Archaeology Odyssey, 2003

Can’t tell a mattock head from a plumb bob? After a few weeks volunteering on a dig, you’ll be a lot cannier about the tools of the archaeology trade—and having fun, too. Archaeology Odyssey’s fourth annual digs list presents you with opportunities to uncover some of the secrets of the ancient past that lie […]

When the Phoenicians arrived on the Iberian peninsula, probably at the end of the ninth century B.C., they came into contact with an indigenous people called the Tartessians. The two cultures soon fused. The hybrid culture produced by this fusion of peoples is evident in a mysterious structure at Cancho Roano, deep in […]

In the Neolithic period (c. 8000–4000 B.C.), Near Eastern peoples created a number of arresting images to represent (or influence) their world. They carved small female figurines immodestly presenting their breasts or pregnant stomachs, for instance, and they depicted animals being viciously stabbed with flints. Perhaps the most powerful and haunting of these Stone […]

In the July/August 2003 issue of Archaeology Odyssey (see “Plundering the Past”), I reported on the terrible events that took place during the second week of April at the National Museum and other cultural heritage sites in Baghdad.

In the summer of 1975 a Spanish gypsy named Virgilio Romero Moreno visited the museum in Jaén, 250 miles south of Madrid, and offered to sell several limestone sculptures. After some negotiation, the museum bought the pieces, which had recently been dug up near the village of Porcuna in the hilly countryside of Andalusia. […]

During the second week of April, something terrible happened in Baghdad: Looters broke into the National Museum, smashing display vitrines full of ancient objects and making off with some of the museum’s prized holdings. The damage didn’t stop there; frenzied mobs also set fire to the National Library and then continued on to the […]

In the 1870s, the German geographer Ferdinand von Richthofen coined the name die Seidenstrasse—the Silk Road—to refer to the 5,000-mile-long trade route that connected China and the Mediterranean in ancient times. Richthofen thus imbued the immense terra incognita of Central Asia with romance. But he also created something of a misnomer: There was not […]

On a sunny morning in 642 C.E., armies of Muslim Arabs, in the process of conquering Egypt, destroyed the ancient library at Alexandria, which for a thousand years had been the western world’s most important center of learning.1 The library held a million volumes, including an extensive collection of Greek and Roman literature, as […]

“The Mediterranean is a passionate collector,” writes European scholar Predrag Matvejevicá in Mediterranean: A Cultural Landscape (1999). Indeed, over the past half-century, essentially since the invention of the aqualung in the 1940s, divers have discovered the remains of well over 1,200 ancient shipwrecks.a Most of these wrecks date to Roman times (200 B.C.–300 […]

Do not be deceived by the alluring mythological creatures known as sirens, sphinxes and gorgons. Their feminine faces belie a ferocity and frightening power, which the ancient Greeks expressed in poetry, sculpture and painting. Sirens lured their prey with seductive songs. Sphinxes posed fatal riddles and snatched away the unsuspecting. Gorgons had faces so […]

In 1881 the great French novelist Gustave Flaubert published his Dictionary of Accepted Ideas. If we were somehow granted permission to add just one item to this revered classic, it should be “Samarkand: a name that makes you dream.” One of the most glorious stops on the Silk Road, which connected China and […]

In 1937, Hollywood costume designer John Armstrong was working on I, Claudius, a film version of Robert Graves’s novel set in first-century A.D. Rome. Asked to design costumes for the Vestal Virgins, the six priestesses of the Roman hearth goddess Vesta, Armstrong meticulously researched the clothing they wore—long, modest veils and robes, as […]

In Sicily’s Villa Romana del Casale, the fourth-century A.D. Roman mansion decorated with the most extensive collection of mosaics to have survived the destruction of the empire, the Cyclops depicted on the floor of the Vestibule of Polyphemus has three eyes. Two regular eyes, normally set, and another, smack in the middle of his […]

For about 5,000 years, Egypt’s Southwest Desert, west of Lake Nasser, has been a hellish, lifeless, hyper-arid region of barren rock and sand. But that wasn’t always so. Archaeologists surveying this part of the Sahara have found ancient remains of lakes, villages, cattle bones, burial tumuli and huge megaliths aligned with the heavens. […]

“It lies outside; outside the circuit of civilisation.” That’s how D.H. Lawrence described Sardinia in Sea and Sardinia (1923), and until recently that’s what many thought about this island: During the third and second millennia B.C., Sardinia remained isolated from the vibrant cultures of the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean. Decades of archaeological research, […]

One of the most devastating earthquakes ever to hit the Mediterranean struck a little after daybreak on July 21, 365 A.D. The fourth-century A.D. Latin historian Ammianus Marcellinus called it “a frightful disaster surpassing anything related either in legend or authentic history.” Ships in Lakonia, in the southern Peloponnesus, were driven several miles […]

You barely notice him in the cacophony of the modern city. Austere, stiffly formal, he is either too large or too small, slightly ridiculous amid Cairo’s dissonant traffic.

Oceans cover 71 percent of the earth, and a whopping 97 percent of these waters are beyond the reach of conventional scuba divers, who can reach only about 200 feet below the surface of the sea. The vast majority of the world’s shipwrecks, therefore, cannot be excavated or even found. Until recently, that is. […]

To escape the city’s hustle and bustle, wealthy Romans flocked every summer to the Bay of Naples. At the resort towns of Baiae, Puteoli and Pompeii, they lounged on beaches, shopped for souvenirs, visited tourist sites, wined and dined—and perhaps even engaged in a little hanky panky.

By around 500 B.C. the Greeks had developed a strange (for us) model of romantic love. While adult men were expected to take a wife and raise a family, they were also allowed considerable license in fulfilling sexual desires. Poets, philosophers and artists celebrated the passion of an adult male (erastes) for a beardless […]

One of the most mysterious buildings in all of Western architecture—the tomb of Theoderic (454–526 C.E.), king of the Ostrogoths (see the sidebar to this article)—glowers at the end of a tree-lined avenue in Ravenna, Italy. The tomb’s heavy, brooding presence has prompted one modern observer to describe it as a “monstrous object flung […]

What is the difference between the Near Eastern focus on female nudity, almost to the point of vulgarity, and the ‘Pompeian style’ of vulgar male nudity? Why did one civilization produce nude representations of women (almost exclusively) and the other nude representations of men (almost exclusively)?” This question was put to me by […]