The bronzes from Bubon’s Sebasteion

Illegal digs are inevitable and Turkey with its countless antique sites is no exception. A beautiful bronze head of an unknown young man displayed at the Getty Villa has recently been identified as stolen or illegally excavated, and it is heartwarming to hear that it will be returned to Turkey. 

The Getty Museum in Malibu, California, acquired the head in 1971 and it could be established that it belonged to a now-lost life-size figure. It is marked with the letter alpha (the Greek A) at the bottom of the neck. The inlaid eyes, which always add so much character to a face, are missing. 

Dated to the period between 100 BC and 100 AD, the statue's provenance was not documented, although scholars now link it to the archaeological site of Bubon in ancient Lycia. Since the late 1960s, several bronzes have been smuggled out of Turkey from that area. Most depicted Roman emperors and their families but the head at Getty has yet to be identified. 

In October 2023, the New York Times published an article on these bronzes from illegal digs that have been scattered around the world to various private homes and museums. 

By 1967 the looting became apparent and slowly stopped as the Turkish police found a headless bronze torso hidden in the woods near Bubon. This site turned out to be the main source for this unique collection and authorities are determined to track the looters down. 

Bubon has not been systematically excavated and all that remains are a small theater and stadium, as well as an Acropolis. The main building may have been a shrine or Sebasteion, where several bronze statues stood around a U-shaped courtyard that was probably roofed. The Sebasteion may have been started by Nero and his wife Poppea Sabina. His example was followed by eleven emperors and three empresses, the last being Gallienus, who ruled till 268 AD. In the following decades, Bubon suffered from repeated earthquakes which buried and saved the Sebasteion. 

Scholars and experts aim to restitute the group of statues, which represented an important binding factor between the citizens to the power of faraway Rome. 

In the end, the villagers themselves, now in their 60s and 70s, provided the most precious information. They described the statues and their posture and remembered how they were sold. Their plinths with the names of the emperors in Greek are still in situ. 

Lucius Verus apparently stood next to Marcus Aurelius, his adoptive brother and co-ruler. His headless statue may be at The Cleveland Museum of Art and his Bubon origin is now under investigation. 

Septimius Severus was accompanied by his wife and sons, Caracalla and Geta. His headless statue was on loan at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and has been turned over to the authorities for repatriation. Some experts believe the missing head is kept at the Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen, Denmark. The head of Caracalla has been seized from the Met and his torso is probably in the hands of a Greek collector. Emperor Valerian stood nearby and his torso is now exhibited at the Museum of Burdur, Turkey. Commodus also had a plinth of his own.

In due time, more emperors will be reconciled with their names on the pedestals and more effigies or body parts will be returned to their rightful spot in Turkey. 

[Top picture from Getty Museum. Lucius Verus is mine taken at the MANN]

Plato, more than a philosopher

Plato is a highly fascinating figure. Not only was he a student of Socrates but he taught Aristotle, who, in turn, passed his knowledge on to young Alexander. 

Plato, born in 427 BC, received the best education of his time. Although we know him mainly as a philosopher, he was educated in martial arts and horse riding, besides mathematics and music, painting and drawing. 

When about the age of twenty, he encountered Socrates teaching on the Agora of Athens, he realized that philosophy was a more worthy goal to pursue. 

Socrates hardly wrote anything down. We know about him from Plato and Xenophon, who are not always in agreement. Socrates preferred talking or rather asking questions to the point of embarrassing and irritating his audience. 

Plato followed his master until the Athenians executed him on the charge of impiety in 399 BC. He then left Athens and traveled to other philosophical centers, such as Megara and Syracuse in Sicily, and later to Egypt and Cyrene. He became a student of Pythagoras, Euclid, and Heraclitus, and concentrated on the religion and metaphysics of Egypt. 

Before the Museum of Alexandria was founded, the center of knowledge was in Heliopolis, where priests studied philosophy, astronomy, and theology. Many Greeks like Homer, Pythagoras, Plato, and Solon consulted the Library that contained the history of Egypt going back thousands of years. For us, Egypt's ancient history is lost in the mists of times … How much was (still) available in Plato’s days? Probably far more than we can imagine. 

In the 380s BC, Plato returned to Athens where he started the Academy. The philosopher educated his followers in a shrine of olive groves, sacred to the Greek hero Academos and called therefore, Academia. Plato’s school would continue to thrive till the early 6^th century AD when it was shot down by Emperor Justinian. This Byzantine emperor was determined to erase paganism for good and impose Christianity instead to regain control over the Western Roman Empire. 

Plato is best known for his Dialogues and his Letters. He contributed hugely to our Western culture and religion although few people realize his impact on monotheistic religions like Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. He was the first philosopher to mention and underscore the soul's immortality. For that reason, his work was not destroyed but accepted by the Christian religious leaders. Plato also stressed the importance of ‘objective truth’ in order to live well. 

