Roman Empire

Medusa Head Discovered in Turkey

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On a hilltop in Turkey’s Antalya province, overlooking the Mediterranean, in what was once the Roman city of Antiochia ad Cragum, a team of archaeologists from the University of Nebraska discovered a remarkable Roman-era Medusa head (see above) below Mount Cragus.

Somehow this pagan symbol survived the Christian-era purges that destroyed so many pagan artifacts.

There is no knowing (yet) as to the date Medusa was carved, but the dig team speculates that she survived the purges because she was part of a building’s facade.

Read here for more.

 

 

Justinian Era Mosaics found in Israel

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The Israel Antiquities Authority just released pictures of marvelous mosaics found in an industrial park in Qiryat Gat, Israel – they once graced the floor of a church likely built in Justinian’s lifetime, featuring christian and more traditional (pagan) images.  Curiously, the mosaics also depicted a map of an Egyptian city – Chortaso – which might have been the original home of this congregation though the true meaning of the map is a mystery.

Why would a church in Judaea have a map of a town in Egypt gracing its floor?

See here for more:

http://www.livescience.com/52335-photos-ancient-church-mosaic.html

 

Belisarius – the “Africanus of New Rome” – in the news

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It’s not often that a mainstream blog or news outlet posts something on General Flavius Belisarius so I thought that I would pass along this link to a recent post in the Ancient Origins blog which does a decent job of providing an overview of Belisarius’ life and achievements.

The piece also repeats many of the fallacies pioneered by Sir Edward Gibbon 300 years ago that have been repeated in similar pieces and histories about the Justinian era ever since (i.e. the Roman Empire is the “Byzantine” empire, Romans are”Greeks”, etc.).

That said, it’s entertaining nonetheless for those not familiar with the General.

Please click here for the full article.

And please note that for a fictional account of General Belisarius’ life and times, my Legend of Africanus trilogy in which he figures most prominently is now available on amazon.com here.

Romans in Germany!

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Nothing gets my juices flowing like a new archaeological find that illustrates the breathtakingly broad reach of Imperial Rome.

Though this doesn’t date to the era of Rome on the Cusp, this little find is fascinating nonetheless.

Near the modern town of Gernsheim (on the Rhine River), archaeologists from Goethe University just discovered an early 2nd century Roman fort.  They estimate that it was abandoned around 120CE when the soldiers stationed there were moved to the Roman frontier with Germania along the Danube.  Found in the dig thus far are signs of ordinary life, dice, combs, etc. and a masonry fragment indicating the name of the unit stationed there (see below), the Legio XXII Primigenia Pia Fidelis, part of the Limes Germanicus.

gernsheim find

Here is a reminder of what the Roman Empire looked like at that date.

romana117

And here is a brief article on the dig in Archaeology.

And a better article in the International Business Tribune.

9/13/533 – Belisarius and the battle of Ad Decimum

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Humble milestones like the one picture above marked each mile throughout the Roman highway system, spanning the 250,000 miles of roadway that once stretched from modern Scotland to Yemen.

The milestones allowed the traveller to know precisely where they stood in relation to their departure point and destination, long before our slavish devotion to smart phones and GPS.

In what had been Roman Africa,  stolen by the Vandals 100 years before, there stood such a stone on the approach to Carthage from the east on the ancient Roman highway that ran along the coast.  It was the tenth milestone from Carthage, known simply as Decimum Miliare (the tenth mile).

At the tenth milestone (Ad Decimum), on September 13th of 533, the Roman Army led by General Flavius Belisarius met the Vandal King Gaiseric in a battle that would change the course of history.

The world fully expected the Romans to fail as Roman armies had failed in the field against the Vandals and their Germanic ‘barbarian’ cousins for generations.  The Romans were 1,000 miles from home – having set sail with an invasion armada for the first time in decades (on ships that were specially built for the purpose since Rome no longer possessed a deep water navy).  If they lost to the Vandals there would be no retreat and no hope of reinforcements.  The Western Roman Empire had already ceased to exist with Romulus Augustulus’ abdication in 476 (in great part due to the Vandal theft of Africa and their brutal sack of the City of Rome).  If Belisarius lost the battle at the tenth milestone, the Eastern Roman Empire would be in grave jeopardy.

