Apollo and his Muses in Rome

Some fantastic mosaics found under later Trajanic baths (dated to AD 109) have just been announced in Rome. The excavations have been going for several years, and lots of photos are worth posting as not only are these spectacular but they are also unusual.

We're used to thinking of trompe l'oeuil architecture painted on walls, as at Pompeii - but frescoes mostly were for those who could not afford marble (a similar analogy can be drawn to the Tomb of John Hawkwood which was painted by Uccello in the Florence Duomo as that was cheaper than a stone tomb). Here the architectural framework was created in mosaic on the walls.

Extensive restoration work was undertaken after excavations. The mosaics seem to depict Apollo and the Muses.

The section with these mosaics post-dates the Domus Aurea whose construction was abandonned with the death of Nero in AD 64.

And this is Apollo, the god himself:

This is the head of a centaur, and the full figure can be seen below in the post:

The 1998 excavations found a figure of a philosopher. In all the mosaics are over six feet high, and up to 33 feet long.

A ground plan super-imposed on an aerial photo of Rome showing the structure where the mosaics were found circled in red:

In the same complex this view of Rome was found in 1997. It's important as although we have the Severan plan of Rome from the Templum Pacis, this is a very unusual perspectival view showing the elevations of buildings:

I also love this mosaic of grapes being stomped (more views here):

Photos courtesy of the Sovraintendenza ai Beni Culturali di Roma

Update - this video shows the site nicely

Bulla Regia ...

The atrium domus is what we associate with Roman housing, thanks to the excavations at Pompeii. It developed out of the need for patrons to have somewhere for their clients to wait for them, whilst being suitably impressed by the great patron's grand ancestors. Atrium houses became architecturally redundant in Rome itself once there was an emperor, but continued to be popular in the provinces.
North African architecture to this day is designed to keep out the heat, and this is not a new concept. The Hadrianic houses at Bulla Regia in Tunisia had at atrium carved down into the basement, and sophisticated water features designed to keep the inhabitants of Massinissa's old capital cool in the heat.

http://www.wmf.org/project/bulla-regia

The villas survive with lavish decoration. My slides are in storage, but the WMF has some photos.

Dorothy King's Day ...

I grew up watching the Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark movies. Then later came Lara Croft the Tomb Raider - Lloyd Levin is an amazing film-maker and storyteller, but I'm sure he wouldn't pretend they have anything to do with reality* ... and the 'reality' of archaeologists' days is what The Day of Archaeology is about.

We know that digging up old tombs has been going on forever - the Abbott Papyrus in the British Museum deals with tomb looters, and several Roman legal texts deal with the looting of tombs and sanctuaries. In the Medieval period Western Europeans thought the ground mummies were a magic cure-all, so there first developed a thriving trade in real mummies being bug up and shipped, and then mummy faking in Egypt (the Muslims were slightly repulsed by this European penchant for cannibalism, but if Francois I of France wanted to wear a purse with ground mummy around his neck for emergencies, then they were happy to take his cash)+. The ancient Egyptians were looking for loot to sell off for cash, the Romans were more interested in collecting. Collecting and archaeology went hand in hand for much of the modern period, with excavations undertaken in Rome during the Renaissance, then around the bay of Naples in the 18th century, as much to find relics of the past as to understand it. Nowadays archaeologist hunting for relics and tomb raiding in the manner of Indie and Lara is frowned upon.

I first 'dug' in the summer of 1981. My brother had just been born and I was sent to cousins in the country. Aged 8, I got them to excavate their garden and our 'finds' are now in the storeroom of the local museum. (At French schools, we had learnt about the Gauls and Romans, so this seemed normal). My first 'real' dig was at Sparta, where the team worked on the theatre. I'm still proudest of my personal find there: the remains of the Augustan theatre built into the foundations of the later stage buildings (I was meant to be drawing an elevation, tied away the ground to even it out at the bottom, and hey presto out popped some finely carved marble fragments). These days I have links with a few excavations, but tend not to dig day to day.

