ATHENS GETS A SECOND ACROPOLIS MADE OF LEGO BY AN AUSTRALIAN

ATHENS now has a second Acropolis ... all the way from Australia.

Already famous in its own right, the LEGO ACROPOLIS OF SYDNEY has gone on exhibit at the Acropolis Museum in Athens after having been on exhibit at the Nicholson Museum at Sydney University for two years. 

Built by Lego-certified professional Ryan McNaught, the Lego Acropolis contains more than 120,000 bricks and took about 300 hours to build.

The buildings, including The Parthenon, the Temple of Athena Nike, the smaller Erechtheion temple and the Propylaia, the monumental gateway, are made from gleaming white bricks.

''The model is as close to the real Acropolis as I could make it,'' he says. ''It's not an architectural scale model; it's more of a representation. The hardest parts were working out how to do all the diagonal lines.''

The Nicholson Museum, in Sydney University's quadrangle, is Australia's largest museum of antiquities and fast developing a reputation as one of the most innovative museums of its type for its integration of the ancient and contemporary world. 

Although the Acropolis is gone, the Colosseum is still in Sydney ... made entirely of Lego bricks.

The departure of the Acropolis makes room for a Lego Pompeii.

ANCIENT EGYPTIAN COBALT GLASS BEAD FOUND ON 3,400-YEAR-OLD VIKING NECKLACE

A thousand years before the siege of Troy, a woman in what is now Denmark was buried wearing a necklace whith "magical" cobalt blue glass beads which had been made in Egypt.

The discovery was made by experts from Moesgaard Museum in Aarhus, the National Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen, and Institut de Recherche sur les Archéomatériaux (IRAMAT) at Orléans, France.

It proves that there was a lively trade route between northern Europe and Ancient Egypt in the era of King Tutankhamun … 3,400 years ago.

Experts have long known that Baltic Sea amber was sought after by the Greeks and Romans.

But until now, it was not known that the Ancient Egyptians, who were well known for their glass technology, operated trade routes that supplied Northern Europe with Egyptian-made glass.

The discovery suggests trade routes between Denmark and the ancient civilizations in Egypt and Mesopotamia in the Bronze Age 3,400 years ago. The discovery also gives us new knowledge about the sun cult in the Nordic Bronze Age.

Archeologists Jeanette Varberg from Moesgaard Museum and Flemming Kaul from the National Museum, and Bernard Gratuze, director of IRAMAT, analysed the composition of some blue glass beads found on a buried Bronze Age women in Denmark. 

Twenty-three glass beads from Denmark were analysed using plasma-spectrometry. 

Without destroying the fragile beads, this technique makes it possible to compare the chemical composition of trace elements in the beads with reference material from Amarna in Egypt and Nippur in Mesopotamia, about 50 km south east of Baghdad in Iraq. 

The comparison showed that the chemical composition of the two sets of trace elements match.

The researchers' first object for comparison was a bead from a wealthy woman's grave at Ølby, 40 km south of Copenhagen.

The woman had been buried in a more extravagant fashion, lying in a hollowed-out oak trunk and wearing a beautiful belt disc, a smart string skirt with tinkling, shining small bronzes tubes, and an overarm bracelet made of amber beads, and a single blue glass bead. 

The glass bead turned out to be Egyptian. This is the first time that typical Egyptian cobalt glass has been discovered outside the Mediterranean area. 

Now the researchers are linking amber and glass together in an unexpected way. One property that both glass and amber have is that sunlight penetrates their surface. The archaeologists believe this could be proof of a link between the Egyptian sun cult and the Nordic sun cult. 

When a Danish woman in the Bronze Age took a piece of jewellery made of amber and blue glass with her to the grave, it constituted a prayer to the sun to ensure that she would be re-united with it and share her fate with the sun's on its eternal journey.

JASON AND THE GOLDEN FLEECE BASED ON FACT, SCIENTISTS SAY

THE ancient Greek myth of Jason and the Golden Fleece was likely rooted in reality ... linked to an historical voyage to the ancient kingdom of Colchis to learn their extraction methods of the famed "golden sands", geologists in the republic of Georgia suggest.

Geologists in Georgia have found evidence that links one of the most famous Greek myths to actual events that took place in an ancient city steeped in gold.

Jason will forever be tied in mythology to the fantastical golden fleece. 

In the era prior to the Trojan War, Jason banded together with a small group of similarly heroic figures known collectively as the Argonauts to battle a series of trials ... including lunch-stealing harpies and loin-cloth-wearing giants ... to find the pelt of the famed golden-haired, winged ram of Zeus, the god of sky and thunder.

Jason (art by Roger Payne) believed that possession of the fleece, said to be held by the ancient kingdom of Colchis in the Svaneti region of modern Georgia, would help to reinstate his usurped father, Aeson, as king of Thessaly in Greece.

Now, a team led by geologist Avtandil Okrostsvaridze from Ilia State University in Georgia has found evidence to suggest that the myth of Jason and the Golden Fleece was indeed based on historical events related to ancient gold extraction techniques.

