Month: March 2022

Pompeii freedman was deliberately mummified

Ancient

Archaeologists in Pompeii have revealed new details about the tomb of the freedman discovered last year in the Porta Sarno necropolis outside the east gate of Pompeii’s walls. First and foremost, analysis of the mummified remains of the deceased confirmed that he was deliberately embalmed, not accidentally preserved by the excellent seal of the burial chamber. He was wrapped in a shroud which was imbued with resin or honey. That simple embalming method combined with the hermitic seal of the burial chamber to partially mummify the soft tissues.

An inscribed marble slab identified the deceased as Marcus Venerius Secundio, a former public slave who was manumitted and rose in social and economic status to become a priest of Venus and of the cult of the Divine Augustus where he had once served as an attendant and to sponsor four days of games in both Greek and Latin. The location of his tomb was a prestigious one (the Porta Sarno led directly to the Via dell’Abbondanza, Pompeii’s main street).

The tomb is a rectangular chamber within a larger rectangular enclosure. The façade is topped by a triangular pediment (the inscription plaque is in the center of it) and painted with a colorful fresco of a garden with trees, bushes and a small fountain in the middle. While the details have faded, close examination has found that this image represents the Elysian Fields where the souls of the virtuous dead reside forever in the eternal spring of its peaceful groves.

Marcus Venerius was inhumed in a small cell behind the façade. The chamber was hermetically sealed by blocks of tufa and masonry, then covered in a red clay plaster coating. Inhumation burials were rare in 1st century, and indeed the cinerary remains of two other individuals were found inside the wider enclosure. A columella funerary marker inscribed “Novia Amabilis” points to one of the cremated people having been Marcus’ wife. A square white marble slab in the ground in front of the columella would have been used to hold offerings.

Outside of Egypt, mummification in the Roman Empire was exceedingly rare in the 1st century A.D., as cremation had become the predominant funerary practice in the middle Republic and would remain so through the middle Imperial era. Only a handful of examples are known from the historical and archaeological record, and those burials were of people of the highest rank and power, including the patrician Cornelia family who idiosyncratically continued the ancient tradition of inhumation long after other ancient families had abandoned it, Nero’s wife Poppea (a native of Pompeii) and Priscilla, wife of a relative of Domitian’s.

Marcus Venerius’ circumstances were entirely different. He was a former slave, not a member of an elite Roman family, and he alone was embalmed while the two other family members buried in the tomb were cremated. Archaeologists believe he may have adopted the Egyptian/Hellenistic practice of embalming to follow the latest death fashions of the elite, linking himself in the afterlife to the most wealthy and powerful people of his era. In his role as priest at Pompeii’s Temple of Venus, he may well have encountered Nero who visited the temple in person and left an enormous offering of gold coins.

Other fresh discoveries made in the ongoing excavation and analysis of recovered artifacts and remains include a bronze coin dating to 65 A.D. found inside the cinerary urn of Novia Amabilis and a large bronze nail between the glass urn and the metal box next to her columella that is believed to have symbolically sealed the urn. A glass ointment bottle was found next to an amphora topped with a round lid; it too was used in ritual offerings.

The glass urn was found to contain a dark reddish liquid, plant remains and burned bones. Study of the cinerary remains identified bones from at least four people, an adult and three young children. One of the children was between six and eight years old, the second between four and six years old, the third between three and five. Finding the ashes of multiple individuals inside a single urn is also exceptionally rare.

1st c. horse burial found in Germany

Ancient

Archaeologists have discovered a rare horse burial from the 1st century A.D. in an excavation at the site of highway construction near Werl, northwestern Germany.  The team unearthed 114 finds from the 1st century, including two wire fibulae that are very rare in this part of the country, evidence there was a small settlement dating to the early Roman Empire at the site.

The skeletal remains of a horse buried on its side is an even rarer find than the fibulae, and all the more so because the soil in the Hellweg region is highly acidic and can make short shrift even of large bones.

“The horse burial is definitely one of the highlights of this dig,” says Robinson. This horse burial came to light completely unexpectedly, because given the prevailing soil conditions, it is not a matter of course that parts of bones and even teeth would have been preserved, according to the excavation director.

One of the teeth is now to be examined further in order to determine the age of the horse more precisely. “However, the soil in the pit backfill around the horse was no different than that in the rest of the pits,” Robinson shares. It is therefore obvious to the experts that the horse burial can also be dated to the first century AD.

The dates have not been confirmed yet. Archaeologists hope that another unexpected discovery — charred wood at the base of a deep pit — will help narrow down the ages of the objects and remains found there.

Cautionary tale and pristine balm tombs open to public

Ancient, Roma, Caput Mundi

The Mausoleums of Saxa Rubra, two ancient tombs on the northern outskirts of the modern city of Rome, are for the first time open to the public every third Thursday of the month. Surrounded by modern construction along the Via Flaminia, the 2nd century tombs are little known and easily missed in the bewildering density of historical sites in Rome, but they are of great archaeological significance.

