Latest news with #AustrianArchaeologicalInstitute
Yahoo
22-04-2025
- Yahoo
Archaeologists Excavated Mysterious Ruins—and Uncovered an Ancient Roman Fort
Austrian ruins previously known as the Desolate Castle were actually once a Roman bridgehead fort. The site served as a strategic trade crossing for the Danube River as part of the historic Amber Road. This is the first Roman bridgehead fort ever discovered in Austria. Archaeologists solved the mystery of the ruins of the Desolate Castle, determining that the mysterious site on the Danube River shore was once part of a crucial Roman trade route. Located two miles from the Roman legionary fortress of Carnuntum along the Danube River and long known in Austria as 'Odes Schloss' (which translates to the 'Desolate Castle'), the 'castellum'—a Latin word for fortlet or tower—was the subject of recent archaeological work. The well-preserved, nearly nine-foot-tall tower walls had long been thought to be some sort of Roman structure, and the team of experts that confirmed the suspicion have opened a new window in the history of Roman military and trade habits. The site is Austria's only known Roman bridgehead fort. Around 1850, the still-visible walls at the site were dubbed the Desolate Castle, but experts were never sure what the area represented—that is, of course, until now. Experts, according to a translated statement from the Austrian Archaeological Institute of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, believe castle construction occurred in two phases. The first was around 170-180 A.D., when Emperor Marcus Aurelius reinforced the Roman border against the Germanic tribes during the Marcomannic Wars. The site's location—on the shore of the Danube River and along the trade route known as the Amber Road, which led from the Baltics via Carnuntum to the Roman Empire—offered a critical trade crossing at the river, which was a natural border of the empire. The second phase of construction, which occurred around 260 A.D., saw a renovation under Emperor Gallienus. Since that time, troop levels manning the fort dropped. During the excavation, archaeologists unearthed stamped bricks from the Roman legion groups XIV and XV, along with small bronze pieces, ceramics, and coins. 'They prove the great strategic importance of Carnuntum within the Roman military system and provide new insights into the military security of the north-south connection,' Eduard Pollhammer, archaeologist and scientific director of Carnuntum, said in a statement. Roman military strategy commonly called for the construction of forts on the opposite side of a border river. From these bases, troops observed both the passage across the river and the surrounding area. The Amber Road would have crossed the Danube at this spot, and having a military presence on the river gave Romans defensive control of comings and goings. Experts believe no physical bridge ever stood at the site—rather, a prominent ferry crossing was the transportation of choice all the way into the 18th century. The Danube River was an important location for Roman border security and control of trade routes. Now, this newly understood castle has been designated part of the Danube Limes, which has been a UNESO World Heritage Site since 2021. 'This impressive find proves the importance of Bernsteinstraße [the Amber Road]—and the Lower Austria region—as an important traffic artery,' Johanna Mikl-Leitner, Lower Austria's governor, said in a statement, 'and as a center in the midst of various dominions, function that Lower Austria still holds today.' You Might Also Like The Do's and Don'ts of Using Painter's Tape The Best Portable BBQ Grills for Cooking Anywhere Can a Smart Watch Prolong Your Life?
CBC
16-04-2025
- CBC
1,900-year-old Roman papyrus details elaborate tax evasion scheme, research suggests
Social Sharing If you thought you would find few parallels between today's world and the world of 2,000 years ago, or you feel like you're the only one dealing with taxes on seemingly everything, think again. According to a recent analysis of a 1,900-year-old papyrus from ancient Rome, taxes and tax evasion have existed for millenia. "It was an incredibly lucky rediscovery that brought this publication to light eventually," Anna Dolganov, a historian and papyrologist of the Roman Empire with the Austrian Archaeological Institute, told As It Happens host Nil Köksal. "It's extremely historically substantial. It's one of those documents that very few scholars get to work on in the whole of their career." The papyrus, found in the Judean desert in the 1950s, includes a tale of two men who lived in a border region between two Roman provinces. The scroll, written by a prosecutor in preparation for a tax evasion trial, accuses the men of an elaborate scheme involving the bogus sale and then manumission of enslaved persons. There were at least five types of taxes associated with the trade, sale, ownership and manumission of slaves in the Roman empire. The earliest evidence shows four per cent tax was charged on the sale of slaves and five per cent tax on manumissions, according to the research. "What they seem to have done is weaponize the fact that the administrative systems of the two Roman provinces did not routinely communicate with each other," she said. Dolganov says it appears the sales of slaves on one side of the border were not verified by the other provincial administration. "And this appears to have been instrumentalized by them to make the slaves effectively disappear on paper from the view of the officials." Two of the men, Gadalias