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Remnants of a Roman statue in North Africa could be the "first-ever depiction of tartan", according to a BBC Scotland documentary. A piece of a bronze statue of the Emperor Caracalla contains the small figure of a Caledonian warrior wearing what appears to be tartan trews. The third century Roman emperor Caracalla styled himself as the conqueror of the Caledonians. A statue marking his achievements stood in the Moroccan city of Volubilis. It stood above a great archway in the ancient city, which lay in the south west of the Roman empire, 1,500 miles from Caledonia -- modern day Scotland....

Hundreds of Roman huts that would have housed refugees fleeing turmoil in Scotland have been discovered by archaeologist near Hadrian's Wall. The scientists unearthed the structures earlier this year within the site of the Roman fortress of Vindolanda near the border. Experts were struck by the circular shape of the temporary but well-built huts which would have been in contrast to the usual style of rectangular Roman architecture. Archaeologists believe that the buildings were hastily constructed to house hundreds of tribespeople who scrambled over Hadrian's Wall when Scotland was invaded in the third century AD... The community north of the...

A Roman graveyard has been dug up in York. The skeletons all belonged to tall, strong men — and most are headless. Were they gladiators killed in the arena or victims of a deranged dictator?Like nobody else before or since, Caracalla had it coming. On April 8, AD217, four days after his 29th birthday, appropriately on his way to a Moon Temple in modern-day Turkey, this irredeemable lunatic dismounted from his horse, pulled down his breeches and surrendered to the demands of diarrhoea. It was one of his own bodyguards who stepped forward and stabbed him to death. Even for...

Borders folk may be descended from Africans By David Derbyshire (Filed: 11/06/2004) Families who have lived in the English-Scottish Borders for generations could be descended from African soldiers who patrolled Hadrian's Wall nearly 2,000 years ago. Archaeologists say there is compelling evidence that a 500-strong unit of Moors manned a fort near Carlisle in the third century AD. Richard Benjamin, an archaeologist at Liverpool University who has studied the history of black Britons, believes many would have settled and raised families. "When you talk about Romans in Britain, most people think about blue eyes and pale complexions," he said. "But...

ROME (AFP) – Archaeologists have unearthed a set of six marble sculptures in Rome that likely belonged to a high-ranking official of the Roman Empire, Italy's culture ministry said Wednesday. Led by Roberto Egidi, the group of archaeologists dug up five marble heads representing members of the Severan imperial dynasty as well as a statue of the Greek god Zeus while excavating a public site. The figures were buried in an ancient fountain of a lavish Roman villa along the Via Anagnina street in southeast Rome. The "extraordinary" discovery, one of the biggest and most important in recent memory in...

Inscriptions revealing complaints about high taxes from 1,700 years ago have been found during the excavation of the ancient city of Rhodiapolis in Antalya's Kumluca district. The excavation was started by Professor Nevzat Çevik, head of the archaeology department in Akdeniz University's faculty of science and literature, and led this year by Assistant Professor İsa Kızgut. Kızgut told the Anatolia news agency that they made interesting discoveries concerning the social life of the people of Rhodiapolis. Noting that one of the most interesting discoveries was an inscription, Kızgut said: “In addition to many historical artifacts, we uncovered some relics concerning...

More than 5,500 silver coins buried by a river about 1,800 years ago are now in the hands of archaeologists, following the hoard's discovery in Augsburg, Germany.At the time of the coins' burial, the Roman Empire was in full swing, with its coinage reaching all corners of its territory and beyond.These coins "are denarii, the standard silver denomination during the 1st-early 3rd century [A.D.]," Stefan Krmnicek, a professor of ancient numismatics (the study of coins) at the University of Tübingen in Germany, told Live Science in an email.Archaeologists found the hoard earlier this year in an old riverbed. But though...

Those who don't know history are destined to repeat it. – George Santayana At the end of the 2nd century AD Britain was a fully developed province of the Roman Empire. It was as Roman as any city in the Empire. While still largely rural, Roman Britain developed towns and cities that mirrored those found in Italy or North Africa and connected them with a spectacular roadway. They had majestic villas, sprawling estates, baths, plumbing and of course aqueducts. The Romans brought industrial sophistication to mining, unprecedented architectural capabilities and improved agriculture. The province was awash in imported goods from...

...His family held prominent positions in Rome, particularly through his grandmother, Julia Maesa, and her sister, Julia Domna, who was the wife of Emperor Septimius Severus...Growing up in Emesa, Elagabalus was exposed to the worship of the sun god Elagabal...Following the assassination of Emperor Caracalla in 217 AD, the unpopular Macrinus took the throne. Julia Maesa, Elagabalus' grandmother... devised a plan, spreading rumors that Elagabalus was the illegitimate son of Caracalla... These rumors resonated with the Roman legions, who were discontent with Macrinus' rule.In 218 AD, at the age of 14, Elagabalus was declared emperor by the Roman legions stationed...

At its peak, the Roman Empire held up to 130 million people over a span of 1.5 million square miles. Rome had conquered much of the known world. The Empire built 50,000 miles of roads, as well as many aqueducts, amphitheatres, and other works that are still in use today. Our alphabet, calendar, languages, literature, and architecture borrow much from the Romans. Even concepts of Roman justice still stand tall, such as being “innocent until proven guilty”. How could such a powerful empire collapse? The Roman Economy. Trade was vital to Rome. It was trade that allowed a wide variety...

