Italians discover hoard of Roman statues

[Dover]

Italians discover hoard of Roman statues

The works have been protected by a temple wall which collapsed during an earthquake 1,600 years ago





By Edek Osser
CYRENE. An Italian team of archaeologists has discovered 76 intact Roman statues at Cyrene in Libya. The discovery is remarkable because the site, once a thriving Greek and then Roman settlement, has been under excavation for the last 150 years.

With a nearby coastal port, Apollonia, serving it, Cyrene was once a conurbation equivalent to Alexandria, Carthage and Leptis Magna. An important Dorian colony, founded by Greek settlers from the island of Thera in 631 BC, it was later ruled by the Ptolemies and then the Romans. It was destroyed by an earthquake in 375 AD but continued to be inhabited until the Byzantine period.

At the end of the seventh century BC, the city was not only famous for its grain and wealth, but also for a quasi-miraculous plant, silphium, which has medicinal properties. The trade in silphium, distributed all over the ancient world, was monopolised by Cyrene for at least 200 years. Up until the Roman conquest, silphium was even printed on its currency.

A sacred site in Cyrene, made up of many temples, was discovered by Italian archaeologists between the first and second world wars.

The latest discovery is the work of Mario Luni, an archaeologist from the University of Urbino, who has been working with his team at the site since 1997. Speaking to The Art Newspaper, Professor Luni said: “One morning, a collapsed wall in the Roman temple, which was discovered in the 1930s, revealed a marble serpent wrapped around a stone. We could not have known that this was only the first in a series of statues of every kind and size that we would pull from the ground. We just kept discovering them every day, for a month and a half, and found 76 in total.”...cont'd

http://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/article.asp?idart=11809

[expatriot]

1. What are the odds?

That of all the nationalities, it would be Italians to find Roman antiquities. I bet Mussolini looted them from Rome during World War II and shipped them to his Libyan colony. I wonder if Italy will do the honorable thing and return the statues to the Roman Empire. Just when you think you've heard it all.... Rome and Italy in the same sentence. Geeesh..... life keeps getting stranger and stranger.