It’s remarkably well-preserved! Aside from some fading and needing some polish, it’s impossible to believe it’s really that old. The “resolution” (to use a modern turn of phrase) is much higher than I would have expected for something that large.
You made me laugh because people used to describe pixels in terms of mosaic tiles. Now we’ve got to the point where we do the opposite and descrive mosaics in terms of pixels.
In the entrance of the Pokemon Company International in Bellingham, WA, one wall is decorated with an image from one of the games, blown up so that the pixels are 1" x 1", filling a space that's about 20' x 10' tall. What makes it cool is that a transparent tile was put over it, where the tiles are 1" x 1", making the whole wall look like a mosaic, giving something totally modern a wonderful antique air.
Yeah, that's it, between Bulbasaur and the people sitting down. Here's the picture I took of it the last time I was there: https://pasteboard.co/JauAUWV.jpg
Kind of curious how they found it(surveyors). Did they use ground radar or something to find anomalies in the soil/bedrock. Probably not something you can do from a satellite right(scifi ha).
The activity on the site had been interrupted in February due to the lockdown, and it restarted this month after the restrictions have been gradually eased up.
As you work in the open air, it's certainly less risky than a closed space (like, say, a haidresser).
Lots of trial and error probably. From the article:
> A note on the commune website said diggers finally made the discovery "after decades of failed attempts".
Also "scholars first found evidence of a Roman villa there more than a century ago", so they knew it must be there somewhere (I guess from old texts), but didn't know where exactly to look for it.
Satellite archaeology is surprisingly effective - the outlines of buildings show up in crop patterns, and precise LIDAR mapping from the air can also reveal things.
right, figured in this case were it was "so deep" under ground not sure if you could tell "ground penetrating" but I see your point eg. finding old ruins in mountains/forests
We take beautiful art for granted today, but imagine how breathtaking and inspiring it must have been for an Ancient Roman to see these mosaics, in a time when beautiful art and artistic form had not yet been commoditized as they are today.
Oh, but it was conmoditized even then. Roman society was suprisingly „modern” on many fields, and their approach to art was no exception. Rich paid the creators to create such art on their properties to increase their value.
Yeah but it was more like “Kanye West paying someone to paint his crib” than “‘middle-class couple hiring a local guy to do up their flat”. Rich people were few and far between.
This is not really true. The rich (patricians) formed entire houses and used combination of wealth and political influence to maintain their positions. Even if their number wasnt greater than few thousands, they de-facto owned the Italy during Roman Republic.
Relatively speaking, they were most numerous within Rome, but they also owned lands they had lower class people and slaves farm for them that they sometimes visited.
Fine art was available to more of the population than you'd think. The world population doubled in the past 45 years. In contrast, during the Roman period, the world population took about 500 years to double.
Wealth accumulated over generations. In that time, if your great-great-great grandfather had a piece of artwork, there was a good chance it was yours now.
We have negative stereotypes of the past, and there were periods of history when that was true, but there were advanced periods too. The Bronze Age empires were pretty impressive until roughly 1300 BC. We had a dark age for a while. The Roman Empire was very impressive. Then we had a dark age for a while.
And you also want to think of the social structure. Rich people employed poor people in households. Even if I owned nothing personally, I'd be exposed to art in my master's household.
More like 70% to 90%, just the city of Rome got up to 750k-1M people let alone all the other cities in the empire. A great deal of this was due to Egyptian farmers ability to grow multiple crops per year on the same land. Fishing was similarly extremely productive in terms of labor to food production.
Many but not all of us do. Every time I think about all the beauty that was created in the Classical Antiquity or the Renaissance (or any other less Eurocentric moment of widespread creative spark), and how it contrasts with nearly everyone today who is seemingly hellbent on making "critical" pieces for the sake of being critical.
I understand that we need to raise awareness of certain issues, that art is also politics, that a lot "has already been done", that art expresses intent and not only depicts reality (or idealized imagery). I understand all of that, but it seems we've somehow lost track of how art can also be made just... for the sake of beauty
There's a reason hordes of tourists flock to Florence all year long, you know? Let's build more of that unquestionable beauty that transcends generations.
