Sardis - Ancient City of Gold

Sardis was an ancient city best known as the capital of the Lydian Empire. Rich in placer gold and silver, the city was along important trade routes and grew extremely wealthy from taxing trade. After the fall of the Lydian Empire, it became the capital of the Persian satrapy of Lydia and later a major center of Hellenistic and Byzantine culture.

Croesus, King of Lydia, ruled from 561 to 547 BCE. His wealth was built on gold from the waters of the Pactolus River, which flowed through the capital, Sardis. The Lydians were the first to mint coins of pure gold and silver.

Sardis was conquered by Cyrus the Great around 547 BC. After the Battle of Pteria and Battle of Thymbra, the Persians followed the retreating army back to Sardis and sacked it after a brief siege. After the destruction, Sardis was rebuilt and continued to be an important and prosperous city.

Little of Persian Sardis is in the archaeological record. Sardis was covered over by waves of succeeding generations of invaders, the Greeks, the Romans, and the Byzantines.

Arm of a soldier, killed in the battle between Croesus and Cyrus. He died clutching a slingstone in his hand.

In 334 BC, Sardis was conquered by Alexander the Great. The city was surrendered without a fight.

In 129 BC, Sardis passed to the Romans, under whom it continued its prosperity and political importance as part of the province of Asia.

Sardis began to decline in the 600s AD. It remained part of the Byzantine Empire until 1078 AD. By the 1700s, only two small hamlets existed at the site.

Rome's news readers - praeco

In the Roman Republic and Empire, the newsreader (praeco) would read aloud the Acta Diurna. These were daily, official notices and public records. They were carved on stone or metal and presented in message boards in public places. The Acta Diurna (Latin for "Daily Acts") was essentially the world's first newspaper. Initiated by Julius Caesar in 59 BC, criers would read these updates on military victories, legal proceedings, and public events to the illiterate or gathered public.

The publication covered a wide range of official and social information. Decrees, legal proceedings, and outcomes of trials were advertised. Social updates included prominent births, marriages, and deaths. General news might include gladiator event results, military victories, weather, and even human-interest stories. After a few days, the postings were taken down and archived.

Chemical warfare is ancient history - Dura-Europos

Researchers claimed in 2009 to have found the first evidence of chemical weapons, dating from a battle fought at the ancient Roman fortress of Dura-Europos in modern-day Syria. 20 Roman soldiers unearthed beneath the town's ramparts didn't die of war wounds, but from poison gas.

War in antiquity rarely matched the heroism of myth. To stave off a Roman siege in A.D. 189, the defenders of the Greek city of Ambracia built a flamethrower that coughed out smoking chicken feathers.

At Themiscrya, another Greek outpost, Romans tunneling beneath the city contended with not only a charge of wild beasts but also a barrage of hives swarming with bees. Roman armies routinely poisoned the wells of cities they besieged.

Roman general Sertorius in 80 B.C. had his troops pile mounds of gypsum powder by the hillside hideouts of Spanish rebels. When kicked up by wind, the dust became an irritant, smoking the insurgents out.

In 332 B.C., the citizens of the doomed port of Tyre catapulted basins of burning sand at Alexander the Great's advancing army.

Poisoned arrows appear in classical literature. The epics of Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey both insinuate the use of the poisoned arrows in the Trojan War. The myths of Hercules also allude to the use of poisoned arrows; after he slew the Hydra he dipped his arrowheads in the venom. Scythians were famous for their poisoned arrows. The poison was a concoction of decomposed poisonous snakes and human blood incubated in a manure heap. One of the terms that the Greeks used to describe this poison was toxikon, which stemmed from toxon meaning a bow. Our modern word toxicology derives from this.

Greek fire was an incendiary weapon developed c. 672 and used by the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire. The Byzantine formula was a closely guarded state secret. The composition of Greek fire remains a matter of speculation with proposals including combinations of pine resin, naphtha, quicklime, calcium phosphide, and sulfur. Byzantine use of incendiary mixtures used pressurized nozzles or siphōn to project the liquid onto the enemy.

Even in antiquity, some feared the lurking consequences of unleashing what we call chemical weapons. The ancient Greek tale of Pandora's box offers a metaphor for their use. Pandora's box is an artifact in Greek mythology which contained all the evils of the world. The phrase "to open Pandora's box" means to perform an action that may seem small, but that turns out to have severely detrimental and far-reaching consequences.

The Dura-Europos shield is the only surviving fully intact rectangular 'long shield' (scutum) from the Roman Empire. It was discovered in the 1930s in Dura-Europos. The artifact dates to the mid-3rd century CE (about 250–256 CE)

The rectangular arched shield is mainly made of wood. It was found broken up into thirteen parts. It is made from strips of wood that are 30 to 80 mm wide and 1.5 to 2 mm thick. They are put together in three layers, so that the total thickness of the wood layer is 4.5 to 6 mm.

In the center of the shield is a hole that was cut into the wood after the board was made, the umbo (central boss) is missing.

Saffron

Saffron, the world’s most expensive spice, is extracted from the flowers of the saffron crocus, Crocus sativus. It has been used for over 50,000 years. Saffron was a precious commodity treasured across ancient civilizations for medicine, dye, perfume, and rituals. It was cultivated and traded extensively. Saffron was a prized luxury item in ancient Rome, symbolizing high status and extreme wealth.

Romans sprinkled saffron essences and scattered saffron threads in public spaces, royal halls, theaters, and banquet rooms to deodorize and perfume the air. When Emperor Nero entered Rome for a triump in 67 AD, citizens famously spread saffron along the streets for him. It wasn't a bloody military victory, Nero was celebrating his 1,808 first-place prizes in music, poetry, and chariot racing. According to Suetonius Nero rode in the historical triumphal chariot used by Augustus.

