4 ms·
Under Notre Dame, a 'dig of the century' unearths 1,700 years of history
- make3 4mo agoIt's surprising that they're not doing that systematically around the building, but then again I guess that applies to a large part of the city as well. One always wonders which incredible books we lost, from amazing mysterious old philosophers. The burning of the library of Alexandria is such an incredible sadness
- cubefox 4mo ago> One always wonders which incredible books we lost, from amazing mysterious old philosophers. You might be interested in The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco, a historical novel about such a lost work.
- Zardoz84 4mo agoAlso, the movie was good. And the 8-bit era game was very popular.
- cubefox 4mo agoI didn't know there was a game. The movie is great, but it focuses on the crime plot and unfortunately leaves most of the historical/philosophical/linguistic meat out, which is not surprising when you compress a 500 page book into a 100 page screenplay. I guess an adventure game would actually be more suitable for incorporating some of the things the film left out.
- pezezin 4mo agoThe game is called La Abadía del Crimen and as far as I know was only released in Spain and never translated to any other language, so even though it is a cult classic in Spain, it is pretty much unknown outside.
- cubefox 4mo agoApparently there is a remake which was also translated into a few other languages: https://store.steampowered.com/app/474030/The_Abbey_of_Crime_Extensum/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/474030/The_Abbey_of_Crime...
- vasco 4mo ago> It's surprising that they're not doing that systematically around the building, but then again I guess that applies to a large part of the city as well. In some places in Italy, Greece, Malta, probably others I don't know, people always joke that you shouldn't try to ever do any renovations lest you end up finding something and lose your house. Some places you're almost guaranteed to find stuff if you just dig once or twice.
- arethuza 4mo agoThere is a wonderful museum it the Italian city of Lecce that started when someone went to fix some plumbing in their house and ended up finding so much amazing historical stuff that they ended up opening the house as a museum: https://www.museofaggiano.it/en/home/ https://www.museofaggiano.it/en/home/ And that's just one house in one city in one country! Edit: I strongly recommend the museum, Lecce and indeed all of Puglia!
- contingencies 4mo agoThanks for the recommendation. What else would you highlight in Puglia for food/nature/history?
- arethuza 4mo agoThe whole region is awesome for food and wine - we did a walk (over few days) from Santa Maria di Leuca to Otranto - sometimes along the coast and sometimes in paths through the lovely countryside. We started and ended that trip in Lecce - staying in a few agriturismos along the way, all of which had sublime food. We've also been to Bari as well - which has a lovely old town as does Otranto - where the town centre is basically one large fortress. One very pleasant surprise we had was using the Frecciarossa express train - we had two business class seats for a journey of a couple of hours and it was less than 50 euros and it was extremely comfortable!
- contingencies 4mo agoI was really looking for some points of interest rather than a tale of walking and sitting, but thanks anyway.
- ninjalanternshk 4mo agoBy not excavating the whole city they leave work for future archaeologists. :)
- irdc 4mo ago> It's surprising that they're not doing that systematically around the building There's a very good reason for that: archaeological techniques improve all the time. The idea here is to leave something for future archaeologists.
- damnitbuilds 4mo agoExcavation with our soon-to-be-outdated techniques is needless destruction. We should only excavate what is about to be destroyed. ( And we shouldn't destroy stuff just to put up yet another shitty modern building. )
- M95D 4mo ago> now Paris wants to soften the hot, bare square in front of it with trees and shade. It's not a building.
- damnitbuilds 4mo agoIt was a general point.
- gom_jabbar 4mo ago[dead]
- porkyhalal 4mo ago[flagged]
- damnitbuilds 4mo ago"Twenty centuries are stacked in 4 meters (13 feet) of earth — or about the height of two-and-a-half Napoleon Bonapartes standing on top of one another." Way to get history wrong in your story about history.
- Insanity 4mo agoI actually was about to post this quote for another reason as well. Usually you make these references to “known sizes” so people can relate. But no one has seen Napoleon in the flesh _and_ they underestimate his size. This was a useless comparison. That said, the dig itself is pretty cool and I’m excited to see what they’ll unearth. I’m pretty interested in Roman history but haven’t gone as deep into the history of the provinces. Semi-related to that, if someone reading this is in the Toronto area, the bata shoe museum has an exhibit (Vindolanda) about unearthed Roman footwear in England
- samch 4mo agoThe author should’ve known that we already have an accepted unit for measuring things in terms of a person’s stature: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoot
- pluc 4mo agoOr about 1/27th of a football field for the Americans
- irishcoffee 4mo agoComparing a height to a distance is pretty silly, for Americans and non-Americans alike. Also it's much closer to 1/23rd than 1/27th.
