A lot of the very few surviving samples do of course look really primitive, but at the high end, cobblers in the Roman world were not fuckin' around.
UC28327 here is a pretty ornate sole with a very modern shape.
The upper on this one must have been super nice when new.
Then, there's no reason to suppose that Marcus Aurelius' (and/or Hadrian's) sandals on their statues were idealized past the point of plausibility, though I'm sure once one government contracted statue with approved Imperial sandals gets made, there's a temptation to stick with the motif regardless of the current Emperor's footwear preferences.
Whenever you visit a Roman Fort marked on an O.S. map it’s pretty much always just a barely noticeable hump in the field where there may once have been a wall - if you’re lucky enough to see anything.
Thousands of years ago, a person was cleaning out a well in Roman Spain when one of their leather sandals slipped off their foot. Now, 2,000 years later, archaeologists have found the well cleaner’s missing shoe.
Anybody else a bit weirded out by the fact that some 1/4 of the article is spent talking about fringe religious beliefs rather than the actual awesome history of the site?
Turkey is so full of archeological wonders, they can’t dig a hole without finding something.
I was so sad when I saw in one of their museums a section with artifacts recovered from what they called an “emergency escavation” before the scholars had to make way for the new construction that was going to happen on that particular site.
The museum didn’t mince words either, clearly stated something like “what was possible to recover in the emergency escavation”. Now it’s just concrete over it.
Then we must help the poor thing recover. I suggest we start by giving them world leaders chosen by random dice rolls. Because I don't want to give them babies, but since the world leaders already feed on baby blood, they'll still get that rejuvenation.
The timeline of Egyptian history is so wild. The span of time between this pyramid being built and the founding of Rome is longer than the time between Plato and Aristotle and now. There’s 1,100 years between this pyramid and King Tut. There’s 800 years between this pyramid and mammoths going extinct. And this isn’t the oldest pyramid.
My understanding was that Egypt was also extremely green for a long time. As generations passed and the population grew, over farming the land allowed the dust-bowl creep across the land. Haven’t checked recently but the same thing is happening across parts of China and the dust can blow nearly halfway around the world. Humans have been good at exploiting land for a very long time.
It’s not necessarily human intervention that did this, the Sahara desert was a lot smaller back then, and there’s evidence of regular rain eroding the Sphinx. A similar process happened to the Levant.
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