A rare Roman-era Mausoleum With Mosaics Excavated in London

 

Photo: Museum of London Archaeology

Roman London was a thriving metropolis and outpost of empire. Known as Londinium, it was founded around 43 CE when Roman troops invaded England. They built the earliest “London bridge,” as well as temples, bathhouses, palaces, and more. The remains of this ancient cosmopolitan network still lie below the modern city, and are often discovered during building projects and archeological digs. Recently, a rare mausoleum was unearthed in London's Southwark neighborhood in the Liberty of Southwark site. This incredible find includes mosaics, stairs, and other fascinating relics.

The excavation site has previously yielded impressive mosaics. The Museum of London Archaeology (MOLA) on behalf of Landsec and Transport for London (TfL) conducted this most recent dig which encountered the mausoleum. The building consists of a mosaic floor, raised platforms, walls, and even stairs leading up to another mosaic. It appears the ancients may have built a second, raised floor above the original lower mosaic. Over 100 coins, pottery shards, roofing tiles, and metal fragments were uncovered, too.

The site was likely a burial ground for wealthy Roman Londoners. However, coffins have not yet been uncovered. “This relatively small site in Southwark is a microcosm for the changing fortunes of Roman London—from the early phase of the site where London expands and the area has lavishly decorated Roman buildings, all the way through to the later Roman period when the settlement shrinks and it becomes a more quiet space where people remember their dead,” says Antonietta Lerz, senior archaeologist at MOLA. While The Liberty of Southwark will be a commercial complex, there are plans to preserve the site so that the public can see this cool part of the city's history.

Lerz adds, “The rediscovery of thus Roman mausoleum and mosaics is a testament to the rich tapestry of our past.” You can explore the site in 3D with this model to see for yourself.

A rare Roman-era mausoleum has been excavated in London's Southwark neighborhood, indicating the former presence of a substantial building of Roman London.

Photo: Museum of London Archaeology

The unique site features a mosaic floor that likely was part of a larger burial complex.

Photo: Museum of London Archaeology

Photo: Museum of London Archaeology

Helen Keller Wrote a Letter to Book-Burning Nazis About the Power of Ideas In 1933

 

Nazi students picking through the collected materials of Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, director of the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin on May 6, 1933 in preparation for a book burning. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)

Helen Keller is known for her activism for the disabled community. After a childhood illness rendered her deaf and blind, she learned to read, write, sign, and speak. Graduating Phi Beta Kappa from Radcliffe College in 1904, Keller was the first deafblind person to earn a Bachelors of Arts degree in the United States. A writer, a socialist, and a suffragette, her activism extended far beyond the deafblind community to touch many national and world affairs. Powerfully, in 1933, Keller penned an open letter in The New York Times warning Nazi students—who were openly burning books, including her own—of the perils of the fascist desire to crush opposing ideas.

The letter can be seen in a typed draft by Keller from May 9, 1933. It contains handwritten additions from Keller's aid Polly Thompson. Keller's book, How I Became a Socialist, had been earmarked for burning on a long list made by the Nazi party for a mass burning event on May 10, 1933. On that day, university students participated in burnings across Germany. The 25,000 books burned targeted a variety of topics, from socialist works like Keller's to Freud to science fiction like H.G. Wells. While anything deemed “un-German” or antithetical to the Nazi regime was in danger, the burnings were heavily targeted towards the works of Jewish authors.

Keller for her part was aware of this attack's anti-Semitic focus. “Do not imagine that your barbarities to the Jews are unknown here,” she wrote in her open letter. Her letter, shared below, speaks to the power of ideas and the impotency of the fascist response to destroy and suppress. While incredibly dangerous, such responses cannot kill ideas which have already permeated the ether of society. Her words, while spoken 90 years ago and directed at a foreign nation, are worth remembering today, as books are banned from school libraries or pulled from public shelves for describing the experiences of people of color and LGBTQ+ individuals. History, as always, must prove a lesson—even as book banning parties would try to rewrite it.

In 1933, Helen Keller wrote an open letter in The New York Times to Nazi students, warning them of the perils of trying to stamp out ideas.

Helen Keller in 1920. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0)

Keller, a socialist, paints a bleak picture of the fascist desire to stamp out ideas.

Helen Keller's own draft of the 1933 letter she wrote to Nazi students. (Photo: Internet Archive)

Here is the text of Helen Keller's Letter:

To the student body of Germany:

History has taught you nothing if you think you can kill ideas. Tyrants have tried to do that often before, and the ideas have risen up in their might and destroyed them.

You can burn my books and the books of the best minds in Europe, but the ideas in them have seeped through a million channels and will continue to quicken other minds. I gave all the royalties of my books for all time to the German soldiers blinded in the World War with no thought in my heart but love and compassion for the German people.

I acknowledge the grievous complications that have led to your intolerance; all the more do I deplore the injustice and unwisdom of passing on to unborn generations the stigma of your deeds.

Do not imagine that your barbarities to the Jews are unknown here. God sleepeth not, and He will visit His judgment upon you. Better were it for you to have a mill-stone hung around your neck and sink into the sea than to be hated and despised of all men.

Her words on learning from history, and the resilience of ideas against oppression, can certainly have modern meaning.