I had originally planned to study History of Art, but seriously fluffed my Courtauld interview due to pneumonia, so I thought I'd study Classics instead since that was the Renaissance education and would give me insight into their mind-set. I tried a few other jobs, but I did post-grad partly because I was raising my baby brother, and I'd managed to schedule my undergrad courses around his school runs, and a PhD seemed easier to work around that than a job at an investment bank. I'll never make as much money at archaeology as I would have at Fleming's but I love what I do, and nobody that chooses to do archaeology can be all that interested in money. I did a post-doc at the ASCSA generously funded by the Onassis Foundation, then went on from there.

The two themes of many of the posts that make up The Day of Archaeology seem to be about emails / paperwork and children. I managed to combine the two this morning thanks to my trusty Blackberry, without which I couldn't have answered hundreds of emails from colleagues (academics love to cc each other) about a few exhibitions that might or might not happen in the future, working with three museums on two continents. I also love Twitter (www.twitter.com/DorothyKing) and last night, for example, ended up discussing women gladiators with www.twitter.com/sarahebond and www.twitter.com/rogueclassicist. Other recent Twitter discussions have included annoyance at portraits of random women being labelled Cleopatra and assorted other topics.

The "children" part is that ... this photo of me I took at lunchtime might suggest khakis and archaeology, but ... the dirt is the result of dogs and children, and a nanny failing to turn up ... although Ellie the Jack Russell is proving rather fond of "her" trowel ...

I've been blogging for years, as it's a handy way of sharing ideas and research, and the Blackberry is also handy for that: http://phdiva.blogspot.com ... I keep track of info through links, so that version of this post on my blog will have lots of links to others' work. Maybe I should have followed the more traditional career path, but these days I am a Fellow of or on the Board of assorted projects / institutions.

The main project keeping me busy these days is trying to set up a database of looted archaeological material to help track antiquities that went missing in wars or the looting of sites or museums. At the moment photos of some objects are available various places, but there is no central place on the web where someone can look up an item they see and suspect is dodgy to see if anyone has reported it missing. Previous attempts to create such a database have failed, so this may all turn out to be a house of cards but I feel I have to give it a go. I'm talking to museums, universities, governments, law enforcement agencies, and we'll be looking for volunteers to help with it - so if you want to get involved, just drop me a line.

Jesper Jensen and Peter Schulz have organised a conference in Copenhagen next May, and kindly invited me to speak, so I'm also working up my paper for it: Kings, Tombs and Ruler Cult Before Alexander: new evidence from Vergina and Caria. I'm re-examining the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus based on the monuments that copied it, and on the newly found sarcophagus in the Tomb of Hecatomnus his father at Mylasa. I also think I've identified Mausolus' mother as a woman named ABA, based on an inscription.

So anyway, that's my day of archaeology on a typical summer holiday day ... dogs, children, answering emails, chatting with colleagues, trying to do some research, trying to get people to collaborate on projects - no tomb raiding or fighting Nazis.




* = I was thrilled to read that not only does Michigan State grad student Kathryn M. Meyers blog at Bones Don’t Lie, but she also works on video games to make the archaeologists more "real" ... (if she's interested in research, I've done high kicks in four inch wedges, so that bit is very possible)

+ = I wrote more about the mummy trade in my 2006 book, The Elgin Marbles
 

Gratuitous Puppy photo

From earlier. Whilst I was waiting for my coffee 'to go' little Ellie had a play with her friend Monty.

Pit Stop

... was via TomTom for some of the best coffee in London ...

We're off ...

A nanny turned up, so I changed into a skirt (£ 5 for Primark's finest) then Ellie and I abandoned five children, jumped into a cab, and headed off for me to pretend to do some work related to archaeology ...

Right now ...

Yup, I'm in khakis, and yes they're covered in dirt ... But as you can see from the context, this has more to do with dogs and children than archaeology ...

