What Was Life Actually Like In Ancient Roman London? | Life and Death Roman London

London was originally a Roman city join me as I tell its story from beginning to end. I'm going to explore the lives of everyday Roman Londoners with exclusive access from some of the world's leading experts. lism is about light and dark

life

and

death

and there would have been dramatic theatrical effects that would shed new light on the lives of London's first inhabitants, there were no grave goods, there are literally just these few bones and they have revealed so much it is amazing , this is

life

and

death

in Roman London, the story of Roman London begins right here around the year 50 AD.

C. behind me. I have the Royal Exchange to my right is the Bank of England and then here we have Cornhill and its Thread Needle Street sometime between Caesar's raids on Britain in 55 and 54 BC. C. and the subsequent Claudian invasion. in the year 43 AD. C., the Romans established a mercantile trading post right here, on a gravel terrace on the high ground above the River Temps, then probably expanded in the early 2nd century as it grew to Ludgate Hill, where the Cathedral stands today St Paul's, and then as it grew again in the 3rd century, it expanded towards Tower Hill, behind me, the area where the City of London was built, the Roman City of London, it would

actually

have been a nice densely wooded area and

what

was really distinctive and different was the river.

At that time it was a much wider river, there were no embankments to narrow it, so at high tide we believe the river would have been almost a kilometer wide, so the water extended 100m further into the city than Now and all the way to the subway station which would have been underwater during high tide, one of the amazing things about this place is the fact that we are still surrounded by legacies of the Roman world to this day in architecture , because if you look at the At the top of the Bank of England, there the lady that you can see is Juno monitas now Juno handyman was the manifestation of the Goddess Juno associated with money and mertile commerce and the words we use today for mint and money come from the fact that the original mint in Rome was established next to its temple on the top of the capital hill, above the foreign

roman

um in Rome, and here it is today, above the bank of England, first and foremost , Roman London was an emporium as we would call it today, which is a merchant city, so if you exported goods from anywhere on the continent, they first arrived in London and then they were divided into smaller loads and put on other ships and then they were They were sent throughout the Southeast via river networks and around the coast.

Maritime trade was fundamental to the real success of the early Roman cities and towns. The reasons the Romans conquered Britain was partly because of the materials that could be produced, these included wool, metals such as tin, people such as slaves, All this left but then entered from the continent. all the things that made Roman life possible and a little more enjoyable, so you know, wine, olive oil, cup, everything that made Roman life special and allowed for trade, really if you live in Roman London , one of the structures you will be in the most. What I know is London Bridge and London Bridge for the Romans was roughly along the line of the modern London Bridge, right behind me, right here the Romans built London Bridge where they did because It was the first easily accessible crossing point where they could build something like a really.

Significant bridge as you go back up the river at River Town, well the first Roman bridge or the first Roman crossing would probably have been a military pontoon bridge. A bridge like a temporary bridge with sort of floating kons and things like that, but we know from archaeological evidence that a wooden bridge was built around 52 AD. and the reason it was so important to build a bridge was the purpose of London's location: it is the first point at EST where there is enough dry land on the S South Bank. and on the north bank to build a good road network and it is the first place where you can

actually

cross the river.

The reason this is so important is that it connected all the trade coming from the south coast via EST with a port in London and then fueled the conquest of the rest of Britain to the north and west, but The Temporal wasn't the only important river that ran through Roman London, the Warbrook was a vital waterway that divided Roman London in half on one side, you had all the beautiful public buildings and on the other side you had all the pooy H where normal people lived, yet today you wouldn't know it exists because it has been channeled and covered.

The only section you can see is this one here, it's a sculpture. Water fountain designed by Christina Eng Glasius to mark the location of War Brook, which is now buried beneath the monumental buildings that cover London's city center today, Warbrook; However, it has proven vital for archaeologists wishing to learn more about excavations from the city's Roman past. This Lost River revealed a wealth of interesting Roman artifacts preserved within the floors of the water logs for more information. I headed to the Roman Gallery in the Bloomberg London building in central London to meet Dr Sophie Jackson, a lead archaeologist on the excavations Well Sophie, this is one of my favorite installations at the London Show that reflects the Roman city.

