Parthenon Once Had Painted Blue Highlights

Millennia have stripped away any visible traces of blue paint.

We’re familiar with Greece’s ancient Parthenon as a classic white edifice, but new imaging technology reveals that portions of it originally were painted blue.

The temple ~ sitting atop the Acropolis in Athens ~ dates from the 5th century BC. Its carved statues and friezes show scenes from mythology and are some of the most impressive to survive from ancient Greece. Pigments are known to have adorned other Greek statues and temples, but despite 200 years of searching, archaeologists had found no trace of them on the Parthenon's sculptures.

Until now.

Giovanni Verri, a researcher at the British Museum in London, has developed an imaging technique that's ultra-sensitive to traces of an ancient pigment called Egyptian blue. He shines red light onto the marble, and any traces of paint that remain absorb the red light and emit infrared light. Viewed through an infrared camera, parts of the marble that were once blue will appear to glow.

Egyptian blue has shown up on the belt of Iris, Poseidon's messenger goddess, and as a wave pattern along the back of Helios, god of the sun, who is depicted rising out of the sea. It also appears as stripes on the woven mantle draped over another goddess, Dione.

"This adds another dimension to how we perceive the Parthenon," says Ian Jenkins, also at the British Museum. He believes the temple would originally have looked "jewelled" and "busy." The main pigments used are likely to have been blue and red, with the white stone showing through in parts, as well as gilding.

Click here for the New Scientist article.

Click here for the longer Discover Magazine article.

High-Tech Reveals More of China's Great Wall

A section of the Great Wall in disrepair.

China’s famed Great Wall has gained another 180 miles due to infrared range finders and GPS devices enabling researchers to find portions previously concealed by hills, trenches and rivers.

The newly mapped parts of the wall were built during the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) to protect China against northern invaders and were submerged over time by sandstorms that moved across the arid region, according to China’s national mapping agency.

The additional parts mean the Great Wall ~ construction of which began more than 2,000 years ago to prevent incursions into China by the Mongols and others ~ spans about 3,900 miles through the northern part of the country.

Recent studies by Chinese archaeologists have shown that sandstorms are reducing sections of the wall in Gansu to "mounds of dirt" and that they may disappear entirely in 20 years. These studies mainly blame the erosion on destructive farming methods used in the 1950s that turned large areas of northern China into desert. In addition, portions of the wall in Gansu were made of packed earth, which is less resilient than the brick and stone used elsewhere in much of the wall's construction.

China in recent years has begun restoring parts of the wall as well as trying to curb commercial development on or next to the ancient structure.

Click here for the Guardian UK article.

Sorry, Googlers, It's Not Atlantis

It was entirely predictable: Google Earth’s new capabilities enabling people at their home computers to scan contours of the oceans’ floors would lead directly to discovery of Atlantis.

Observers recently reported to Google’s offices what appeared to be a grid of streets and the outlines of a big city on the sea floor about 600 miles off the African coast. Experts had said this was one of the possible sites of the city described by Plato, the Greek philosopher.

But Google said the lines represented sonar data collected from boats. "It's true that many amazing discoveries have been made in Google Earth including a pristine forest in Mozambique that is home to previously unknown species and the remains of an ancient Roman villa," a Google statement said.

"In this case, however, what users are seeing is an artifact of the data collection process. Bathymetric (or sea floor terrain) data is often collected from boats using sonar to take measurements of the sea floor," the statement continued. "The lines reflect the path of the boat as it gathers the data. The fact there are blank spots between each of these lines is a sign of how little we really know about the world's oceans."

The story of Atlantis, a fabled utopia destroyed in ancient times, has captured the imagination of scholars ever since it was first described by the philosopher Plato more than 2,000 years ago.

Click here for the BBC article.

Photo shows suspicious Google Earth image.

Cave Paintings Took Thousands of Years

Using uranium-series technology, scientists have been able for the first time to accurately date paintings in Spain's famous Altamira caves.

Scientist are now saying some of the world’s prehistoric cave paintings may have been a 20,000-year work in process. Across hundreds of generations, the prehistoric paintings in Europe’s caves were refreshed, added to and sometimes painted over.

The realization came about as the result of new technology enabling researchers for the first time to accurately date paintings that span millennia. The technique is called uranium-series technology, which reduces the dependency on carbon in the dating process, where carbon has proven to be notoriously unreliable.

"The art gives us a really intimate window into the minds of the individuals who produced them, but what we don't know is exactly which individuals they were as we don't know exactly when the art was created,” says Dr. Alistair Pike of Bristol University, who is leading the research. “If we can date the art then we can relate that to the artifacts we find in the ground and start to link the symbolic thoughts of these individuals to where, when and how they were living."

Scientists have used the new techniques to date a series of famous Palaeolithic paintings in northern Spain known as the "Sistine Chapel of the Palaeolithic,” thought to date from around 14,000 years ago. But Pike’s team discovered some of the paintings were between 25,000 and 35,000 years old. The youngest paintings in the cave were 11,000 years old.

"We have found that most of these caves were not painting in one go, but the painting spanned up to 20,000 years,” he said. “This goes against what the archaeologists who excavated in the caves and found archaeology for just one period. It is probably the case that people did not live in the caves they painted. It seems the caves they lived in were elsewhere and there was something special about the painted caves."

Click here for the complete London Telegraph article.