Imagine how inspiring it would be for modern folks today to see these mosaics in their own homes instead of... carpeting. Rugs are cool. Wall to wall carpeting is gross, and unimaginative. I am not a fan.
A few years ago I was in Fez, stayed in a 600 year old riad with original tile. And yes it was breathtaking and inspiring every day. A few days before, I was in Volubilis (وليلي)a long abandoned Roman town. Every home had these mosaic tiled floors.
Even 100 year old buildings have a craftsmanship about them that is gone in modern stick frame apartments. I wonder if we would ever see a real art deco building again, with all the polish and craftsmanship, and not something that's just art deco 'style' and severely diluted into a cheap generic building, but the real deal. Maybe there just aren't enough people trained in those stone working skills anymore. Maybe no one is willing to pay for nicer things.
Replacement cost tends to factor greatly into how much things stick around. Cheap stuff gets replaced over the years, expensive stuff gets maintained and fixed up so you get a lot of survivorship bias.
Additionally, labor becomes cheaper relative to materials the farther back you go in history so older stuff has proportionately more labor put into it. Having a bunch of fancy ornate wood work in your house was the 100yo equivalent of having a bunch of granite countertops.
But that's the thing, even the fancy stuff today doesn't have much of the fit and finish of modest stuff in the past. Go find a new construction apartment commanding top of market rent in your town, and I bet you can hear your neighbors through those paper thin walls and the appliances are new, but the cheapest ones possible. Mansions became McMansions. Compare the Broad in LA to the library build 100 years before; the materials in the $140mm Broad are bare concrete and latex paint, while the LA central library looks like a Byzantine palace.
Old woodwork in houses is pretty much always excellent. Why? There was way, way more top-quality lumber available (they'd "throw away" giant near-perfect timbers in framing, including using huge load-bearing pieces along foundations that'd cost thousands of dollars each today, assuming you could find something similar at all) and you couldn't get away with doing bad woodwork—because there was no air conditioning and heat wasn't as good as it is today! Badly-installed woodwork that didn't have great corners and joins, didn't account for wood grain and cut and position pieces accordingly, use properly aged lumber of a suitable quality, and so on, would simply fall apart between temperature and humidity swings over the years, probably so fast it'd come back to bite whoever did the shoddy work in the ass. Well-build wood finishes, meanwhile, can break a century and still be almost perfect, with little or no maintenance (aside from repairing outright accidental damage, of course, and keeping water from getting in the structure). But we don't really make those anymore.
If someone wants really nice wood trim, mantlepieces, panelling, and such in a modern house, it seems they usually loot it from an old house. The materials and work are too expensive now to make it from scratch. Ditto doors, of all things. Modern interior and exterior doors are awful compared to solid wood doors that were common not even that long ago, but, though you can still buy them, new solid doors are impractically expensive, so buying salvaged old doors usually makes more sense.
Lived for a while in an apartment building put up about 1910/20, so indeed pushing a century. Solid oak doors. The banisters (railings on the stairs) also solid oak. Duplicated would cost a fortune today with newly cut wood.
> Go find a new construction apartment commanding top of market rent in your town, and I bet you can hear your neighbors through those paper thin walls and the appliances are new, but the cheapest ones possible.
Not really true, I rented more upscale apartment once and, unlike my previous apartment, I couldn’t hear neighbors due to much better sound isolation. Appliances and cabinets were much nicer too.
Turkey allows archaeological digs, with only the same amount of red tape as in other nations around the Mediterranean. There have been a number of major excavations and discoveries in Turkey in recent decades.
I'm aware and it doesn't matter what it's called, just pointing out that Byzantine = Eastern Roman Empire and that we've already uncovered a bunch of their ruins since OP seemed to be implying that we hadn't.
I live in Turkey. I can confirm Turkey allows diggings if you can show proof you are capable of doing it. Leading such missions are mostly left to the academy for this reason. There is also a policy which I had the chance to witness it being forced which is if you encounter a historic finding when you farm your land or build a building, you are enforced to give up so that the land can be investigated. Most of the time, such land is never given back to the owner. They are compensated in some other form, depending on the type of ownership claim.
As exciting as it is to make archaeological discoveries, one benefit of not allowing archaeological digs is that you're preserving what's under that dirt for future archaeologists who may have better techniques and tools, operating under a friendlier government.
