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In 990AD, the Archbishop of Canterbury named Sigeric the Serious had a more practical reason to walk to Rome. Having risen into his prestigious office, he needed to visit the Vatican to be ordained and collect his official garments. At the time he made the journey, there were many different paths to Rome. But Sigeric, who’d left from Canterbury, wrote down his route home through Italy, Switzerland, France and into the UK, cataloguing the towns he stayed in on his journey. The route he took now makes up the official Via Francigena. The only part that cannot be completed on...

Today in history, on May 29, 1453, the sword of Islam conquered Constantinople. Of all Islam's conquests of Christian territory, this was by far the most symbolically significant. Not only was Constantinople a living and direct extension of the old Roman Empire and contemporary capital of the Christian Roman Empire (or Byzantium), but its cyclopean walls had prevented Islam from entering Europe through its eastern doorway for the previous seven centuries, beginning with the First Arab Siege of Constantinople (674–678). Indeed, as Byzantine historian John Julius Norwich puts it, "[h]ad the Saracens captured Constantinople in the seventh century rather than...

Archaeologists of the Superintendence of Archaeology, Fine Arts and Landscape of Verona are bringing to light the magnificent floor mosaics and foundations of a Roman villa dating back to the third century AD. The villa, which was first discovered in the 1920s at Negrar di Valpolicella, near Verona, had remained buried since then and was all but forgotten. In summer 2019 the technicians of the Superintendence of Archaeology, Fine Arts and Landscape of Verona returned to the site after almost a century, under the direction of the archaeologist Gianni de Zuccato. The investigations continued in October 2019 and in February...

Archaeologists in Israel have discovered a rare coin minted about 1,900 years ago, when the Jewish people revolted against Roman occupation, the Israel Antiquities Authority announced (IAA) last week. The bronze coin is so rare, that out of 22,000 coins found in archaeological excavations in the Old City of Jerusalem, just four are from the revolt, known as the Bar Kokhba revolt, Donald Tzvi Ariel, head of the Coin Department at the IAA, said in a statement. A cluster of grapes and the inscription, "Year Two of the Freedom of Israel," appear on one side of the coin, and on...

It's not clear why ancient people dug up these chambers, but evidence suggests they used them in everyday life. Co-director of the excavation Barak Monnickendam-Givon standing in the subterranean chambers. (Image: © Yaniv Berman-Israwl Antiquities Authority) Archaeologists recently uncovered three ancient subterranean chambers carved in the bedrock beneath the Western Wall plaza in Jerusalem. The 2,000-year-old chambers, consisting of an open courtyard and two rooms, were carved on top of one another and connected by hewn staircases. Inside the chambers, archaeologists discovered clay cooking vessels, cores of oil lamps, a stone mug and a piece of a qalal, or a...

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

Volunteers poring over detailed aerial surveys of the borderlands between Cornwall and Devon spotted telltale signs of dozens of previously unknown settlements and miles of roads linking Roman forts. The project suggests areas including Bodmin Moor, in Cornwall, and Dartmoor, in Devon, were much more populous than previously had been thought. So far, less than a tenth of the material available has been studied but already 30 previously unknown settlements believed to date from between 300BC and AD300 have been found, as well as more than 20 miles of Roman road... Because this could not be done, the volunteers (just...

Take the Roman Britain coin, known as a radiate, found in Headbourne Worthy, Hampshire. "On the face of it, it looks a grotty old coin, which it is, I guess," said Lewis. But it helps tell the story of Carausius who declared himself emperor of Britain and northern Gaul between AD286-93, breaking away from the Roman empire. He was assassinated by his treasurer Allectus. The newly found coin is just one from an astonishing variety of nearly 4,000 which were struck during Carausius' reign. Other finds include a pure gold arm ring weighing 300g and dating from the eighth century...

Reason #7: RELIGION Saint Augustine in his Confessions tells us that after many years of wandering in the desert of indecision, it was Cicero who led him to Christ. Cicero’s Hortensius set him on the path to Christian conversion by implanting in him a longing for the immortality of wisdom. The text of Hortensius did not make it to the modern world and thus is probably the most famous lost treatise in world literature. Wouldn’t we all love to read this work that St. Augustine praises so highly? Well, I have read a lot of Cicero and, like most writers,...

The mysterious location of the tomb of Alexander the Great might finally have been confirmed. Alexander the Great was a king of the ancient Greek kingdom of Macedon from 336–323 BC and after conquering the Greek city-states he rolled over Persia founding an empire with 70 cities across three continents covering an estimated two million square miles. Now, a piece of masonry from an ancient tomb discovered in the foundations of St Mark ’s in Venice matching the dimensions of a sarcophagus in the British Museum might confirm the location of the tomb of Alexander the Great, and what’s more,...

