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Hatty
Site Admin
In: Berkshire
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The 'incident' concerns Caligula but with Canute-like resonances. It is described in Wiki article on Brittenberg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittenburg
The Roman historian Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus wrote a story about the emperor Caligula, who lined up his soldiers and artillery on the beach and declared war on Neptune, god of the sea. After that he claimed victory over the ocean and commanded his men to collect shells as war booty. As a monument to this victory he built a tall lighthouse. This story resulted in a search for Caligula's lighthouse.
In the 16th century, when many early tourists came to see the Brittenburg at low tide, people from Katwijk reported that their fishing nets were regularly stuck behind the stones of what they called "Kalla's tower" (Kalla = Caligula). This story of Caligula is probable, because a wine barrel was found originating from his personal vineyard in this area | |
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Oh yes, the old Caligula wine barrel stunt. I was interested because a correspondent tells me that (nearby) Leiden's Latin name was Lugdunum, or so the later savants (of which, as we know, Leiden was full) claimed. This intrigued me since a) Lugdunum is usually applied to Lyons, that wondrous city of fakes and b) Lug is one of our old Megalithic faves, buried (I seem to remember) under Ludgate Hill. Probably a red herring, of which Holland is full.
Indeed, according to one of M J Harper's long lost works, the rise of Holland as a Great Power was because the herring shoals moved out of the Baltic and into the southern North Sea. A likely story.
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Hatty
Site Admin
In: Berkshire
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Leiden, or Lugdunum, is famous for its university, the first Dutch university (if you don't count Leuven) founded in 1575, though the foundations of its history aren't so clearcut. Old Leiden was put on the map in the 1570s by Abraham Ortelius, 'the father of Netherlandish cartography'
| The site, known as "Brittenburg", was still visible in the dunes in the fourteenth century, but the gradual advance of the sea made the ruins lie on the beach in the sixteenth and seventeenth century. Today, they would be somewhere in the Rhine estuary, inaccessible to archaeological research. All that remains is a small set of finds, collected in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and a famous map by Ortelius. A copy of an old Roman map Tabula Peutingeriana shows Brittenburg as Lugduno; on the coast and with two towers |
Not so fast.
| When the Tabula Peutingeriana was discovered by Conrad Celtes around 1500, Leiden scholars assumed that an old shell keep in the city center called the Burcht van Leiden, at the spot where the Leidse Rijn met the Oude Rijn, was Lugduno. Leiden has called itself (incorrectly) Lugdunum Batavorum for this reason. The Latin name of Leiden University is Academia Lugduno-Batava. The Batava was only added to distinguish Leiden from another Lugdunum. This term is even more unfortunately chosen, since those same scholars also assumed that Leiden was located within the old Batavia (region), which was in fact much further east, near Germany. |
'Britten' may refer to a former lighthouse at the mouth of the Old Rhine. The site of Brittenberg was exposed by a storm in 1520 and the historians went to press soon after
The oldest picture of the Brittenburg is a woodcut (identified by Leiden professor Jan Hendrik Holwerda, curator of the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden) by Abraham Ortelius in 1562 for Lodovico Guicciardini's first edition of The Low Countreys, printed in 1589 by Christophe Plantin in Antwerp. This woodcut was replaced in later editions with an engraving. The oldest picture was used later by Zacharias Heyns (1598, 1599) and Hermann Moll (1734, 1736). It concerns a land surveyor's draft (trigonometry), in which the distance from the ruins (by that time in the North Sea and only visible at low tide) westward to the church of Katwijk is mentioned, namely 1,200 'schreden' (= 1,080 meters).
Brittenburg was part of the Roman border defense (limes), as the guard post (castellum) called Lugduno, the western-most position situated along the Old Rhine, which formed the northern frontier of the Roman province Germania Inferior. | |
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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So ol' Plantin pops up again. Ya gotta be careful with 'fathers of cartography' because it was a vair competitive business. Not the cartography so much as a) the knowledge within and b) claims for territoriality. Remember the whole world was divided between Spain and Portugal on the basis of a papal map. Mebbe. The details in your last quote suggest coastal charts were in vogue, an important matter in this neck of the Rhine, not to mention the small matter of the border between Spain and the United Provinces.
| A copy of an old Roman map Tabula Peutingeriana shows Brittenburg as Lugduno; on the coast and with two towers |
Why do our own dear savants carry on believing these fantasies when everyone is producing faux Classical sources to give their own work the patina of authority.