I say that in a complete vacuum with respect to Turkey. I'm guessing disallowing archaeological digs is has less to do with conservation & preservation and more to do with not getting in the way of real estate developers. I live in Philadelphia (Pennsylvania, not Alaşehir), where it's not that archaeological digs aren't allowed, but the trouble is that such digs are not mandated in the historical sections of the city, and as a result, so much history gets carted away in dump trucks.
Not sure how often this is followed but I read once while studying Roman history that best practice is to only excavate part of a site so that future generations can access it with better technology.
> archaeological digs is has less to do with conservation & preservation and more to do with not getting in the way of real estate developers
In Turkey, building stops if any archaeological finding is found in the process, until they come in and resolve the situation of the ruin. This may even lead to cancellation of the building project.
I'm really curious about how you came to the conclusion that Turkey doesn't allow digs (not criticizing!). Like, I'm just wondering where the failure in PR was for archaeologists working in Turkey that it wasn't self-evident.
Perhaps I'm biased (certainly) but Turkey often seems to be in the news for spectacular finds from archaeological digs across the country (focused mostly in the west though). I worked on a site in the SE for seven years, and there was a ton of activity every year many foreign but also Turkish digs working in every province.
I've spent almost the entire 3 weeks of my vacation in Turkey in 2015 visiting Roman archeological sites... From the Library of Celsus in Ephesus, to the entire hilltop in Bergama, to the cemetary and fantastic amphitheatre in Pamukkale, to the caves in Cappadocia (okay, those are post-Roman, but they're Christian)... Then there's the mind-blowing Hittite and Akkadian stuff at the Museum of Anatolian civilizations in Ankara... Walking along the Lycian way...
Despite the spin from post-enlightement historians recasting everything between ~600-1600 into the 'dark ages', 'rome' as in 'the roman empire' didn't end in the east until 1453 (or possibly 1917, depending on how Romanov you go), and didn't end in the west until 1806 (or possibly 1914, depending on how Hapsburg you go).
Not 'ancient rome', but still self-styled as 'rome' with a direct lineage in some form or fashion.
Polemic aside, certainly cappadocian caves would fall under the 'eastern roman empire' category, albeit post-pagan as you point out.
I agree with you on the eastern part of the Roman empire but what is the "direct lineage in some form or fashion" than brings you to 1806 for the western part?
As Voltaire quipped: "The Holy Roman Empire was neither Holy nor Roman, nor an Empire"
Just assuming the title of the Roman emperor is not really a direct lineage.
I believe he's referring to when the last Holy Roman Emperor abdicated in 1806. "The empire was dissolved on 6 August 1806, when the last Holy Roman Emperor Francis II (from 1804, Emperor Francis I of Austria) abdicated, following a military defeat by the French under Napoleon at Austerlitz (see Treaty of Pressburg)." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_Roman_Empire
Although you could make an argument that the Roman Empire in the west ended in 476 C.E. when the last Roman emperor, Romulus, was overthrown by the Germanic leader Odoacer, who became the first Barbarian to rule in Rome. In 800 the Pope gave Charlemagne the title of Roman Emperor so there's a gap of 324 years with no emperor in the west. Meanwhile, the Roman Empire in the east continued to function.
Odoacer was a career general in the Roman army, while "Romulus Augustus" was the kid of a former secretary of Attila. Odoacer took power with the benediction of the Senate and ruled in the name of the actual Emperor in Constantinople.
It's not any more or any less the end of the Western Roman Empire than the political troubles that occurred in the earlier and later centuries. The Gothic, Frankish or Vandalic kingdoms very much thought of themselves as belonging to a Roman world.
I agree that the date 476 CE was probably not as much of a devastating blow to the Roman empire and their contemporary population as it was made out to be later.
But in those 324 years a lot happened that make the case of a direct lineage questionable. The Gothic wars destroyed a lot of remaining infrastructure and Roman culture, the Roman senate was no more after 600 CE, the long term population loss, and the Christian Pope was the defacto ruler of the city (if you could still call that what was left a city).
The coronation of Charlemagne was also considered illegitimate by the Eastern Roman emperor at first, until they couldn't ignore Charlemagne's military power anymore.
