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Sourcing Herod the Great's calcite-alabaster bathtubs by a multi-analytic approach.

ABSTRACT: Herod "the Great", king of Judea in the second half of the first century BC, was known for his building projects, wealth, and political power. Two of his personal calcite-alabaster bathtubs, found in the Kypros fortress and the palace of Herodium, are among the very limited archaeological evidence of his private life. It seemed plausible that they were imported from Egypt, the main source of calcite-alabaster in ancient periods. Yet, the recent identification of a calcite quarry in the Te'omim cave, Israel, challenges this hypothesis. Here, we developed an approach for identification of the source of calcite-alabaster, by combination of four analytical methods: ICP, FTIR, ssNMR and isotope ratio. These methods were then applied to Herod's bathtubs demonstrating that they were indeed quarried in Israel rather than in Egypt.

SUBMITTER: Amir A

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9079073 | biostudies-literature | 2022 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Sourcing Herod the Great's calcite-alabaster bathtubs by a multi-analytic approach.

Amir Ayala A Frumkin Amos A Zissu Boaz B Maeir Aren M AM Goobes Gil G Albeck Amnon A

Scientific reports 20220507 1

Herod "the Great", king of Judea in the second half of the first century BC, was known for his building projects, wealth, and political power. Two of his personal calcite-alabaster bathtubs, found in the Kypros fortress and the palace of Herodium, are among the very limited archaeological evidence of his private life. It seemed plausible that they were imported from Egypt, the main source of calcite-alabaster in ancient periods. Yet, the recent identification of a calcite quarry in the Te'omim c ...[more]

PMID: 35525885

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Project description:SignificanceConcerns about the reproducibility of experimental findings have recently emerged in many disciplines, from psychology to medicine and neuroscience. As NIRS is a relatively recent brain imaging technique, the question of reproducibility has not yet been systematically addressed.AimThe current study seeks to test the replicability of effects observed in NIRS experiments assessing young infants' rule-learning ability.ApproachWe conducted meta-analyses and mixed-effects modeling-based inferential statistics to determine whether effect sizes were replicable and comparable in a sample of 23 NIRS studies investigating infants' abilities to process repetition- and diversity-based regularities in linguistic and nonlinguistic auditory and visual sequences. Additionally, we tested whether effect sizes were modulated by different factors such as the age of participants or the laboratory. We obtained NIRS data from 12 published and 11 unpublished studies. The 23 studies involved a total of 487 infants, aged between 0 and 9 months, tested in four different countries (Canada, France, Italy, and USA).ResultsOur most important finding is that study and laboratory were never significant moderators of variation in effect sizes, indicating that results replicated reliably across the different studies and labs included in the sample. We observed small-to-moderate effect sizes, similar to effect sizes found with other neuroimaging and behavioral techniques in the developmental literature. In line with existing findings, effect sizes were modulated by the participants' age and differed across the different regularities tested, with repetition-based regularities giving rise to the strongest effects; in particular, the overall magnitude of this effect in the left temporal region was 0.27 when analyzing the entire dataset.ConclusionsMeta-analysis is a useful tool for assessing replicability and cross-study variability. Here, we have shown that infant NIRS studies in the language domain replicate robustly across various NIRS machines, testing sites, and developmental populations.

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Sourcing Herod the Great's calcite-alabaster bathtubs by a multi-analytic approach.

Publications

Sourcing Herod the Great's calcite-alabaster bathtubs by a multi-analytic approach.

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