As a result of the recent advanced imaging diagnostic techniques to read the carbonized papyri from Herculaneum (see: Reading the papyrus scrolls from Herculaneum), scholars have discovered more details about Plato’s life, of which very little is otherwise known. By virtually realigning the bits of burnt papyrus, they were able to restore the continuity of the text and obtain more information. 

The scroll revealed that Plato was sold into slavery on the island of Aegina, south of Athens, either in 404 BC when Sparta conquered the island, or in 399 BC upon the death of Socrates. It was previously and erroneously accepted that this event took place while he resided at the court of Dionysios of Syracuse in 387 BC. 

We also learned more about the final hours of Plato. While battling a fever, he listened to flute music played by a Thracian slave girl. He was still very lucid as he had the strength to criticize the girl’s lack of rhythm. A perfectionist to the end? 

Plato died in 348/347 BC and it is now understood that he was buried in the garden of his Academia of Athens. This is very telling since the Academy is considered the world’s first university, which he founded next to the Mouseion. 

Deciphering the papyrus scrolls is a lengthy process that may well require many more years. Who knows what more we will learn?

The ten oldest languages still spoken in the world today

Language is our means of communication, wherever we are, wherever we go. It would be so practical if we all spoke the same language, yet its diversity is what underscores the uniqueness of each ethnicity or group of people residing in one particular area. Language is closely connected to tradition, ancestry, and history. It is the extra spicing of every tale. 

It was entirely by chance that I found the site of The Culture Trip which offers a concise list of ten languages labeled as being as old as the world to be still spoken today. Amazingly, Greek is not on the list – a deception to many people, no doubt! 

To keep the story true to its source, I simply quote the content of The Culture Trip link that gives all the details of the top ten languages: 

Hebrew, Tamil, Lithuanian, Farsi, Icelandic, Macedonian, Basque, Finnish, Georgian, and Irish Gaelic.

Language evolution is like biological evolution – it happens minutely, generation by generation, so there’s no distinct breaking point between one language and the next language that develops from it. Therefore, it’s impossible to say that one language is really older than any other one; they’re all as old as humanity itself. That said, each of the languages below has a little something special—something ancient—to differentiate it from the masses.
 
Hebrew
Hebrew is a funny case, since it essentially fell out of common usage around 400 CE and then remained preserved as a liturgical language for Jews across the world. However, along with the rise of Zionism in the 19th and 20th century, Hebrew went through a revival process to become the official language of Israel. While the modern version differs from the Biblical version, native speakers of Hebrew can fully comprehend what is written in the Old Testament and its connected texts. As the earliest speakers of Modern Hebrew often had Yiddish as their native language, Modern Hebrew has in many ways been influenced by this other Jewish language.

Tamil

Tamil, a language spoken by about 78 million people and recognized as an official language in Sri Lanka and Singapore, is the only classical language that has survived all the way through to the modern world. Forming part of the Dravidian language family, which includes a number of languages native mostly to southern and eastern India, it is also the official language of the state of Tamil Nadu. Researchers have found inscriptions in Tamil dating back to the third century BCE, and it has been in continuous use ever since. Unlike Sanskrit, another ancient Indian language that fell out of common usage around 600 BCE and became mostly a liturgical language, Tamil has continued to develop and is now the 20th most commonly spoken language in the world.
 
Lithuanian

The language family that most European languages belong to is Indo-European, but they started splitting apart from each other probably around 3500 BCE. They developed into dozens of other languages like German, Italian, and English, gradually losing the features that they had all shared. One language, however, up in the Baltic language branch of the Indo-European family, retained more of the feature of what linguists call Proto-Indo-European (PIE), which is the language that they postulate was spoken around 3500 BCE. For whatever reason, Lithuanian has kept more of the sounds and grammar rules from PIE than any of its linguistic cousins, and can therefore be called one of the oldest languages in the world.
 
Farsi
In case you haven’t heard of Farsi, it’s a language spoken in modern-day Iran, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan, among other places. You’ve probably heard of Persian, and it probably conjures up pictures of genies coming out of bottles. They’re actually the same language, under a different name. Farsi is the direct descendant of Old Persian, which was the language of the Persian Empire. Modern Persian took form around 800 CE, and one of the things that differentiates it from many modern languages is that it has changed relatively little since then. Speakers of Persian today could pick up a piece of writing from 900 CE and read it with considerably less difficulty than an English speaker could read, say, Shakespeare.
 
