Tip o’ the pileus to Vicky Alvear Shecter for this one … a very nicely-put-together article in History Today on the fire and the reactions to it:
… for my part, I was unaware of the letter mentioned; not sure how I missed it.
The Vindolanda Trust tweeted this item from Law Pundit … seems Apple needs to do some Classical archaeology courses:
In contrast to some of the other ones posted yesterday, this video from the Royal Ontario Museum is pretty good. Christopher Smith of BSR fame gives us an intro to Roman Religion:
… just a few posts from the end of the day; gotta keep the info flowing:
Hot off the Twitterfeed from the Caerleon dig (I’ll post some coverage on this dig later today, hopefully):
Hobnail footprint in a tile from trench 1 twitpic.com/67xf58—
Caerleon Dig (@CaerleonDig) August 18, 2011
Don Lavigne of Texas Tech tells us about his work with Archilochus (interesting ideas about performance in different contexts):
The BBC is really starting to bug me as regards coverage of archaeology. Of late, it appears the only things it feels worth covering are those which ‘happen’ to be associated with its Digging for Britain series. The problem is, of course, that there generally isn’t anything ‘new’ about it, but my email and social network feeds are all abuzz with the exciting ‘news’. A case in point is the latest thing clogging up the airwaves:
Archaeologists believe they have found the first pre-Roman planned town discovered in Britain.
It has been unearthed beneath the Roman town of Silchester or Calleva Atrebatum near modern Reading.
The Romans are often credited with bringing civilisation to Britain – including town planning.
But excavations have shown evidence of an Iron Age town built on a grid and signs inhabitants had access to imported wine and olive oil.
Prof Mike Fulford, an archaeologist at the University of Reading, said the people of Iron Age Silchester appear to have adopted an urbanised ‘Roman’ way of living, long before the Romans arrived.
“It is very remarkable to find this evidence of a planned Iron Age layout before the arrival of the Romans and the development of a planned, Roman town,” he said.
“Indeed, it would be hard to see a significant difference between the lifestyles of the inhabitants of the Iron Age town and of its Roman successor in the 1st Century AD.”
He said they seem to have been drinking wine and using olive oil and a fermented fish sauce called garum in their cooking, all imported from abroad.
Silchester is famous for the most complete Roman town walls in Britain.
After the Roman invasion, the town was used by its military, and there is evidence that Roman buildings were very swiftly built on top of Iron Age structures.
Prof Fulford believes that shortly before this, the town may have been taken over by the British Iron Age chieftain Caratacus – a leader of the Catuvellauni tribe – as his stronghold.
The evidence comes from coins minted by Caratacus in the area.
“Both their tight distribution in central southern England and their style point to Calleva as being the source of Caratacus’ coins,” he said.
Caratacus was a hero of the British resistance to Roman rule. He famously took on the invading Roman army at the Battle of Medway and after his capture was taken to Rome where he appeared so fearless that the Emperor Claudius was moved to spare his life.
As for the fate of the Roman town, a scorched layer within the archaeology suggests that it was actually burnt to the ground, and seems to have been abandoned for about 20 years.
It is possible that this destruction was carried out by the Queen of the Iceni tribe, Boudicca, or at least at the time of her anti-Roman rebellion in 60 – 61 AD.
It is known from the Annals of Tacitus that Boudicca and her army laid waste to the Roman towns of Colchester (Camulodunum), London (Londinium) and St Albans (Verulamium), but could Silchester have been a fourth, previously unknown Roman settlement to fall victim to Boudicca’s rebellion?
