For more than 500 years scholars have been wrestling with an ancient Roman puzzle that would test even the most cunning of quiz-masters. How do you put together a giant stone jigsaw when 80% of the pieces are missing and you have even lost the lid? Now with a joint Italian-US team on the case using a hi-tech approach the answer might finally be within reach. The Forma Urbis, or Severan Marble Plan, is a giant map of the city of Rome constructed around AD200 by the Emperor Septimus Severus. It was fixed onto the wall of the Templum Pacis (Temple of Peace) in the heart of the city - a massive display symbolising both the greatness of the city, and the emperor's power to know its every nook and cranny. But with the decline of the empire from the 4th Century, the vast marble map - measuring 18m by 13m (59 feet by 43 feet) and intricately carved onto 250 separate slabs - was prised off the wall. The building stones were stolen, crushed into cement or merely slid down off the wall to lie buried in the gardens below for the next 1,000 years. The rediscovery of some of the pieces during the Renaissance ignited an interest in reconstructing the map that has bewitched scholars ever since. Now scientists at America's Stanford University have joined Italian archaeologists in the capital's Museum of Roman Civilisation with a multi-disciplinary and hi-tech approach to solving the ancient riddle. The Stanford team has digitally scanned all 1,186 surviving pieces of the Plan and constructed a range of computer programmes which use algorithms to try to fit the pieces together.
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