This article discloses what happens when you get involved with European powers - a load of Asian immigrants turn up in London, and twice as many Africans too!

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3803648/A-meeting-two-ancient-empires-Chinese-skeletons-Roman-cemetery-promise-rewrite-history.html

A word of caution - it is from the Daily Wail.

Interesting tho this is, what disturbs me is that this article did not appear in the Daily Wail we get - nor Telegraph either. News distribution is also  carefully edited. The above might foment unrest in Essex re shortage of burial space and reasons for that in a region where, in parts, the understanding of ancient means sometime last month.

Well this was mentioned on the 11 pm news on R4 - so it might take a while for the printed copy of the Wail to catch up with the on-line one.
Surely there can't be a problem with burial space in Essex? Half the smaller towns have been dead for half a century, and the rest are full of the walking dead, so a few stiffs won't even be noticed.

Exciting and all as this discovery is, the Daily Mail inference is premature, and in essence Rebecca Redfern has it right when she says in the article that it really answers no question but simply poses another one related specifically to the two skeletons found and their particular context. Which of course didn't stop the editors from inserting the word "China" as many times as they felt they could get away with (19 times, which is 19 times more than the evidence warranted).

Serious effort has been made already using archaeological evidence from throughout Roman occupied territories to establish the extent of Far-East Asian influence, trade, demographic imprint and cultural interaction with the Roman hegemony. The paucity of data, even after deliberate attempts to quantify it, suggests very little such interaction in any meaningful sense. It is highly likely that this understates what is a natural assumption regarding the actual historical recognition between these two diverse empires of each other. However it is also highly likely that it simply confirms another natural assumption that the political geography of the globe they inhabited worked against anything but the most random and infrequent interchange, just as the extensive philological evidence also tends to confirm anyway.

On the other point - another view of Britain (or the Insulae, as the area was classically alluded to throughout Roman, Dark Ages and early medieval history) is that "Brexit" is its natural state, political attitude and tendency. What is easier to enumerate and analyse, due to its infrequency and tendency to have profound and visible political impact, is the incidence of "Brentrance", voluntary or otherwise, in which the expectation is that the state can exercise equal influence and enjoy commensurate status with its continental neighbours as a very active and engaged insider, whoever these neighbours happen to have been at the time or however their own power was expressed. Each such incident, it can be said, has tended to generate within the "Insularians" - especially when this status is perceived as having been denied them - a very real eventual backlash politically to revert to what is perceived as their "normal" status vis-a-vis "the others". Exactly what you'd expect from islanders, in fact. What makes Britain unique historically is that for many years it actually engineered a position of very real global power where it could proclaim that status of equality (in fact "first among equals" in the case of its empire) unilaterally, and unarguably with good reason. But even that didn't work out in the long run. Throughout this period it never ditched its innate pride in its insularity, and in the aftermath this is again rapidly becoming (not without several historical precedents) about the only thing of political value remaining.

I like this notion of random interchange. Probably many finds are perplexing. I have dumped stone collections in many gardenborders and rockeries that might confuse someone in the distant future. These were picked up in walks in  many distant and diverse places - and somewhere in many back gardens in parts East must be assorted broken pot shards from about the world hidden by careless but nervous house staff.  And no one ever explained that perfect large chinese vase I found in my compost pit there and is now in our study. I expect ferv knows the correct way of looking at such stuff...... but Time Team could design an entire village about a bit of vase rim.

I totally agree, and especially in the case of such finds from the Roman era when, for the first and probably only time in human history, it was possible for vast numbers of people to traverse huge areas of the globe, largely but by no means exclusively on the back of trade, slavery and military service, with almost no accountability or identification beyond that which the people themselves might volunteer to leave for posterity (normally in the form of a grave inscription, and more recently in the form of DNA). The Roman habit of assimilation which carried as a proviso that the assimilated communicate in Latin once they left their place of ethnic origin (and Greek to the next greatest extent, but with no language outside of Hebrew having evidently survived amongst these "new" Roman denizens) meant that pre-DNA we modern investigators were aware of such great mobility but probably still underestimated it by a huge factor, yet to be accurately determined. Two far-eastern skeletons located in Londinium do not an inter-empire alliance make.

Priscilla wrote:

I like this notion of random interchange. Probably many finds are perplexing. I have dumped stone collections in many gardenborders and rockeries that might confuse someone in the distant future. These were picked up in walks in  many distant and diverse places - and somewhere in many back gardens in parts East must be assorted broken pot shards from about the world hidden by careless but nervous house staff.  And no one ever explained that perfect large chinese vase I found in my compost pit there and is now in our study. I expect ferv knows the correct way of looking at such stuff...... but Time Team could design an entire village about a bit of vase rim.