If these theories are correct, then within a single generation Silchester went through a period of turbulent evolution from a prosperous and sophisticated Iron Age town, to being under direct Roman army control to being burned to the ground and deserted.
via: ‘Britain’s first pre-Roman planned town’ found near Reading | BBC
Okay … I’m first to admit this is a very interesting story and in the past I’ve mentioned that Silchester must be an incredibly interesting dig. But let’s have a bit of a flashback:
… I’m all for hyping Silchester and all the wonderful work Dr Fulford has been doing there for 13 or 14 years now (maybe more), but please do not present it as news!!!! At a bare minimum, in the ‘related stories’ box, link to your previous coverage BBC! It strikes me as intellectually dishonest not to …
Image via Wikipedia
ante diem xv kalendas septembres
I think back in February I missed posting about the House of the Vestals in Rome being opened to the public. Here’s a nice AP video that popped up:
Can’t say that I like the latest trio of short vids from the ROM … we mentioned the meh factor in the Pantheon video (below), and now I’ve been alerted to two others … the first is ostensibly on ‘Bread and Games’, but really is about the theatre in Bosra and doesn’t really say anything about the ‘Bread and Circuses’ aspect of Roman life:
The next one is about gladiators and looks at a relief from Turkey … the narrative is a rather ‘popular’ viewpoint (with some rather loose use of ‘Colosseum’):
… this one’s perhaps the most infuriating as the relief itself is so interesting … the gladiators are wearing the same armour (which is extremely uncommon) and it seems to be a mishmash of different types; I have to stare at this one a lot longer and harder, I think …
… and now we catch up with what was posted yesterday or so:
Latest video from the folks at the Royal Ontario Museum … Trinity Jackman tells us where the name comes from:
… kind of ‘meh’ given that the monument was recently in the news with a semi-new theory …
Interesting little excerpt from the middle of an item in the Los Angeles Times:
Liz Glynn’s studio, on the second floor of a mildly shabby Chinatown office complex, is modest in size and extremely cluttered. Shelves are crammed with boxes and bins; tables are loaded with books, piles of snapshots, and odds and ends from various projects. It would be difficult, at a glance, to get a very clear sense of the work Glynn makes, or the scale on which she makes it: sculptures, installations and participatory performances involving crowds of volunteers, feats of DIY engineering and a thematic range spanning centuries of history.
Nor is her manner particularly revealing: 29 and slight of build, she has a quiet voice and a calm demeanor. In her studio as in her often hectic performances, she seems always to be poised in the eye of the storm. As she speaks, however, drawing objects and anecdotes out from the clutter like an archaeologist drawing from the rubble of a dig — given her interest in ancient history, the metaphor is irresistible — a picture gradually begins to appear.
Ten minutes into a recent visit, for instance, she tells an animated story that epitomizes the scope of her current interests concerning the discovery of what’s known as the “gold of Troy” by the German-born businessman-turned-amateur archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann, who was obsessed with establishing the historical veracity of “The Iliad.” Schliemann unearthed the gold — a cache of ancient jewelry — in northwest Turkey in the 1870s and gave it to a museum in Berlin. In World War II it was seized by the Russians, who hid it in the basement of the Pushkin Museum for 50 years until an outside scholar tracked it down.
“So this curator who’d been there the whole time was like, ‘Yeah, we have it, and we’re not giving it back because the Germans did such damage to our culture,’” she says. Meanwhile, she adds, “you go to the museum in Berlin and there are these really crappy copies there and this thing about how the Russians took it, the Germans were the victims of World War II, and the Germans want their gold back. The whole thing is totally insane. So I made copies and I snuck them into the museum and shot video of me sticking them in. Then I brought some other copies to Troy and shot a video of me walking through all the trenches and stuff.”
Tracing the paths of artifacts through the world, including the splintering paths of copies and replicas, is a central preoccupation for Glynn, who sees objects like the gold of Troy, and the charged, often irrational disputes that tend to surround them, reflecting larger forces of growth and decay, creation and destruction at play in the operations of history.
Again and again, the work calls attention to the odd ways in which the distant past intertwines with the present. For instance, she has plans for an installation involving the construction of a tunnel intended to invoke both the tunnels in the Egyptian pyramids and those constructed today between Egypt and Gaza, drawing a parallel between antiquities being smuggled out and provisions being smuggled in. [...]
via Artist Liz Glynn digs through rubble of history, modern times | LA Times.