Belisarius and his Roman knights would triumph at Decimum Miliare against all odds and went on to extinguish the upstart Vandal kingdom and to bring Africa back into the Roman fold.  This was the first in a string of stunning victories engineered by Belisarius that would restore much of the lost Western Empire in the name of the reigning Caesar, the Emperor Justinian.  These recuperated lands (Africa, Italy, parts of Gaul and Hispania) would remain part of the Roman Empire until after Justinian’s death – the moment when the ancient world truly ended and the Dark Ages began.

This moment, the battle that became known as Ad Decimum, figures prominently in the second book of the Legend of Africanus series: Avenging Africanus (available at amazon.com here).

For those that would like to read more of the military history of Ad Decimum, see the excellent Byzantine Military blog by clicking here.

9/4/476 – Romulus Augustulus, Last Western Roman Emperor, Abdicates

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On this day (September 4th) in 476CE, the last Western Roman Emperor, Romulus Augustulus, was deposed by the Goth warlord Odoacer.

When Romulus, who was little more than a boy, stepped down from the throne in Ravenna (then capital of the Western Empire), Odoacer took the Imperial regalia and sent it to the Eastern Emperor, Zeno, claiming that Italy no longer needed a Caesar and that the Goths would rule Italy in Zeno’s name, as his vassals.

It’s a fascinating moment in time, one often misinterpreted as marking the “fall” of Rome – a fallacy created in large part by the great historian Edward Gibbon.  The truth is much more complex!

In reality the Western Empire had ceased to exist, in all but name, decades before.  Yet at the same time the essence of Rome would continue in its former Western territories for centuries to come.  And Italy herself would be brought formally back into the Empire during the reign of Justinian, thanks to the extraordinary efforts of General Flavius Belisarius.  There she would remain until after Justinian’s death.

Nonetheless, the day the boy Emperor abdicated and retired to live peacefully on a Goth-provided pension in the Castellum Lucullanum at Neapolis (Naples) was indeed a turning point in human history and deserves to be remembered.

On a final note, though the Roman fortifications on the site were subsequently replaced by the Normans in the 12th century (see image to the right)Il_Castello_dell'Ovo_In_Napoli, one can’t help but imagine the melancholic Caesar looking out from the battlements, dreaming of Empire lost…

Though nothing is known of Romulus’ death he could not have lived to have witnessed Belisarius’ reconquest of Italy (completed in in 540CE).

Following is a post in today’s “New Historian” for those looking for more on the Last Western Emperor.

http://www.newhistorian.com/romulus-augustus-deposed-by-odoacer/4754/

 

Ancient Rome vs. Istanbul’s New Subway

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“Oh, some archaeological crockery turned up—oh, some finding turned up,” he told the press. “That’s how they put obstacles in our path. Are these things really more important than the human?”

– Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan on the archaeological dig in what once was Constantinople’s Eleutherion Harbor

Istanbul – Nova Roma – Constantinople – BYZANTIUM.

Few more fascinating places exist on the face of the planet, layered with history and culture, teeming with life, speeding into the future.

As part of that race, in 2004, Turkey revived Ottoman-era plans to build a tunnel beneath the Bosporus to accommodate a subway line (prior to the tunnel the only way to cross the Bosporus was via ferry or over one of two bridges).  Having lived in Istanbul, I can testify to the city’s remarkably bad traffic (which is getting worse – when I left in ’98 the city had 9 million residents, today that number is 14 million).

In an effort to avoid burrowing through the historic district of Sultanahmet for the subway (formerly the heart of both Greek-Byzantium and Roman-Constantinople), the tunnel’s designers chose the modern neighborhood of Yenikapi (that was built on reclaimed land that had once been water) for the subway’s principal European stop.

