Field Notes

Taking the Plunge

Have Archaeologists Found the Famous Baths of Chiusi?

For over a hundred years, archaeologists have been searching for the ancient cold-water springs of Chiusi, in eastern Tuscany about 50 miles southeast of Siena.

In the first century B.C., the Romans developed a liking for cold-water baths as a cure for stomach problems and headaches—and Chiusi was a favorite place to soak and shiver. The poet Horace (65–8 B.C.) praised Chiusi over the more traditional hot springs of Baiae: “Antonius Musa makes Baiae / Useless to me and even makes me unpopular there, / Now that at mid-winter I soak in icy water.”

But it was Emperor Augustus (27 B.C.–14 A.D.) who made cold baths a national passion. His physician, the Antonius Musa mentioned by Horace, recommended a cold mineral bath as a cure for an abscessed liver. When Augustus survived the painful ailment, Musa became rich, and his cure became fashionable.

In 1995, a team of archaeologists, led by David Soren of the University of Arizona in Tucson, discovered a bubbling spring and the ruins of a bathhouse and giant pool outside Chiusi, near the modern spa town Chianciano Terme. (Perhaps taking its cue from Augustus, Chianciano Terme’s slogan is “It’s Chianciano for a healthy liver.”) The area was first excavated in 1993 by Italian archaeologist Giulio Paolucci, who uncovered a small bath complex, traces of a water-distribution tower and walls associated with a large pool or cistern. When Soren and his team resumed work at Chianciano in 1995, they soon revealed the large pool, several structures that may have been houses or shops, and portions of Etruscan streets (Chiusi was a major Etruscan city, known as Chamars, beginning in the sixth century B.C.).

Attention so far has focused on the large swimming pool (shown above in a reconstruction drawing). The pool’s size, more than 60 by 130 feet, indicates that this site was a major complex—unlike anything else yet found in the region. Built during the late Etruscan period (mid-second to early first century B.C.), the pool complex was renovated at least once during Roman times: Tiles bearing stamps from 114 A.D. were used to repair the floor of a sloping patio leading to the edge of the pool. Soren told Archaeology Odyssey that cold-water baths remained popular late in the Roman period: “There is no evidence for a major decline [in the use of the Chiusi springs] until the fourth century A.D.”

Though there is no proof that this was where Horace and Augustus bathed, Soren told The New York Times, “We are either looking at the famous spring of Chiusi, or at the very least at one of a series of springs that made this area famous in antiquity.”

The Pathologists and the Emperor

Diagnosing Alexander’s Fatal Fever

Legend has it that just before Alexander the Great died in Babylon in 323 B.C., he knew there would be problems surrounding his succession: “I forsee a great funeral contest over me” What Alexander did not foresee was a controversy over the cause of his death.

Confusing evidence for Alexander’s death has mystified scholars, who have suggested such diverse causes as arsenic poisoning, lead poisoning or malaria. A team of doctors and historians from the University of Maryland and Pennsylvania State University has ignited the discussion once again in an article on the New England Journal of Medicine (“A Mysterious Death,” June 11, 1998) declaring that Alexander died of typhoid fever. Basing their conclusions on the works of the first-century Greek historians Plutarch and Arrian, David Oldach, Robert Richard, Eugene Borza and Michael Benitez chose typhiod fever not only because the symptoms (fever, chest pain, partial paralysis) match, but because the paralysis associated with advanced stages of typhoid fever may have given the impression that Alexander’s body did not decompose until several days after his death.

The article sparked letters to the journal disputing the diagnosis. Benitez explained to Archaeology Odyssey that this exercise in diagnosis “is one way of showing how an experienced physician would approach a challenging case. In a broader perspective, historical events have often been altered by disease process—scourges of typhoid or the plague, for example— and it is interesting to us as physicians to note how the course of history can be changed by organisms too small to be seen.”The team had presented articles on the deaths of Edgar Allen Poe and Ludwig van Beethoven, and it plans to present more in the future.

