Dear Kitty. Some blog

@birdblogger: Found a Cedar Waxwing on Inishbofin, Co.Galway. A first for Ireland and the third bird for Western Paleartic!!!!

How to Keep Buildings from Killing Birds: here.

This is a video about the Agora in Izmir, Turkey.

From Hurriyet Daily News in Turkey:

Goddess of divine retribution awaits daylight

Monday, October 12, 2009

İZMİR - Anatolia News Agency

Archaeologists have found traces of a temple built for the Greek goddess of divine retribution, Nemesis, during excavations in the ancient city of Agora in the Aegean port city of İzmir.

There was no “ancient city of Agora”. Agora in ancient Greek means market and/or city center. In this case, the city center of Smyrna, as the city was called then.

Akın Ersoy of Dokuz Eylül University’s archaeology department and heading the archaeological excavations in the ancient city, told the Anatolia news agency on Monday that they speculated there might be a temple built for Nemesis in the area.

“We found traces of such a temple during our excavations in Agora,” he said. “We want to concentrate our work to unearth the temple in the future.”

This year’s archeological excavations have unearthed many important findings that belonged to the Ottoman era, said Ersoy, including many pieces of Ottoman ceramics. “There are several layers to be worked,” said Ersoy. “We will work on the Ottoman era first, followed by the Eastern Roman, Roman and then the earlier ages.”

Ersoy said it was during the excavation work when they found clues of a temple to Nemesis built in the ancient city. “We think the temple is situated on the western side,” he added. “It might be under the Hürriyet Anatolian High School building. We hope to unearth it in coming years.”

In Greek mythology, Nemesis was the spirit of divine retribution against those who succumb to hubris, vengeful fate, personified as a remorseless goddess.

The ancient city of Agora was constructed during the rule of Alexander the Great. Today it is mostly in ruins. What little is left remains because of Faustina, wife of Marcus Aurelius, who had the Agora rebuilt after an earthquake devastated the original in A.D. 178.

A problem with this is that Empress Faustina died in 175, three years before the earthquake.

The Agora was first excavated by German and Turkish archaeologists between 1932 and 1941.

Surrounded on the west and north by colonnades, the Agora once had a large altar dedicated to Zeus in the center. The altar is now gone, but statues of Poseidon and of Demeter believed to have come from the altar are on display in the Archaeological Museum in İzmir. Also visible at the site are various capitals, remnants of three of the four main gates, some recognizable stalls, architectural fragments bearing medieval coats of arms and a stone slab that may have been used as a gaming board.

From Associated Press today:

Nero’s dining room unveiled in Rome

ROME – Archaeologists say they have unveiled what they believe to be remains of the “dining room” of the Roman emperor Nero, part of his palatial residence built in the first century.

Lead archaeologist Francoise Villedieu says her team discovered part of a circular room, which experts believe rotated day and night to imitate the Earth’s movement and impress guests.

Villedieu told journalists Tuesday that the room on the ancient Palatine Hill was supported by a pillar with a diameter of 4 meters (more than 13 feet). She says only the foundation of the room was recovered during the four-month excavation.

The Golden Palace, also known by its Latin name Domus Aurea, rose over the ruins of a fire that destroyed much of Rome in 64 A.D. and was completed in 68 A.D.

See also here.

From British daily The Morning Star:

Archaeological online database opens to public

Tuesday 11 August 2009

A Scottish archaeological and architectural internet database has opened to the public for the first time.

It holds pictures and information on 280,000 buildings and archaeological sites.

The main web-based archive of the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland has been on the internet for some time but only became fully interactive today.

Enthusiasts of Scotland’s culture and its built heritage can add detail to any of the archive’s places of interest and upload their photographs.

Project manager Siobhan McConnachie said: “We know from the work that we do and the people we meet while doing it that many people have a wealth of information they would like to share with us that will add to our knowledge of a building’s past or images that will help tell a story.”

Contributions can be added at canmore.rcahms.gov.uk

Hidden beneath a four-ton slab of rock and surrounded by ancient carved symbols of prehistoric power, a spectacular high-status potentially royal tomb, dating back 4,000 years, has been discovered by archaeologists in Scotland: here.

From ScienceDaily:

Archaeologists Find Cache Of Tablets In 2,700-year Old Turkish Temple

(Aug. 11, 2009) — Excavations led by a University of Toronto archaeologist at the site of a recently discovered temple in southeastern Turkey have uncovered a cache of cuneiform tablets dating back to the Iron Age period between 1200 and 600 BCE. Found in the temple’s cella, or ‘holy of holies’, the tablets are part of a possible archive that may provide insights into Assyrian imperial aspirations.