What can you tell us about the context in which all of these artifacts were found? Well, these are artifacts they are just a small selection of the thousands and thousands. What we found here we had to excavate before Bloomberg built his new building and the archeology here is particularly deep, going down about 7 or 8 meters. The tablets are the most amazing and the best find from this site before we excavated this site. About 19 1n wax tablets from Roman London that had decipherable messages, we found 405 fragments at this site and 87 of them have so far been deciphered, even if they are small fragments of text, they give us surprising clues about the people. from London,

what

they were doing, what the partnership was like and there are some really very special ones in this case, this is actually a deed of sale between two fredman and one is recording that he owes him 105 dinar for the goods delivered um but the brilliant thing about This is that it is dated, it has a date that can be calculated is January 8 AD57, it is the oldest manuscript, it is the oldest writing in this country, it is absolutely surprising and how brilliant has been found in it.

In the city of London, you can imagine what Mike Bloomberg thought when he discovered that he had the first writing and that it is a financial document and the good thing about it is that it tells us how much of the legal and financial framework was actually in place. only about 10 11 12 years after London was established, so it's a really very important and early document, in 60 AD. London had already become the largest settlement in Britain, the city had experienced remarkable and rapid growth, but disaster struck quickly. in the year 60 AD. the I queen buddika Leed a massive revolt against the Romans a revolt that quickly set its sights on London it was a catastrophic attack and an assault on London basically the entire city was burned down and you can see this in the archaeological record it is one of the most Surprising is this red layer, burnt bricks, burnt wood, but there is also evidence of violence that we have dug in pits and trenches where pottery and possessions have been smashed and thrown into the pits and then the burnt rubble has entered.

Buddha's destruction of London was a complete victim of the attack that numbered in the thousands; However, the revolt would eventually be put down and in its wake the Romans refused to abandon London and its important trading location, setting up a base on today's Fen Church Street to emphasize the point that the Romans were there to stay and The London Renaissance was launched immediately after the Buddha Revolt, probably not. There's a lot going on, there's regrouping and clearing and the military coming back, but then, quite quickly, there's new investment in London. The really huge key and port facilities were built in sort of 63 64 AD.

C. for 70 d. C., we have the Roman amphitheater under construction, we have the embraced Hill bars, a large public bath complex, so there are investments in London, you know, pointing out that this city, this city is going to survive the artifacts from the excavations of Warbrook only prove it, especially the remarkably preserved tablets Sophie, what can the tablets tell us about the recovery of the Roman moneylender Rec from the Buddan revolt? Oh, they are actually very useful for that. Well, first of all. one here, um, dating from the mid 60s to late 60s, this is so surprising for a couple of reasons, first of all, it's the first mention of London in history, so here we go, we see London, that's amazing and then Secondly, the name Maganus is actually a Celtic name, so this is, again, an

ancient

tablet, probably from around 65 post Buican, but we know that there are letters addressed to Celts in London and it charming of these tablets, even some of them. where they don't really say much, just the name can give you a clue as to who they are, what they're doing, it tells us that you know Monus is in London and that London is being reset, but there's another really good one um. which is actually on loan to the British BM museum at the moment.

It is dated October 21, 62 and is a record of a merchant's order. He requests a delivery of 20 loads of provisions from St. Orb Verenium to London. and that tells us that it's one of these beautiful tracks, it tells us that both cities have recovered, they're delivering 20 loads of stuff, we don't know what they are, but from St Orbin to London, it's incredible to live next to these. the merchants in a recovering London were also soldiers, these spearheads are obviously military and we have quite a few of those here and also Arro heads and then we have what is really surprising, many small fragments of armor, those little hinges would have been fixed up. to leather or metal plates and they are part of the type of body armor, so they are really very important, really diagnostic of the military presence here, which is interesting because when you go to most Roman towns and cities you usually don't you get any kind of military presence within the city, but there's quite a bit here so this is like a full Roman legionary right in the middle of Rome, London, yeah, yeah, AB absolutely and it's often a question about whether London was founded, you know?

It was a military foundation, it was a mercantile place, a commercial place, well, they are both, actually, I think that's what the archaeological evidence tells us, they are here, they are very, very present, um, but they are not functioning. The show, then, who was running the show well, that would be the Roman governor who would have lived in a Monumental Palace where this Palace was located in London, remains a matter of debate, but it is possible that he may have been located somewhere near the current Canon Street train station, however, this Palace. was not the only monumental building built right in the heart of London's revived post Roman budika, other distinctive structures also began to appear whose remains can be found in some rather peculiar places beneath the streets of London, today in the heart of each Roman city and The city had two structures in each and Roman London is no exception.

