Melvadius

As you've specified someone from 100AD it might be interesting to see their reaction to our interpretations of Rome - at least if he/she didn't get annoyed by the errors they tend to propound so one of the 1950's/60's Biblical/ historical works like 'The Robe' or 'Ben Hur' might be of interest. Personally I would steer clear of anything to do with Boudicca as there tends to be so little in such films that can be said to have been 'properly' researched. As the Roman's seem to have liked more rumbustious (slapstick) comedy and singing (given the soldiers songs surving from Caerar's triumph) a better alternative might be 'A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum'.

I believe that everyone is getting too involved in the semantics of both what 'Roman' and 'colony' actually mean. As has already been pointed out there is a large body of evidence that there was at least irregular contact between members of what became the Roman Empire and both China and the Indian sub-continent over several centuries (millenia if you include the Byzantine period of the Eastern Empire) from the Ptolemaic period in Egypt onwards. The precise 'legal' and 'political' nature of that contact is open to some debate, due to a paucity of written material. However the fact that there are sailing instructions to the Indian sub-continent surviving does tend to indicate that amongst the Greco-Roman community at least the contact was sufficiently sustained for a need to exist for generally available instructions. The seasonal nature of the winds in the area as several of us have previously agreed meant that anyone trading in the area needed to plan for an extended visit until the winds were favourable for their return trip. This DOES NOT mean that there was anything so formal as a 'colony' and probably only meant that at the height of the trade there were a number of semi-permanent merchants quarters established on th eIndian sub-continent during the trading seasons which may, at most, have held a much smaller number of agents during the off-season periods. [Edit - This does negate the fact that one or two individuals from time to time may have decided to stay on a more permanent basis but to my mind this does not equate to a colony only a few 'settlers' who hoped to be left alone to live out their lives in an area and/or with people they liked. As far as a formal colony is concerned; contact was seasonal and it would have been several hundred if not thousand miles from the main Empire across potentially hostile areas. This means that if ever there was a problem between the locals and the colony it would have taken several months for the Empire to find out there MAY have been a problem let alone to organise and send a punative mission. In the moden world a Chinese or Italian run restauraunt down your local high street is not a surefire indicator of a colony, unless actually in China or Italy, probably only means that someone from there has settled in the area. :; Colony within the Empire had a strict legal sense and nothing that MAY have been established on the Indian sub-continent could to my mind have met the main criteria. Just think of it, could the land it was established on be 'gifted' to the colonists by the Empire with any degree of certainty.] Touching on Caldrail's point; the Chinese did on at least one occasion attempt to send an embassy to Rome but according to one source I have (MILLER The spice trade of the. Roman Empire, 29 B.C. to A.D. 641) were put off by the Parthians apparently claiming that Rome was at least another two years travel away along the Silk Road. Even if the Chinese embassy was unsuccessful there are some records of other embassies along the Silk Road including that of Kanishka who was the ruler of the Kushan Empire, which straddled the Silk Road routes around Samarkand that led to both to China and into northern India. He sent at least one embassy to Trajan (Wood The Silk Road, p 41) although it is unclear from my source what the outcome of the embassy was.

Mike Fulford and his excavation team at Silchester have been busy again with another really nice find coming from their post excavation work form last year which is reported in the Guardian

They had the builders in for some light renovations and you know what happens then... ?

ANSA reports on the discovery of a possible mansio in the Maremma Natural Park.

I would refer you back to the first couple of responses on this thread for more details but to recap as has already been pointed out 'corn' means something totally different in Europe to America where the confusion with maize sometimes arises. Depending upon who was writing 'corn' in translations of Roman texts could mean a number of different food crops but primarily includes three different forms of wheat as well as barley and possibly oats. I believe that the majority of the 'grain' dole would however have been made up of one of the varieties of wheat. N.B. Maize was unknown in Europe until the 16th or 17th centuries at the earliest and if I am not mistaken not really commercially grown (at least in northern Europe) until the 20th century.

I was lucky enough to catch a short presentation on the recent work at Portus during the RAC/ TRAC conference last April in Oxford. This article although hitting one of the 'high' points of the recent excavations really only skims over (and possibly reinforces some misconceptions about) what the Portus Project team members currently believe following their recent work there. Soem of the other buildings archaeologically are equally if not more significant and/or still open to other interpretations. The full project report is probably a few years away as yet but there are some good reconstructions and a host of other information about the Project at Portus Project. The computer graphics section of the site may be of particulal interest; Visualising Portus which some visitors here may be interested in following up on.

