Update to Colored Ancient Sculpture

Here is a link to some more of the reconstructions, although the text is in German.

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Adding color to the ancient world

(Image copyright Stiftung Archäologie, Munich)

The Smithsonian's website has an interesting article on research by Vinzenz Brinkmann on the use of paint on ancient sculpture. It's been known for a long time that most ancient marble sculpture was painted, although in most cases the paint has disappeared, leaving the familiar white surface. There have been numerous attempts to illustrate what ancient sculpture may have looked like. But while Brinkmann's work is not particularly novel, the article does have some nice reconstructions created by Brinkmann using evidence he has collected, such as traces of paint on the stone. Some of his creations, such as the particolored Amazon archer above, are incorporate substantially more guesswork, but nonetheless are quite plausible. Many of these reconstructions toured last year in the 'Gods in Color' exhibition.

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Obama is not Xerxes

I try to avoid general political issues here, since that's not the topic of this blog, but some doofus named Christopher Cook has issued a call to arms against liberals and stinky evil people based on what appears to be too many hours spent watching 300.

Some choice comments:

These Greek city-states are showing the first stirrings of real democratic governance. A much greater percentage of people in Greece enjoy true freedom than in any of the neighboring lands. And it is about to fall under the yoke of a dictatorship.

What happens if Leonides fails? Does the Grecian experiment in democracy fail too, as Greece is trampled under by Xerxes and his army of slaves?

If the Greek cradle of democracy had fallen, Rome would not have absorbed its ideals.

If Rome hadn't taken those ideals and spread them into the Western world, where would those ideals be today? How far along would the ideas of representative governance be?

Without the Roman example, what would Great Britain have become? Would she have produced the Magna Carta? Would she have produced us, or any of the other nations of the Anglosphere—the freest nations in human history?

As I noted in my review here, Sparta is about the last place you would look for the foundations of modern liberal democracy. With a strict hierarchy of classes based on birth, slavery for most of the population, militarism, religious superstition, lack of interest in the outside world, and no scientific achievements to speak of, Sparta was the wart on the backside of Greek civilization. Not to mention that if Xerxes' invasion had succeeded, the effect on Roman political development would have been minimal, since Rome became a Republic in 509 B.C. (or thereabouts; that is the conventional date), nearly 30 years before Thermopylae.

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Greek Salad Dressing?

Okay, let’s get to some news.

From Discovery News, a report that scholars have been able to extract DNA from transport amphorae recovered from a shipwreck off the Greek island of Chios dating to the 4th century B.C. One contained olive oil blended with oregano (which the headline inexplicable calls ‘salad dressing’ – the text of the article, which says it would be used to ‘dress and flavor meals’ – is suitably vague given that it could have been used for lots of things. A second container contained DNA from the genus Pistacia, which could signal shipping of pistachio nuts but since amphoras are traditionally associated with transport of liquids, more likely signals wine blended with mastic, something akin to modern Greek resinated, or retsina wine. That would be particularly appropriate given the wreck’s location, as Chios in the Middle Ages was the primary supplier of mastic to Europe. That would also enable us to identify the wreck as a vessel leaving Chios, and not arriving there, which is consistent with some of the amphora types in the cargo, which are Chian. The source of the amphora containing the Pistacia DNA is not known, but if they contained Chian mastic, then logically they were probably made on the island as well.

The really cool thing is that the technique used to extract the DNA was extremely simple and could be applied to almost any pottery sample (though analyzing the DNA was no doubt time-consuming and expensive), meaning that we may have taken a major leap forward in our ability to source vessel contents. Oddly enough, given how crucial pottery is to reconstructing trade routes, our surmises as to what a vessel contained are often based on the flimsiest of evidence. In addition, there is a tendency to assume that if a particular amphora carried, say, wine, that every amphora of that type found was used to carry wine. We have enough evidence from multiple analyses to determine that transport vessels were rarely so strictly functionally segregated, but I think that as more such investigations are made there will be many more surprises in store.

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Greece Is Burning

It is summertime in Greece, and with it come the traditional wildfires. These are not natural forest fires; at least, it is thought that most of them are the result of deliberate arson. This is the product of a conflict between Greek law and society that has been going on for years. Most forested land in Greece is protected from development. Those wishing to build sometimes respond by setting deliberate fires. Sometime this is done in an amateurish way, other times explosives with remote detonators are used. Once the forest is burned down, the land becomes cheap and development can commence.

