Free Republic

The few sowed the wind, and the many reaped their whirlwind. American society is facing three existential crises not unlike those that overcame the late Roman, and a millennium later, terminal Byzantine, empires. Premodern Barbarism We are suffering an epidemic of premodern barbarism. The signs unfortunately appear everywhere. Over half a million homeless people crowd our big-city downtowns. Most know the result of such Medieval street living is unhealthy, violent, and lethal for all concerned. Yet no one knows—or even seems to worry about—how to stop it. So public defecation, urination, fornication, and injection continue unabated. Progressive urban pedestrians pass...

Our crisis was not the next generation of foreign Hitlers and Stalins. It was not earthquakes, floods, or even pandemics. It was not endemic poverty and want. It was not a meager inheritance from past generations of incompetents. Nor was it a dearth of natural resources or bounty. Instead our catastrophe arose from our most highly educated, the wealthiest and most privileged in American history with the greatest sense of self-esteem and sanctimoniousness. Sometime around the millennium, they felt their genius could change human nature and bring an end to history—if only they had enough power to force hoi polloi...

In the Middle Ages, the Roman alphabet and runes lived side by side. A new doctoral thesis challenges the notion that runes represent more of an oral and less of a learned form of written language....Johan Bollaert, Senior Lecturer at the Department of Linguistics and Scandinavian Studies... has investigated written language used in public inscriptions in Norway from the 1100s to the 1500s. Last autumn, he defended his doctoral thesis "Visuality and Literacy in the Medieval Epigraphy of Norway."The assumption that runes represent a more oral tradition is based on the idea that runic inscriptions are contextually bound and are...

Boston, Mass., Jan 13, 2023 / 14:00 pm A team of Israeli archaeologists has discovered a sixth-century Byzantine church with highly decorated mosaic floors. The Civil Administration’s Archaeology Unit, which oversees historical sites in Judea and Samaria, announced Wednesday that the church was found in Jericho, a Palestinian town located in the West Bank, according to The Times of Israel. The agency is part of the government of Israel’s Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories, which is part of the Ministry of Defense. The outlet reported that the church is 250 square meters large, which would have made the...

About 1,500 years ago, in the previously Roman city of Antiochia Hippos, a magnificent cathedral arose. It was decked out in the finest stone available, say the archaeologists who have now completed an excavation there that began seven decades ago. And what they found in its ruins may shed light on early Christian power politics in Byzantine Palestine.Now theoretically reconstructed (on paper) for the first time, its size and pomp suggest that this basilica and its presiding bishop commanded a monopoly over baptism of catechumens in much of what is today the southern Golan Heights and eastern side of the...

For most of human history, the disasters wrought by nature were utterly unpredictable, their causes wholly unknown. They were merely a random act of God that could lay waste to whole cities without warning. On the morning of May 20, 1202, thousands of people across an enormous swath of the Earth experienced such destruction.The Forgotten 1202 earthquakeThe History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered1.13M subscribers | 79,737 views | December 12, 2022

The coin, the first of its type discovered in Israel, was minted by the Byzantine Emperor Theodosius II, whose edicts led to the abolishment of the Sanhedrin Council and to the large-scale emigration of Jews to the Diaspora.1,600 years after the edict of the Emperor Theodosius II led to the abolishment of the post of the 'Nasi,' the Head of the Sanhedrin, school pupils found a rare piece of evidence reflecting this dramatic moment in Jewish history.In February 2019, four ninth grade students from the Haemeq Hamaaravi High School in Kibbutz Yifat in the Jezreel valley were orienteering in the...

Archeologists have uncovered part of an 1,800-year-old Roman road in northern Israel, built in the time of emperor Hadrian, the Israel Antiquities Authority announced.In a statement, the IAA said the road section, measuring some 8 meters (26 feet) wide and 25 meters (82 feet) long, was found near the village of Rumat al-Heib, some 20 kilometers (12 miles) west of the city of Tiberias on the Sea of Galilee. It was discovered during development work on a walking trail.The IAA branded the road as “the Highway 6 of the ancient world,” referencing Israel’s major north-to-south highway.It said the road, which...

While cleaning one set of Byzantine mosaics in Hippos of the Decapolis, the archaeologists found more mosaics. An unknown bishop, a goldsmithing priest and an anxious couple have come to lightPeople of yore were deeply religious, it seems – including in Hippos (Sussita) of the Decapolis, a Greco-Roman city perched high above the Sea of Galilee. No less than seven churches have been found in the city from the early Christian era. Now, four inscriptions newly discovered in one of its ancient churches – the Martyrion of Theodoros, or “Burnt Church” – during the summer 2022 excavation season shed rare...

“The profane conversion of Hagia Sophia into a mosque is not only an insult to historical truth, it constitutes a direct threat to the monument,” believes the General Secretary of the Interparliamentary Assembly on Orthodoxy. “Hagia Sophia must be declared a monument in danger,” Dr. Maximos Charakopoulos, Member of the Hellenic Parliament, said after a meeting with a representative of the UNESCO Cultural Heritage Center in Paris, reports News Bulletin 24/7. During the meeting, Charakopoulos informed the UNESCO rep about the damages the former cathedral has suffered since being reconverted into mosque. Unfortunately, there have been numerous reports of damage...