These are the Basilica, which is the official law courts and the Forum, which is the official market and here below the leol market in a barber shop is a wharf of the Basilica in Roman London. This structure dates back to between 807 and 8120, when the Romans actually monumentalized their new provincial capital after defeating Buddika. The Forum is present throughout Roman, so it is really the key market, there are workshops and shops and market activities in between and this is a fact. being a large open public space and then the Basilica is where the lawyers live, the city administration lives the Courts of Justice, so it's really about the functioning of the city and everything happens in the Basilica, the Romans were master builders and they use the same building techniques everywhere in their empire, you have stone foundations, you have a tiled wall and everything is held together with Roman concrete, that's how well this war was built, it's still with us 2000 years later, the London Roman had a new These monumental buildings dotted the eastern side of the River W Brook, but what about the common people of this revived Roman emporium?

Those inhabitants who lived largely west of Warbrook in a Roman town or city, each house would have a fairly similar layout, so you would enter from the street into an atum that had an impluvium pool in the middle and then, in the middle of the house,as you walked through the house, which tended to be quite long and thin, you had a tabini which is where the owner of the house would meet all the important people he wanted to meet on a given day, but also the trinium dining room and then in the The back of the house would have a peristyle and behind me is a recreation of a trinium dining room from the first century AD, if you looked at any recreation of the Roman city of Tanel you would assume that all the buildings were built with stone, but they are hardly all of the buildings, including many of the fine trailer houses, are actually built with stone foundations, but they are built with Watland orb, so they would be painted to look like they had stone exteriors and would have painted plaster interiors, That's exactly what we have here in this recreation of a Trinium dining room so you can say it's early Roman London, not later.

Roman London Because the mosaic floor is quite primitive, this particular building on which the re-enactment is based burned down in the hydronic fire of the 820s. This fire appears to have been one of a series of calamities that suddenly struck the Roman London revived in the early 2nd century. The evidence is far from clear, but there are clues to what may have happened. I'm standing here on Noble Street, near the Museum of London, next to the second phase of the Roman fortification of London, it's the Cripples' Fort, so you have the first stage, which was the fort built on Furch Street after from the Buddan revolt this fort was built in 120 AD after Hadrian became emperor in 8117 now at that time because many Romans did not expect Hadrian to become emperor there were problems throughout the Empire and there were problems in London and there were three events that marked this issue, firstly the discovery of hundreds of decapitated skulls in the W Brook Valley, secondly there appears to have been a huge fire in Roman London and interestingly all of Roman London was burned. that fire appears to have been the front of the buildings burned not the back so it was a deliberate burning event and then thirdly there is the construction of the crippled fort so it appears there is a Roman London of the Insurrection burning and then when the Romans The military came back in the 820s and built this crippled fort that you can see here behind us.

This is the line of the strong cripple. It is an

ancient

Roman fort. It is shaped like a simple card and you can see that it also has internal towers because the foundations are there. of the internal towers visible today, so what do I mean by a simple card-shaped fort? Well Roman forts came in four sizes at the top end you have a legionary fort for about 5,500 6,000 men so in Britain it will be at Kuran in south east Wales. that will be in Chester and that will be in York next, which has a vexation fort for about a thousand men, which is this fort here, it is always shaped like playing cards and in Roman Britain, other examples would include houses on the wall of the Chickens and Lander folders nearby.

Any problems that London experienced during Hadrian's reign were quickly resolved and soon London recovered once again entering a golden age in its Roman history. One of its biggest attractions was the games behind me, you have the religious boundary of the original Roman city. city ​​which later became the land wall built by sepia cus and as you are away from the large public buildings on Corn Hill we have now jumped towards Ludgate Hill, behind us you have the remains of the London Roman amphitheater and the arena. The wall is marked by the line of stones that curve just behind me.

In 1987 the Roman amphitheater was found in London and it was excavated very carefully and we know that there were two phases of the amphitheater, the first phase being built. The first amphitheater was built in 70 AD. and then expanded in the early 2nd century to London was a fairly large structure that could hold 7,000 people. I mean, compared to the Colosseum in Rome it was absolutely insignificant, but for London it was a big deal and we know from the archaeological evidence and the findings that there would have been animal fights they would have let wild animals fight each other.

It was probably the rather gruesome place where prisoners were killed either by wild animals or by execution and also as a sort of real highlight there would be gladiatorial combats. One of the key experiences of living in Roman London would have been going to the public baths, so the Romans, being Romans, did the same everywhere in the Empire, including Roman London. This is a representation of a public baths at the top of T Street in the City of London today we have very good archaeological data that can show us exactly what this experience of going to the Roman public baths would have been like because in fact we found that the plaster of the wall was so partially One of your experiences of going to the Roman baths in London would have been seeing beautifully painted artwork on the walls like this.

