Live from London: Debating on the Parthenon Marbles

"Greece has found a number of prominent allies in the ongoing 200-year-old discussion on whether the Parthenon Marbles should leave the premises of the British Museum in London and return to Athens. "What greater gesture could be made to Greece in its appalling finance distress? An act of friendship, atonement and an expression of faith in the future of the cradle of democracy would be so, well just so damned classy,” British comedian and author Stephen Fry wrote on the subject of their possible return in an essay published in December last year."

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Simple mathematics worked for ancient trade

"Archaeologists in the eastern Mediterranean region have been unearthing spherical jugs for decades, which were used for storing and trading oil, wine, and other valuable commodities. Because we use a metric system, which defines units of volume based on the cube, modern archaeologists believed that the merchants of antiquity could only approximately assess the capacity of these round vessels, said Prof. Itzhak Benenson of Tel Aviv University’s (TAU) Department of Geography."

Read the rest of the article at Past Horizons 

Uncovering the Great Theater of Apamea

"The Great Theater at Apamea in northern Syria vies with the Large Theater at Ephesus, Turkey for the honor of being the largest extant Roman edifice of its type to have survived the ravages of time.  Both buildings are estimated to have held audiences of over 20,000 persons, and both may have had their origins in an earlier Greek Hellenistic structure that was overbuilt in the Roman Era.  Only one other theater, the Theater of Pompey in Rome, is known to have been larger."

Read the rest of the article at Popular Archaeology