Yerebatan Samici: Basilica Cistern

The Yerebatan Samici (Basilica Cistern)

The Yerebatan Samici, or Basilica Cistern, is the largest of several hundred cisterns located beneath the city of Istanbul in Turkey. Built in the sixth-century during the reign of Byzantine Emperor Justinian I, it is located one hundred-fifty meters southwest of the Hagia Sophia and currently maintained as a tourist site.

Before the construction of the cistern, a public building serving as a commercial, legal and artistic center, called the Stoa Basilica, was located on the site of the large public square at the First Hill of Constantinople. After assuming control of the empire in 324 AD, the Emperor Constantine built the Basilica Cistern on that site. The cistern served as a water filtration system for the extensive palace complex of Constantinople and other public buildings on the hill. After the Nika Riots of 532 destroyed nearly half of the city of Constantinople, the original cistern was rebuilt and enlarged during the reign of Emperor Justinian.

The Basilica Cistern/s chamber is about ninety-eight hundred square meters and is capable of holding eighty-thousand cubic meters of water. The ceiling, nine meters in height, is supported by twelve rows, spaced five meters apart, of twenty-eight marble columns, with capitals of mainly Corinthian and Ionic styles. The majority of the columns, carved and engraved from various types of marble and granite, were likely brought to Constantinople from other parts of the empire

Entrance to the Basilica Cistern is reached through a descent down fifty-two stone steps to the water storage. The source for the cistern’s water supply is the current Eğrikapı Water Distribution Center in the Belgrade Forest, located nineteen kilometers north of Istanbul. The water’s long journey includes a one-thousand meter run through both the Valens and Mağlova Aqueducts to reach the storage basin of the cistern.

The Basilica Cistern has undergone several restorations since its foundation. During the eighteenth-century reign of Ottoman Emperor Ahmed III, architect Muhammad Agha of Kayseri oversaw a major restoration in 1723. A second major restoration during the nineteenth-century was conducted during the reign of Sultan Abdulhamid II. The Metropolitan Museum of Istanbul also undertook two repairs to cracks in the masonry and damage to the columns, the first in 1968 and the second in 1985.

During the 1985 restoration, fifty thousand tons of mud were removed from the Basilica Cistern, and platforms for tourists were built to replace the former tour boats. The cistern was opened to the public on the 9th of September in 1987. It has appeared as settings in fiction novels, video games, and films, including the 1063 James Bond “From Russia with Love” and Jean-Baptiste Andrea’s 2013 thriller “Brotherhood of Tears”

Calendar: July 15

A Year: Day to Day Men: 15th of July

Sunflowers in Blue Vase

On July 15, 1799, French Captain Pierre-Francois Bouchard finds the Rosetta Stone.

The Rosetta Stone is a granodiorite stele, inscribed with three versions of a decree issued at Memphis, Egypt in 196 BC on behalf of King Ptolemy V. The top and middle texts are in Ancient Egyptian using the Hieroglyphic script and the Demotic script, respectively, while the bottom is in Ancient Greek. As the decree had only minor differences between the three versions, the Rosetta Stone proved to be the key to deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs.

The Rosetta Stone is a fragment of a larger stele; no additional fragments were found in later searches. Owing to its damaged state, none of the three texts is absolutely complete. This fragment of the stele is 3 feet 8 inches high at its highest point, 2 feet 6 inches wide and 11 inches thick. It weighs approximately 1,680 pounds. The front surface is polished smooth with the incised text; the sides are smooth; and the back is only roughly worked as this would not have been visible when erected.

The stone, carved in black granodiorite, similar to granite, is believed to have been originally in a temple, possibly at nearby Sais. It was moved during the medieval period, and was eventually used as building material in the construction of Fort Julien near the town of Rashid in the Nile Delta. During the Napoleonic campaign in Egypt, Pierre-Francois Bouchard discovered the stone and was immediately convinced of its importance. It was the first Ancient Egyptian bilingual text recovered in modern times; it aroused widespread interest with its potential to decipher previously untranslated hieroglyphic language.

Study of the decree was already under way when the first full translation of the Greek text appeared in 1803. It took another 20 years, however, before the transliteration of the Egyptian scripts was announced by Jean-Francois Champollion in Paris in 1822. It took longer still before scholars were able to read the Ancient Egyptian inscriptions and literature confidently.

The major advances in the decoding of the Rosetta Stone were: The recognition in 1799 that the stone offered three versions of the same text; It became known in 1802 that the demotic text used phonetic characters to spell foreign names; Thomas Young recognized in 1814 that the hieroglyphic text did so as well, and had pervasive similarities to the demotic text; Champollion saw in his 1822-1824 studies that. in addition to being used for foreign names, the phonetic characters were also used to spell native Egyptian words.

Calendar: February 13

A Year: Day to Day Men: 13th of February

Red Bell Peppers

On February 13, 1961, the Coso artifact is discovered near the town of Olancha, California.

