Posted on 03/27/2005 5:12:32 PM PST by nickcarraway
In Libya, again open to U.S. travelers after more than two decades, archaeologists have uncovered spectacular mosaics of the glories of Rome
Helmut Siegert returned to the coast of Libya last year to follow up on a tantalizing discovery. In September 2000, his colleague Marliese Wendowski was excavating what she thought was a large farmhouse when, 12 feet deep in the sandy soil, she came across a floor covered with a stunning glass-and-stone mosaic of an exhausted gladiator staring at a slain opponent. The discovery had come too late in that year's expedition to pursue further, so the University of Hamburg archaeologists reburied the mosaic. "It was well preserved," Ziegert says. "I knew there had to be a lot more."
When Ziegert and his co-workers finally returned to the site—near the town of Homs, which is adjacent to the ancient Roman settlement of Leptis Magna—they found, mixed in with the ruins of a modest farmhouse, those of a stately villa that housed gladiators, ancient Rome's superstar athletes. The mosaics decorated the floor of an elaborate cold-water bathhouse and consisted of tiny pieces of green, brown and gold glass and stone laid in a thin layer of chalk atop about five inches of concrete. Ziegert, who has conducted digs all across northern Africa, was stunned by the works' size: five huge panels that stretched 30 feet. Luisa Musso, a specialist in mosaics and Roman archaeology at the University of Rome Three, says, "I've seen mosaics all over this area, and these are extraordinary."
The scenes captured the gore of the Roman amphitheater that stood nearby. In the panel Ziegert's team uncovered first, the slain gladiator's head tilts backward nearly out of the frame, in a technique more common to paintings than mosaics. In the other panels, four young men wrestle a wild bull to the ground with their bare hands, a warrior does lone battle against a long-antlered deer, and a gladiator wearing intricately patterned trousers hoists his shield over a stricken foe. Some antiquities specialists say the painterly touches indicate that a Roman artist probably created the mosaics. But other experts resent the implication that an African couldn't produce such sophisticated work. "It looks like the artist might have been trained at one of the local schools in North Africa," says Hafed Walda, a Libyan archaeologist based at the University of London's King's College.
The mosaic is a window onto a thriving Roman city at the height of the empire's hold on North Africa. Set in a natural harbor on Libya's North African coast, Leptis Magna was founded some 3,000 years ago by Phoenicians as a commercial trading post for the Mediterranean region. After centuries of political turmoil, the area joined the Roman Empire around 25 b.c. Walls and gates were built around the city later, but residents retained the right to own their land and control local affairs. Leptis Magna's traders did well under Roman rule, but after the empire collapsed, in the fifth century a.d., the city's prestige and population waned. The town disappeared completely in the 11th century. Today, the ancient settlement is nestled next to Homs, a bustling modern town that caters largely to archaeological missions and a growing number of foreign tourists.
Like many of Leptis Magna's original buildings, the villa that Ziegert has been uncovering was buried over time by the slow shifting of nearby hills. Musso guesses that the villa's owner was a prosperous local trader. Given the mosaic's artistry, she says, the trader would have had immense wealth. "Everyone who stepped into the villa would know immediately how rich he was."
Last June, Ziegert hired Libyan workers to lift the panels out of the ground, haul them more than a mile and cement them to the walls of the small Leptis Magna Mosaic Museum financed by Italian officials. The removal incensed some archaeologists, who claim that the mosaics were irreparably damaged. "The beautiful Roman artwork remained well preserved under the sand for almost 2,000 years, only to be hastily and clumsily unearthed," Giuma Anag, a technical adviser to Libya's Department of Archaeology, bemoans in an e-mail. "It will take a good restorer several years and a lot of money to rid the mosaic of its current steel-and-concrete base." Musso and others believe that instead of relocating antiquities, officials should arrange for security guards to watch over intact archaeological sites. "It's always better to leave something where it is," Musso says. "But one of the issues is that there is a great difficulty in finding money to preserve them on the spot."
Ziegert dismisses the concerns, saying that the mosaics were damaged centuries before during an earthquake around a.d. 200. Abdallah Elmahmudi, the scientific research director for Libya's Department of Archaeology, also denies the archaeologists harmed the artifact. "It was excavated according to scientific theories," he says. "The people are very good workers and used the materials that we have in the department."
The dispute highlights new pressures on Libya, which is promoting its archaeological ruins as a tourist attraction after decades as an international pariah. In February 2004, President Bush lifted the 23-year-old ban on U.S. citizens traveling to Libya; in September, air travel between the two nations resumed. The move came after Libya agreed to dismantle its nuclear weapons facilities and compensate the families of people killed in the 1988 bombing of a New York City-bound Pan Am airliner over Lockerbie, Scotland; 270 people, including 189 Americans, died in the terrorist act, committed by a Libyan intelligence officer now jailed in Scotland. The United States still limits exports to Libya, and the nation remains on the State Department's list of terror sponsors along with countries such as Iran, Syria and Cuba.
Still, hundreds of Americans have recently traveled to Libya on package tours to visit the ruins of Leptis Magna, Sabratha and Cyrene. Among the best-preserved ancient Roman and Greek towns on the Mediterranean, the sites nonetheless show signs of neglect. "They're fantastic, but they look like they have been put in the hands of caretakers who don't give a damn," says Wisconsin travel consultant Rex Fritschi. Standing in the lobby of a Tripoli hotel last October, he said his group had found garbage strewn at some sites and no working toilets at others. Government officials and archaeologists say they need more funds not only for excavating but also administering archaeological sites.