Several bathhouses have been discovered in Roman London. The main public bath was a bathhouse built on Hugon Hill in 70 AD. and it actually fell out of use relatively quickly, which is surprising, there may be another one near where the Canon Street train station is and there is another bathhouse in the east of the city at the check-in gate and all the bathhouses Bathrooms were located mainly on that kind of slope. to the river, presumably to use gravity to make the water rush with sudden pressure. You will start the public bath experience by going to the tepidarium, the cool room, then you will go to the caldarium, the hot room and then you will finish. your bathing experience by closing your door because you jump into a frozen pool of the frigidarium.

What seems to have happened with bathhouses is that there was early public investment in, you know, the government finances the construction of these public buildings, but then in Roman times. Over a period, they became more private institutions in the backyards of people's homes or maybe, you know, for a select few, not everyone, London began to prosper like never before with people venturing into this rich metropolis of the entire Roman Empire. We know quite a bit about the inhabitants of Roman London in the 2nd century, when it is sort of the peak population, we think there were probably around 30,000 people living in London and we know that they came from a wide range of places and what we now call kinds of people. who come from Gaul from France, from modern France, from Spain, from Italy, but also from many native Britons who assimilated into the Roman civilization, so it is a really mixed society, with really mixed cultures and with all the different grades of people.

Sort of mixed together, a fundamental way in which we have been able to learn more about the population of Roman London is through burials. To find out more, I met up with Museum of London's senior curator of archaeology, Dr Rebecca Redfern, so Rebecca, where did the Romans come from? bury their dead in Roman London, like in every other city in the Roman Empire, the law ordered them to bury outside the Roman walls and then we also have quite a few burials that we would call clandestine burials, so there is a man who has stuck his head in a well, really, and there are many types of remains of people that we find in rubbish heaps and in ditches and things like that, although most of the people are supposed to be buried outside of Rome. walls and they are on the roads leading out of London and that ties into part of the fun Roman ritual where reading someone's tombstone is an act of commemoration because if you had entered Roman London you would have passed through all the cemeteries which you know would have been painted bright colors, they would have had people's names and where they came from, so we can learn a lot about the people of Roman and London from that evidence and are there any specific types of cemetery that we know of? around London we have divided them according to the cardinal points because there is so much development in London that there are many individual sites, actually all together for large cemeteries, so we have north, south, east and west, and they look like have different characteristics, so in the eastern cemeteries there are a lot of people buried with things that we don't necessarily find in other places and some seem to belong to the 4th century, early 5th century, and some don't, that could just be because, um no has it been excavated yet or um, that's just the nature of the settlement that changes over time and Rebecca were people buried in different ways throughout the chronology of Roman London, yeah, and that's a reflection of um, where it comes from. people.

Early on we had these cremations of some incredibly wealthy, high-status men and they're clearly being buried in the Mediterranean style, one is buried in an Egyptian pot, an Egyptian stone pot, so they studied the stone and found out that it came from Egypt, so what would have been brought to Britain and is clearly someone of very, very high status and then you have a cremation and the thing to remember with cremation is that it is actually the expensive option because you need to have bought all the wood and it is It needs a lot of wood.

I know it's a very, very long funeral tradition compared to putting someone in a coffin and burying them. We have people in wooden coffins and we also have some very high status burials, like that of the Roman woman SP, where they are buried in lead coffins. and those lead coffins have been brought to London probably from other parts of Britain and then we also have stone sarcophagi. A couple of them appear to have been imported and we know they are made on the continent or elsewhere in Britain. Normally they would have like a picture of a woman's face, but sometimes the face is not finished, so they were done to a certain point and then obviously, like you say, oh yeah, I'll have that psycho and they'll be like okay.

What does this person look like and top it off? But it didn't happen in this case. It's really remarkable, but it just shows that this exchange of fairy traditions, like with the Roman woman of Spi, we know that she has also been embedded in her body, not like the Egyptian. It is where they rubbed the body with oils and spices and that was studied by colleagues at the University of Bradford and they were able to show that it is pine resin and there are also yellow spots on some of their neck bones and that is again from the treatment of the body and at the same time you have a lot of very local customs, like the traditions of where they come from, and they include other parts of Britain as well, which to me speaks to this kind of cosmopolitan nature of Rome.

