ANTIKYTHERA SHIPWRECK TREASURE TROVE FAR GREATER THAN BELIEVED

MARINE archaeologists report they have uncovered a bronze arm and the remains of at least seven more priceless statues from an ancient Roman shipwreck famed for yielding an amazingly sophisticated astronomical calculator the "Antikythera Mechanism" for casting horoscopes.

Divers found the right arm, encrusted and stained green, under sediment on the boulder-strewn slope where the ship and its cargo now rest. 

The huge vessel, perhaps 50 meters from bow to stern, was sailing from Asia Minor to Rome when it foundered near the tiny island between Crete and the Peloponnese.

An international survey team says the ship is twice as long as originally thought and contains many more calcified objects amid the ship's lost cargo that hint at new discoveries.

The ancient Roman shipwreck was lost off the Greek coast around 67 BC, filled with statues and the famed astronomical clock.

"What we're finding is these sculptures are in among and under the boulders," said Brendan Foley, co-director of the excavations team at Lund University. "We think it means a minimum of seven, and potentially nine, bronze sculptures still waiting for us down there." 

The boulders that overlie the metal objects weigh several tons and may have tumbled onto the wreck during a massive earthquake that shook Antikythera and surrounding islands in the 4th century AD.

The bronze arm, probably from a statue of a male, is the highlight of the team's 2017 excavation season. 

Among other objects the divers recovered are a patterned slab of red marble the size of a tea tray, a silver tankard, sections of joined wood from the ship’s frame, and a human bone. 

Last year, the team found the skull, teeth, ribs and other bones of an individual who perished on the wreck. They have since extracted DNA from the skull and from it learned the individual's sex and where they came from. 

Until those results are published, the person is known as Pamphilos after divers found the name, meaning “friend of all”, carved on a buried cup that had been decorated with an erotic scene.

Salvaged by the Greek navy and skin divers in 1901, its stern perched too deep for its original skin-diver discoverers to find. The wreck is best known for yielding a bronze astronomical calculator, the "Antikythera Mechanism" widely seen as the most complex device known from antiquity, along with dozens of marble and bronze statues. 

The mechanism apparently used 37 gear wheels, a technology reinvented a millennium later, to create a lunar calendar and predict the motion of the planets, which was important knowledge for casting horoscopes and planning festivals in the ancient world.

A lead anchor recovered in a stowed position in the new survey shows that the ship likely sank unexpectedly when "a storm blew it against an underwater cliff," says marine archaeologist Theotokis Theodoulou of Greece's Ephorate (Department) of Underwater Antiquities. "It seems to have settled facing backwards with its stern (rear) at the deepest point," he says.

STEVEN SAYLOR'S 'RAIDERS OF THE NILE' IS THE BEST GORDIANUS ADVENTURE YET

ANYONE who neglects to read Steven Saylor's RAIDERS OF THE NILE, which has just been released in Britain, will be soundly lashed, hung upside-down for three days and then fed to a crocodile.

At the very least!

Gordianus the Finder is back ... younger and more daring than ever ... in this prequel to the series of novels 20 years ago which featured Gordianus as a mature sleuth in the waning days of the Roman Republic ... and which established Saylor as a major writer.

A metamorphosis has occurred, befitting a Classical myth: A generation ago, Saylor was a young author writing about a middle-aged Gordianus who had an established reputation for solving inscrutable mysteries by means of his sage deductions. 

Now, Gordianus is a randy and somewhat naive 22-year-old who has a lot to learn ... and Saylor is the mature author with an established reputation for deftly guiding his readers through a tangle of clues as dense as any papyrus thicket in the marshes of the Nile Delta.

This superb historical novel works on so many levels ... as an adventure mystery yarn with the thrills and spills of any Indiana Jones flick ... and also as a brilliant literary spoof of Classical literature which will make scholars nod in recognition.

The story has all the elements of Greek tragicomedic literature: Lovers torn from each other's arms ... mistaken identities ... abductions ... pirates ... poisonings ... rapes ... cuckoldry ... buffoonish potentates ... smart-aleck slaves ... men dressed up as women .... 

Why, there's a Spielbergian cute kid who squeals and gives away secrets at the most inopportune times.

