Roman Gladiator's Gravestone Describes Fatal Foul

News – This 1,800-year-old tombstone depicts a gladiator holding two swords standing above his defeated opponent …

Owen Jarus, LiveScience Contributor
LiveScience.com – Mon Jun 20, 8:05 am ET

An enigmatic message on a Roman gladiator's 1,800-year-old tombstone has finally been decoded, telling a treacherous tale.

The epitaph and art on the tombstone suggest the gladiator, named Diodorus, lost the battle (and his life) due to a referee's error, according to Michael Carter, a professor at Brock University in St. Catharines, Canada. Carter studies gladiator contests and other spectacles in the eastern part of the Roman Empire.

He examined the stone, which was discovered a century ago in Turkey, trying to determine what the drawing and inscription meant. [Top 10 Weird Ways We Deal With the Dead]

His results will be published in the most recently released issue of the Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik(Journal for Papyrology and Ancient Epigraphics).

Tombstones talk

The tombstone was donated to the Musee du Cinquanternaire in Brussels, Belgium, shortly before World War I. It shows an image of a gladiator holding what appear to be two swords, standing above his opponent who is signalling his surrender. The inscription says that the stone marks the spot where a man named Diodorus is buried.

"After breaking my opponent Demetrius I did not kill him immediately," reads the epitaph. "Fate and the cunning treachery of the summa rudis killed me."

The summa rudis is a referee, who may have had past experience as a gladiator.

The inscription also indicates Diodorus was born in and fought in Amisus, on the south coast of the Black Sea in Turkey.

Though Carter has examined hundreds of gladiator tombstones, this "epitaph is completely different from anything else; it's telling a story," he told LiveScience.

The final fight

The story the tombstone tells took place about 1,800 years ago when the empire was at its height, its borders stretching from Hadrian's Wall in England to the Euphrates River in Syria.

Gladiator games were popular spectacles, many of them pitting two men against each other. Although deaths from wounds were common, the battles were not the no-holds-barred fights to the death depicted by Hollywood, said Carter.

"I believe that there are a number of very detailed rules involved in regulating gladiatorial combat," Carter said.

Though the exact rules are not well understood, some information can be gleaned from references in surviving texts and art. 

For starters, most, if not all, of the fights were overseen by the summa rudis.

Among the rules he enforced was one in which a defeated gladiator could request submission, and if submission was approved by the munerarius (the wealthy individual paying for the show), the contestant could leave the arena without further harm.

Another rule that appears to have been in place was that a gladiator who fell by accident (without the help of his opponent) would be allowed to get back up, pick up his equipment and resume combat.

Death of Diodorus

It's this last rule that appears to have done in Diodorus. Carter interprets the picture of the gladiator holding two swords to be a moment in his final fight, when Demetrius had been knocked down and Diodorus had grabbed a hold of his sword.

"Demetrius signals surrender, Diodorus doesn't kill him; he backs off expecting that he's going to win the fight," Carter said.

The battle appears to be over. However the summa rudis — perhaps interpreting Demetrius' fall as accidental, or perhaps with some ulterior motive — thought otherwise, Carter said.

"What the summa rudis has obviously done is stepped in, stopped the fight, allowed Demetrius to get back up again, take back his shield, take back his sword, and then resume the fight."

This time Diodorus was in trouble, and either he died in the arena or Demetrius inflicted a wound that led to his death shortly thereafter.

This event would have happened before a crowd of hundreds, if not thousands, of people in a theater or in part of an athletic stadium converted into a sort of mini- Colosseum.

After Diodorus was dead, the people who created his tombstone (probably family or friends) were so upset, Carter suggests, that they decided to include some final words on the  epitaph:   

"Fate and the cunning treachery of the summa rudis killed me."

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• History's Most Overlooked Mysteries

Ancient Roman Shipwreck May Have Held Giant Fish Tank  

Charles Q. Choi, LiveScience Contributor,
LiveScience.com – Thu Jun 2, 2011.

An ancient Roman shipwreck nearly 2,000 years old may once have held an aquarium onboard capable of carrying live fish, archaeologists suggest.

The shipwreck, which lay 6 miles (nearly 10 kilometers) off the town of Grado in Italy, was discovered by accident in 1986. Approximately 55 feet (16.5 meters) long, it dated back to the mid-second century and had a cargo of about 600 large vases known as amphoras that contained sardines, salted mackerel and other fish products.

Curiously, its hull possessed a unique feature — near its keel was a lead pipe at least 2.7 inches (7 cm) wide and 51 inches (1.3 meters) long. Why pierce its bottom with a hole that seawater could rise up?

Scientists now suggest this pipe was connected to a hand-operated pump to suck up water. The aim? To keep a constant supply of flowing, oxygenated water into a fish tank onboard the ship. [Images of device and shipwreck]

"Historians think that before the invention of the freezer, the only possibility to trade fish was to salt or dry it, but now we know that it was possible to move it alive also for quite a long distance," researcher Carlo Beltrame, an archaeologist at Ca' Foscari University of Venice, told LiveScience.

A number of texts from antiquity have contentiously suggested the ancient Romans could transport live fish by sea. For instance, the scientist, Roman officer and historian Pliny the Elder spoke of transport of parrotfish from the Black Sea to the coast of Naples.

They estimate an aquarium behind the mast of the ship could have measured about 11.4 feet by 6.5 feet by 3.3 feet (3.5 m by 2 m by 1 m) for a capacity of approximately 250 cubic feet (7 cubic meters). For comparison, an average bathtub has a volume of about 7 cubic feet. If properly maintained, it could help keep at least 440 pounds (200 kg) of live fish such as sea bass or sea bream, they noted.

"This simple apparatus implies that, as attested by some ancient authors, the trade of live fish in antiquity was possible," Beltrame said.

Intriguingly, the researchers added that the Istria coast, which is only a few hours by boat from Grado, was known for numerous vivaria — enclosures for keeping live animals. Perhaps ships capable of transporting live fish brought such cargo to large markets, the researchers speculated.

Beltrame noted the existing archaeological evidence for their idea was poor. They now plan to reconstruct the apparatus to test how well it might have worked.

The scientists detailed their findings online March 11 in the International Journal of Nautical Archaeology.

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Beneath Jerusalem, an underground city takes shape

AP – In this May 17, 2011 photo, a view of Zedekiah's Cave is seen in Jerusalem's Old City. Underneath the …

• Slideshow:Underground Jerusalem

By MATTI FRIEDMAN, Associated Press – Mon May 30, 12:09 pm ET

JERUSALEM – Underneath the crowded alleys and holy sites of old Jerusalem, hundreds of people are snaking at any given moment through tunnels, vaulted medieval chambers and Roman sewers in a rapidly expanding subterranean city invisible from the streets above.

At street level, the walled Old City is an energetic and fractious enclave with a physical landscape that is predominantly Islamic and a population that is mainly Arab.

Underground Jerusalem is different: Here the noise recedes, the fierce Middle Eastern sun disappears, and light comes from fluorescent bulbs. There is a smell of earth and mildew, and the geography recalls a Jewish city that existed 2,000 years ago.

Archaeological digs under the disputed Old City are a matter of immense sensitivity. For Israel, the tunnels are proof of the depth of Jewish roots here, and this has made the tunnels one of Jerusalem's main tourist draws: The number of visitors, mostly Jews and Christians, has risen dramatically in recent years to more than a million visitors in 2010.

