Saturday, August 30, 2003
Update!
I went back to see if I could get into the museum - it was rather late - and I was able to walk right in! It has changed quite a bit in the past three months. There are very slick interactive presentations all around the temple that show how the dig was performed and one showed the warehouse in which all the stones were stored (yeah, they stored EACH ONE in its individual plastic bag!). A lot of the findings were encased in the periphery. Many small oil lamps, offering bowls, bones from chickens and other food and a surprising number of scrolls were discovered. About half of the scrolls (which were etched onto some metal sheet) have been translated. I don't know what language they were supposed to be, but they sure weren't Latin. Anyway, here are a few photos that I took.
I went back to see if I could get into the museum - it was rather late - and I was able to walk right in! It has changed quite a bit in the past three months. There are very slick interactive presentations all around the temple that show how the dig was performed and one showed the warehouse in which all the stones were stored (yeah, they stored EACH ONE in its individual plastic bag!). A lot of the findings were encased in the periphery. Many small oil lamps, offering bowls, bones from chickens and other food and a surprising number of scrolls were discovered. About half of the scrolls (which were etched onto some metal sheet) have been translated. I don't know what language they were supposed to be, but they sure weren't Latin. Anyway, here are a few photos that I took.
Roman Around
I just saw something very interesting today. Mainz was first inhabited by Romans almost 2,000 years ago and a few places in Germany have quite a few Roman artifacts left (Cologne, Trier and Mainz). Mainz even has THREE Roman museums. One for the collection of Roman boats that have been found in the silt of the Rhine, a museum of the many monuments that the Romans put up here and a third that displays smaller pieces of Roman art.
Well, a fourth museum just officially opened today and this one is very unusual indeed. This museum is UNDER the one and only shopping mall in Mainz, which was built on the site of Roman temple dedicated to the Egyptian Goddess Isis. Yes, you read that correctly. Evidently one of the Roman emperors was on VERY good terms with one of the pharoahs and so they have the one and only Roman/Egyptian temple in Europe here in Mainz. One stipulation that Germany put on the mall builder was that they renovate the temple into a museum. You see, the existence of the temple has been known about for a long time but there were insufficient funds to do it justice, so they left it buried. Not a bad idea. It's been there for about 1,700+ years and why not leave it there until it can be done right?
Well, that is what the mall company has been doing for the past two years. The entrance to the underground temple is inside the mall and it looks just like another shop until you notice Romanesque posters and columns inside. I talked my way past the old lady several months prior to opening in exchange for helping them with their translation of the English Tour Guide. The translator had trouble with the difference between "skeleton" and "skull", "offering" and "payment" and assorted grammatical errors. I descended the stairs into a big, dark cavity and workmen were painstakingly reassembling all the stones of the temple under the glare of light like a film stage. They consulted a big map for every stone that they mortared into place. It turns out that the first thing the archaeologists did at the start of the project was to completely disassemble the temple and they cataloged the location of every stone! They did this to do a complete archeological study UNDER the temple. I understand that they dug down to two meters UNDER the foundation of the temple, which would have been about 12 meters underground altogether. At that time I had a good idea of how the temple was laid out and my first impression was that it was SMALL. I guess my sense of perspective has been warped by the giant cathedrals here.
Anyway, today was the big opening. The archaeologists had extracted a nice collection of artifacts that were sent to another of Mainz's museums for study and preparation. Incidentally, do you remember about the "Ice Man" that was found up in the Alps between Italy and Austria? Well, they sent all of the Ice Man's possessions here to Mainz for study. This is the same museum that did the preparation of the temple artifacts. I read that they had brought the choice artifacts that had been excavated back from the temple and they were finally in place in the temple. I was looking forward to see the completed temple except there was one problem: a line of people waiting to enter that nearly filled the mall! Was I disappointed? A little, but not too much because in typical German fashion, they made a big event out of the opening.
They had a Roman festival to accompany he opening! The first thing I noticed as I walked to the mall was the horde of people and one of those huge jumbo-tron television screens set up for those in the back to see. I got there just in time to see a white haired man dressed in Roman Senator fashion burn an offering of meat and bread in a little brazier (note: it smelled nice for a minute or two, but then BOY did it stink and BOY was it slow about burning up completely!). The local television station was there and a lot of photographers and many people, but I muscled my way up to a get a good place from which to watch...
GLADIATORS!!!
Yep, they had gladiators in period-correct armor and weapons warming up for combat! Sweet! Not only that, they had a band of Roman-costumed people playing period instruments entertaining the crowd. A few men played those LONG, straight brass instruments that look like the bugler at the Kentucky Derby. Another man played an oversized tambourine-looking instrument and another man played a brass instrument that had been bent around in a great circle. Since these instruments have no valves to vary the length of the instrument, the player must make any change in tone with their lips alone. When they play a single tone they sound nice enough, but they usually are able to make only a few distinct tones.
The first up was a tall man, bare chested, with a black-plumed helm that covered him completely down to lower part of his neck. He had to see through grating over the eyeholes. He fought with a sort of spear with a padded tip and a large shield. From his knees to his ankles was brass armor over heavy padding. The combination of his height (he was perhaps two meters tall) and the helm and plumage made him look like a giant. He fought against a man with medium shield and a wooden long sword. His brass helm also covered him down to his neck. He had little peepholes to see out of.
I have never seen sparring with Roman weapons and really didn't know what to expect. Understand that these guys were NOT new to this sparring and they took it pretty seriously. They were going at each other as seriously as their padded weapons would allow them to.
Separating the two combatants was what I suppose would be a referee with a woven length of branches in his hand. He stood between them until he wanted them to fight, in which case he jumped back quickly.
The first bout was won by the spear wielding giant. The victory was called by the referee by virtue of the spear having made it past the man's shield and clearly hit him in the gut. Had the spear not been padded he would have been skewered like a shish kebob.
But it was the second bout that was REALLY interesting to me. One combatant used a large shield and a short wooden sword and wore another full-coverage brass helm with little peepholes. His opponent wore no helm and wore only a heavy padding and armor on his left arm and left leg and he used a trident and a throwing net for his weapons! Now THIS is what I wanted to see. Looking closely I noticed that he also carried a small wooden sword, presumably as a backup.
I have never seen a net used in combat and I really didn't know how it should be used. It was actually pretty simple. The net-wielder used a defensive strategy with his equipment. As soon as an opportunity presented itself he threw the net over his opponent. His opponent - to his credit - did not try to avoid the net because if he had been distracted for even a millisecond to extricate himself the trident would have gigged him like a sucker in a creek. The net didn't seem to have an effect at all... at first. The trident-wielder moved quickly laterally to keep the swordsman moving and when the swordsman attempted an attack the ingenuity of the net made itself apparent. The trident-wielder attempted to stop the assault by putting the tines of his trident in the face of the swordsman. Easily enough the swordsman knocked the trident aside and moved quickly forward... except the trident got caught up in the net! This caught the rapidly advancing swordsman like when a running dog reaches the end of his leash. It looked comically painful and he almost lost his footing.
Now that the swordsman was caught and a bit off balance, the trident-wielder immediately took the initiative and started to pull the swordsman around trying to knock him off his feet, safely at shaft's length from the point of the short sword. As quickly as he had been caught by the net he was free of it and it fell to the ground. I don't know he got loose, but he did and he was PISSED!
The trident-wielder circled the swordsman trying to retrieve the fallen net but the swordsman cut him off at every turn. The swordsman attacked again quickly and when the trident wielder tried to back up he ran into a wall of people! The swordsman turned the trident aside with his shield and the short sword flashed up from around his large shield past the trident-welders guard and he stabbed him in the side. Again, if that had been a metal sword he would have been gutted like a trout. As it was you could see a red weal under his ribcage that was going to leave a nasty bruise by tomorrow.
The two went for a second bout because the audience got in the way in the first one. The trident-welders strategy of defense was more effective this time and he succeeded in really angering the swordsman, who just couldn't get in close for an attack. The swordsman actually tried to rip the trident out of the welders grasp and I rather think that was a stupid thing to attempt and in a short time so did he. He was lucky he let go of the shaft as soon as he did. This bout ended when the infuriated swordsman tried another quick, linear advance and the trident-wielder caught him right in the eyeholes during the approach! It is one thing to see a silent sword strike, but quite another to see the definitive end to a bout accompanied by muted bell ringing sound effect. He was nailed so convincingly that the helm was damaged! If the trident had been unpadded it would have been gory indeed.
I wandered around to see some of the other kiosks and there was a "Roman Makeup" display were women could have themselves "made over" in Roman fashions. If they were historically accurate in their makeovers, Tammy Bakker would have been right at home. It looked more like the pancake they use for stage shows than makeup. Another man made papyrus scrolls and wrote in Latin on the papyrus. Another made Roman jewelry in bronze and silver. Still others offered Roman food (which doesn't look much different than what we eat today).
I hope to get to the museum on Monday when there won't be such a crowd.
I just saw something very interesting today. Mainz was first inhabited by Romans almost 2,000 years ago and a few places in Germany have quite a few Roman artifacts left (Cologne, Trier and Mainz). Mainz even has THREE Roman museums. One for the collection of Roman boats that have been found in the silt of the Rhine, a museum of the many monuments that the Romans put up here and a third that displays smaller pieces of Roman art.
Well, a fourth museum just officially opened today and this one is very unusual indeed. This museum is UNDER the one and only shopping mall in Mainz, which was built on the site of Roman temple dedicated to the Egyptian Goddess Isis. Yes, you read that correctly. Evidently one of the Roman emperors was on VERY good terms with one of the pharoahs and so they have the one and only Roman/Egyptian temple in Europe here in Mainz. One stipulation that Germany put on the mall builder was that they renovate the temple into a museum. You see, the existence of the temple has been known about for a long time but there were insufficient funds to do it justice, so they left it buried. Not a bad idea. It's been there for about 1,700+ years and why not leave it there until it can be done right?
Well, that is what the mall company has been doing for the past two years. The entrance to the underground temple is inside the mall and it looks just like another shop until you notice Romanesque posters and columns inside. I talked my way past the old lady several months prior to opening in exchange for helping them with their translation of the English Tour Guide. The translator had trouble with the difference between "skeleton" and "skull", "offering" and "payment" and assorted grammatical errors. I descended the stairs into a big, dark cavity and workmen were painstakingly reassembling all the stones of the temple under the glare of light like a film stage. They consulted a big map for every stone that they mortared into place. It turns out that the first thing the archaeologists did at the start of the project was to completely disassemble the temple and they cataloged the location of every stone! They did this to do a complete archeological study UNDER the temple. I understand that they dug down to two meters UNDER the foundation of the temple, which would have been about 12 meters underground altogether. At that time I had a good idea of how the temple was laid out and my first impression was that it was SMALL. I guess my sense of perspective has been warped by the giant cathedrals here.
Anyway, today was the big opening. The archaeologists had extracted a nice collection of artifacts that were sent to another of Mainz's museums for study and preparation. Incidentally, do you remember about the "Ice Man" that was found up in the Alps between Italy and Austria? Well, they sent all of the Ice Man's possessions here to Mainz for study. This is the same museum that did the preparation of the temple artifacts. I read that they had brought the choice artifacts that had been excavated back from the temple and they were finally in place in the temple. I was looking forward to see the completed temple except there was one problem: a line of people waiting to enter that nearly filled the mall! Was I disappointed? A little, but not too much because in typical German fashion, they made a big event out of the opening.
They had a Roman festival to accompany he opening! The first thing I noticed as I walked to the mall was the horde of people and one of those huge jumbo-tron television screens set up for those in the back to see. I got there just in time to see a white haired man dressed in Roman Senator fashion burn an offering of meat and bread in a little brazier (note: it smelled nice for a minute or two, but then BOY did it stink and BOY was it slow about burning up completely!). The local television station was there and a lot of photographers and many people, but I muscled my way up to a get a good place from which to watch...
GLADIATORS!!!
Yep, they had gladiators in period-correct armor and weapons warming up for combat! Sweet! Not only that, they had a band of Roman-costumed people playing period instruments entertaining the crowd. A few men played those LONG, straight brass instruments that look like the bugler at the Kentucky Derby. Another man played an oversized tambourine-looking instrument and another man played a brass instrument that had been bent around in a great circle. Since these instruments have no valves to vary the length of the instrument, the player must make any change in tone with their lips alone. When they play a single tone they sound nice enough, but they usually are able to make only a few distinct tones.
The first up was a tall man, bare chested, with a black-plumed helm that covered him completely down to lower part of his neck. He had to see through grating over the eyeholes. He fought with a sort of spear with a padded tip and a large shield. From his knees to his ankles was brass armor over heavy padding. The combination of his height (he was perhaps two meters tall) and the helm and plumage made him look like a giant. He fought against a man with medium shield and a wooden long sword. His brass helm also covered him down to his neck. He had little peepholes to see out of.
I have never seen sparring with Roman weapons and really didn't know what to expect. Understand that these guys were NOT new to this sparring and they took it pretty seriously. They were going at each other as seriously as their padded weapons would allow them to.
Separating the two combatants was what I suppose would be a referee with a woven length of branches in his hand. He stood between them until he wanted them to fight, in which case he jumped back quickly.
The first bout was won by the spear wielding giant. The victory was called by the referee by virtue of the spear having made it past the man's shield and clearly hit him in the gut. Had the spear not been padded he would have been skewered like a shish kebob.
But it was the second bout that was REALLY interesting to me. One combatant used a large shield and a short wooden sword and wore another full-coverage brass helm with little peepholes. His opponent wore no helm and wore only a heavy padding and armor on his left arm and left leg and he used a trident and a throwing net for his weapons! Now THIS is what I wanted to see. Looking closely I noticed that he also carried a small wooden sword, presumably as a backup.
I have never seen a net used in combat and I really didn't know how it should be used. It was actually pretty simple. The net-wielder used a defensive strategy with his equipment. As soon as an opportunity presented itself he threw the net over his opponent. His opponent - to his credit - did not try to avoid the net because if he had been distracted for even a millisecond to extricate himself the trident would have gigged him like a sucker in a creek. The net didn't seem to have an effect at all... at first. The trident-wielder moved quickly laterally to keep the swordsman moving and when the swordsman attempted an attack the ingenuity of the net made itself apparent. The trident-wielder attempted to stop the assault by putting the tines of his trident in the face of the swordsman. Easily enough the swordsman knocked the trident aside and moved quickly forward... except the trident got caught up in the net! This caught the rapidly advancing swordsman like when a running dog reaches the end of his leash. It looked comically painful and he almost lost his footing.
Now that the swordsman was caught and a bit off balance, the trident-wielder immediately took the initiative and started to pull the swordsman around trying to knock him off his feet, safely at shaft's length from the point of the short sword. As quickly as he had been caught by the net he was free of it and it fell to the ground. I don't know he got loose, but he did and he was PISSED!
The trident-wielder circled the swordsman trying to retrieve the fallen net but the swordsman cut him off at every turn. The swordsman attacked again quickly and when the trident wielder tried to back up he ran into a wall of people! The swordsman turned the trident aside with his shield and the short sword flashed up from around his large shield past the trident-welders guard and he stabbed him in the side. Again, if that had been a metal sword he would have been gutted like a trout. As it was you could see a red weal under his ribcage that was going to leave a nasty bruise by tomorrow.
The two went for a second bout because the audience got in the way in the first one. The trident-welders strategy of defense was more effective this time and he succeeded in really angering the swordsman, who just couldn't get in close for an attack. The swordsman actually tried to rip the trident out of the welders grasp and I rather think that was a stupid thing to attempt and in a short time so did he. He was lucky he let go of the shaft as soon as he did. This bout ended when the infuriated swordsman tried another quick, linear advance and the trident-wielder caught him right in the eyeholes during the approach! It is one thing to see a silent sword strike, but quite another to see the definitive end to a bout accompanied by muted bell ringing sound effect. He was nailed so convincingly that the helm was damaged! If the trident had been unpadded it would have been gory indeed.
I wandered around to see some of the other kiosks and there was a "Roman Makeup" display were women could have themselves "made over" in Roman fashions. If they were historically accurate in their makeovers, Tammy Bakker would have been right at home. It looked more like the pancake they use for stage shows than makeup. Another man made papyrus scrolls and wrote in Latin on the papyrus. Another made Roman jewelry in bronze and silver. Still others offered Roman food (which doesn't look much different than what we eat today).
I hope to get to the museum on Monday when there won't be such a crowd.