The coin at the centre of the story was among a small hoard discovered in 1713. It was thought to have been a genuine Roman coin until the mid-19th century... The final blow came in 1863 when Henry Cohen, the leading coin expert of the time at the Bibliotheque Nationale de France, considered the problem for his great catalogue of Roman coins. He said that they were not only 'modern' fakes, but poorly made and "ridiculously imagined". Other specialists agreed and to this day Sponsian has been dismissed in scholarly catalogues...A chemical analysis also showed that the coins had been...

A foraging badger has uncovered a trove of 209 Roman coins dating as far back as the third century in a Spanish cave, scientists report. Hailed as an 'exceptional find', the coins include some 'from the distant mints' of London, Constantinople and Antioch, an ancient city once located in what is now modern-day Turkey. Researchers think they were hidden in the cave before the arrival of the Suebi, a Germanic people who invaded the Iberian Peninsula in AD 409, known for their infantry and ambush tactics.

Alarge number of artifacts belonging to the second and third centuries A.D. were unearthed in an underground city featuring places of worship, silos, water wells and passages with corridors in southeastern Mardin province’s Midyat district. Midyat, which is almost an open-air museum with its history and culture, offers a magical atmosphere to its visitors with stone houses, inns, mosques, churches and monasteries that are thousands of years old. In the district, a cave was found within the scope of a project started two years ago for cleaning and conservation of the historical streets and houses. After it was determined that...

“Look back over the past, with its changing empires that rose and fell, and you can foresee the future, too.” – Marcus Aurelius What Took So Long? Monetary, fiscal, economic, political, and military affairs are tightly interwoven into the fabric of a nation. The primary thread extending throughout is the state’s endless desire to dominate and centralize the supply of money. Monetary policy, in this regard, always attends to the apparent wants of a country’s leaders and its ruling class. Sometimes, over an extended period, it may appear to enrich the general population. But that is merely the mirage of...

The complete text is at: http://www.cato.org/pubs/journal/cjv14n2-7.html Here are some highlights: Augustus, emperor of Rome 27 B.C. to 14 A.D: An expansion of economic freedom. Augustus clearly favored private enterprise, private property, and free trade. The burden of taxation was significantly lifted … a period of "almost complete freedom for trade and of splendid opportunities for private initiative. Tiberius, emperor of Rome (14-37 A.D.) extended the policies of Augustus. It was his strong desire to encourage growth and establish a solid middle class (bourgeoisie), which he saw as the backbone of the Empire. High level of economic prosperity, made possible by...

Count the waysA German scholar twenty years ago listed, I recall, some 210 reasons for the collapse of the Western empire. Readers, you have heard many of them, plausible and otherwise—corruption, civil strife, Germanic barbarians, Christianity, lead in the pipes of the elite, etc.Any such discussion is also predicated on two other twists: the Eastern Empire at Constantinople went on for nearly another 1,000 years until the 1453 sack by the Ottomans. And for the last twenty years, revisionists have disputed Gibbon’s notion of a dramatic “fall” in the West, and argued instead that it was a “transition” as the...

Nearly two thousand years ago most of Britain was a settled province of the Roman Empire. But those in the north held out against the world superpower and insurrection flared across Hadrian's Wall. So, in 208AD, the Roman Emperor Septimius Severus marched into Scotland with 40,000 men - one of the largest invasion armies Rome ever mobilised.When Septimus Severus Invaded Scotland | Britain's African Emperor | Timeline | Published May 17, 2020

...The hoard of copper alloy coins, dating from the 3rd Century, was unearthed in Montgomery, Powys, several weeks ago. About 900 were found by a member of a Welshpool metal detecting club, with the rest of the discovery made with help from archaeologists. The exact location is being kept secret to protect the site. The Powys coroner will determine whether they qualify as treasure. Clwyd-Powys Archaeological Trust (CPAT), which helped unearth the coins, said the discovery had the potential to reveal more about Roman life in mid Wales in the late 3rd Century. The find in Montgomery is a few...

Volume Thirty-Seven        1995 Essays in History Published by the Corcoran Department of History at the University of Virginia. The Fall of the Roman Empire Revisited: Sidonius Apollinaris and His Crisis of Identity By Eric J. Goldberg Scholars of Late Antiquity (the period roughly from A.D. 300-600) have long labored under the shadow of two monumental works: Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1787) and M. I. Rostovtzeff's Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire (1926). Though Gibbon, an intellectual of the Enlightenment, and Rostovtzeff, a Russian Marxist, approached their topic from very different viewpoints,...

The absence of monsoon rains at the source of the Nile was the cause of migrations and the demise of entire settlements in the late Roman province of Egypt...The oasis-like Faiyum region, roughly 130 km south-west of Cairo, was the breadbasket of the Roman Empire. Yet at the end of the third century CE, numerous formerly thriving settlements there declined and were ultimately abandoned by their inhabitants. Previous excavations and contemporary papyri have shown that problems with field irrigation were the cause. Attempts by local farmers to adapt to the dryness and desertification of the farmland - for example, by...