Posted on 07/27/2009 8:45:10 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
The murky water in Dock No.1 in Cospicua has witnessed much history over the years. Nobody ever imagined, however, that lying underneath could be the remains of an ancient Turkish wonder - the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus.
No one, that is, but oncologist Stephen Brincat, who came across this precious piece of information while reading an article about the excavations of the site by the British in the 19th century in the Turkish magazine Cornucopia.
"There was one sentence which said that the wall of the mausoleum was dismantled to build a dock in Malta," Dr Brincat said.
Blocks of marble that made up a wall of the mausoleum, built more than 300 years BC, are believed to be submerged in the dock, which is expected to be soon embellished in a €10 to €12 million project.
Armed with this piece of information, Dr Brincat, a history lover, started studying local archives to find out more. He struck gold when he found that what is today known as Dock No. 1 was built at the time when British archaeologist Charles Newton excavated the site in Bodrum, Turkey, and shipped crates of sculptures and other antiquities to London's British Museum, which had commissioned the excavations.
According to Dr Brincat's research, the Royal Navy ship HMS Supply, laden with crates of antique treasures, entered Grand Harbour in 1858, a year after the foundation stone of the dock was laid.
(Excerpt) Read more at timesofmalta.com ...
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I suppose the English word mausoleum is derived from the name of the emperor, Mausoleus...
It’s interesting how people and things live on.
I mispelled the name:
Mausolus and Artimisia
Artimisia should have a word. She’s the one who constructed the tomb! She could have just kept his money.
“an ancient Turkish wonder” “Blocks of marble that made up a wall of the mausoleum, built more than 300 years BC”
Turkish?
The Turks didn’t invade and take over Byzantium and make it Turkey until almost a thousand years later.
Halicarnassus was originally a Dorian colony of Greece. Things were swell and cultured for a while, but then Lygdamis came to power and started killing the poets. The long-winded Herodotus, a native of Halicarnassus, left in 457 BCE.
By 387 BCE the Dorian cities of Asia became subservient to Persia, and under the Persian satrap Mausolus things started looking up again.
The city prospered, and was wealthy enough for Mausolus’ widow Artemisia II (who was also his sister!) to build a gigantic tomb named the Mausoleum after its occupant. It was about 45 meters tall, and the exterior walls had sculptural reliefs. It was so gigantic and elaborate that it was included in the standard list of Seven Wonders of the World (compiled by one Antipater of Sidon). And, “Mausoleum” became a general term for an above-ground tomb, especially ones that were large, elaborate, or ideally, both.
IIRC, The Knights of Malta used what was left of the ruins after earthquakes and pillaging to built the castle. Today we call that recycling.
Bodrum is a nice little town.
The first thing we do is kill all the poets?
Panyassis of Halicarnassus, sometimes known as Panyasis, was a 5th century BC Greek epic poet, famous for the Heracleia and the Ionica. It is believed that he also wrote other works which have since been lost. He was critically unappreciated during his lifetime, but was posthumously recognised as one of the greatest poets of archaic Greece. He was either Herodotus' uncle or cousin. In 454 BC, Panyassis was executed for political activities by the tyrant Lygdamis
That’s a direct quote from wikipedia.
I guess your point is that Poets are subversives. Me, I’m always suspicious of the people that own and operate hub cap shops.
bttt
Kinda set the tone for Greek-Turkish relations the next century.
They’re still unsettled about Cyprus ... two more countries in the M.E. who have hated each other for hundreds, if not thousands of years.
We were living there during the Papandreou coup in ‘67 and black-outs that followed b/c each thought the other was going to invade.
I looked at some sources about the Greek-Turkish war and found something I didn't know. Crete similarly had a large Turkish population but the treaty ending the war provided for an exchange of populations and they were sent to Turkey. Cyprus, not part of Greece, was not part of that agreement.
There seem to be some serious moves to cut a peace deal there. What's happened since the Turkish occupation of the north end is the Greek area got it's act together and got into the E.U. while the Turkish government in the north is a pariah. The Greeks are getting rich while the Turks stagnate in a territory where you can't even fly nonstop, except from Turkey.
Old animosities die hard. The Turks refuse to open her ports to ships from Cyprus and hence, Turkey’s accession into the EU trundles on ...apparently Sarkozy does not want them in ... but Greece remains an ally in that regard.
bump for later.
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