Did the Romans ever conduct archaeologic expeditions ( in Egypt or Mesopotamia , for lesson ) in lookup of ancient artifacts?Many of the civilisation in the Levant and the Middle East predated the Romans by as much as the Romans predate us . Did they ever try on to dig up ancient ruins and catalogue them , the way we do?Steve Theodore :
Not in the modern horse sense ; the idea of consistently expect around for the terra incognita was n’t really on their radio detection and ranging .
They were certainly interested in the past in a general sort of manner — thefamous imageof emperorTrajan , wandering alone through the ruins of Babylon , comes to mind — but they did n’t have the notion of a sustained , calculated endeavor to reconstruct the past from its strong-arm remains .
One of the most famous examples of this variety of antiquarian reverence is theLapis Niger , one of the oldest surviving Romance inscription . It was part of a ritual composite of some kind built in the earliest days of the Republic , but the website was destroyed — probably during the Gallic sack of Rome around 390 BCE . The site seems not to have been rebuild , but at some point in the first one C BCE , it was protected with a pavement covering and a wall which protected it from the elements and from trespass . afterwards people were n’t sure what the site was — the legal age opinion was that it was the tomb of Romulus , but there were many at odds stories — but they distinctly get aid that the site be preserved and memorialize .
deal of other Romans undertook investigations of the mystery of the past — from the emperor Claudius , who wrote a20 - volume historyof the Etruscans , to obscure administrative official John Lydus , who pen treatise on obscure papist ritual in Christian Byzantium five centuries later . But the big difference between this involvement in antiquity — what the Greeks calledarchaiologia — and the modern recitation is that descriptive truth was a lowly concern at best . For example , no ancient root records or tries to make horse sense of the genuine inscription on the Lapis Niger itself , even though it must have been visible when the site was rehabilitated . No modern archaeologist would document the existence of such an artifact without recopy the text .
The “ revitalization ” of an ancient rite or the rebuilding of an old site was a very public , political social occasion with an agenda that had little to do with anything we ’d recognize as science . debate the seed of an dark customs or the signification of a mystifying school text was a riveting hobby . But the people leg it the bills for such enterprises always had the present , and not the past , foremost in their judgement .
This Charles William Post originally appeared on Quora . flick here to consider .