They do allow digs. Turkey, as a nation, just isn't as enthusiastic about archaeology as one might hope. This might be due to some unfounded perception of themselves as "invaders".
To this day, many Greeks, Russians, etc. (mainly Eastern Orthodox Christians) still refer to Istanbul as Constantinople, as though it is under some form of illegitimate occupation. The West also still seems to view the fall of Constantinople as the fault of the Turkish people. Is it hard to blame the average Turkish citizen for being less then enthusiastic about exploring the history of what everyone around them views as somebody else's historical legacy?
This all ignores the fact that the Eastern Empire declined steadily for centuries and lost territory to many other peoples besides the Turks, including both Greeks and Europeans. While we may view the conquest of Constantinople as the tragic end of the Roman empire, the fact is that the empire lived on in the institutions of the Ottoman empire and in its people. The Ottoman empire absorbed populations that were once Roman and, although their descendants today may adhere to a different religion, their culturual inheritance is still, in large part, Roman.
This alienation of Turkish citizens from their heritage is now causing serious problems. Erdoğan's regime holds commercial interests to be supreme and has not hesitated to throw important sites under the bulldozer over minor delays. Roman ruins are widely viewed, not as the people's heritage, but as a foreign nuisance that is best swept away to make room for the new. This must change.
That is really sad to hear. Regardless of the past, archaeological ruins are collective humanities’ shared treasure and must be preserved.
Somewhat OT, I wonder if there’s a way to teach history that wouldn’t make people’s dislike it just because of perceptions like this. The Roman and Ottoman empires don’t exist anymore, what do people get my being angry at states that are gone?
Really wish it detailed how they discovered it. Hope there wasn't some digging that ran into and destroyed some section.
Can't wait to see a further analysis of the site. Hope they can use some techniques to measure the full scale and find even more interesting artifacts nearby
"Old maps showed that a villa was in the area, but of course they didn't use scale until much later, so the exact location had been lost. This was the result of a long search to finally pinpoint it."
I watched a lot of old Time Team episodes lately and this looks like more of the same from the era. Really nice, complex looking work but overall what can be expected for the time period. Cool that it's so well preserved though and hasn't suffered from having a plow or seismic event turn it into a puzzle.
If you like this stuff, I recommend checking out the UK show 'Time Team'. Each episode they do an archaeological dig spanning three days, to see if they can piece together what was going on in a particular site. Many of their digs are on old Roman sites in England.
There's 17 seasons of it, most of which is on Amazon Prime (I think youtube has episodes as well). It's been my goto show lately for interesting entertainment during the pandemic.
From what I understand, this happens in Rome all the time. Their subway system encounters a work stoppage due to stumbling onto a new buried building on like a weekly basis. Rome keeps sinking and so there are layers upon layers of buildings on top of each other. While there last May I went to a 14th century chapel they was on top of a fourth century chapel, on top of a send century chapel, on top of a first century villa, on top of an old mint. There is an underground river that would need to be diverted to see if there is something under that but it appears there is.
Fun thing I saw there: this is where St. Cyril was buried and above his tomb there are about a dozen plaques thanking him for bringing literacy to places like Ukraine, Macedonia, etc. Despite them being centuries old I could read them almost perfectly since I can read Russian and Ukrainian. That was incredible.
How old is the mosaic? article doesn't say and I'm curious since there's a cross motif and wondering if popular theme (coincidence) or post-Constantine Christian imagery.
I found many remnants of Roman mosaics in Tunisia; they seem to be everywhere. They are especially easy to find along the beaches because even the individual stones stand out. They have a small square shape that is unlike anything else you are likely to see. I suspect they were from the private homes and villas of wealthy Romans. The largest one I found was over 2 square meters, but I did not invest much effort searching. Back in those days, I had more interesting things to do with my time on the beach.
