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The ancient coin of Cleopatra: There could have been pyramids in Paris

3/11/2014

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Found in an archaeological dig in Bethsaida, this rare bronze coin tells of love, trade ties and globe-shaking jealousies. And what if Marc Antony had won the war?

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The Lover's Coin
Great rulers come but a rare few leave a mark echoing down the millennia. Two such were Cleopatra and Marc Antony, who fleetingly placed Egypt at the center of the ancient world, only to unleash unrest and eventually war on the region.

A few thousand years is a mere blink of an eye when it comes to the vital ties between this land and Egypt, as attested by a rare coin carrying historical weight far greater than its 7.59 grams, which depicts the notorious lovers – and which emerged last year from the ruins of a first-century house at Tel Bethsaida on the Sea of Galilee.

Tel Bethsaida rises from the northern coast of the Sea of Galilee, but the coin was minted in another city by another sea – the Mediterranean port of Akko - today better known as Acre. The coin, made of bronze, is about the size of a quarter, being 21–23 millimeters in diameter (it is not perfectly round, at least not any more). Its date shows that it was minted in the last half of the year 35 or the first half of 34 BCE.

Mark Antony, the most powerful man in the world at the time, is on one side of the coin and Cleopatra graces the other. On her side are the Greek words “of the people of Ptolemais.”

Ptolemais is the Greek name for ancient Akko, which was founded in the 3rd century BCE and named after Ptolemy II Philadelphus. The name appears in the New Testament (Acts 21:7) as the home of an early Christian community that Paul the apostle visited: "And when we had finished our course from Tyre, we came to Ptolemais, and saluted the brethren, and abode with them one day."

The coin was minted some two and a half centuries after the city was founded, a time when both Mark Antony and his bitter rival Octavian were in their prime and no one knew who would prevail, Arav says.

Why depict them? The cities of the ancient Middle East had a habit of minting coins bearing the portraits of whoever was in power, says Dr. Donald T. Ariel, head of the Israel Antiquities Authority Coin Department.

And Marc Antony was most definitely powerful in the year stamped on the coin. Prof. Rami Arav, director of the Bethsaida Excavations Project, suggests that the minting of the coin may have had to do with Marc Antony's victory over the Parthians, rulers of a land in what is now northeastern Iran and Armenia, in 35 BCE. He then granted Armenia to Cleopatra’s sons and gave Cyprus to her daughter Selene.

Cleopatra also appears on coins from the same period, found in cities further north up the Lebanese coast, that were among gifts Marc Antony gave his consort.

That same year Marc Antony, still deeply involved with Cleopatra, moved the capital of the empire from Rome to Alexandria, Egypt.

The west could have been worshipping cats

Had Antony not lost the battle of Actium in 31 BCE, there might have been a dramatic change in the history of the Western civilization, Arav says.

“We can only imagine what could have happened to Western civilization if the capital of the empire was not Rome, but Alexandria," Arav says. "Until Augustus turned it ‘from a mudbrick city to marble’ Rome was a very unimpressive town. It could have remained an unimportant city on an insignificant peninsula of Italy, way in the west, where according to the Greeks, demons and giants lived.”

When pressed to imagine what could indeed have happened, Arav, says: “I am not sure that we would be worshipping cats today or building pyramids, but Greek could have been much more important than it was and perhaps the rise of Europe in the 15th century would not have happened. Who knows?”

But Antony did lose that battle, and 11 months later, he took his own life, dying in Cleopatra's arms in an immortal star-crossed lovers’ moment.

Other coins from Akko have been found in Bethsaida, showing the trade connections between the port city, an international commercial hub at the time, and Bethsaida, a regional one, Arav points out.

The "lovers' coin" recalls Bethsaida around the turn of the first millennium, when its main claim to fame was being the New Testament home of the apostles Peter, James and John.

Bethsaida was where Jesus is believed to have healed a blind man (Mark 8:22-25) and fed the 5,000 (Luke 9:5-17). But much of the efforts of Arav’s team involve uncovering remains that go back a thousand years before that – to a time the city was the capital of the ancient, strategic kingdom of Geshur, the homeland of one of the wives of David’s youth, Maacah.

Coins with the portraits of Antony and Cleopatra are extremely rare. Only six have been found anywhere in the world, says Ariel. But to him the coin recalls Cleopatra’s connection with a man who doesn't even appear on it - the man who, after Jesus, is perhaps the best-known figure of this land: Herod the Great.