The assemblage appears to represent a Neo-Assyrian renovation of an older Neo-Hittite temple complex, providing a rare glimpse into the religious dimension of Assyrian imperial ideology,” says Timothy Harrison, professor of near eastern archaeology in the Department of Near & Middle Eastern Civilizations and director of U of T’s Tayinat Archaeological Project (TAP). “The tablets, and the information they contain, may possibly highlight the imperial ambitions of one of the great powers of the ancient world, and its lasting influence on the political culture of the Middle East.” The cella also contained gold, bronze and iron implements, libation vessels and ornately decorated ritual objects.

Partially uncovered in 2008 at Tell Tayinat, capital of the Neo-Hittite Kingdom of Palastin, the structure of the building where the tablets were found preserves the classic plan of a Neo-Hittite temple. It formed part of a sacred precinct that once included monumental stelae carved in Luwian (an extinct Anatolian language once spoken in Turkey) hieroglyphic script, but which were found by the expedition smashed into tiny shard-like fragments.

“Tayinat was destroyed by the Assyrian king Tiglath-pileser III in 738 BCE, and then transformed into an Assyrian provincial capital, equipped with its own governor and imperial administration,” says Harrison. “Scholars have long speculated that the reference to Calneh in Isaiah’s oracle against Assyria alludes to Tiglath-pileser’s devastation of Kunulua – ie, Tayinat. The destruction of the Luwian monuments and conversion of the sacred precinct into an Assyrian religious complex may represent the physical manifestation of this historic event.”

The temple was later burned in an intense fire and found filled with heavily charred brick and wood which, ironically, contributed to the preservation of the finds recovered from its inner chambers. “While those responsible for this later destruction are not yet known, the remarkable discoveries preserved in the Tayinat temple clearly record a pivotal moment in its history,” says Harrison. “They promise a richly textured view of the cultural and ethnic contest that has long characterized the turbulent history of this region.”

This is a video of a Baillon’s crake taking a bath in Zevenhoven, the Netherlands, 14 June 2009.

Baillon’s crake is a rare bird. Lately, there have been Internet reports of this species nesting in Oegstgeest, the Netherlands: the two parents, three chicks. Photos have also been published on the Internet.

Polders Poelgeest became a nature reserve only recently, in 2007. Yet it is already beautiful.

As I arrive at the southern end today, I pass ‘t Poeltje, a windmill built in 1787. On its upper sails, great cormorants; on its lower sails, jackdaws. Barn swallows flying. A common tern flying.

In the water: coot, moorhen, black-headed gull, shelduck including juveniles.

Wading or standing on the mud: black-tailed godwit; lapwing; greenshank; redshank; ruff; wood sandpiper; snipe.

Where are the Baillon’s crakes, the reason why there are six birders with telescopes here now? I hear that just before I arrived, a grey heron came close to the crakes. The parents and the chicks then moved to water plants on a bank where they are difficult to see.

I hear a little grebe sound. A female shoveler duck swims past.

Then, suddenly, the male Baillon’s crake is clearly visible. It stands on a mudflat, then it flies to the left. A quarter of an hour later, the female goes to the left as well.

A spoonbill flying overhead.

The female Baillon’s crake swims to the right, with food for the chicks in her beak.

We hear a reed warbler’s song.

The grey heron starts wading to the left, causing the Baillon’s crakes to make alarm calls. But the heron looks for food mainly in the water, and finally wades off towards to the left, where it is no longer visible.

Then, suddenly, panic in the marsh. A sparrowhawk diving from the sky, then flying away fast, surrounded by furious godwits, lapwings, and other birds. The bird of prey dived closely to where the three Baillon’s crake chicks must be hiding. Did the sparrowhawk catch a Baillon’s crake chick? Did it catch something else? Or did it not catch anything? It all happened too fast for us to see.

According to this update, the sparrowhawk did not catch a Baillon’s crake chick.

From British daily The Morning Star:

US bulldozed Babylon site

Friday 10 July 2009

UNESCO have released a report which confirmed that the US-led invaders of Iraq inflicted serious damage on one of the world’s greatest archaeological sites.

Heavy machinery was driven over sacred paths, hilltops were bulldozed and trenches destroyed potential areas of interest on the site of the ancient city of Babylon.

