We all know the ancient Romans were skilled engineers, constructing vast highways to cover the enormous lands they conquered. But did you know they were also fashionable? In the Empire, footwear was used as a status symbol in addition to providing warmth and protection. And with Italy's reputation for shoes, it should come as no surprise that their Roman ancestors were also good cobblers.
A stylish shoe on display at The Saalburg in Germany shows just how fashionable women in ancient Rome could be. The Saalburg is a Roman fort located on the ridge of the High Tanus mountain and was part of ancient border fortifications in the area. Enormous in scale, the fort and its surrounding village were home to around 2,000 people at its peak. It was constructed in 90 AD and stayed in operation until around 260 AD when a political and economic crisis caused it to go out of use.
Since 2005, The Saalburg has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site with a museum that displays items found in the area. This includes a 2,000-year-old shoe discovered in a well before going on exhibit for the world to see. Typical of certain types of ancient Roman footwear, they have a leather upper and a hobnailed sole. Shoes were often modeled after caligae—heavy-soled military boots with lots of open areas.
For women, decorative embroidery and patterns were often added to the shoes in addition to laces. Not only demonstrating the craftsmanship of the maker, these shoes helped display the wealth and status of the women wearing them. These thick-soled shoes would have been worn outdoors, with lighter sandals used indoors.
Their destiny to be discovered in Germany shows just how much craftsmanship and style traveled within the Ancient Roman Empire. It's incredible to see that the fashion choices made aren't far off from the modern shoes we wear ourselves.
Archaeologists say a third-century sarcophagus found in what is now western Germany contained the remains of a young Roman woman who was buried along with perfume bottles, a makeup palette and a silver hand mirror.
The Landesmuseum in Bonn said Monday that the massive stone coffin contained an unusual wealth of beauty products, jet jewelry, pins and a folding knife with a handle in the shape of a Hercules figure.
The 4 1/2-ton sarcophagus was discovered along the route of an ancient highway connecting the Roman empire settlements of Trevorum and Colonia Claudia Ara Agrippinensium — now the German cities of Trier and Cologne.
Archaeologists kept their discovery last year secret until further graves in the area had been investigated.
Construction workers in Cologne unearth a structure that is believed to be the oldest German library.
During excavations in Cologne, archaeologists have discovered the foundations of Germany’s oldest verifiable library. Cologne historic preservation official Marcus Trier said on Wednesday that it was built in the 2nd century in Roman Cologne.
The foundations hark back to the 2nd century AD, when Cologne was part of the Roman empire, Marcus Trier, the director of the city's Romano-Germanic Museum said Wednesday. They were first discovered during construction work for a new church one year ago. "At first we thought they were the remains of a space for public gatherings," Trier said, but the walls had "unusual, cavernous structures."
After extensive research, including comparisons with other ancient buildings in Ephesus in modern day Turkey, it became clear that the structure had been a library. "At one point several thousands scrolls must have been stored here," Trier said.
The remains are set to be integrated into the new church building, as the local newspaper Kolner Stadt-Anzeiger reported, and are to be partially accessible to the public.
A German court has ruled that authorities must pay a farmer 773,000 euro (£687,000) for a bronze horse’s head dating back to Roman times found on his land in 2009.
The head, part of a statue of the Roman emperor Augustus, was found by archaeologists in Lahnau in western Germany.
The state of Hesse initially paid the farmer 48,000 euro (£36,000).
The Limburg regional court said that according to state law at the time the farmer was eligible to half the value of the head, which an expert estimated at around 1.6 million euro (£1.21 million). He would also be entitled to interest.
A previously unrecognized 132 million-year-old fossilized sea monster from northern Germany has been identified by an international team of researchers. Findings published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.
The bizarre sea creature was a plesiosaur, an extinct long-necked aquatic reptile resembling the popular image of the Loch Ness monster, which dominated the seas during the Age of Dinosaurs.
The remains of the eight-meter-long skeleton were collected in 1964 by private fossil collectors. The perfectly preserved bones were rescued from heavy machinery excavating a clay-pit at Sarstedt near Hannover.
Despite being discovered nearly half a century ago, a group of international scientists was only recently invited to study the specimen by the Lower Saxony State Museum in Hannover. "It was an honor to be asked to research the mysterious Sarstedt plesiosaur skeleton" says Sven Sachs from the Natural History Museum in Bielefeld, Germany, and lead author on the study. "It has been one of the hidden jewels of the museum, and even more importantly, has turned out to be new to science."
