There are some puzzling details from antiquity that have had historians scratching their
heads for years.
Well, step aside, historians, because now we're on the case!
Here's a look at some mysteries of Ancient Rome that remain unsolved to this day.
There's a village in western China where the residents have blue and green eyes, light
hair, and a legend they're descended from a Roman legion.
Are they?
Here's what we know: In 53 B.C., Marcus Crassus led a Roman force into what is now Iran, and
almost his entire army was slaughtered.
It's believed, though, that some escaped, and clues in ancient Chinese history books
suggests that they may have become wandering mercenaries.
Legend has it, they later settled down in China.
In 2010, the Telegraph reported that DNA tests on the villagers of Liqian showed they were
indeed about 56 percent Caucasian.
But are they descendants of Crassus's doomed legion?
So far, that remains a mystery.
Ham Hill is an Iron Age fort nestled in the scenic English countryside, and for a few
years, it was the site of a joint archaeological dig overseen by the Universities of Cambridge
and Cardiff.
There, they found something horrible: scores of human bodies, mostly women in their 20's
who had been chopped up and stripped of their flesh.
It's unclear just what happened at Ham Hill, but archaeologists suggest some sort of brutal
conflict took place there.
Perhaps some Iron Age Britons even defleshed their kin as part of their burial rituals.
We don't know, but just remember Ham Hill the next time you think you want to go back
in time to live a simpler life.
In 2010, archaeologists from the University of Michigan uncovered a mysterious, 1,000-pound
lead coffin buried in the city of Gabii.
Clearly, someone had gone to huge lengths to give this person an elaborate funeral,
securing their earthly remains in a sheet of lead folded carefully into a coffin in
a shape that gave it the nickname "lead burrito."
Archaeologist Nicola Terrenato said lead coffins were rare and that one that heavy would have
cost a fortune.
Unfortunately, when researchers used noninvasive techniques to see what artifacts were buried
with the man, it turned out there was...nothing at all.
And without any other burial objects to give them clues, everyone is still in the dark
about who this person was and why they were buried inside a burrito.
The survivors of Marcus Crassus's doomed army aren't the only famous troop of Roman soldiers
to vanish without a trace.
There's also the famous case of the Ninth Legion, a unit said to be the best of the
best, so deadly that it was sent to the furthest reaches of the Roman Empire to deal with the
rebellious Picts in Northern England.
And then they just…disappeared.
According to the BBC, the theory they all died beyond Hadrian's Wall was popularized
by Rosemary Sutcliff's novel The Eagle of the Ninth.
However, that doesn't seem to be quite true.
The last official mention of the Ninth Legion was in the year 108 A.D., and the historian
Titus wrote that the Ninth did suffer massive losses in the lands beyond Hadrian's Wall.
We also know that around the year 118, the Sixth Legion was transferred to the Wall,
presumably to replace the fallen Ninth.
That all checks out with legend.
However, bricks have been unearthed in The Netherlands that were stamped with the Ninth
Legion's mark and dated to the year 121.
And in the year 142, an officer from the Ninth shows up in records as the governor of Arabia
of all places.
So what really happened to the Ninth?
Were they simply transferred back out of England after getting their butts whupped?
Historians have a number of competing theories about where they may have actually ended up,
but nobody knows the truth.
In 1988, 39 skulls from the Roman era were excavated at a site near the Museum of London,
and it was initially thought that the skulls may have been washed downriver from a burial
ground or something.
But in 2015, The Guardian reported that new finds, including a pot filled with cremated
human remains, suggested something more sinister: that the skulls had been deliberately placed
together on the river bank as some sort of warning.
Or even as trophies!
And we're still trying to understand the scale of the carnage.
Lead archaeologist Jay Carver said that over the past two centuries, there had in fact
been hundreds of skulls found near the dig.
Confusing the matter, though, are an additional 2500 skeletons dumped at the site during the
great plague of 1665, so figuring out just what happened when and to whom remains a tall
task.
There's a huge amount of Roman history we only know because of Titus Livius, otherwise
known as Livy.
The Ancient History Encyclopedia even goes as far as crediting him as being the reason
the Roman Empire was remembered, a lofty claim that makes it even weirder that we know next
to nothing about him.
We know he was born in Patuvium, ended up in Rome, had at least a son and a daughter,
and...that's pretty much it.
Oh, and we know that his claim to fame even at the time was his massive 142-volume history
spanning the years from the founding of Rome into Imperial Rome, a whole seven centuries
condensed into a set of books you'd need at least a few donkeys to carry.
Unfortunately, though, most of the history has been completely lost.
The only books that survived in their entirety were the first ten volumes, and volumes 21
through 45.
We also have a short synopsis for most of the others, though two are gone completely.
Who knows what else we would have learned about the Roman Empire?
Heck, maybe even some of these other mysteries would have made sense if only we had Livy's
history to explain them to us.
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