

Mosaics Revealed at Ancient Greek City of Zeugma in Turkey - diodorus
http://eu.greekreporter.com/2014/11/11/mosaics-revealed-at-ancient-greek-city-of-zeugma-in-turkey/

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return0
This city is apparently now underwater, but is full of wonderful mosaics. This
is an interesting documentary about the restoration of mosaics during
2000-2004:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUJ7PHCNOVs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUJ7PHCNOVs)

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bonjurkes
Turkish government has huge success for destroying historical remainings. They
just send all Zeugma remainings under water because they wanted to build a
barrage right there!

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kamilafsar
> Turkish government has huge success for destroying historical remainings.

That would be weird since Turkey has huge interests in those "historical
remainings": tourism is one of the biggest sources of income.

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stinos
Marvellous. This excerpt from the article really says what I initially thought
when seeing the pictures: _What is really striking about this mosaic is the
wonderful and vivid colors used as well as the beauty of the heroes’ faces_

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pilsetnieks
That was my first thought as well - in comparison, medieval art looks like
child's scribbles.

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moron4hire
Well, yes, but understand that most of the surviving medieval European pieces
of art are icons and other religious works, which put a number of requirements
on the artist that dictated a less-than-precise portrayal. It was not a
general lack of talent or technical understanding. Politically more important
figures had to be drawn larger than everyone else, with their heads placed
higher, regardless of their more realistic height and position in the scene.
Being often used as sort of religious picture books, the depth dimension is
present, but often used to depict passage of time, not distance from the
viewer. And for a period of time, it was considered sinful to try to "compete
with God" by making things look more realistic.

And like modern software projects, the artists had to work with the employees
they could find and train on their own. It does no good to design a perfectly
rendered scene when the only employees you have on hand to do the grunt and
fill work are recent college undergrads who have only touched PHP or Java.

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pbhjpbhj
> _it was considered sinful to try to "compete with God" by making things look
> more realistic_ //

I'd love a citation that confirmed that? Sounds very like the "of course
everyone thought the world was flat" unfounded claims that people make.

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Luc
The (blogspam?) article slyly omits mentioning a date, but I think these are
mosaics recovered more than 10 years ago, and currently on display at the
Zeugma Mosaic Museum.

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acdha
Clearly they've been around for awhile – the Zeugma Mosaic Museum opened in
2011 according to
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeugma_Mosaic_Museum](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeugma_Mosaic_Museum)
– but it looks like there were some recent releases:

[http://www.archaeology.org/news/2682-141104-turkey-zeugma-
ne...](http://www.archaeology.org/news/2682-141104-turkey-zeugma-new-mosaics)

and the pictures appear similar to the ones in this article covering social
media complaints about the mayor & other dignitaries walking on the mosaics:

[http://www.todayszaman.com/national_mayor-of-gaziantep-
walks...](http://www.todayszaman.com/national_mayor-of-gaziantep-walks-on-
ancient-zeugma-mosaics-in-high-heels_363420.html)

This older 2012 article is worth a look if you want to know more of the
history of the site:

[http://www.archaeology.org/issues/44-1211/features/252-featu...](http://www.archaeology.org/issues/44-1211/features/252-features-
zeugma-after-the-flood)