Ouch! Although I have just realised that if you instead used the link I put in above to his theories and IF you really wanted to you could instead buy the 'pdf' version of the chapter containing his theory as an 'extract' from the full book for only $25..... I still think I'll pass.

A Byzantine invention, I believe. I think the original article is bogus. I'm not sure how bogus it is or if it was intended as a serious contribution to the event but there seems to be a website devoted to the conference which has on it's programme for 8th June 2010 listed the following item: 11.45-12.30 Prof. Cesare Rossi: Archimedes

I'm not sure which reports you have been reading about this discovery but everything I have seen up to now refers to the recent British hoard as consisting of mainly 3rd century coins, some of which are very significant regarding a British based usurper Emperor. I would be grateful if you could explain how your comments about Josephus, who was writing in the late First Century AD, and any change in how shekels were described around that period fits into this discovery. EDIT- I have just discovered that a version of the story in the Detroit News seems to have conflated this recent discovery with the Anglo-Saxon hoard which was discovered last year. The value of the hoard quoted in the Detroit News article is actually the value eventually set for the Staffordshire Hoard (

Since I posted the original item something more interesting has apparently come out which was included in some television reports as well as a later version of the Telegraph article. The hoard apparently contains the largest number of coins ever found together of the rebel British emperor Carausius, who ruled the province from 286 to 293.

BBC is reporting on the discovery last April of one of the largest coin hoards found in Britain. A documentary on the find will form part of their Digging for Britain series in August but it is worth noting that the detectorist acted very responsibly by immmediately contacting the Portable Antiquities Scheme when he made the discovery allowing them to fully excavate the find. The full report includes a short video and a photograph of the excavation. This is already being picked up by the press with short items in some local news services This is Bristol, the The Chard and Ilminster News and one still freely available on-line version of a National paper so far The Telegraph

No problem, glad to discuss. BTW One thing I didn't but should have mentioned is that it is highly likely that due to the need to make use of shifting wind patterns to aid travel in each direction, like the Indian traders at Bernike and other Roman entrepots, the Greco-Roman traders operating in the opposite direction would also have had to wait for favourable wind patterns. Such enforced extended presence probably explains at least some of the apparent 'domestic' Roman rubbish found in the Indian sub-continental trading areas, while they made their sales and purchased goods for their return trip.

If the 2000 date of discovery is correct then I would go slightly further, given the script's first draft is dated April 4, 1998 and the film shot between January and May 1999, there is no way any 'similarites' can be anything but coincidence. BTW a link to the more recent articles mentioned may be of general interest to anyone wishing to follow up on this story.

This article from December 2008 referring to finds which started in 2000 in De Spiegel may be what you were referring to:

Payvand Iran News reports on the recent discovery of a Sassanid period 'Fire' Temple along with other artefacts. There is a good photograph in the original article showing the central area of the temple and what I presume is the 'stucco work at the foot of the fireplace' The archaeologists surmise that the fire temple was used during the period after the fall of the Sassanid Empire due to the fact that the plaster on the fire temple floor has been recovered several times. "This kind of the Sassanid religious architecture has previously been found in southern Iran, but this first time such a structure with these characteristics has been identified in central Iran," Javeri noted. The fire temple is located in one of the two Sassanid cities, which were identified in the region in 2005. Javery said that the cities, which are almost intact, are buried under the sands. Upcoming studies on the cities could shed light on the transition from the Sassanid era to the Islamic period and urbanism during the early Islamic eras in the region, he stated. The Vigol region is located at a distance of about seven kilometers northeast of the city of Kashan in Isfahan Province. [/quotwe]

Live Science reports on an interesting take on how Archimedes may have defended Syracuse froma paper presented at the recent THE GENIUS OF ARCHIMEDES International conference held in Syracuse. Personally I am not totally convinced by this premise but it is one way of getting an academic paper widely read and discussed.

