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Israeli archaeologists recently found two areas which might have been part of the ancient city of Bethsaida, which was mentioned prominently in the Bible. A Byzantine church may be the missing link needed to establish one of them as the city where two apostles were born. The areas have both Byzantine as well as Roman ruins from the eras through which the city flourished. What the researchers call “Area A” at El-Araj has the remains of the southern, western, and northern walls of the Byzantine-era Church of the Apostles. Also in that same area are the remains from the Roman...

A Turkish homeowner chasing his chickens through a hole in his basement during renovations came across an abandoned underground Turkish city that once housed 20,000 people. ... the ancient city of Elengubu, known today as Derinkuyu. Derinkuyu, burrowed more than 280 feet beneath the Central Anatolian region of Cappadocia, is the largest excavated underground city in the world and is believed to connect to more than 200 smaller, separate underground cities ... Inside the subterranean city — whose entrances connect to more than 600 private homes in the modern, surface-level region of Cappadocia — researchers found 18 levels of tunnels...

A stained glass portrait of St Augustine After Mary Beard's list of important Romans, here's mine...Mary Beard has done more than anyone else, I think, to bring ancient Rome alive, and over at the Guardian she provides us with her list of the ten best ancient Romans. Lists are very personal things, and everyone will have a rival version, so I cannot resist submitting my own. Here are ten people we call all learn from, indeed need to learn from, in the order in which they popped into my head.1. Aurelius Augustinus, better known as St Augustine of Hippo,...

Turkey’s Izmir Archaeological Museum is hosting a different exhibition this month. A bronze strigil is the museum’s guest this month as part of its “You Will See What You Can’t See“ project, in which a new, special artifact is introduced to visitors every month. The Izmir Archaeology Museum recently opened a new, unique exhibition focusing on the historical relic known as a “strigil,” which was used to cleanse the body 2,300 years ago by scraping off dirt, perspiration, and oil. The strigil in issue was unearthed during archaeological digs at Teos, one of the 12 ancient Greek towns that made...

The artefact has inscriptions written in Hebrew, showing partially preserved lines of fragmentary names with letters and numbers carved onto a chalkstone (qirton) slab. The slab was originally used as an ossuary (burial chest), which was discovered in a tunnel previously excavated during the 19th century by British archaeologists. Although the slab was found outside of its original context, an analysis of the type of script and comparisons with contemporary examples suggests that it dates from the early Roman period or the late Second Temple period. During antiquity, the find-site would have been located along the Pilgrimage Road, a major...

The sixth century historian Procopius, in both his History of the Wars, and The Secret History, mentions a sea monster--a gigantic whale--named Porphyrios that dwelt in the Bosporus Strait and the Black Sea, and which terrorized the shipping lanes around Constantinople for about fifty years, and which causes significant headaches for the Emperor Justinian & the Roman navy. Our information is fairly limited, but what can we say about this real life Moby Dick?SOURCES:The Secret History, ProcopiusThe History of the Wars, ProcopiusA Cabinet of Byzantine Curiosities, KaldellisPinned by The Historian's CraftPorphyrios: The Sea Monster that Terrorized the Late Roman Empire3:51...

The Armenian Genocide, the systematic mass murder and expulsion of 1.5 million ethnic Armenians carried out in Turkey and adjoining regions by the Ottoman government between 1914 and 1923, is commemorated on April 24th every year. The Armenian Genocide was an atrocity that occurred within the context of a wider religious cleansing across Asia Minor that lasted 10 years and included Armenians, Greeks, and Assyrians. They were all Christians who were also subjects of the Ottoman Empire. The religious cleansing was actually the first in modern times, and it fit the pattern of genocides that would follow in the century...

On Saturday April 21, the city of Rome celebrated what is believed to be its 2,776th birthday during a traditional celebration called Natale di Roma. The founding of the Eternal City was marked on Saturday with parades of re-enactors dressed as ancient Roman soldiers and gladiators, as well as re-enactments of ancient Roman rituals. The ancient Romans themselves marked the day of their city’s foundation with the festival of the Parilia. During this festival, the Romans honored Pales, the enigmatic deity of shepherds, flocks, and livestock. Grecian Delight supports Greece Rome’s birthday celebrations Modern-day celebrations of Rome’s foundation take place...

Concrete is an incredibly useful and versatile building material on which not only today’s societies, but also the ancient Roman Empire was built. To this day Roman concrete structures can be found in mundane locations such as harbors, but also the Pantheon in Rome, which to this day forms the largest unreinforced concrete dome in existence at 43.3 meters diameter, and is in excellent condition despite being being nearly 1,900 years old.Even as the Roman Empire fell and receded into what became the Byzantine – also known as the Eastern Roman – Empire and the world around these last remnants...

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...