I have toyed with a slightly absurd but factualy
correct history of the ancient world, told from the point of view of roofers.
One of the main objectives of many, many, many
conquests was to steal the lead roofing that was used to cover and seal/water proof the roofs of
countless civic and religious and religious buildings,another main target were.....are....
the collums used to support said roofs, or lions
or dragons,horses,whatever....
The ancestry of greek and roman columns are fascinating. People tend to think of the white marble ones, but many of the temples were adorned with beautiful colored marble columns. These were sourced from throughout the empire and conquests. A good book or guide can outline much of greek, roman, and islamic history using columns alone.
the aqueducts and sisterns ander various currently habitated ancient cities are sometimes supported by forests of even more ancient columns
and what we see today in areas where marble was the building material of choice is the stuff that escaped the lime kilns,where mountains of ancient
statuary and architectural marble, was burnt to make lime, to put on the fields of those living in the abandoned cities littering the ancient world
and the fate of bronze statuary and architectural
elements, was of course the same as the lead roofing, as a target for plunder and to be recast
and rededicated to a new god
If they were made in Constantinople, they're Byzantine(as we tend to call the empire) or Roman(as they would have called themselves), not really Greek, right? Just because they spoke Greek doesn't make them Greeks. Or had they been taken from Greece to Constantinopole before being looted in the crusades?
To my mind, calling them Greek is a bit like calling people in, say, Belize "English". If I brought a vase from Belize and said "I brought you an English vase", would you not find that odd?
Just because someone speaks a related language (and I'm pretty sure the Greek of Constantinople was different from the Greek of Athens at the time), doesn't mean that they are the same people. The Byzantines had hundreds of years as a distinct culture from the Greek islands and peninsula, with a major Roman influence.
> To my mind, calling them Greek is a bit like calling people in, say, Belize "English".
Those situations are nothing alike. The Byzantines lived in Greece. Byzantium was founded by Greeks. Others in Europe called them "the Greeks". They were the genuine continuation of Hellenic culture for over 10 centuries.
It's either that or Greeks ceased to exist between Roman conquest and Ottoman independence - at which point they were ruled by a German and, presumably by your logic, were actually Turks anyway, not Greeks.
If you know much about Hellenic history, you know it's been a culture in flux since prehistory. I'd assert there has never been a group that you would call "true Greeks"... except maybe the Graecoi - Hellenic colonists in Italy. Even the post-Classical period of pan-Hellenism was driven and ruled by Macedonians, who a century prior were not considered Hellenes.
> If they were made in Constantinople, they're Byzantine(as we tend to call the empire) or Roman(as they would have called themselves), not really Greek, right?
I mean, define 'Greek'. Byzantium was a Greek city before the Romans got there, Greek was always its major language, and so on. It's not within modern Greece, granted, but nor are a lot of classical Greek cities.
Well, I think we could define it by what the people living there considered themselves to be. And generally, from what I know (but I'm not well read on this subject, so I'm happy to be corrected), the inhabitants of the area would have called themselves Romans, at least by the time the city came to be known as Constantinople.
Also, the culture of Athens or Sparta or Crete or any of the other places that would have called themselves, or at least accepted the term, Greeks (well, Hellenes) was quite different from the culture of Constantinople, at least, again, by the time the city came to be known by that name.
>>> TIL that in 1912 when the island of Lemnos was occupied by Greece, some of the children ran to see what Greek soldiers looked like. "What are you looking at?" one of them asked. "At Hellenes," the children replied. "Are you not Hellenes yourselves?" a soldier
retorted. "No, we are Romans."
It's a common misconception that the crusades were a crime of white christians versus non-white non-christians. In reality crusades were just as well a crime against other white christians as against non-white christians, white non-christians, non-white non-christians, an excuse would be found for any of these targets
Oh yes that was surely a motivator for some but also an excuse for others.
The political landscape of that time was truly complicated and chaotic in a way that is hard to truly capture in the image we have of that time period brought through general education, mostly because of lack of time to explain it all properly
> There is no historical record of when or how the lion arrived in Venice, but it was already installed atop the column in St. Mark’s Square by the time Marco Polo returned from China in 1295.
Venice had trade agreements with the Mongol empire for decades prior to that. It’s not hard to imagine that the Mongols took it from China and traded it to Venetian merchants.
"Further proof arrives through the holes in the sculpture’s head, which researchers believe would have once held horns, and ears which have been rounded off. The sculpture, which is known to have arrived in parts and reassembled, was essentially modified to look more lion-like."
There is also a (bit wild) theory that St. Mark's relics in Venice are actually remains of Alexander the Great. The idea is that he was buried in Alexandria in Egypt and when the Christians started looting and pillaging someone swapped them for St.Mark's remains as those would be protected from them
I was at St.Mark's Basilica just a few days ago (I live in Venice). An informed archeologist pointed to a specific stone decoration on the north facade, telling me that it was depicting Alexander the Great, and this was confirmed only by very recent studies in Alexandria (where she was going to go back the following week).
