Archaeology Odyssey, 2001
Features
Over the past half century, archaeologists have uncovered dozens of burial tumuli near the ancient site of Gordion, about 60 miles southwest of modern Ankara, Turkey. Built of earth over single-chambered wooden tombs, these mounds probably housed the remains of royal 016families who ruled from the Phrygian capital of Gordion during the first […]
It was a cataclysm of immense proportions: Near the end of the 13th century B.C.E., the great Bronze Age civilizations of the Aegean and Near East suddenly collapsed. In the latter part of the Late Bronze Age (c. 1400–1200 B.C.E.), Mycenaean civilization flourished in Greece and Crete. The Hittites controlled most of Anatolia […]
Do you detest sparkling sunlight and fresh air? Would it be too onerous to visit beautiful, exotic lands? Would it bore you to tears to travel through time or touch a piece of history? If the answer to any (or all) of these questions is no, then you may be a perfect candidate to […]
Alexander the Great never reached his goal of conquering all the inhabited earth. This was simply beyond his army’s endurance. But he did get as far east as ancient Bactria, in modern Afghanistan. More than two thousand years later, archaeologists have begun to recover evidence of Greek settlers Alexander left behind at a […]
In an 1896 lecture on the causes of hysteria, Sigmund Freud provided his audience with an elaborate archaeological analogy: “Imagine that an explorer arrives in a little-known region where his interest is aroused by an expanse of ruins, with remains of walls, fragments of columns, and tablets with half-effaced and unreadable inscriptions. He […]
The thousands of mid-second-millennium B.C. documents unearthed at Boghazkoy, Turkey, the site of the Hittite capital of Hattusha, include several collections of myths dealing with ancient heroes and gods. In the most important group of these myths, however, the heroes and gods are not Hittite; they are Hurrian, and their stories are set not […]
In the 19th century, officers of the British Raj began to collect large quantities of ancient Indian statuary, often hauling away dozens of camel loads from a single site. Some of the most intriguing carvings came from a territory called Gandhara, in far northwestern India between the Indus and Kabul rivers. Gandharan statues and […]
If you read later Sumerian literature, you will think that Sumer was always a monarchy ruled by a king. That is what these later kings wanted you to believe. But this is not necessarily so. How monarchy came to Sumer is in fact a fascinating, if somewhat obscure, historical development. Sumer was an early […]
Legendary Bamiyan! As our car neared the valley, I had no idea what to expect. Afghanistan and its friendly people promised a magnificent climax to the 18 months I had spent in Asia in 1969 and 1970. It was an up-and-down ride, crossing three or four high passes. Eventually ruined forts, villages and […]
Around 1354 B.C.E. a caravan of hundreds of donkeys laden with valuable treasures departed from Washukkani, the capital of the Mittani kingdom in present-day northern Syria. Protected by a formidable military corps of chariots and infantry, the caravan headed through Syria and Palestine to the Egyptian capital of Thebes—a 1,400-mile journey that would take […]
The Arab historians and geographers who accompanied the Muslim invaders of northwestern Africa in the middle of the seventh century C.E. said it was like a large island—surrounded on the north and east by the Mediterranean Sea, on the west by the Atlantic Ocean, and on the south by a sea of sand, the […]
Unlike other great Hellenistic/Roman cities—Alexandria, Antioch, Rome, Constantinople—Ephesus was abandoned in antiquity. These other cities continue to thrive today, which, unfortunately for archaeologists, means that they cannot be excavated, at least not completely. The principal remains we have from ancient Alexandria, for example, are catacombs and debris from the harbor floor; archaeologists digging at […]
It sounded like the roar of a high-speed train—but it caused far more devastation. The earthquake that hit northwestern Turkey at Izmit, near Istanbul, on August 17, 1999, measured 7.4 on the Richter scale and killed 17,000 people. The tremors destroyed entire buildings, collapsed bridges, burst dams and caused landslides. Three months later, another […]
Around 90,000 years ago, modern humans appeared in the Near East. They weren’t the first humans to make this journey, and as they moved north and west, they encountered earlier immigrants. In some places, the newcomers settled right next to their archaic cousins, living in close proximity for tens of thousands of years. Then […]
Readers of Archaeology Odyssey are no doubt aware of the magazine’s dedication to finding a realistic and effective solution to the problem of rampant archaeological looting. As economists, we first became interested in archaeological regulations and markets in artifacts after reading about the public uproar concerning the fate of an ancient stone formation in […]
We moderns tend to believe that ancient Egyptian art contains little that is overtly sexual. Egyptian painting seems to lack the strong sensual qualities of much classical art and its descendant, the richly textured art of the Renaissance. This impression is mistaken, however. In paintings and reliefs in Egyptian temples and tombs, the sexuality […]
In a fiery speech delivered at Clermont, France, in 1095 C.E., Pope Urban II called on Western Christians to expel the “Infidel” from the Holy Land. Thus the Pope unleashed the Crusades, during which European armies gained control of most of the Levant, including Jerusalem. The Pope also unleashed something else—a kind of […]
Who would think that a marble statue weighing more than a ton could be invisible? Yet that is the fate of hundreds of Roman statues in museums all over the world. Huge, white and shiny, they line galleries of classical art, but no one ever sees them. Their labels make them invisible. Each is […]
We tend to think of ancient objects as either useful or beautiful—or both. A bit of text scratched on a clay tablet is used to communicate or record information; a finely filigreed golden earring is thought to be lovely; an elegant stairway, perhaps leading into the adyton (inner chamber) of a temple, may be […]
One morning in February 1846, a little over 150 years ago, the young Englishman Austen Henry Layard was returning to work after visiting his friend Sheikh Abd-ur-rahman, the head of a local Arab tribe. Layard had been in northern Mesopotamia for only three months, where he had begun to excavate a large mound called […]
To most people, Yemen is an obscure part of southwest Arabia that appears to have escaped major currents of history. Yemen’s greatest claim to fame is that it is known as the birthplace of the queen of Sheba and that it was once the center of a series of fabulous kingdoms that developed along […]
In the waning years of the first century A.D., one of the six Vestal virgins who guarded Rome’s sacred flame was accused of breaking her vow of chastity. Sentenced to death by the emperor Domitian (81–96 A.D.), she was dragged to an underground chamber just inside the city walls and buried alive. Her alleged […]
Roman Britain is most familiar as a battleground for legions marching through the pages of ancient writers—Julius Caesar in his Gallic Wars (books IV and V) or Dio Cassius (c. 150–235 A.D.) in his History of Rome. The picture we get, often enough, is of a mighty empire subduing barbarous hordes. The Roman historian […]