Greece having a dry climate, frequently these fires get out of hand. The fires this year are particularly severe -- huge tracts of the Peloponnese have been burned to the ground, and giant plumes of smoke can be seen in satellite images like the one above. That image is actually rather tame -- there are at present at least five major fires raging in southern Greece.

Not only is this a major problem for conservation and a severe health hazard, these fires often threaten archaeological remains. One fire now burning near Olympia has come very close to the sanctuary of Zeus there, the original home of the Olympic games and one of the most significant sites in Greece. An emergency effort has saved the site from destruction, but the threat is not over and other regions of Greece are in even graver danger.

This sort of thing has been allowed to continue for far too long. Greece has to regain control of the situation and crack down on illegal and shady development. Otherwise the human and cultural costs will only get worse.

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Lions and Tigers and.....Satyrs? Oh my!

There is an interesting story in USA Today which, if true, would definitely qualify as "Weird Archaeology." There was a recent discovery of a preserved human body in an Iranian salt mine. The dry conditions in such locations help preserve soft tissue and hair, and there have been other such discoveries in recent years. The dessication creates shriveled-up faces and snub noses on the bodies. This observation has led Adrienne Mayor of Stanford University to suggest that the discovery of such bodies lay behind the ancient Greek stories of satyrs -- humanoid creatures that are generally depicted with goats' legs, pot bellies, prominent phalluses, snub noses and prominent beards. Mayor is known for her hypotheses that discoveries of fossilized animals lie behind many ancient myths of giants and monsters -- for example, a mastodon's skull, with its prominent nasal opening, could have been the inspiration for the cyclops.

One piece of suggestive evidence is an account of a visit of the Emperor Constantine to Antioch in the early 4th century A.D., where, it is recounted, he was shown the remains of a 'satyr' which had been preserved in salt. Could he have been looking at a body like those from the Iranian salt mines? It's a tempting idea, although not something we could ever definitively establish.

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Heaven Forbid

Connections, connections. The world of archaeology, and pseudoarchaeology, is a fairly small one. Those of my readers who clicked through the link a few posts back to the 'discovery' in the Gulf of Cambay would have seen a quote by Michael Cremo, who is identified as a 'researcher and author of Forbidden Archaeology.'

Meanwhile, recently I picked up an issue of Atlantis Rising. The title of this magazine tells you just about all you need to know about its contents. If that weren't enough, article titles such as "Was the Ark Electrical" would, I think, be sufficient to brand the periodical as a bit out there. To be fair, not everything in the magazine is bunk -- I'd say no more than 50% is. I picked up the magazine as it looked to be a good source of material on pseudoarchaeology to discuss in this blog. The column that first caught my eye is a regular feature called "The Forbidden Archaeologist" by none other than our Mr. Cremo. He has a website.

It doesn't appear that Cremo has any professional credentials whatsoever. That in and of itself doesn't prevent him from being a good popular writer. As a young field, archaeology has benefitted from the contribution of amateurs far more than most other fields. However, the column in this issue contains a mixture of good data and misplaced credulity that is a hallmark of pseudoarchaeology.

Cremo begins the column with a reference to Plato's Timaeus, the major source for the Atlantis story. Plato tells a story in this dialogue about a trip by the Athenian lawgiver Solon to Egypt. This probably never happened; Solon was a famous wise man to whom all sorts of stories and travels were attributed, much like Albert Einstein in the present day. Plato has the Egyptians tell Solon that their civilization was far older than the Greeks, and that even Greek history was older than the Greeks imagined; this is the intro to the Atlantis story.

Cremo then claims that, like the Egyptians, he will show modern scholars that humans have been in Greece longer than they currently imagine. The starting point is the Petralona skull, discovered in a cave in 1960. This is the oldest recognized evidence for hominids in Greece. Dated to between 200,000 and 500,000 years ago, it is now thought to be a specimen of Homo heidelbergensis. The skull is hard to identify and date because it was found embedded in a stalagmite, without context. A 1981 article in Nature dated the skull between 160,000 and 240,000 years old, significantly earlier than Poulianas put it.

