Uncovering Antioch
The Ancient City and Its Lost Treasures of Mosaic Art
Failed to add items
Sorry, we are unable to add the item because your shopping cart is already at capacity.
Add to basket failed.
Please try again later
Add to Wish List failed.
Please try again later
Remove from Wish List failed.
Please try again later
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
1 credit a month to buy any audiobook in our entire collection.
Access to thousands of additional audiobooks and Originals from the Plus Catalogue.
Member-only deals & discounts.
Auto-renews at $16.45/mo after 30 days. Cancel anytime.
Uncovering Antioch
Pre-order for $28.95
-
Narrated by:
-
By:
-
Robert Kanigel
About this listen
In 1932, ground broke at Antioch. After years of fundraising and flurries of letters back and forth, a team from Princeton had finally assembled in the desert to see what riches might lay beneath the dry earth. The team expected to find sculptures, frescos, palace walls, and busts. Instead, they found the most extraordinary mosaics yet seen in archaeology—or the art world.
There were some three hundred mosaics in all, glories of color and design, stones and pieces of glass heaped up into spectacular images. Many of them were vast, room-sized tableaus, commissioned by wealthy Antiochenes for their villas. They depict banquets, drinking contests, olive harvests; lions, leopards, peacocks, and gazelles; legends, scenes from mythology, Cupid and Psyche, Narcissus and Dionysus. Though dated to early in the Christian era, they are unabashedly pagan; the animals and plants they depict are so life-like scholars can often identify them by species. A vast, collectively obsessive outpouring of industry and effort, art and artisanship, they stand for beauty, the drive to make it, the human need to have it as part of life.
The dig at Antioch was an astonishing feat, one that survived financial downturns, interpersonal conflict, and the looming threat of World War II. What was gained were mosaics that ultimately ended up in museums around the world—Harvard University, Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, New York’s Metropolitan, Paris’s Louvre, and more than a dozen others. The dig was a feat of human cooperation and a triumph of archaeology, but it also raised profound questions about the nature of art. Who has a right to a piece of art, the country of origin or the archeologists who dig it up? What elevates someone from a craftsperson to an artist—their medium or their technique? Is a piece of art more interesting as something beautiful, or something historical? Robert Kanigel tackles these questions and more, breathing life into this historical event for the first time.
No reviews yet
In the spirit of reconciliation, Audible acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of country throughout Australia and their connections to land, sea and community. We pay our respect to their elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today.