2,300-year-old mosaic made of shells and coral found under Rome

https://www.cnn.com/style/rome-palatine-hill-archaeology-discovery/index.html

by clouddrover • 3 years ago

118 19 3 years ago

cnn.com

SSLy2• 3 years ago

Mirror please, the s(h)ite is blocking safari.

jefftk2• 3 years ago

Are you sure? It looks fine in Safari to me: https://imgur.com/a/lHTYmfL

SSLy2• 3 years ago

https://a.uguu.se/COCUiUWU.png And I’ve tried disabling AdGuard, didn’t change anything.

ahmedfromtunis• 3 years ago

I'm surprise that they decided to put article about this mosaic under the "Style" section. I understand that this is were articles about the arts, design and architecture live, but still.

readyplayernull• 3 years ago

Those blue stones, are they painted or natural?

adrian_b• 3 years ago

As mentioned in the article, those are beads of Egyptian blue glass.

The Egyptian blue glass was colored during manufacturing by including in the melted glass certain minerals that contained oxides of copper or, more rarely, oxides of cobalt.

Modern blue glass is usually made with cobalt oxide, a process rediscovered during the Middle Ages.

perihelions• 3 years ago

- "Such an elaborate space would also have been used to impress guests with water games, which were very popular amongst nobility at the time. “We have found lead pipes embedded within the decorated walls, built to carry water inside basins or to make fountains spout to create water games,” said Russo."

It was an eyebrow-raising reading how the water economics of ancient Rome worked [0]. Probably a microcosm of the dysfunction and absurdity of that city as a whole.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_aqueduct#Distribution

sologoub• 3 years ago

That article seems to describe a system where public uses were prioritized over paid. Like in any system, some degree of favoritism/corruption existed, but at least initially it seemed to still serve the public at large quite well. Especially when one considers many of their contemporary equivalents or what followed for centuries in Europe.

lovecg• 3 years ago

Thanks for the link!

The construction of Rome's third aqueduct, the Aqua Marcia, was at first legally blocked on religious grounds, under advice from the decemviri (an advisory "board of ten"). The new aqueduct was meant to supply water to the highest elevations of the city, including the Capitoline Hill, but the decemviri had consulted Rome's main written oracle, the Sibylline Books, and found there a warning against supplying water to the Capitoline. This brought the project to a standstill.

One can’t help but draw parallels with modern day out of control environmental review process…

JoeAltmaier• 3 years ago

Wow, the third of the screen lost to ads was obnoxious.

neonate• 3 years ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20231223142429/https://www.cnn.c...

gwbas1c• 3 years ago

I've never had an issue opening a CNN website; no subscription required. (I use Brave.)

Do other people need to use archive.org to bypass something? Is it region-locked or otherwise has some other kind of barrier?

MagerValp• 3 years ago

I just get an error page that says my browser is “preventing this site from implementing required components that protect your privacy”.

Yeah, no thanks, I trust my adblocker to do that for me.

romanzubenko• 3 years ago

Making something so extremely beautiful is the surest way to optimize for long term longevity.

crazygringo• 3 years ago

Unfortunately that's not true. Most beautiful stuff has been destroyed at one point or another.

The laws of economics and war and necessity really don't care the slightest about beauty.

The pyramids of Giza were covered with fine, smooth, white limestone that gleamed in the sunlight -- as beautiful as you could imagine. That didn't prevent people from stealing most of it later for their own purposes.

iambateman• 3 years ago

I’ll take the other side on this. OP said “surest” which you seem to interpret as “certain.”

Of course not _all_ beautiful artifacts persist - no one takes that position. But it is reasonable to say that most artifacts which receive attention today are just the artifacts which were formed with special care and whose beauty was preserved, probably by accident, for us.

chasil• 3 years ago

When I visited the ancient city of Ostia ("Ostia Antiqua"), I saw several murals, some on the ground with instructions on how to walk on them, and some stacked vertically with chips that had fallen into the soil.

The discovery on the Palatine is impressive, but far from unique.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostia_Antica

archsurface• 3 years ago

"A five-year dig into the side of Rome’s Palatine Hill yielded treasure last week when archaeologists discovered a deluxe banquet room..."

A week to clean up from discovery? I thought these things took much longer.

2,300-year-old mosaic made of shells and coral found under Rome

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