I'm surprise that they decided to put article about this mosaic under the "Style" section. I understand that this is were articles about the arts, design and architecture live, but still.
When I visited the ancient city of Ostia ("Ostia Antiqua"), I saw several murals, some on the ground with instructions on how to walk on them, and some stacked vertically with chips that had fallen into the soil.
The discovery on the Palatine is impressive, but far from unique.
- "Such an elaborate space would also have been used to impress guests with water games, which were very popular amongst nobility at the time. “We have found lead pipes embedded within the decorated walls, built to carry water inside basins or to make fountains spout to create water games,” said Russo."
It was an eyebrow-raising reading how the water economics of ancient Rome worked [0]. Probably a microcosm of the dysfunction and absurdity of that city as a whole.
That article seems to describe a system where public uses were prioritized over paid. Like in any system, some degree of favoritism/corruption existed, but at least initially it seemed to still serve the public at large quite well. Especially when one considers many of their contemporary equivalents or what followed for centuries in Europe.
> The construction of Rome's third aqueduct, the Aqua Marcia, was at first legally blocked on religious grounds, under advice from the decemviri (an advisory "board of ten"). The new aqueduct was meant to supply water to the highest elevations of the city, including the Capitoline Hill, but the decemviri had consulted Rome's main written oracle, the Sibylline Books, and found there a warning against supplying water to the Capitoline. This brought the project to a standstill.
One can’t help but draw parallels with modern day out of control environmental review process…
Unfortunately that's not true. Most beautiful stuff has been destroyed at one point or another.
The laws of economics and war and necessity really don't care the slightest about beauty.
The pyramids of Giza were covered with fine, smooth, white limestone that gleamed in the sunlight -- as beautiful as you could imagine. That didn't prevent people from stealing most of it later for their own purposes.
I’ll take the other side on this. OP said “surest” which you seem to interpret as “certain.”
Of course not _all_ beautiful artifacts persist - no one takes that position. But it is reasonable to say that most artifacts which receive attention today are just the artifacts which were formed with special care and whose beauty was preserved, probably by accident, for us.
As mentioned in the article, those are beads of Egyptian blue glass.
The Egyptian blue glass was colored during manufacturing by including in the melted glass certain minerals that contained oxides of copper or, more rarely, oxides of cobalt.
Modern blue glass is usually made with cobalt oxide, a process rediscovered during the Middle Ages.
