Military History Photo Friday: Roman Warship Ram

I haven't blogged in a while because I've been up in Oxford for my usual summer research and writing trip. Besides that, I've been hiking and visiting museums. The best exhibition of the summer is certainly the Ashmolean Museum's Storms, War & Shipwrecks Treasures from the Sicilian Seas, which I've written up for Black Gate. This show looks at the amazing finds from more than a dozen shipwrecks around Sicily.

One of the more unusual displays shows three warship rams from the Battle of the Egadi Islands, fought between the Roman and Carthaginian navies in 241 BC. It was the final battle of the First Punic War and an important Roman victory. A fleet of 200 Roman warships ambushed a convoy of 250 heavily laden Carthaginian warships. The Romans sunk 50 ships and captured 70, while losing only 30 of their own. They seized control of Sicily and began to dominate the Mediterranean. Of course it would take two more Punic Wars before the Romans vanquished their rivals once and for all.

The ram shown here once adorned the prow of a Roman warship. You can just see on the top a decoration in the form of a helmet. The spiky bits would have been just below the waterline and apparently they made a direct hit on some poor Carthaginian vessel, because a chunk of wood is still stuck in the bottom groove!

Check out my article for more on this great exhibition. I blog on Black Gate every Wednesday.

Travel Tuesday: Archaeological Museum of Cuenca, Spain

The coolest artifact in the collection, a Roman brick that a couple of people stepped on while it was still wet. You can imagine the bricklayer screaming at the clueless pedestrian as he walked on it two thousand years ago, only to have a second person do the same thing!

Last weekend we got away from Madrid and spent some time in Cuenca, an hour's train ride from the capital. I'll be writing up this historic town more thoroughly in my usual Wednesday post over at Black Gate. In the meantime, here are some photos from the city's excellent little archaeological museum.

The museum has modest collections from the Neolithic, Medieval, and Early Modern periods and some impressive items from the Iron Age and Roman times. The province of Cuenca has three major Roman towns--Ercávica, Segóbriga, and Valeria, so the Roman section was especially good.

Roman feet!

Maybe the hipsters will make this style popular again.

This little guy is an Iron Age figurine, one of many in the museum's collection.

Travel Tuesday: Roman Mosaics in Morocco

Venus and Adonis.

Morocco became part of the Roman Empire in 40 AD as the province of Mauretania Tingitana. There are several good archaeological sites in the country, including the famous city of Volubilis and several smaller cities such as Lixus.

In the archaeological museum of Tetouan, there are a number of fine mosaics from Lixus. Originally a Phoenician city founded in the 7th century BC, it prospered under Roman rule. The mosaics you see here were all made in the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD. Life wasn't always peaceful in Roman Mauretania Tingitana, however, as you can see from this picture of a most unfortunate Roman soldier.

For some more shots of this kind of art, check out my post on Roman gladiator mosaics.

Mars and Rhea Silvia.

The three graces.

Military History Photo Friday: Frontier Forts of the Emperor Hadrian

Photo courtesy Jean-Pierre Neri via Wikimedia Commons.

This is an aerial photo of Lambaesis, a Roman fort in what is now Algeria. It was built during the reign of Emperor Hadrian (117–138 AD). This was a permanent camp for the III Augusta legion complete with fortification walls, baths, an amphitheater, and temples.

Meanwhile, at the empire's northern frontier at the edge of Scotland, Hadrian was building the wall that would bear his name. The below photo is an aerial view of Housesteads fort, situated on the wall and the base for the II Augusta legion. While it's smaller than the contemporary fort in Algeria, you can see that its based on a very similar plan. The Romans standardized many of their buildings, only varying them because of special needs or terrain. Thus if a legionnaire decided to switch from the III to the II legion, and moved from the heat of Algeria to the damp of Scotland, he'd be able to make his way around the fort without any problem.

A few years ago I did a series about hiking Hadrian's Wall on the now-defunct travel blog Gadling. The photo galleries are gone but all my text is still up.

The photo of Housesteads is courtesy the Tynedale U3A. Hadrian's Wall Group, which is doing great work educating the public about Hadrian's Wall.