The Day of Archaeology

Some 400 archaeologists around the world are blogging about their day (I'll add a post later), so if you're curious about what real archaeologists get up to (rather than fictional ones like Indiana Jones or Lara Croft) then take a look here:

www.dayofarchaeology.com

And my day so far has involved two children (the third one is still sleeping), two dogs - though one of them has been digging holes in the garden ...

The Tombstone of Regina (South Shields)

Interesting post about the tomb stone of Regina, found in the far north of the Roman Empire. She was a freedwoman who married her former master, a man from Palmyra in Syria. We tend to think of travel as a modern concept, but there was a great deal of mobility under the Romans - it tended to be of soldiers moved around on Imperial orders, but also included private citizens usually working as merchants.

http://drjonathaneaton.blogspot.com/2011/07/tombstone-of-regina-south-shields.html

Ancient Painted Portraits 101

Very few ancient painted portraits survive. Bronze statues were melted down for their metal, so most of those we have are marble. And paintings tended to be on fragile materials that have been eaten away by the centuries. I know people were quite surprised by the 'modern' quality of the drawings in the Artemidorus Papyrus, so I thought it might be worth highlighting some information about ancient 2-D portraits. Aba of Caria was probably represented on the wall of the tomb of Hecatomnus.

Many portraits on wooden panels survive from Egypt, but these tend to be the mummy portraits of private individuals. This tondo is more interesting as the head-gear worn by the family show that it represented royals, and the style of dress that they were Roman, so it depicts the Imperial family.

Romans were clean-shaved until Hadrian, a philhellene, revived the beard and his subjects copied him. (Incised rather than painted eyes in sculptures also date to the reign of Hadrian).

The face could be Clodius Albinus or Septimius Severus - the two can look very similar - but the bifurcate beard shows that it is the later. Sometimes the two strands of the beard were even longer and more pronounced, a portrait type known as the Septimius-Serapis type because of its similarity to depictions of the god Serapis.

The forked beard is visible on this coin of Septimius ... but gold, like marble, does not show colouring.

Septimius Severus was an 'African' emperor in the sense that he was descended from Romans that had settled at Lepcis Magna in Libya, but the extend to which he had native or Berber blood is a matter of conjecture. The tondo shows him as having browner skin than his wife, but brown men and white women were a convention of ancient art seen in Egyptian and Minoan paintings.

Some portraits show Septimius Severus with a gaunter face or longer beard, but this head from Herculaneum in the Louvre of the Septimius-Serapis portrait type is the closest I could find to the tondo portrait.

If the man is Septimius Severus, then the woman must be his beloved second wife Julia Domna (as we don't know much about the first one, Paccia Marciana - he erected posthumous statues to her as emperor, whose bases survive, but chose to ignore her in his Memoirs). Julia seems to have married him in AD 187, giving birth to sons in 188 and 189. Septimius reigned from AD 193 to 211, and the tondo must have been produced during this time, probably in the earlier years when the children were young.

The hairstyle of this Julia Domna in the Louvre is similar, but the marble cannot show is her colouring and make-up in the same way as the tondo can. The sculptor has also chosen not to depict her magnificent pearls.

The gold coin above shows Julia Domna on one side, and her two sons on the other. The elder one in the coin profile wears a diadem, but not the sort of elaborate wreath-crown shown in the painting. A few funerary wreaths survive, but these are mostly made out of gold foil and cannot show us how magnificent the long melted-down Roman crowns once were.

What I find particularly fascinating is the face of the small boy on the left - it has been erased, suggesting he suffered from Damnatio Memoriae after his death and proscription by his brother - therefore it represented Geta. That makes the boy whose portrait survives Caracalla.

And if you want to see some non-marbles images of Caracalla, then Google the Aboukir Medallions for an image of the adult brute that he became (article, see also images of Alexander the Great and Olympias in Berlin)

Hecatomnus on the Mausoleum?