Two thousand years ago, the mediterranean was a much different place. Today much of Tunisia seems barren, but one peek at the El Jem Amphitheatre and you know things have changed. Tunisia was once a verdant agricultural land with a booming economy that supported the building of sumptuous homes, outdoor theatres, public baths, temples, enormous aqueducts, etc.
http://www.tourismtunisia.com/historic-sites-in-tunisia/
You understate what Tunisia once was; it was once, basically, Carthage, the richest city-state in the world and the center (or one of the centers) of several of the most advanced civilizations in the world--the Phoenician, Carthaginian, and later Roman Empires. Carthage was razed during the Arab Conquest so the Romans would stop attempting to take back the region. A more modest city was rebuilt nearby but the region never came close to achieving its former glory.
Carthage and Corinth were Rome’s primary competition. Carthage’s final fall coincided with Corinth's, but its history with Rome dated back much much earlier. Roman artifacts are a relic of their occupation and rebuild of the city. And you’re correct with the notion of the Arab/Muslim conquests. An amazing city that was reduced to a fraction of its former glory. That such a well-preserved artifact has been preserved is quite an amazing discovery. I’m pretty excited by it.
The province of Africa was a pillar of the Roman empire well after the fall of Carthage. It didn't really decline until the Early Middle Ages with the successive crisis of Donatism, the Vandal invasion and the Islamic invasion.
It looks there are about 4-5 feet of earth of the mosaics. I know it has been thousands of years, but where did the earth come from? Did it move there naturally from some place higher up? Is it flood debris from a nearby river? Was it placed there by people?
After the collapse of the Empire, Roman building where stripped and left to rot, floors where covered with dirt for making crops or just for hiding pagan images.
I am also amazed by amount of dirt, not by the fact it is covered (it came by process of top soil formation ); but by the sheer amount of it. If that was just after 2-3 thousand years, it makes me wonder what other things can we dig which are much deeper?
But again not prehistoric kind of deep, more in range of last million years.
As someone that just spent over 10K on a botched marble floor job. This just pissed me off more at my installer. The guy didn't level the floor. Told me he had 10 years of experience laying tiles. He had 1 by 2 foot tiles, took over a month to lay down 1000 sqft. Not even mosaic.
I feel drunk walking on the floor, since it goes up and down so much.
Oh, of course the roof is amazing, one of the crowning achievements of human ingenuity, IMHO. But for some reason the floor impresses me at least as much.
If you're a Roman working on that roof, you know you're doing something totally unprecedented in human history. So you pull out all the stops with an utterly heroic feat of engineering and construction. That's very impressive, but when it comes to the floor -- well, plenty of buildings have floors, nothing groundbreaking about that. So, y'know, just call the flooring contractors and have them install something nice.
The fact that something relatively ordinary is still performing so well, a couple thousand years later, is what blows my mind. Today, I'm sure that a gathering of the world's greatest engineers would be capable of designing a dome that would last for millennia. But I doubt there's any flooring contractor on earth who would give even a hundred-year guarantee on their work.
But the woman and man in the lower right of the picture are weirding me out. It seems there are two men almost identical walking one in front of the other, next to two women who also look almost identical walking one in front of the other - but the woman's clothing has changed colors. I'm assuming it is some panorama software weirdness as I see other strange artifacts, but changing the colors to give the impression of different people following each other is... interesting.
Hah, yes I saw that but that makes more sense to me as a panoramic artifact. The duplicated woman with different colors seems like a (possibly ML-driven?) attempt to make a more “realistic” looking photo.
That's so weird. I thought it was just a family walking together at first, but then the details are so similar that you get a creeping feeling of unease. I would bet that the colors were changed manually so it was less obvious that the same people appeared in the photo twice.
If you look just slightly to the right of center, it looks like a partial image of the same woman appears again, weirdly cut off and out of scale (just her left shoulder and arm).
Did you withhold final payment? For future reference, if you are in a mechanics lien state you can also just not pay until the job is done and satisfactory. Although it can be hard to find someone during a construction boom who will work for that. But it is typically used when you have major remodels or new home construction (basically anything financed by a bank loan).
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[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 161 ms ] threadLast year they started digging again and the first parts of the mosaic floor had been uncovered.
As you work in the open air, it's certainly less risky than a closed space (like, say, a haidresser).
> A note on the commune website said diggers finally made the discovery "after decades of failed attempts".
Also "scholars first found evidence of a Roman villa there more than a century ago", so they knew it must be there somewhere (I guess from old texts), but didn't know where exactly to look for it.
