DNA and the Roman Army in Britain

Fresh from the success of confirming the identity of the skeleton in the car park in Leicester as the remains of Richard III, and hot on the heels of the documentary about Eddie Izzard’s genetic ancestry, another DNA research breakthrough was announced about 10 days ago. In The Daily  Telegraph (23rd February 2013) it was reported that up to a million Britons carry genetic signatures that are commonly found in and are likely to have their origin in Italy. The DNA marker R1b-S28 is thought to come from men who served in the Roman army.

I have to confess I am a tad sceptical about this. After all it’s not so long ago that claims were made on the basis of DNA studies that the Etruscans really were descended from people who left Lydia or western Turkey to settle in northern Italy as was claimed by some writers.  Later it was revealed that the DNA link went back much much earlier and it reflected the fact that people recolonized Europe after the last Ice Age over ten thousand years ago from warmer refuges in western Asia. Most Italians had the Asian DNA not just those living in northern Italy because they were mainly descended from a small population of ancestors who’d lived in the same refuge before the last Ice Age.

The claim in The Daily Telegraph seems to assume that all the men in the Roman army were Romans or at the very least Italian. However, detailed research on the Roman army over many years has shown that it was ethnically an extremely diverse organisation. ‘Odds and sods’ of all sorts as Mark Hassall once put it. The number of soldiers fluctuated but much of the time there were three legions numbering in total 15,000-18,000 men in Britain and at least as many auxiliaries. The auxiliaries were recruited from peoples who had been incorporated in the empire or who supplied troops under a treaty obligation. After serving for 25 years the auxiliaries received Roman citizenship. One of our best sources of information about ethnicity in the Roman Empire is epigraphy or the study of inscriptions. Gauls, Spaniards, Moors, Germans, Syrians and many other peoples are attested. For example, for a time here in Manchester the garrison of the Roman fort consisted of men from Raetia and Noricum (Switzerland and the modern Styria, Carinthia, Salzburg, and part of Austria and Bavaria in eastern central Europe). Once these men had become Roman citizens their sons would have been eligible to serve in the legions. This being so, we should expect a diverse DNA profile.

Raetians and Noricans are mentioned in an inscription on an altar from Roman Manchester displayed in the Ancient Worlds galleries

Even if we focus on the legions, historically the recruitment shifted over time from Italy to the provinces, although these men must have been the sons and grandsons of men who were Romans and Italians in the late Republic/early Empire. Later as the sons of auxiliaries awarded Roman citizenship became eligible to serve in the legions a broader genetic catchment must have had an influence.

One of the best examples we have here in the Museum’s Ancient Worlds displays of ethnicity in the Roman army is a fragmentary bronze auxiliary diploma from Ravenglass in Cumbria. This official record showed the recipient has been awarded Roman citizenship after serving the requisite number of years. We don’t know the man’s name. That bit of the diploma hasn’t survived, sadly, but we do know he came from Syria.

The Ravenglass auxiliary diploma

The date he was demobbed – in the reign of Antoninus Pius –  suggests he was recruited in the early 130s AD. In his publication of the diploma Paul Holder, who works at the Rylands Library, suggested that the most likely historical circumstance in which this man was recruited is the suppression of the Jewish revolt in 132-5 AD. Afterwards the man came back to Britain with his unit and, because his diploma was found in the North West, he must have stayed here. Like another easterner, Barates, the Palmyran who married his former slave, the British woman Regina or Queenie (her tombstone is at South Shields),  the Syrian on the Ravenglass diploma probably put down roots. Maybe he got married, had children, and ran a business in a vicus or civilian settlement attached to a fort. Could Syrian DNA be identified in the populaton of northern Britain? The numbers involved were probably not large. A cohort of Hamian archers on Hadrian’s Wall numbered 480 men. However, in the First World War Yemeni sailors settled at South Shields and married local women. 1800 years earlier Tigris boatmen had been garrisoned at Arbeia.  Just a thought.

Young Archaeologists and Ancient Etruscans or what to call your rabbit

Seianti Hanunia’s sarcophagus in the British Museum

In mid-January the first of the Manchester Museum’s Young Archaeologists Club meetings for 2013 took place. We were scratching our heads wondering what to do because it was too cold to take the children out on a site digging and we had already talked about the ancient Greeks, Romans and Egyptians in previous sessions. However, there was one people of the ancient world we hadn’t looked at and they are the Etruscans. The Etruscans lived in northern Italy and were very powerful and influential between about 1000 and 100 BC. The Greeks called them Tyrrhenians and the Tyrrhenian Sea is named after them. The Roman name Tusci gave rise to the modern region of Italy called Tuscany, favoured holiday retreat of a former prime minister.  The early kings of Rome were Etruscan. The Manchester Museum happens to have quite a good collection of Etruscan material and a few objects are shown in the new Ancient Worlds displays. A catalogue of Manchester Museum’s Etruscan collection was published by Jean Turfa in the early 1980s.