He wore a purple robe covered in gold stars and held his musical crowns proudly in his hands. The procession traveled through the Circus Maximus, the Velabrum, and the Forum up to the Temple of Apollo on the Palatine. As he passed, citizens and attendants showered him with birds, ribbons, sweets, and the very expensive saffron. The spectacle alienated the Roman aristocracy and military commanders and accelerated unrest that forced Nero's death months later in June 68 AD.

The first known use by humans of wild crocuses was as pigment for cave paintings, about 50,000 years ago in today’s Iraq. Ancient texts from Sumer, Assyria, and Babylonia also describe the use of wild crocuses in medicine and dye. Ancient artworks and genetics point to Bronze Age Greece, in 1700 BCE or earlier, as the origin of saffron’s domestication. Domesticated saffron can only be propagated asexually with human help. The process was first described by the Greek philosopher Theophrastus in the fourth century BCE. Today, domesticated saffron is grown for use in cooking and perfumes and as a yellow dye. 16000 flowers, requiring up to 470 person-hours to collect, yield a single kilo, worth between $1,300 and $10,000.

Dense patches of crocus flowers on the fresco ‘The Saffron Gatherers’ from the island of Santorini (1600 BCE) suggest cultivation.

Around the globe today, all saffron crocuses are effectively clones dating back to saffron’s emergence in ancient times.

The Zliten mosaic

The Zliten mosaic is a Roman floor mosaic from about the 2nd century AD, found in the town of Zliten in Libya, on the east coast of Leptis Magna. It was the birthplace of Septimius Severus.

Gladitorial combat between equites, a retiarius and secutor, a thraex and murmillo, a hoplomachus and a bleeding murmillo who is appealing to the referee.

It depicts gladiatorial contests, animal hunts, and scenes from everyday life.

The mosaic was discovered in 1913 and is now on display at The Archaeological Museum of Tripoli.

Gladiatorial contests alternate with animal hunts. Across the top border musicians and combat scenes appear. Music was played during contests, accompanying the tempo of the action. Gladiators followed many rules and always fought barefoot. Across the right-hand border there are scenes of damnatio ad bestias (execution by beasts) and venationes (staged animal hunts). The opposing borders are damaged but show more gladiatorial combat across the bottom and venationes on the left.

Roman trade with India

The Roman Empire funded up to half its empire from tax on trade with India. At the height of Rome’s power, the richest city in the western world ran a huge, unbalanced trade account with a land its armies never reached.

Pliny the Elder, who had governed provinces, put the annual outflow at 50 million sesterces in bullion. The emperor Tiberius complained Roman wealth was passing to foreigners. Domitian built dedicated warehouses for pepper in the heart of the city attempting to control prices. A single shipload, recorded in a surviving papyrus, was valued at close to 9 million sesterces, a massive sum. Based on those numbers, customs duties on Indian cargoes produced close to half of the revenue needed to finance the empire. Two legions in Egypt held the customs house that made the scheme work.

India sent pepper, ivory, gems, perfumes and medicines.

Romans prized Indian black pepper, precious gemstones like beryl, pearls, sapphires, and fine cotton and silk textiles along with ivory. Rome paid in gold and silver. Taxes on imports and exports produced the revenues for the state. The Red Sea corridor required a trip by ship of 4,500 km, (2800 mi) followed by a caravan route of 380 km (236 mi) across the Egyptian Desert, and then another 760 km (472 mi) by ship on the Nile, for a total distance of 5,640 km (3500 mi). The Persian Gulf corridor required a trip by ship of 2,350 km (1460 mi) from India and then by caravan across the Syrian desert for 1,400 km (870 mi), for a total of 3,750 km (2330 mi). To get to India, Chinese silk had traveled another 5,000 km (3100 mi) across the mountainous terrain of Central China.

Great braziers of incense were burned at the Colosseum in Rome to cover the stench of the blood and gore left in the hot sun. During mass spectacles like gladiatorial games and wild beast hunts (venationes), the volume of organic waste created a severe odor problem. Romans honored their dead by burning prodigious quantities of incense at their funerals. The wealthier the dead, the more elaborate the ceremony. Pliny reported that at the funeral of a guilty Nero’s consort Poppaea, a full year’s supply of Rome’s incense was consumed. Facing severe financial problems, Vespasian tried in vain to restrict the import of Indian luxury goods to Rome. Vespasian even taxed the collection and trade of urine around AD 70. Romans traded human urine as a valuable industrial commodity because stale urine breaks down into ammonia, a powerful natural cleaning and bleaching agent.

Poppaea

Cool ancient - Alyattes of Lydia

Alyattes is the name inscribed in the Lydian language on early electrum coins. That is King Alyattes (reigned c. 619–560 BC). He was the father of Croesus, who succeeded him around 560 BC. This is among the first coins ever minted for general circulation.

LYDIAN KINGDOM. Alyattes or Walwet (ca. 630-mid-6th century BC). EL 1/24 stater or myshemihecte (6mm, 0.57 gm). NGC AU★ 5/5 - 4/5. Lydo-Milesian standard. Sardes mint. Head of boar right / Incuse square punch with geometric design. Spier p. 332, 6. Rosen 282 (A5/P5). Weidauer Series XIII (unlisted denomination). Kurth G13 (same rev. punch). cf. SNG Kayhan 1011 (hemihecte). Possibly the finest certified of its type. Radiating, honey dies.

The coin is bid to $4,600 USD with 8 days to go. Here

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