From the Sydney Morning Herald (tip o’ the pileus to Tim Parkin):
Colonel Alan Treloar was one of Australia’s greatest linguists and classical scholars and also a distinguished soldier.
Few could rival his knowledge as a scholar of ancient Greek and Latin. He had a special interest in the Roman poet Horace but had read the entire classical literatures of both languages at least twice.
He had an astonishing gift for languages and would admit, when pressed, to direct knowledge of about 80. He had a formidable command of many, such as Sanskrit, Russian, Chinese, Arabic and Hittite. In his early 80s he was investigating Bunuba, a language of the Kimberley.
Alan Treloar was born in Ivanhoe, Victoria, on November 13, 1919, the eldest of four children of John Treloar, who became the first director of the Australian War Memorial, and his wife, Clarissa (nee Aldridge), a music teacher.
His first linguistic interests were in French at six and Latin at 10. He soon took up ancient Greek as well and was learning Japanese by correspondence while at school.
He went to Carey Baptist Grammar School and the University of Melbourne, where he took a bachelor of arts and was the Victorian Rhodes Scholar for 1940 but did not take up the scholarship then because of his service in the Second Australian Imperial Force.
He began his military career with the Melbourne University Regiment and went on to serve with the 2/14th Battalion from 1940 to 1944, first in the Syrian campaign, during which he was seriously wounded, and later on the Kokoda Track.
His wounding meant he was no longer able to march with the infantry and he was transferred to a staff appointment at Victoria Barracks in Melbourne. After hours, he worked for his master of arts degree from the University of Melbourne, which he took in 1943. He then transferred to the Australian Army Intelligence Corps from 1944 to 1945.
In 1945 he married Bronnie Taylor, a fellow linguist and diplomatic staff cadet.
On release from the army, Treloar was a lecturer in classics at the University of Melbourne and tutor at Trinity College, Melbourne, before taking up his Rhodes Scholarship. At Oxford, he chose to read classical moderations and greats.
He also served with the British Army of the Rhine in 1946 and from 1949 to 1950 was assistant lecturer in ancient history at the University of Nottingham. He then went to the University of Glasgow from 1950 to 1959. During this period, he was attached from the Australian Army to the University of Nottingham Training Corps and then the Glasgow Highlanders, then was transferred to the Territorial Army.
In 1959 the Treloars moved back to Australia. He became first warden of Hytten Hall and reader in classics at the University of Tasmania in 1959 and, in 1960, moved to the University of New England, where he was master of Wright College (1960 to 1966) then reader in comparative philology (1966 to 1984).
He also continued his military involvement, transferring back to the Australian Army to serve with the Tasmania Command and then the Sydney University Regiment in command of New England Company until retiring in 1969.
Academic retirement came nominally in 1984 but in fact ended only with failing health in the past few years. He continued to be sought out for expert advice by scholars from around the world and to make his skills available as an inspirational teacher to a string of students.
His publications reflect the diversity of his interests and include The Importance of Music (1987) and Lyra (1994), as well as academic and military papers.
Treloar was a reserved and dignified man of honesty and integrity and a warm and generous friend. In 1992, he was awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters by the University of New England.
Alan Treloar is survived by his children, Anna and Jeannie, son-in-law James and grandchildren Sarah, Katy and Alex. Bronnie died in 1991, as did daughter Meg, in 1995.
This was making the reTweet rounds the other day:
Interesting interview with Joel Christensen on Homer and the links between ancient epic and modern science fiction:
Got a bit sidetracked yesterday … this will keep you busy while I wade through the accumulated email:
ante diem xvii kalendas septembres
nothing!
From the IAA:
A Rare Statue of Hercules was exposed at Horvat Tarbenet in the Jezreel Valley in excavations of the Israel Antiquities Authority, within the framework of the Jezreel Valley Railway project, directed by the Israel National Roads Company.
