What’s A Greek Urn?
$7.50 an hour, just to update an old, old joke. But seriously, archaeologists in Greece have discovered some very, very old cloth inside a copper urn. That urn also contained fragments of a cremated human body and dates back some 2,700 years.
ATHENS, Greece - Archaeologists in Greece have discovered a rare 2,700-year-old piece of fabric inside a copper urn from a burial they speculated imitated the elaborate cremation of soldiers described in Homer's "Iliad."
The yellowed, brittle material was found in the urn during excavation in the southern town of Argos, a Culture Ministry announcement said Wednesday
"This is an extremely rare find, as fabric is an organic material which decomposes very easily," said archaeologist Alkistis Papadimitriou, who headed the dig. She said only a handful of such artifacts have been found in Greece.
The cylindrical urn also contained dried pomegranates — offerings linked with the ancient gods of the underworld — along with ashes and charred human bones from an early 7th century B.C. cremation.
The copper urn actually is what saved the cloth. The copper oxides that formed as the urn corroded are lethal to many microorganisms. Cremation was not widely practiced during that period in Greek history, so the find is doubly unusual.
By Thomas, Wednesday, 9 May , 2007 @ 7:45 pm
There seems to be this pervasive myth that cremation was common in preindustrial societies. It takes a remarkable amount of fuel to burn a human body to ash, especially if it hasn’t been thoroughly dried first. This usually turned out to be too costly for most people. While heads of state, distinguished warriors and just plain rich people were cremated, it was cost prohibitive for most.
I think that might be the only bit of qualitative understanding that I took away from college anthropology, btw.