The Empty Library at the Bebelplatz in Berlin, designed by Micha Ullman. The sculpture is a memorial to the book burnings of Nazi rule. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0)

Manuscript 500-Year-Old Contains First Recorded Stand-Up Comedy Routine

The first known mention of the phrase “red herring” in its modern meaning. (Photo: National Library of Scotland)

One can find fascinating, surprising things in medieval manuscripts. These rich records of history and culture include anything from a list of herbs or religious prayers to innovative dog names and pictures of cute kittens. Time-consuming to create, expensive to buy, and precious to pass on, these books hold a certain fascination today. A new find suggests they may even provide insight into the history of comedy. Before there was Monty Python, there was Richard Heege. His manuscript is a rare record of a real-life performer's “stand up” comedy in the 15th century, and it includes the first recorded use of the phrase “red herring” in its modern meaning.

The comedic value in this manuscript, held by the National Library of Scotland, was noted recently by Dr. James Wade, a scholar at Cambridge, in the Review of English Studies. “We shouldn’t assume that popular entertainers weren’t capable of poetic achievement. This minstrel clearly was,” explains Dr. Wade. Around 1480, Heege copied three texts by hand into a volume. He likely copied the storylines from a memory-aid for minstrels, traveling performers who made their living entertaining crowds across England. Much of the humor contained within could be considered slapstick sketch comedy, by today’s standards.

The three texts include a burlesque romance called The Hunting of the Hare, a “mock sermon in prose,” and The Battle of Brackonwet, nonsensical verse. The Hunting of the Hare features killer rabbits, a trope often seen in medieval literature and in the Beast of Caerbannog of Monty Python fame: “Jack Wade was never so sad / As when the hare trod on his head / In case she would have ripped out his throat.” The hunted become the hunters. The next piece, the “sermon,” then encourages drinking and references popular drinking ballads. In poking criticism at the nobles of the day, the author calls events a “red herring” or distraction. This is the first known reference of the phrase in this meaning.

Lastly, The Battle of Brackonwet invokes the famous robin hood among a cast of trippy characters, such as jousting bears, that would have been at home in Disney's film. “Heege gives us the rarest glimpse of a medieval world rich in oral storytelling and popular entertainments,” says Wade. In the late 15th century, society was changing. Heege, who was a tutor to a wealthy family, captured this change in a rare insight into a vanished culture. “These texts remind us that festive entertainment was flourishing at a time of growing social mobility. People back then partied a lot more than we do today, so minstrels had plenty of opportunities to perform. They were really important figures in people’s lives right across the social hierarchy. These texts give us a snapshot of medieval life being lived well.”

This medieval manuscript from the 15th century contains fantastical jokes and sassy social critique.

Scribe's additions to Richard Heeg's comedic manuscript. (Photo: National Library of Scotland)

Killer rabbits are a theme in medieval literature. (Photo: The Smithfield Decretals, decorated in London, England, in the 1340s: Royal MS 10 E IV, f. 59v-61v/British Library)

Global Seed Vault on a Norwegian Island

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault. (Photo: Subiet via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0)

Would you like a tour of one of the world's most exclusive venues? It may not be the hottest club in Manhattan or the chicest Instagram backdrop in Paris, but only a select few get to see the inside of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen. The doors only open a few times a year for select people, but now a virtual tour is allowing everyone to peer inside the concrete “doomsday” collection of seeds from around the world. Start at the entrance and work your way through the snow-shrouded interior of the mountain to learn more about the 1.2 million seeds deposited inside.Opened in 2008, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault is the world's backup reserve of seeds from plants both common and rare. The location was chosen for its relative insulation from warming climates and its remoteness. The building, which looks like a concrete “pride rock,” was carved into the side of Plateau Mountain. It stands alone against the cold landscape. Some of the vault lies under 400 feet of rock, and five metal doors separate the seeds within from the world outside. Inside, towers of shelves hold thousands of boxes containing seeds in aluminum envelopes. A low temperature of -18 degrees Celcius preserves this precious material.

The aluminum envelopes contain over 1.2 million samples of plant seeds from around the world. Each envelope can hold 500 seeds, and the entire vault has the “capacity to store 4.5 million varieties of crops,” according to Crop Trust. So, why collect these crops? Many countries, in fact, have their own gene banks around the world. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is the backup to these local reserves, in the case for some reason they are unavailable or depleted. For example, the vault stepped up to provide samples in 2015 for the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas after an Aleppo seed bank became unusable during the Syrian civil war. Now 15 years into its mission, the vault's collection continues to grow.

“From here in Svalbard, the world looks different. This seed vault represents hope, unity, and security,” says Stefan Schmitz, executive director of the Crop Trust and a co-manager of the vault, in a statement. “In a world where the climate crisis, biodiversity loss, natural catastrophes, and conflicts increasingly destabilize our food systems, it has never been more important to prioritize safeguarding these tiny seeds that hold so much potential to adapt our future food to such global threats.”

Explore this potential yourself through the virtual tour, by Virtual Tour Company. Click the arrows to “walk” or use the map function to see the entire amazing facility.

Interior storage of the vault. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)

The vault holds over 1.2 million seed samples, including examples from most of the world's countries.

Aluminum bags holding seeds. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)