Free Republic

In an overlooked corner of the Vatican Museums is a Roman toilet of red marble, probably made for an emperor. This toilet and its twin played an important role in the investiture ceremonies of medieval popes - and inspired a scandalous legend.The Roman Toilet That Became a Papal ThroneMay 3, 2022 | toldinstone

A conservationist in Ukraine discovered an ancient cave complex with Viking carvings behind an abandoned house. Dmytro Perov, a conservationist at the Center for Urban Development in Kyiv, grew up hearing stories about an ancient cave somewhere on the estate of his great-great-grandmother and her family, he told Life Pravda in a Nov. 7 interview. Perov knew the location of the three-story manor — now a dilapidated, abandoned house — in central Kyiv. Perov decided to investigate, he told Live Pravda. He went with a few friends to try and find the cave. After searching for half a day, the...

Zwischgold was used to gild sacred figures. It is not actually gold leaf, which was quite expensive, but a special double-sided foil of gold and silver where the gold can be ultra-thin because it is supported by the silver base. Other microscopy techniques had been used previously to examine zwischgold, however, they only provided a 2D cross-section of the material. In other words, it was only possible to view the surface of the cut segment, rather than looking inside the material. The scientists were also worried that cutting through it may have changed the structure of the sample. But an...

The first day of winter will bring a celestial delight. According to Rice University astronomer Patrick Hartigan, Jupiter and Saturn will appear closer than they’ve been since the Middle Ages. The effect will create a “Christmas Star,” or “Star of Bethlehem.” 2020 can sure use it.Just after the sun sets on December 21, the winter solstice, the two planets will look like a double planet, or large star.“Alignments between these two planets are rather rare, occurring once every 20 years or so, but this conjunction is exceptionally rare because of how close the planets will appear to one another,” said...

* Bishop Sarah Mullally will take over from the retiring holder, Lord Chartres * Bishop Mullally is a self-described feminist, who ordains both men and womenThe Queen has appointed her first female ‘Dean of Her Majesty’s Chapels Royal’ since the post was created in the Middle Ages. Bishop Sarah Mullally, who was also appointed Bishop of London in March 2018, will take over from the retiring holder, The Rt Revd and Rt Hon Lord Chartres, this summer - which means one of her first tasks could be to baptise little Archie Mountbatten-Windsor, the newborn son of the Duke and Duchess...

The island in question was called Cyanida (or Kianida), and is featured on maps from the 15th century based on “Geography" (also known as “Geographia" or the “Cosmographia"), a work written ca. 150 AD by 2nd century AD Greco-Roman geographer Claudius Ptolemy. These include maps published in 1467 in the Reichenbach Monastery (today in Southern Germany) such as Ptolemy’s 9th European Map (Nona Europae Tabula) (featuring Dacia (Datia), Thrace (Thracia), and Upper and Lower Moesia) and Ptolemy’s 1st Asian Map (Tabula Asiae I), depicting Asia Minor / Anatolia. (The maps in question are part of the collection of the National...

“Medieval people may have wanted to restrict cats to the function of animated mousetraps, for the very reason that the cat “stands at the threshold between the familiar and the wild.” “Cats were intruders into human society. They could not be owned. They entered the house by stealth, like mice, and were suffered because they kept the insufferable mice in check.” This causes a kind of conceptual tension. While the cat possesses the characteristics of a good hunter it is useful, “but as long as it does it remains incompletely domesticated.” Heretics, too, in a transferred sense, are not completely...

Thanks to "Game of Thrones," television just can't get enough of the Middle Ages. Those flickering smoky interiors, enormous woolly coats and bloody, ax-heavy battles; the remarkable décolletage, the picaresque foliage and mud. Sometimes there's magic, sometimes there isn't, but, by gosh, there's always plenty of bloody hacking and mud. Certainly "The Last Kingdom," the BBC drama that premieres Saturday and is based on the first book of Bernard Cornwell's "Saxon Tales," checks all these boxes in short order. Don't let the exposition-heavy first episode fool you; this may be a sword 'n' longboat epic with a handsome hero at...

When we think of people who lived in the Middle Ages, it is usually the crushing poverty and high infant mortality that stand out. But now a historian of the medieval period has revealed something less well-known: the ploys that women used to get their other halves into bed. Speaking on a new podcast, Dr Eleanor Janega said that one bizarre method involved wives kneading dough on their naked bodies before baking it to turn it into bread and then serving it to their husbands. Some medieval women also believed that honey was an aphrodisiac and would smother it 'all...

“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...