I would not jump to the conclusion solely based on isotope signatures. A decade or so ago, a prominent Chinese professor Weidong Sun specialized in geochemistry analyzed the ancient bronze artifacts dated back to the Shang dynasty and found isotope signatures pointing to a Mediterranean origin, and he had to answer that. Well there can be several explanations, for example, the Shang people traded with central Asian tribes and got the ores and perhaps the bronze smelting tech too. But Sun, based on some ancient documents on some mythical long travel of the ancestors of the Shang people, concluded that the only reasonable explanation is that the Shang people are offsprings of those tribes, who are offsprings of the Sumerian people.
As an Asian person having grown up with a bit of South Chinese culture, it does appear a bit like a Chinese lion statue, but the wings really throw it off for me.
> Lead isotope analysis of the bronze alloy provided indisputable evidence of the Chinese origin of the materials used in the statue.
Is there some more detailed source explaining how this conclusion was reached? What's distinct about Chinese lead / how this kind of evaluations are done?
The original article translated from Italian puts it this way:
>the results indicate that the colossal statue is most likely an elaborate reassembly of what was initially a zhènmùshòu (镇墓兽 "keeper of tombs") fused in the Tang period (609-907 AD) with copper from the mines of the lower basin of the Yang-tze River, the Blue River in southern China. This is confirmed by accurate analyses of lead isotopes, which leave in the bronze unmistakable traces of the original mines from which the copper was extracted.
The implication is that the mines themselves have different isotope signatures that have been established in previous archaeological studies.
Isotope ratios are very easy and reliable signals compared to impurities. Impurities can be all over the place depending on where the materials were mined. Impurities could have also been added inadvertently during the casting as well.
For those ancient animal gift exchanges I always wonder about the practicality. Travelling overland and over the Himalayas with lions does not seem like the best thing to do.
Also: Back in 801/802 Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne send an emissary - Isaac, the jew - to the Caliph in Baghdad, Harun Al-Rashid. Yes, that one. For the return journey the caliph gave a present, an elephant called Abul Abbas. And according to the historical chronicles Isaac really travelled with Abul Abbas from Badghad to todays Tunesia, crossed the Mediterranean on a ship and travelled to the emperor's court in Aachen, in western Germany. Charlemagne used the elephant in his campaign against the saxons. Abul Abbas seems to have survived until 810, when he died in todays northwestern Germany.
I do love the origin of the term white elephant:
> Because the animals were considered sacred and laws protected them from labor, receiving a gift of a white elephant from a monarch was simultaneously a blessing and a curse. It was a blessing because the animal was sacred and a sign of the monarch's favour, and a curse because the recipient now had an animal that was expensive to maintain, could not be given away, and could not be put to much practical use.
> For those ancient animal gift exchanges I always wonder about the practicality. Travelling overland and over the Himalayas with lions does not seem like the best thing to do.
Presumably that was part of the point; it's a good gift because it's difficult and expensive.
> Also: Back in 801/802 Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne send an emissary - Isaac, the jew - to the Caliph in Baghdad, Harun Al-Rashid. Yes, that one. For the return journey the caliph gave a present, an elephant called Abul Abbas.
That just seems rude. It's one thing to _bring_ an elephant as a gift; quite another to make the recipient responsible for getting the damn thing home.
From wikipedia:
> It seems that in 831, Harun al-Rashid's son al-Ma'mun also sent an embassy to Louis the Pious.
No word on whether Louis sent some sort of inconvenient animal back, as revenge.
Don't miss the power play. Giving of a few beautiful birds would be one thing. Now the emperor can create beauty in the realm.
But Lions. Lions are apex predators, and though they hadn't been seen, the trade routes would surely have brought their reputations ahead of them. Lions kill people, they eat camels, they devour. Kill one and you're mighty. Capture one, and you're very powerful, skillful and brave. Double up and you're formidable. Have a breeding pair and you're a warlord with no need for an army.
The Chinese Imperial story has a lot to do with being the presiding authority of knowledge and power. Check out the preoccupation with celestial events. The emperor made sure that he not only knew when and where an eclipse would take place in the realm, but he went there to make sure people knew that the mysteries of the sky were known by the Emperor.
If you want to cozy up to a ruler like that, you show him that you also know similar power, and you have enough to share ~ "tell your people you can make lions now, thanks to your friends in Persia"
Nowadays it just looks more like 5th gen fighter contracts.
Like elephant, lion is not a native animal. Not in the folklore at least.
Four main direction are dragon, tiger, special bird, Tortoise … wonder if you present a lion to old emperor what does it meant. Giraffe is a good example.
