Ancient history: deciphering the Roman red dust

Cosmos ^ | October 2018 | Andrew Masterson

[SunkenCiv]

Greek and Roman writers record the use of a substance called miltos as a decoration, a medicine - and a handy way to repair a boat. Now scientists have worked out why. Andrew Masterson reports. From ancient Greek and Roman source texts it is possible to conclude that in the classical world a mineral, a powder known as miltos, was something of a wonder substance. Miltos - referred to in the works of writers such as Theophrastus, Dioscorides and Pliny - was red, fine-grained, and made up mostly of iron-oxide. By the time Theophrastus, a Greek philosopher and proto-botanist, wrote about it in the third century BCE, it was already a mineral validated by antiquity. Its use is attested to in Mycenaean clay tablets, inscribed in the script known as Linear B and dating from the second millennium BCE... The ancient texts made it clear that miltos, unlike some other types of mineral, could be found, and mined, in only a few places in Graeco-Roman world - namely Kea, in the Cyclades, Lemnos in the northeast Aegean, and Cappadocia in Turkey... To make their findings, the scientists analysed five samples: four obtained from Kea, and one originally from Lemnos that had been collected during the sixteenth or seventeenth century and is currently housed in the Pharmacy Museum of the University of Basel in Switzerland. No Turkish miltos was available. The samples were subjected to a battery of tests, including X-ray defraction, geochemical analysis, dynamic light scattering to probe nanoparticle structure, DNA sequencing to discover microbiological components, and anti-microbial tests.

[teeman8r]

The duct tape over your eyes, but the duct tape over the wart can be removed when it is gone

[Red Badger]