However that reclaimed land upon which Yenikapi was built was of particular significance to the city’s Roman era – it had once been known as Eleutherion Harbor (or the ‘Theodosian Harbor’), one of the Imperial city’s principal harbors during its early days as the capital of the Roman Empire and through Justinian’s era.  However, with time it silted over and was eventually abandoned in the city’s later Roman period.

Once Istanbul’s Big Dig began it quickly became clear that Yenikapi contained a Roman treasure trove including some of the best preserved Roman ships of war ever found (many from Justinian-era Rome including the featured image above) and a piece of Constantine’s original city wall.  Additional excavations unearthed previously unknown Neolithic settlements dating to 6000 BC (the earliest known settlements prior to this discovery dated to ~1,300 BC).

The superb Istanbul Archaeology Museum was brought in to monitor and control the dig, resulting in many of these exceptional finds being preserved for future study – a process that will take decades given the scale of the finds.  Having the Museum involved in the process (fortunately) resulted in an equally exceptional delay to the dig which was just completed in 2014 (raising hackles in the Turkish government as per lead quote above).

See an interesting article in the current New Yorker that does a good job of summarizing the Tunnel project, the associated politics and the stunning discoveries that resulted from it all.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/08/31/the-big-dig

For more on the Istanbul Archaeology Museum see here:

http://www.istanbularkeoloji.gov.tr/main_page

Nero’s Golden House

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A house whose size and elegance these details should be sufficient to relate: Its courtyard was so large that a 120-foot colossal statue of the emperor himself stood there; it was so spacious that it had a mile-long triple portico; also there was a pool of water like a sea, that was surrounded by buildings which gave it the appearance of cities; and besides that, various rural tracts of land with vineyards, cornfields, pastures, and forests, teeming with every kind of animal both wild and domesticated. In other parts of the house, everything was covered in gold and adorned with jewels and mother-of-pearl; dining rooms with fretted ceilings whose ivory panels could be turned so that flowers or perfumes from pipes were sprinkled down from above; the main hall of the dining rooms was round, and it would turn constantly day and night like the Heavens; there were baths, flowing with seawater and with the sulfur springs of the Albula; when he dedicated this house, that had been completed in this manner, he approved of it only so much as to say that he could finally begin to live like a human being.  Suetonius, The Lives of the Caesars

An intriguing piece appeared in this month’s “Archaeology Magazine” on Nero’s Domus Aurea or “Golden House” that has been undergoing a painstaking and extended renovation.  After the tyrant Nero’s death the Roman Senate had this sprawling city-within-the-city filled with earth and buried so that the dictator’s memory too would be submerged (but never forgotten).  Spanning the area between the Palatine and Esquiline hills in Rome (where the Colosseum stands today) – the scale of the structure and its contents are difficult to fathom.  On a side note, the Flavian Amphitheatre took its colloquial name, the Colosseum from the hundred foot tall statue of the “Colossus”  as the stature of Nero on the grounds of his Golden House was known.

The Domus Aurea stood for four years after completion before it was buried in 69CE following the Emperor’s death.  And it slept peacefully underground until the Renaissance when a boy fell through the roof into the halls below in the 15th century.  A generation of some of the great artists of the period including Raphael heard of the chance discovery and had themselves lowered by rope into the palace through holes drilled in the roof (contributing greatly to the subsequent damage that archeologists today are trying mightily to undo).  While its difficult to say how these glimpses of the ancient world influenced them one can begin to imagine as we look at the stunning Domus Aurea today.

