The luxurious mansion was built about 1,700 years ago. And despite being excavated and studied both in 1856 and in the 1990s, it still hides some secrets. The latest thing archaeologists have discovered is that many of the mosaics in the town were made with recycled glass, a sign that this recycling is not new, that it has always been fashionable.
The team of researchers now analyzing the remains at the site, led by Professor Kaare Lund Rasmussen of the University of Southern Denmark, were surprised by the quality of the richly colored mosaic tesserae (pieces) that decorated the floor of the house, as explained in an article published in the journal Heritage Science.
The tesserae come from the excavation of a villa located in Halicarnassus (now known as Bodrum), in Anatolia (Turkey). Halicarnassus was famous for having the giant and luxurious tomb of the Persian king Mausolus (hence precisely the word mausoleum), considered one of the seven wonders of the ancient world.
The mansion was arranged around two courtyards, and the many rooms had mosaic floors. In addition to geometric patterns, there were also motifs of various mythological figures and scenes taken from Greek tradition such as Princess Europa being kidnapped by the god Zeus in the form of a bull or Aphrodite at sea in her seashell.
These compositions also represented motifs from the stories of the Roman author Virgil, who was born in Lombardy in 70 BC. and died at Brindisi in 19 BC. Among the works of this poet, the Aeneid (his famous epic of him), the Bucolicas and the Georgics stand out.
Floor inscriptions have revealed that the owner was called Charidemos and that the house was built in the middle of the fifth century. Having mosaics was an expensive luxury at that time. Raw materials such as white, green, black and other colored marble had to be transported from distant quarries. And other stone materials, ceramics and glass also had to be imported. Perhaps that is why Charidemos opted for recycling.
Kaare Lund Rasmussen received 19 tiles to analyze in his laboratory in Denmark. "Of these, seven were glass in different colors: red, purple, yellow and dark red. My conclusion is that six of them are probably made from recycled glass," she explains.
This conclusion is based on a chemical analysis called mass spectrometry. Using this method, the research team has determined the concentrations of no fewer than 27 elements, some of them down to a concentration of billionths of a gram.
“We were able to distinguish between glass based in Egypt and glass based in the Middle East. And we were also able to determine what elements the ancient artisans added to color the glasses and make them opaque, the models that were preferred at that time,…” he adds.
Rasmussen assumes that it is "difficult to extrapolate from just seven glass mosaic tesserae," but says the new results "fit very well with the picture of Anatolia in late antiquity."
As the power of the Roman Empire waned, trade routes were closed or diverted, likely leading to shortages of goods in many places, including raw materials for glass production in Anatolia.
