In religious traditions there are many manifestations of divinity that make tangible to the believer something that is abstract and beyond the realm of human experience. This is the case in Christianity with relics that are associated with prophets or other figures who serve as mediators between God and man. One most famous relic in the Christian tradition is the Veil of Veronica, a cloth upon which is supposed to be imprinted the features of Jesus Christ.

According to the lore surrounding the veil, a woman named Veronica used the cloth to wipe the sweat off the brow of Jesus Christ and it miraculously retained on its surface the divine figure’s facial traits. Although the garment is not mentioned in early Catholic canonical texts and only seems to be referenced after the 13th century C.E., it has a significant place in the reliquary tradition of imagery associated with Jesus Christ or the Virgin Mary.

In the Eastern Orthodox tradition of the Holy Mandylion, or the first icon said to represent Jesus Christ, there is a similar story told of a ruler who, upon requesting the blessing and healing powers of Jesus, receives an image in his likeness that serves this purpose. However, whether the image was painted or was an imprint, like the Veil of Veronica, is not a significant detail. What is remarkable about the objects is less the manner in which a likeness was transferred onto cloth and more the implication that the likeness is bestowed with the power of the divinity represented.

The Shroud of Turin is another, more recently highlighted relic and object of significant speculation in the Catholic church. It is also said to have the imprint (or particularly, the negative imprint) of Jesus Christ’s body on its surface and to have, by this heritage, healing and spiritual powers. The cloth was said to have been the burial shroud of the martyred Christ and what remained in the tomb after

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his resurrection. That these images all have an added dimension of significance because they were supposed to have had direct contact with his figure have made them hallmarks of what the relic is in the religious tradition but they are the epitome of the tradition, not the standard. Many other images were derived from these primary relics and the history of iconology reflects that power in imagery could have exponential consequences.

*image: Hans Memlin, painting of Veil of Veronica, c.1470
*image: Holy Face of Genoa, in the Mandylion tradition, c. 14th century

The Bible tells us that its’ most fabled monarch, King Solomon, ruled the Holy Land from within the First Temple in Jerusalem. There he sat on a golden throne, surrounded by five hundred golden shields and effigies of golden animals. He dined on golden tableware. He drank from golden goblets.

What exactly was the source of this extravagant cache of wealth? The Old Testament relays that Solomon received a shipment of the precious metal – along with silver, sandalwood, precious stones, ivory, apes and peacocks - every three years from his personal mines in a faraway land named only as Ophir.

With biblical geography vague at best, the supposed location of Ophir remained a mystery for over a millennia, until Portuguese traders in 16th century stumbled upon the abandoned ruins of East Africa’s greatest sub-Saharan civilization, Great Zimbabwe. Thinking the freestanding, artfully constructed temples beyond the capabilities of the native “primitives,” they would go on to make erroneous attributions of the site to the Phoenicians, Greeks and Egyptians. Moslem traders who passed through the area circulated a different rumor: the city in the jungle was, in fact, the true location of King Solomon’s mines.

Surprisingly, that unchecked piece of information failed to circulate widely in Europe until the mid-19th century when a missionary named Merensky returned from Africa and published account claiming he had found the “gold fields of Solomon.” In 1885, the English author H. Rider Haggard cemented the conceptual link between “darkest Africa” and the wise king’s secret depot with King Solomon’s Mines – an adventure tale that also linked the legend with the Ethiopian traditional telling of a supposed sexual relationship between Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. Even today, the Lemba people of Southern Africa claim Semitic heritage – a fact recently confirmed by DNA testing.

The ruins themselves told a different story, however. By 1905, archaeologist David Randall-MacIver had dated their construction to the 11th century – a thousand years after Solomon’s time – and deemed them to be of solely African origin. While that classification has severed the

link between kingdom of Great Zimbabwe and Ophir for most, it hasn’t abated the tide of a speculation as to the mines’ true location. In the past century alone, the Timna Valley in southern Israel, the African side of the Red Sea, the coasts of Pakistan or India and Mahd adh Dhahab in Saudi Arabia have all been fingered as potential sites. The latter is the favored modern candidate, due to its proximity to an ancient trade route supplying Jerusalem…and evidence of long abandoned gold mining operation.

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The progress of nations was much more slow in ancient days than now, and these two rival empires - Rome and Carthage - continued their gradual growth and extension, each on its own side of the great sea which divided them, for five hundred years, before they came into collision. At last, however, the collision came. It originated in the following way:

Origin of the First Punic War
By looking at the map below, the reader will see that the island of Sicily is separated from the main land by a narrow strait called the Strait of Messina. This strait derives its name from the town of Messina, which is situated upon it, on the Sicilian side. Opposite Messina, on the Italian side, there was a town named Rhegium. Now it happened that both these towns had been taken possession of by lawless bodies of soldiery. The Romans came and delivered Rhegium, and punished the soldiers who had seized it very severely. The Sicilian authorities advanced to the deliverance of Messina. The troops there, finding themselves thus threatened, sent to the Romans to say that if they, the Romans, would come and protect them, they would deliver Messina into their hands.