From this firm starting point, Cremo goes off into ever murkier terrain. He brings up a later discovery by Poulianos, the Greek anthropologist who found the Petralona skull. In 1977, near the village of Perdikkas, Poulianos claimed to find a 3 million-year-old mammoth with associated stone tools. If valid, this would be the oldest evidence for hominids outside of Africa. However, this 'discovery' has not been generally accepted by the scientific community. Poulianas never published his finds in an independent scientific journal; the only articles on the topic are in Poulianas' own journal Anthropos, the house organ of his group the Anthropological Association of Greece, which has feuded with the Greek Cultural Ministry. You can find a rather wild rant by Poulianos against the Greek Cultural Ministry here.

I am not an expert in paleoanthropology, so I won't comment on the validity of the Perdikkas finds. However, it is clear that they haven't been properly published, nor are they currently accepted by the scientific community. Simply presenting the information as fact without mentioning any of this is irresponsible, albeit par for the course among pseudoarchaeologists.

Cremo next claims that there is evidence for hominid occupation of Greece and nearby areas as far back as the Miocene. The Miocene ended at least 5 million years ago, so this would put us at a time at or before the split between the ancestor of hominids and chimpanzees. Needless to say, this would upset all of paleoanthropology. What is Cremo's evidence? A paper given at the International Congress of Prehistoric Anthropology and Archaeology in 1872 reporting early horse bones with evidence of human modification, and an article in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute in 1874 reporting carvings on animal bones. That's it -- two articles written over 125 years ago, at a time when knowledge of human ancestors and geology was in its infancy. I haven't been able to get access to these articles (apparently even the library here at Penn has its limits), but the lack of followup calls into question the degree to which these can be used to support any kind of argument. Occam's razor would suggest that the first author was mistaken about the use of tools (this is well before use-wear analysis) and the latter was mistaken as to geological context. At the least, one would have to return to the sites in question and confirm the finds before printing them as fact.

Cremo then drifts off into woo woo land arguing that the Sanskrit Puranas are evidence for human civilization millions of years ago. From fact to questionable to 'evidence' to fiction in three pages -- all in a day's work in the world of pseudoarchaeology.

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Ancient Greek Science

Tangled Bank is a weekly collection of blog stories and links on the topic of the biological sciences hosted in rotation by a series of science blogs. Something not usually relevant to the topic of this blog, except that this week's version, Tangled Bank #84, hosted by the Voltage Gate, uses Greek science as a unifying theme. Take a look!

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Ancient Acoustics

Researchers at Georgia Tech have announced that they have been able to determine what makes the acoustics at the Greek theater of Epidauros, one of the best-preserved from the ancient world, so good. They conducted experiments in which they determined that the pattern of seats in the theater effectively filters out low-frequency background noise, such as crowd murmur, leaving higher-frequency sounds such as the voices of the actors in the orchestra, or circular stage of the theater. They suspect that the actors would have been comprehensible even without the lower-frequency tones because of the ability of the human brain to reconstruct missing tones in human speech.

They also hypothesize that the results were serendipitous, and the Greeks did not understand why the acoustics at Epidauros were so good. At least, no extant theater produces such good effects. On the other hand, no theater is nearly as well-preserved, though some have been reconstructed.

My only question with the piece is if they did experiments or modelling to determine what the effect of a packed theater would be on the acoustics. Would the sound waves react off the seats in the same way if they were filled with people?

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Question Time: Greek Homosexuality

From time to time I am going to answer people have about the ancient world. Until the time when my readership starts sending in questions (which you can do by emailing me at brestian@@sas..upenn..edu -- just take out half the symbols), I will post some of the questions I frequently encounter as a practicing archaeologist. To take the topic of the movie 300 one step further, I will address a question that pops up frequently: were the Greeks really all flaming homosexuals?

This is a topic that is difficult to answer in a straightforward fashion. First, there is the old saw that any sentence beginning with "The Greeks" is false. Every city state had different customs, laws and rituals, and it is impossible to generalize. In addition, almost all our literary and artistic evidence comes from Athens, so it always gets a disproportionate amount of attention. Most of what I say here will deal with that city.

The Greeks did not have words for "heterosexual" and "homosexual." Our notion of sexual 'orientation' would be alien to them. Right there we have a major stumbling block to finding an answer to the question. What we can talk about is what the Athenians did. What they did participate in homosexual liasons quite openly. However, homosexual sex played a rather different role in Athenian society than in ours. Men of similar age did not engage in homosexual sex (at least, we don't have much evidence for it), nor did one individual act as both penetrator and penetrated with a single partner.

