Greek court gives life sentences to 2 convicted of dealing in illegally excavated antiquities

A Greek court has imposed life sentences on two men convicted of dealing in ancient treasure worth an estimated €12 million ($15.85 million), which had been illegally excavated from a cemetery in northern Greece.

 The court in the northern city of Thessaloniki jailed two more men for 20 and 16 years, respectively, after finding them guilty of digging up and transporting the antiquities.

 The severity of Friday’s sentences was due to the high market value of the loot — more than 70 artifacts from the 6th century B.C.

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The Sweet Girl: Annabel Lyon’s last volume on Ancient Greece

Mercifully, Annabel Lyon has left her iPhone in her hotel room, which renders her unable to display a treasured photograph of the Iron Age vaginal dilator she snapped in a museum while visiting Athens to research her latest novel, a sequel to 2009’s award-winning, bestselling The Golden Mean.

“It’s horrifying!” she exults, spreading her arms to show the size of the fearful artifact, technically known as a speculum. “And it’s got this big screw on it, and it’s just ohh….” The novelist shudders.


“And I loved it, of course.”

Lyon loved it so much that she made the instrument a crucial prop in her new novel, The Sweet Girl, which returns to the ancient Greek world of philosophers and kings that she brought to life so successfully in The Golden Mean. But as the lovable speculum suggests, this is “a very different book” from her speculative biography of Aristotle, Lyon says. Chronicling the adventures of the philosopher’s precocious daughter after his death, The Sweet Girl is yin to the former book’s yang.

Whereas The Golden Mean focused on men and public life – “politics, warfare, science and reason and all of that,” according to the author – The Sweet Girl is “much more female, much more interior.”

Click here to read this article from The Globe and Mail

See also The Sweet Girl by Annabel Lyon: A brilliant philosopher’s daughter from the Toronto Star

Were the Ancient Greek Athletes Tougher Than Today's Olympians?

The Games of the XXX Olympiad are under way in London, with China and the United States taking the early lead in the medal count. Last week, Slate visualized Olympic competitions between 19th-, 20th-, and 21st-century athletes. How would the ancient Greeks, who invented the Olympic Games, compete against today’s athletes?

Probably not well. Ancient athletes could have held their own in the first modern Olympic Games of 1896. Phayllos of Croton, for example, hurled the discus 95 feet in the Pythian games around 500 B.C. Although that distance is approximate—Greeks measured distance in actual human feet—it would have put him in the running for a medal at the 1896 Olympic competition. Phayllos probably would have bested American Robert Garrett’s 95.6-foot throw if he had used modern tools and techniques. Ancient hurlers likely used a heavier discus and took only a three-quarter turn before releasing it, rather than the two-and-a-quarter turns that modern athletes use. Variations aside, Phayllos wouldn’t have stood a chance against 21st-century athletes: The current world record is more than 243 feet.

Historians have puzzled over records from ancient long-jump competitions. Athletes posted distances of well over 50 feet—nearly double the current world long-jump record. Many classicists assume that the event was actually a triple jump, although that still puts the ancients surprisingly close to the modern record. The ancient competition was quite different from the modern version, however. The Greeks probably started from a standstill and swung handheld weights, known as halteres, to provide momentum on takeoff and allow them to extend their feet farther forward on landing.

Click here to read the rest of this article from Slate Magazine

Descendants of Alexander the Great’s army fought in ancient China, historian finds

A recent article is examining the possibility that a contingent of soldiers from the Mediterranean fought at the Battle of Talas River in 36 BC, but instead of being Roman forces, new research suggests they may have been descendants of the armies of Alexander the Great.

 Christopher A. Matthew’s proposes this idea in his article, “Greek Hoplite in an Ancient Chinese Siege”, which appears in the latest issue of Journal of Asian History. It re-examines a theory put forward more than 70 years ago by Homer H. Dubs, in which the historian believed that Roman legionaries were serving as mercenaries in a city besieged by Han Chinese nearly 2,000 miles to the east of Roman territory. When the city fell, these men were captured and take east and eventually settled in a town on the fringes to the Han Empire.