And there's even a cowardly lion whose uncharacteristic courage saves the day.

But this is a novel by Steven Saylor, after all, whose epic best-seller ROMA traced the history of Rome from its founding as a cluster of mud huts on the banks of the Tiber to the city of marble which would influence Western Civilization for all time.

His scholarship is no less meticulous for this novel, set in Ptolemaic Egypt in the chaotic days of the 1st Century BC just before Julius Caesar stepped in to "save" the Egyptians from themselves ... and end Egyptian sovereignty for 1,900 years to come.

As always, his characters are richly drawn and developed. The plot is writhing with villains and brigands, cut-throats and pirates. 

But in the best tradition of the Greek tragicomic novels Saylor used as the basis of this book, each character is more than what it appears to be at first glance. Good and evil dwell in every heart.

This is masterful writing by a master story-teller. 

Other successful writers become jaded and formulaic with success ... and age. But Saylor has rejuvenated not only his protagonist, but also his skills as a story-teller. 

In many ways Raiders of the Nile is the best book for first-time Saylor readers ... the book which best introduces a new reader not only to Gordianus the Finder, but also to Steven Saylor.

STEVEN SAYLOR'S 'RAIDERS OF THE NILE' HITS BOOK STORES FEBRUARY 25

EXCITING news for fans of Steven Saylor, gay author of the best-selling epic "ROMA" ... he has announced publication of his newest novel ... a further adventure of Gordianus the Finder.

"RAIDERS OF THE NILE" hits book shops worldwide February 25.

The new book comes fresh on the heels of his highly acclaimed Gordianus prequel "THE SEVEN WONDERS", which traces the exploits of Gordianus the Finder as a young man.

Saylor just posted this on Facebook:

"My new novel is called 'Raiders of the Nile' and directly follows 'The Seven Wonders,' recounting the further adventures of young Gordianus (and Bethesda) in Egypt. I took inspiration from the motifs of the ancient Greek novels: separated lovers, kidnapping, bandits, concealed identity, love tested and redeemed. This plot hinges on a true incident: the disappearance of the golden sarcophagus of Alexander the Great..."

NEW STEVEN SAYLOR BOOK

PUTS THE WONDER BACK IN OLD GORDIANUS

 

GORDIANUS is back and his legions of fans can take delight in finding out — at long last — how Gordianus the naive teenager became cunning and cynical "Gordianus the Finder," the finest sleuth in the turbulent waning days of the Roman Republic.


THE SEVEN WONDERS is the prequel to a dozen previously published Gordianus novels and short-story collections by award-winning, openly gay writer STEVEN SAYLOR. 

Last seen, Gordianus was semi-retired and had more or less been turned out to pasture by Saylor, who turned his attention to epic novels about Rome spanning generations and centuries. Those epic novels were really quite good — good, but not great — and Gordianophiles were worried.


Had Saylor done what Sir Arthur Conan Doyle did with Sherlock Holmes? Weary of writing "trivial" serialized short novels, and itching to be regarded as the next Dickens, Conan Doyle dispensed with Holmes  — sent him hurtling over the Reichenbach Falls with Moriarty. And Conan Doyle turned to epic novels which were quite good — but not great.


Under pressure from fans (and his publishers), Conan Doyle grudgingly brought Holmes back in a "now it can be told" prequel about his most remarkable case prior to his tragic demise — "The Hound of the Baskervilles" — considered Conan Doyle's best novel, if only because grieving readers were so delighted to see their hero in his youthful prime of vim and vigor.


Saylor has done the same with THE SEVEN WONDERS, which is in many ways his best novel. Gordianus is no longer old and world-weary. He is 18 years old, wide-eyed and boyishly naive. All his sleuthing skills are there, but he hasn't yet developed a really good investigator's ability to look at a case objectively and to eliminate the impossible, so that whatever remains (no matter how improbable), must be the truth.

Gordianus develops this ability during his travels with his tutor Antipater of Sidon to see all Seven Wonders of the World.

As always, Saylor's historical accuracy is impeccable, and his readers have fun cross-referencing even minor characters and place names in their bedside LEMPRIÈRE'S for subtle details and wry clues that more casual readers may overlook.

