in their time, including Nazi executioners, spies, witches and sodomites.

Here’s the witchy one, courtesy of 17th c. Sweden.

Accused by her own daughters of carrying their children — Malin’s grandchildren — to Satanic masses, “Rumpare-Malin” obstinately refused to cop to the charge. (Naturally, not confessing was a further indicator to the court that Satan was fortifying her defiance.) Without a confession, the authorities couldn’t assuage themselves by giving her the easy-ish death of decapitation; the law required burning at the stake.* A sack of gunpowder around the neck to speed things up was the best they could offer her.

Matsdotter maintained her innocence to the stake, frustrating the confessors, and when one of her daughters called on her to admit the crime, “she gave her daughter into the hands of the devil and cursed her for eternity.”

Some years later the daughter apparently was executed for perjuring herself in this case, thereby fulfilling mom’s dying curse. Oh, and Malin’s husband was also an executee. Sodomy.

Srsly if I were part of that family, I’d be courting any dark power I could think of to make me invisible to the authorities.

I’ve mentioned whole ancient chariots having being found in two entries, but neither times did any source provide a picture, and believe me I looked far and wide.

Well, Bulgarian archaeologists have found a 1900-year-old chariot in a Thracian tomb and for once they’re not being stingy with the archaeoporn, bless their merciful hearts.

Daniela Agre said her team found the four-wheel chariot during excavations near the village of Borisovo, about 180 miles east of Sofia, the capital.

“This is the first time that we have found a completely preserved chariot in Bulgaria,” said Agre, a senior archaeologist at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences.

At the funerary mound, the team also discovered table pottery, glass vessels and other gifts for the funeral of a wealthy Thracian aristocrat. In a separate pit, they found skeletons of two riding horses apparently sacrificed during the funeral of the nobleman, along with well-preserved bronze and leather objects, some believed to be harnesses.

It’s actually not the first time a complete chariot has been found in Bulgaria; it’s just the first time one has been found by archaeologists and excavated properly instead of torn out of the earth by looters.

Anyway, it’s hotness, so without further ado, enjoy: