Archaeology Odyssey

See Charles Thomas’s splendid work, Christian Celts: Messages and Images (Tempus, 1998).

No works of the late-fifth-century B.C.E. sculptor Polyclitus have survived; in Roman times, however, he was famous as the sculptor of the Doryphorus (the spear-bearer), much imitated by Roman sculptors. The fourth-century B.C.E. Athenian sculptor Praxiteles’s works include the Aphrodite of Knidos and the altar of the Artemision in Ephesus (neither work has survived). Scopas, a fourth-century B.C.E. sculptor from the island of Paros, designed the Temple of Athena at Tegea, not far from Sparta.

The Bible records a later exception to this rule: The Israelite king Solomon (c. tenth century B.C.E.) married the daughter of the Egyptian pharaoh (1 Kings: 9:16)

Mitanni kings bore Hurrian names until they actually ascended to the throne; then they assumed their Indo-Aryan names. A number of Hurrian words dealing with the breeding and training of horses are also Indo-Aryan.

The Sumerian word for coppersmith, tabira, probably derives from the Hurrian tab-iri (“the one who has cast [copper]”). This may suggest the importance of the Hurrian ledge sites for access to natural resources in the north.

Most scholars believe that Hurrian and Urartian derive from a single language and that these two branches broke off sometime in the late fourth or early third millennium B.C.

See E.C. Krupp,“Sacred Sex in the Hittite Temple of Yazilikaya,” AO 03:02.

The British archaeologist Arthur Evans found numerous Linear B tablets in his excavations at Knossos, on the island of Crete, some three decades earlier. Mycenaeans from the Greek mainland occupied Crete in the mid-second millennium B.C.

See Hershel Shanks, “The Great MFA Exposé,” AO 02:02 and “How to Stop Looting: A Modest Proposal,” AO 04:02.

For more information on the Miami Circle, see Richard L. Stroup and Matthew Brown, “Deciding the Future of the Past: The Miami Circle and Archaeological Preservation” (available from the James Madison Institute in Tallahassee, Florida).