- Aardwolf 4mo agoIt's about two and a half Ford Tauri stacked on top of each other
- cucumber3732842 4mo ago
- throw0101c 4mo agoThe book Paris, 1200 is pretty good read for anyone interested in 'point in time' history: > Paris in 1200 was a city in transition. The great cathedral of Notre Dame was halfway through its construction and walls were being built to enclose the new, larger limits of the city. Pope Innocent III ordered all French churches closed to punish King Philip Augustus for his remarriage; the king himself negotiated an unprecedented truce with the English; and the students of Paris threatened a general strike, punctuated with incidents of violence, to protest infringements of their rights. John W. Baldwin brilliantly resurrects this key moment in Parisian history using documents only from 1190 to 1210—a narrow focus made possible by the availability of collections of the Capetian monarchy and the medieval scholastic thinkers. This unique approach results in a vivid snapshot of the city at the turn of the thirteenth century. Paris, 1200 introduces the reader to the city itself and its inhabitants. Three "faces" exemplify these that of the celebrated scholar Pierre the Chanter, of King Philip Augustus, and of the more deeply hidden visages of women. The book examines the city's primary the royal government, the Church, and its celebrated schools that evolved into the university at Paris. Finally, it offers an account of the delights and pleasures, as well as the fears and sorrows, of Parisian life in this period. * https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/8937746-paris-1200 https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/8937746-paris-1200 * https://www.sup.org/books/history/paris-1200 https://www.sup.org/books/history/paris-1200
- rubzah 4mo ago> the students of Paris threatened a general strike Paris in 1200 was at least somewhat recognizable.
- pi-err 4mo agoAwesome book. Students were already gaming the system as extremists in 1200 Paris. > (the cleric students were) marked by the tonsure, which granted them two major privileges: > the privilegium canonis, protected their persons, which were regarded as sacred. Any physical violence against them entailed excommunication, which could only be lifted after severe penance. One did not mistreat a cleric without exposing oneself to serious consequences. > The second was the privilegium fori, which placed clerics under the sole jurisdiction of ecclesiastical courts... Philip Augustus is said to have observed the boldness of clerics who rushed into the fray brandishing swords, yet wearing neither armour nor helmets. Hardly surprising, when a shaved head offered better protection than a helmet.
- lvl155 4mo ago[flagged]
- christophilus 4mo agoThat’s been talked about ad nauseam. It’s nice to talk about something else for a change.
- prmoustache 4mo agoyes we can.
- walthamstow 4mo agoGo on then. Nobody's stopping you.
- M95D 4mo agoCan we talk about the Spanish instead? They killed more.
- complianceowll 4mo agoNot to engage in whataboutism, but every major power or even near-peer power has engaged in those types of atrocities. We like to talk about international law, but anyone who has paid attention understands that the only international law that exists is power. I wish it were different, but the language they spoke back then was conquest, and every nation and ethnicity spoke that language, and embraced it. And they weren't just unaliving people. They were having their way with the women and unaliving the male children. The Arabs did this. The Persians did this. The Europeans did this. The Asians did this. Everyone. There's a reason why 0.5% of the male global population today has Genghis Khan's DNA. I'm not white, but it boggles my mind how modern society has been so radicalized and brainwashed that a particular segment of our population actually thinks white people are the only people in history that have done this. But yeah, the French...
- eszed 4mo agoYou're right, of course, but the post-War consensus in which (most) major powers (mostly) acknowledged international law and (mostly) restricted themselves to economic, rather than military, competition was... nice. It took the two most destructive wars in history, back-to-back, to reach that state of (imperfect, relative) peace, and I'm sorry to see it ending.
- jfengel 4mo agoThere was already a museum of a Roman era settlement out in the plaza. It's somewhat confusingly named the Archeological Crypt, but it's not the crypt of the Notre Dame Cathedral. (The Cathedral doesn't have a crypt; I think the water table is too low to allow there to be significant spaces below the level of the nearby river.) So I'm unclear on exactly what this dig is. I get the impression that it's around the edge of the plaza. Perhaps it will be incorporated into the The Crypte Archéologique de l'İle de la Cité?
- tylerflick 4mo agoDefinitely worth visiting if you’re there, along with the remains of the medieval fortress under the Louvre.
- jfengel 4mo agoI second that recommendation. It's my favorite part of the Louvre. It's a very castle-looking castle; it feels like it's straight out of a movie. To my mind, all of the best stuff in the Louvre is in the basement: the Codex Hammurabi, Babylonian artifacts, etc. Yeah, it's all just as stolen as the artifacts in the British Museum that get more attention, but it's more significant than their art collection that are "the greatest" because they said so. (Not that they aren't also great works. But there are many great works, and the distinction of these has more to do with French nationalism than any serious consideration of artistic merit.)
- fleroviumna 4mo ago[dead]
- mrlonglong 4mo agoC'est tres magnifique!