Icelandic
Icelandic is another Indo-European language, this time from the North Germanic Branch (just for comparison, English is also a Germanic language, but from the West Germanic branch). Many Germanic languages have streamlined themselves and lost some of the features that other Indo-European languages have (you’ve probably never heard of a case, for example, unless you’ve studied Latin or a Slavic language), but Icelandic has developed much more conservatively and retained many of these features. Danish governance of the country from the 14th to the 20th century also had very little effect on the language, so it has mostly gone unchanged since Norse settlers brought it there when they came to the country, and Icelandic speakers can easily read the sagas written centuries ago.
 
Macedonian
The Slavic language family, which includes Russian, Polish, Czech, and Croatian, among others, is relatively young as far as languages go. They only started splitting off from their common ancestor, Common Slavic (or Proto-Slavic), when Cyril and Methodius standardized the language, creating what is now called Old Church Slavonic, and created an alphabet for it. They then took the language north with them in the 9th century as they went to convert the Slavs to Christianity. They came from somewhere just north of Greece, probably in what is now known as Macedonia (or the Republic of Macedonia or FYROM), and Macedonian (together with its very close relative Bulgarian) is the language that is most closely related to Old Church Slavonic today.
 
Basque
The Basque language is the ultimate linguistic mystery. It is spoken natively by some of the Basque people who live in Spain and France, but it is completely unrelated to any Romance language (which French and Spanish are) or indeed any other language in the world. Linguists have postulated over the decades about what it could be related to, but none of the theories have been able to hold water. The only thing that’s clear is that it existed in that area before the arrival of the Romance languages – that is before the Romans got there with the Latin that would eventually develop into French and Spanish.
 
Finnish
Finnish may not have been written down until the 16th century, but as with any language, it has a history that stretches back far earlier than that. It is a member of the Finno-Ugric language family, which also includes Estonian, Hungarian, and several smaller languages spoken by minority groups across Siberia. Despite that, Finnish includes many loan words, which were adopted into Finnish from other language families over the centuries. In many cases, Finnish has retained these loan words closer to their original form than the language that they came from. The word for mother, aiti, for example, comes from Gothic – which, of course, is no longer spoken. The word for king, kuningas, comes from the old Germanic word *kuningaz – which no longer exists in any Germanic language.
 
Georgian
The Caucasus region is a real hotbed for linguists. The main languages of the three south Caucasian countries, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia, come from three entirely different language families – respectively Indo-European, Turkic, and Kartvelian. Georgian is the biggest Kartvelian language, and it is the only Caucasian language with an ancient literary tradition. Its beautiful and unique alphabet is also quite old – it is thought to have been adapted from Aramaic as far back as the third century AD. While not a language island in the same sense as Basque, there are only four Kartvelian languages, all spoken by minorities within Georgia, and they are all unrelated to any other languages in the world.
 

Irish Gaelic
Although Irish Gaelic is only spoken as a native language by a small majority of Irish people nowadays, it has a long history behind it. It is a member of the Celtic branch of Indo-European languages, and it existed on the islands that are now Great Britain and Ireland well before the Germanic influences arrived. Irish Gaelic was the language from which Scottish Gaelic and Manx (which used to be spoken on the Isle of Man) arose, but the fact that really lands it on this list is that it has the oldest vernacular literature of any language in Western Europe. While the rest of Europe was speaking their own languages and writing in Latin, the Irish decided that they wanted to write in their own language instead.

The Culture Trip also offers trips and guides for every traveler around the world.

The remarkable Illyrian helmet

Illyrian helmets truly stand out and are immediately recognizable. Their particularity is the rectangular opening for the face and two parallel ridges on the top of the crown for the crest.

They may be found all over the Balkan but also in Macedonia and Greece proper and evolved from the 8^th to the 3^rd century BC. The earliest version had a low crown and lacked a neck guard. It was soon followed by a helmet with a more pronounced back guard, the typical horizontal ribs, and a decorative edge around the face often using a series of studs. The most recent model showed elongated cheek pieces and a simple decoration around the edges.
 

An early example is in the Museum of Olympia, Greece which dates from the end of the 7^th century/beginning 6^th century BC. It clearly shows the framing studs. The horizontal ribs are already more pronounced than those shown in my previous post, A rare Illyrian Helmet.

 

The Archaeological Museum in Athens has two beautiful specimens from the 6^th century BC. One is this helmet from Pengaion,  550-500 BC
 
The other is the very telling Funerary Mask (see top picture) from 530-510 BC, which is missing the horizontal slit for the crest between the ridges. It is framing the face of the deceased covered in gold foil.

 

As expected, the Museum of Tirana in Albania has a well-preserved helmet on display. It has been dated to 550-500 BC.

 

The Illyrian helmets are in the news after excavations of the burial mounds on the Peljesac Peninsula in Croatia. Several tombs from the 4^th century BC yielded well-preserved Illyrian helmets that have been dated to the 6^th century BC.

 
The eastern Adriatic coast looks very promising since at least a dozen helmets were found in Dalmatia, and even more in Herzegovina.