This is Scottish Archaeology Month so I have been spending quite a few days puddling about in the ground on different projects, none I must add particularly productive, the 'Lost Broch' being still determinedly lost. All of them have involved shifting metres of soil containing large quantities of 18th and 19th c. remains, mostly pot. Yesterday we were speculating as to what happens to these when the finds trays are emptied and all the rubbish therein is disposed of - are they put back in a convenient hole in the ground and if so, how might a future archaeologist interpret this? Might they propose a 21st c. habit of ritual deposit of ancestral pottery or perhaps a symbolic rejection and 'cleansing' of earlier ideas and values?

I did bring home one identical to this though, we could have furnished a stall at an antiques fair and made a few bob.

Random inter change  cont.

I have read but cannot track down ref to a 600BC tomb in Halstatt.... I think... of silk found a woman's burial.
No assumption can be made about trade links  because surely clothing of any sort was of great value and constantly nicked - and taken from bodies, surely tho the tombs of the knobs being a bit more sacrosanct, perhaps. I recall  tales of our town  about washing being stolen from the lines with small children and dogs used to keep an eye on it.

Loot travels far - and the movement of slaves was surely no less widespread.

Do you mean the Chinese silk found in the tomb of the Vix 'princess'?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vix_Grave

No, not the Vix grave, ferv - about which I know quite a lot. It was found in Switzerland - so at a guess, Halstatt.

There is silk from Hohmichele and other Hallstatt and La Tene sites:

There have been several confirmed silk finds dating as far back as the Hallstatt periodand which include the Hochdorf chieftain’s burial which contained ‘a complicated textileof silk woven by ‘combining tabby and twill elements’ (Jorgensen 56) and the Hohmichele burial mounds dating roughly to the same period located close to Heuneburg, Germany.Recent research of the silk woven fabric and embroidery from Hohmichele has has beenunder scrunity by Johanna Banck-Burgess but according to Dr. Bettina Arnold of the University of Milwaukee, these fibres were in fact silk, but of Mediterranean origin. These fibres differed from Asian silk to the extent that they were shorter due to the Mediterranean process of harvesting the threads early as not to kill the silk worm. The Hochdorf silk was indeed a luxury import traced to Asia, a clear indication to the intricate trade system of the period that defined prestige. (Arnold 2011) Another noted burial find of the princely gravefrom Altrier located in Luxembourg from the early La Tene period composed of 2/2 twill of wool or possibly ‘silk’. (Jorgensen 105) Two other silk finds date to the Romano-British period are 3/1 compound twill and a tabby in untwisted yarn from Holborough and Colchester in England both of trade origin, Chinese and Roman.

https://www.academia.edu/1488040/Celtic_Clothing_During_the_Iron_Age-_A_Very_Broad_and_Generic_Approach

The reference to Chinese silk in England conveniently drags this conversation back on topic.

Thank you for filling in the detail, ferv. Perhaps you also know of that cave place on one of the  Himalayan Silk Roads bearing within a ancient Latin inscription along the lines of 'Marcus was here,.'  It has been suggested that this was a remote outpost to protect trade from the far east. 

They had probably also need for such a one along the b****y  X11  - or  b****y A12 as they call it now between Colchester and London. Those two Chinese origin bodies were not mown down by speeding mules, were they?

Priscilla wrote:

Thank you for filling in the detail, ferv. Perhaps you also know of that cave place on one of the  Himalayan Silk Roads bearing within a ancient Latin inscription along the lines of 'Marcus was here,.'  It has been suggested that this was a remote outpost to protect trade from the far east. 

They had probably also need for such a one along the b****y  X11  - or  b****y A12 as they call it now between Colchester and London. Those two Chinese origin bodies were not mown down by speeding mules, were they?

Probably looked the wrong way whilst crossing the road - like Churchill in New York.

Can't help with that inscription P but how about a green glass Roman cup taken from an Eastern Han tomb (25-220 CE) in Guangxi province in southern China?




I wonder if they swapped it for some silk?

Priscilla wrote:

Those two Chinese origin bodies were not mown down by speeding mules, were they?

You see? If you repeat an assertion enough times in quick succession it then becomes fact in some people's minds. The Daily Wail will be pleased with itself if they read your comment. Job done.

