Free Republic

Ancient texts speak of a strange and valuable metal known as orichalcum. The mystical material was often dismissed as a fantastical invention – until they discovered a large cache of the stuff in the Mediterranean Sea. Orichalcum’s name is derived from the Greek for "mountain copper.” One of its most prominent mentions comes in the legend of Atlantis by Plato, in which it is described as “more precious [...] than anything except gold.” The dialogue, called Critias, explains how the mythical citadel of Atlantis was adorned with walls, pillars, and floors that were coated in orichalcum, endowing the building with...

...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...

The Fezzan is an area of approximately 212,000 square miles of unforgiving desert and valleys. Situated in the south west of modern day Libya it’s not an area you’d easily traverse, let alone live in. Yet in the 1st millennium BCE a people did exactly that. They created art, irrigated the baked earth and sustained a culture. One of the earliest surviving references to the Garamantes is found in Herodotus’ Histories, written in the 5th century BCE[1]. Herodotus’ description was contradictory, they had no weapons, but they hunted a cave dwelling tribe nearby using chariots. He also went on to...

Greek and Roman writers record the use of a substance called miltos as a decoration, a medicine - and a handy way to repair a boat. Now scientists have worked out why. Andrew Masterson reports. From ancient Greek and Roman source texts it is possible to conclude that in the classical world a mineral, a powder known as miltos, was something of a wonder substance. Miltos - referred to in the works of writers such as Theophrastus, Dioscorides and Pliny - was red, fine-grained, and made up mostly of iron-oxide. By the time Theophrastus, a Greek philosopher and proto-botanist, wrote...

On Sunday, March 6, 2016, Dr. Pier Luigi Tucci, Assistant Professor of Roman Art and Architecture at Johns Hopkins University, will deliver the lecture "Ancient Libraries in Rome: Reconstruction of the Bibliotheca of the Templum Pacis" in the Washington, D.C. area. The event is hosted by the Biblical Archaeology Society of Northern Virginia (BASONOVA) and Biblical Archaeology Forum (BAF). The Templum Pacis (Temple of Peace) was built by the Flavian emperor Vespasian in 75 C.E. near the Roman Forum. It commemorated both the end of the Jewish war and the civil strife that had followed the death of Nero...

Archaeologists have unearthed the remains of a complex in Tuscany they believe was once a bustling staging post on a major trade route mentioned by the ancient Roman writer Pliny. The building, which runs parallel to the River Ombrone in the Maremma Natural Park, was probably built in around 200 AD and functioned for at least a couple of centuries. The size and layout of the building, as well as its location next to a river and a major Roman road, has led archaeologists to conclude they have probably discovered a well-known 'mansio', or staging post. Pliny and another Roman...

Today, some would call Patrick intolerant or bigoted. He was. He would have flunked a class on How to Win Friends and Influence People. Imagine how he would have reacted to diversity training. If he were ministering today, he might refer to Christians as “the Good,” the Druid gods as “the Bad,” and those who believed in the pagan gods as “the Misinformed.” The Druids didn’t like his message. They arrested him several times, but he was always freed to preach another day. During his 30 years as a missionary to the Irish, Patrick spoke out against what he...

Over the centuries the belief lingered on that here had been a great, wealthy, powerful commercial city that dominated the mouth of the Po and the shores of the Adriatic, a city of luxury and splendor, a kind of ancestor and predecessor of Venice, founded more than a thousand years later. Classical scholars also knew about Spina, for ancient literary sources indicated that there must once have existed a thriving maritime trading settlement of great economic importance, until the Celtic invasion of the Po valley destroyed it... The final key to its ultimate discovery came from aerial photography. Some...