Posted on 06/10/2011 8:23:09 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
The route had long been known as a lost Roman road... dig director Tim Malim noticed that the road had twice been rebuilt, and knew its history could be dated using a technique that tells you when buried mineral grains were last exposed to sunlight.
The unexpected result was a more than 80% chance that the last surface had been laid before the Roman invasion in AD43. Wood in the foundation was radiocarbon-dated to the second century BC, sealing the road's pre-Roman origin. And Malim thinks a huge post that stood in 1500BC close to the crest of the hill was a trackway marker...
...notwithstanding villas with central heating and public statues of Roman emperors, some academics portray the... occupation as a mere ripple on the longer and stronger flow of native culture and politics... Could Britain have been more "Roman" than was thought... Britons were more aware of Rome than Rome was of Britain... in a cemetery near Colchester, Essex, excavated mostly in the 1990s... members of the ruling class who had died between about AD40 and AD60... the things the deceased took with them... precious Roman objects requiring Roman expertise... there is "the doctor". This man had his wine jar, his imported pottery service and copper vessels. But he also had a set of surgical instruments -- one of the oldest known in the ancient world... scalpels, forceps, probes and more -- and comparable to finds made around the Roman empire.
But they are not Roman. On current evidence, they were made in Britain to designs that merely borrowed from Greece and Italy... Many things here once thought "Roman" could, in fact, be older. Shropshire's road, then, could be the start of a journey that changes the way we think about early Britain.
(Excerpt) Read more at guardian.co.uk ...
I am very jealous of you that you learned another European language so well.
I am somewhat OK with Spanish now and my French is very rusty.
I will make sure that my kids speak ATLEAST two other european languages fluently and one Asian language by the time they are 18
Today, the more languages you know the more successful you are.
As the old joke goes:
What do you call a guy who speaks THREE languages..... TRI-Lingual
What do you call a guy who speaks TWO languages.. .BI-lingual
What do you call a guy who speaks ONE language....
.....
....
American!
The joke is on us.. we need to learn more languages like German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Hindi etc.
Latin - it is the root language of many. Send your kids to catholic school, make sure they take latin.
The rest is easy.
Except spelling - I can’t spell in six languages. In fact, I can’t spell in any of them. Heh, Bier, beer, cervesa, ....
Good comment and accurate. Then that same empire eventually calcifies losing its dynamism and the benefits of aggregation/dissemination pass to another. Isn’t that history?
Excellent and I am a proud speaker of Mid-Western Standard English (American). ;-]
Just like in a modern restaurant.
Yes, but...
You have no cultural identity. You are milque-toast, vanilla, undistinguished.
Except tornadoes. You win that one. ;)
If there's some other to grab the baton. Looks like the baton was dropped for some time after Rome.
Much the same in China, I think. They were so advanced for so long and then went to rot for quite a while.
Thanks for the ping. That’s some fascinating stuff.
This is a very poorly written article. It rambles all over the place.
When I was a child, accents found amongst members of Congress were marked. A Californian (as I was at the time) could barely understand a Kennedy from Massachusetts, or some of the Southern Senators. I remember my uncle (when he came home from WWII) talking about the boys he knew on his ship from "Joisey" and how they couldn't say dirty bird (came out "doity boid"). Fritz Hollings from SC was one of the last Southern Senators who talked as if he had mush in his mouth. But now, the accents have pretty much evened out; and you can barely tell which state they are from unless somebody posts their name and state on the screen.
Back at the height of adding school buildings in CA, I knew an administrator who recommended that the builders leave the sidewalks out in a new collge complex for the first year. He claimed that the students would wear paths into the ground and those were the places to lay the walks. I’m sure he was right, and it saved the lawns from getting ruined.
LOL
Hey - George Mason U did exactly that in 1986, I think. It worked - after a year they paved all the paths the students had worn.
Aurelian was indeed an interesting guy.
He died because he figured out one of his freedmen, who acted as staff because the Romans never really developed much of a bureaucracy or army staff, was a crook, and planned to execute him.
So the guy wrote up an execution order with the names of a bunch of Aurelian’s officers on it whom he had no intention of killing. They bought the forgery because A had a well-earned reputation for killing officers he saw as a threat.
As you say, the biggest problem the Romans had was that they never developed a coherent rule of succession, and neither did the Byzantines. That’s 1500 years without a way of determining who’s up next.
This meant that while the Empire desperately needed good generals, the Emperor had to consider any successful general a great threat, and was constantly tempted to execute him in self-defense. After all, that was how he, or possibly his father, had gained the throne. Meanwhile, any competent general knew he risked execution, and was tempted to revolt in self-defense.
“The King is dead, long live the King!” of later Europe at least had the advantage of allowing generals to do their thing. With rare exceptions like Cromwell, generals couldn’t take power because people just wouldn’t follow them. Kings were still murdered with regularity, but were the throne was handed down by a pre-determined line of succession.
The Roman map to the left shows where the dig is taking place. The star is just to the south of modern day Shrewsbury. To the east lies Viroconium which was the fourth largest city of Roman Britain. The road veering to the left is believed to be the route of the Celtic road - it is now the A5. To the right is an artists impression of Celtic Cornovii - the people who are believed to have built the road.
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