Archaeology Odyssey, 1998
Features
According to Leo the Deacon, a tenth-century Byzantine historian, the inhabitants of the Anatolian province of Cappadocia were troglodytes: “They went underground in holes, clefts, and labyrinths,” he reported. This remote, mysterious people lived “in dens and burrows.” The surviving ancient architecture of Cappadocia—a region in central Turkey about 60 miles long and […]
Do you wonder what happened to the ancient Etruscans, those civilized, seemingly mysterious people who revealed so many secrets of life and death to the Romans? Simply journey to the heart of Tuscany, to the bustling train station at Florence. Wait for one of the local trains from Chiusi, a town 90 miles […]
The publication of “Thinking About the Elgin Marbles” (Michigan Law Review, vol. 85 [1985]) confirmed John Henry Merryman’s status as a leading authority on cultural property matters. Merryman is Sweitzer Professor of Law at Stanford University and one of the founders of the International Journal of Cultural Property. When not trying to figure out […]
King Agamemnon rose to his feet: “Friends, Zeus vowed to me long ago that I should never embark for home till I had brought the walls of Ilium crashing down.” 016 “Metal object, biconvex.” Thus wrote English archaeologist Donald Easton in his excavation diary in July 1995, dispassionately recording what every excavator at […]
Respect, even reverence, for the past has inspired Graham Binns to take up causes involving cultural history. In the 1950’s, he chaired a committee that oversaw the restoration of a 17th-century theater in Malta. Since the early 1980’s, he has lectured widely on the repatriation of the Greek antiquities, and he is currently chairman […]
When the Elgin Marbles appeared in London between 1802 and 1812, heady talk filled the air. They would create a revolution in the arts. They would change the tastes of the entire nation. New truths would be discovered in these old stones, carved under the direction of the sculptor Phidias in the fifth century […]
When Cappadocians cut vast living spaces into the conelike formations of the local volcanic tufa around the turn of the first millennium, they created vestibules, halls, kitchens, storage areas, stables, churches and burial chapels, all hollowed out of the soft rock and arranged around courtyards, whose exteriors were often carved with elaborate facades. […]
The Etruscan settlement at La Piana came to a violent end. Every year excavations at the site, near the Italian city of Siena, turn up new evidence that La Piana was attacked and destroyed toward the end of the third century B.C. The invaders flung golfball-size missiles through the walls of the Etruscan […]
Did a man named Homer really live? And are the poems attributed to him, the Iliad and the Odyssey, rooted in actual history? Generations of scholars have wrestled with these problems and provided widely different solutions. But does it really matter? Perhaps the scholarly disputes over the historicity of Homer and his tales are […]
Horses whinny softly, stamping nervously as their riders mount up in the chilly predawn air. The day’s mission looms ahead: a dangerous trek straight up the Wadi ’Ara and through the narrow Musmus Pass, then a quick dash across the Plain of Esdraelon to engage the enemy controlling ancient Megiddo, a city on […]
In 92 and 1993, at Sepphoris (in Hebrew, Tzippori) in the lower Galilee, we uncovered two inscribed amulets designed to invoke magical powers.1 It’s not abracadabra; it’s WHYHAW and AWAAA. See if that will cure your fever!
Can a folktale from the Middle Bronze Age provide us with information about the remote past that has eluded even extensive archaeological expeditions? The answer is yes. The Tale of Sinuhe,1 composed during Egypt’s Middle Kingdom, may help resolve scholarly debates about social conditions in Canaan-Syria (also known as the Levant) in the early […]
How does a site get lost? It happens. For nearly a decade—from 1867 to 1875—General Luigi Palma de Cesnola, a flamboyant Italian who served as both the American and Russian consul to Cyprus, dug at Idalion (located 12 miles south of Nicosia), where, he claimed, he emptied 15,000 tombs. Cesnola’s exports from Idalion […]
The Iliad and the Odyssey were composed nearly 3,000 years ago, and they are still constantly translated, imitated, dramatized and—above all—read. In a world in which few things stay in fashion for more than a single season, that is indeed a surprising fact. It is also a fact that distinguishes our society from most […]
Sometimes archaeologists come face-to-face with a site so unusual that they feel a sense of awe in its presence. That describes our experience upon entering and excavating a mortuary cave in the Galilean hills of northern Israel. Used for burials during the Chalcolithic period (c. 4500–3500 B.C.E.), this cave had been sealed for nearly […]
Nothing brings together the scholar and the crackpot like a pyramid. Built more than 4,000 years ago, Egypt’s pyramids are among archaeology’s perennial fascinations—huge, geometric structures with mummified bodies inside. Books about the pyramids have a long history, too, going back at least as far as the Pyramid Book, written by the medieval Egyptian […]
One of last year’s most important archaeological discoveries occurred not in the field but in some apartments in Germany. And it was not made by archaeologists but by police after an eight-month sting operation. Last fall, Munich police raided three apartments during a crackdown on an antiquities smuggling ring. Hidden in the floors and […]
I would make the startling suggestion that the alphabet was invented by a single human being, who created this remarkable technology to record the Greek hexameters of the poet we call Homer.
Barry Powell should have listened to his grammar school teacher. It was the Phoenicians who invented the alphabet.
Two of the oldest temples in the world—dating back more than 8,000 years—have recently been found at a site called Ain Ghazal, outside of Amman, Jordan. The site is already famous for its lifelike, nearly life-size plaster statues. With the two temples discovered in 1995 and 1996, as well as other finds, Ain Ghazal […]