But many Palestinians, who reject Israel's sovereignty in the city, see them as a threat to their own claims to Jerusalem. And some critics say they put an exaggerated focus on Jewish history.

A new underground link is opening within two months, and when it does, there will be more than a mile (two kilometers) of pathways beneath the city. Officials say at least one other major project is in the works. Soon, anyone so inclined will be able to spend much of their time in Jerusalem without seeing the sky.

On a recent morning, a man carrying surveying equipment walked across a two-millennia-old stone road, paused at the edge of a hole and disappeared underground.

Click image to see photos of Underground Jerusalem

AP Photo/Bernat Armangue

In a multilevel maze of rooms and corridors beneath the Muslim Quarter, workers cleared rubble and installed steel safety braces to shore up crumbling 700-year-old Mamluk-era arches.

Above ground, a group of French tourists emerged from a dark passage they had entered an hour earlier in the Jewish Quarter and found themselves among Arab shops on the Via Dolorosa, the traditional route Jesus took to his crucifixion.

South of the Old City, visitors to Jerusalem can enter a tunnel chipped from the bedrock by a Judean king 2,500 years ago and walk through knee-deep water under the Arab neighborhood of Silwan. Beginning this summer, a new passage will be open nearby: a sewer Jewish rebels are thought to have used to flee the Roman legions who destroyed the Jerusalem temple in 70 A.D.

The sewer leads uphill, passing beneath the Old City walls before expelling visitors into sunlight next to the rectangular enclosure where the temple once stood, now home to the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the gold-capped Dome of the Rock.

From there, it's a short walk to a third passage, the Western Wall tunnel, which continues north from the Jewish holy site past stones cut by masons working for King Herod and an ancient water system. Visitors emerge near the entrance to an ancient quarry called Zedekiah's Cave that descends under the Muslim Quarter.

The next major project, according to the Israel Antiquities Authority, will follow the course of one of the city's main Roman-era streets underneath the prayer plaza at the Western Wall. This route, scheduled for completion in three years, will link up with the Western Wall tunnel.

The excavations and flood of visitors exist against a backdrop of acute distrust between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Muslims, who are suspicious of any government moves in the Old City and particularly around the Al-Aqsa compound, Islam's third-holiest shrine. Jews know the compound as the Temple Mount, site of two destroyed temples and the center of the Jewish faith for three millennia.

Muslim fears have led to violence in the past: The 1996 opening of a new exit to the Western Wall tunnel sparked rumors among Palestinians that Israel meant to damage the mosques, and dozens were killed in the ensuing riots. In recent years, however, work has gone ahead without incident.

Mindful that the compound has the potential to trigger devastating conflict, Israel's policy is to allow no excavations there. Digging under Temple Mount, the Israeli historian Gershom Gorenberg has written, "would be like trying to figure out how a hand grenade works by pulling the pin and peering inside."

Despite the Israeli assurances, however, rumors persist that the excavations are undermining the physical stability of the Islamic holy sites.

"I believe the Israelis are tunneling under the mosques," said Najeh Bkerat, an official of the Waqf, the Muslim religious body that runs the compound under Israel's overall security control.

Samir Abu Leil, another Waqf official, said he had heard hammering that very morning underneath the Waqf's offices, in a Mamluk-era building that sits just outside the holy compound and directly over the route of the Western Wall tunnel, and had filed a complaint with police.

The closest thing to an excavation on the mount, Israeli archaeologists point out, was done by the Waqf itself: In the 1990s, the Waqf opened a new entrance to a subterranean prayer space and dumped truckloads of rubble outside the Old City, drawing outrage from scholars who said priceless artifacts were being destroyed.

This month, an Israeli government watchdog released a report saying Waqf construction work in the compound in recent years had been done without supervision and had damaged antiquities. The issue is deemed so sensitive that the details of the report were kept classified.

Some Israeli critics of the tunnels point to what they call an exaggerated emphasis on a Jewish narrative.

"The tunnels all say: We were here 2,000 years ago, and now we're back, and here's proof," said Yonathan Mizrachi, an Israeli archaeologist. "Living here means recognizing that other stories exist alongside ours."

Yuval Baruch, the Antiquities Authority archaeologist in charge of Jerusalem, said his diggers are careful to preserve worthy finds from all of the city's historical periods. "This city is of interest to at least half the people on Earth, and we will continue uncovering the past in the most professional way we can," he said.

Stone Age tools found in Crete prove man sailed the sea at least 130,000 years ago

By Daily Mail Reporter  04.01.2011.

 

Discovery: Archaeologists in Crete have found tools they believe prove man sailed the sea tens of thousands of years earlier than previously thought

Archaeologists have discovered a set of tools they believe prove that man sailed the sea tens of thousands of years earlier than previously thought.

Rough axes and other tools thought to be between 130,000 and 700,000 years old were found close to shelters on the south coast of the Mediterranean island of Crete.

Crete has been separated from the mainland of Greece for about five million years, so whoever made the tools must have travelled there by sea, a distance of at least 40 miles.

The previous earliest evidence was of sea travel was 60,000 years ago; in Greece it was 11,000 years ago.

The findings upset the current view that human ancestors migrated to Europe from Africa by land alone.

The Greek Culture Ministry said in a statement yesterday: 'The results of the survey not only provide evidence of sea voyages in the Mediterranean tens of thousands of years earlier than we were aware of so far, but also change our understanding of early hominids' cognitive abilities.'

The previous earliest evidence of open-sea travel in Greece dates back 11,000 years.

The tools were found during a survey of caves and rock shelters near the village of Plakias by archaeologists from the American School of Classical Studies at Athens and the Culture Ministry.

Rough axes and other tools thought to be between 130,000 and 700,000 years old were found close to shelters near the village of Plakias on the south coast of the Mediterranean island

Significant: The previous earliest evidence of sea travel was 60,000 years ago, so the findings upset the current view that human ancestors migrated to Europe from Africa by land alone

MAN'S BEST INVENTIONS

Now that it appears man invented the boat long before 60,000 BC, here is a list of some other breakthrough inventions:

• The Wheel - 5,000 BC
• Musical Instruments - 50,000 BC
• Spears - 400,000 BC
• Housing - 500,000 BC
• Clothing - 500,000 to 100,000 BC
• How to control fire - 1,000,000 BC
• Knife - 1,400,000 to 2,500,000 BC
  

Such rough stone implements are associated with Heidelberg Man and Homo Erectus, extinct precursors of the modern human race, which evolved from Africa about 200,000 years ago.

Maria Vlazaki, senior ministry archaeologist, said: 'Up to now we had no proof of Early Stone Age presence on Crete.'

She said it was unclear where the hominids had sailed from, or whether the settlements were permanent.

'They may have come from Africa or from the east,' she said. 'Future study should help.'

The team of archaeologists has applied for permission to conduct a more thorough excavation of the area, which Greek authorities are expected to approve later this year.

Picturesque: Preveli Beach is one of two locations on Crete where the chiseled shards were found

Island: Crete has been separated from the mainland of Greece for about five million years, so whoever made the tools must have travelled there by sea, a distance of at least 40 miles

Explore more:

Places:

Athens,

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Archaeologists discover second sphinx-lined road in Luxor dating back to fourth century

By Michael Theodoulou 16.11.2010.

They were buried beneath Egypt's shifting desert sands for centuries and more recently entombed by unsightly urban sprawl.

But now the remains of hundreds of ancient sphinxes have been unearthed in Luxor and - once renovated - are due to go on show to tourists from next February in a huge open-air museum.

The latest remarkable discovery came when jubilant Egyptian archaeologists found the 12 sphinxes along a road linked to an already discovered ceremonial route known as the Sphinx Alley.

Discovery: Twelve sphinxes dating back to the fourth century have been found in Luxor

The Kabash path connects the vast Karnak temple in ancient Thebes to the Luxor Temple.

It marks a route that ancient Egyptians promenaded along once a year carrying the statues of the deities Amun and Mut in a symbolic re-enactment of their marriage.

Amun was ancient Egypt's supreme god king, while Mut was a goddess worshipped as a mother.

The road was later used by the Romans and is believed to have been renovated by Cleopatra, the fabled Ptolemaic queen who left her cartouche - an inscribed hieroglyphic bearing her name - at the temple in Luxor.

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• Read articles on visiting Egypt here

Zahi Hawass, Egypt's most celebrated archaeologist, told the Daily Mail: 'It maybe shows that Cleopatra brought Mark Antony or Cesar on a journey up the Nile River to visit Sphinx Avenue.'

Ancient: The statues are from the reign of Pharaoh Nectanebo I and are in a road off 'Sphinx Alley' which could not be dug up before because of flats above it

Dig site: Workers remove some of the earth along the newly discovered road in Luxor

The remains of some 850 fragmented sphinxes had already been discovered in recent years along an earlier section of Sphinx Alley which was built by the fabulously wealthy Pharaoh Amenhotep III,

They were erected on either side of the road, alongside chapels stocked with offerings for the deities.

Some 1,350 sphinx statues are thought once to have flanked the path.

The 12 discovered today - most missing their heads - were inscribed with the name of Nectabo I, the founder of the last Pharaonic dynasty, who died in 362 BC.

He ruled over a declining nation that was harried by the expanding Persian Empire.

They were found along an east-west road that adjoins the Kabash path from north to south.

Historic: The Avenue of the Sphinxes links Karnak Temple and Luxor in Egypt and is believed to have been visited by Cleopatra

Scholars knew of the road from ancient texts, but the today's find was the first proof of its existence.

Exploration could not begin until authorities had compensated and found new homes for those living above the site in scruffy apartment blocks, a procedure which took 18 months.

Dr Hawass believes that only 30 per cent of Egypt's ancient treasures - from the Pyramids to Luxor and the splendours of Tutankhamun tomb - have yet been found.

He said: 'We hear every day of an important new discovery.'

Egypt: A life before the afterlife

Gloomy tombs and morbid mummies? Everyday Egypt was much more than that, argues Richard Parkinson in a first glimpse of a new series focusing on the ancient world, free with tomorrow's Guardian

• Richard Parkinson  guardian.co.uk,   05.11. 2010

 

• Wall painting on plaster from the Tomb of Nebamun, 1350 BC Photograph: British Museum

Ancient Egypt rarely escapes our stereotypical view of it: an exotic place full of pyramids crammed with cursed treasure, waiting to be discovered by adventurous archaeologists. As in René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo's comic Asterix and Cleopatra, it is often presented as a land of spooky tombs and people speaking in hieroglyphic pictures. These stereotypes are themselves quite ancient – even to the ancient Greeks, Egypt was a quintessentially different culture. But they trivialise a complex society.

Ancient Egypt is one of the first civilisations that children are taught about, and so people sometimes assume that it must be a "childish" culture, an early step in humanity's evolution towards modernity. People of all ages visit the displays of mummies in the British Museum, and there can be no more vivid way of stirring anyone's historical imagination than to look into an actual ancient face. But as we stare, we can sometimes forget that they were more than mummies, and that once they were people as complex and sophisticated as us.

Some of our misunderstandings about ancient Egypt come about in part because the Egyptians presented much of their history in a monumental and monolithic form. For centuries, the Egyptians codified in stone their history as a list of kings, each the son of the sun god, each a triumphant hero who, with each reign, re-established order in a chaotic universe. Even now, Egyptian history is conventionally divided into great kingdoms of centralised rule, the Old, Middle and New Kingdoms, divided by periods of supposed chaos. The central role of the king is perhaps the key to Egypt's self-representation: every king re-established Egyptian society, eternal and unchanging since the time of the gods.

In these official records, Egypt presented itself as an extremely conservative culture. As in any society, it is all too easy to accept this ideology at face value, but there were huge changes behind this facade and continual tensions between the royal centre and periphery – aspects of history that were written out of royal inscriptions. After so many centuries, how can we get behind these official political pronouncements and begin to understand the Egyptians in context?

Occasionally we have different types of evidence for the same events, which allow us a fuller picture. In 1858BC at Semna, in Nubia at the southern edge of Egypt, King Senusret III erected an inscription to mark the border of his territory. In this, he proclaimed scornfully that the Nubian locals "only have to hear and then fall at a word: just answering them makes them retreat". But the archaeological context reveals that the inscription was erected in a massive mud-brick fortress, which shows that the king needed more than words to control the Nubians. And this fortress was part of an expansion into Nubia that was motivated by complex economic and political factors. The history of the area was not simply a triumph of royal rhetoric.

For one week during the reign of the following king, Amenemhat III, we have evidence that hints at a more complex history underlying this monumental facade. A fragmentary series of military despatches records trivial realities such as the arrival of a group of soldiers to report "on month 4 of winter, day 2 at breakfast-time" that a patrol had returned with the news that "we found the tracks of 32 men and three donkeys". This was a civilisation not just of pyramids, but also petty paperwork and interrupted breakfasts.

The ancient Egyptians were, of course, as fully aware as any modern historian or politician of the difference between words and reality. The dichotomies between what one can say on an official monument and what one really feels is vividly conveyed in a letter from Luxor, dated around 1100BC, in which the pharaoh's general Payankh tells a scribe to have two troublesome policemen "put in two baskets and thrown into the water by night – but don't let anyone find out". He continues: "and Pharaoh (life, prosperity, health!) – how will he even get to this part of the land? And ... whose boss is he anyway?" Such dissidence is unthinkable in Egyptian official writings, although even here the writer adds the obedient salutation to the Pharaoh's health even as he mocks him.

Life and death

Boris Karloff in the 1932 motion picture The Mummy Photograph: © Bettmann/CORBIS

Popular books often tell us that the ancient Egyptians spent their whole life preparing for death. Western cinema has been haunted by the image of the mummy emerging from its tomb to send innocent westerners to their doom ever since Boris Karloff appeared as the bandaged Imhotep in 1932. But if we read Egyptian poetry, we find that their attitudes to death were more complex. Poets lament the cruelty of death, and urge their readers to enjoy life: "Follow the happy day! Forget care!"

Because cemeteries were located in the desert, they are better preserved than anything else, and this has given us a very distorted view of the culture – imagine if only municipal cemeteries were preserved from Victorian Britain.

Yet they can still tell us as much about life as death – the dry desert can preserve organic material so well that we can still handle actual wigs, baskets, food and flowers from 3,000 years ago. Objects from a person's life were buried with them in the tomb, and when we can still see a baker's fingerprints in an ancient loaf of bread we sense some of the material experience of their lives better than from any inscription.

But even here there is a danger: tombs filled with such variety tell us only about the lives of those who could afford to be buried this way – that is, the wealthy elite.

