Posted on 12/26/2024 7:55:31 AM PST by SunkenCiv
...The usual story is that the fragments remained untouched for 880 years until the invasion by the Umayyad caliph Muawiya I. However, literary and geological evidence suggest a more complex, and more likely, story involving several reconstructions, finishing with a devastating earthquake in 142...
The little we know about the statue comes from the frustratingly brief writings of Philo... Strabo... and Pliny... however none of these authors describe what it actually looked like, apart from its height. It is generally assumed that the head of Helios resembled that on Rhodian coins... and that it topped a rather austere vision of the god, perhaps holding a torch with a spear or military cloak...
The account continues that the bronze fragments of the statue were left untouched on the ground for 880 years until the invasion of the Arabs...They gathered the remains, transported them to Syria and sold them to a Jewish merchant. However, this seems a very unlikely scenario and the story was probably invented at a much later date for political reasons...
the Greek historian Eusebius... suggests a shorter and more complex story... The first restoration seems to have been shortly after the earthquake in 226... ...
ell for a second time during an earthquake in 107... This earthquake must have been relatively minor as it did not leave a notch in the cliffs... Later Byzantine historians relate that the Colossus was restored during the reign of Vespasian... and again during Hadrian's time, perhaps in association with an official visit in 123... we do not know of a nearby earthquake between the reigns of Vespasian and Hadrian.
(Excerpt) Read more at anetoday.org ...
I think it’s in the original, just not in the excerpt.
That was in the works, but after fabrication on the mainland, the train carrying it to the port went off the rails. Crazy.
Thanks abb!
ISWYDT!..................
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