The tombs are on the 8th kilometer of the Via Flaminia, the ancient Republican road leading north out of the city. They were both carved out of the red tufa outcroppings that Saxa Rubra (meaning “red cave”) was named after. 

An inscription identifies the larger of the two tombs as that of Quintus Nasonius Ambrosius, freedman of the Nasonian family, and his wife freedwoman Nasonia Urbica. It was discovered in 1674 during works in preparation for the Jubilee year of 1675. From the moment it was found it was treated in the worst possible way. The history of this tomb is a microcosm of how cultural patrimony can be obliterated by neglect, ignorance and greed. The information panels in the tomb tell the story.

The workers who found the tomb broke through its frescoed ceiling, putting a hole in it and destroying a section of the plaster. The front entrance to the funerary chamber was framed by a temple façade with four pilasters supporting a triangular pediment, also carved out of the same living rock.

Inside they found a rectangular funerary chamber with three niches on its long sides and one at the apex. The walls were divided into two registers separated by a cornice. The bottom register has the niches; the top register alternating lunettes and squares. It was adorned with mosaic floors and elaborate frescoes on every stuccoed surface of the walls, niches and ceiling.

Detailed drawings of the tomb and frescoes by painter and engraver Pietro Santi Bartoli published in 1680 document an absolute riot of richly detailed scenes from mythology (Oedipus and Sphinx, Orpheus charming the animals) and literature, as well as architectural trompe l’oeil (Corinthian columns, cornices, pediments, friezes), floral garlands, animals, urns, allegorical figures (the four seasons, happiness, and some amazing hunt scenes, including one with a pair of rather odd-looking lions attacking a party of shielded men and another with a pair of oversized leopards attacking the men attempting to entrap them, likely for the arena.

The fresco over the inscription referring to Nasonius and Nasonia depicts Ovid as poet laureate with the god Mercury and the Erato, muse of lyric and erotic poetry.  This is a bit of a name-drop by the owners of the tomb, associating themselves by implication with great Augustan-era poet Publius Ovidius Naso, author of the Ars Amatoria and Metamorphoses. There is no actual family connection between Nasonius and Ovid (Naso was a cognomen of the gens Ovidia; the freedman has adopted his former owner’s name (gens Nasonia) as his own).

The discovery was celebrated at the time, but not in any way protected. From the time of its discovery through the late 19th century, even after Rome was made capital of a unified Italy in 1870, the frescoes were pried off and sold piecemeal to a variety of willing buyers including the British Museum. The mosaics were torn up. By the turn of the century even the façade had been destroyed. The fraction of frescoes remaining were damaged and faded to the point of being almost unrecognizable as the works Bartoli had so meticulously recorded two centuries before.

The new information panels in the Tomb of the Nasonians recount the whole sad tale and use Bartoli’s drawings to give visitors a glimpse into what the tomb looked like when it was first discovered.

The second tomb is a soothing balm after the Tomb of the Nasonians. An inscribed marble slab at the door dedicates it to a woman named Fadilla from her loving husband. It was intact and in beautiful condition when it was discovered in 1923. It’s a smaller space but it is luxuriously appointed with a black-and-white mosaic floor with birds, meanders and other shapes in alternating octagons and squares. The walls and ceilings are fully stuccoed and frescoed with winged Cupids, deities, urns, animals (peacocks, antelopes), outlined in colored paint to create curved and polygonal sections.

Fadilla’s tomb was left unmolested, surviving Fascism, World War II and municiple neglect, which thankfully in this case turned out to be remarkably benign. The contrast between the two tombs is marked. This video’s auto-translated closed captions are terrible, but it’s worth watching even if you can’t understand Italian for the video tour of the two tombs.

Unique figurine wears ancient British hoodie

Ancient, Treasures

A unique Roman-era copper alloy figurine of a man wearing the birrus Britannicus, the characteristic heavy wool caped hood worn of native Britons, that almost fell through the cracks in the Treasure Act was saved from exile and is now one of the gems of the collection of the Chelmsford City Museum.

The figurine was discovered near Chelmsford in 2015 by a metal detectorist. It is just two-and-a-half inches high and weighs 66 grams (2.3 oz). The arms below the elbows and legs below the knees broke off in antiquity, but the figure’s posture is still evident. The right arm is held out horizontally with the elbow bent so that the missing forearm pointed down. The left arm is bent upwards at the elbow. The left leg is straight; the right bent at the knee suggesting the contrapposto position.

It’s his fashion that makes him unique. He wears a tunic with a pleated skirt belted at the waist. His birrus Britannicus crosses his shoulders at the front and then drapes all the way down his back to his knees. The back of the cloak is incised with a double V from the top of the shoulders to the bottom, perhaps meant to represent a quiver. Small v-shapes in a horizontal orientation decorate the left and right edges of the cloak and the deep triangle of the V. The hood is up, coming to point over the center of forehead that then crests down to the nape of the neck.

