Field Notes

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Spiffing up the Colosseum

Restorers Remove the Detritus of the Modern City from Rome’s Ancient Landmark

Thanks to a $17.6 million renovation project sponsored by the Banco di Roma, about 85 percent of the world’s most famous amphitheater will be accessible to the public by the year 2003—four times the area that can be visited today.

Smog stains will be scraped from the nearly 2,000-year-old walls of the Colosseum, restoring their original golden color. (The north side of the arena has already undergone cleaning.) An underground corridor, used by emperors as they entered the amphitheater from the imperial residences on the nearby Celio hill, will be excavated.

A planned geological probe of the land underlying the Colosseum should provide information about how to stabilize the edifice. About a quarter of its foundation rests on an old stream bed that the emperor Nero (54–68 A.D.) dammed to create a small lake, designed to reflect a 90-foot-tall gilded statue of himself. His successor Vespasian (69–79 A.D.) drained the lake and erected the amphitheater.

A new exhibition called “Blood and the Arena” (June 21, 2001, to January 7, 2002)—the first major public event to be held in the Colosseum in hundreds of years—includes an important inscription (above) concerning Vespasian’s amphitheater. As recently deciphered, the epigraph reveals that Vespasian financed the Colosseum’s construction with booty from the war that Rome fought against Jewish rebels in Judea from 66 to 73 A.D. (see Louis H. Feldman, “Financing the Colosseum,” BAR 27:04).

Also on view are recent finds discovered during the ongoing restoration project, including a plaster statue of two jugglers and fragments from a mosaic floor. The National Archaeological Museum of Naples has also loaned items of gladitorial interest, such as weapons, helmets and richly decorated metal parade armor. Other displays describe how pulley-drawn elevators hoisted elaborate stage sets and wild animal cages to the arena floor, which was flooded on occasion—enabling gladiators to wage mock naval battles, complete with realistic ship-to-ship boardings.

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Fossil Fracas

Rival Claims to the Earliest Human Remains

In recent months, two different research teams in East Africa have dug up fossilized bones they believe belonged to the earliest humans. Now there’s a dispute over just who is in possession of the remains of our oldest ancestors.

Two French scientists excavating near Nairobi, Kenya, Martin Pickford of the College of France and Brigitte Senut of the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, have recovered six-million-year-old bone fragments and teeth from a chimp-like creature whom they claim walked upright. These fossils date to the epoch when hominids first diverged from their ape-like ancestors.

Other scientists dispute the French team’s findings, noting that the new bone fragments do not include a lower femur, which would provide more persuasive evidence that this primate was capable of bipedalism, rather than being an ape-like “knuckle-walker.”

Slightly younger fossils were discovered a few months later in the Awash region of Ethiopia, 140 miles from Addis Ababa, by University of California at Berkeley graduate student Yohannes Haile-Selassie (above, center), a member of a 12-country research team codirected by Berkeley anthropologist Timothy White. The 5.2-million-year-old bones belonged to five chimp-like creatures who roamed through the cool, wooded uplands that once covered this now-arid region. One of the fossils, a toe joint (top row, eighth bone from the left in the photo below), provides strong evidence that these creatures walked upright.

Prior to these finds, most scientists dated the evolution of the earliest humans to about four million years ago.

These discoveries also challenge the widely held assumption that the evolution of the first hominids was prompted by climatic change—specifically, by the drying up of the ancient forests. According to the climatic theory, the migration of primates from dying woodlands to the open savanna favored the reproductive success of creatures capable of upright locomotion, which enabled them to hunt game and flee predators more effectively. Yet the earliest hominid fossils discovered so far come from regions that were thickly forested in ancient times.

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Curator’s Choice

Tale of Sinuhe
limestone
12 inches long
British Museum

Of the 100,000 objects in the Egyptian Department of the British Museum, my favorite is an unprepossessing lump of limestone used around 1200 B.C.E. to copy a text. Such small slabs were used by apprentice scribes as notepaper for writing exercises in a cursive version of hieroglyphs, called hieratic.

The handwriting on our small slab is clear, if a little faint; red dots mark the ends of lines of verse. The text is the final stanza of a masterpiece of Egyptian poetry, the Tale of Sinuhe. It was in order to read this poem in the original that I became an Egyptologist.

The poem describes how an Egyptian official flees to Canaan after the death of King Amenemhet I (1991–1962 B.C.E.) and searches for a meaning to his life. Although the poem has often been assumed to be a historical account, it is actually a fictional work of the highest artistry, an intense probing of Egyptian cultural values.

The Tale of Sinuhe is known mainly from a papyrus, dating to about 1800 B.C.E., in Berlin’s Staatliche Museen. This so-called “B manuscript” contains 311 lines of hieratic script, but its scribe either became careless towards the very end or was copying a corrupt text. The British Museum text, like all apprentice exercises, is just a few lines long and somewhat corrupt—suggesting that the scribe did not entirely understand the sense of what he was copying. Nevertheless, this version provides vital evidence of the ending of the poem, which had remained unclear in earlier versions. According to our text, Sinuhe, having returned to Egypt after his long sojourn, receives the great honor of being buried beside the king’s pyramid.