The new plesiosaur was named Lagenanectes richterae, literally meaning 'Lagena swimmer', after the medieval German name for the Leine River near Sarstedt. The species was named for Dr Annette Richter, Chief Curator of Natural Sciences at the Lower Saxony State Museum, who facilitated documentation of the fossil.
The skeleton of Lagenanectes includes most of the skull, which had a meshwork of long fang-like teeth, together with vertebrae, ribs and bones from the four flipper-like limbs.
"The jaws had some especially unusual features." says Dr Jahn Hornung a palaeontologist based in Hamburg and co-author on the paper. "Its broad chin was expanded into a massive jutting crest, and its lower teeth stuck out sideways. These probably served to trap small fish and squid that were then swallowed whole."
Internal channels in the upper jaws might have housed nerves linked to pressure receptors or electroreceptors on the outside of the snout that would have helped Lagenanectes to locate its prey.
The bones also showed evidence of chronic bacterial infection suggesting that the animal had suffered from a long-term disease that perhaps eventually claimed its life.
"The most important aspect of this new plesiosaur is that it is amongst the oldest of its kind" says Dr Benjamin Kear from the Museum of Evolution at Uppsala University in Sweden and senior author on the study. "It is one of the earliest elasmosaurs, an extremely successful group of globally distributed plesiosaurs that seem to have had their evolutionary origins in the seas that once inundated Western Europe."
Elasmosaurs had spectacularly long necks -- the longest of any vertebrate -- including up to 75 individual vertebrae. Not all of the neck vertebrae of Lagenanectes were recovered but it is estimated that around 40 or 50 must have originally been present.
Elasmosaurs flourished during the Cretaceous period but went extinct with the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. Lagenanectes lived in a shallow sea that covered northern Germany around 132 million years ago. It thus predates the last elasmosaurs by nearly 70 million years.
The skull of Lagenanectes will be displayed as a centerpiece in the 'Water Worlds' exhibition at the Lower Saxony State Museum in Hannover.
A chunk of a stone gutter from the birthplace of the ancient Olympic Games, which was illicitly taken from Greece some 80 years ago, has been voluntarily returned by a German member of the public.
Greece’s Culture Ministry said Wednesday that the 75-centimeter (30-inch) long ancient marble fragment was handed over to the Greek embassy in Berlin.
It is now stored at the museum of ancient Olympia, in southern Greece, where the Games were held in antiquity from 776 B.C. to 393 A.D.
A ministry statement said the unnamed German donor believed the chunk may have come from the stadium — where most of the ancient events were held. It didn’t say how he acquired it.
Ancient Olympia had an extensive stone drainage network to deal with flooding.
Herxheim, in southwest Germany, is a Neolithic site that dates back to 5300-4950 BC. Archaeologists found a mass grave that was used by the people of the Linear Pottery culture (LBK); they believe the site was a ritual center for the area. The site was discovered in 1996 when construction work uncovered bones and human skulls. The excavation ended up being a rescue dig, or salvage dig, as it had already been damaged in part during the construction work.
The structure, found at Herxheim, indicates a large village that was up to 6 hectares in size and surrounded by large ovoid pits had been dug over many centuries. Some of these pits cut into each other and created triple semi-circular areas that split into three sections. The patterns of pits suggest that there was a predetermined layout. Due to their age, they have eroded considerably; the structures inside the pits have also eroded over time, and not many still exist.
There are 80 oval pits around the settlement at Herxheim, containing the remains of both human and animals. Inside are also material goods, such as bone and stone tools, pottery, and decorative artifacts. Interestingly, remains of whole dogs have been found intact in some of these pits.
Using an equation called “minimum number of individuals,” which is a quantification process, the researchers decided that the site contains up to 500 humans, ranging from infants to the elderly. However, only half the site has been excavated so far. Few human remains in the pits are intact, and many were shattered and had been dispersed across a pit.
The people who resided in Herxheim in the Neolithic period were known to practice a style of burial called “secondary burial”. This means that the whole of the corpse or partial pieces of it are removed and placed elsewhere. It is also possible that they practiced “sky burials,” in which some parts of the decomposing bodies may have been allowed to be carried off by scavengers. In 2006, a study of the bones revealed that many had been intentionally broken and cut apart, either at death or just after, and stone tools were most likely used to achieve the breaks that have been observed. The study concludes that Herxheim was most likely a ritual mortuary center, otherwise known as a necropolis, where the remains of the dead were destroyed, for reasons as of yet unknown.