London, where much of the population was not British at all, but came from all over the Roman Empire, yes, and you can see that largely through the inscriptions, so you have a lot of military people who are recorded on the tombstones. of the graves. being buried in a very formalized and very recognizable way within the military community, we thought that London was attractive or that people came to London from all over the Empire because it offered economic opportunities, it is a new market for you to sell your products or take estate. from this country to the rest of the Roman Empire there are economic opportunities, but there are also people whose job it is to administer and enforce Roman civilization, so this is someone of African descent who grew up in Roman London, yeah, which is fantastic because this is the kind of evidence that we don't get in the inscriptions that we don't get in the letters, so the only evidence we have of different population affiliations is how we would describe them forensically, by looking at their skeleton and then adding that type of DNA and that . isotope evidence to create a picture because there were no grave goods there are literally just these few bones all mixed together and they have revealed so many things it's amazing and one thing I really noticed is how hot those teeth are there so it must have been very It hurts inside the tooth, so you have a hard white crown and that is very hard, but it wears down because pieces of stone are incorporated into the grain that you eat, so it is like sandpaper on the tooth because of the way it that We're polishing it and then that exposes the soft brown dentin and that's really, that would be really sensitive, my goodness, and what they have taken to relieve the pain, there are many recommendations in the medical literature written in the Mediterranean and they are saying you know things like puppy syrup for pain relief and all kinds of other crazy medical shocks so poppy syrup yeah that's an opiate yeah they're basically taking opx for toothache.

The Victorians did stranger things, so why not? Early foundations in Cornhill to Budd's Reckoning and then a notable revival. The rise of London is a fascinating topic to learn about. Within a century, this Roman Foundation had become the new capital ofBritannia, but harsh tests awaited Roman London. His story has changed. Just starting in the last episode, we cover the rise of Roman London to the end of the 2nd century from the oldest surviving writing of the city. It is the earliest mention of London in history anywhere we see Londino. That's incredible for a strange Roman medicine.

In the medical literature they say things like puppy syrup to relieve pain. They are taking OPI for toothache. Now let's look at the later history of Roman London and what ultimately happens to this beating heart of ancient Britannia. Traces of London's Roman roots. It can be found hidden in peculiar places beneath the streets of London, but other features hide in plain sight. We are standing here outside one of the few surviving sections of the L Wall of Roman London and the history of this wall begins in 193 AD. Of the five emperors, the Roman Empire was convulsed by a series of civil wars and at the end of the year the last emperor standing was Septimia Seus, born in North Africa in Lepus Magna, died in 211 AD. in York, Great Britain, but at the beginning of his Reign he discovered that he had several usurpers potentially challenging him for the throne, so he spoke to them one by one and the hardest one for him to defeat was the British Governor based here in London called Clodius albinus and clodus albinus. he actually made a power play for the throne and had to take his armies to Gaul to fight a titanic Civil War battle at Lunham Modern Leyon in 197 AD, which he had just won and, after defeating Albinus, beheaded him and he mounted his Stallion and then ceremoniously stomped on Albus's body and then decided that he needed to send a message to the people of London who supported Albino the Usury, so he sent his generals to London and told them to build the first wall in London.

Roman, not to keep the bad guys out, but to say to the people of London, what would happen to you if you misbehaved again and he built this 2 mile circuit and it's still here today? an outer face and an inner face and then you have five levels of stone built and then at the end of the five levels of stone you have a tile bonding layer and the tile bonding layer is actually used by the Romans throughout his empire and that bonding layer of tiles Because it is from the Mediterranean, he designed it to give flexibility to the wall if there is an earthquake.

Now clearly there aren't many earthquakes in London, but the Romans did the same thing everywhere in their empire and here's to sending a message to Londoners to behave. On this map behind me you can see the outline of the route used to build the motorway in London, so it is 3.2km long. This blue line starts here where we are standing now at the Tow Hill subway station and then continues all the way to the end. It goes around to the London Wall, then it goes to the hall of guilt and then it goes to where the Museum of London is today, which is there, and then it goes down to the line of the Old Bailey and then it goes back to the river, by which is 3.2 km long.

Built by Septimia Seus around 199 AD. Thanks to his, London was now surrounded by this Monumental City wall and as the 3rd century progressed, more and more structures would be built within one of those buildings was a mysterious underground temple built beneath what is now Bloomberg's European headquarters. . in London city center to find out more I'm meeting Dr Sophie Jackson from the Museum of London Archeology so Sophie was in this amazing space near W Brook and it's a myth isn't it ? What can you say? Tell us how she really found herself. Well, it was a miracle it was found.

