Archaeology Odyssey, May/June 2001
Features
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]