A study in 2009 confirmed many of the 2006 findings, as one pit that had been discovered contained 1906 bones and bone fragments that belonged to 10 individuals, ranging in age from infants to the elderly. It was soon obvious that many of the bones had been singled out for their marrow content, and this suggests that a form of cannibalism was practiced there.
Due to the presence of marks and damage to the bones from impact, it is believed that the bodies were defleshed before the bones were shattered and broken.
The skulls were treated in a similar manner, with many of them struck in a way that caused them to fracture into symmetrical shapes. On many, the vault of the skull was preserved. It is not known at this point why these people used such a ritualistic method of burial. Many theories are being shared about why this site exists, including ritual sacrifice or religious use, but it is still very unclear at present.
Kassel in 1783, the capital of the Protestant state of Hesse, whose Prince Karl was one of many high-profile figures linked to the Illuminati.
IMAGE COURTESY BRIDGEMAN/ACI
OIL PAINTING BY J. H. TISCHBEIN
How did a Bavarian professor end up creating a group that would be at the center of two centuries of conspiracy theories?
The 18th-century German thinker Adam Weishaupt would have been stunned if he had known his ideas would one day fuel global conspiracy theories, and inspire best-selling novels and blockbuster films.
Until he was 36, the vast majority of his compatriots would have been equally stunned to discover that this outwardly respectable professor was a dangerous enemy of the state, whose secret society, the Illuminati, was seen to threaten the very fabric of society.
Born in 1748 in Ingolstadt, a city in the Electorate of Bavaria (now part of modern-day Germany), Weishaupt was a descendant of Jewish converts to Christianity. Orphaned at a young age, his scholarly uncle took care of his education, and enrolled him in a Jesuit school. After completing his studies, Weishaupt became a professor of natural and canon law at the University of Ingolstadt, married, and started a family. On the surface, it was a conventional enough career—until 1784 when the Bavarian state learned of his incendiary ideas.
Freemasons, like many secret societies, held initiation ceremonies.
IMAGE COURTESY BRIDGEMAN/ACI
Secret papers seized by the Bavarian authorities revealed fascinating details about the rituals of the Illuminati. A novice preparing to pass to the higher level of minerval, for example, had to present a detailed report on the titles of the books he owned, the identity of his enemies, and the weak points of his character. Upon initiation as a minerval, he promised to sacrifice all personal interests to those of the society.
A closer look at his upbringing, however, reveals that Weishaupt always had a restless mind. As a boy he was an avid reader, consuming books by the latest French Enlightenment philosophers in his uncle’s library. Bavaria at that time was deeply conservative and Catholic. Weishaupt was not the only one who believed that the monarchy and the church were repressing freedom of thought.
Convinced that religious ideas were no longer an adequate belief system to govern modern societies, he decided to find another form of “illumination,” a set of ideas and practices that could be applied to radically change the way European states were run.
Freemasonry was steadily expanding throughout Europe in this period, offering attractive alternatives to freethinkers. Weishaupt initially thought of joining a lodge. Disillusioned with many of the Freemasons’ ideas, however, he became absorbed in books dealing with such esoteric themes as the Mysteries of the Seven Sages of Memphis and the Kabbala, and decided to found a new secret society of his own.
Society of Secrets
Weishaupt was not, he said, against religion itself, but rather the way in which it was practiced and imposed. His thinking, he wrote, offered freedom “from all religious prejudices; cultivates the social virtues; and animates them by a great, a feasible, and speedy prospect of universal happiness.” To achieve this, it was necessary to create “a state of liberty and moral equality, freed from the obstacles which subordination, rank, and riches, continually throw in our way.”
On the night of May 1, 1776, the first Illuminati met to found the order in a forest near Ingolstadt. Bathed in torchlight, there were five men. There they established the rules that were to govern the order. All future candidates for admission required the members’ consent, a strong reputation with well-established familial and social connections, and wealth.
In the beginning, the order’s membership had three levels: novices, minervals, and illuminated minervals. “Minerval” referred to the Roman goddess of wisdom, Minerva, reflecting the order’s aim to spread true knowledge, or illumination, about how society, and the state, might be reshaped.
Adam Weishaupt, founder of the Illuminati
PICTURE COURTESY KARGER-DECKER/AGE FOTOSTOCK
Over the following years, Weishaupt’s secret order grew considerably in size and diversity, possibly numbering 600 members by 1782. They included important people in Bavarian public life, such as Baron Adolph von Knigge and the banker Mayer Amschel Rothschild, who provided funding. Although, at first, the Illuminati were limited to Weishaupt’s students, the membership expanded to included noblemen, politicians, doctors, lawyers, and jurists, as well as intellectuals and some leading writers, including Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. By the end of 1784, the Illuminati had 2,000 to 3,000 members.