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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| Hatty wrote: | | The 'incident' concerns Caligula but with Canute-like resonances. |
Brilliant Hatty! This is the very same story told from two perspectives!
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Wile E. Coyote
In: Arizona
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| Hatty wrote: | | The 'incident' concerns Caligula but with Canute-like resonances. |
Its about madness... lunacy (la lune).... moon and tides......?
Era of madness?
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Wile E. Coyote
In: Arizona
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Maybe trying to end Moon worship?
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Wile E. Coyote
In: Arizona
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OK carry on.....
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| This woodcut was replaced in later editions with an engraving. |
Not quite such an innocent phrase as it sounds. I had assumed the pic of Junius the Elder
was a woodcut but I am assured by the National Portrait Gallery (who have been very helpful) that it is an engraving. An engraving, they say, was a means of reproducing an image in pre-photography days, usually copied from a painting or sometimes a fictional drawing. Mmm...
But Junius matters are being dealt with over on the British Forgeries thread (we'll see how apposite that is as we go along) so I will transfer this over there.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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The manuscript crowd have gone potty because somebody's found a thousand-year old female jawbone with lapiz lazuili in it.
https://twitter.com/sarahzhang/status/1083080385939017735
Oh wow, they all cry in exultation, women scribes a thousand years ago! Take that, you misogynist sceptics. None of them seem to know that reflectance transformation imaging has already revealed that women were responsible for the eighth century illustrated Lichfield Gospels but you don't expect them to actually know anything about their subject.
Not that it is eighth century but that's another story.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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While Hatty was being sent to bed without any supper over on Lindisfarne because, after eighteen archaeological visitations in thirty years, they really have found the eighth century monastery (looked at in a certain light)
| bless - I've already told you we've found a structure associated with dated burials and early medieval ecclesiastical sculpture- I know you are an associate of MJ Harper - I know we're never going to agree so lets leave it at that- night night |
I’d been watching over Scotland’s holy island, Iona. PBS’s The Vikings’ Last Battle (we haven’t found their first one yet, PBS) tells of a source for the destruction of their non-existent eighth century monastery. I hadn't been aware of it, perhaps because it emanated from faraway Germany, but it's The Life of Saint Blathmac (murdered by Vikings on Iona, natch) by Walafrid Strabo c 840 AD. This appealed to me greatly because of our contention that medieval forgers often adopted imposing names and they don’t come much more imposing than Strabo. But, no, alas, I was confidently assured Strabo means "squint-eyed". Not very nice of them, was it?
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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But help is at hand courtesy of the Guardian
Welsh farmstead is rare medieval hall house, experts confirm
New dating technique used to prove Llwyn Celyn farmhouse is medieval marvel |
Sounds exciting. What did they used to think?
| Conservation experts from the Landmark Trust, who first encountered the building in a perilous state of disrepair but still inhabited by two farmers in 2007, initially believed it dated from much later in the 15th century |
So they thought it was a medieval marvel. But tell us more about this new technique. Is it, for instance, an important breakthrough? Does it maybe transform our understanding?
| Caroline Stanford, a historian and head of engagement at the Landmark Trust, said the application of the Swansea technique was “a hugely important breakthroughâ€. She said: “Isotope research is transforming our understanding not only of historic buildings but of archaeology as well." |
Yes, that's all very well for us history buffs but is it important more generally?
| "It’s an absolutely fascinating crossover between science and the humanities, and transformative in our understanding of the planet. It is breaking us out into the sunlight of a much bigger world, in terms of our understanding of how humanity has evolved.†|
Now about that door...
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Hatty
Site Admin
In: Berkshire
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Officially only one Viking helmet has ever been found which everyone regards as astonishing.
The one example, found in a burial mound on a farm in eastern Norway in 1943, was identified as tenth century.
| Over the past 70 years the funerary items have been studied, and to this day the helmet found in the mound is unique in the archaeological world. It has been positively dated to the 10th Century, around 970 AD, but this very special helmet is the only example of a Viking helmet that has ever been found anywhere in the world |
https://www.thevintagenews.com/2016/12/22/the-only-surviving-example-of-a-complete-viking-helmet-in-existence-2/
According to the article the find included some unlikely Viking accoutrements such as chain mail and equestrian equipment. Could it have been a Norse/Norman helmet all along?
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