Ferv - there was this one too found in a fifth century CE grave in Japan. The glass itself has been identified as Roman from as early as the second or third century, originating in Roman Asia (Anatolia).



Beads are even more transportable of course, and Roman beads from the period, and even earlier, have turned up as far away as the Philippines. Mobile Buddhists are normally awarded the credit.

Priscilla wrote:

I've been trying to find this Daily Wail  you are on about. I keep seeing it in posts on Res Hist so it must be a fact

Alas, yes it is.

The assertion that solidified into fact in your nut due to the Wail's unfounded repetition was the Chinese origin one, right enough. In the article the only people asserting the skeletons' sinisism are the reporter and his editors (19 times, no less). Cynicism, on the other hand, regarding that assertion is healthily asserted by the archaeologist interviewed, but only once so it apparently lost out in the grey matter penetration stakes for certain readers (as the Wail no doubt intended).

nordmann wrote:

The assertion that solidified into fact in your nut due to the Wail's unfounded repetition was the Chinese origin one, right enough. In the article the only people asserting the skeletons' sinisism are the reporter and his editors (19 times, no less). Cynicism, on the other hand, regarding that assertion is healthily asserted by the archaeologist interviewed, but only once so it apparently lost out in the grey matter penetration stakes for certain readers (as the Wail no doubt intended).

How odd that you should so misread - or misunderstand rather - Priscilla's words. Wasn't her mention of the Chinese bods in her post just an example of her usual dry/wry/ironic manner, a style of writing we all - or most of us - find very amusing and entertaining? Dry, but not in the least bit dry, if you get my meaning.

The dangers of people reading everything literally are endless. But like those speeding mules of hers.

But I'd best not stick my nose in here. I don't know a thing about the Chinese, the A12 or mules (except Muffin).

Misunderstanding Priscilla's words is what keeps me sane these days (the alternative horrifies me, to be honest). Don't knock it till you've tried it.

What is really depressing about the Wail is that it is consistently the best British newspaper (at least the online version) for concentrating on historical British themes. The journalism itself may be suspect, but they do at least spare some effort in compiling some very interesting photo-journalistic articles, especially regarding themes that will go down well - they reckon - with Nigelites.

Your sanity - that can be verified? I will t-r-y  t-o w-r-i t-e  e-v-e-r  s-o  c-l-e-a-r-l-y. But then why bother? The other 3 people who read our posts might understand without having an attack of the hair-raising quivers...... and 19 times ain't that many to get an understanding. Try getting a six year old to recall that 8x7=56. As a child  whom I know once said of it, 'If you say so - but it don't matter to me.'

Returning to the subject and random happenstance for - for the other two readers who understand me - that there were two bodies with similar DNA origins buried at the same place makes it the more interesting. Imagination expands about that.

As for the silk in the weave, ferv - would that have been to add colour, or shine? I assume the tabby was warmer and dull. It might also explain why finding 'tartan' weaves' is often mentioned of the big burial finds; if the threads are laid flat and not twisted.

Oh, do STOP THIS AT ONCE (that's me shouting), you two. Just as everything was all nice and friendly again.

You are driving me to drink and I mustn't.

Being a touch less "yellow peril"ist, where would people with this sort of "Asian" ancestry begin, geographically? What specifically marks them out as "of Asian ancestry"?

Lookee, 'ere. I lasted a whole seven days before an out break. Speaking for myself, nice and friendly is so hard to keep up - and I would not dare to speak for him, of course.

So, before I have to again, perhaps ferv might know of the appeal in that silk if it was in a mixed weave.... not all silk has lustre. I wear quite a lot which looks like rather dull cotton - and would not appeal to a chieftain wanting to show off.

Gilgamesh of Uruk wrote:

Being a touch less "yellow peril"ist, where would people with this sort of "Asian" ancestry begin, geographically? What specifically marks them out as "of Asian ancestry"?

Apparently comparisons of their teeth enamel "proves" the Roman Empire traded with the Chinese other than along the Silk Road. Another "possibly Asian man" found in Vagnari, Italy, seals the deal. "Phenomenal", they are saying. "Phenomenamel", say I.

Priscilla wrote:

The other 3 people who read our posts might understand without having an attack of the hair-raising quivers...

You do us a disservice, ma'am. According to Google Analytics the post in which you made this statement has already itself been perused by 35 people in 7 different countries. The Bangladeshi lingered longest. Probably insane.