Rhegium and Messina. A perplexing question
The question, what answer to give to this application, was brought before the Roman senate, and caused them great perplexity. It seemed very inconsistent to take sides with the rebels of Messina, when they had punished so severely those of Rhegium. Still the Romans had been, for a long time, becoming very jealous of the growth and extension of the Carthaginian power. Here was an opportunity of meeting and resisting it. The Sicilian authorities were about calling for direct aid from Carthage to recover the city, and the affair would probably result in establishing a large body of Carthaginian troops within sight of the Italian shore, and at a point where it would be easy for them to make hostile incursions into the Roman territories. In a word, it was a case of what is called political necessity; that is to say, a case in which the interests of one of the parties in a contest were so strong that all considerations of justice, consistency, and honor are to be sacrificed to the promotion of them. Instances of this kind of political necessity occur very frequently in the management of public affairs in all ages of the world.

The Romans Determine to Build a Fleet.
The contest for Messina was, after all, however, considered by the Romans merely as a pretext, or rather as an occasion, for commencing the struggle which they had long been desirous of entering upon. They evinced their characteristic energy and greatness in the plan which they adopted at the outset. They knew very well that the power of Carthage rested mainly on her command of the seas, and that they could not hope successfully to cope with her till they could meet and conquer her on her own element. In the mean time, however, they had not a single ship and not a single sailor, while the Mediterranean was covered with Carthaginian ships and seamen. Not at all daunted by this prodigious inequality, the Romans resolved to begin at once the work of creating for themselves a naval power.

Preparations
The preparations consumed some time; for the Romans had not only to build the ships, they had first to learn how to build them. They took their first lesson from a Carthaginian galley which was cast away in a storm upon the coast of Italy. They seized this galley, collected their carpenters to examine it, and set woodmen at work to fell trees and collect materials for imitating it. The carpenters studied their model very carefully, measured the dimensions of every part, and observed the manner in which the various parts were connected and secured together. The heavy shocks which vessels are exposed to from the waves makes it necessary to secure great strength in the construction of them; and, though the ships of the ancients were very small and imperfect compared with the men-of-war of the present day, still it is surprising that the Romans could succeed at all in such a sudden and hasty attempt at building them.

They did, however, succeed. While the ships were building, officers appointed for the purpose were training men, on shore, to the art of rowing them. Benches, like the seats which the oarsman would occupy in the ships, were arranged on the ground, and the intended seamen were drilled every day in the movements and action of rowers. The result was, that in a few months after the building of the ships was commenced, the Romans had a fleet of one hundred galleys of five banks of oars ready. They remained in harbor with them for some time, to give the oarsmen the

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opportunity to see whether they could row on the water as well as on the land, and then boldly put to sea to meet the Carthaginians.

Previous Article in Series:
Part I: Hannibal and Carthage
Part II: Carthage and Rome Before The First Punic War

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Part IV: The First Punic War 280-249 B.C. (Part I)

Source: Makers of History: Hannibal. Jacob Abbot, 1901.

Built on the bank of the Nile along the northern edge of the city of Luxor, the Temple of Karnak was dedicated to the worship of one of Egypt’s oldest and most storied deities: Amun-Re. Though initially worshipped as the primeval god of the wind and air, Amun-Re increased in favor from the 11th Dynasty onwards, eventually ascending to the forefront of the Egyptian pantheon and becoming endowed with the attributes of an all-powerful sun god.

It was this incarnation of Amun-Re – envisioned initially by a powerful cult in ancient Thebes - that led Egypt’s masterful builders to construct the Temple of Karnak sometime between 1500 and 1350 BC - though, in essence, construction never truly ended on the ominous complex. Every ruler from the New Kingdom on saw fit to add their own embellishments, until the temple grew to cover the five acres that we associate it with today.

Access to the temple is granted through a sequence of six monumental gateways, each of which was eventually taken on a pet project by many a particular pharaoh during their respective reigns. For instance, the second gateway, started by Rameses I, leads to the so-called “hypostyle hall” - a secretive enclave that only the pharaoh and temple priests were allowed to enter. The meeting space of hall is surrounded on all sides by 122 columns divided into seven, symbolically meaningfully rows. An earlier pharaoh, Amenhotep III, chose a different tact by inlaying his third gateway with gold and silver, though all of his decorative addition has been lost to looters in the interceding centuries.

The six gateways eventually led onto Karnak’s inner temple – the highest and darkest point in the entire complex. Even today, it is remains clad in the pink granite grafted onto the original structure around 330 BC by Philip Arridaeus, brother of Alexander the Great. The inner sanctum was focused on a stone dais that once bore ceremonial boat dedicated to Amun-Re, as well a large statue of the god – the latter of which occupied the center of temple life for the high priest of the temple and the Egyptian king alike. On feast days, the statue be hoisted onto the ceremonial boat, and then carried around the temple perimeter. Natives of the surrounding towns and encampments, believing the statue to be gifted with powers of prophecy, would shout questions at the procession as it passed. As the boat rounded the temple, it would rock from side to side; a tilt to one side or another was seen by temple devotees as being indicative as a yes or no answer to their queries.

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The Karnak complex also included smaller outcroppings devoted to the worship of Montu, war god and son of Amun-Re and an installation by the monotheistic pharaoh, Akenaten (Amenhotep IV) that was subsequently dismantled, along with the rest of the king’s works, following his death in 1334 BC. Worship of Amun-Re and use of his temple at Karnak eventually subsided as the influence of Thebes waned; his cult was later driven south and went on to thrive in Ethiopia.