Gossip and swearing

Scenes inside the tombs themselves defy the cliches: the modern visitor is often shocked to find how intimate and colourful a place they are. They show workmen squabbling and fighting among themselves, very much alive. And when we can observe the ancient Egyptians' own interactions with their dead, they were usually not concerned with magic or curses as we might expect, but with more immediate domestic matters. People would visit tomb-chapels and sometimes write letters to their dead relatives, asking them for help with ongoing family problems. In one example, a husband asks his dead wife why she is persecuting him from the underworld, repeatedly protesting (perhaps rather too much) that he had never done anything with the serving girls. The blessed dead were still part of the living family even when they had left the land of the living.

Deir el-Medina, Egypt - Ancient mudbrick walls crumble in the desert west of the Nile River at Luxor, Egypt Photograph: Roger Wood/CORBIS

Much less survives from settlement sites because they were almost always in the agricultural land of the Nile valley. Luckily for us, there are a few exceptions, such as the village of the craftsmen who decorated the royal tombs in the Valleys of the Kings and Queens, now known as Deir el-Medina, in the 1200sBC. For reasons of convenience, this was built near their workplace in the desert hills, and so it preserves a unique range of archaeological and textual material. In Deir el-Medina we can still see and study their living spaces, their furniture and vast quantities of discarded broken pottery. We can also still read about the minutiae of daily life: the problems of donkey hire, and accusations of sleeping around ("he had sex with the lady Hel while she was married to Hesysunebef … and when he'd had sex with Hel he had sex with Webkhet, her daughter. And then Aapehty, his son, had sex with Webkhet"). We can see universal human concerns embodied in very different cultural ways from our own: government–employed artists drew cartoons in which animals parody the official art they produced for the kings – a mouse pharaoh in a chariot attacks a citadel of cats, imitating scenes of royal victories. This one small village gives us evidence for a full range of human intrigues, gossip, learning, sophistication and sensuality that is mostly lacking in our record of Egypt's long history. In Deir el-Medina it is impossible to forget that these ancient people were once very much alive.

Egyptology is a relatively recent discipline, and was born in imperial times. Unfortunately it is still tainted by its own colonialist stereotypes or those similar to the macho archaeologist embodied by Indiana Jones. Popular books still go on relentlessly about uncovering finds, cracking secret codes – a language that implies that we are acquiring hidden treasures and bringing them from primitive darkness into modern scientific light. Real Egyptology, however, is no longer about acquiring objects, but about understanding their meaning in their original context, and about working within the Egyptian landscape. Long gone is the old colonial arrogance that once denied to ancient Egyptians any possibility of being our equals – and denied to modern Egyptians any interest in their own culture: Egyptology is now always a partnership with modern Egypt. More sophisticated theoretical perspectives are developing, drawing on work from other disciplines, and we are beginning to understand Egyptian culture more as a whole, and less as a sequence of facts and artefacts. Our European stereotypes are not the only way of viewing this past, no matter how familiar and natural they seem to us. Modern scholarship has a lot to learn from how modern Egyptians have engaged with their history: when the Egyptian director Shadi Abd al-Salam filmed the story of a 19th- century discovery of royal mummies, his film was titled The Mummy – but instead of being another crude yarn of monsters and curses, it sympathetically explores our complex relationship with this ancient heritage, and reminds us that ancient and modern Egypt are parts of the same country.

Culture shock

When we encounter an ancient Egyptian artefact face to face, it often produces a strangely mixed feeling of meeting something very different from our own culture, but also very familiar. No matter how "other" it is, it can also give us a slight shock of recognition.

And sometimes not so slight. It is said that when the statue of the aristocratic lady Nofret from c2600BC was first discovered in 1871, the workman excavating the chamber ran out of the tomb, terrified. He had tunnelled into a chamber and looked through the hole to find he was looking straight into the statue's eyes, inlaid with rock crystal, which seemed to be staring back at him. The excavator, Albert Daninos, described the eyes as "uncomfortably real".

Which is exactly the point: when we look at the ancient world, we do not expect the ancient dead to look back at us, or to look so lively. We prefer them to stay safely dead, distant and irrelevant. "Uncomfortably real", the ancient Egyptians can still challenge our assumptions that ours is the only way of looking at the world, and remind us that they saw it differently.

Richard Parkinson is a curator in the Department of Ancient Egypt and Sudan at the British Museum. His main research interest is the poetry of the classical age of Egyptian literature

Chinese archaeologists' African quest for sunken ship of Ming admiral

Search for remains of armada which came to grief on a pioneering voyage to Kenya 600 years ago

• Xan Rice in Nairobi   guardian.co.uk,  25.08.2010

A beach near Malindi where admiral Zheng He's armada was shipwrecked. Photograph: Schalk Van Zuydam/AP

It's another chapter in the now familiar story of China's economic embrace of Africa. Except that this one begins nearly 600 years ago.

 

A team of 11 Chinese archaeologists will arrive in Kenya tomorrow to begin the search for an ancient shipwreck and other evidence of commerce with China dating back to the early 15th century. The three-year, £2m joint project will centre around the tourist towns of Lamu and Malindi and should shed light on a largely unknown part of both countries' histories.

 

The sunken ship is believed to have been part of a mighty armada commanded by Ming dynasty admiral Zheng He, who reached Malindi in 1418. According to Kenyan lore, reportedly backed by recent DNA testing, a handful of survivors swum ashore. After killing a python that had been plaguing a village, they were allowed to stay and marry local women, creating a community of African-Chinese whose descendants still live in the area.

 

A likely shipwreck site has been identified near Lamu island, according to Idle Farah, director general of the National Museums of Kenya, which is working on the archaeology project with its Chinese equivalent and Peking University.

 

"The voyages of the Portuguese and the Arabs to our coasts have long been documented," Farah told the Guardian. "Now, by examining this shipwreck, we hope to clarify with clear evidence the first contact between China and east Africa."

 

The project forms part of a recent effort by the Chinese government to celebrate the achievements of Zheng, a Muslim whose ships sailed the Indian and Pacific Oceans many decades before the exploits of more celebrated European explorers such as Christopher Columbus and Vasco da Gama. Starting in 1405, Zheng made seven journeys, taking in south-east Asia, India, the Middle East and Africa, in fleets of up to 300 huge ships with nearly 30,000 sailors in total, according to Chinese records.

 

On his voyages, Zheng dished out gifts from the Chinese emperor, including gold, porcelain and silk. In return, he brought home ivory, myrrh, zebras and camels. But it was a giraffe that caused the biggest stir. The animal is known to have been a gift from the Sultan of Malindi, on Kenya's northern coast, but theories vary as to how exactly it got to China. One account suggests that the giraffe was taken from the ruler of Bengal — who himself had received it as a gift from the Sultan — and that it inspired Zheng to visit Kenya a few years later.

 

Herman Kiriama, Kenya's head of coastal archeology, said the joint archeological team will this week try to locate the Sultan's original village, which is though to be around Mambrui village, outside Malindi, where Ming porcelain has been discovered. In late August, the project will move underwater, with the arrival of specialist maritime archeologists from China.

"Though we have not located the shipwreck yet, we have good indications of where it might have gone down," said Kiriama.

 

The team's confidence in finding the sunken ship is bolstered by work done in the run-up to the 600th anniversary of Zheng's first voyage. As part of the 2005 celebration, in which the Beijing government sought to present Zheng as a sort of maritime goodwill ambassador – a portrayal disputed by some scholars who point to his use of military force – China sent a team of scholars to Lamu.

