Tip o’ the pileus (Piraeus?) to Terrence Lockyer for bringing this abstract from Geology to our attention:
The famous Greek geographer Strabo wrote in the first century A.D., that Piraeus was formerly an island and lay ‘over against’ the mainland, from which it got its name. To validate Strabo’s hypothesis, cartographic and historical data were compiled with multiproxy paleoenvironmental analyses and radiocarbon dating from a series of boreholes drilled in the Cephissus coastal plain, southwest of Athens, Greece. The results of this interdisciplinary geoarchaeological research demonstrate the reliability of Strabo’s text by revealing that Piraeus was indeed an island. In early Holocene time, the rocky hill of Piraeus was linked to the mainland of Attica. During the late to final Neolithic Period (4850–3450 B.C.), Piraeus became an island in a shallow marine bay, due to sea-level rise in the Holocene. Between 2850 and 1550 B.C., in the Early and Middle Bronze Age, Piraeus was separated from the mainland by a wide lagoon. In the fifth century B.C., Themistocles, Cimon, and then Pericles connected Athens to Piraeus by building two “long walls” partly built on a residual coastal marsh called the Halipedon. This study reveals an impressive example of past landscape evolution.
[my problem is that I can’t find where Strabo says Piraeus was an island; I’m sure it’s there somewhere …]
Interesting feature up at the Met’s website … here’s a tease:
The “Mask of Agamemnon” is one of the most famous gold artifacts from the Greek Bronze Age. Found at Mycenae in 1876 by the distinguished archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann, it was one of several gold funeral masks found laid over the faces of the dead buried in the shaft graves of a royal cemetery. The most detailed and stylistically distinct mask came to be known as the Mask of Agamemnon, named after the famous king of ancient Mycenae whose triumphs and tribulations are celebrated in Homer’s epic poems and in the tragic plays of Euripides. The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s replica of this mask molded by Emile Gilliéron père (manufactured and sold by the Würtemberg Electroplate Company) is an example of an electroformed reproduction, also commonly known as an electrotype—or by the historic term, “galvanoplastic”—reproduction.
Electrotype technique was developed in the nineteenth century and was used to reproduce many different kinds of historic metalworks. It became an important means of disseminating information about historic cultures throughout the world in a time before readily accessible color images and widespread travel. An electrotype reproduction was thought of as a precise replica, even though the method of manufacture and the materials were not the same as those of the original artwork. In A Brief Account of E. Gilliéron’s Beautiful Copies of Mycenaean Antiquities in Galvano-plastic, the sales catalogue for the replicas, they were described as “exact imitations of the objects in Galvano-Plastic, in which the forms, no less than the brilliancy and colours of the metals, are faithfully reproduced.” Gisela M. A. Richter—the eminent Metropolitan Museum curator who was instrumental in the acquisition of many of these reproductions—wrote that the copies were “of sufficient accuracy to give us a vivid idea of the originals.” (more follows)
… the article goes on to describe the process … definitely worth a read.
ante diem iii nonas junias