Wednesday, March 27, 2019

An Etruscan Tomb on Corsica

French archaeologists have been exploring a large cemetery on Corsica that dates to the Etruscan (500-269 BC) and Roman periods.


The most spectacular find is a large tomb built as an underground room with entrance stairs; the excavators think the tomb was re-opened on multiple occasions for additional rites.

The artifacts include a bronze mirror and luxury ceramics.

These earrings.

And this charming ring.

3 comments:

G. Verloren said...

Any insights into what the ring depicts?

Some sort of rodent? Rolling something? A stone? A ball? The orb shape has a cross marking within it - is that just stylization, or does it actually suggest a textured or segmented object? I'm not aware of this sort of behavior in rodents, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist, or perhaps exised in the past.

The thought had crossed my mind of a cat with a ball of yarn, but that would require both to be drawn fairly oddly and inaccurately. Curious.

John said...

I think it's a mouse with a ball, but the image has the wrong caption on the INRAP web site. This post just went up today so they may get around to fixing the caption in a day or two; if so, I will report back.

John said...

As I had hoped, INRAP fixed their bad caption, so now one can read a description of this object. It turns out there is a name for this class of objects, "kitten rings;" yes, enough rings with stones carved to depict cute animals survive from the Roman world that they have a name. However, INRAP's curators do not think this looks very much like a kitten, and they suggest that it might be a squirrel.