The traditional Athenian homosexual relationship involved an older man (the erastes, or "lover"), and a younger boy or man (the eromenos, or "loved"). These names are modern; the Greeks did not distinguish them so precisely. The younger partner would be anywhere from 13-20 years of age. The erastes would court the young man with gifts and admiring words. The eromenos would become enamored with the older man's wisdom and experience, but would never take an active role in the relationship. The eromenos was always the one sought, the one pursued, the one penetrated. K. J. Dover has likened the eromenos to the role of a young Victorian woman, who was never supposed to initiate courtship or sex, but simply be an object of admiration and desire. Together, the two would form a mentor-pupil relationship. This could have practical benefits, as the erastes could educate the eromenos in politics and civic life, and use his connections to ensure the eromenos would find success when he got older.

Actually consenting to be the eromenos for money, particularly with multiple partners, was considered prostitution, and was illegal in Athens. We have an account of the prosecution of an Athenian in the 4th century named Timarchus for this crime. In Athens, there was no law-enforcement agency; private individuals brought other Athenians to court for alleged crimes, and in this case the real reason Timarchus was prosecuted is in retaliation for his actions as ambassador to Philip II. What is interesting is that the prosecutor, Aeschines, anticipates that the defense would attempt character assassination against himself (a standard tactic), and says that he never stooped to prostitute himself, although he too served as an eromenos. This public admission, done without apparent embarrassment, indicates the institution was widely accepted at the time. Occasionally we find philosophers speaking disapprovingly, but only in the context that lust for either sex was a sign of lack of self-control.

The erastes-eromenos relationship wasn't permanent. Once the "boy" reached adulthood, sooner or later he would marry and have kids, and the erastes would be left behind, although ties of friendship would continue. In turn, the former eromenos might well become an erastes himself when he got older.

Unlike in modern society, men engaging in homosexual behavior were not, by and large, characterized as feminine (the eromenos, as the passive partner, could be an exception). Indeed, having an erastes and eromenos serve together in battle was seen as a good thing, as the erastes would endeavor to provide a good role model, and the eromenos would strive to meet the example of his mentor. For those who have seen 300, remember "The Captain" and his son Astinos? Make them erastes/eromenos instead of father/son and you have it. The Theban Sacred Band, a crack unit, was composed of 500 homosexual pairs, and was feared in battle for that very reason.

Foreigners, such as the Persians, could be depicted as effeminate, and occasionally as the subordinate partner in a homosexual relationship. Here, it is the status, rather than the action, that is derogatory. For example, there is an Athenian red figure vase with a nude Greek with the inscription "I am Eurymedon" (a reference to the Greek victory at the battle of the Eurymedon in the 460s), while on the other side is a Persian bent over with the inscription "I am bent over" (i.e., "I'm fucked!")

We know very little about homosexuality at Sparta. In Plato's Laws, he has an Athenian speaker speak negatively of Spartan homosexuality as unnatural -- not only one of the few examples of anti-homosexual opinion, but one of the few references to Spartan practice. We also have a comment in Aristophanes to Spartan homosexuality, but it's hard to know how much weight to place on a comedic author. The historian Ephorus tells us that on Crete, the pursuit of the eromenos was highly ritualized, with a show of mock resistance by the family of the pursued youth.

All this involves elite males, as Greek literature was created for the elite, and depictions of homosexual behavior on Greek vase painting was used for the Greek ritual known as the symposium. About women we know little, about the lower classes and slaves even less. The modern word 'lesbian' does come from the island of Lesbos, for it was the home of the poetess Sappho, who wrote poems to her lover in the sixth century B.C. (whence also "Sapphic love")

In short, Greek homosexuality is difficult to generalize about, and by and large it took forms that would be very unfamiliar to us. The Greeks are often brought into both pro- and anti-GLBT rhetoric by individuals who don't really know what they are talking about. Like most aspects of ancient society, it can only be understood in context.

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Ancient grapes found in Greece

Part of the purpose of this site is to present regular summaries of archaeology news. Today, there is an interesting story from The Discovery Channel website. A team of archaeologists working in northern Greece at a site called Dikili Tash have found the remains of grape seeds and crushed grapes in one of the houses there. The site dates to the Neolithic period, around 4500 B.C. It's not clear whether the grapes were being gathered to make wine or simply used for their juice. Probably the former, as wine was being made in Iran a millenium earlier. The grapes were either picked from wild vines or were in the earliest stages of domestication. It's possible that the cultivation of the grape was motivated specifically by the desire for greater alcohol production. Some scholars think wheat may have been first cultivated in order to make beer, not bread, although there is really no evidence for this.

