Having grown up in the Midlands (England), I know a thing or two about grid-based cities. Miletus, was the world’s first grid based city, designed by Hippodamus in 479BC. The city boasts your usual Ancient Greek features – arches, statues, and of course – Amphitheatres. The Miletus Amphitheatre has three layers, with the underground layers constructed in 700BC and the ground level constructed in 100AD. Sleyman Demi’s photograph is of a corridor on the ground floor of the amphitheatre. The photograph is a black and white shot which could easily be taken as a lighting study of the corridor. The…
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The Antikythera Mechanism is one of the most debated – execpt perhaps the Elgin Marbles – Greek artefacts. Where the frieze of the Parthenon leaves us with mainly one single question, ‘Who does it belong to?’, this no-doubt ingenious ancient device raises a myriad questions like, ‘When and by whom was it created?’; What purpose did it serve?’; ‘How did it look in its entirety?’ and, ‘What was it doing on board of the Antikythera Wreck?’ Scholars around the world are working hard to resolve these issues, and every year new answers surface. One thing all the scholars agree on,…
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When the British Museum is explaining why they should not return the Elgin Marbles – and how they acquired them in the first place – they often offer two old letters as proof of their entitlement on the Parthenon Friezes: a copy of letter written by Philip Hunt talking about the ‘Firman’, a letter of permission, as well as a translation of the Firman in Italian dating to 1801. But was ‘feel free to ship half the Parthenon to Britain’ really what the Ottoman Firman said? In a recent statement Neil McGregor, director of the British Museum, said on the…
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It seems that while thousands of Athenians have lost their homes, and forests in the area have been reduced to ashes, one of Greece’s most famous ancient cities has avoided the flames. Yet as the inferno enveloping Marathon subsides, its mayor claims government authorities did nothing to protect it from the worst wildfires to hit the country in over two years. “(We were) begging the government to send over planes and helicopters,” says mayor Spyros Zagaris. Yet none were forthcoming, and the city narrowly escaped flames which ‘raced’ down a hill to threaten ancient museums and monuments. Marathon‘s close call…
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A team of international archaeologists have begun to investigate the existence of a Roman town partially submerged in a lake 20km outside stanbul. The excavation has started at Lake Kkekmece, a small inlet west of Turkey’s largest city, which is now believed to be the location of the ancient city of Bathonea. Little is known about Bathonea, but the site is thought to have been inhabited by humans for many millennia before it became a Greek settlement, which the Romans then built upon as they expanded their empire eastwards. It is near to the Yarmburgaz cave, which is already known…
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From the shimmering death mask of King Tut to the swinging penile replacements of 50 Cent, Gold and silver have been as staple pursuits of humanity as food, drugs and celebrity gossip. But while the dripping opulence of the ancient world may not seem a million miles away from the crass overindulgence of our own ‘enlightened’ age, you might be surprised to find that the two metals have almost exactly the same value now as they did then. According to economist Jeff Clark, that is. When faced with the notion gold was a dead investment, Clark looked at historical valuations…
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To be released in October 2009, the Hollywood-made film Agora – set in Alexandria, Egypt, 391 AD, directed by Alejandro Amenbar and starring Rachel Weisz – about the life and death of the Greek scholar Hypatia of Alexandria should be next in the long line of ‘historically correct’ blockbusters that succeed at capturing the attention of a wide audience. The film contains everything it needs – pretty heroine (including love story with Davus) gets killed over science vs. religion conflict and thus becomes a martyr – to appeal to a large crowd and to generate a huge amount of ticket…
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Exorbitant taxes, rising bankruptcy and angry protesters. No, not central London today but the ancient Greek city of Rhodiapolis, some 1,700 years ago. A new excavation of the coastal settlement, located in the Kumluca district of the modern Turkish city of Antalya, has revealed much about the previously little-known maritime hub. Yet the most fascinating artefact thrown up by the project is a large stone tablet, on which the city’s inhabitants had etched their dismay at rising taxes to the then-Roman Emperor Septimius Severus. Assistant Professor Isa Kizgut has led the excavations by Akdeniz University’s science and literature faculty. He…
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A heated cross-border dispute has been rumbling the last few days over the origins of the humble haggis Scotlands national dish, famously memorialised as the great chieftain o the puddin race in Robert Burns 1787 Address To The Haggis. Its been sparked by historian Catherine Brown, who has attributed the delicacys origins to the Scots auld enemy, the English, on the basis of references to the dish shes recently discovered in a book called The English Hus-Wife, which was written in 1615 and thus predates Burns homage to stomach-cooked sheeps organs by 171 years. Well, the Scots who in questions…
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A video depicting the damage done to the Parthenon over the centuries on display at the new Acropolis Museum was censored following protests by the Greek Orthodox Church. The fragment from a film by Costa-Gravas gives an overview of the ‘vandalism’ to the Parthenon starting at the Germanic warriors in 267 ADto the removal of a large part of the freize by British diplomat Lord Elgin in the 19th century. As such, it also contains a scene from the early Byzantine period showing figures clad in black climbing up ladders and destroying part of the Parthenon frieze. Some damage was…