BASIL!

Sorry, everyone, for sending a private message on the forum but I have no PM privilege, (and rightly so.)

Basil, have you heard about the Saxon Hoard? I believe it's somewhere up your way? All I can say is WOW!!!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staffordshire_Hoard

Damn, I missed him!

He's headed off to join the hordes. Actually, I think one of my Pommie cousins might have whored in Staffordshire back in the eighties.

[BigBrotherVoiceover voice] That's the forst I hoard of it like[/BigBrotherVoiceover voice]

what hoardy old chestnuss

what a horrie old chestnut?

ta tac...modesty forbade me roasting that chestnut

Yes, my little nest of vipers?

Demelza wrote:Sorry, everyone, for sending a private message on the forum but I have no PM privilege, (and rightly so.)

Basil, have you heard about the Saxon Hoard? I believe it's somewhere up your way? All I can say is WOW!!!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staffordshire_Hoard

It's stupendous isn't it? IIRC, there was a Time Team Special about it some months ago, and it was hinted that the site may yet throw up more treasure.

Talking of Time Team - R.I.P Robin Bush

WideWally wrote:He's headed off to join the hordes. Actually, I think one of my Pommie cousins might have whored in Staffordshire back in the eighties.

He he! Male, or female?

Basil wrote:It's stupendous isn't it? IIRC, there was a Time Team Special about it some months ago, and it was hinted that the site may yet throw up more treasure.

Talking of Time Team - R.I.P Robin Bush

Yes, very sad about Robin Bush. He was only 67
I didn't see the Time Team special, will have to look out for the repeat. Absolutely fascinating. Did you see that pyramid, made of gold and garnets? It's amazing to think that people were making items like that, what was it, 1500 years ago? Not only producing gold, but how did they design that? They said it had a type of tin foil - as thin as our modern day tin foil - under the garnets to make them sparkle. HOW did they do that??? Amazing!

Outstanding craftsmanship is not a modern thing, less still has it been restricted to societies that have boasted their high levels of "civilisation" and technological prowess.


In his usual "jocular hyperbolical" style, Terry Jones (yes, the Python, working with Alan Ereira) has a lot of interesting points to make about the traditional - and in many ways false - assumptions of "civilised" and "savage" societies.

For example, how the typical Roman propaganda of a rationally ordered, original (innovative) and supremely enlightened model Roman society systematically stamped out alternative perspectives, .... and later, how this set of propagandistic notions was essentially adopted by the Church, for its own purposes, ..... to endure, still largely unchallenged, to this day.

And - by the same token - how there remains widespread ignorance about the various parallel societies, which the Roman Empire had a characteristic tendency to seek to attack, plunder for loot, crush and colonise by militaristic (and we might add, fascistic) methods.


Read "Barbarians", for example. I think the book is even better than the TV series. Jones overstates his case at points, for effect, but it is still a case that needs making, and a set of different perspectives that should be reopened, if we are to understand more of what actually occurred in history - and to be able to reject either (on the one hand) defensive, anally-retentive or (on the other hand) over-cynical, well-poisoned ideas of what "civilisation" might actually mean. ...

That's fine but this is not a Roman hoard is it? It dates from a time which has left relatively little hard evidence as to it's nature, particularly when compared to the Roman era.

Not too shabby for 15 000 years or so ago! :::




"Before the fall,
When they wrote it on the wall,
And there wasn't even any Hollywood;
They heard the call
And they wrote it on the wall,
And you and me, we understood."

Basil wrote:That's fine but this is not a Roman hoard is it? It dates from a time which has left relatively little hard evidence as to it's nature, particularly when compared to the Roman era.

I was trying to make a general point based on my first two lines, Baz. ~ That it shouldn't surprise us that from societies we might think of as "unsophisticated" there may emerge artefacts of outstanding workmanship, and beauty.

PeterCS wrote:

Basil wrote:That's fine but this is not a Roman hoard is it? It dates from a time which has left relatively little hard evidence as to it's nature, particularly when compared to the Roman era.

I was trying to make a general point based on my first two lines, Baz. ~ That it shouldn't surprise us that from societies we might think of as "unsophisticated" there may emerge artefacts of outstanding workmanship, and beauty.

Point taken.

nothing compares to the glorious Roman era when civilisation was introduced to Pomgollia

I always suspected you were a bit of a closet right-winger, o Horatie.

rofl...tho in Rome I was not above changing political sides - helped me survive several potentially fatal scrapes

Making really thin sheets of gold and silver wouldn't have been too hard, just need parience and good technique with a hammer to flatten out the metel finer and finer.As for making something beautiful, all you need is imagination, art forms from the earliest of times prove mankind has had that in abundance fir millenia.

The horde is stunning. I hope that it can stay in The Midlands.

Horrie, you would have loved the latest Time Time special, ir was about a cemetary of Roman graves they found in York where many of the bodies had been beheaded. After extensive forensic archeological investigations the experts are pretty certains it's a cemetry for Gladiators.

eowyn, you been on the last of the summer wine again?

No more than usual, taccy one.

horace wrote:nothing compares to the glorious Roman era when civilisation was introduced to Pomgollia

I think you need some history lessons old boy. 'Pomgolia' didn't even exist for another 900 years after the Romans invaded, and indeed not anything remotely 'Pomgolian' on the island for 400 years.

The glorious English kingdoms came after the Romans old bean

The Ancient Tribes of Britain and The Anglo Saxons all look the same to horrie....

As do colostomy bags and cheap Scotch whisky ...

Which explains a lot.

dolts....its cheap irish whisky