The Coso artifact is an object claimed by its discoverers to be a spark plug found encased in a lump of hard clay or rock. It was found by Wallace Lane, Virginia Maxey and Mike Mikesell while they were prospecting for geodes near the town of Olancha. It has been long claimed as an example of an out-of-place artifact. Such an artifact is an object of historical, archaeological, or paleontological interest found in an unusual context, that challenges conventional historical chronology by being “too advanced” for the level of civilization that existed at the time.

Following its collection, Mikesell destroyed a diamond-edged blade cutting through the rock containing the artifact and discovered the item. In a letter written to “Desert Magazine of Outdoor Southwest” a reader stated that a trained geologist had dated the nodule as at least 500,000 years old and it had contained a manmade object. The identity of the alleged trained geologist and means of geologic dating were never clarified, nor the findings ever published in any known periodical.

At the time that Virginia Maxey reported the Coso artifact being dated at 500,000 years old, there was no known method, including the use of guide fossils, by which either the artifact or concretion could have been dated as being this old. The nodule surrounding the spark plug may have accreted in a matter of years or decades, as demonstrated by examples of very similar iron or steel artifact-bearing nodules, which are discussed and illustrated by J. M. Cronyn’s “Elements of Archaeological Conservation”, a reference work for the conservational excavation of materials at sites.

An investigation carried out with the help of members of the Spark Plug Collectors of America, suggested that the artifact is a 1920s Champion spark plug. Chad Windham, President of the Spark Plug Collectors of America, identified the Coso artifact as a 1920s-era Champion spark plug, which was widely used in the Ford Model T and Model A engines. Other spark plug collectors concurred with his assessment.

The location of the Coso artifact is unknown as of 2008. Of its discoverers, Wallace Lane has died, Virginia Maxey is alive but avoids public comment, and the whereabouts of Mike Mikesell are not known.

Zagreb Archaeological Museum

Chas, “Zagreb Archaeological Museum”; Photo taken Early Morning, October 2017

The Archaeological Museum in Zagreb, Croatia, is an archaeological museum with over 450,000 varied artifacts and monuments, gathered from various sources but mostly from Croatia and in particular from the surroundings of Zagreb.

Its predecessor institution was the “National Museum”, open to the public since 1846. It was renamed to “State Institute of Croatia, Slavonia, and Dalmatia” in 1866. In 1878, the Archaeological Department became an independent institution within the State Institute, and the umbrella institute was dissolved in 1939, leaving the Archaeological Museum as a standalone institution.

The archaeological collection of the State Institute had been kept in the Academy mansion at Zrinski Square from the 1880s and remained there until 1945, when the museum moved to its current location at the 19th-century Vranyczany-Hafner mansion, 19 Zrinski Square.

Temples of Tarxien

Temples of Tarxien, Island of Malta

The Temples of Tarxien, date back from 3, 600 B. C. to 2, 800 B. C. These temples are renowned for the detail of their carvings, which include domestic animals carved in relief, altars, and screens decorated with spiral designs and other patterns.

The temples where excavated by the father of archaeology of Malta , Sir Temi Zammit in the beginning of the 20th century and are considered as being the first to be excavated in a scientific method. Most of the original artifacts excavated from the site, today are at The National Museum of Archaeology in Valletta.

Excavation of the site reveals that it was used extensively for rituals, which probably involved animal sacrifice. Especially interesting is that Tarxien provides rare insight into how the megaliths were constructed: stone rollers were left outside the South temple. Additionally, evidence of cremation has been found at the center of the South temple, which is an indicator that the site was reused as a Bronze Age cremation cemetery.

Ami Drach and Dov Ganchrow

Man-Made Collection by Ami Drach and Dov Ganchrow, Updated Stone Tools

The ‘man made’ collection by Tel Aviv-based designers Ami Drach and Dov Ganchrow is a series of contemporary artifacts that proposes various gripping and slicing possibilities. The concept originates from the different stone hand-axe forms rather than specific utilitarian actions used in the stone-age. Each of the white 3D printed handles complement and highlight a singular use of the tool – the extensions effectively transform the ultimate multi-tool into a specialized object.

The flint hand-axes were three-dimensionally scanned at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem’s Institute of Archaeology. with support from Stratasys, the handle files were printed in Verogray – a performance polymer. The parts were then prepared and assembled on the original flint hand-axes, effectively joining the two most temporally distant making technologies: flint knapping and 3D printing.

“Any multi-tool becomes specialized when frozen at a single moment in time during its use. The first stage of the project was one of hastened evolution and bleeding: flint rocks of desirable size, shape and material quality were sourced from the Negev desert in southern Israel, while time was spent improving and understanding the skill of knapping. Basically this involved the striking of flint with a softer stone (historically a striking bone or antler was also used) to create controlled breakage, and chipping away flint flakes as the impact’s shock wave runs through the stone. Needless to say this is also where the bleeding comes in.” – Dov Ganchrow