 

In Siyu village they conducted DNA tests on a Swahili family whose oral history and hints of Chinese facial features led them to believe they were descendants of Zheng's shipwrecked sailors. The tests reportedly showed evidence of Chinese ancestry and a 19-year-old woman called Mwamaka Shirafu was given a full scholarship to study traditional medicine in China, where she remains.

First humans arrived in Britain 250,000 years earlier than thought

Archaeologists digging on a Norfolk beach found stone tools that show the first humans were living in Britain much earlier than previously thought

 

• Ian Sample, science correspondent   guardian.co.uk,  07.07. 2010

Archaeologists explain how flint tools and other artefacts found on the Norfolk coast reveal how the first Britons lived. Video: Nature Link to this video

 

A spectacular haul of ancient flint tools has been recovered from a beach in Norfolk, pushing back the date of the first known human occupation of Britain by up to 250,000 years.

 

While digging along the north-east coast of East Anglia near the village of Happisburgh, archaeologists discovered 78 pieces of razor-sharp flint shaped into primitive cutting and piercing tools.

 

The stone tools were unearthed from sediments that are thought to have been laid down either 840,000 or 950,000 years ago, making them the oldest human artefacts ever found in Britain.

 

The flints were probably left by hunter-gatherers of the human species Homo antecessor who eked out a living on the flood plains and marshes that bordered an ancient course of the river Thames that has long since dried up. The flints were then washed downriver and came to rest at the Happisburgh site.

 

The early Britons would have lived alongside sabre-toothed cats and hyenas, primitive horses, red deer and southern mammoths in a climate similar to that of southern Britain today, though winters were typically a few degrees colder.

 

"These tools from Happisburgh are absolutely mint-fresh. They are exceptionally sharp, which suggests they have not moved far from where they were dropped," said Chris Stringer, head of human origins at the Natural History Museum in London. The population of Britain at the time most likely numbered in the hundreds or a few thousand at most.

"These people probably used the rivers as routes into the landscape. A lot of Britain might have been heavily forested at the time, which would have posed a major problem for humans without strong axes to chop trees down," Stringer added. "They lived out in the open, but we don't know if they had basic clothing, were building primitive shelters, or even had the use of fire."

 

The discovery, reported in the journal Nature, overturns the long-held belief that early humans steered clear of chilly Britain – and the rest of northern Europe – in favour of the more hospitable climate of the Mediterranean. The only human species known to be living in Europe at the time is Homo antecessor, or "pioneer man", whose remains were discovered in the Atapuerca hills of Spain in 2008 and have been dated to between 1.1m and 1.2m years old.

 

The early settlers would have walked into Britain across an ancient land bridge that once divided the North Sea from the Atlantic and connected the country to what is now mainland Europe. The first humans probably arrived during a warm interglacial period, but may have retreated as temperatures plummeted in subsequent ice ages.

 

Until now, the earliest evidence of humans in Britain came from Pakefield, near Lowestoft in Suffolk, where a set of stone tools dated to 700,000 years ago were uncovered in 2005. More sophisticated stone, antler and bone tools were found in the 1990s in Boxgrove, Sussex, which are believed to be half a million years old.

 

"The flint tools from Happisburgh are relatively crude compared with those from Boxgrove, but they are still effective," said Stringer. Early stone tools were fashioned by using a pebble to knock large flakes off a chunk of flint. Later humans used wood and antler hammers to remove much smaller flakes and so make more refined cutting and sawing edges.

 

The great migration from Africa saw early humans reach Europe around 1.8m years ago. Within 500,000 years, humans had become established in the Mediterranean region. Remains have been found at several archaeological sites in Spain, southern France and Italy.

 

In an accompanying article in Nature, Andrew Roberts and Rainer Grün at the Australian National University in Canberra, write: "Until the Happisburgh site was found and described, it was thought that these early humans were reluctant to live in the less hospitable climate of northern Europe, which frequently fell into the grip of severe ice ages."

 

Researchers led by the Natural History Museum and British Museum in London began excavating sites near Happisburgh in 2001 as part of the Ancient Human Occupation of Britain project and soon discovered tools from the stone age beneath ice-age deposits. So far, though, they have found no remains of the ancient people who made them.

"This would be the 'holy grail' of our work," said Stringer. "The humans who made the Happisburgh tools may well have been related to the people of similar antiquity from Atapuerca in Spain, assigned to the species Homo antecessor, or 'pioneer man'."

 

The latest haul of stone tools was buried in sediments that record a period of history when the polarity of the Earth's magnetic field was reversed. At the time, a compass needle would have pointed south instead of north. The last time this happened was 780,000 years ago, so the tools are at least that old.

 

Analysis of ancient vegetation and pollen in the sediments has revealed that the climate was warm but cooling towards an ice age, which points to two possible times in history, around 840,000 years ago, or 950,000 years ago. Both dates are consistent with the fossilised remains of animals recovered from the same site.

 

"Britain was getting cooler and going into an ice age, but these early humans were hanging in there. They may have been the remnants of an ancient population that either died out or migrated back across the land bridge to a warmer climate," said Stringer.

Radar imaging reveals ancient Egyptian underground city

Austrian archaeologists have identified the layout of Avaris, a 3,500-year-old city, using computer-generated images

 

• Associated Press in Cairo   guardian.co.uk, Monday 21.06.2010
• A computer-generated image of Avaris, a 3,500-year-old underground city in Egypt. Photograph: Supreme Council of Antiquities/EPA

An Austrian archaeological team has used radar imaging to determine the extent of the ruins of the 3,500-year-old one-time capital of Egypt's foreign occupiers, according to the country's antiquities department.

Egypt was ruled for a century from 1664-1569 BC by the Hyksos, a group of warriors from Asia – possibly Semitic in origin – whose summer capital, Avaris, was in the northern Delta area.

Irene Müller, the head of the Austrian team, said the main purpose of the project was to determine how far the underground city extends. The radar imaging showed the outlines of streets, houses and temples underneath the green farm fields and modern town of Tel al-Dabaa.

Dr Zahi Hawass, secretary general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, said the computer-generated images of the city, which is still buried under the ground, show a very detailed layout of ancient Avaris. Several architectural features including houses, temples, streets, cemeteries and palaces can be seen.

The team has also been able to make out the arrangement of neighbourhoods and living quarters.  "Using such a special scientific survey to locate such a city is the only way to gain a better understanding of such a large area at one time," Hawass said.

The team has succeeded in identifying a collection of houses and a possible harbour area. A series of pits of different sizes are also visible but their function has not yet been determined.

The Austrian team of archaeologists have been working on the site since 1975. Egypt's Nile Delta is densely populated and heavily farmed, making extensive excavation difficult, unlike in southern Egypt with its more famous desert tombs and temples

Kuwait's lost treasures: how stolen riches remain central to rift with Iraq

Hundreds of artefacts were plundered during Gulf war, and project to repatriate them is ongoing

 

• Martin Chulov in Kuwait   guardian.co.uk,  21.06.2010
  
• The Kuwait National Museum is still trying to trace 487 priceless artefacts looted after Saddam Hussein’s invasion. Photograph: Lonely Planet Images/Alamy

In a spacious but frugal office in Kuwait, a glossy catalogue lists the dozens of reasons why Kuwait and Iraq are still at daggers drawn after all these years.