This is "vintage" Saylor at his best, stringing together vignettes and colorful characters which seem to bear no relation to each other and which this brilliant author then weaves together into a Holmesian final chapter in which all is revealed.

(Speaking of revelations, there are a few "spoilers" in the next few paragraphs ....)

This time the vignettes and characters could not be more disparate. There are murders and mysterious goings-on which young Gordianus solves easily and whose outcome the reader has just as easily foreseen.

Some of these vignettes have appeared as short stories in magazines and seem to have been cobbled together for the book. The reader is just about to conclude that this is indeed primarily a travelogue collection of short mysteries in exotic locales, when ... all of a sudden ... Saylor works his magic and begins weaving all those disparate vignettes and characters together into a tale of espionage and intrigue which poses an imminent threat to Rome itself.

Young Gordianus realizes (as does the reader) that everything had been inter-connected and nothing and no one had been what it had appeared to be.

"The world is not as simple as you think," Antipater says to Gordianus. And it would never be as simple ever again for Gordianus in his subsequent exploits. The lessons he learns from Antipater put his career into perspective.

Along the way, young Gordianus beds gorgeous wenches at the Olympiade, consorts with a witch in the ruins of Corinth, sees a boy morph into a girl at the pool of Hermaphroditus, gets seduced by a high-class madame in Hallicarnassus, has gay sex with a beefy blond Gaul who is the true-life Colossus of Rhodes, receives sexual favors from a priestess of Ishtar in Babylon and even has mystical conjugal union with Isis in a sarcophagus buried deep inside the Great Pyramid.



Everything culminates in a fiery climax atop the Pharos Lighthouse at Alexandria when all is revealed quite literally in a blinding flash — and Gordianus the nice teenager from Rome has become "Gordianus the Finder."

After the success of "Hound of the Baskervilles", Conan Doyle had no choice but to write additional "prequels" about the early adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and eventually had to bring Holmes back from the dead so as to fight the Kaiser in World War I.

Last seen, the Great Detective had "definitely retired from London" and had taken himself "to bee-farming on the Sussex Downs" of southern England ... where he presumably still resides, when not appearing in some book, movie or TV mini-series.

That means Saylor now has no choice but to pen further early adventures of Gordianus and to stave off his demise indefinitely. Gordianus still alive somewhere in the world today? Impossible, you say?

Improbable, yes. Impossible, no .... not for Gordianus ... not for Steven Saylor.

NEW STEVEN SAYLOR NOVEL

 

THE long-awaited prequel in openly gay historical novelist Steven Saylor's series of mysteries featuring the 1st Century B.C. sleuth "Gordianus the Finder" is finally ready for pre-ordering, Saylor announced today.

THE SEVEN WONDERS will be published on June 5th, the award-winning author said.

The novel takes place decades prior to the settings for the adventures of the mature Gordianus whom readers have come to know and love. The year is 92 B.C., Gordianus has just turned eighteen and is about to embark on the trip of a lifetime — a far-flung journey to see the Seven Wonders of the World.

As this blog was being posted, Steven Saylor contacted us with a scoop: "PS I can also tell you that Gordianus has his first gay encounter while visiting the Colossus of Rhodes..."

In the new novel, Gordianus is not yet called "the Finder" — but at each of the Seven Wonders, the wide-eyed young Roman encounters a mystery to challenge his already prodigious powers of deduction.

Accompanying Gordianus on his travels is his tutor, Antipater of Sidon, the world's most celebrated poet. But there is more to the apparently harmless old poet than meets the eye.

Before they leave home, Antipater fakes his own death and travels under an assumed identity. Looming in the background are the first rumblings of a political upheaval that will shake the entire Roman world.

Teacher and pupil journey to the fabled cities of Greece and Asia Minor, and then to Babylon and Egypt. They attend the Olympic Games, take part in exotic festivals, and marvel at the most spectacular constructions ever devised by mankind.

Along the way they encounter murder, witchcraft and ghostly hauntings. Traveling the world for the first time, Gordianus discovers that amorous exploration goes hand-in-hand with crime-solving.

The mysteries of love are the true wonders of the world, and at the end of the journey, an Eighth Wonder awaits him in Alexandria. Her name is Bethesda ... who the reader knows will become the love of his life and companion throughout all the other novels.