Several important and interesting things have become known recently about the classical world, and I would like to share them with you, inserting hopefully incisive commentary and/or snark in the meanwhile.
We begin in Rome, where the famous Capitoline Wolf has been found to have been made in the medieval period: specifically, in the 13th century CE, not in the 5th century BCE. The twins Romulus and Remus, suckling underneath, were added later, probably in the 15th century CE. This statue was long thought to have been ancient–Pliny the Elder writes of it, and Cicero mentions a statue of a wolf twice (De div. 1.20 and 2.47) among the objects damaged by a lightning strike in 65 BCE–but there have been doubts about the statue’s authenticity since at least the 17th century. These questions have now been put to rest by radiocarbon and thermoluminescence dating, which establish the 13th century date. Furthermore, the casting method by which the wolf was constructed was not developed until the 12th century anyway. This news will come as quite a disappointment to those of us who were taught from an early age to view the statue as the exemplification of The Grandeur That Was Rome, but it’s still an impressive and beautiful piece of art nonetheless.
Next on our travelogues, we come to Greece, but let’s stay on the topic of non-ancient artifacts–or at least possible hoaxes. The Phaistos Disc has remained an indecipherable artifact of Minoan Greece since its discovery in the early 20th century. Its pictograms, unrelated to anything else in the world, may represent some sort of form of Greek, or they may not–nobody has been able to figure them out yet. But there’s a new theory that states that the disc might be a hoax, a fake created by one of the archaeologists who excavated the site. There are, apparently, problems with the way the clay was fired and the way the impressions were made on its surface, and of course it hasn’t been deciphered yet. My prediction: debate on this issue is not likely to cease any time soon.
Finally, also from the Greek Islands, there have been new developments in understanding the Antikythera mechanism, an ancient analog calculation device that is (by some definitions) the world’s oldest computer. This device was built sometime between 140 and 100 BCE and was recovered a hundred years ago in a shipwreck off the island of Antikythera, but until recently nobody really had much of an idea what it was for or how it worked. The mechanism possesses a complex series of gears and wheels which calculated dates of solar eclipses and, according to new evidence, the calendar according to the four-year Olympiad cycle. X-ray tomography and other advanced imaging techniques have revealed lengthy inscriptions in Greek on the device, but the calendar in use was the Egyptian one, and it shows evidence of having been altered after its construction. Thus, this device, according to Paul Fenwick’s masterful talk “An Illustrated History of Failure” given at OSCON 2008, is the world’s earliest examples of software collaboration, code modification, and feature creep.
This concludes our whirlwind tour through the recent awesomeness of ancient history and archaeology. Stay tuned for future instalments!
