The most famous international historian of the Roman Empire, the German Theodor Mommsen, visited the Burnum archaeological site in 1862 as part of a study trip to Dalmatia. His presence in our region was accompanied by short reports in the contemporary press.
Theodor Mommsen, whose full name was Christian Matthias Theodor Mommsen, was born on November 30, 1817 in Garding in Schleswig (today in Germany), and died on November 1, 1903 in Charlottenburg near Berlin. He was the son of a Protestant minister in Garding. He grew up in Oldesloe (now Bad Oldesloe). He received his basic classical education in the upper classes of the Christianeum Gymnasium in Altona, then part of the Holstein Duchy. From 1838 to 1843, he studied law at the University of Kiel. The study of law in Germany at that time was mostly concerned with the study of Roman law, which greatly influenced his future work. He owed the idea, which he wholeheartedly advocated, about the close connection between law and history, to his law professors and to the works of Friedrich Karl von Savigny, one of the founders of the school of historical law.
After obtaining his master’s degree and doctorate, a scholarship from the Kingdom of Denmark enabled him to spend three years (1844-1847) in Italy, where he carried out research at the German Archaeological Institute in Rome. That was the time when Mommsen designed the preliminary framework for the future Corpus inscriptionum latinarum, a comprehensive collection of ancient inscriptions in stone, bronze, and other permanent material, arranged in accordance with the basic principles of philological methodology. He was prepared for this undertaking by the epigraphist and Latinist Otto Jahn. He soon became a master of epigraphy, and he studied, read, and interpreted inscriptions with Bartolomeo Borghesi, an erudite classicist, who had created a pattern for the systematic analysis of all the Latin inscriptions of the Roman world. Over the next several decades, Mommsen turned the Corpus of Latin Inscriptions (CIL) into an original work that was instrumental in supplementing a one-sided literary tradition and that further provided the first comprehensive understanding of life in the ancient world.
In 1852, he was invited to Zurich (Switzerland), where he taught at the Faculty of Law. In as early as 1854, he was offered a professorship at the University of Breslau, in Prussia. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1902 for his masterpiece Römische Geschichte (The History of Rome).
Theodor Mommsen visited Burnum at the end of April 1862. Thanks to the recently published article by M. Baratta, we learn what occurred at Burnum from 1850 to 1861, on the eve of his visit. In the archives of the German Archaeological Institute in Rome, Baratta found notes related to Burnum among the documents and letters of Theodor Mommsen. Thanks to these notes, two very important pieces of information about Burnum can be recovered. The first refers to the condition of the arches of the principia (basilica) and also the first archaeological excavations in the area of the principia.
The earliest document copied by Mommsen was sent from the District Court in Knin to the District Captaincy in Zadar on May 17, 1850. The condition of the arches of the principia/basilica in Burnum is described in it: “The arches (in Šupljaja near Ivoševci) are in such bad condition that they are in danger of collapsing, since the iron supports and other items that were placed there many years ago have been removed because of the greed of the local inhabitants (Morlachs), so that without urgent help, this monument will suffer the fate that befell one of its columns last winter, which, knocked over by the fury of the bura winds, now serves as a quarry for the local Vandals.” In this manner we learn that in 1840 the right side of the central arch was “knocked over by the fury of the wind”, and that the stone was carried away.
The next document is dated November 18, 1859. It is extremely important because it provides data on the first excavations in the area of the principla, which had not been known until now, and had been carried out by the curator Đuro Sundečić. Thanks to Mommsen, the architectural plan and cross-section of the excavated structure have been preserved, and the report also mentions the finds from these excavations, especially the stone monuments, some of which are still preserved today.