Baron von Knigge played a very considerable role in the society’s organization and expansion. As a former Freemason, he was in favor of adopting rites similar to theirs. Members of the Illuminati were given a symbolic “secret” name taken from classical antiquity: Weishaupt was Spartacus, for example, and Knigge was Philo. The membership levels also became a more complex hierarchy. There were a total of 13 degrees of initiation, divided into three classes. The first culminated in the degree of illuminatus minor, the second illuminatus dirigens, and the third, that of king.
The French Connection
After the French Revolution began in 1789, the Illuminati were accused of desiring a similar revolt against the Bavarian regime. Some even claimed that Weishaupt had met the French revolutionary leader Robespierre. In reality, Weishaupt was more of a reformer than a firebrand revolutionary.
An Inside Job
Pressures both internal and external, however, would soon put an end to the order’s expansion into the upper echelons of Bavarian power. Weishaupt and Knigge increasingly fought over the aims and procedures of the order, a conflict that, in the end, forced Knigge to leave the society. At the same time, another ex-member, Joseph Utzschneider, wrote a letter to the Grand Duchess of Bavaria, supposedly lifting the lid on this most secret of societies.
The revelations were a mix of truth and lies. According to Utzschneider, the Illuminati believed that suicide was legitimate, that its enemies should be poisoned, and that religion was an absurdity. He also suggested that the Illuminati were conspiring against Bavaria on behalf of Austria. Having been warned by his wife, the Duke-Elector of Bavaria issued an edict in June 1784 banning the creation of any kind of society not previously authorized by law.
The Illuminati initially thought that this general prohibition would not directly affect them. But just under a year later, in March 1785, the Bavarian sovereign passed a second edict, which expressly banned the order. In the course of carrying out arrests of members, Bavarian police found highly compromising documents, including a defense of suicide and atheism, a plan to create a female branch of the order, invisible ink recipes, and medical instructions for carrying out abortions. The evidence was used as the basis for accusing the order of conspiring against religion and the state. In August 1787, the duke-elector issued a third edict in which he confirmed that the order was prohibited, and imposed the death penalty for membership.
Weishaupt lost his post at the University of Ingolstadt and was banished. He lived the rest of his life in Gotha in Saxony where he taught philosophy at the University of Göttingen. The Bavarian state considered the Illuminati dismantled.
Their legacy, however, has endured and fuels many conspiracy theories. Weishaupt was accused—falsely—of helping to plot the French Revolution. The Illuminati have been fingered in recent events, such as the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Weishaupt’s ideas have also influenced the realms of popular fiction, such as Dan Brown’s Angels & Demons and Foucault’s Pendulum by Italian novelist Umberto Eco. Although his group was disbanded, Weishaupt’s lasting contribution may be the idea that secret societies linger behind the scenes, pulling the levers of power.
The Ascent to Illumination
The Order of the Illuminati’s complex, 13-grade structure was devised by Baron von Knigge, who applied the model used in the masonic lodges of which he had been a member.
The Christian Eye of Providence (as shown on the great seal of the U.S.A.), later a symbol of Freemasonry
First Class
Each novice was initiated in humanitarian philosophy until he became a minerval. He then received the order’s statutes and could attend meetings.
1. Initiate
2. Novice
3. Minerval
4. Illuminatus Minor
Second Class
The various degrees in this class were inspired by Freemasonry. The illuminatus major supervised recruitment, and the illuminatus dirigens presided over the minervals’ meetings.
5. Apprentice
6. Fellow
7. Master
8. Illuminatus Major
9. Illuminatus Dirigens
Third Class
The highest degree of philosophical illumination. Its members were priests who instructed lower-degree members. The lower orders of this class were themselves under the authority of a king.
10. Priest
11. Prince
12. Magus
13. King
MILWAUKEE, WISCONSIN—NPR reports that archaeologist Bettina Arnold of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and her research team worked with Lakefront Brewery to try to re-create an alcoholic beverage that had been placed in a bronze cauldron and buried in a grave sometime between 400 and 450 B.C. in what is now Germany.
It's one thing to appreciate a 20-year-old fine wine. It is something else to brew up a 2,500-year-old alcoholic beverage.
While sifting through the remains of an Iron Age burial plot dating from 400 to 450 B.C. in what is today Germany, Bettina Arnold, an archaeologist and anthropologist at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and others uncovered a cauldron that contained remnants of an alcohol brewed and buried with the deceased.