Cleopatra managed to persuade Marc Antony to wrest Herod’s priceless balsam plantations from him and hand them over to her. As a client king of Rome, there wasn’t much Herod could do about that (in fact, it is said Herod rented the plantations back from her and still turned a profit).

However, Ariel notes, Herod, who was no stranger to romantic imbroglios, was able to resist the queen’s wiles - unlike Julius Caesar and Marc Antony - and hold on to the rest of his kingdom.

In fact, Herod confessed to Augustus, the victor of the battle of Actium, that he had always counseled Marc Antony to kill Cleopatra, to put an end to the long civil war that tortured Rome after the assassination of Julius Caesar.


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Viennese archaeologist claims to have identified the bones of Cleopatra's murdered sister or half-sister.

3/11/2014

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PictureThis image shows reconstruction of Cleopatra's murdered half-sister, Arsinoe IV
A Viennese archaeologist lecturing in North Carolina this week claims to have identified the bones of Cleopatra's murdered sister or half-sister. But not everyone is convinced.

That's because the evidence linking the bones, discovered in an ancient Greek city, to Cleopatra's sibling Arsinoe IV is largely circumstantial. A DNA test was attempted, said Hilke Thur, an archaeologist at the Austrian Academy of Sciences and a former director of excavations at the site where the bones were found. However, the 2,000-year-old bones had been moved and handled too many times to get uncontaminated results.

"It didn't bring the results we hoped to find," Thur told the Charlotte News-Observer. She will lecture on her research March 1 at the North Carolina Museum of History in Raleigh.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/26/cleopatra-half-sister-bones-murdered_n_2766739.html


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Cleopatra's Palace -- a surprising find

3/11/2014

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Exploration of the Palace of Cleopatra

The ruins of Cleopatra's palace and temple complex are sunken in waters off Alexandria.

- Topographical surveys have allowed underwater archaeologists to conquer the harbor's poor visibility.

- Divers are finding stunning artifacts, including coins, a statuette of a pharaoh and tiny amulets.

Plunging into the waters off Alexandria Tuesday, divers explored the submerged ruins of a palace and temple complex from which Cleopatra ruled, swimming over heaps of limestone blocks hammered into the sea by earthquakes and tsunamis more than 1,600 years ago.

The international team is painstakingly excavating one of the richest underwater archaeological sites in the world and retrieving stunning artifacts from the last dynasty to rule over ancient Egypt before the Roman Empire annexed it in 30 B.C.

Using advanced technology, the team is surveying ancient Alexandria's Royal Quarters, encased deep below the harbor sediment, and confirming the accuracy of descriptions of the city left by Greek geographers and historians more than 2,000 years ago.

Since the early 1990s, the topographical surveys have allowed the team, led by French underwater archaeologist Franck Goddio, to conquer the harbor's extremely poor visibility and excavate below the seabed. They are discovering everything from coins and everyday objects to colossal granite statues of Egypt's rulers and sunken temples dedicated to their gods.

"It's a unique site in the world," said Goddio, who has spent two decades searching for shipwrecks and lost cities below the seas.

The finds from along the Egyptian coast will go on display at Philadelphia's Franklin Institute from June 5 to Jan. 2 in an exhibition titled "Cleopatra: The Search for the Last Queen of Egypt." The exhibition will tour several other North American cities.

Many archaeological sites have been destroyed by man, with statues cut or smashed to pieces. Alexandria's Royal Quarters -- ports, a cape and islands full of temples, palaces and military outposts -- simply slid into the sea after cataclysmic earthquakes in the fourth and eighth centuries. Goddio's team found it in 1996. Many of its treasures are completely intact, wrapped in sediment protecting them from the saltwater.

"It's as it was when it sank," said Ashraf Abdel-Raouf of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, who is part of the team.

Tuesday's dive explored the sprawling palace and temple complex where Cleopatra, the last of Egypt's Greek-speaking Ptolemaic rulers, seduced the Roman general Mark Antony before they committed suicide upon their defeat by Octavian, the future Roman Emperor Augustus. It is also the site of the Temple of Isis, with its Sphere of Destiny where reportedly Cleopatra contacted the gods through the "Eye of Cleopatra," some sort of seer's stone of power.

Dives have taken Goddio and his team to some of the key scenes in the dramatic lives of the couple, including the Timonium, commissioned by Antony after his defeat as a place where he could retreat from the world, though he killed himself before it was completed.

They also found a colossal stone head believed to be of Caesarion, son of Cleopatra and previous lover Julius Caesar, and two sphinxes, one of them probably representing Cleopatra's father, Ptolemy XII.