Do you think they may have hitched a ride in one of the plaustra coming across from Caletum, or were they in Britannia legitimately? or even legionitically?

The context of their interment would go a long way towards establishing their possible status. We're not getting much about this in the news reports.

Also, I see Forbes magazine, in an excellent article by bioarchaeologist Kristina Killgrove, has rightly issued a word of caution about newspapers cloning the article as it stands. They cite Redfern herself and her own wariness of deducing too much from this non-DNA "statistical modelling" approach to establishing ancestry based on tooth formation (it's not even enamel analysis) and skull shapes. Here are Killgrove's reservations - note the very last sentence:

The fact that many of the samples were fragmented means that 41% of the sample had only two traits to score. As the researchers write, “This degree of missing data can affect classification accuracies, particularly among the sample having two or less (sic) traits.”

“We recognise that this is a subjective approach… and that many of the individuals used to generate these methods derive from modern populations outside of the territories that formed the Roman Empire. [...] The population affiliation divisions used here may disguise or fail to find many affiliations because they are subjective, and morphology varies between individuals and over time,” they further note.  This is problematic because bioarchaeologists cannot be sure how much the skull and tooth shapes have changed over 2,000 years. Comparing an ancient population with a modern one may not yield accurate results. (For example, when I put metric data from skeletons from Rome into FORDISC, a software program that compares metric data from skulls, the program happily classifies them into Asian samples.)

“The method development was particularly lacking in north African and southern Mediterranean populations, whose DNA shows a greater degree of genetic diversity compared to sub-Saharan and more northern ones. Therefore, the results must be understood in their temporal and spatial context, and the biases introduced by the methods acknowledged.” With few comparative samples from contemporary Africa and the southern Mediterranean, which are much more likely to be the origin of Roman Britons than is Asia, this means there may be bias introduced into the interpretation of the skull and tooth shapes.

So, the plaustrum had no unintended passengers, it seems ...

M. Didius Falco would probably cry "Hades" at that news. No mystery - no need for a "private informer", no pay. Bit like the Wail reporter.

As a true Roman wouldn't he have been likely to cry "Dis Pater" or "Pluto" rather than "Hades" (though I understand the author's wish to avoid "Pluto" in view of its mus ad canem implications.)

While idly browsing for information about early Sino-European interactions I came across this, oddly serendipitous (and very odd indeed) considering the earlier discussion.







The Hohmichele 'Mediterranean' silk was presumably Coan silk from Kos which was mentioned by Aristotle:

From one particular large grub, which has as it were horns, and in other respects differs from grubs in general, there comes, by a metamorphosis of the grub, first a caterpillar, then the cocoon, then the necydalus; and the creature passes through all these transformations within six months. A class of women unwind and reel off the cocoons of these creatures, and afterwards weave a fabric with the threads thus unwound; a Coan woman of the name of Pamphile, daughter of Plateus, being credited with the first invention of this fabric.

SOURCE: Aristotle, Historia Animalium, Book V. Vol. IV of The Works of Aristotle. Trans. D'arcy Wentworth Thompson (Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1910): 551b.


That would of course be perfectly plausible considering all those great big kraters in the graves which if I remember  correctly were imported through Massalia and presumably the solk came by the same route.


The Hallstatt tartans were similar to tartan as we know it - plaid dyed with the natural colours as were the early Scottish ones. Here are some scraps from the Hallstatt salt mines.

Can I chuck into the mix The Epic of Gesar of Ling. No, i had never heard of this either but it is described as the last living oral epic poem principally in Tibet and parts of Central Asia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_of_King_Gesar

http://www.khandro.net/langnlit_Gesar.htm

Quoting from Wiki:

Etymology of the name[edit]
It has been proposed on the basis of phonetic similarities that the name Gesar reflects the Roman title Caesar, and that the intermediary for the transmission of this imperial title from Rome to Tibet may have been a Turkic language, since kaiser (emperor) entered Turkish through contact with the Byzantine Empire, where Caesar (Καῖσαρ) was an imperial title. Some think the medium for this transmission may have been via Mongolian Kesar. The Mongols were allied with the Byzantines, whose emperor still used the title.[13] Numismatic evidence[14] and some accounts speak of a Bactrian ruler Phrom-kesar,[15] specifically the Kabul Shahi of Gandhara, which was ruled by a Turkish From Kesar ("Caesar of Rome"),[16] who was father-in-law of the king of the Kingdom of Khotan around the middle of the 8th century CE.[17][18] In early Bon sources, From Kesar is always a place name, and never refers, as it does later, to a ruler.[19] In some Tibetan versions of the epic, a king named Phrom Ge-sar or Khrom Ge-sar figures as one of the kings of the four directions – the name is attested in the 10th century[20] and this Phrom/Khrom preserves an Iranian form (*frōm-hrōm) for Rūm/Rome. This eastern Iranian word lies behind the Middle Chinese word for (Eastern) Rome (拂菻:Fúlǐn), namely Byzantium (phrōm-from<*phywət-lyəm>).[21][22]

and from the other link:


