New discoveries at ancient sacred bath

This year’s excavation of the ancient hot springs sacred to the Etruscans and Romans at San Casciano dei Bagni near Siena in central Italy has continued to uncover exceptional ancient votive offerings. Four new bronze statues, plus bronze arms, heads, legs, a small bronze bull, a gold diadem, a gold ring, gems, amber, inscriptions in Etruscan and Latin, intact whole eggs and an astonishing nest of bronze snakes. When the discovery of 24 bronze votive statues, the largest group of bronze statuary from ancient Italy ever found, was announced in 2022, about 6,000 coins had been discovered up to that point. That figure has now increased to more than 10,000 coins from the Roman Republican and Imperial periods.

The new, exceptional inscriptions discovered are in Etruscan and Latin. Votes appear that bear the Etruscan name of Chiusi, Cleusi, alongside dedications to the Nymphs and the Hot Spring, Flere Havens in Etruscan, oaths on the Fortune and Genius of the Emperor. An exceptional naked male body is offered exactly in half, as if cut from the neck to the genitals by a surgical cut. Dedicated by a Gaius Roscius to the Hot Spring, this half body perhaps testifies to the healing of the body part immortalized in bronze. A child augur, a small priest from the end of the 2nd century BC, with a long inscription in Etruscan on his right leg, holds a ball in his left hand, with the classic pentagons sewn on, which still rotates between his fingers: perhaps a divinatory element, to be rotated in a ritual. The gesture of the offerer is rendered by a female statue, almost identical to the one found in 2022, with elegant braids that fall on the chest and placed on one side. The votive heads are elegant proto-imperial portraits, with the first dedication in Latin to the source, on the neck of a head, whose features almost seem to recall Caesar, who also mentions the Hot Spring.

A team of more than 80 archaeology students from around the world worked professional archaeologists and international researchers from multiple disciplines between June and October of this year. The area of the Great Bath under excavation was expanded and the team dug deeper than ever. The discovery of thousands of egg fragments and several whole ones intact with yolk still visible within, attest to a rapid, deliberate layering of the offerings. Eggs, symbols of new birth and regeneration, alternate with flakes of travertine stone, clay and plant-based offerings, including pine cones and twigs trimmed and wound with vegetal materials.

Then came the snakes. At the base of a series of large wooden trunks planted vertically in the oldest basin, almost 16 feet under the surface of the water, archaeologists found a whole layer of bronze snakes of different shapes and sizes, with different scale patterns, from little grass snakes to a bearded and crested snake three Roman feet long representing an agathodaemon, guardian spirits that brought good fortune and played an important role in divination. It is the largest agathodemon serpent ever found. Depictions of agathodaemons are common in the lararium (shrine) frescoes of Pompeii and Herculaneum, often reaching to eat the offerings on altars, including fruits, eggs and pinecones, the very same organic offerings found by the hundreds in layers just above the snakes.

 

This footage from the Ministry of Culture (no audio) has great views of among other finds, the agathodaemon and the extraordinary child augur with the ball that still rotates in his hand.

* This article was originally published here