This part of the city was actually heavily bombed during the bombardment. A small group of archaeologists got together just after the war to investigate these bomb sites and just to make a record of the archeology before the rebuilding started, so they came here because they wanted to record the deposits in the Wallbrook River and they laid the trenches in only a few trenches and one of them miraculously cut the curved abidal. In the end, they couldn't investigate it right away, that was in 1952, so they came back in 1954, just before construction started on this big new office development, and during the summer of 1954 they discovered the site plan, all of this had all its extension, but they did not know what it was, they thought it was a Roman temple, they did not know who it was dedicated to and in reality it was the last day of excavation, September 18, 1954, that the diagnostic piece emerged, it was the head of Mithas . found perhaps by a worker and that was at the last possible moment of the excavation that they discovered that this was a temple of myth and what does the finding of this head tell us about the date the Mian was built, the excavation went really very well fact and there is a lot of very good dating evidence of coins and such here, so we know that this building was built around 250 AD.

C., quite late, you know, almost 200 years after the founding of London, so what do we know about the religious worship that would have taken place in this space, well, we know a little about what happened in this building, but not much, and that's because Mithraism was a secret cult, it was a mystery cult that members of The Cult were initiated into and sworn into. to the secret so that there is no liturgy or written description of what really happened here, we have to reconstruct the archaeological evidence that we know from other myrea that these buildings are often sunken and this one was three steps down and probably had no windows. illuminated by candles it would have been a kind of eerie and terrifying experience there would have been columns actually there were seven pairs of columns here and seven is a significant number we know from a famous myth in AA in Italy that there were seven degrees and we believe all seven here are obviously indicative and refer to those grades, so if you are a beginner, the lowest grade was a crow, you probably sat near the door and the companion or sect father would have been in the matter ends with the Altar and Mithraic sculpture.

This is the threshold, the entrance and surprisingly the cast iron fitting for the doors where the doors would have swung is still there. They are still surviving and what do we know about the people who In fact, I have worried in this building because they have all been men. We know that the cult was actually very popular among army men, public officials and merchants. These are people who move around the Roman Empire and are sent to different places and, obviously, public relations are offered. spiritual power and special knowledge, but also a great networking opportunity, so if you probably wanted to advance in the military, it was nice to be invited to be a Mytra and join this particular Club in this space.

Is there an area that would have been the center of worship, yes, well the center would have been directed towards the altar, in this case it is the West End and you can see here that we have reconstructed or given the impression of the cult statue. what would have been on this end would have been really dramatic, the miter head, which was the sculpture that was found on the last day of the excavation, would have been on this statue, the rest would probably have been made of plaster of paris and the hands they could have been marble, the head was marble, but the rest was a bit fake, true, everything would have been painted, of course, Mithraism is about light and dark, life and death, and there would have been dramatic IC theatrical effects, you know, we know.

In other myraa there would have been spaces to remove or draw the curtains and there are four types of sockets behind the cult statue here for lamps to illuminate that kind of religious theater, you can imagine, this would have been very dark. there was the smell of incense, a candle lit the lights behind there with party a leading the whole business in the front because the Roman religion could operate on two levels, firstly you have the worship of the classical gods, so here represented for example minura and Neptune and if you are worshiping the classical gods you are not participating in the worship, the actual altar is outside the classical temple and the priests do the service but you are not participating in what you are asking there in terms of transactions. with the deity is that they do not interfere with your daily life, the last thing you want is to have this monstrous deity of Jupiter, for example, pulling the strings of your life because anything could go wrong, but you also have another level of religion. are the congregate religions of the east, for example Christianity, Judaism and the worship of mithas Mithraism, so in this space it is clearly associated with the worship of Mithras, but is there any other evidence that other religions were also celebrated here?

Yes, there is. It appears that the building was remodeled around 320 AD. The columns are gone and we think it was rededicated to Baccus, so it became a temple to Baccus when he stopped being Mithras, someone dug a hole that would have been around here and they actually buried him. all the cult statues associated with Mithas and the other statues that had been associated with the Mithraic phase and buried them there in other buildings where they were once replaced by churches. The statues are often vandalized, but here they were treated with respect and thank God. They were because they are the best Roman sculptures ever found in this country.

These were objects that had real power and real meaning, but they also wanted to almost purify the space and cleanse the past religion before they started worshiping Aus and here we are. They have the royal objects, so all these heads of deities were buried in the ground with reverence, almost to close the previous cult, but obviously there were other religions at the same time that also fell into disuse, so to speak, for example, behind from my. You can see this amazing marble bust of CPU, who is also an eastern deity but was also buried at the same time as these objects of the Mithas cult.