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Conservation Watch

Temple of Karnak
Luxor, Egypt
2nd and 1st millennia B.C.

A succession of pharaohs from Egypt’s Middle Kingdom (2040–1640 B.C.) and New Kingdom (1550–1070 B.C.) built the magnificent temple complex at Luxor, known as Karnak. The complex consists mainly of sacred precincts dedicated to the gods Amun-Ra, Mut and Montu enclosed by mudbrick walls; within these enclosures are large temples, halls (including the Great Hypostyle Hall of Ramesses II [1279–1213 B.C.]), sacred lakes and smaller temples devoted to other Egyptian gods.

Today, an accumulation of sodium chloride in the groundwater only six feet beneath the site is eroding the stone foundations of the monuments. Gaballa Ali Gaballa, the head of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, has reported that some structures have been so severely undermined that their relief carvings have fallen to the ground.

The Egyptian Research Center for Subterranean Water is working with Swedco of Stockholm, Sweden, to determine the source of the water and ways of rechanneling it. The Egyptian antiquities council has also received support from the United Nations and USAID.

One theory is that the problem is caused by the Aswan Dam, which was built between 1960 and 1970 about 150 miles south of Luxor, creating Lake Nasser. According to Gaballa, the dam prevents the Nile Valley from draining properly. It has been estimated that should Egyptian authorities fail to take appropriate measures, the temple complex could be lost in as little as three years.

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Current Exhibitions

The Pharaoh’s Photographer: Harry Burton, Tutankhamun, and the Metropolitan’s Egyptian Expedition

Shimmering photographs capturing the opening of King Tut’s tomb in 1922 (above), as well as documentary film footage of other excavation sites in the Nile valley—all shot by Harry Burton, the premier archaeological photographer of his day—are on public display for the first time at the Met’s Lila Acheson Wallace Galleries of Egyptian Art.

Along the Nile: Early Photographs of Egypt

A second Met photographic exhibition spotlights 19th-century camera images of Egypt’s landscapes, inhabitants and imposing monuments. On display at The Howard Gilman Gallery are the works of American and European photographic pioneers: Félix Teynard, who set about updating Napoleon’s Déscription de l’Égypte, the standard architectural reference of the day; Maxime Du Camp, a Parisian journalist and traveling companion of the novelist Gustave Flaubert; and Francis Firth, the enterprising Liverpool businessman whose exotic photos turned the British public into armchair travelers.

Agatha Christie and Archaeology: Mystery in Mesopotamia

One of the world’s most popular writers, Agatha Christie was as comfortable cataloguing pottery sherds as she was plotting murder mysteries. Christie accompanied her archaeologist husband, Max Mallowan, to digs at Ur, Nineveh, Tell Brak and Nimrud, shooting many photographs and home movies now on display at the museum. Visitors will also be able to view the Royal Standard of Ur, props and costumes worn in filmed versions of Christie’s books, and a reconstructed sleeping compartment from the fabled Orient Express train.

Antioch: The Lost Ancient City

Multicultural Antioch—one of the great cities of the Greco-Roman-Byzantine world—comes alive in this traveling exhibit organized by the Worcester Art Museum, in Massachusetts, one of the original sponsors of the pre-World War II excavations conducted there. (See Florent Heintz, “Polyglot Antioch,” AO 03:06.) Magnificent mosaics, early Christian antiquities and a Sasanian silver horn vessel shaped like an antelope’s head are some of the 160 treasures on display.

Fire and Ice

The reinstallation of the museum’s Eugene Schaefer Collection of Ancient Glass is being celebrated with the opening of a new exhibit highlighting 100 modern and ancient glass objects (including the Roman jar above) culled from three private collections. Video clips will demonstrate various ancient glassmaking techniques.

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OddiFacts

Shhhh!

Reading out loud was the norm in the ancient world. Plutarch notes that when Alexander the Great (336–323 B.C.) stood before his troops one day and silently perused a letter from his mother, his soldiers were bewildered. They had never seen anyone read without vocalizing the words. Other stories recount how Julius Caesar’s aide-de-camp thought he was witnessing an epileptic seizure when he observed Caesar studying a document. Silent reading was still considered an oddity in 384 A.D., when Augustine, then a young professor of Latin rhetoric, marveled at the way in which Ambrose of Milan (later canonized, as was Augustine) read: “His eyes scanned the page … but his voice was silent and his tongue was still” (Confessions 6.3). In the semi-literate Mediterranean world of antiquity, reading was viewed as a public, not private process. Indeed, the lack of word separations and arbitrary line wraps in inscriptions almost demanded that readers verbalize the words in front of them to make sense of them.

Spiffing up the Colosseum
Restorers Remove the Detritus of the Modern City from Rome’s Ancient Landmark