Click here to read this article from History of the Ancient World

2,000-year-old road unearthed in Greece; children’s games etched on paving stones

Archaeologists in Greece’s second-largest city have uncovered a 70-metre section of an ancient road built by the Romans that was the city’s main travel artery nearly 2,000 years ago.

The marble-paved road was unearthed during excavations for Thessaloniki’s new subway system, which is due to be completed in four years. The road in the northern port city will be raised to be put on permanent display when the metro opens in 2016.

The excavation site was shown to the public on Monday, when details of the permanent display project were also announced. Several of the large marble paving stones were etched with children’s board games, while others were marked by horse-drawn cart wheels.

Also discovered at the site were remains of tools and lamps, as well as the bases of marble columns.

Click here to read this article from the Toronto Star

Two Roman shipwrecks found in deep waters around Greece

Two Roman-era shipwrecks have been found in deep water off a western Greek island, challenging the conventional theory that ancient shipmasters stuck to coastal routes rather than risking the open sea, an official said Tuesday.

 Greece's culture ministry said the two third-century wrecks were discovered earlier this month during a survey of an area where a Greek-Italian gas pipeline is to be sunk. They lay between 1.2 and 1.4 kilometers (0.7-0.9 miles) deep in the sea between Corfu and Italy. That would place them among the deepest known ancient wrecks in the Mediterranean, apart from remains found in 1999 of an older vessel some 3 kilometers (1.8 miles) deep off Cyprus.

 Angeliki Simossi, head of Greece's underwater antiquities department, said sunken ancient ships are generally found 30-40 meters (100-130 feet) deep. Most scholars believe that ancient traders were unwilling to veer far offshore, unlike warships which were unburdened by ballast and cargo.

 "There are many Roman shipwrecks, but these are in deep waters. They were not sailing close to the coast," Simossi said.


 "The conventional theory was that, as these were small vessels up to 25 meters (80 feet) long, they did not have the capacity to navigate far from the coast, so that if there was a wreck they would be close enough to the coast to save the crew," she said.

Click here to read this article from NRToday

Warning signs from ancient Greek tsunami

In the winter of 479 B.C., a tsunami was the savior of Potidaea, drowning hundreds of Persian invaders as they lay siege to the ancient Greek village. New geological evidence suggests that the region may still be vulnerable to tsunami events, according to Klaus Reicherter of Aachen University in Germany and his colleagues.

The Greek historian Herodotus described the strange retreat of the tide and massive waves at Potidaea, making his account the first description of a historical tsunami. Reicherter and colleagues have added to the story by sampling sediments on the Possidi peninsula in northern Greece where Potidaea (and its modern counterpart, Nea Potidea) is located. The sediment cores show signs of “high-energy” marine events like significant waves, and excavations in the suburbs of the nearby ancient city of Mende have uncovered a high-energy level dated to the 5th century B.C. The Mende layer contains much older marine seashells that were probably scoured from the ocean bed and deposited during a tsunami.

Click here to read this article from History of the Ancient World

Ancient Byzantine road unearthed in Greece

Archaeologists have unearthed an ancient marble paved Byzantine road during excavation work for a new metro in the northern Greek port city of Thessaloniki, the Culture Ministry said on Friday.

Dating from the third century BC, the marble paved road, known as the Via Egnatia, runs across much of modern day Thessaloniki at a depth of three meters.

Other finds range from hundreds of graves and tombs spanning an 800-year period from the fourth century BC, marble sarcophagi, stone tombs and more than 2,500 square meters of ancient buildings.

Many of the burial sites contained offerings, including 1,500 pieces of jewellry made of gold, silver and copper, Roman-era gold coins from Persia, clay vessels, glass perfume-holders and eight golden wreaths.

Click here to read this article from IOL Scitech

Robbery at Ancient Olympia museum

Armed robbers have stolen dozens of artefacts from a museum in Olympia dedicated to the history Olympics. Officials say two masked men smashed glass display cabinets after overpowering a guard.

Local mayor Thymios Kotzias said items of "incalculable" value had been stolen, but gave no details.

Culture Minister Pavlos Geroulanos has tendered his resignation, but it has so far not been accepted. He is on his way to the site in western Greece.

