2,300-year-old mosaic made of shells and coral found under Rome
cnn.com
cnn.com
Do other people need to use archive.org to bypass something? Is it region-locked or otherwise has some other kind of barrier?
Yeah, no thanks, I trust my adblocker to do that for me.
A week to clean up from discovery? I thought these things took much longer.
The discovery on the Palatine is impressive, but far from unique.
It was an eyebrow-raising reading how the water economics of ancient Rome worked [0]. Probably a microcosm of the dysfunction and absurdity of that city as a whole.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_aqueduct#Distribution
> The construction of Rome's third aqueduct, the Aqua Marcia, was at first legally blocked on religious grounds, under advice from the decemviri (an advisory "board of ten"). The new aqueduct was meant to supply water to the highest elevations of the city, including the Capitoline Hill, but the decemviri had consulted Rome's main written oracle, the Sibylline Books, and found there a warning against supplying water to the Capitoline. This brought the project to a standstill.
One can’t help but draw parallels with modern day out of control environmental review process…
The laws of economics and war and necessity really don't care the slightest about beauty.
The pyramids of Giza were covered with fine, smooth, white limestone that gleamed in the sunlight -- as beautiful as you could imagine. That didn't prevent people from stealing most of it later for their own purposes.
Of course not _all_ beautiful artifacts persist - no one takes that position. But it is reasonable to say that most artifacts which receive attention today are just the artifacts which were formed with special care and whose beauty was preserved, probably by accident, for us.
The Egyptian blue glass was colored during manufacturing by including in the melted glass certain minerals that contained oxides of copper or, more rarely, oxides of cobalt.
Modern blue glass is usually made with cobalt oxide, a process rediscovered during the Middle Ages.