Not necessarily just a singular weird animal either. Sometimes a breeding pair was given. Take this interesting excerpt about Plato's stepbrother:
By 413, Demos had inherited his father's peacocks, descendants of an original breeding pair given to Pyrilampes s.v. on one of his embassies to the Persian court. They were such beautiful εὐόφθαλμος and expensive birds—a pair valued at a thousand drachmae (Ael. NA 5.21)--that visitors would arrive from Sparta and Thessaly to see them, and in hopes of obtaining some of their eggs. Apparently Demos continued the tradition his father had begun, more than thirty years previously, of admitting the public on the first day of each month to view the birds.
To me the face and mane of the lion resemble artwork/designs I've seen from historical Iranian-adjacent/Persian empire related sites all along the historical maximum extent of the Farsi speaking world, much of which overlaps with the historical land based trade routes to/from western China.
Keep in mind that this statue was broken and reassembled several times so it probably doesn't look very much like the original Chinese version any more. In particular, the wings aren't original.
The Lion sculpture has had a very long and obscure history, probably starting its existence as a funerary statue called zhènmùshòu (镇墓兽 in Simplified Chinese, literally “tomb guardian”) in medieval China, during the reign of the Tang Dynasty.
...The Lion, in its present form, is a composite of different pieces of bronze created at very different times, building upon ancient "core" components. It has undergone extensive restoration and repair work at various times.
...More recent studies, however, suggest that the statue likely comes from the regions near the lower course of the Yangtze River, in eastern China, and was probably cast sometime in the period from the 7th to the early 10th century CE, during the reign of the Tang Dynasty. The original bronze figure, taken as a whole, was likely significantly different from the Lion of today...
> In the western world, Asian seals were traditionally known by traders as chop marks or simply chops, a term adapted from the Hindi chapa and the Malay cap, meaning stamp or rubber stamps.
> There is no historical record of when or how the lion arrived in Venice, but it was already installed atop the column in St. Mark’s Square by the time Marco Polo returned from China in 1295.
"Lead isotope analysis of the bronze alloy provided indisputable evidence of the Chinese origin of the materials used in the statue."
So we definitely know that the metal came from China. I suppose it's theoretically possible the metal could have been made in China, exported elsewhere to make into the statue, but that seems like a claim that would require a LOT of evidence to make plausible.
> suppose it's theoretically possible the metal could have been made in China, exported elsewhere to make into the statue
Or the metal was made in China, made into a statue and then reworked into a slightly different one. Happens all the time that statues get melted down and the metal is reused.
> that seems like a claim that would require a LOT of evidence to make plausible
That is not the claim. The claim is that we don’t know.
Direct quote from comment: “the origin of the artwork seems unclear”.
Saying “we know both the metal and the pattern the metal is in came from China” is what requires evidence. (Not extra ordinary evidence, but some. For example the stylistic analysis mentioned in the article could be that evidence easily.)
And before someone tries to psychoanalyse my opinion about the origins of this statue: i do not have an opinion.
The only thing i have strong opinions about is that the person claiming that we do know something is the one who has to provide evidence, not the person who claims we don’t know something.
That seems beyond implausible; shipping bronze half way around the world a thousand years ago would just make no sense at all. It would be _vastly_ more expensive than just sourcing it locally.
> I suppose it's theoretically possible the metal could have been made in China, exported elsewhere to make into the statue
First it's not theoretical where the metal is from, it's just been established. That is all that's been proven.
Second, I'm not aware of much international metals trade across the silk road circa 1290~. If that was the case.. I really would expect some documentation on it. Especially given Venice's historical diligence with recording trade.
I'm not sure what you're trying to imply, even from the comments it's not clear.
Are you being flippant about the metal being from China but the creation (artwork) was done in Venice ?
That would be a bit strange, Venice had access to easier sources of metals than the silk road. Also why would it be a point of contention? If it came from China, cool, that's fascinating that items of this size/magnitude was transported for reasons.. Maybe a gift maybe pillaging ? But that's just speculation.
The main theory is that it actually came to Venice from the sack of Constantinople. Which would make a lot of sense: placing proof of your military power in your main square is something that people would do, and the Eastern Roman Empire probably had more regular contacts with China over the centuries.
> Which the metal came from China but the origin of the artwork seems unclear.
Even wildly famous western artwork often has unknown provenance, or only vaguely-known provenance. Furthermore art historians often see identifying details, stylizations, flaws, etc that laymen (like myself) don't. I'm happy to trust the reporting here as much as I'd trust anything from a field I don't know much about (what alternative is there, really?).
You don't find many of these when looking at the past, and if you do, this should be a giant, glaring red flag. I may not be a trained art historian but I do know my historiography very well.
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