A marble statue of Hercules from the second century CE was uncovered in excavations the Israel Antiquities Authority is conducting at Horvat Tarbenet, within the framework of the Jezreel Valley Railway project, directed by the Israel National Roads Company
According to Dr. Walid Atrash of the Israel Antiquities Authority, “This is a rare discovery. The statue, which probably stood in a niche, was part of the decoration of a bathhouse pool that was exposed during the course of the excavations. It is c. 0.5 m tall, is made of smoothed white marble and is of exceptional artistic quality. Hercules is depicted in three dimension, as a naked figure standing on a base. His bulging muscles stand out prominently, he is leaning on a club to his left, on the upper part of which hangs the skin of the Nemean lion, which according to Greek mythology Hercules slew as the first of his twelve labors”.
The hero Hercules, of Greek and Roman mythology, was born in Thebes. He is the son of the god Zeus and the mortal Alcmene, a woman from Electryon. Hercules is considered the strongest man in the world, a symbol of power, courage and superhuman strength; one of the most famous legendary heroes of ancient Greece who battled the forces of the netherworld on behalf of the Olympian gods. Hercules is described as hot tempered, and he often times acted impetuously and with uncontrollable rage. Greek mythology has it that Zeus’ wife, Hera, expressed her jealousy and fierce hatred of Hercules from the day he was born because he was the product of her husband’s infidelity. While he was just a baby Hera placed two poisonous snakes in his bed, but he managed to overpower them. Later, in a fit of madness brought on by Hera, Hercules killed his three sons and his wife Megara, whilst she attempted to protect the smallest of them. In order to atone for his terrible sin, the Oracle of Delphi ordered Hercules to go to Eurystheus, king of Mycenae, and perform whatever the king commanded him to do. Among the king’s commands were twelve superhuman feats known as the ‘Labors of Hercules’. Depictions of the labors of Hercules are among the most common themes in ancient art and the statue that was discovered portrays Hercules’ first task.
Horvat Tarbenet is located in the Jezreel Valley, three kilometers northeast of Kefar Barukh, and four kilometers northwest of Afula. Tarbenet was a Jewish settlement in the third century CE, which is mentioned in the Jerusalem Talmud (Megilla 4, 5). The story is told of a local teacher who would teach the Ten Commandments very quickly, so rapidly that his students could not understand him. The townspeople asked the teacher to take a break between each passage so they could follow him. The teacher refused because “the sages forbade one from stopping while reading the words of Moses”. The teacher’s refusal even received the backing of Rabbi Hanina. The teacher continued to teach as he did until the residents fired him.
In an archaeological excavation conducted at the site remains were discovered, among them dwellings, a built well and an installation that included a large pool which was probably part of a Roman bathhouse. Benches were found on two sides of the pools. The well, which is 2.90 m in diameter and in excess of 4 m deep, had a saqiye type pumping installation constructed above its opening. A drainage channel that extended as far as the pool was built alongside the well. It seems that the well and channel were meant to supply water for the pool. After the pool was no longer being used it was filled in with a layer of earth that contained numerous potsherds, an abundance of broken glass vessels and the marble fragment of the statue of Hercules. The complex that was discovered apparently underwent a number of changes and it is dated to the Roman and Byzantine periods, until the beginning of the Early Islamic period.
At the beginning of the last century the legendary Valley Railway linked Haifa with Damascus. Recently the Israel National Roads Company commenced work renewing the rail line with the necessary changes in its route. The new Valley Railway, which is c. 60 kilometers long, will carry passengers and freight between Haifa, Afula and Bet She’an. In certain places the new track will pass alongside the route of the historic Valley Railway.
Here’s one of the IAA’s photos:
Not quite sure what to make of the phrase “rare discovery” … the ‘vertical pose’ of the photo is a bit misleading because this seems to be another version of the ‘Weary Hercules’/Farnese type of the same sort that the Boston MFA was recently in the news for because, among other things, there are over 100 copies of this thing (see: Weary Hercules to be Returned) …
