Posted on 09/28/2013 7:15:24 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
An unexpected discovery awaited a team of Israeli archaeologists in a drainage canal dating from roughly 2,000 years ago: an aluminum bottlecap. From a beer bottle.
No, the good people of ancient Sussita weren't producing aluminum metal. The meaning of the startling discovery is that millennia after its construction, the drainage canal was still working, centuries after the city's final destruction by earthquake.
Made of aluminum and feather-light, the bottle-cap floated on rainwater that washed into the canal, says Dr. Michael Eisenberg, head of an Israeli archaeological team digging the site.
This canal, or less romantically -- a sewer, passed beneath the floor of the public bathhouse being excavated in the city, which the Greeks called Antiochia Hippos. Its end was discovered several hundred meters away by Eisenberg and his team.
The archaeologists believe this remarkably robust sewage system drained effluent from a postulated public toilet near the bathhouse. If the sewer's upper opening is found, the public toilet will be found as well, Aizenberg postulates.
Happily for historians, the Sussita sewer system contained not only a beer bottlecap but much more. For instance several hundred bronze coins, swollen and rusted from eons of exposure to urine, were also found inside.
Ten dice made of bone found near the coins provided further evidence of the sewer's function: Eisenberg believes that the city's inhabitants gambled with dice as they sat in the bathroom. Just as latter-day man accidently drops his phone into the john, thus the people of yore apparently let coins and dice fall into the sewer.
(Excerpt) Read more at haaretz.com ...
A metal object (alum still counts as metal, right?) floats feather lightly upon the waters of a ditch into a sealed stone building?
Oh those archeologists. They say the darnedest things.
Occam’s razor says it was put there by a time traveling angel of the Lord which happened to have a taste for Tuborg beer.
Sure, a public restroom is at the top of my fav places to play dice. Not! That guy is full of bs.
Was the beer bought by FOOD STAMPS?? It looks like an Area where Obama’s supporters live in the US.
Musta been whre they held one o' those Space Shriner conventions.
has Tuborg been the brand of beer endorsed by Pharaohs for 2,000 years?
They had a very very different culture back then I guess
Hah.... :-)
Good story, except that aluminum doesn't float, and beer bottle caps are made of steel. Aluminum is too weak to hold the pressure.
So the Vikings were making Tuborg earlier than thought; and brought it with them when they were fighting as mercenaries in the Byzantine Period?
After a long day of pillaging, they just wanted to kick back and have a beer, usually poured into and drunk out of the defleshed cranium of a vanquished enemy.
Nowhere does it say that the caps were floating, they were merely washed down the pipe. And aluminum is also used in beer bottling; in my childhood canned beverages shipped in lined steel cans, most stuff sold was in glass; aluminum cans for carbonated soft drinks didn’t catch on in Michigan until the early 1970s. That was around the same time the bottlers here stopped operating their own systems for deposits on bottles and the cases they came in, replaced by a single gubmint “bottle bill” system.
Water also moves boulders. But hey, no one could fault a time traveling angel of the Lord for stopping for a wee nip.
The Romans (and their Romanized conquests) did pretty much everything in the public baths, including bathing (heh), exercise, scraping with the strigel, hitting the head, possibly even hair removal of different kinds, and, even though the public baths were kept gender-separated, having the enjoyment from prostitutes. It’s surprising they ever came out of there.
Not all of them were gender-separated, all the time I bet.
You can also imagine Senators selling out their votes to lobbyists there. lol
Ah, but water doesn’t move boulders through a stone wall into a sealed room!
Ipso facto, my explanation is cooler.
Q.E.D.: I win!
PS. I have no clue what either ipso facto or QED mean, but they sounded nifty and smart so...
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