I couldn’t help but think, as I read the article, that as these Renaissance pioneers were rediscovering an ancient world in the West that had been lo200px-Constantine_XI_Palaiologos_miniaturest for so many centuries, in Constantinople at that same
approximate time the very last Caesar, the Emperor Constantine XI (see contemporary image at right) was battling Mehmed the Conqueror to prevent the fall of Constantinople that would finally and forever extinguish what remained of the Roman Empire.  I am fascinated by this contrast, artists in the West re-learning, rediscovering their patrimony and in the East, a flickering light finally extinguished.  Incidentally, the Fall of the East that ensued when Mehmed breached the Theodosian Walls of Constantinople made the Renaissance possible, flooding Italy with scholars, artists and philosophers and the contents of the world’s greatest libraries from Constantinople that had kept the flame of ancient Greece, Rome and Persia alive while the rest of Europe had wallowed in centuries of darkness and comparative ignorance.

Here is a link to the article on the Domus Aurea in Archeology Magazine:

http://www.archaeology.org/issues/187-1509/features/3562-golden-house-of-an-emperor

And for those interested in learning a bit more about the Last Roman Emperor, Constantine XI, who will appear prominently in my next novel (now being researched), please see this fair summary in Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constantine_XI_Palaiologos

Happy Anniversary – Justinian “the Great”

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On August 1st 527, the old warrior and Roman Emperor, Justin I died in the Imperial capital of Constantinople.

Justin had risen to the throne in 518.  He had previously held the position of Commander of the Excubitors, the elite palace guard, and upon the death of the Emperor Anastasius, Justin was nominated to the purple with the considerable help of his brilliant young nephew, Pietrus Sabbatius.

As Justin’s health failed he named his nephew (now re-christened “Justinian” in honor of his uncle) as co-Emperor in April of 527.

And when Justin died on August 1st, Justinian became sole Emperor, a position that he would hold until his death in November of 565.

So began the Age of Justinian (though he also exerted tremendous influence behind the throne while his Uncle reigned) – a period which continues to impact the world that we live in today.

He would be the last Roman Emperor to speak Latin as his first language, and the last Caesar to rule over an Empire that included the city of Rome in its domains.  Justinian would count many other “lasts”, and many “firsts” amongst his accomplishments though for me what continues to resonate is that as Justinian ascends, the world stands on a razor’s edge, with the Ancient World on one side and the Dark Ages on the other.  Upon his death the passage to the Dark Ages was irrevocably made.

The Justinian Plague and Volcanoes?

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“The sun gave forth its light without brightness, and it seemed exceedingly like the sun in eclipse, for the beams it shed were not clear.” – Procopius of Caesarea

This has been an unusually rich last couple weeks for the Age of Justinian in the news but of all the recent bits, this takes the cake.

Not many know that the Black Plague of the 14th century first appeared (in recorded history) during Justinian’s reign and was one of the primary reasons for the calamities that followed (including the loss of many of Belisarius’ territorial gains and the collapse of the Persian Empire).  For more on the Justinian Plague, during which over a 1/3 of Constantinople’s one million residents died within a matter of months in the summer of 541, see the brilliant book – “Justinian’s Flea” by William Rosen (on Amazon.com).  The Justinian Plague was savage, ferocious, and more than any single factor can claim to have hastened the end of the ancient world (ushering in the Dark Ages).

This week we learned more about the origins of Justinian’s Plague.  A scientific study just published in the Journal of Nature, and summarized well for the lay-reader on Smithsonian.com, reveals that there were two epic volcanic eruptions that likely facilitated the terrifying Plague.  The first happened in 535/536 (possibly in El Salvador) and the second came later in 540 (somewhere in the Northern Hemisphere).  Together they spewed inconceivable quantities of sulfate and ash into Earth’s atmosphere and dimmed the sun around the Mediterranean Basin for years (as per the quote from Procopius above).   The dimmed sun cooled the planet, causing crops to fail and sparking widespread famine just at the very moment that y. pestis (the organism responsible for bubonic plague) began to spread northward and eastward from the Nile River Basin on the backs of rats.

The volcanic eruptions had opened the gates to Constantinople for the Plague, and Rome (and the civilized world) would never be the same.

For the article on Smithsonian.com see here:

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/sixth-century-misery-tied-not-one-two-volcanic-eruptions-180955858/?no-ist