Bbc disappointing me here - it’s not a commune but a comune, i.e. the local council / municipality.
Relatively speaking, they were most numerous within Rome, but they also owned lands they had lower class people and slaves farm for them that they sometimes visited.
Wealth accumulated over generations. In that time, if your great-great-great grandfather had a piece of artwork, there was a good chance it was yours now.
We have negative stereotypes of the past, and there were periods of history when that was true, but there were advanced periods too. The Bronze Age empires were pretty impressive until roughly 1300 BC. We had a dark age for a while. The Roman Empire was very impressive. Then we had a dark age for a while.
And you also want to think of the social structure. Rich people employed poor people in households. Even if I owned nothing personally, I'd be exposed to art in my master's household.
Art is just a thing we expect to see now and is easily reproduced. We are surrounded by it. This is why I chose "commoditized".
Many but not all of us do. Every time I think about all the beauty that was created in the Classical Antiquity or the Renaissance (or any other less Eurocentric moment of widespread creative spark), and how it contrasts with nearly everyone today who is seemingly hellbent on making "critical" pieces for the sake of being critical.
I understand that we need to raise awareness of certain issues, that art is also politics, that a lot "has already been done", that art expresses intent and not only depicts reality (or idealized imagery). I understand all of that, but it seems we've somehow lost track of how art can also be made just... for the sake of beauty
There's a reason hordes of tourists flock to Florence all year long, you know? Let's build more of that unquestionable beauty that transcends generations.
A few years ago I was in Fez, stayed in a 600 year old riad with original tile. And yes it was breathtaking and inspiring every day. A few days before, I was in Volubilis (وليلي)a long abandoned Roman town. Every home had these mosaic tiled floors.
Additionally, labor becomes cheaper relative to materials the farther back you go in history so older stuff has proportionately more labor put into it. Having a bunch of fancy ornate wood work in your house was the 100yo equivalent of having a bunch of granite countertops.
If someone wants really nice wood trim, mantlepieces, panelling, and such in a modern house, it seems they usually loot it from an old house. The materials and work are too expensive now to make it from scratch. Ditto doors, of all things. Modern interior and exterior doors are awful compared to solid wood doors that were common not even that long ago, but, though you can still buy them, new solid doors are impractically expensive, so buying salvaged old doors usually makes more sense.
Not really true, I rented more upscale apartment once and, unlike my previous apartment, I couldn’t hear neighbors due to much better sound isolation. Appliances and cabinets were much nicer too.
I wish Turkey would allow archeological digs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_Empire#Nomenclature
I say that in a complete vacuum with respect to Turkey. I'm guessing disallowing archaeological digs is has less to do with conservation & preservation and more to do with not getting in the way of real estate developers. I live in Philadelphia (Pennsylvania, not Alaşehir), where it's not that archaeological digs aren't allowed, but the trouble is that such digs are not mandated in the historical sections of the city, and as a result, so much history gets carted away in dump trucks.
In Turkey, building stops if any archaeological finding is found in the process, until they come in and resolve the situation of the ruin. This may even lead to cancellation of the building project.
Perhaps I'm biased (certainly) but Turkey often seems to be in the news for spectacular finds from archaeological digs across the country (focused mostly in the west though). I worked on a site in the SE for seven years, and there was a ton of activity every year many foreign but also Turkish digs working in every province.
Despite the spin from post-enlightement historians recasting everything between ~600-1600 into the 'dark ages', 'rome' as in 'the roman empire' didn't end in the east until 1453 (or possibly 1917, depending on how Romanov you go), and didn't end in the west until 1806 (or possibly 1914, depending on how Hapsburg you go).
Not 'ancient rome', but still self-styled as 'rome' with a direct lineage in some form or fashion.
Polemic aside, certainly cappadocian caves would fall under the 'eastern roman empire' category, albeit post-pagan as you point out.
As Voltaire quipped: "The Holy Roman Empire was neither Holy nor Roman, nor an Empire"
Just assuming the title of the Roman emperor is not really a direct lineage.
It's not any more or any less the end of the Western Roman Empire than the political troubles that occurred in the earlier and later centuries. The Gothic, Frankish or Vandalic kingdoms very much thought of themselves as belonging to a Roman world.
