Here are some posts from around the web that I enjoyed this week:
1,6000 yr old frescoes from the catacombs in Rome have been restored with lasers used to lift off black layer of algae, smoke and mineral deposits without affecting the bright colors of the frescoes. The tombs are from the period soon after Christianity became legal and the state religion under Constantine. Buried there were wealthy merchants involved in the imperial grain trade, and the frescoes depict the transfer of grain around the Mediterranean and up from the port of Ostia to Rome. Other frescoes depict stories from the gospels and other parts of the Bible. Both pagan and Christian symbols are intermixed, given that this is the beginning of the period when wealthy families began to shift to the new religion. The catacombs were used to bury the dead, not to hide them or for secrecy, but as a tax evasion as they only paid taxes on the surface land area and could fit a lot of dead in by going deep. Click here for the Telegraph “Laser Technology Uncovers 1600 Year old Christian frescoes in Rome’s biggest Catacomb”
A brief video from Cambridge University about an almost extinct dialect of Greek in a region of Turkey (a small group of villages not thrown out of Turkey in the 1920’s because they were Muslim) that reflects ancient Greek and what this dialect shows about language development. Quite intriguing. I did not know about this group of villages near the Black Sea. The interaction of the old women depicted is a window into a charming world. Click here for “Archaic Greek in a Modern World” on the website Greece High Definition
Artifacts lost during WWII often have intriguing stories of postwar wanderings and mysterious/illegal transfers. Troy’s treasures taken from Turkey by Schliemann to Germany ended up in the Russian state museum, for example. Now an Egyptian faience-covered carved stone plaque depicting the mayor of Memphis under Ramses II (13th C BCE) has been given back to the Neues Museum Germany after being discovered in the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor. It was donated to the Kelsey by a Dutch-American physicist named Goudsmit who worked on the Manhattan project and then after the war was sent to Germany to investigate the German nuclear weapons program. He collected antiquities along with building nuclear weapons. The plaque had been hidden inside a sarcophagus at the beginning of the war for its protection, but the Neues museum was badly damaged by Allied bombing and was not restored until long after the reunification of Germany. So no one was looking or noticing. Until a Dutch scholar compared an old photo with one from the Kelsey and made the connection. Interesting story, isn’t it? Seems like a fun one to write sometime. Click here for Live Science “Lost WWII Egyptian Artifact returns to Germany”