The armed thieves are reported to have entered the Museum of the History of the Olympic Games in Antiquity at 07:30 on Friday (05:30 GMT) and demanded that a female employee hand over various objects. When the employee refused she was tied up and gagged. The two men then smashed cabinets, stealing more than about 60 items, mostly bronze and clay statuettes, officials say.

Click here to read this article from the BBC


Museum Robbed at Greece's Ancient Olympia

Armed robbers on Friday seized dozens of items on display at the antiquities museum in Ancient Olympia, the birthplace of the ancient Olympics in southern Greece, after tying up an employee. Greece's Culture Minister Pavlos Geroulanos submitted his resignation after the robbery, state television reported.

Police and museum authorities did not have an immediate account of the items taken from smashed display cases, but local authorities and police said about 60 artifacts are estimated to have snatched.

Click here to read this article from Time

The Flowering of Hellenic Studies at Princeton University

Princeton University has been an international leader in the study of Greek culture for a long time, but the creation of the new Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies promises to bring up more blooms in that already flowering garden.

“Princeton is now one of the world’s great centers for the study of Greece and the transformative influence of Greek ideas across times and cultures”, said Princeton president Shirley M. Tilghman when she and her colleagues on the Academic Planning Group approved the creation of the Center in May 2011.

Princeton’s Program in Hellenic Studies was founded in 1981 with a two million dollar gift presented to the University by the passionate philhellene Stanley J. Seeger Jr., in 1979. The Stanley J. Seeger Hellenic Fund continued to contribute additional monies over the years, and now that gift is the primary support of the new Center named in his honor. Seeger, a 52 (and ’56) Princeton alumnus who out of love for the country became a citizen of Greece, died in July 2011.

Lecturer in Classics, Dimitri Gondicas, previously the Executive Director of the Program in Hellenic Studies and now the first Director of the Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies, believes that Princeton’s principal and lasting contribution to Hellenism in America is its deep commitment to academic excellence in teaching, in high-level research, and in international academic exchanges, rather than large-scale cultural events.

Click here to read this article from Greek News

See also Princeton establishes Stanley J. Seeger '52 Center for Hellenic Studies

Countless Treasures Found in the Excavations for the Subway in Thessaloniki

Macedonians discovered a valuable treasure hid in the bowels of the earth, thanks to the methodical excavations undertaken in the construction of the Thessaloniki metro.

Many artifacts found in the excavation, from items such as gold hoops, benches, and thousands of everyday objects, up to whole churches, remnants of the glorious, long history of Thessaloniki, have come to light. The excavations were completed by the end of the year, leaving behind thousands of “mosaics” of cultures that flourished in the city.

Archaeologists are revealing a palimpsest of the city, a city that has undergone constant and continuous phases of occupation from the 4th century BC, when it was founded in Thessaloniki, until now! “In Byzantium, Thessalonica was described as the second city of Constantinople, precisely because of its extremely important historical position in the region.” They emphasized, among other things, that the general secretary of the Ministry of Culture, Lina Mendoni, spoke to the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Economic Affairs of the House, ahead of signing an additional contract to perform archaeological work. "In terms of area stations, there are mainly archaeological investigations in the order of 17,000 sq.m. In essence, speaking of the area of ​​excavation, we speak about 28,000 square meters," explained Ms. Mendoni.

Click here to read this article from The Greek Reporter

Ancient Greek sites could soon be available for rent

Available for rent: The Acropolis.

In a move bound to leave many Greeks and scholars aghast, Greece's culture ministry said Tuesday it will open up some of the debt-stricken country's most-cherished archaeological sites to advertising firms and other ventures.

The ministry says the move is a common-sense way of helping "facilitate" access to the country's ancient Greek ruins, and money generated would fund the upkeep and monitoring of sites. The first site to be opened would be the Acropolis.

Archaeologists, however, have for decades slammed such an initiative as sacrilege.
The culture ministry said any renting of ancient Greek sites would be subject to strict conditions.

According to a ministerial briefing dating from the end of December, a commercial firm could rent the Acropolis for a professional photographic shoot for as little as 1,600 euros a day ($2,046). Demonstrators could also rent the ancient landmark.

Click here to read this article from AFP