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The colorful secret of a 1,600-year-old Roman chalice at the British Museum is the key to a supersensitive new technology that might help diagnose human disease or pinpoint biohazards at security checkpoints.
The glass chalice, known as the Lycurgus Cup because it bears a scene involving King Lycurgus of Thrace, appears jade green when lit from the front but blood-red when lit from behind—a property that puzzled scientists for decades after the museum acquired the cup in the 1950s. The mystery wasn’t solved until 1990, when researchers in England scrutinized broken fragments under a microscope and discovered that the Roman artisans were nanotechnology pioneers: They’d impregnated the glass with particles of silver and gold, ground down until they were as small as 50 nanometers in diameter, less than one-thousandth the size of a grain of table salt. The exact mixture of the precious metals suggests the Romans knew what they were doing—“an amazing feat,” says one of the researchers, archaeologist Ian Freestone of University College London.
The ancient nanotech works something like this: When hit with light, electrons belonging to the metal flecks vibrate in ways that alter the color depending on the observer’s position. Gang Logan Liu, an engineer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who has long focused on using nanotechnology to diagnose disease, and his colleagues realized that this effect offered untapped potential. “The Romans knew how to make and use nanoparticles for beautiful art,” Liu says. “We wanted to see if this could have scientific applications.”
The original fourth-century A.D. Lycurgus Cup, probably taken out only for special occasions, depicts King Lycurgus ensnared in a tangle of grapevines, presumably for evil acts committed against Dionysus, the Greek god of wine. If inventors manage to develop a new detection tool from this ancient technology, it’ll be Lycurgus’ turn to do the ensnaring.
The early history of the cup is unknown however from the Wikepedia page I found this also interesting:
The early history of the cup is unknown, and it is first mentioned in print in 1845, when a French writer said he had seen it "some years ago, in the hands of M. Dubois". This is probably shortly before it was acquired by the Rothschild family. Certainly Lionel de Rothschild owned it by 1862, when he lent it to an exhibition at what is now the V&A Museum, after which it virtually fell from scholarly view until 1950. In 1958 Victor, Lord Rothschild sold it to the British Museum for £20,000, £2,000 of which was donated by the Art Fund (then the NACF).
Most people would agree that we live in an age of technological innovation. However, some recent archeological discoveries may prove that some of this new technology may have been discovered centuries or even millennia before, only to be lost, until now.
Take for example a 1,600 year old cup discovered in the 18th century. The Lycurgus Cup named after the king depicted on the glass from the sixth book of Homer’s Iliad has fascinated scientists for decades. The unique properties from the glass allow the cup to change its color. In direct light the glass of the cup resembles jade, but when the light shines through the glass the cup turns to a translucent ruby color. This unusual optical effect is called dichroic.
The cup resides at the British Museum. They acquired it in 1958 from Lord Rothschild, who had it in the family for almost a century. Various studies were done on the cup since 1950, but a recent study has uncovered a technology that was thought to be a 20th century discovery.
As I recently discussed, sometimes we need to look to the past for solutions to our current problems. Queensland University professor Zhu Huai Yong has done just that, noting that painting glass windows with gold particles can purify the air.
Zhu came across this realization after studying medieval painted church windows, which were often decorated using glass colored with gold nanoparticles.
Though people likely did not realize it at the time the churches were built, the sun-energized nanoparticles destroy air-borne pollutants, as sunlight creates an electromagnetic field that resonates with the gold particles’ oscillations.
While CO2 is a byproduct of the filtering process, it only occurs in small amounts and is not as harmful as volatile organic compounds that the nanoparticles destroy.
Zhu’s discovery isn’t just trivia fodder—the researcher believes that it could be applied to produce specialty chemicals at room temperature that are both cost-effective (despite the high price of gold) and have minimal environmental impact.
One thing that must be kept in mind, is the ability to make something doesn't imply you know why it's happening.
They ground up metal into fine dust and mixed it with glass. That's hardly profound. Today, we understand the actual scientific reasons these things happen, that doesn't mean they did, or that they did these things with the intent of creating such a result.
Old blacksmiths were able to form carbon nanotubes in steel. That does not imply they designed their method in order to create nanotubes, nor does it imply they were even aware of the existence of such a thing.
Same thing with maya blue, there isn't any mystery to it, we know exactly how to make it, and it's a simple process. It's properties are result of its ingredients, not magic of the maya. The ability to produce such a simple product doesn't imply you are aware of chemistry to the point where these ingredients were combined specifically to produce the properties that happen to exhibit.
The first person to create fire figured out if he rubbed two sticks together it made fire. He didn't understand (or need to) the complexities of rapid oxidation and chemical reactions in general in order to create fire.
These artifacts are definitely cool and interesting, but they in no way imply any sort of advanced ancient knowledge or abilities.