Floors of 1700-year-old Greek villa decorated with recycled glass – Egypt Today

Floors of 1700-year-old Greek villa decorated with recycled glass – Egypt Today

CAIRO – 4 August 2022: A 1,700-year-old villa that was excavated and examined in 1856 still holds unrevealed secrets. New secrets have now been uncovered by an international research team, with University of Southern Denmark's professor and archaeology expert, Karl Lund Rasmussen, leading the so-called archaeological analyses, which is using chemical analysis to determine what the artifacts were made of, and how they were made and processed, etc. The mosaic used in decorating the villa floors was found to be originated from a villa from Late Antiquity, located in Halicarnassus, Turkey. Halicarnassus is famous for the gigantic tomb of King Mausolus, which was considered one of the Seven Wonders of the World. The villa is set around two courtyards and many rooms are decorated with mosaic floors, which were an expensive luxury. In addition to the geometric patterns, there were also motifs of various mythical figures and scenes taken from Greek mythology. Additionally, expensive raw materials such as white, green, black and other colors of marble had to be transported from distant quarries, and it was necessary to import stone materials, ceramics and other glass. “I received 19 mosaics for analysis in my lab in Denmark. Seven of them were