The Volcano That Destroyed The Minoan Civilization Is Stirring To Life Again

Cruise ships muster in the bay of the island of Santorini. The volcanic peak can be seen at the top-right of the image. 

 'Atlantis'-Killer Volcano Under Island Of Santorini Wakes Again -- News.com.au

IT destroyed the Minoan civilisation and sent shockwaves through history as the legend of Atlantis. Now, the volcano of Santorini is stirring again. Almost four thousand years ago, the island of Santorini was probably much as it is now - a scenic retreat for the Minoan's wealthy and powerful. And history may be set to repeat itself: Magma has been detected once again pouring up to 20 million cubic metres of molten rock into chambers deep beneath the idyllic island.

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My Comment: We have been lucky in the modern age to not experience a major earthquake in this part of the world .... but if this report is true .... it appears that the clock is ticking.

Tsunamis Buried Greece's Ancient Olympics Site

The ruined Temple of Zeus at Olympia. Photo: Karta24/Wikimedia Commons

Tsunamis Buried Ancient Olympics Site -- Discovery News

A series of devastating tsunamis -- not an earthquake -- might have swept away the birthplace of the Olympic Games in ancient Greece nearly 1500 years ago, according to new findings.

Scholars have long assumed that Olympia, located at the confluence of the Kladeos and Alpheios rivers in the western Peloponnese, was destroyed by an earthquake in 551 AD and later covered by flood deposits of the Kladeos river.

Indeed the site where the first Olympic Games took place in 776 BC, was rediscovered only some 250 years ago, buried under 26 feet of sand and debris.

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Drinking In Ancient Greece

Photo: This terra cotta cup was a "designer knock off" with a pattern meant to emulate silver work. This type of cup appeared as people sought escape from harsh economic and social realities, according to Kathleen Lynch, an archeologist with the University of Cincinnati. Courtesy of the excavations of the Athenian Agora

In Vino Veritas: Wine Cups Tell History of Athenian Life -- Live Science

Over centuries, the ancient Athenian cocktail parties went full circle, from a practice reserved for the elite to one open to everyone and then, by the fourth century B.C., back to a luxurious display of consumption most could not afford.

The wine cups used during these gatherings, called symposia, reflect this story, according to Kathleen Lynch, a University of Cincinnati professor of classics.

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My Comment: Drink and merry .... what more can I say.

Did the Greeks Spot Halley's Comet First?

From Discovery News:

Piecing together historic record and correlating it with the location of celestial objects nearly 2,500 years ago is an an epic task, but it can prove rather useful for interpreting ancient cosmic discoveries.

After some fascinating astronomical detective work, researchers have (possibly) found the first documented proof of a sighting of Halley's Comet two centuries earlier than when Chinese astronomers first described the famous 'dirty snowball' around 240 BC.

So, who beat the Chinese? The Greeks.

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Ancient Greeks Spotted Halley's Comet

The comet was considered a bad omen in 1066 (Image: Mary Evans/Alamy)

From New Scientist:

A CELESTIAL event in the 5th century BC could be the earliest documented sighting of Halley's comet - and it marked a turning point in the history of astronomy.

According to ancient authors, from Aristotle onwards, a meteorite the size of a "wagonload" crashed into northern Greece sometime between 466 and 468 BC. The impact shocked the local population and the rock became a tourist attraction for 500 years.

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Discovery Of Ancient Cave Paintings In Petra Stuns Art Scholars

Detail of a winged child playing the flute, before and after cleaning. Photograph: Courtesy of the Courtauld Institute

From The Guardian:

Exquisite artworks hidden under 2,000 years of soot and grime in a Jordanian cave have been restored by experts from the Courtauld Institute in London.

Spectacular 2,000-year-old Hellenistic-style wall paintings have been revealed at the world heritage site of Petra through the expertise of British conservation specialists. The paintings, in a cave complex, had been obscured by centuries of black soot, smoke and greasy substances, as well as graffiti.

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The Father Of Civilisation: Alexander The Great

Alexander the Great: The Greek leader made Alexandria a place of knowledge, discovery and sexual intrigues

From The Daily Mail:

There is not, and has never been, another city to match it. It was a glittering metropolis, home to the most sexually charismatic queen of all time, founded by a man whose megalomaniac ambitions knew no bounds.

It was a buzzing hub that boasted one of the seven wonders of the world, where intellectual geniuses from both East and West met to tussle and debate in a library containing all the knowledge on the planet.