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Movie Review: 300

I just saw 300 yesterday, so it seemed a good subject to launch this blog with. I didn't go into the movie with great expectations, but still found the movie disappointing. And I don't mean the more than vaguely bigoted undertones. Don't get me wrong; I don't judge historical epics simply by how close they stick to the texts. However, I don't get the point of altering history beyond all recognizability. Some say that the public doesn't care about accuracy. My response is: if history doesn't matter, instead of making a movie about the stand of 300 Spartans against the Persian king Xerxes, why not make it about the stand of 300 Phlebaeans against the Emperor Orazand? Because the fact that it really happened is an irresistible hook. Humans are the only animal we know of that has an interest in the past. For that very reason, the past shouldn't be trifled with.

My biggest disappointment was that there is a good movie to be made about the Spartans, or about the Persians. These are two genuinely fascinating cultures. Unfortunately, the movie whitewashes the one (no pun intended), and stereotypes the other. Rather than nit-pick the historical errors in the movie, therefore, I will take the opportunity to say something about these two peoples. I will discuss the Spartans today, the Persians will get space later in the week.


Another name for Sparta is "Lacedaemon," which is why they bore the Greek letter lambda on their shields (poorly rendered in the movie). The Spartan state controlled much of southern Greece, known as the Peloponnesus. In particular, it encompassed two regions: Laconia, in the SE, and Messenia, in the SW. Laconia was the heart of the Spartan kingdom, and gives us the word "laconic," referring originally to the short, dry speech of the Spartans. In the SW was the land of Messenia, which was conquered by Sparta in the 7th century B.C. and remained under their thumb until the 4th century B.C.

Sparta was governed by a traditional government that was supposedly laid out by the semi-mythical lawgiver Lycurgus. Although later generations claimed that the system was laid out all at one time (part of which was enshrined in the oral constitution known as the "Great Rhetra"), we now think that, like most constitutions, it grew gradually over time.

Like most Greek city states, Sparta had a series of different offices. Unlike most later Greek cities, Sparta maintained a system of kingship into the Classical period. Unusually, Sparta had two kings, and two royal families, a system not without parallel in other societies. Spartan kings did not hold absolute power, however. There was also an assembly, which elected five annual magistrates known as ephors. Although the kings commanded the army in war, the ephors had considerable political authority, and in at least one case commanded a king to divorce his wife and marry another in order to produce heirs. The ephors also led the gerousia, an elected body of 28 elders all over 60. Between them, the kings, ephors and the gerousia held most of the political power in Sparta.

Spartan society was rigidly regimented. At the top were the Spartiates, full citizens, men who at the age of seven were taken from their families and raised in age groups in a process known as the agoge until they were 20. During this time they trained in warfare and dined in communal messes called sussitia, which they continued to attend after they reached adulthood. The Spartiates formed only a small fraction of Spartan society. At the time of Thermopylae (480 B.C.) there were about five or six thousand. Like many small groups that marry only among themselves with no influx of new blood their numbers dwindled over time. By the Battle of Leuctra (371 B.C.), there were only 1500. More numerous were the perioikoi (dwellers round-about). These were free men living in Laconia and Messenia but who did not have the rights of Spartan citizens nor did they participate in the agoge. They generally served as light support troops in the Spartan army. Most of the population however were serfs or slaves known as helots. Many of these were descended from Messenians who had been enslaved when Messenia was conquered by Sparta. They formed 80% or more of the population. Naturally, the Spartiates were terrified at the prospect of a helot revolt, and their fanatical militarism must be seen in part as a response to this threat. Even the Spartans had to unbend eventually in the face of demographic reality, however, and on a few occasions helots were freed in exchange for military service, although afterwards they were even more distrusted than before.

Sparta is perhaps the closest ancient equivalent to a fascistic state. In subsequent centuries, reactionaries and militarists have held it up as a model of discipline and self-abnegation (Sparta was famously so uninterested in commerce that they continued to use iron spits as currency until the Peloponnesian War). For a liberal democracy, however, Sparta would seem to have little to offer.

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