"We actually were able, ultimately, to derive at least some sense of what the contents were in a bronze cauldron," says Arnold.
So she decided to team up with Milwaukee's Lakefront Brewery to re-create the ancient brew, using a recipe inspired by evidence collected from the archaeological remains.
Arnold says the cauldron actually contained about 14 liters of fairly high-quality liquid. A paleobotanist then analyzed the contents and shared a basic idea of the recipe. "The honey, which is definitely present ... and then as a bittering and preservative agent — not hops ... but meadowsweet," Arnold explains. Mint was also uncovered in the brew.
The alcohol in the vessel is believed to be a braggot. As Chad Sheridan, a cellarmaster at Lakefront Brewery, explains, "a braggot is a blend of barley and honey as the two sugar ingredients to create the beverage."
Sheridan was pulled into the project because of his background in home brewing meads and braggots. Besides yeast, the brew really only contains four ingredients: barley, honey, mint and meadowsweet. It took seven hours to make the brew and another two weeks to let it ferment.
I got to sip the final product. The result was smooth and pleasant — almost like a dry port, but with a minty, herbal tinge to it. It also packed an alcoholic kick.
Alas, you won't find this ancient recipe on beer store shelves any time soon. While it's certainly drinkable and "very cool to taste ... I don't think people would be interested in purchasing it to drink," says Lakefront Brewery's Chris Ranson.
"But it sure was a fun experiment," Ranson adds.
Arnold says it's actually quite fortuitous that they were able to re-create this recipe. "Luckily for us, they didn't just send people off to the afterlife with [swords and spears] — they also sent them off with the actual beverage. It's a BYOB afterlife, you know? You have to be able to sort of throw a party when you get there."
For thousands of years, alcohol has played a vital role in cultures around the world. During the Iron Age, as it is today, alcohol was used as a social lubricant and it was also used to mark special events, like inaugurations, weddings and, in this case, burials.
"Alcohol's a really important part of ritual. It helps us kind of pay attention to a specific moment in time," says Joshua Driscoll. He's an anthropology Ph.D. student at UWM specializing in the history and archaeology of fermented beverages.
"So if you take the example of a toast — everyone raises their glasses, they drink a little bit of the alcoholic beverage and it makes everyone pay attention to that specific moment, which helps them remember it in the future," Driscoll says.
This re-created brew is hopefully the first attempt of many, Arnold says. UWM's College of Letters and Science is developing a program on the culture and science of fermentation. Eventually, she says, she will be developing a course where they will brew up different beverages based upon archaeological evidence.
This story first aired on Lake Effect, a program on member station WUWM in Milwaukee.
Remains of at least five Neaderthal individuals. Dating indicates that the ones marked with an asterisk go back to between 40,500 and 45,500 years ago.
Proponents of the Paleo philosophy, a popular diet based on foods believed to have been eaten by cavemen, are overlooking a gruesome staple of their meals: other people.
Researchers at the University of Tübingen in Germany found that Neanderthals had a taste for human bones and meat. The study published in the journal Scientific Reports on Wednesday found that cannibalism dates back as far as 45,000 years ago. Neanderthal remains discovered in France and the Iberian Peninsula bear cut marks, as well as percussion indentations that show bones were purposefully crushed to extract the marrow.
“These indications allow us to assume that the Neanderthals practiced cannibalism. The many remains of horses and reindeer found in Goyet were processed the same way,” Hervé Bocherens, a University of Tübingen professor and lead researcher.
Not much information is known about Neanderthals who existed between 40,000 and 45,000 years ago, since most research looks at those who lived close to when the human subspecies died out around 30,000 years ago. Some theories suggest that lack of resources contributed to their extinction, while other studies bolster the theory that Neanderthals were an appetizing dinner: A study published in 2009 suggested that humans ate the species to extinction.
“Neanderthals met a violent end at our hands, and in some cases we ate them,” Fernando Rozzi, an anthropologist at the National Center of Scientific Research in Paris, told Time.
No Paleo diet guides were immediately amended to reflect the latest findings.
The Alte Hofhaltung or Alte Residenz in Bamberg was built as the Bishop’s palace in 1571-76. Replaced by the Neue Residenz in 1704. The structure contains fragments of masonry from the great hall and chapel of the 11th-century episcopal palace. Today the Old Court houses the Historical Museum of the city of Bamberg.
Entrance Gate to the 15th century court yard of Alte Hothaltung, Bamberg, Germany.
