I was reading one of my childhood diaries the other day and there was a whole paragraph saying how hopeful I was that my writing will help the archeologists in the far future. Then it proceeded to describe my lunch that day and how my dog was probably secretly able to talk.
Secret Panel HERE 🍯 tapas.io/episode/3158408
The anti-paganism policies of the early Byzantine Empire ranged from 395 till 567. Anti-paganism laws were enacted by the Byzantine Emperors Arcadius,[1][2][3][4][5] Honorius,[6][7][8] Theodosius II,[9][10] Marcian[11] and Leo I the Thracian. They reiterated previous legal bans, especially on pagan religious rites and sacrifices and increased the penalties for their practice. The pagan religions had still many followers but they were increasingly obliged to keep under cover to formally comply with the edicts.[12][13][14] Significant support for paganism was present among Roman nobles,[15] senators, magistrates,[16] imperial palace officers,[17] and other officials.[16]
Many Christians pretended to be such while continuing pagan practices,[18] and many converted back to paganism; numerous laws against apostasy kept being promulgated and penalties increased since the time of Gratian and Theodosius.[19][20][21][22] pagans were openly voicing their resentment in historical works, like the writings of Eunapius and Olympiodorus, and books blaming the Christian hegemony for the 410 Sack of Rome. Christians destroyed almost all such pagan political literature, and threatened copyists with cutting off their hands.[23][24]
Laws declared that buildings belonging to known pagans and heretics were to be appropriated by the churches.[25][26][27] St. Augustine exhorted his congregation in Carthage to smash all tangible symbols of paganism they could lay their hands on.[26]
image: Head of Aphrodite, 1st century AD copy of an original by Praxiteles. Christian cross defacing the chin and forehead. Found in the Agora of Athens. National Archaeological Museum in Athens.
Why Archaeologists Are Fuming Over Netflix’s Ancient Apocalypse Series
My immediate impression after watching the film was to question why the three female leads were presented as a vulnerable, passive, with a dull ongoing focus on their fictional problems, not their achievements.
I’ve been writing about archaeology for several years, and that often means traveling to the places where researchers are excavating. Every site has different rules, and local environmental conditions mean that people use different tools and techniques to dig. But there are a lot of other details about archaeology — and archaeologists — that you might not know. Here are a few things that I learned while writing Four Lost Cities, sometimes the hard way.
These images are tens of thousands of years older than the famous drawings at Lascaux in France, which are dated to about 17,000 years ago. So the warty pig is simply the latest piece of evidence that cultures with complex symbolism were developing in the tropics long before they did in Europe. Another piece of evidence comes from proto-farms, which have been discovered dating back 45,000 years in the equatorial regions of Africa, the Americas, and southeast Asia. These proto-farms, which involved clearing land with fire, draining swamps, and planting trees, were the seeds of a distinctly tropical urban culture that developed in these regions.
Tens of thousands of years later, vast, sprawling garden cities emerge in southeast Asia and elsewhere on the equator. Unlike the massive stone monuments and brick houses that characterize ancient cities in the Mediterranean, these tropical cities favor homes made of wood and other perishable materials, as well as urban farms interspersed between high-density neighborhoods. Angkor, capitol of the powerful Khmer Empire, is one of those cities.
For years, Western archaeologists didn’t understand how people in southeast Asia could have built such a magnificent city in the middle of thick jungle that’s frequently lashed by monsoons. But new discoveries like the warty pig painting, and those proto-farms, make it clear that the global south developed its own urban traditions and technologies that suited the environment. And these days, with climate change transforming urban life, we might want to look to these tropical urban traditions for inspiration. This is a major topic in my book, Four Lost Cities, which comes out in just 10 days! In it, I explore two ancient garden cities, Angkor and Cahokia, and describe how their people dealt with urban planning and agriculture.
Of course scholars talk about Cicero, you might say. He was a famous lawyer and politician whose great oratory in the Forum has been preserved for two thousand years. And Murtis? She was just a lowly sex worker. What’s important about that?
Quite a lot, actually -- at least, if you care about history. To understand how this ancient civilization actually worked, you can’t learn about it exclusively from a conservative pundit like Cicero. You have to consider all the evidence we have about ancient Roman life. That includes the built environment, covered in graffiti and smeared with the remains of food and wine.
Over its centuries of life Çatalhöyük changed a great deal, as its people developed new technologies and different styles of architecture. There’s ample evidence that its residents understood how deep its history stretched back, too. Hodder, who led excavations here, describes how the site offers a sense of “history within history,” where ancient people looked back to ancestors who were even more ancient.
As the Portable Antiquities Scheme records its 1.5 millionth find, we speak to Michael Lewis, who is head of the scheme, about some of the most remarkable archaeological discoveries in its history
Thanks to a closer look at Elusa’s municipal garbage dumps, however, archaeologists now realize that the city’s decline occurred almost a century before Islamic influences entered the area, during what had traditionally been considered the peak of the Byzantine period. The culprit? A quick and deadly shift in climate brought about by a succession of distant volcanic eruptions.
After digging through layers of refuse like ash from fireplaces, bones from meat and fish, seeds from grapes and olives, discarded construction material, and broken wine jugs, the researchers found that the main dumps stopped receiving trash around 550.
The end of trash management at Elusa does, however, correlates with new developments in climate science, which show that the middle of the sixth century was actually a horrible time to be alive in most of Europe and Asia.
The researchers suggested that the climate events may also be associated with major social changes that started in the middle of the sixth century, from the expansion of Slavic populations west into much of continental Europe, to the collapse of the eastern Turk Empire in northeast Asia. The Late Antique Little Ice Age may have also facilitated the world’s first recorded pandemic outbreak of the bubonic plague, known as the Plague of Justinian, which spread throughout the Mediterranean beginning in 541.
Historians and authors have speculated on the fall of Roman civilization for centuries, and the findings from Elusa are part of new trend to look at the complex web of environmental factors that might have influenced social change across the empire.
Warinner eventually reached out to Alison Beach, a historian at Ohio State University who studies female scribes in 12th-century Germany. Over the past couple of decades, Beach and other scholars have cataloged the overlooked contributions of women to medieval book production. The challenge, Beach says, is that while most manuscripts with signatures are signed by men, the vast majority of manuscripts are unsigned. But a small number of surviving manuscripts are signed by women, and scholars have found correspondence between monks and nuns about book production.
Beach even came across a letter dated to the year 1168, in which a bookkeeper of a men’s monastery commissions sister “N” to produce a deluxe manuscript using luxury materials such as parchment, leather, and silk. The monastery where sister “N” lived is only 40 miles from Dalheim, where the teeth with lapis lazuli were found. Beach also identified a book using lapis lazuli that was written by a female scribe in Germany around a.d. 1200. The pigment would have traveled nearly 4,000 miles from Afghanistan to Europe via the Silk Road. All the evidence suggests that female scribes were indeed making books that used lapis lazuli pigment in the same area and around the same time this woman was alive.
Jamie Woodward, author of The Ice Age: A Very Short Introduction, gives his top 10 things you should know about the Ice Age