The UN cultural agency noted: “The use of Babylon as a military base was a grave encroachment on this internationally known archaeological site.”

The report did not single out any nationalities of forces on the base, except to mention “contractors employed by them, mainly Kellogg, Brown and Root (KBR),” a US corporation that was then a Halliburton subsidiary.

The report said that soldiers and KBR contractors had “caused major damage to the city by digging, cutting, scraping and levelling.”

Steel stakes were driven into ancient walls, which included fragments with inscriptions from the time of King Nebuchadnezzar II, who ruled two-and-a-half millennia ago and is credited with building the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.

A helicopter pad, roads and car parks were built and heavy vehicles devastated ancient brick roads, the report said.

KBR spokeswoman Heather Browne said that the firm would not comment before seeing the report.

Halliburton, of course, is the corporation of George W. Bush’s Vice President during the Iraq invasion, Dick Cheney.

UNESCO, the United Nations cultural organization, has issued a report outlining the extensive damage caused by US occupation forces in Iraq to the archeological site of ancient Babylon: here.

From the New Indian Express:

Kublai Khan’s Xanadu unearthed in China

IANS
First Published : 08 Jul 2009 07:08:04 PM IST
Last Updated : 08 Jul 2009 07:30:51 PM IST

BEIJING: Xanadu, the city built by Mongol emperor Kublai Khan and mentioned by Italian traveller Marco Polo, has been unearthed by Chinese archaeologists who have sketched its layout.

“The most exciting findings are the layout of the moat in front of the Mingde Gate to the royal capital in the three-month excavation,” said Yang Xingyu, a senior archaeologist.

Xanadu, also spelled Shangdu, was built in 1256 under the command of Kublai Khan, the first emperor of Yuan or Mongol Dynasty (1206-1368). It became the summer capital of Mongol emperors of China after the Yuan Dynasty moved its capital to what is now Beijing.

Yang said that the excavation programme is expected to take three years to unearth structures in Shangdu.

Marco Polo (1254-1324) once described the prosperity of Shangdu in his book, arising the interest of many archaeologists and historians.

The regional administration of Inner Mongolia has submitted an application for World Cultural Heritage status for the site with the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco).

Xanadu later provided inspiration for, eg, a poem by Coleridge; and for the song in this video.

From ANI news agency:

Secrets of daily life among the great pyramids of Giza uncovered

Washington, June 29 : In a study lasting two decades, archaeologists have uncovered a number of secrets of daily life among the great pyramids of Giza in Egypt.

According to a report in The Columbus Dispatch, archaeologists Ana Tavares and Mark Lehner have been digging for two decades in Egypt, digging up a lost city where Giza pyramid builders lived.

The findings indicate that the Egyptians who built the giant pyramids on the Giza Plateau 4,500 years ago ate dense bread, choice cuts of meat and preserved fish.

They slept in military-style barracks and belonged to work gangs with names such as the “Drunkards of Menkaure.”

Archaeologist Mark Lehner knows these details because he spent the past two decades digging them up from their lost city.

Nearby are the pyramids and the Great Sphinx, icons most people associate with Egyptian archaeology.

Lehner spent three years surveying the Great Sphinx, mapping it by hand, block by block. He then turned his attention to the Giza Plateau, where the Sphinx and the three key Fourth Dynasty pyramids stand.

“The really neat thing about our project is that we could go out there in 1988 and over the next 20 years we tested that hypothesis, which is the best of science. And guess what? Sure enough, there it was,” he said.

“Since then, three areas of the city have emerged,” said Tavares, assistant field director for Ancient Egypt Research Associates, a donor-funded archaeology group Lehner founded to explore the lost city site.

“You have a barracks, which is tightly controlled with streets and an enclosure wall,” she said. “And there in the shape of the houses and the artifacts we find, it tells one story and that’s basically of workers, young men, presumably no women or children at this point: a rotating labor force,” she added.

According to Tavares, near the barracks, a village grew with smaller houses, twisting streets and a less regimented lifestyle, perhaps with more women and children.

“The people who lived there appeared to be providing for themselves on a family scale,” she said.

And then there is the nearby town where officials lived.

“There, you have a lot of evidence of administration, of sealings of documents that came in,” said Tavares. “There are very large houses with beautiful painted plaster on the walls and the finds there are quite different: stone vessels, more delicate finds,” she added.

“The next steps for studying the lost city will take place mostly in the lab,” she said.