This is Gloucestershire reports the discovery of a "new" Roman villa site. This was apparently by a team from Oxford Archaeology working in advance of pipe laying by Severn Water. I find it interesting that the quote from the archaeologist involved indicates that despite the discvovery of the skeleton headlining the article this is still early days in the excavation so there may be a lot more detail in weeks to come of what they have actually found. I do find the 'clothing' reference a bit suspect as that type of discovery is very ependent on the right soil conditions including the amount of permanent waterlogging on the site. [quote[A 2,000-YEAR-OLD human skeleton has been unearthed alongside Iron Age artefacts near Tewkesbury. Archaeologists uncovered signs of the ancient Roman villa in a field on the edge of Bredon's Norton. It is thought the finds could be of national importance. Metal detector hunts in recent years had led historians to suspect an ancient community might be found there. That was confirmed when contractors who were laying a new water pipeline began digging. Senior project manager Stuart Foreman is leading a team of archaeologists on a six-week excavation at the site. Mr Foreman, of Oxford Archaeology, said thousands of pieces of masonry, nails, tiles, pottery and clothing will have been unearthed by the time the project is complete. The area being examined is 200 metres long and 15 metres wide. He said: "Whenever you find a new villa, it's of national importance. It's pretty unusual to find a new villa that hasn't been recognised before. It's an important local centre." He said large pieces of masonry and flagstone flooring had been found and it was well preserved. ...

I have a copy of Roberta Tomber's Indo-Roman Trade: from pots to pepper; unfortunately it another book in my must read sometime category. Hwer book looks at a wide range of material from recent excavations as well as written sources so I would liek to know the basis of this claim. That said I did a quick skim through it and on page 152/3 she discusses some aspects of the trade between the Empire and India which may be relevant stating the view that in She goes on to note that Her view on the presence of colonies is possibly indicated by the following in which she describes the presence of foreiners in some of the Egyptian entrepots: She accepts that there were foreign residents at the various entrepots The book includes a number of maps showing the distribution of 'Roman' finds in India including coins and pottery and the picture drawn, as far as I have read, seems to be one of shifting trading centres on the Indian sub-continent depending on the period. To my mind that would seem to fit best with the idea that the Roman side of the trade also made use of private individuals (independent merchants) rather than with the establishment of permanent colonies on the Indian sub-continent.

The Heritage Key blog discusses the recent spat of announcements about Roman shipwrecks being discovered - obviously the diving season is now in full swing. A linked story referred to by Heritage Key is the recent announcement on ANSA.

I would agree that the claim of her being a gladiatrix is somewhat less than proven especially on the limited evidence which has been presented by the BBC. Yes muscle development may be an indicator of this particular activity BUT equally there are several other occupations which could provide similar explanations including laundress, fuller, bath attendant or even blacksmith if the trade wasn't a completely male preserve in the local community. The description of the coffin indicates wealth but not necessarily status. Analysis of the fired pot enclsoed with the burial may provide dates even if it is not of a datable variety - the article is unclear if it is of a known type. Dependent on the dating of the grave this may indicate that the burial actually either predates or post-dates the expansion off the suburb. Burials after a suburbs went out of use in the latter Empire is a fairly common occurance but not all burials were in recognised cemetries and there are numerous instances of cemetries being built over by latter expansions of towns. Regarding injuries or other aspects of the skeletal remains there can be more than one explanation for these, with the possible exception of 'cut' related injuries, so again I would wish to know a lot more before jumping to this particular 'answer'.

As usual there are some very interesting book titles here amongst the academic spectrum in particular. Another case of searching through the moths in my wallet to see which of these I can afford to buy this month:(

The BBC has reported on a project, started in 1998, which will see an 'authentic' medieval castle built in Burgandy. This project goes a long way beyond the previous, what in comparison now seem fairly limited, attempts at archaeological 'recreations' of the past or living history events such as the annual event at Kentwell Hall which began in 1979 in a similar way with an equivalent timestream progressing a day at a time based on real events. It looks like a lot of useful data is already being gathered about possible reasons for why some castles were built in the way they were.

Possibly rather than saying discovered as the full article in Helium makes clear the local authorities have now discovered that a Greek water park developer tried to cover up/ ignore this potentially important discovery so he could finish building his park. The site is now being excavated and the new Water Park closed indefinately.

The Gloabal Arab Network has reported the discovery of Hellenist and Roman period temples in central Syria. The full article is quoted below but without the accompanying photograph.