and Saulos, have biblical names which indicate very strongly that they are Jewish, Dolganov said. "The one who was instrumental in the forgery happened to be the son of a notary. So he was involved in his father's notarial business and therefore had access to the instruments that one needs to create forged legal documents," she said. Possible motives The details of the case are seen through the lens of the prosecution, which argues the men are criminals who should be condemned. It is possible, however, to eke out a bit of the background story, Dolganov said. One puzzling element to the whole story, Dolganov said, was that at some point after the sale of the slaves took place, one of them was freed by the original owner who was no longer the owner on paper. "If the point is to evade taxes, why was the risk of manumitting the slave taken? Because when a slave is manumitted, their manumission has to be registered," she explained. She believes that this may have been when officials became suspicious that something was going on. Dolganov has several theories as to the men's motives beyond mercantile tax evasion. The slaves automatically became Jewish if they had Jewish masters, and Jewish law has requirements surrounding the treatment of slaves. She says it's possible that the men were trying to evade their own law. Another possibility, according to Dolganov, could be that the accused men had a human relationship to these slaves, and in the Roman world it was customary to reward faithful household slaves with manumission. Capital punishment Rules for tax evasion were not specific to Jewish subjects. They were universal and extremely harsh. "The Romans did not joke about tax evasions. They saw this, essentially, as a crime against the state," Dolganov said. The punishment could include significant fines, temporary or permanent exile, or hard labour in mines or stone quarries — with the latter essentially a death sentence, she explained. "In the worst case, one could be made an example of and executed in an imaginative way. For example, being thrown to wild beasts in the amphitheatre," Dolganov said. The text mirrors what Roman legal literature says about the way that these types of cases ought to be handled, Dolganov said. "It shows that these local lawyers in these borderland provinces were extremely competent in both rhetoric and Roman law, and this is a huge discovery because it shows that Roman legal knowledge was actually very widespread throughout the empire." 'Sound piece of scholarship' One history expert applauded the research, saying it is an impressive piece of legal history from a lesser-known time period. The papyrus dates back to the eve of a poorly documented revolt by Jewish people against the Roman Empire in Judea — a period researchers have struggled to document. "I think it's a really sound piece of scholarship … it's a really important piece of evidence from a time and place that we just don't know much about otherwise," said Seth Bernard, a professor of ancient history at the University of Toronto. He says two aspects of the research stood out: the history of slavery in the Empire, and the political history of a time and place that historians have had trouble accessing. He compared the findings to today's world, where taxes on many goods and services are commonplace. "You have to pay a tax when you buy a slave, you have to pay a tax when you own a slave, you have to pay a tax when you manumit them and you pay a tax when you export them," he said. "It's like this is just one activity, and it seems like they're paying taxes on everything … it's kind of nice to know that we're not the first people dealing with taxes on everything."
New York Times
14-04-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
How to Evade Taxes in Ancient Rome? A 1,900-Year-Old Papyrus Offers a Guide.
It may not have been the tax-evasion trial of the century — the second century, that is — but it was of such gravity that the defendants faced charges of forgery, fiscal fraud and the sham sale of slaves. Tax dodging is as old as taxation itself, but these particular offenses were considered so serious under Roman law that penalties ranged from heavy fines and permanent exile to hard labor in the salt mines and, in the worst case, damnatio ad bestias, a public execution in which the condemned were devoured by wild animals. The allegations are laid out in a papyrus that was discovered decades ago in the Judean desert but only recently analyzed; it contains the prosecutor's prep sheet and the hastily drafted minutes from a judicial hearing. According to the ancient notes, the tax-evasion scheme involved the falsification of documents and the illicit sale and manumission, or freeing, of slaves — all to avoid paying duties in the far-flung Roman provinces of Judea and Arabia, a region roughly corresponding to present-day Israel and Jordan. Both tax dodgers were men. One, named Gadalias, was the impoverished son of a notary with ties to the local administrative elite. Besides convictions for extortion and counterfeiting, his catalog of misdeeds included banditry, sedition and, on four occasions, failing to show up for jury duty at the court of the Roman governor. Gadalias's partner in crime was a certain Saulos, his 'friend and collaborator' and the supposed mastermind of the caper. Although the ethnicity of the accused is not explicitly stated, their Jewish identities are assumed, based on their biblical names, Gedaliah and Saul. This ancient legal drama unfolded during the reign of Hadrian, after the emperor's tour of the area around 130 A.D. and presumably before 132 A.D. That year, Simon bar Kochba, a messianic guerrilla chief, led a popular uprising — the third and final war between the Jewish people and the empire. The revolt was violently suppressed, with hundreds of thousands killed and most of the surviving Jewish population expelled from Judea, which Hadrian renamed Syria Palestina. 