Conservation Watch

Hagia Sophia
Istanbul, Turkey
537 A.D.

At the dedication of Hagia Sophia (Greek for Divine Wisdom), the Roman emperor Justinian, who commissioned its construction, majestically declared: “Glory to God who has thought me worthy to finish this work. Solomon, I have outdone you.” Shortly after the dedication, a visitor reported that the cathedral’s soaring dome appeared “suspended from a chain from heaven.” But over the centuries the building has endured considerable damage (an earthquake in 557 A.D. caused the first of three partial collapses of the dome). In 1993, when a UNESCO team visited Hagia Sophia, it found crumbling plaster, grimy marble facings, broken windows, moisture-damaged paintings and a disintegrating lead roof. In 1996, the World Monuments Fund added the cathedral to its List of 100 Most Endangered Sites. UNESCO recently reported that progress has been made toward healing Hagia Sophia’s latest injuries. In 1998, the Turkish Ministry of Culture allocated $540,000 for preservation of the church and its disintegrating mosaics (above) and about $250,000 is expected from other contributions.

Assyrian Reliefs Found Again

Carvings from the Palaces of Sennacherib and Ashurbanipal Turn up in England’s Green and Pleasant Land

Two seventh-century B.C. Assyrian reliefs from Nineveh, in present-day northern Iraq, have been found in an English manor house.

For over a century, the carvings had rested in the cavernous cellars of Eastnor Castle, Herefordshire. They were found behind an old stove by guests of the Hervey-Bathurst family, the owners of the castle, and have since been authenticated by Julian Reade of the British Museum.

Lying near the tablets were letters from Austen Henry Layard, who had found the reliefs at Nineveh, in 1850, and later presented them to his friend and benefactor Charles Somers, Viscount Eastnor, an ancestor of the Hervey-Bathurst family. In a letter to Somers, Layard described the “deep mystery” hanging over things Assyrian: Although the Assyrians dominated the Near East in the first half of the first millennium B.C., controlling a territory that at times stretched from Iran to Egypt, little physical evidence for their empire had been found. (The situation has not vastly changed.)

So mighty were the Assyrians that several of their kings and cities, including Nineveh, are mentioned in the Bible. Jonah, for instance, is commanded by God to warn the Ninevehites to abandon their evil ways. Layard’s discoveries appeared to confirm the historicity of biblical accounts—at a time when many scholars had come to think of the Bible as merely a collection of myths. Layard presented his finds to the public in Nineveh and Its Remains (1849), a book that soon became the world’s first archaeological best-seller.

Somers, an avid traveler himself, sponsored several of Layard’s expeditions. To ensure future financial backing, Layard often gave fragments like those found at Eastnor to his friends and benefactors.

The smaller of the two Assyrian reliefs is from Ashurbanipal’s North Palace at Nineveh, built around 645 B.C.; it shows a eunuch greeting an Assyrian officer. The larger relief (above), from a palace of Sennacherib (704–681 B.C.), shows manacled Babylonian prisoners. Mentioned in the Bible (2 Kings 20:12–19; 2 Chronicles 32:31; Isaiah 39), the Assyrian king Sennacherib invaded the southern Israelite kingdom of Judah and besieged Jerusalem. The Judahite king Hezekiah (727–698 B.C.) apparently was able to withstand the siege because he had constructed an intricate underground water system (see “Jerusalem’s Underground Water Systems,” BAR 20:04). Cuneiform texts recognize that the siege was ultimately unsuccessful.

Many of Layard’s finds are now in the British Museum and New York’s Metropolitan Museum. Layard also gave numerous antiquities to his cousin Lady Charlotte Guest, perhaps best known for her translation of the Welsh King Arthur legends. To house her Assyrian art, Lady Guest built the famous Nineveh Porch on the grounds of her estate, Canford Manor, in Dorset. In 1994, one of Layard’s Assyrian reliefs was found at the estate, now a school, and sold to Japan’s Miho Museum for nearly $12 million.