Divers photographed a section of the seabed cleared of sediment with a powerful suction device. Their flashlights glowing in the green murk, the divers photographed ruins from a temple to Isis near Cleopatra's palace on the submerged island of Antirhodos.

Among the massive limestone blocks toppled in the fourth century was a huge quartzite block with an engraving of a pharaoh. An inscription indicates it depicts Seti I, father of Ramses II.

"We've found many pharaonic objects that were brought from Heliopolis, in what is now Cairo," said Abdel-Raouf. "So, the Ptolemaic rulers re-used pharonic objects to construct their buildings."

On the boat's deck, researchers displayed some small recent finds: imported ceramics and local copies, a statuette of a pharaoh, bronze ritual vessels, amulets barely bigger than a fingernail, and small lead vessels tossed by the poor into the water or buried in the ground as devotions to gods.

Alexandria's Eastern Harbor was abandoned after another earthquake, in the eighth century, and was left untouched as an open bay -- apart from two 20th century breakwaters -- while modern port construction went ahead in the Western Harbor. That has left the ancient Portus Magnus undisturbed below.

"We have this as an open field for archaeology," Goddio said.

From Here: http://news.discovery.com/history/archaeology/cleopatra-underwater-ruins.htm
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Cleopatra's Sanctum Sanctorum

1/27/2014

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Since the early 1990s, the topographical surveys have allowed the research team led by French underwater archaeologist Franck Goddio to conquer the harbor of Alexandria. The field of vision is clearer. 

"This location is a unique site in the world," said Goddio who has spent two decades trying to find the lost city.

This photo is from the exploration that took a team of divers to the palace and temple complex of Isis. This is a central and essential part of the palace compound. The goddess Isis was special to Cleopatra. Isis was the goddess of magic and power. 



Cleopatra is reputed to have been schooled in the mysteries of Isis and Osiris, and the priests of these gods were very powerful. They were thought to have means of magic, telepathy and clairvoyance, which legend says were taught to the young princess from her youth.

It is in this temple, in a small room known as "The Sphere of Destiny," that Cleopatra was supposed to have kept a large quartz block. It had a smooth polished surface about the size of two hands on one of the upper faces of the stone. 



It was by scrying into that dark mirror that Cleopatra was supposed to be able to see the past and future, communicate with her generals and even it was said, she was to first see the face of Mark Antony. 


This stone of power was called the "Eye of Cleopatra," or "Cleopatra's Eye" and was rumored to be as old as Egypt itself. After the death of Cleopatra and Antony, the stone disappeared never to be seen again. Could it still be buried somewhere here beneath the bay?

It was in the Temple of Isis where Cleopatra's love affair with the Roman general Antony took place--his rooms were there. The pair allegedly committed suicide following the defeat by his former ally Octavian. Octavian then appeared with the name of the Roman Emperor Augustus.

Teams of divers find a central place in the life of Cleopatra and Antony, the dramatic pair whose love was so famous, including the Timonium where Antony withdrew from the outside world after the defeat of Octavian by Brutus in the Civil War. The building has not been completed because Antony committed suicide.



They also found a large head-shaped stone monument, which is strongly suspected as that of Caesarion, son of Cleopatra and her lover before Antony, Julius Caesar. The team also found two sphinxes that one of them is probably the picture of Cleopatra 's father , Ptolemy XII . 


Discovery in the waters of Alexandria will be on display at the Franklin Institute, Philadelphia , United States ( U.S. ) from June 5 to January 2, 2010 in the exhibition titled "Cleopatra : The Search for the Last Queen of Egypt ". Exhibition will then continue to other cities in North America.

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This is a photo of the area of Alexandria where Cleopatra's Palace lies.
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This is a map of the Palace of Cleopatra excavations. Mark Anthony's rooms are marked. The Temple of Isis, where Cleopatra's sanctum and Mark Antony's rooms were located was a sumptuous and lavish compound that was more of a palace of its own than a cultic shrine.

Much has been made of the last days of Cleopatra's rule, but in fact, the complex is revealing of her whole reign and her industrious and brilliant architectural, military and artistic knowledge. Her brain and wit were more important to her success than her beauty. She seemed to have knowledge and resources way beyond that of those she dealt with, and the scribes of the day attributed this to her deep Egyptian magic.

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    Marcus Devol

    I am an archaeologist and adventurer. I love dogs, food, wine, and books. Most of all, I love to dig.

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