'The papyrus reflects the suspicion with which the Roman authorities viewed their Jewish subjects,' said Anna Dolganov, a historian of the Roman Empire with the Austrian Archaeological Institute, who deciphered the scroll. She noted that there is archaeological evidence for coordinated planning of the Bar Kochba revolt. 'It is possible that tax evaders like Gadalias and Saulos, who were inclined to disrespect the Roman order, were involved in the preparations,' Dr. Dolganov said. In the current issue of Tyche, a journal of antiquity published by the University of Vienna, Dr. Dolganov and three Austrian and Israeli colleagues present the court proceedings as a case study. Their paper brings to light how Roman institutions and imperial law could influence the administration of justice in a provincial setting where relatively few people were Roman citizens. 'The document provides rare and highly interesting evidence for the slave trade in this part of the empire,' said Dennis P. Kehoe, a classicist at Tulane University, who was not involved in the study, 'as well as the circumstances under which Jews might have slaves.' Following the papyrus trail No one is certain when or by whom the papyrus was unearthed, but Dr. Dolganov said that it was probably found in the 1950s by Bedouin antiquity dealers. She suspects that the discovery site was Nahal Hever, a steep-walled canyon west of the deep cleft of the Dead Sea where some Bar Kochba rebels, fleeing the Romans, took refuge in natural fault line caves in the limestone cliffs. In 1960, archaeologists found documents from the era in one of the Jewish hide-outs; others have been discovered since. Initially misclassified, the ragged 133-line scroll lay unnoticed in the archives of the Israel Antiquities Authority until 2014, when Hannah Cotton Paltiel, a classicist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, realized that it was written in ancient Greek. In light of the document's complexity and extraordinary length, a team of scholars was assembled to conduct a detailed physical examination and cross-reference names and locations with other historical sources. Deciphering the papyrus and reconstructing its intricate narrative posed major challenges to Dr. Dolganov. 'The letters are tiny and densely packed, and the Greek is highly rhetorical and full of technical legal terms,' she said. Unlike in documents such as contracts, there were no formulaic expressions that made the translation easier. 'It certainly does not help that we only have the second half, or less, of the original,' Dr. Dolganov said. The researchers deduced that the tax scheme was designed to escape notice, which meant careful detective work was required to piece together what happened. 'I had to adopt the perspective of the Roman fiscal administration to understand what the text is talking about,' she said. Dr. Dolganov also had to imagine the dodge from the standpoint of the accused: To commit tax fraud with the slave trade in the most remote corner of the Roman world, what would you have to do, and what would have made the effort profitable? The ancient scheme has resonated deeply with modern tax lawyers. A German lawyer told Dr. Dolganov that the shenanigans of Gadalias and Saulos were not all that different from today's most common forms of tax fraud — shifting assets, phony transactions. And the Roman interrogation methods were largely in line with Untersuchungshaft — investigative custody — for financial crimes, which involves intimidation and often brutal questioning. 'Dr. Dolganov has performed wonderful feats of scholarship in unraveling the meaning of the contents and their significance for the history of the region and the empire,' said Brent Shaw, a classicist at Princeton University with no connection to the project. Rebels with a cause The case against Gadalias and Saulos was bolstered by information provided by an informant who tipped off the Roman authorities — and the text even suggests that the informant was none other than Saulos, who denounced his accomplice Chaereas to protect himself in a looming financial investigation. The most likely scenario, Dr. Dolganov said, was that Saulos, a resident of Judea, arranged the bogus sale of several slaves to Chaereas, who lived in the neighboring province of Arabia. By being sold across the provincial border, the slaves would have vanished in print from Saulos's assets in Judea. But because they physically stayed with Saulos, the alleged buyer, Chaereas, could opt not to declare them in Arabia. 'Thus, on paper, the slaves disappeared in Judea but never arrived in Arabia, thereby becoming invisible to Roman administrators,' Dr. Dolganov said. 'Henceforth, all taxes on these slaves could be avoided.' The empire had sophisticated systems for tracking slave ownership and collecting various taxes, which amounted to 4 percent on slave sales and 5 percent on manumissions. 'To free a slave in the empire, you had to present documentary evidence of the slave's current and previous ownership, which had to be officially registered,' Dr. Dolganov said. 