An archaeologist who claimed to have found the bones of Cleopatra's murdered half-sister says they are pinning their hopes on new forensic techniques to conclusively identify the remains. It was claimed that the remains of Princess Arsinöe IV, who was murdered more than 2,000 years ago on the orders of Egypt's queen Cleopatra, were the first relics of the Ptolemaic dynasty to be identified.

For traditional Basques the pictures, symbols and words found scraped onto pieces of third century pottery dug up near the town of Nanclares, in northern Spain, included miraculous evidence that their unique language of Euskara was far older than ever thought. Eighteen months ago the dig's director, Eliseo Gil, claimed that some finds at the Roman town known as Veleia were on par with those at Pompeii or Rome itself. Basque nationalists bristled with pride... Now a committee of experts has revealed those jewels to be fakes... The hunt is on for an archeological fraudster who defaced fragments of third...

San Sebastian, Spain - No frontier marks the entrance to Spain's Basque region, but the traveller passing by quaint villages on green hillsides has a clear sense of entering a distinct territory. It is not just the Basque flags here and there. It is, above all, the signs in a strange language unlike any other in the world. A travel bureau, for instance, is marked 'bidaiak.' An ice-cream shop has a sign saying 'izozkiak.' A police station is marked 'ertzainza', and an office of the Basque regional government is called 'eusko jaurlaritza.' Scientists remain puzzled by the Basque people of...

A grape variety still used in wine production in France today can be traced back 900 years to just one ancestral plant, scientists have discovered. With the help of an extensive genetic database of modern grapevines, researchers were able to test and compare 28 archaeological seeds from French sites dating back to the Iron Age, Roman era, and medieval period. ...a team of researchers from the UK, Denmark, France, Spain, and Germany, drew genetic connections between seeds from different archaeological sites, as well as links to modern-day grape varieties. It has long been suspected that some grape varieties grown today,...

The sinkhole, located in the Piazza della Rotonda, is almost 10 square feet (1 square meter) big and just over 8 feet (2.5 m) deep. Inside the hole, archaeologists found seven ancient slabs made of travertine, a type of sedimentary rock. Luckily, no one was hurt when the sinkhole collapsed on the afternoon of April 27, because the normally crowded piazza was empty due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Sinkholes like this one, however, are becoming an increasingly common problem in Rome. The stones uncovered by the sinkhole were created around the same time that the Pantheon was built, from 27...

An overview of the Art of Pompeii to the music of Alison Balsom playing Neruda's Trumpet Concerto in E Flat and Haydn's Trump Concerto in E Flat. A wide range of styles. Anyone else see surrealism and German expressionism? Surrealism - Villa Lobos - Joan Baez

Coins dating from the Jewish revolt against the Roman Empire (66 CE-70 CE) were discovered by archeologists during excavations near the southern wall of the Temple Mount on Monday, according to the Israel Nature and Parks Authority. The archeological dig, run by Dr. Eilat Mazar of the Institute of Archaeology of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, uncovered dozens of bronze coins measuring approximately 1.5 cm., as well as numerous fragments of pottery vessels. The vessels, mainly jars and cooking pots, were left behind by Jewish residents who hid in a large cave that measured seven meters by 14 m. The...

New research using ancient DNA has revealed that plague has been endemic in human populations for more than twice as long as previously thought, and that the ancestral plague would have been predominantly spread by human-to-human contact -- until genetic mutations allowed Yersinia pestis (Y. pestis), the bacteria that causes plague, to survive in the gut of fleas. These mutations, which may have occurred near the turn of the 1st millennium BC, gave rise to the bubonic form of plague that spreads at terrifying speed through flea -- and consequently rat -- carriers. The bubonic plague caused the pandemics that...

Y. pestis was the notorious culprit behind the sixth century's Plague of Justinian, the Black Death, which killed 30%-50% of the European population in the mid-1300s, and the Third Pandemic, which emerged in China in the 1850s. Earlier putative plagues, such as the Plague of Athens nearly 2,500 years ago and the second century's Antonine Plague, have been linked to the decline of Classical Greece and the undermining of the Roman army. However, it has been unclear whether Y. pestis could have been responsible for these early epidemics because direct molecular evidence for this bacterium has not been obtained from...

By The Week Staff August 30, 2014Think Ebola is alarming? Scientists expect a much deadlier virus to emerge in the not-distant future. How likely is a pandemic? Epidemiologists believe we're statistically overdue for a global viral outbreak, which occurs every generation or so. This year's Ebola crisis is probably just a dress rehearsal: Though the virus has killed at least 1,420 people in Africa in the last five months, Ebola is transmitted only through intimate contact with bodily fluids and doesn't have the global reach of a true pandemic, such as Spanish influenza in 1918. Humanity had no prior exposure...