Between 2002 and 2010, the team carried out field work in Svaneti region on the east coast of the Black Sea, where they compared the available geological data, artefacts, myths and historical sources surrounding the kingdom of Colchis. 

Publishing in the current edition of Quaternary International, they now suggest that the myth "took inspiration from an actual voyage sometime between 3,300 and 3,500 years ago."

Jason and the Argonauts’ destination was the kingdom of Colchis, a large, coastal city famous at the time for harbouring a great wealth of gold. 

"According to Greek mythology and historical sources the ancient Georgian Kingdom of Colchis was rich in 'gold sands' and the natives mined this metal from the rivers, using special wooden vessels and sheepskins," the researchers write.

As a result of their geological investigation, they confirmed that still today in the Svaneti region, the rivers that snake down the sides of the mountains contain tiny particles of gold that have worn off the edges of the rocks.

CARDINAL ALESSANDRO ALBANI SAINT OF ANTINOUS

ON December 11th the Religion of Antinous honors SAINT ALESSANDRO ALBANI, who was an Italian aristocrat and cardinal, and a collector and patron of the arts. 

It is largely thanks to Cardinal Albani that Antinous experienced a resurgence of interest in the 18th Century which continues to this day.

It is also believed that Albani secretly worshiped the Beauteous Boy as a gay god.

Albani became a trend-setter and an arbiter of taste. Albani, whose sexuality was ambivalent, and the openly gay Winkelmann more or less single-handedly launched a craze throughout the European aristocracy for Classical art.

When he was 29, by special dispensation from his uncle Pope Clement XI, Alessandro Albani was made a Cardinal, although he had never been a priest or member of a lower order. 

Indeed, he would have preferred to pursue a military career. But chronic eye problems, which eventually resulted in total blindness in old age, convinced him to take up his uncle's generous offer.

He is said to have been a continuing cause of great concern to his uncle, due to his worldly and irreligious obsessions, first among these his passion for art. 

Cardinal Albani used his vast wealth to collect Classical art, and to patronize artists of his day, such as Anton Raphael Mengs, and the "Father of Archaeology" Johann Joachim Winckelmann, who was an open homosexual.

The art collection of Cardinal Albani contained an extraordinary number of statues of Antinous, and these were studied by Winckelmann, who had taken up residence in the sprawling and very lavish Villa Albani outside of Rome (pictured at right). 

And Antinous was the pre-eminent example of male beauty in Classical art. 

Every aristocrat in Europe wanted a statue or Antinous. And monarchs such as Frederick the Great of Prussia (who never married and favored intimate friendships with males) sent out experts to find statues of Antinous. 

Thus, the science of archaeology was born largely through a desire by aristocrats to furnish their palaces with the sort of Antinous-style Classical art which Albani had made fashionable.

By the time he died on December 11th in the year 1779, it was rumored that Cardinal Albani, along with his intimate friends Winckelmann and neo-classicist painter Anton Mengs, had been secret worshippers of Antinous and Priapus. 

It was asserted that they reinstated the religion of the Beloved Boy as a kind of underground cult along with other, unnamed persons.

For this reason, though based largely on rumor, Cardinal Alessandro Albani is sanctified as a Saint of the Religion of Antinous.

Although he was a Cardinal of the Catholic Faith, he may in fact have been the first High Priest of Antinous since the extermination of the ancient religion 1,300 years before. 

Albani's secret cult ... assuming it truly existed ... is the only known predecessor since ancient times to the current Religion of Antinous.

ANTINOOPOLIS ERA EGYPTIAN PRIEST WROTE A TALE OF PRIESTLY SEX

AN EGYPTIAN priest living in the heyday of the city of ANTINOOPOLIS wrote a steamy fictional story of priestly sex, according to a recently deciphered papyrus text.

The crumbling papyrus was found at the famed Tebtunis Library — a cache of thousands of papyrus scrolls at a temple complex in the Fayoum Oasis not far from Antinoopolis. 

The papyrus is believed to be 1,900 years old, which would make the author a contemporary of the nearby Priests of Antinous at Antinoopolis, only a short boat ride up the Nile from Tebtunis.

Thousands of scrolls were found at Tebtunis, few of which have been translated. This scroll is currently in Florence, Italy, in the Istituto Papirologico "G. Vitelli."

The newly deciphered tale refers several times to priests dressing up, wearing makeup, partying and having sex. At one point a speaker implores a person to "drink truly. Eat truly. Sing" and to "don clothing, anoint (yourself), adorn the eyes, and enjoy sexual bliss."

The narrator of the story adds that the chief deity of his temple, the vulture goddess Mut, will not let you "be distant from drunkenness on any day. She will not allow you to be lacking in any (manner)."

The narrator defends his views by saying, "As for those who have called me evil, Mut will 'call' them evil."

Christian writers at the time harshly condemned Egyptian priests in general, and the Priests of Antinous in particular, for engaging in what they called "debaucheries" and "wanton sexual perversities" in the name of religious ecstasy.