If the gladiator mosaics are any indication, Libya's potential as a window into the Roman Empire's past has only just begun to be tapped: less than a third of Leptis Magna, a 1,500-acre site, has been excavated. As archaeologists continue to work, visitors to the little museum can contemplate the Roman equivalent of an action movie. The mosaics, Musso says, "are so full of passion and drama, it's like watching a film. They are really cinematic."
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For more information on this topic, explore the Archives of Smithsonian Magazine: East Meets (Wild) West (March 2005) Ahead of Its Time? (January 2005) Unearthing Athens' Underworld (November 2002)
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Vivienne Walt, who has worked as a reporter for Time magazine, is based in Paris. Originally published in the April 2005 issue of Smithsonian. All rights reserved.
There seesm to have been that lots of construction jobs were available back in the ancient days.
I thought this might interest you.
I thought this might interest you.
Sorry!
fascinating story
tomorrow.
Again, no one thought to bring a camera.
"It's always better to leave something where it is," Musso says.
If the objective of archeology is to expand the knowledge of humanity by studying past human life and culture, the focus ought to be on the former as well as the latter. If the objective is to give people like Musso trips to dig sites, what's the bother? I don't care if educated people dig up nifty stuff if no one else ever gets to see it.
Maybe the Libyans should have preserved it better, or transported it more safely, but their judgment on this issue still seems better than Musso's.
(Denny Crane: "Sometimes you can only look for answers from God and failing that... and Fox News".)
Please FREEPMAIL me if you want on, off, or alter the "Gods, Graves, Glyphs" PING list --
Archaeology/Anthropology/Ancient Cultures/Artifacts/Antiquities, etc.
The GGG Digest -- Gods, Graves, Glyphs (alpha order)
somewhat related:
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Bump
"Maximus Decimus Meridius" bump.
I would like to attempt something like that. Where do you get the tiles and other supplies?
Hi, FreedomCalls! I hope you don't mind, but I am going to post part of an email I wrote to a friend who was thinking about creating a mosaic for his entryway to his house. Here goes:
As for a primer on how to do it ... well, the best thing you can do is get yourself a good book on the subject! As for it being hard -- in one way it is quite easy, in
another it is very hard. Conceptually there's nothing to it, piece o' cake. Basically, what you do is glue the pieces to a piece of special netting (using water-soluble glue), then when it is all done, you use mastic to
stick the netting and tile down to your base (usually cement board). Let that dry, then grout it. Not hard.
The hard part is twofold: one, marble is much harder to work than tile! It is really, really dense and hard, difficult to cut through. (Though thick porcelain tile can be quite hard also.) Think seriously about whether a thinner tile wouldn't work just as well as marble. Also, if you use tile, you could do part of it in mosaic and part of it, maybe the border, in solid (maybe fancy) tile, and save yourself a lot of work. The second hard part is that
this takes FOREVER! We have been working on this project for months. Every time we have to make a cut on a marble bit, you have to either do it by hand (with one of two different kinds of nippers) or step over to the tile saw.
Then like as not, the cut isn't quite right, so you have to fiddle with it a bit more. You end up making 2 or 3 cuts on a single 1/2" x 1/2" piece! So you can see why this is time-consuming.
If you are a marble tesserae junkie, I'd suggest trying to figure out a pattern that uses as few cuts as possible, maybe a geometric. (Curves in the pattern almost always mean cuts! Try not to use curves, unless they are gradual enough that you won't need cuts.) If you could do a pattern in straight geometric lines, or mostly that, it would take a lot less time, since all you would need to do is glue the bits on place, rather than cutting them first.
Another issue is cost. It has turned out to be a bit on the costly side, since it has taken more marble than I originally figured. I have been afraid to add up all my receipts, but I think the materials have run about $400,
and it is only 40" x 43". I also bought two pairs of nippers at about $20 each, and a small tile saw from Home Depot for about $90. (Of course, the nippers and saw will be used for other projects.) You also need a small file
and an edge smoothing stone. Professionals often use a hardie (a small anvil) and special hammer, but I have not been able to find any locally and was reluctant to order something unless I was sure I would like it.
Where do you get this stuff? Almost any tile store, or over the Internet. Comparison shopping is a must! Also, different stores handle different manufacturers, so colors and sizes can be a bit different. It is all about 3/8" thick, but sizes range from 1/2" to 5/8" square. It is available in polished or tumbled. I chose polished since it has more intense color. Prices can also rise, for seemingly inexplicable reasons. The price has doubled on two of the colors since I started, and no one seems to know why.
I'd suggest trying it on a small scale first, maybe do the top of an end table or cover a terra cotta pot, if you have never done mosaic work at all. I have heard stories from many people now about projects they started and abandoned. I would also suggest making the piece first, and then cutting out the spot for it on your floor last, so that you are not walking around an empty spot on your floor for months on end (as we have been!) OTOH, if you do have the patience, it is certainly rewarding. It makes me so happy when I go out to our garage and see our nearly completed piece. I do think it is beautiful, and it is exactly what I wanted.
FVNNY!
Thanks. I saw a beautiful mosaic in Greece once that I have forever regretted not buying. I didn't want to lug it around and didn't want to spend the moeny and have regretted it ever since.
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