Sheikha Hussa Salem al-Sabah thumbs through the pages of the booklet, pointing out the most egregious cases – page upon page of priceless treasures looted by Saddam Hussein's invading army 20 years ago and still missing: a dazzling 234-carat emerald the size of a paperweight; a slightly smaller gem inscribed with exquisite Arabic calligraphy; Mughal-era ruby beads.

"The Iraqis still don't understand the damage they did to us, not just financially, but for our souls," says the daughter-in-law of Kuwait's emir Sabah Al-Ahmad Al-Jaber Al-Sabah, who maintains the dynasty's heirlooms. "It was emotionally wrenching and still is."

Though many of the priceless treasures have been returned to the collection in the bitter decades since, up to 57 remain missing – perhaps lost for ever. At the National Museum across town, they report that the whereabouts of another 487 treasures remain unknown.

Many of the pieces, Kuwaitis believe, now form the core of private collections in post-Saddam Iraq and around the Arab world. To the victims of the 1990 invasion they remain the central reason of a failure to close the unfinished business of the first Gulf war – just as the second one is beginning to wind down.

In the seven years since Saddam was ousted, Iraq has been obliged to settle United Nations-prescribed debts of $43bn (£29bn), and compensations to private families totalling several hundred million dollars more, before being welcomed as a fully-fledged member of the so-called community of nations.

It is a burden that has proven difficult to bear for a brittle state still ravaged by war and chaos and deeply resentful of the fact that Kuwait was not invaded in the name of the current regime in Iraq.

To Iraq's wealthy southern neighbour though, neither 20 years nor the time after Saddam has diminished the desire to reclaim what was lost.

With a higher per capita income than most other Gulf petro-states, Kuwaitis remain sensitive to the claim that their residual hostility is all about getting even richer. "This is about principle," says Sheikha Hussa. "It remains a huge dilemma for us. The people here have a say in everything we do and the parliament does also. This is part of Kuwait's rights and we will continue to press them."

At the National Museum, which was ravaged by marauders who seemed to know what they were looking for as they packed items into cushioned crates before driving them to Baghdad,a plethora of irreplaceable pieces remain missing. The lost artefacts mainly date from the Moghul dynasty and include around 20 gold bracelets, necklaces and ankle rings, pottery, arrow heads and Korans.

Staff handed over a list of loot and mentioned a theory often discussed in Kuwait that much of what was stolen remains in a warehouse north of Baghdad, where it is being used as leverage in any eventual settlement between the two countries.

Three months of inquiries by the Guardian with officials in Iraq's government, military and police seem to rule out that there is such a central repository of loot in Iraq.

"Anything that was stolen was taken to Saddam's palaces and the offices of his high officials," said one Kuwaiti MP. "There were antique cars stolen by Uday [Hussein, Saddam's psychopath son] that were sold in Europe at auction, paintings and heirlooms. But after the American invasion it was a free-for-all. Everything was stolen again then and there was no control over who took it, or where it went."

Between the first and second Gulf wars, there were attempts by Saddam's regime to put things right, with Kuwaiti officials under UN supervision being invited to the National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad to reclaim some stolen Kuwaiti pieces that had been on display there.

The private art world also turned up the occasional treasure. In 1996, a jewel-encrusted Moghul dagger, which had been on the cover of a Sotheby's catalogue, was taken off the market and returned to the Dar-al-Athar collection. Financial compensation has been paid, according to Sheikha Hussa. Butthe far more important repatriation of priceless pieces has been rare.

Two years ago, parts of a giant archive of Kuwait's history, known as the Prince's Archive, were returned from Baghdad after being kept in the home of a civil servant who had little idea of the value of his souvenirs. Recently, a well-known Iraqi actor and her husband made contact with an Iraqi now living in Kuwait in an attempt to sell another part of the collection.

Iraq hopes that a steady repayment of the billions owed – $23bn has been handed over so far – will boost its credentials. It also appears to be hoping that a steady repayment of the debt will stop Kuwait from pressing claims through international courts for the seizure of Iraqi assets.

Twice in recent months the state-owned Kuwait Airways has moved to seize an Iraqi Airways plane that had landed in London as part of a new passenger route from Baghdad. That action has led Iraq to suspend the route only weeks after it was opened. Baghdad also says it is now looking at ways to privatise the airline.

Iraq's monthly repayments are pegged by the United Nations at 5% of its oil revenue. "Last month they paid $520m as part of the United Nations Compensation Commission obligations," said the chairman of a Kuwaiti public authority established to process compensation claims from Iraq's invasion. "They have been co-operating with us in meetings lately. But it takes time, it will need another generation to forget. There are also the remains of fallen soldiers and POWs yet to be returned."

In Baghdad, the speaker of the Iraqi parliament, Ayad al-Sammaraie, said things were now moving quicker than at any other time since 1990. He said: "Both countries are willing to sort things. But there is a remaining bitterness. Resolving this is complicated and needs a realistic perspective. Our fishermen are worried at repeated interceptions by the Kuwaitis in the Gulf.

"Our farmers in the south are worried about border claims. And we are concerned about having good relations again."

Asked about the ancient treasures that in some ways hold the key to goodwill, he said: "There was no [sovereign] Iraq from 2003 for three years and we had no ability to look for them. But really, Iraq is sincere and willing to return them."

Missing

Qur'anic emerald

An 18th-century emerald centrepiece from the Indian Mughal or Deccan eras, the 73.2 carat stone is diamond-engraved with the Throne Verse from chapter 2, verse 255 of the Qur'an.

Mughal dagger

With a blade of Jawhar steel, the late 16th-century Indian dagger is overlaid with gold and set with rubies, turquoise and emeralds.

A huge emerald

A priceless 234-carat emerald that is the size of a paperweight was one of the biggest prizes for Saddam's looters.

Jewelled dish

A plate from the Indian Mughal period in the first quarter of the 17th century and is set with rubies and emeralds. It appeared with the dagger above in Sotheby's London catalogue in 1996 and was returned to the Dar-al-Athar museum collection.

  Buddhist Relics in Nanjing

 

Links:  http://english.cntv.cn/english/special/stupa/homepage/index.shtml   Several reports with exclusive videos on the History & Development of Buddhism, Excavations, The Emperor Ashoka and related links

Has the real Atlantis finally been found... under a modern holiday paradise?  By Bettany Hughes  31.05.2010

Picture your dream home on a Mediterranean island. Whitewashed walls and sun streaming through wide olive-wood windows. As far as the eye can see is a stretch of perfect blue water.

Fragrant herbs grow in the courtyard. On the walls there are exquisite paintings: antelope leaping through exotic landscapes, lithe young men, their bodies glistening with oil, catching fresh fish or hoisting the sails on richly decorated boats and beautiful, bare-breasted women walking through fields of saffron flowers.

