Jewels from an Ethiopian grave reveal 2,000-year-old link to Rome | Hacker News Reader

Jewels from an Ethiopian grave reveal 2,000-year-old link to Rome

theguardian.com

57 pointsdiodorus14 comments

Archaeological news is always frustrating due to the lack of pictures. I would love to look through dozens of high res photos of this find, but I doubt I'll ever get the chance.

Why "ever"? It seems to me like more & more artifacts like this are getting photographed -- and/or even scanned in 3D! -- and posted online. But maybe you're alluding to something in the culture of archaeology I don't know about...? Just curious.

GirlWithTrowel alludes to working under a press embargo. One woman's blog is not proof of much, however, press embargos are BAU for NASA missions, PIs get a year to publish before the results are public, however media coverage disappears a couple hours after mission events. So at least in mass "push" media, the data is never distributed beyond occasional PR team low res footage.

It would not be surprising if press/publicity stuff works the same for archeology missions as NASA missions, after all they're all academia employed PHDs trying to get published in journals, so convergent evolution and all that.

All the data is eventually released "somewhere" usually on a public website, but it takes awhile.

The problem is that priority must be conservation, so items are likely stored away very quickly and examined later with all due care. Pics will eventually emerge through studies and papers. But yeah, I agree with the sentiment. Maybe archeologists should film their proceedings, it would make things easier later on.

>The finds will go to a new German-funded museum, opening in October. Schofield hopes to organise a loan to the British Museum

Why isn't the find staying with the Ethiopian people?

> German-funded museum

Quite possible the museum is actually in Ethiopia

tldr; Luxury goods were widely traded, even in the ancient era. We're supposed to be astounded that Roman goods were found in ancient Ethiopian graves, when said ancient Ethiopian kingdom lay athwart one of the main ancient trade routes linking the Mediterranean and India/Southeast Asia.

Pliny the Elder complained about how much specie this trade was leeching out of the Roman economy, in terms that echo criticisms of the BEIC before the establishment of the opium trade [1].

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-Roman_trade_relations#Esta...

> Luxury goods were widely traded, even in the ancient era.

Especially in the ancient era. As the security of the Roman Empire started to decline across the Mediterranean, long-distance trade routes were disrupted and it often took several centuries before they could be "rediscovered" by Europeans.

> We're supposed to be astounded that Roman goods were found in ancient Ethiopian graves, when said ancient Ethiopian kingdom lay athwart one of the main ancient trade routes linking the Mediterranean and India/Southeast Asia

This is an interesting comment, but it reads to me like you're dismissing new work, and that is something we need to see less of on HN.

The article doesn't say you're "supposed to be astounded". It describes "evidence that the Romans were trading [in Ethiopia] hundreds of years earlier than previously thought". Your claim seems to be that the Romans traded with India, Ethiopia was near that route, and therefore these goods could have just spilled over into Ethiopian graves. That's fascinating. And it would be fine (more than fine!) to pose it as a question. But it doesn't justify the crushing-objection-on-internet-forum genre.

It's possible, of course, that (once again) a crushing internet objection has demonstrated the triviality of some discovery with a wave of the hand and a Wikipedia link. But the odds are much greater that the researchers are aware of such objections and (were they here) could tell us why the evidence they found is stronger than random spillage can explain—or any number of other details or arguments that didn't make it into this story. Given those odds, the burden is on you to be less dismissive, and certainly less snarky, even if you do know their field better than they do.

Aside from the above, I enjoyed this comment and learned from it. I'm emphasizing the procedural issue because HN, like a lot of places on the internet, has a big problem with this.

Valid objection. I am entirely sure that the archaeologists were fully aware of the history of the area in which they are doing their excavations, and that they meant that this is a new concrete piece of evidence filling in some of the dotted lines. The issue I have with the article is that it plays into the so-overly-simplified-as-to-be-incorrect view of world history that is mostly taught to the general populace.

I'm sure that this quote was cherry-picked, but it reads like this is a discovery of some previously unknown revelation:

> “Ethiopia is a mysterious place steeped in legend, but nobody knows very much about it,” said Schofield. “We know from the later Aksumite period – the fourth and fifth centuries, when they adopted Christianity – that they were trading very intensely with Rome. But our finds are from much earlier. So it shows that extraordinarily precious things were travelling from the Roman Empire through this region centuries before.”

Both the romans and greeks have a lot of documentation from multiple sources from the "empire era onward" about them being a major trading center, but there is a lack of documentation before the empire era. Note that doesn't prove no trade was happening, just no one wrote it down. Their economic linkage with rome pretty much began with the empire and grew more or less continuously till the empire fell apart.

From memory there was nothing documented about the Aksumite kingdom in greco-roman writing until 0100 AD and it was a greek who's name I forget who had some flowery prose about it being a major ivory trading hub at that time. Also the Aksumites didn't have their stuff together as a kingdom until 0100 or so. Although I also remember some roman writing about it being an iron hub much later. It was a major trading partner of rome... if the land route wasn't nuts they'd probably have ended up a province. They grew close, really close.

I suspect what happened is the journalist filter input something like "artefacts dating from 150 BCE" and output "artefacts dating from the first and second centuries." To take out the technical stuff, make it more mass market, simpler, more least common denominator. However most people assume a date like 2015 or "2nd century" means AD/CE and this is extremely important in context.. Trade with the romans in 200AD when the kingdom was flourishing would be the most boring story ever, but proven trade going back to 200BC before there was an organized Aksumite nation is a pretty cool story.

Being a really likely sounding narrative doesn't prove its true; could be some kind of proto-Aksumite site in 90 AD before they got their stuff together as a kingdom. That might make an interesting story of its own. I always figured the Aksumites got their stuff together and then started trading with the Romans some time later, once their economy stabilized and they had the basics down and some surplus to trade. The actual story might be the romans helped them get their stuff together by injecting trade goods so the cause and effect are flipped. That is a pretty cool story, but again, sounding likely or cool has little to do with truth. Still, if true, it would be a heck of a story.

Someday when it all settles down and gets documented, it probably will be a cool story. We're just not going to get the cool story from mass market journalism.

Rome tried to invade Arabia Felix (known as Yet-another-drone-target nowadays), which is right across from Ethiopia if I remember right. So they certainly knew about the area, and that it was posh enough to be worth pillaging.

Oh thank you, thank you, thank you! [Bookmarks comment]

Like all sciences, it's one thing to "know" something, it's another to prove it. This is simply more evidence.

Further, "They offer evidence that the Romans were trading there hundreds of years earlier than previously thought."

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