So how did the cult of Mithras, this Eastern cult, come to be practiced in London in the early Myrea? appeared in the first century AD. and it used to be thought that this was the Persian religion that had traveled more or less westward, but actually now we think that the Romans someone borrowed the iconography of this earlier religion to give it a sense of mystery. and gravitas or whatever, um, but it appears first in places like modern Turkey and then Rome and then it takes a few hundred years for AC to cross the Empire, but there are four known myraa in the UK and obviously they're all more late there in the second third century type, are there other elements of the building structure near here that are associated with the mithan but are not on display?

Yes, we were absolutely blown away when we were doing the first investigations here because we made a trench right outside. There, beyond the entrance here where Myra was, we found surviving remains of a kind of hallway that could officially be called narx, which could have effectively been the locker room where you dressed for what was happening here. A few years ago we did an excavation on the other side of Wallbrook on the right and we found remains of a large Roman building and we think that may have been the house, the residence of perhaps the person who built this mitham, so it is actually a building private in the back garden of someone's big house there is an inscription on what is called the tootan panel, this bull slide scene that references Opia Sylvanas, who is a veteran of Augustine's second Legion and says that he built this and he kept his promise, so it's possible that this is the sylvanas opium house across modern Walbrook Street and he may have been the person who built this, so it's another fantastic link to a real person and you can see here this classic Mytra scene with Mithas killing the bull, but also these others. animals attacking the bull there is also a dog there is a scorpion there is a snake all this is associated with the iconography of the cult of Metras also the graffiti on the side so it is seus and then it says there he is from liio a Augusta is incredible Let's think that if Were it not for this inscription we would never have met Severinus, the man was one of the many Romans who chose to settle in this prosperous city and live quite luxurious lifestyles, clues about which archeology has revealed this recreation of a Trinum dating back to around the year 300 AD.

C. If you look at the quality of the mosaic, this is a really excellent mosaic. The history of Roman London has moved on. Now it is this very successful merchant city. We can see here that we are recreating the Box Flu tiles from the inside. the walls, which means that this house has a high cost, it has central heating, but also if you move around this way we can see some evidence of everyday life in this house around 300 AD. One of the key things for me are these lamps. It is worth remembering that glass is very expensive inthe Roman world, so the windows will be very small, therefore, to give you light inside this incredible Roman house, you will need lamps everywhere, hidden in this corner, it is one of my favorite artifacts in the world.

All over Roman London and it's this, it's a metal makeup jar that was found with the makeup still in it, so we were able to analyze what the Roman makeup was made of and this makeup was made up of animal fat starch from ground bulbs and dye of tin, so imagine the The person who uses this makeup will shine with this tin dye that will make them almost glow, but very few things speak to me like this pot of makeup because the pot of makeup tells me who was using it in the London Roman and even has the marks of his fingers.

It's absolutely amazing, another way we can learn more about these high status individuals is through their bials to find out more. A meeting with the Museum of London's senior curator of archeology, Dr Rebecca Redfern, and looking at the skeleton, actually gives us a lot of information about This person is female, has very wide notches and also the shape of her skull He tells me that they have also cut the bone from his upper leg and that is his femur and we removed some bone from his femur so we could do that. To date her burial because it's one of the late Roman burials that we have so we wanted to see exactly when she was being buried and that came out as early 400's and late 300's.

We also looked at areas of her pelvis so this a little bit here and that can tell us how old he was when he died, so he was between 36 and 45 years old. Okay, we don't know what she died of because she didn't turn up anything in the DNA analysis about that, but what she did tell us. was that he actually has light brown hair, fortunately it didn't work for his eye color or his skin color, but it worked for his hair color, so we know that he has light brown hair, you may have noticed that on his jaw there are A little green stain, right, and that's because she was buried with these huge brooches that are like these huge pepper shakers, um, that were held together by these really beautiful chains of glass beads, and then she also had this comb of bone that was placed behind.

Off the top of your head, these are so-called Germanic objects, so they are found in Roman Germany all over continental Europe. Where we know that there are people from Germany stationed in the army by looking at their tooth enamel, the hard white tooth enamel, we were able show that he was actually born outside Britain, so he probably spent his early childhood in the German area. from Europe, so she's someone who grew up on the continent and had a very visible expression of her community, came to London and then was transformed with all of its cultural significance, which is really nice because then we see that in other parts of Roman Britain towards the end.