Curators at the Cincinnati Art Museum made a surprising discovery when they shined a flashlight onto a mirror in their collection, revealing a hidden image. Last spring, Hou-mei Sung, a curator in the museum's East Asian art collection, was rummaging through one of the archives while conducting research on "magic mirrors." When these rare mirrors, typically from Japan or China, are viewed in a certain light, they reveal images on their reflective surfaces, according to CNN. Sung noticed that the mirror, which measures less than 9 inches (23 centimeters) in diameter and is affixed with a strand of bright-red rope,...

Scottish museum acquires 8th c. gold sword pommel An exceptionally rare gold sword pommel that is one of the only ones of its kind ever found in Scotland has been acquired by National Museums Scotland. It was made around 700 A.D. out of solid gold and is decorated with intricate gold filigree, geometric patterns and stylized zoomorphic designs. Garnets are set in the goldwork. Goldwork of any quality from this period is rare in the UK; this object is so rich and so skillfully crafted that it is a unique example on the Scottish archaeological record. The pommel (the widened...

Thousands of years ago, a swath of land along what is now the western coast of England served as a superhighway for humans and animals alike. Today, the ebb and flow of each passing tide reveals more of the ancient footprints that these long-gone travelers stamped into the once mud-caked route.Reminders of their travels can be seen along a nearly 2-mile-long (3 kilometers) stretch of coastline near Formby, England. The footprint beds show how, as glaciers melted and sea levels rose after the last ice age ended around 11,700 years ago, humans and animals were forced inland, thus forming a...

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...

When the bubonic plague arrived in London in 1348, the disease devastated the city. So many people died, so quickly, that the city's cemeteries filled up. "So the king [Edward III], at the time, bought this piece of land and started digging it," says geneticist Luis Barreiro at the University of Chicago. This cemetery, called East Smithfield, became a mass grave, where more than 700 people were buried together. "There's basically layers and layers of bodies one on top of each other," he says. The city shut down the cemetery when the outbreak ended. In the end, this bubonic plague,...

The true beauty of Lady Jane Grey By Nigel Reynolds, Arts Correpondent Last Updated: 1:38am GMT 05/03/2007 The great unsolved mystery of what Lady Jane Grey, England's shortest reigning monarch, looked like may finally have been cracked, thanks to a piece of jewellery, a flower related to the cabbage and the historian David Starkey. Dr Starkey, a Tudor specialist, claimed yesterday that he was "90 per cent certain" that he had succeeded in identifying the first contemporary portrait of Jane Grey, the pious Protestant pawn who was queen for nine days in 1553 before being beheaded at the Tower of...

Tuscan church reveals answer to mystery of Medici deaths John Hooper in Rome Thursday December 28, 2006 The Guardian (UK) Picking through centuries-old rubbish, masonry and discarded body parts beneath an abandoned Tuscan church, an Italian historian believes she has solved one of history's great crime mysteries. For more than four centuries, researchers have puzzled over the fact that Francesco I Medici, the son of the first Grand Duke, Cosimo, died within hours of his wife in October 1587. Legend had it they were poisoned by his brother and successor, a cardinal. Modern historians have tended to settle for the...

SLAGEN, Norway (Reuters) - Archaeologists exhumed the body of a Viking queen on Monday, hoping to solve a riddle about whether a woman buried with her 1,200 years ago was a servant killed to be a companion into the afterlife. As a less gruesome alternative, the two women in the grass-covered Oseberg mound in south Norway might be a royal mother and daughter who died of the same disease and were buried together in 834. "We will do DNA tests to try to find out. I don't know of any Viking skeletons that have been analyzed as we plan to...

CAMERAS MIGHT SHED LIGHT ON CITY CRYPT MYSTERIES 11:40 - 22 August 2007 Thanks to modern technology some of the mysteries surrounding a crypt under the floor of St Stephen's Church in Exeter could soon by solved. Although the crypt has been there since the church was built in the 11th century it has no door, so architects and archaeologists are planning to use fibre optic cameras to see what is there. The church in Exeter High Street is undergoing a £1m restoration. The roof and tower are being repaired and the medieval sanctuary, which was above St Stephen's Bow,...

Vikings acquitted in 100-year-old murder mystery By Alister Doyle Fri Apr 25, 10:06 AM ETReuters Photo: Archaeological conservationist Brynjar Sandvoll and his co-worker Ragnar Lochen (R) study the bones of a... OSLO (Reuters) - Tests of the bones of two Viking women found in a buried longboat have dispelled 100-year-old suspicions that one was a maid sacrificed to accompany her queen into the afterlife, experts said on Friday. The bones indicated that a broken collarbone on the younger woman had been healing for several weeks -- meaning the break was not part of a ritual execution as suspected since the...