Copper figurines from the Roman period are not in and of themselves exceptionally rare, but they usually depict deities and the ones that do feature people in hooded cloaks are not wearing the birrus, but rather the Gallic style cloak. There are no known parallels of the Chelmsford birrus Britannicus figurine on the archaeological record, even though we know from the Edict of Diocletian that they were exported throughout the empire. Diocletian’s Edict on Maximum Prices (301 A.D.) fixed the price of the British hooded cloak at 6,000 denarii, 2,000 more than the highest quality of military mantle and 4,000 more than the best Phrygian hooded cloak.

An almost identical hooded figure, with contrapposto legs and raised arms, the right hand pointed down, the left up, is depicted in a 4th A.D. mosaic in the dining room at Chedworth Roman Villa in Gloucestershire, southwest England. The floor mosaic features personifications of the four seasons, one in each corner. Winter is wearing a birrus Britannicus over a tunic and trousers. In his right hand he holds a hare from the hunt; in his left hand is a branch denuded of leaves, a symbol of the season. It is the only known Roman-era mosaic depicting of a native Briton.

The figurine was not declared treasure because it’s not made of precious metals, even though it is a one-of-a-kind depiction and was deemed of national importance by the Portable Antiquities Scheme. It was sold for a comparative pittance of £550 ($730), and thankfully when the UK Ministry of Culture deferred an export license to give a local museum a chance to keep this most British of Roman figurines in Britain, the Chelmsford City Museum was able to acquire it.

Archaeological collection of Kings of Italy reopens

Ancient, Museums

The Archaeological Gallery in the Royal Palace of the House of Savoy in Turin has reopened after an extensive redesign. More than 1,000 ancient artifacts and artworks, many of which have never before been on public display, have been installed in the ground floor of the 19th century New Wing of the palace, which connects through a monumental atrium to the painting collection of the Savoy dynasty.

The earliest of the Savoy dukes to succumb to the fascination of Antiquity were Emanuele Filiberto (1553-80) and his son Carlo Emanuele I (1580-1630). In the first gallery there are two 16th-century fakes that illustrate the taste of the period: the mysterious “cabalistic” bust of Isis in black marble with the Signs of the Zodiac on its face; and the sleeping boy with the wings of Eros but the attributes of Hercules, with deliberate breakages.

By the 18th century, the works began to be seen more as sources of knowledge than trophies, so in 1724 the collection, which in the meanwhile had grown through purchases and donations, was given to the University of Turin by King Vittorio Amedeo II, and the poet, scholar and playwright Scipione Maffei was charged with displaying it in the Palazzo della Regia Università. A hundred years later, the Egyptian collection assembled by Bernardino Drovetti and bought by King Carlo Felice was put on display in the former Collegio dei Nobili. In the 1840s Paul Emile Botta, the French consul in Mosul, discovered Niniveh and the Assyrian civilisation, while a little later Luigi Palma di Cesnola and his brother Alessandro were putting together one of the greatest collections of Cypriot antiquities from the excavations they were conducting on the island. Both these campaigns enriched the Savoy collections, with two exquisite reliefs in calcareous alabaster depicting the Assyrian king, Sargon II and a court dignitary, both from the palace at Khorsabad now on show in the Galleria.

The new gallery occupies 10 rooms divided into five sections. The first section covers the history of the collection itself, accumulated over 400 years by the Savoy dynasty, since the 11th century rulers of the Savoy region which includes modern-day Piedmont with Turin as its capital, and Kings of Italy from 1860 until 1946. From the origins of the collection, visitors move through the long Sculpture Gallery lined on both sides by Greek and Roman statues, portrait busts and sarcophagus reliefs. The gallery ends in the Rotunda of the Emperors, where busts of Roman emperors surround the viewer.

The next section is dedicated to the Near Ancient East and features Assyrian artifacts, including the portrait relief of King Sargon II, and the largest collection of cuneiform texts and cylinder seals in Italy.

Rooms dedicated to Roman Civilization follow, that includes a never-before-exhibited 19th century cast of the Fasti Praenestini calendar, a mosaic of Orpheus taming the beasts and the portrait bust of Julius Caesar considered by scholars to be the most realistic known, and therefore likely the one that most resembles him.

The Greek and Etruscan Civilization rooms contain, among many other treasures, more than 400 Greek and Italian ceramics plus a second collection of Etruscan bronzes, bucchero pottery, cinerary urns and sarcophagi, including the large sarcophagus of Matausna dated to 280-270 B.C.

The last section, Antiquities from Cyprus, contains the objects from the greatest chronological span in the museum, ranging from the Bronze Age (3rd millennium B.C.) to Late Antiquity (5th century A.D.).