There is a very clear expression of German identity, so in which of the cemeteries in Ran London was she actually buried? She was buried in the Eastern Cemetery. That area seems to be used later in late London too, while other areas seem to go out of use a bit more this time in London we're getting these very high status barrels, like Spi's Roman woman CU, she's pretty late in the game. chronology, so although London seems to be getting smaller in size, in reality there are still these people who have these continental connections that are very rich and still express their community and traditions in a way that would be recognizable to people from other parts of the world.

Roman Empire, it is burials like this that can reveal so much about those who lived in In later Roman London, many evidently prospered, but the general history of London between the late 3rd and early 5th centuries is one of gradual decline. A key event in this decline occurred near the end of the 3D century, orchestrated by a Roman usurper, a pirate king, corus the year. It is 8286, Emperor Max Simon in the west decides that because there is no longer a Roman Navy in Britain, the North Sea is being invaded by Germanic piracy and therefore the Emperor gets one of his best Admirals Corus mount a naval operation to clean up the North Sea. piracy, but he does such a good job that the emperor accuses him of siding with the pirates and being a traitor and orders his execution, so Corus usurps and comes to Britain and Corus decides he wants to keep the Romans away. , so he starts minting coins, he creates the first proper mint in Roman Britain sometime around the year 8290.

On the coins he has his own face and then he has the face of Maximian, who is the emperor in the west and also the emperor in the east. D cyan, so he's trying. say that I am an Emperor as powerful as the other two Emperors existing in the Imperial Center, but he knows that they will come for him, so he builds a series of forts around the coast of Great Britain, some of which will later become the Saxon Shore Forts, but also builds the river wall to close the land circuit built by Sep Seus. When the river wall is built, there are no more ragstone quarts operating in the Medway Valley, so there is no new stone to use, hence why he builds this wall.

In a hurry to keep the vagrants away, he pulls down the entire Great Mosy and all the great funerary monuments outside the city, pulls down many of the fine public buildings in London itself and reuses the stone, many of those stones are inscribed with the names of the governors. the procurators, the key people of ancient Roman London and we only know their name because they were later reused in the construction of the Corian River wall, so behind me you really get an idea of ​​three of the phases of the fortification of Roman London, first , the door crippled, and second, built. above it, the San Land wall and finally, when Corus built the river wall, he also built a series of bastions bolted to the outside of the original L wall.

That's one of them, a lot of that stone is original Roman stone. heavily in defenses to protect his Breakaway Empire, but things did not go well for the Sho serer in 8293. Corus was assassinated by his chancellor, who was called electus and then you have three years, the last three years of what was previously called his North Sea Empire. This recalcitrant part of the Roman Empire was dragged kicking and screaming back into the Roman imperial fold and that was carried out by Constantius Chloris, who was Caesar's junior emperor in the west. Now Constantius Clor celebrated his victory by minting a coin that tells an incredible story about Roman London because he arrived just in time to save London from being sacked by Germanic Frankish mercenaries fighting for electus.

Here we can see the oldest pictorial representation of London and it is called the Aris Medallion. London returned to the Imperial Fold, but there will be no new golden age for this Roman city; Instead, over the next few decades, London would experience gradual decline; It's actually much harder for archaeologists to say what was going on because the last part of the history of Roman London is often the part that's removed by Victorian cellars and things like that, so we have less, but we also have less because there were less. We know that London was really prospering in the 1st and early 2nd centuries AD.

C. and then gradually there is a sort of slow period of decay the port disappears the large stone buildings are abandoned we have archaeological evidence that they begin to fall and collapse and presumably people are moving away towards the countryside where they perceive it to be safer or perhaps returning to where they may have originally come from their families origin come from the Roman administration ceases in 410 AD throughout the Western Roman Empire essentially London is alone there is no government to protect anyone there is no military and that is effectively the end of Roman London Roman London had come to an end However, its legacy lives on.

It is very important to learn about the Roman history of London because London was founded by the Romans. Just understanding what they built, where and what their lives were like, gives us a different perspective, a really exciting perspective on why the city is how it is. It is and it also changes your view of what it is to be British or English or whatever. It was a very diverse and different population that created our city. I think it's amazing to learn more about it and find it, and it's just exciting. Well thanks for watching this video on the YouTube history channel, you can subscribe right here to make sure you don't miss any of our great movies coming out or if you're a real history fan check out our special dedicated History of the channel. hit. you're going to love television