Remembering A Scholar

John Chadwick Was One of the Founding Fathers of Mycenaean Studies

With the passing of John Chadwick, 78, the Perceval Maitland Laurence Reader in Classics at Cambridge University, on November 24, 1998, the world lost another precious link to one of the major intellectual feats of the 20th century.

In June 1952, the young British architect Michael Ventris sent a series of letters to scholars working on Aegean scripts of the second millennium B.C.E. Ventris informed them that he had made an astonishing discovery: the decipherment of the syllabic-ideographic script known for half a century as Minoan Linear Script B—so-called because this writing resembles Linear A, a largely undeciphered script used by the ancient Minoans on Crete. Ventris’s letters included a chart of values for the 65 or so core phonetic characters of the script, as well as readings of certain texts. On July 1, he modestly announced his news on BBC radio. He was not yet 30 years old.

We now know that Linear B represents the Greek (not the Minoan) language in its earliest extant form (1400–1200 B.C.E.). Scholars today refer to it as a Mycenaean script.

As Ventris announced his news to the world over the airways, John Chadwick was listening. He immediately contacted Ventris and offered to assist him in presenting his work both to the scholarly community and to the public at large. Thus began one of the most fruitful collaborations in the history of archaeology. At the first international Mycenological Colloquium at Gif-sur-Yvette, near Paris, in April 1956, Ventris, Chadwick and the American Emmett L. Bennett, Jr.—then one of the world’s leading authorities on the Linear B tablets—dined together almost every night. They formed a mutually sympathetic triad—decipherer, linguist and epigrapher, each aware of how much still had to be done—until Ventris died in an automobile accident on September 6, 1956.

John Chadwick did three remarkable things from the time of the BBC broadcast onwards. He made sure that the decipherment was quickly and clearly explicated by providing the linguistic underpinnings that Ventris lacked. Then, for about a decade, Chadwick defended the decipherment with remarkable grace and intelligence against virulent, and often personal, attacks. Finally, as a scholar and inspirational teacher, he saw to it that anyone interested might learn a good deal about the Linear B tablets and what they tell us about Greek civilization in the Late Bronze Age. Two generations of scholars learned from him to pay close attention to the many diverse aspects of Mycenological work: the primary editing of the texts, the reconstruction of the language they encode, lexicography, social linguistics, and historical and archaeological interpretation. None of these things would have been done, or done so well, without the quiet energy and scholarly integrity of John Chadwick.

Chadwick’s own work includes the well-known second edition of the Mycenaean “bible” he wrote with Ventris, Documents in Mycenaean Greek (Cambridge, 1973), his text-based reconstruction of life in the Bronze Age, The Mycenaean World (Cambridge, 1976), and his superb, profusely illustrated presentation of Aegean scripts, Linear B and Related Scripts (Univ. of California, 1987). If Mycenology continues to share with Sumerology and Hittitology a failure to make its latest discoveries accessible, John Chadwick was a stellar exception to the rule.

In technical journals, Chadwick addressed an amazing range of topics, such as working women at Pylos, scribal errors, the Aeolic dative plural, publication of the tablets, the evidence for human sacrifice and the controversial Dorian invasion.

Interested Archaeology Odyssey readers might track down a technical publication from 1979: “The Use of Mycenaean Documents as Historical Evidence” (in Colloquium Mycenaeum [Geneva: Libraire Droz]), for an elegant explanation of how to interpret Linear B texts.

Chadwick’s students—in England, South Africa, Austria and the United States—have taken their teacher’s groundbreaking work even further, covering perfumed oil manufacture, administrative techniques, the function of elites, cloth production, livestock management, taxation, the ethnic makeup of Mycenaean Crete, Linear B and Homer, Mycenaean Greek religion and the history of Greek Bronze Age archaeology. John Chadwick’s legacy continues to collaborate with the spirit of Michael Ventris.

Taking the Plunge