One of my pet hates is when people identify random idealised heads as specific monarchs ... and the problem with many Greek portraits is that they are idealised images of rulers, and so by definition almost impossible to identify.

The figure on the left is a colossal statue from the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus (now in the British Museum). Because it comes from this specific structure, and because of it's scale, we know it's a god or a Hecatomnid ruler. It is an early portrait, but not idealised, so it can be said with a great deal of certainty that it is a man not a divine being ... Therefore most scholars identify it as having represented the eponymous Mausolus of the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus built to him by his sister-wife Artemisia II of Caria (yes, I know a lot of books say he built it, but the ancient sources are very specific when they assign it to her).

Because the Mausoleum became one of the wonders of the ancient world, and spawned a term to describe a large tomb type, we have many sources that mention it. Although most of them are brief, and many of them are quite late, the term 'heroon' is often used - suggesting that it was some sort of a cult structure to the heroised semi-divine deceased. It was also a shrine that in its architectural decoration commemorated the might of the Carian Satraps and their ancestors.

Gods were represented on the tomb too, but they tended to be idealised rather than realistic portraits - for example this head of Apollo (also in the BM). Apollo is the only God identified with any degree of certainty, and the debate continues about who was represented in the chariot that topped the structure: Helios, Mausolus, or, my theory, Mausolus as or becoming Helios.

If we assume for now that the colossal figure is Mausolus, and its female pair was his sister-wife Artemisia - the women were still pretty idealised in Hecatomnid Caria, so are harder to identify with certainty - then I thought it might be worth looking at some of the other portraits from the Mausoleum and on the sarcophagus found in Hecatomnus' tomb at Mylasa to see if we can identify any others.

We know that there were many portraits of the Hecatomnids around the Med, because of surviving literary sosurces and inscriptions on surviving bases, but the only one we can identify with certainty is the one below. This relief, probably commemorating a donation was found at Tegea and honours Idrieus and Ada of Caria, shown flanking the supreme deity Zeus Carius, whose sanctuary Hecatomnus controlled at Mylasa.

Ada is shown in the 'Orans' pose previously used for her sister Artemisia. Figures in this style appear on the Mourning Women Sarcophagus, which imitated the Mausoleum, and it continued to be used as a 'type' for the depiction of Roman empresses. Idrieus is small, but identifiable, and this small scale relief probably copies the figures from a large scale statue group of the couple.

There are two bearded heads from the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus in the British Museum which are clearly portrait heads of Hecatomnids.

I slightly feel as if I'm blogging 'how to read Greek sculpture 101' and apologies if this is obvious, but you can tell from its shape that this head was created to be inserted into a statue. It's close to the Mausolus portrait type, with a similar beard, but not identical.

I may be pointing out the obvious, but Hecatomnus is represented reclining on his sarcophagus, with two bearded sons to the left of him, who are presumably Mausolus and Idrieus (see below). And this looks most like Hecatomnus to me (although I reserve the right to keep changing my mind right up until publication ...).

This second head is more idealised, and to me suggests that it might represent an ancestor rather than a living relative. The obvious person for me to suggest would be Hecatomnus - or more likely his father Hyssaldomus. As we know from Ptolemaic portraits it can be hard to tell family members apart, but this seems to be a Hecatomnid ancestor of Mausolus' though which one ...

The Mausoleum of Halicarnassus depicting amongst its lavish sculptural decoration a royal hunt and a battle - both motifs immitated by the Alexander Sarcophagus found at Sidon, but which were also depicted on the Hecatomnus Sarcophagus that pre-dated it. So the figure hunting on the Hacatomnus Sarcophagus must be Hecatomnus himself, and therefore we can safely identify these two heads below as having been portraits of him.

Many comparisons can be drawn between the Alexander Sarcophagus, the Hecatomnus Sarcophagus and the fragments of the figures from the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus. I'll be making them in a conference paper, but I thought these points might be worth sharing. We have portraits of all the major Hecatomnids - we just need to work out who's who ...