From Nature journal:

Traces of paint confirmed on Parthenon sculptures

Pristine white marbles were once a riot of colour.

Alison Abbott

Researchers have confirmed that the sculptures on the triangular gables of the Parthenon temple in Athens were originally brightly painted.

Conservation scientists at the British Museum in London used a non-invasive technique to reveal invisible traces of an ancient pigment known as Egyptian blue. The team says that this is the first definitive evidence that the two-metre-high sculptures were not pristine white, as they appear today, but were precisely painted — as most sculptures from antiquity once were.

The belt of the winged messenger goddess Iris was painted blue, as shown by a luminescence technique (right). British Museum

The pigment, which was widely used until 800 AD, was identified on sculptures that formed parts of the decorated east and west ends of the Parthenon temple. Together with other parts of the temple, such as the frieze from within the building, they are sometimes collectively referred to as the Elgin marbles — removed by Lord Elgin, British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire from 1799–1803, and then transferred to the British Museum in 1816.

The scientists announced their findings just as the long-running feud over the ownership of the marbles has once again boiled over. The Acropolis Museum in Athens is due to be inaugurated on 20 June and was, in part, designed to house the marbles. Top delegates from the United Kingdom — including the Queen, Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Neil MacGregor, director of the British Museum — have declined to attend the opening.

The British Museum has also reiterated its standpoint on Greece’s request to repatriate the marbles, saying that it will not return any of them except on a short-term loan — and then only if Greece acknowledges the British Museum’s rightful ownership.

Antique paint

It has been known for more than two centuries that the Ancient Greeks and Romans painted their statues. That paint has almost completely disappeared over time, although tiny flecks can be found on most statues on close inspection. Unusually, no trace of paint has ever been found on the Parthenon sculptures, despite thorough analysis — including a full investigation by the renowned British physicist Michael Faraday in the 1830s.

There are more aspects of this issue. As can be read in this blog, in an earlier item on this:

Experts believe the Elgin Marbles may have been stripped of some of their remaining colour when they first arrived in London in the early 19th century, due to months of scraping with abrasive tools by museum officials convinced that the marbles had originally been pure white.

And:

The Parthenon Marbles (a name prefered by Greeks to a name honouring 19th century Lord Elgin whom they consider a robber) were also scraped with copper and caustic chemicals in order to become “pure white” in the 1930s, at the orders of Lord Duveen.

In fact, in ancient Greece, people, including priests and priestesses, wore colourful clothes.

Their sculptures and buildings were colourful.

Similarly so in Etruscan and Roman cultures.

However, textiles rarely survived thousands of years.

While Greek buildings and statues sometimes did, but often with their colours hardly surviving.

So, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries an image arose in Western Europe and North America of ancient Greece as a land of people in ‘pure’ white clothes, with ’spotless’ white sculpture and buildings.

In that time, also racist ideologies evolved, intertwining ‘white race supremacy’ viewpoints with this misunderstanding of history.

At its sharpest in this was nazi Germany.

As seen in the aesthetics of the movie Olympia on the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games, made by Hitler’s favourite film director Leni Riefenstahl.

The Nature article continues:

Giovanni Verri, a physicist in the museum’s department of conservation and scientific research, developed a technique to exploit the fact that Egyptian blue emits near-infrared radiation when excited by visible light. His portable detector comprises a light-emitting diode that beams red light onto the surface being examined, and a camera that can detect the infrared light emitted by the pigment particles1.

The distribution of the pigment is also a key issue in proving that the sculptures were painted, says Verri. For example, the pigment found on the winged messenger goddess Iris traces just the belt restraining her billowing tunic (see picture, above), and nowhere else on the figure.

Greek conservators have recently observed greenish flecks on remnants of the Parthenon frieze that are in Athens, but have not reported analyses of them. “We informed our Greek colleagues of what we found,” says Verri, “and they responded warmly, saying they are interested to examine these flecks themselves.”

“I always believed the frieze must have been painted,” adds Ian Jenkins, senior curator in the British Museum’s Department of Greece and Rome. “This new method leaves no room for doubt.”

Verri thinks these frieze flecks could also be Egyptian blue, and is keen to examine them with his portable detector. But he adds that as diplomatic tensions have flared up again, now might be an insensitive time to offer.

*
References
1. Verri, G. Anal. Bioanal. Chem. 394, 1011-1021 (2009).

See also here.

Ancient Egyptian origins of dyes: here.