I got out a selection of Etruscan objects from the stores. I set up four tables and put out groups of bronze figurines, brooches, pottery, stone cinerary urns, inscriptions and votive offerings on each. We talked about the rich mineral resources that were the source of the Etruscans’ wealth and prosperity and how contact with ancient Greek traders stimulated a passion for imports of Greek things such as pottery. Not that they didn’t have their own graceful and attractive pottery called bucchero ware. We explored the role of Etruscan women who seem to have had slightly more freedom than their Greek and Roman sisters. A facial reconstruction of an upper class Etruscan woman made by Prof.John Prag and Dr Richard Neave of the University of Manchester is shown in the new displays. Her name was Seianti Hanunia Tlesnana and her beautiful sarcophagus can be seen at the British Museum. It offers one of those rare chances to compare a depiction of someone who lived in the ancient world with a facial reconstruction based on their physical remains.

We stopped in the middle of the session to go and see Etruscan objects on display including the facial reconstruction, a votive offering of a woman’s womb and a carved marble slab from a cinerary urn.  This gave the children a chance to get up and move around after about half an hour of sitting. We returned to the Discovery Centre for the last topics about writing and religion. The Manchester Museum has a few Etruscan inscriptions and one of them is all the more interesting for being longer (most Etruscan inscriptions are quite short and often do no more than mention someone’s name, status and family relationship). This one has been translated and it mentions ‘Hercle’ or Heracles. It may refer to the offering of a statue of the hero.  I distributed a photocopy of the names of Etruscan gods and goddesses compared with their Greek and Roman equivalents. The children were amused when they found out the Etruscan equivalent to Dionysos was called Fufluns. Someone said it was a good name for a rabbit!

Andrea’s rabbit Eric with one of Irit’s cabbages (March 2015)

Desperately Seeking Women in the Ancient World

Meeting to discuss project using the Manchester museum collection

The recent teaching sessions using the Manchester Roman word-square have paid dividends because lecturer in Classics, Dr Roberta Mazza, met me, Campbell Price and Naomi Kashiwagi a few days ago to discuss making a grant application to help support further student use of the collection. Roberta showed us some inspiring work that had been done over at the John Rylands library using the beautiful Greco-Roman mummy portraits. The project brought together the library’s papyrus collections with portraits from the Manchester Museum. The students of Thomas Whitham Sixth Form College, Burnley, were invited to voice that particular person based on what was known about their life, their family relationships and standing in society, and all this working under the guide of academics and graduate students from Classics and Religions and Theology. You can see the short film at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bd-OJkLBTww

This certainly struck a chord with us because the new Ancient Worlds galleries make extensive use of real people, people who have gathered the collections, researched and conserved them or made use of them in teaching. Roberta asked if we could suggest some people from the past who were represented in the Manchester collections. Straightaway we thought of the Syrian man who was awarded Roman citizenship on a bronze diploma found at Ravenglass or one of the Palmyrans whose bust will be displayed in the portraits gallery or Senecianius, the Roman centurion from VI Legion Victrix in York, who commanded the Manchester garrison.

Mummy, complete with painted portrait, of Artemidorus

Another candidate is one of the Manchester Museum mummies, a man called Artemidorus, who was found at Hawara in the Fayum. He dates between about AD 110 and 160. He is one of those relatively rare instances where the wax portrait is still in position above the face. Worsley Man is another possibility, funnily enough dating from a similar period but from the province of Roman Britain, as far as you could get from Egypt but still be in the Roman Empire.

There’s just one problem. As Roberta reminded me in her email: “We desperately need a woman now!!!! Don’t we have an interesting case?” Sadly women were often denied access to the high profile roles exercised by men in the ancient world so they are less visible archaeologically as named individuals. Women turn up on ancient Greek painted pottery or as terracotta figurines all the time but we don’t know who they were. Egypt is one of the places where women do appear to have had more rights as is shown by papyri. The Etruscans may help us. There is a facial reconstruction of Etruscan noblewoman Seianti Hanunia Tlesnana in the collection and other relevant material like a votive offering of a woman’s womb, for example, can be seen in the Ancient Worlds galleries.

Votive offering of an Etruscan terracotta womb (MM acc.no.35152)

The idea is that the students will research this person and produce a short film in which they give voice to that person’s experiences in so far as they can reconstruct them using a wide range of resources. The films can be shown in the galleries. In this way they will gain practical experience of working with the material evidence of the past that may be of practical use to them in the future. Thinking about what to call the project was a no-brainer: ‘Ancient Lives, Future Skills’.

It’ll be interesting to see how this develops. There is certainly no shortage of content material. If students develop skills in presenting and interpreting fascinating information about the past hopefully it’ll be an antidote to the current vogue for celebrity presenters who think the subject of the programme is themselves and who skirt over the really interesting stuff.