Israeli archaeologists have discovered a secret stash of Byzantine-era coins inside a stone wall—where someone may have once tried to hide them.Made of pure gold, the 44 coins are decorated with portraits of Emperors Phocas and Heraclius, who ruled in the first half of the seventh century. Experts believe the treasure, which is dated to 635 C.E., was hidden during the Muslim conquest of the area around the end of Heraclius' reign.The artifacts were unearthed as part of a larger excavation in the ancient city of Banias, now a part of Hermon Stream Nature Reserve in the Golan Heights, an...

Remnants of a statue depicting Hercules that derives from ancient Roman times was unearthed during an excavation of an archeological site in Greece, according to a report by Greek City Times. The larger-than-life statue of a young Hercules, dated to the 2nd century C.E., was uncovered at a site formerly known to be the ancient city of Philippi, located the country’s northern region by researchers at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (AuTH). The team was led by Natalia Poulos, a professor at AuTH, in collaboration with her colleagues there Anastasios Tantsis and Emeritus Professor Aristotle Menzos; 24 students (18 undergraduates, 3...

Last spring, a Palestinian farmer was planting a new olive tree when his shovel hit a hard object. He called his son, and for three months, the pair slowly excavated an ornate Byzantine-era mosaic that experts say is one of the greatest archaeological treasures ever found in Gaza...The floor, boasting 17 iconographies of beasts and birds, is well-preserved and its colors are bright."These are the most beautiful mosaic floors discovered in Gaza, both in terms of the quality of the graphic representation and the complexity of the geometry," said René Elter, an archaeologist from the French Biblical and Archaeological School...

In 1965, a mural was discovered in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, when local authorities decided to build a road in the middle of the Afrasiab tepe. A tepe is a mound marking an ancient site, in this case pre-Mongol Samarkand. When it was found, the mural was weathered and its images obscured. But those who discovered it had the foresight to make a drawing of it, from which replicas have been made. A replica of this mural is now being shown as part of the exhibit "The Crossroads of Civilizations: The Asian Culture of Uzbekistan" until September of next year at the...

On May 29, 2022, in Istanbul and other cities in Turkey, elaborate celebrations were held to commemorate the 569th anniversary of the Islamic conquest of Constantinople in 1453. During these neo-Ottoman celebrations, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan declared that “As our ancestors buried Byzantium, let us hope that today, by building our vision for 2053, we also manage to put in the time warp of history the current Byzantines who are plotting against us.” In order to understand the troubling significance of this otherwise cryptic remark—most Westerners are today totally unaware of the history between Muslim Turkey and Christian Byzantium—some background...

Near the newly-discovered mosque are the ruins of a very different structure: a “strangely magnificent mansion” that may have belonged to wealthy Byzantine Christians, per Haaretz. At around 10,000 square feet, it had frescoed walls, stone pavement, plaster floors and expensive tableware and glassware.The structure also had two ovens, one of which was quite large. Because of its size, along with the fact that it was beside a water cistern, excavation director Elena Kogan-Zehavi hypothesizes that the inhabitants were making soap—which perhaps explains their wealth.“Israel, according to Islamic historians, is one of the areas where soap was made and exported...

The Hagia Sophia, a Byzantine-era religious building in Istanbul, Turkey, was reportedly damaged last week when heavy cleaning equipment cracked the marble floors. It is just the latest incident in recent years that has seen the site damaged. The Hagia Sophia, constructed by the Eastern Roman Emperor Justinian I between 532 and 537, served as the largest Christian cathedral in the world until Constantinople was taken over by the Ottoman Empire in 1453. It was then turned into a mosque and subsequently into a museum by Turkish leader Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in 1935. Considered one of the most important religious...

Saturday, 27 July, 2002, 16:22 GMT 17:22 UK Ancient chess history unearthed The chess piece was found in the ancient city of Butrint A team of British archaeologists have unearthed evidence suggesting that Europeans were playing chess as early as the sixth century. An ivory chess piece, excavated at a Byzantine palace in what is now southern Albania, is more than 500 years older than any previously discovered. Leaders of the University of Anglia expedition said it proves the game has a much longer history in Europe than was previously thought. Until now chess historians had agreed that the game...

"Echoes of History: Ragnarök" is a historical podcast inspired by the video game "Assassin’s Creed Valhalla : Dawn of Ragnarök." It’s the second season of Ubisoft’s popular podcast “Echoes of History."The year 1066 has become indelibly linked to William the Conqueror, the Norman King who by his victory at Hastings seized the English throne. But for every event that becomes gilded in history as a turning point, there were thousands of others overshadowed, and one such event happened only weeks before that fateful battle and involved the same English King, but instead of securing everlasting glory, it ended the career...

JERUSALEM - A boat that plied the coast of the Holy Land 1,300 years ago carrying fish, carobs and olives is helping researchers better understand a little-known period in the region's history. The boat, discovered in a coastal lagoon near the northern city of Haifa, dates from the early 8th century, not long after the rise of Islam and the Arab conquest of the Middle East. The find suggests that a long tradition of sea trade was not disrupted by the arrival of new rulers from the Arabian desert.