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Mound Of Ash Reveals Shrine To Zeus

The Greek god Zeus was honored by the ancients at an open-air sanctuary atop Mount Lykaion, new research shows. iStockPhoto

From Discovery News:

An altar dedicated to the king of the gods was used for ritual ceremonies by the ancient Greeks.

Excavations at the Sanctuary of Zeus atop Greece's Mount Lykaion have revealed that ritual activities occurred there for roughly 1,500 years, from the height of classic Greek civilization around 3,400 years ago until just before Roman conquest in 146.

"We may have the first documented mountaintop shrine from the ancient Greek world," says project director David Romano of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

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Laminated Linen Protected Alexander The Great

Image: This mosaic of Alexander the Great shows the king wearing linothorax -- an armor made from laminated linen. Martin Beckmann

From Discovery News:

Alexander's men wore linothorax, a highly effective type of body armor created by laminating together layers of linen, research finds.

A Kevlar-like armor might have helped Alexander the Great (356–323 B.C.) conquer nearly the entirety of the known world in little more than two decades, according to new reconstructive archaeology research.

Presented at the annual meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America in Anaheim, Calif., the study suggests that Alexander and his soldiers protected themselves with linothorax, a type of body armor made by laminating together layers of linen.

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Evidence Alexander The Great Wasn't First At Alexandria

Detail from the Alexander mosaic. From the House of the Faun, Pompeii, c. 80 B.C. Credit: National Archaeologic Museum, Naples, Italy

From Live Science:

Alexander the Great has long been credited with being the first to settle the area along Egypt's coast that became the great port city of Alexandria. But in recent years, evidence has been mounting that other groups of people were there first.

The latest clues that settlements existed in the area for several hundred years before Alexander the Great come from microscopic bits of pollen and charcoal in ancient sediment layers.

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World's Oldest Submerged Town Dates Back 5,000 Years

Underwater archaeologists at Pavlopetri. (Credit: Image courtesy of University of Nottingham)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Oct. 16, 2009) — Archaeologists surveying the world’s oldest submerged town have found ceramics dating back to the Final Neolithic. Their discovery suggests that Pavlopetri, off the southern Laconia coast of Greece, was occupied some 5,000 years ago — at least 1,200 years earlier than originally thought.

These remarkable findings have been made public by the Greek government after the start of a five year collaborative project involving the Ephorate of Underwater Antiquities of the Hellenic Ministry of Culture and The University of Nottingham.

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Suspected Trojan war-era couple found

The finding is 'electrifying', say experts (Source: Reuters / Ho New )

From ABC News (Australia):

Excavations in the ancient city of Troy in Turkey have found the remains of a man and a woman believed to have died in 1200 BC, at the time of the legendary Trojan war, says a German archaeologist.

Dr Ernst Pernicka, a University of Tubingen professor of archaeometry, who is leading excavations on the site in northwestern Turkey, says the bodies were found near a defence line within the city built in the late Bronze Age.

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Elgin Marble Argument In A New Light

The bronzed original sculptures stand in contrast to the white reproductions of the part of the frieze now displayed in the British Museum. Thanassis Stavrakis/Associated Press

From The New York Times:

ATHENS — Not long before the new Acropolis Museum opened last weekend, the writer Christopher Hitchens hailed in this newspaper what he called the death of an argument.

Britain used to say that Athens had no adequate place to put the Elgin Marbles, the more than half of the Parthenon frieze, metopes and pediments that Lord Elgin spirited off when he was ambassador to the Ottoman Empire two centuries ago. Since 1816 they have been prizes of the British Museum. Meanwhile, Greeks had to make do with the leftovers, housed in a ramshackle museum built in 1874.

So the new museum that Bernard Tschumi, the Swiss-born architect, has devised near the base of the Acropolis is a $200 million, 226,000-square-foot, state-of-the-art rebuttal to Britain’s argument.

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New Test Reveals Parthenon's Hidden Colour

The Parthenon would once have been much more gaudy (Image: Roy Rainford/Robert Harding/Rex Features)

From New Scientist:

Images of the Parthenon as a stark, white structure set against an azure sky will have to change. Researchers have found the first evidence of coloured paints covering its elaborate sculptures.

The temple, which tops the Acropolis in Athens, Greece, dates from the 5th century BC. Its carved statues and friezes show scenes from Greek mythology and are some of the most impressive sculptures to survive from ancient Greece.

Pigments are known to have adorned other Greek statues and temples, but despite 200 years of searching, archaeologists had found no trace of them on the Parthenon's sculptures.

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