'If any documents were missing or looked suspicious, Roman administrators would investigate.' To hide Saulos's double-dealing, Gadalias, the notary's son, evidently forged the bills of sale and other legal agreements. When the authorities became aware of the matter, the defendants allegedly made payments to a local city council for protection. At the trial, Gadalias blamed his late father for the forgeries, and Saulos pinned the manumission on Chaereas. The papyrus offers no insight into their motive. 'Why the men took the risk of freeing a slave without valid papers remains a mystery,' Dr. Dolganov said. One possibility is that, by faking the sale of slaves and then releasing them, Gadalias and Saulos were observing a Jewish biblical duty to free enslaved people. Or maybe there was profit to be made in capturing people — perhaps even willing participants — from beyond the border, bringing them into the Empire and then releasing them from their 'slavery' to become free Romans. Or maybe Gadalias and Saulos were human traffickers, plain and simple — Dr. Dolganov emphasized that the alternate story lines were entirely speculative, as nothing in the text supported them. What surprised her most about the trial, she said, was the professionalism of the prosecutors. They employed deft rhetorical strategies worthy of Cicero and Quintilian and displayed an excellent command of Roman legal terms and concepts in Greek. 'This is the edge of the Roman Empire, and boom, we see legal practitioners of high caliber who are competent in Roman law,' Dr. Dolganov said. The papyrus does not reveal the final verdict. 'If the Roman judge was convinced these were hardened criminals and execution was in order, Gadalias as a member of his local civic elite may have received a more merciful death by decapitation,' Dr. Dolganov said. 'At any rate, almost anything is better than being eaten by leopards.'
ARN News Center
21-03-2025
- Science
- ARN News Center
25,000-year-old mammoth hunting site discovered in Austria
Archaeologists from the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW) have made a significant discovery in Langmannersdorf, Lower Austria, uncovering a prehistoric hunting ground used for mammoths. Excavations in this area, located northeast of St. Pölten, revealed the remains of at least five mammoths dating back 25,000 years, along with stone tools. Researchers believe that dozens of these animals were processed here, with their meat utilised and ivory crafted by ancient hunters. In February, a team led by Marc Händel from the Austrian Archaeological Institute (ÖAI) undertook further excavations slightly away from previous sites as part of the European research project MAMBA, which focuses on mammoth bone accumulations in Central Europe. \ They identified two zones, approximately 15 metres apart, containing multiple layers of bones, along with stone tools and waste from tool production. While neither zone contained complete skeletons, one area revealed remains of at least three animals, including intact and fragmented tusks, but few vertebrae and long bones. This suggests that ivory was likely processed there, possibly to create spear points. The second zone lacked ivory but included vertebrae and long bones from at least two additional mammoths. Notably, both locations lacked rib bones, indicating that the ancient hunters sorted the remains. Additionally, signs of Upper Paleolithic habitation have been found, such as fire pits and pits, which suggest that while butchering mammoths, the hunters remained in the area and left behind traces of their presence. Händel noted that 25,000 years ago, during the late Ice Age, mammoth herds roamed Central Europe, utilising the Perschling Valley in Langmannersdorf as a transit and grazing area.
Dubai Eye
20-03-2025
- Science
- Dubai Eye
25,000-year-old mammoth hunting site discovered in Austria
Share on Facebook Share on Messenger Share on Messenger Share on X Share on Whatsapp Archaeologists from the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW) have made a significant discovery in Langmannersdorf, Lower Austria, uncovering a prehistoric hunting ground used for mammoths. Excavations in this area, located northeast of St. Pölten, revealed the remains of at least five mammoths dating back 25,000 years, along with stone tools. Researchers believe that dozens of these animals were processed here, with their meat utilised and ivory crafted by ancient hunters. In February, a team led by Marc Händel from the Austrian Archaeological Institute (ÖAI) undertook further excavations slightly away from previous sites as part of the European research project MAMBA, which focuses on mammoth bone accumulations in Central Europe. \ They identified two zones, approximately 15 metres apart, containing multiple layers of bones, along with stone tools and waste from tool production. While neither zone contained complete skeletons, one area revealed remains of at least three animals, including intact and fragmented tusks, but few vertebrae and long bones. This suggests that ivory was likely processed there, possibly to create spear points. The second zone lacked ivory but included vertebrae and long bones from at least two additional mammoths. Notably, both locations lacked rib bones, indicating that the ancient hunters sorted the remains. Additionally, signs of Upper Paleolithic habitation have been found, such as fire pits and pits, which suggest that while butchering mammoths, the hunters remained in the area and left behind traces of their presence. Händel noted that 25,000 years ago, during the late Ice Age, mammoth herds roamed Central Europe, utilising the Perschling Valley in Langmannersdorf as a transit and grazing area.
