[HN Gopher] 2,300-year-old mosaic made of shells and coral found...
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       2,300-year-old mosaic made of shells and coral found under Rome
        
       Author : clouddrover
       Score  : 106 points
       Date   : 2023-12-23 14:07 UTC (8 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.cnn.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.cnn.com)
        
       | SSLy wrote:
       | Mirror please, the s(h)ite is blocking safari.
        
         | jefftk wrote:
         | Are you sure? It looks fine in Safari to me:
         | https://imgur.com/a/lHTYmfL
        
           | SSLy wrote:
           | https://a.uguu.se/COCUiUWU.png And I've tried disabling
           | AdGuard, didn't change anything.
        
             | jefftk wrote:
             | Any other extensions?
        
       | ahmedfromtunis wrote:
       | I'm surprise that they decided to put article about this mosaic
       | under the "Style" section. I understand that this is were
       | articles about the arts, design and architecture live, but still.
        
       | readyplayernull wrote:
       | Those blue stones, are they painted or natural?
        
         | adrian_b wrote:
         | As mentioned in the article, those are beads of Egyptian blue
         | glass.
         | 
         | The Egyptian blue glass was colored during manufacturing by
         | including in the melted glass certain minerals that contained
         | oxides of copper or, more rarely, oxides of cobalt.
         | 
         | Modern blue glass is usually made with cobalt oxide, a process
         | rediscovered during the Middle Ages.
        
       | perihelions wrote:
       | - _" Such an elaborate space would also have been used to impress
       | guests with water games, which were very popular amongst nobility
       | at the time. "We have found lead pipes embedded within the
       | decorated walls, built to carry water inside basins or to make
       | fountains spout to create water games," said Russo."_
       | 
       | It was an eyebrow-raising reading how the water economics of
       | ancient Rome worked [0]. Probably a microcosm of the dysfunction
       | and absurdity of that city as a whole.
       | 
       | [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_aqueduct#Distribution
        
         | sologoub wrote:
         | That article seems to describe a system where public uses were
         | prioritized over paid. Like in any system, some degree of
         | favoritism/corruption existed, but at least initially it seemed
         | to still serve the public at large quite well. Especially when
         | one considers many of their contemporary equivalents or what
         | followed for centuries in Europe.
        
         | lovecg wrote:
         | Thanks for the link!
         | 
         | > The construction of Rome's third aqueduct, the Aqua Marcia,
         | was at first legally blocked on religious grounds, under advice
         | from the decemviri (an advisory "board of ten"). The new
         | aqueduct was meant to supply water to the highest elevations of
         | the city, including the Capitoline Hill, but the decemviri had
         | consulted Rome's main written oracle, the Sibylline Books, and
         | found there a warning against supplying water to the
         | Capitoline. This brought the project to a standstill.
         | 
         | One can't help but draw parallels with modern day out of
         | control environmental review process...
        
       | JoeAltmaier wrote:
       | Wow, the third of the screen lost to ads was obnoxious.
        
       | neonate wrote:
       | https://web.archive.org/web/20231223142429/https://www.cnn.c...
        
         | gwbas1c wrote:
         | I've never had an issue opening a CNN website; no subscription
         | required. (I use Brave.)
         | 
         | Do other people need to use archive.org to bypass something? Is
         | it region-locked or otherwise has some other kind of barrier?
        
           | MagerValp wrote:
           | I just get an error page that says my browser is "preventing
           | this site from implementing required components that protect
           | your privacy".
           | 
           | Yeah, no thanks, I trust my adblocker to do that for me.
        
       | romanzubenko wrote:
       | Making something so extremely beautiful is the surest way to
       | optimize for long term longevity.
        
         | crazygringo wrote:
         | Unfortunately that's not true. Most beautiful stuff has been
         | destroyed at one point or another.
         | 
         | The laws of economics and war and necessity really don't care
         | the slightest about beauty.
         | 
         | The pyramids of Giza were covered with fine, smooth, white
         | limestone that gleamed in the sunlight -- as beautiful as you
         | could imagine. That didn't prevent people from stealing most of
         | it later for their own purposes.
        
           | iambateman wrote:
           | I'll take the other side on this. OP said "surest" which you
           | seem to interpret as "certain."
           | 
           | Of course not _all_ beautiful artifacts persist - no one
           | takes that position. But it is reasonable to say that most
           | artifacts which receive attention today are just the
           | artifacts which were formed with special care and whose
           | beauty was preserved, probably by accident, for us.
        
       | chasil wrote:
       | When I visited the ancient city of Ostia ("Ostia Antiqua"), I saw
       | several murals, some on the ground with instructions on how to
       | walk on them, and some stacked vertically with chips that had
       | fallen into the soil.
       | 
       | The discovery on the Palatine is impressive, but far from unique.
       | 
       | https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostia_Antica
        
       | archsurface wrote:
       | "A five-year dig into the side of Rome's Palatine Hill yielded
       | treasure last week when archaeologists discovered a deluxe
       | banquet room..."
       | 
       | A week to clean up from discovery? I thought these things took
       | much longer.
        
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       (page generated 2023-12-23 23:02 UTC)