Selinunte: Site of massacre 2,500 years ago yields the secrets of a lost Greek city
One of the ancient world's greatest tragedies, frozen in time for almost 2500 years, is at last yielding up its long-lost secrets
Archaeologists are gradually unearthing an ancient Greek city - Selinunte in Sicily - whose inhabitants were slaughtered or enslaved by North African invaders in the late 5th century BC.
Like an ancient Greek Pompeii, the whole city remained at least partially intact, despite the tragic loss of most of its inhabitants.
At Pompeii all the houses and other buildings were interred almost instantaneously under volcanic ash - but at Selinunte they were buried more gradually by hundreds of thousands of tons of earth and windblown sand.
Archaeological excavations are now revealing how the exact moment that Selinunte ceased to exist as a major living city was preserved in graphic detail.
Buried under a collapsed roof in a building burnt by the invaders, the archaeologists have even found the half-eaten remains of meals abandoned by the townsfolk as catastrophe engulfed them. Scientists are now analysing visible food residues inside half a dozen bowls left around a hearth in that building.
Archaeologists are gradually unearthing an ancient Greek city - Selinunte in Sicily - whose inhabitants were slaughtered or enslaved by North African invaders in the late 5th century BC.
Like an ancient Greek Pompeii, the whole city remained at least partially intact, despite the tragic loss of most of its inhabitants.
At Pompeii all the houses and other buildings were interred almost instantaneously under volcanic ash - but at Selinunte they were buried more gradually by hundreds of thousands of tons of earth and windblown sand.
Archaeological excavations are now revealing how the exact moment that Selinunte ceased to exist as a major living city was preserved in graphic detail.
Buried under a collapsed roof in a building burnt by the invaders, the archaeologists have even found the half-eaten remains of meals abandoned by the townsfolk as catastrophe engulfed them. Scientists are now analysing visible food residues inside half a dozen bowls left around a hearth in that building.
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