So it is possible this story was a reaction to the prudishness of the fanatical Christians, who insisted that Jesus was virginal and sexually abstinent, as were his priests.

Researchers know the story is fictional because it employs an Egyptian noun used only in fiction to mark separate sections of a story.  They know when it was written because the priest wrote in DEMOTIC, which was the Egyptian script used during the Roman occupation of Egypt.

Reconstructing the overall plot narrative of the papyrus is tricky. The text is fragmentary, and researchers cannot be certain how the full story unfolded since there are large "lacunae" or gaps where bugs have eaten away sections of the text.

"Conceivably, we have here the remains of an account of how an adherent of the goddess Mut persuaded another individual to devote himself to her worship or join in her rites," according to the researchers, professors Richard Jasnow and Mark Smith, who published their translation and analysis of the papyrus in the most recent edition of the journal Enchoria.

Jasnow, from Johns Hopkins University, and Smith, from Oxford, write that evidence of ritual sex is  rare in ancient Egypt and the act probably would have been controversial in earlier ages.

"There is surprisingly little unequivocal Egyptian evidence for the performance of the sex act as such in ritual contexts," Jasnow and Smith write.

Thus it is possible that the ancient priest was writing a tongue-in-cheek satire lampooning the prudishness of contemporary Christian writers who accused Egyptian pagans of lasciviousness in their temples.

SHACKLED SLAVE VICTIMS' SKELETONS UNEARTHED NEXT TO GLADIATOR ARENA

Archaeologists have discovered a group of skeletons bound by shackles at the site of a large ancient Gallo-Roman burial ground in southwest France.

The excavation site is adjacent to the Saintes amphitheatre, where wild animals and gladiators would battle thousands of years ago.

In what experts believe to be an important necropolis possibly used for those killed in the stadium, hundreds of graves dating back to the 1st and 2nd Centuries AD were unearthed.

But perhaps the most interesting finds were five shackled skeletons - four adults and one child. Three skeletons had their ankles bound with iron chains, another was secured around the neck, and a child was found with a chain around his or her wrist.

Many of the other skeletons at the site were buried with their heads and toes touching, in rectangular trench-like pits.

Archaeologists were made aware of the necropolis last year, and hope they can now determine how each person died, their status when they were alive and whether they lived in the same communities.

Roman necropolises were generally situated out of towns in the countryside, and were used for burials and cremations.

While people were sometimes buried with their belongings, the archaeologists in southwest France only found a few vases alongside a man, and a child with coins resting on its eyes, Mail Online reported.

Romans believed that by burying a person with coins, his or her spirit could pay the underworld's ferryman and they would safely make it to the afterlife.

ANTINOUS MARVELED AT THESE MEGALITHS NOTICE THE OUTLINE OF ONE STILL BURIED

SEE that absurdly massive stone block? Well, that's not the one we're talking about. Look over to the right to see the outline of an even larger megalith … still buried in the ground at a site which Antinous and Hadrian visited. 

German archaeologists working at the Baalbek site in Lebanon have uncovered the largest known ancient megalith ... or single block of stone.

The fully exposed block, which dates back to around 27 B.C., is the well known Hajjar al-Hibla. It's located in a stone quarry at Baalbek, site of the ancient Heliopolis in Lebanon. 

Similar stone blocks measuring up to 20 meters (65 feet) in length and a diameter of 4 x 4 meters (13 x 13 feet) were used for the foundation of the Temple of Jupiter in the Roman sanctuary of Baalbek.

Hadrian and Antinous visited the temple on their fateful tour of the Eastern Provinces.

Baalbek is famous for the colossal stones used in the construction of the Temple of Jupiter which had a colossal statue of Hadrian on a horse.

Antonius Subia explains why the triumphal arrival of Antinous at Baalbek is significant to us:

"The city of Baalbek-Heliopolis was an immensely important sacred site, with highly erotic, religious, solar significance. But it is these gigantic stones that are our spiritual focus, because it is in this season that we prepare ourselves to be as living stones in the Temple of Antinous.

"Antinous and Hadrian, always interested in architecture would have been shown the miraculous stones, would have touched them and stood amazed by their size. 

"Let us direct our attention to the image which shows a man inspecting the mysterious foundation stones, and let this be a metaphor for the immensity of our task as the Stones of the Temple of Antinous."

A few months ago, a team from the German Archaeological Institute conducted excavations at the quarry, and to their amazement they found an ever bigger stone just off to the side and underneath it. 

It measures 19.6 meters (64 feet) in length, 6 meters (19.6 feet) wide, and is at least 5.5 meters (18 feet) high. Its weight is estimated at a daunting 1,650 tons (that's 3,300,000 pounds, or 1,496,850 kg). Future excavations will confirm its precise dimensions.

The archaeologists concluded that because of the stone's configuration and level of smoothness, the block was meant to be transported without being cut. It's thus the biggest stone block known from antiquity. 

They're now investigating why the stone was not completed and remained in the quarry — and by what means the Roman builders had to transport it.

[ German Archaeological Institute via The Archaeology News Network ]

Photo credit: Deutsches Archäologisches Institut.