Archaeology Odyssey, July/August 2003
Features
Plundering the Past
The rape of Iraq’s national museum
During the second week of April, something terrible happened in Baghdad: Looters broke into the National Museum, smashing display vitrines full of ancient objects and making off with some of the museum’s prized holdings. The damage didn’t stop there; frenzied mobs also set fire to the National...Read more ›
The Destruction of the Great Library at Alexandria
On a sunny morning in 642 C.E., armies of Muslim Arabs, in the process of conquering Egypt, destroyed the ancient library at Alexandria, which for a thousand years had been the western world’s most important center of learning.1 The library held a million volumes, including an extensive...Read more ›
Excavating Hollywood
In 1937, Hollywood costume designer John Armstrong was working on I, Claudius, a film version of Robert Graves’s novel set in first-century A.D. Rome. Asked to design costumes for the Vestal Virgins, the six priestesses of the Roman hearth goddess Vesta, Armstrong meticulously researched...Read more ›
Death at Kourion
In the fourth century A.D., a huge earthquake destroyed one of Cyprus’s glittering Greco-Roman cities.
One of the most devastating earthquakes ever to hit the Mediterranean struck a little after daybreak on July 21, 365 A.D. The fourth-century A.D. Latin historian Ammianus Marcellinus called it “a frightful disaster surpassing anything related either in legend or authentic history.” Ships in...Read more ›