[The_Republican]

Exciting Find!

[billorites]

[muawiyah]

It's also consistent with a persistent habit of paving over graveyards to build new public structures. After all, good, buildable space "downtown" anywhere has always been in short supply, and the dead, after all, really don't care.

Glad to see Rome's founders were so terribly human.

[DJ MacWoW]

ping

[sourcery]

Legend has it that Rome was founded in 753 B.C. by Romulus and Remus, the twin sons of the god of war, Mars.

The idea of using the year of Christ's birth as the epoch year of the Julian Calendar was first proposed by the Monk Dionysius Exiguus in 525 AD. At the time, a variety of epoch years were in common use, with the year when Diocletian ascended to the office of Emperor of Rome being the most widely used. Although the Imperial and post-Imperial Romans counted time from various reference points that changed frequently, there was one "epoch date" that was canonically (albeit infrequently) used to unify all their various time counts: the date of the founding of the city of Rome (an era that was called "Ab Urbe Condita," Latin for "From the Founding of the City.") Dionysius explicity specified the year that would be the year 1 of the Anno Domini Era as the year 754 A.U.C. ("Ab Urbe Condita.")

[DoughtyOne]

This is cool. Thanks for bringing it to our attention.

[Fiddlstix]

BTTT

[satchmodog9]

bump

[stinkerpot65]

Romulus?

[stevem]

Do you have any idea where in the Forum this was located? My wife and I were just in Rome about 10 months ago. We spent half a day exploring the Forum. It extends over quite a vast area. Do they think there are burial sites throughout?

[starbase]

So then who were these ancient pre-Roman people? Etruscans, colonizing Greeks, Gauls?

[Veto!]

1,000 B.C., meaning the people who constructed the necropolis pre-dated the ancient Romans by hundreds of years.

Etruscans, perhaps? Should be easy to identify, as Rome and the surrounding area is full of their artifacts, especially delightful at the Etruscan Museum. Anything other than Etruscan would be interesting indeed.

[mikrofon]

So a funny thing happened on the way to the Forum...

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks Fiddlstix. I would ping it, but I'm about to do the digest.

To all -- please ping me to other topics which are appropriate for the GGG list. Thanks.

Please FREEPMAIL me if you want on or off the
"Gods, Graves, Glyphs" PING list or GGG weekly digest
-- Archaeology/Anthropology/Ancient Cultures/Artifacts/Antiquities, etc.
Gods, Graves, Glyphs (alpha order)

[SunkenCiv]

[don-o]

Link don't work.

Is there more information on who is doing this excavation?

[ubermensch88]

Sitting here in Ohio at 10 til Midnight reading H.G. Wells book 1 of the Outline of History...I read ‘ 753 is the date given for the founding of Rome, but there are Etruscan tombs beneath the Roman Forum of a much earlier date than that, and the so called tomb of Romulus bears an indecipherable Etruscan inscription.’ ....... this book was written in 1920 ....and we are just now hearing about this ...Not to mention Etruscan text is not indecipherable.