Wonder of the ancient world or fantasy? The story of the fabled Atlantis has captivated humanity for centuries

Bettany Hughes on the island of Santorini - which is believed to be one of the possible sites of Atlantis

Modern paradise: The island of Santorini is a now a holiday hotspot

(chinadaily.com.cn)
Updated: 2010-05-18 09:42

 

An archeologist cleans up the porcelain artifacts salvaged from the sunken ancient ship Nan'ao No 1 in Shantou, a coastal city in South China's Guangdong province, May 1, 2010. Salvage of relics from Nan'ao No 1 in Shantou coast went smoothly with more and more antiques retrieved from the sunken merchant ship. [Photo/Xinhua]

 

Salvage team retrieves ancient ship's secrets

 

Relics to be salvaged from ancient ship

 

 

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More Terracotta Warriors rise from the earth

By Ma Lie (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-05-19 07:34

Archeologists examine terracotta figures newly excavated from the No 1 Pit of the Terracotta Museum in Lintong, Xi'an, in this picture taken in August last year and was released Tuesday, May 18, 2010. The museum said on Tuesday it had completed the latest round of excavation and restoration after a year's work. About 120 more figures, some of them painted in pink, red and lilac, were excavated. [China Daily]

 

XI'AN - Chinese archaeologists have unearthed about 120 more figures in their latest round of excavations at the Terracotta Army site that surrounds the tomb of China's first emperor in Shaanxi province.

Most of the newly found Terracotta Warriors were broken when unearthed from the No 1 pit in Lintong county, 35 km east of Xi'an, Shaanxi's capital, where excavation started on June 13 last year, said Xu Weihong, acting head of the excavation team.

Xu said it was still hard to tell the exact number of the figures.

The No 1 pit is the first and largest of three pits at the site. It had also suffered the worst damage, so archaeologists had not pinned much hope on the excavation.

Related readings:  114 Terracotta Warriors discovered at museum pit  Terracotta warriors perform in Shanghai ahead of Expo  Chinese Terracotta Warriors exhibite in Chile  Terracotta warriors on display in US

"It's a pleasant surprise to find some of them painted in pink, red, white, gray or lilac," Xu said.

Archaeologists said that the colors on the figures' faces showed their different expressions, but further studies will be needed.

Xu and his colleagues used special chemicals to preserve the figures' original colors and after taking photographs, wrapped them in plastic film for protection.

Richly colored figures were unearthed from the mausoleum of Qin Shihuang, the first emperor of a united China, in the previous two excavations, but once they were exposed to the air they began to lose their luster and turned an oxidized grey.

To better protect the unearthed clay warriors and horses and the colors on them, the museum cooperated with German archaeologists and technicians for more than 10 years and achieved "very effective preservation technologies".   "We also found 12 clay horses and a number of other relics such as bronze weapons, wooden chariots, drums and wooden rings in the pit," Xu said.

The excavation also made clear that the pit had seven layers and was set on fire, as archaeologists found traces of burns on the clay warriors and the walls of the pit.

The newly found figures were between 1.8 and 2 meters tall, a mystery archaeologists are still trying to understand.

"We're not certain whether people who lived in the Qin Dynasty (221-206 BC) were actually that tall, or the craftsmen exaggerated their height," Xu said.

An army officer also stood out in the excavation. Except for his broken head, the figure was one of the best preserved ones unearthed this time, he sai 

Besides the Terracotta Warriors, archaeologists also found piles of charcoal that was believed to be grain in ancient times, said Zhang Tianzhu, deputy head of the excavation team.

On the two chariots, archaeologists found three "suitcases" that were made of a fabric similar to silk. Similar fabric was found on the drum, Xu said.   "It provides important clues for further research on textiles and industry in the Qin Dynasty."

The No 1 pit is said to contain about 6,000 life-sized Terracotta figures, more than 1,000 of which were found in previous excavations.

Experts believe the emperor had hoped the army would help him rule in the afterlife.

The Terracotta Army was discovered in 1974 by peasants who were digging a well.

The first formal excavation of the site lasted for six years from 1978 to 1984 and produced 1,087 clay figures. A second excavation in 1985 lasted a year but was cut short for technical reasons.

The Terracotta Army, listed as a world heritage site by UNESCO in December 1987, has turned Xi'an into one of China's major tourist attractions.

 Anglo-Saxon gold hoard discovered  2009.09.24.

A 55-year-old metal detectorist has unearthed the largest hoard of Anglo-Saxon gold ever found, archaeologists said.   The staggering discovery, on private farmland in Staffordshire, will redefine perceptions of Anglo-Saxon England, experts predict.

Terry Herbert, from Burntwood, Staffordshire, came across the hoard as he searched a field near his home with his trusty 14-year-old detector.  Experts said the collection of more than 1,500 pieces - which will be officially classified by a coroner as treasure - is unparalleled in size and may have belonged to Saxon royalty.

 

The hoard, believed to date back to the seventh century, contains around 5kg of gold and 2.5kg of silver, far bigger than previous finds - including the Sutton Hoo burial site.  Many of the items in the hoard are warfare paraphernalia, including sword pommel caps and hilt plates, often inlaid with precious stones. The exact location of the discovery has not been disclosed but it is understood to be near the Lichfield border in South Staffordshire.

 

Mr Herbert, who has been metal detecting for 18 years, came across the buried hoard in July after asking a farmer friend if he could search on his land. He said: "I have this phrase that I say sometimes; 'spirits of yesteryear take me where the coins appear', but on that day I changed coins to gold. I don't know why I said it that day, but I think somebody was listening and directed me to it.

 

"Maybe it was meant to be, maybe the gold had my name on it all along, I don't know. My mates at the (metal detecting) club always say if there is a gold coin in a field I will be the one to find it. I dread to think what they'll say when they hear about this." He added: "This is what metal detectorists dream of, finding stuff like this. But the vast amount there is is just unbelievable."

 

Dr Kevin Leahy, National Finds Adviser from the Portable Antiquities Scheme, catalogued the hoard. He said: "The quantity of gold is amazing but, more importantly, the craftsmanship is consummate. This was the very best that the Anglo-Saxon metalworkers could do, and they were very good."

Ancient figurines were toys not mother goddess statues, say experts as 9,000-year-old artefacts are discovered  By David Derbyshire  2009.09.10.
They were carved out of stone and squeezed out of clay 9,000 years ago, at the very dawn of civilisation.  Now archaeologists say these astonishing Stone Age statues could have been the world's first educational toys. 

Rare find: The 9000-year-old figurines dug up in Turkey are thought to have been used as educational toys 

The find, which is the 'largest and most important' Viking hoard of jewellery since 1840, was found in a field in Harrogate, North Yorkshire in January 2007. It had been buried there for more than 1,000 years.

Enlarge  

A king's ransom: Silver jewellery buried more than a millennium ago will now go on display in London and Yorkshire

Valued at £1,082,000, the hoard was purchased by the British Museum and the York Museum Trust after two years of fundraising.

 

The highlight of the collection is an intricately carved silver cup, estimated to be worth more than £200,000. It contains 617coins and various silver fragments, ingots and rings. Some of the pieces were from as far away as Afghanistan.

The treasure is believed to have belonged to a rich Viking who buried it during the unrest following the conquest of the Viking kingdom of Northumbria in 927 by the Anglo-Saxon king Athelstan.  It is believed he was unable to go back to the hoard, possibly as a result of turbulence during the period.

The silver cup is worth around £200,000. Many of the coins were preserved as they were kept inside the vessel

Conservation work on the find began about a month ago and experts hope the process will reveal crucial details about the Viking era.Initial examinations suggest the treasure dates back to AD927 or 928.

Experts have spent over a month cleaning the hoard, often with a porcupine spine, to protect the delicate collection.

Enlarge  

Silver coins from the Vale of York Viking hoard. They will go on display in Yorkshire and London

The process, performed under microscope, has already revealed intricate designs which were invisible when the hoard was first discovered.