But in those 324 years a lot happened that make the case of a direct lineage questionable. The Gothic wars destroyed a lot of remaining infrastructure and Roman culture, the Roman senate was no more after 600 CE, the long term population loss, and the Christian Pope was the defacto ruler of the city (if you could still call that what was left a city).
The coronation of Charlemagne was also considered illegitimate by the Eastern Roman emperor at first, until they couldn't ignore Charlemagne's military power anymore.
To this day, many Greeks, Russians, etc. (mainly Eastern Orthodox Christians) still refer to Istanbul as Constantinople, as though it is under some form of illegitimate occupation. The West also still seems to view the fall of Constantinople as the fault of the Turkish people. Is it hard to blame the average Turkish citizen for being less then enthusiastic about exploring the history of what everyone around them views as somebody else's historical legacy?
This all ignores the fact that the Eastern Empire declined steadily for centuries and lost territory to many other peoples besides the Turks, including both Greeks and Europeans. While we may view the conquest of Constantinople as the tragic end of the Roman empire, the fact is that the empire lived on in the institutions of the Ottoman empire and in its people. The Ottoman empire absorbed populations that were once Roman and, although their descendants today may adhere to a different religion, their culturual inheritance is still, in large part, Roman.
This alienation of Turkish citizens from their heritage is now causing serious problems. Erdoğan's regime holds commercial interests to be supreme and has not hesitated to throw important sites under the bulldozer over minor delays. Roman ruins are widely viewed, not as the people's heritage, but as a foreign nuisance that is best swept away to make room for the new. This must change.
Somewhat OT, I wonder if there’s a way to teach history that wouldn’t make people’s dislike it just because of perceptions like this. The Roman and Ottoman empires don’t exist anymore, what do people get my being angry at states that are gone?
Can't wait to see a further analysis of the site. Hope they can use some techniques to measure the full scale and find even more interesting artifacts nearby
"Old maps showed that a villa was in the area, but of course they didn't use scale until much later, so the exact location had been lost. This was the result of a long search to finally pinpoint it."
Unfortunately, it turned out that the GWR railway line had obliterated the original villa. :(
There's 17 seasons of it, most of which is on Amazon Prime (I think youtube has episodes as well). It's been my goto show lately for interesting entertainment during the pandemic.
Fun thing I saw there: this is where St. Cyril was buried and above his tomb there are about a dozen plaques thanking him for bringing literacy to places like Ukraine, Macedonia, etc. Despite them being centuries old I could read them almost perfectly since I can read Russian and Ukrainian. That was incredible.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Clemente_al_Laterano
Two thousand years ago, the mediterranean was a much different place. Today much of Tunisia seems barren, but one peek at the El Jem Amphitheatre and you know things have changed. Tunisia was once a verdant agricultural land with a booming economy that supported the building of sumptuous homes, outdoor theatres, public baths, temples, enormous aqueducts, etc. http://www.tourismtunisia.com/historic-sites-in-tunisia/
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carthago_delenda_est
The sheer competency of these guys was unbelievable.
If you're a Roman working on that roof, you know you're doing something totally unprecedented in human history. So you pull out all the stops with an utterly heroic feat of engineering and construction. That's very impressive, but when it comes to the floor -- well, plenty of buildings have floors, nothing groundbreaking about that. So, y'know, just call the flooring contractors and have them install something nice.
The fact that something relatively ordinary is still performing so well, a couple thousand years later, is what blows my mind. Today, I'm sure that a gathering of the world's greatest engineers would be capable of designing a dome that would last for millennia. But I doubt there's any flooring contractor on earth who would give even a hundred-year guarantee on their work.
But the woman and man in the lower right of the picture are weirding me out. It seems there are two men almost identical walking one in front of the other, next to two women who also look almost identical walking one in front of the other - but the woman's clothing has changed colors. I'm assuming it is some panorama software weirdness as I see other strange artifacts, but changing the colors to give the impression of different people following each other is... interesting.
If you look just slightly to the right of center, it looks like a partial image of the same woman appears again, weirdly cut off and out of scale (just her left shoulder and arm).
Otherwise you should sue in small claims court.
https://www.exurbe.com/the-shape-of-rome/