Posted by pseudolus 10/24/2024
Perhaps the lion was also looted and brought to Constantinople originally which would fit with pre Marco Polo's travels.
There is no such thing as Greece before 1821. So they would have to travel back in time.
Byzantine = specific, inaccurate. Romans = accurate, nonspecific. Greek = a bit of both
Just because someone speaks a related language (and I'm pretty sure the Greek of Constantinople was different from the Greek of Athens at the time), doesn't mean that they are the same people. The Byzantines had hundreds of years as a distinct culture from the Greek islands and peninsula, with a major Roman influence.
Those situations are nothing alike. The Byzantines lived in Greece. Byzantium was founded by Greeks. Others in Europe called them "the Greeks". They were the genuine continuation of Hellenic culture for over 10 centuries.
It's either that or Greeks ceased to exist between Roman conquest and Ottoman independence - at which point they were ruled by a German and, presumably by your logic, were actually Turks anyway, not Greeks.
If you know much about Hellenic history, you know it's been a culture in flux since prehistory. I'd assert there has never been a group that you would call "true Greeks"... except maybe the Graecoi - Hellenic colonists in Italy. Even the post-Classical period of pan-Hellenism was driven and ruled by Macedonians, who a century prior were not considered Hellenes.
I mean, define 'Greek'. Byzantium was a Greek city before the Romans got there, Greek was always its major language, and so on. It's not within modern Greece, granted, but nor are a lot of classical Greek cities.
Also, the culture of Athens or Sparta or Crete or any of the other places that would have called themselves, or at least accepted the term, Greeks (well, Hellenes) was quite different from the culture of Constantinople, at least, again, by the time the city came to be known by that name.
Looting an empire halls way across the world is a tad harder.
But they were also an anti-colonial struggle to liberate occupied native christians from the imperialist ambitions from the Arabian peninsula.
The political landscape of that time was truly complicated and chaotic in a way that is hard to truly capture in the image we have of that time period brought through general education, mostly because of lack of time to explain it all properly
Venice had trade agreements with the Mongol empire for decades prior to that. It’s not hard to imagine that the Mongols took it from China and traded it to Venetian merchants.
https://news.artnet.com/art-world/bronze-venice-lion-from-ch...
Is there some more detailed source explaining how this conclusion was reached? What's distinct about Chinese lead / how this kind of evaluations are done?
>the results indicate that the colossal statue is most likely an elaborate reassembly of what was initially a zhènmùshòu (镇墓兽 "keeper of tombs") fused in the Tang period (609-907 AD) with copper from the mines of the lower basin of the Yang-tze River, the Blue River in southern China. This is confirmed by accurate analyses of lead isotopes, which leave in the bronze unmistakable traces of the original mines from which the copper was extracted.
The implication is that the mines themselves have different isotope signatures that have been established in previous archaeological studies.
So they are looking for the signature lead impurities in that copper. They use isotope analysis to find the lead impurities in the copper.
There's some more info on the lion's measurements here, but I haven't been able to find the study that was presented in September
https://journals.iucr.org/j/issues/2024/03/00/in5093/in5093....
The first mentions lead once. The second does not mention any region of present-day China, as far as I can tell. I can't see the information there.
The first link explains how we use isotopes in this fashion. The second explains that lead has some useful ones.