Early history of Belgium

455-843 Frankish Empire: The start of the great divide

A slow peaceful invasion takes place - more like a colonisation of the sparsely populated lands of today's Flanders. It was at this time that the division between the Flemish and Walloons originated.

The Franks were not conquerors. Accepted by the Romans as mercenaries with their own chiefs, they were loyal to Rome and considered themselves a part of its army. They used its political organisation and titles, and even dressed in Roman style. But the language became Frankish, a primitive form of Dutch, and was used throughout the region right down to Paris and the Loire. Latin was the language of the church. Frankish was used for administration. The upper/ruling classes employed both...

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Study points to the seats as the reason for acoustics at Epidaurus

As the ancient Greeks were placing the last few stones on the magnificent theater at Epidaurus in the fourth century B.C., they couldn’t have known that they had unwittingly created a sophisticated acoustic filter. But when audiences in the back row were able to hear music and voices with amazing clarity (well before any theater had the luxury of a sound system), the Greeks must have known that they had done something very right because they made many attempts to duplicate Epidaurus’ design, but never with the same success.

Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have pinpointed the elusive factor that makes the ancient amphitheater an acoustic marvel. It’s not the slope, or the wind — it’s the seats. The rows of limestone seats at Epidaurus form an efficient acoustics filter that hushes low-frequency background noises like the murmur of a crowd and reflects the high-frequency noises of the performers on stage off the seats and back toward the seated audience member, carrying an actor’s voice all the way to the back rows of the theater.

The research, done by acoustician and ultrasonics expert Nico Declercq, an assistant professor in the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Georgia Tech Lorraine in France, and Cindy Dekeyser, an engineer who is fascinated by the history of ancient Greece, appears in the April issue of the Journal of the Acoustics Society of America.

While many experts speculated on the possible causes for Epidaurus’ acoustics, few guessed that the seats themselves were the secret of its acoustics success. There were theories that the site’s wind — which blows primarily from the stage to the audience — was the cause, while others credited masks that may have acted as primitive loudspeakers or the rhythm of Greek speech. Other more technical theories took into account the slope of the seat rows.

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Egyptian archaeologists find oldest fort to date on Horus road

"Egypt's chief archaeologist, Zahi Hawass, took a bus of journalists into the North Sinai to showcase his agency's latest discovery - the ancient buried walls of a military fort and a few pieces of volcanic lava.

According to Egyptian officials, the evidence of lava is from a volcano in the Mediterranean Sea that erupted in 1500 BC and is believed to have killed 35,000 people and wiped out villages in Egypt, Palestine and the Arabian Peninsula.

The same diggers found evidence of a military fort with four rectangular towers, now considered the oldest fort on the Horus military road." If you enjoyed this post, never miss out on future posts by following me by email!