Great Caesar's Ghost

The name, Gesar, is evocative of the Latin Caesar, from which we get the German Kaiser, and also the Russian word for "king," Tsar.)  Noted mythologist Joseph Campbell (1968, 107) also had this impression, but pointed out that, although some think the Gesar material refers to "the glories that were Rome," there is also a commonality in the pre-Islamic Persian word for "sovereignty" which is sahr.

There are further links.  Gesar is said to have ruled the land of Phrom from a city called Rum.  The town that later became the legislative capital of the eastern Roman Empire, Byzantium (Constantinople, now Istanbul) was known as "Rome" or Rum to those who knew of no other Roman centre.  Interestingly, its main religious shrine was to the Wisdom Goddess.  (It later became a church dedicated to "Santa Sophia,"  and though it is today a mosque, it is still called Hagia Sophia.


Unlike the memory of Alexander preserved in the Iskandar epics, Gesar is an all round good geezer and yet another product of a miraculous birth and rather than just dying, disappears off to a hidden realm ready to return to save his people. In fact the many and various versions are packed full of familiar incidents - a descent into hell to rescue someone, in this case his mother, and the defeat of several daemons and devils.

P, have you come across any of this during your years east of Suez?

Re Trike's mention of roman coins in Japan ... I guess one shouldn't really be surprised to find roman coins throughout Asia as the romans themselves acknowledged that their demand for silks, spices and other exotic commodities was draining the empire of ready coinage. Pliny the Elder lamented that,

"... journeys made to Seres [China] to obtain cloth, the abysses of the Red Sea explored for pearls, and the depths of the earth scoured for emeralds ... at the lowest computation, India and Seres and the [Arabian] Peninsula together drain our empire of one hundred million sesterces every year. That is the price that our luxuries and our womankind cost us."

Some of that drain was due to an imbalance of trade but the Senate itself recognised that a lot of it was simply in gold and silver coin ... readily transportable, widely recognised as of pukka quality and so readily accepted nearly everywhere (a bit like American Express but leaving physical evidence of the transactions even if they were between merchants who themselves had never been even to the furthest Roman outpost). The senate's response was to introduce sumptuary laws to limit the wearing of silks and pearls etc, but as so often these laws didn't work.

Periplous of the Erythraean Sea
A first century guide book for merchants and traders operating from Roman Egypt.:

Meles meles wrote:

Re Trike's mention of roman coins in Japan ... I guess one shouldn't really be surprised to fing roman coins throughout Asia as the romans themselves acknowledged that their demand for silks, spices and other exotic commodities was draining the empire of ready coinage. Pliny the Elder lamented that,

"... journeys made to Seres [China] to obtain cloth, the abysses of the Red Sea explored for pearls, and the depths of the earth scoured for emeralds ... at the lowest computation, India and Seres and the [Arabian] Peninsula together drain our empire of one hundred million sesterces every year. That is the price that our luxuries and our womankind cost us."

A similar thing happened in the 19th century with a drain of silver to supply the ever growing demand in Britain for China Tea, though in this case the British decided it would be a good idea to correct this imbalance by selling Opium to the Chinese.

And again, re coinage, one can easily see the same thing with Euro coins, which are freely exchangeable throughout the entire Euro Zone but are still readily identifiable as to their place of issue. So here where I am most of the coins in my pocket are French and Spanish, with typically quite a few from Italy, Germany, Belgium and Holland, but often also one of two from places as far apart a Portugal, Ireland, Greece, Lithuania, Finland and Malta. These coins have travelled more widely than I have done.

An 18th century equivalent Meles, the Spanish Dollar, worth 8 reales, hence pieces of eight;



US 55 dollar note issued by the Continental Congress in 1779;

(Literally) In-fighting

UKIP Fight

Triceratops wrote:

Toblerone

Probably increase the price for this new, low-calorie bar.

Triceratops wrote:

(Literally) In-fighting

UKIP Fight

"Out" fighting, surely?