Detail on the silver jewellery fragments and in the designs and inscriptions on some of the coins is now apparent.

Close examination revealed small incisions made in the metal - evidence that the makers tested the silver before they began work.

Gareth Williams, curator of early medieval coins and Viking expert at the British Museum, said: 'There's been nothing like it for over 150 years.

'The size and range of material gives us an insight into the political history, the cultural diversity of the Viking world and the range of cultural and economic contact at that time.'

He said some parts of the hoard came from as far as Afghanistan as well as from Russia, Scandinavia and continental Europe.

Most items were preserved because they were hidden in the cup.

Finders David Whelan, 53, and Andrew, 37, from Leeds, said: 'Being keen metal detectorists, we always dreamed of finding a hoard but to find one from such a fantastic period of history is just unbelievable.

'The contents of the hoard we found went far beyond our wildest dreams and hopefully people will love seeing the objects on display in York and London for many years to come.'

The pair will share the £1,082,000 with the owners of the field, who wished to remain anonymous.

Mary Kershaw, director of collections at York Museum, said: 'The Vale of York Viking hoard is a once in a lifetime find. It will greatly add to the understanding of the early 900s in Yorkshire and its connections with the wider world.'

The treasure will go on display at the Yorkshire Museum in York from September 17 until November 1. It will then travel to the British Museum.

According to historians, Yorkshire is one of the areas which shows the strongest Viking influence.
100 Ancient Tombs Robbed  2009.08.30.  SHANGHAI: Local authorities are fighting a centuries-old business - tomb robbing, which recently has been brought back to life around Nanjing, the ancient capital city of six dynasties in China.

A farmer in Lishui county of Jiangsu province shows a robbed tomb on Thursday. Some 100 ancient tombs have been raided since 2008. Inset: The farmer holds a discarded piece of pottery. [China Daily/Cai Zhen]

Police and cultural relics protection department staffers are trying to catch the tomb raiders, who dream of becoming rich overnight.  About 100 ancient tombs within an area of 20 hectares in Lishui county of Nanjing were illegally excavated recently, the Nanjing-based Yangtze Evening Post reported.

 

"Such sites are mostly located in mountainous regions where police forces are short-handed. Local police have a difficult time providing effective protection," Cao Zhijun, director of culture heritage protection department of Nanjing Cultural Heritage Administration Bureau, told China Daily on Friday.

 

The exact number of affected tombs is still under investigation, Cao said. "We have sent staffs to the affected site to check how serious the problem is. The losses cannot be predicted at this stage," added Cao.

 

Related readings:  Ming Tombs festival  4,300-year-old pharaonic tombs unveiled near Cairo  Archaeologists unearth Herod family tombs

Grave robbing is often considered a high-risk, high-return business. However, the robbers may be disappointed this time, according to experts.

"The value of a piece of pottery in the black market is no more than 1,000 yuan ($147)," said Cao.  The crypt is not very large so the tombs must be for ordinary people. Therefore, the will not contain particularly valuable objects, Cao said.

 

Four robbers have been arrested and one is on the run, the Yangtze Evening Post reported.

 

Strict laws have been imposed by the Chinese government to stop grave robbing. However, the lure of making an overnight fortune has led some robbers to risk the danger, especially in this rural area where the police force is short-handed.

 

Some precious cultural relics have been sold overseas through the black market, resulting in the loss of historical finds.  "We do need a long-term effective management system to keep our cultural relics protected, " said Cao

Climate change helped the Incas build civilisation. 
Agencies: 2009.07.27. 

Their warfare, building and agricultural skills may have been impressive but, according to scientists in Peru, the Incas would have been nothing without good weather induced by climate change.

Machu Picchu: Scientists believe climate change was critical in allowing the Incas to build their civilisation.   Photo: GETTY

 

New research has revealed that a prolonged period of warm weather between AD1100 and 1533 cleared large areas of mountain land to be used for farming, helping the Incas to spread their influence from Colombia to the central plains of Chile.

 

With the tree line moving steadily higher up the mountains, the Incas carved terraces into the mountainside to grow potatoes and maize, and developed a system of canals to irrigate the land.

 

The climate remained dry but melting glacial ice provided a constant supply of water, resulting in a surplus of crops to feed the population.

 

The men freed up from agricultural duties were then able to focus on other activities, among them constructing roads and buildings such as the Incas' 3,250-mile Royal Road through the highlands, the 2,520-mile Coastal Road and Machu Picchu, the Lost City of the Incas.

 

Dr Alex Chepstow Lusty, a British palaeoecologist working for the French Institute for Andean Studies in Lima, Peru, said the clement weather also freed up men to fight in the Inca's ambition and expansionist Army.  "It was the perfect incubator for the expansion of a civilisation."  he told The Times.

 

Dr Chepstow Lusty and his team made their discovery by analysing sediment on the floor of a small lake called Marcacocha, 11,000 feet above sea level in the Peruvian Andes near Cuzco, the cradle of the Incan civilisation.   The layers of sediment at different heights represent different periods of time, like rings in the trunk of a tree. The scientists found suggestions of trees and crops at the critical time, suggesting the tree cover had moved upwards.

 

Dr Chepstow Lusty believes modern civilisations have much to learn from the pre-Columbians when it comes to the environment.  He wants to see controlled deforestation and the increased growing of crops on terraces using glacier melt as irrigation.  "Such methods increase crop yields. In fact, they are beginning to be reintroduced by the local populations,” he told the French scientific publication CNRS.

China starts rescue excavation of 'Peking Man' site

By   (Xinhua)
Updated: 2009-06-24 15:41

BEIJING: China Wednesday began a rescue excavation in Zhoukoudian Caves in a suburb of Beijing, where the skulls of "Peking Man," or Homo erectus, were found in the 1920s and 1930s.

 

Paleoanthropologists will excavate 20 square meters along the western wall of Locality 1, said Gao Xing, deputy director and research fellow of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Palaeoanthropology (IVPP), at a press conference here Wednesday.

Locality 1, where the first complete skull of "Peking Man" was found, used to be a 20-meter-wide, 140-meter-deep cave but the ceiling has collapsed.

 

The four-month excavation aims to protect the western wall from threats of collapse, he said. "We found a wide longitudinal crack from the top and rocks in the wall are loose. It could collapse in any moment. Once it collapses, it will cause serious damage to the relic deposit in the cave."

This section remained the most complete sequence of stratum settlement with rich relic deposits of great significance, he added.

Scientists will first work on the crack areas over the next month and on the whole section between August and October.

In addition to the excavation, paleoanthropologists will try to reinforce the cave wall and install more detailed introductions for visitors.

Paleoanthropologists began preparing for the evacuation in May. They have mapped the section with laser 3-dimension scanning technology, which offered reliable data for the excavation, Gao said.

"Peking Man," the tool-making "erect man," was previously believed to have lived in Zhoukoudian Caves about 400,000 to 500,000 years ago. But in March Chinese scientists revealed that using a new radioactive dating method, they found they were actually 200,000 years older.

Chinese Archaeologist Pei Wenzhong found the first complete skull in December 1929, together with a large number of stone tools and evidence of fire used by humans.

In 1936, technician Jia Lanpo, who later became an archaeologist, unearthed three skulls.

Fossils unearthed in the caves were found to belong to 40 individuals, with more than 100,000 stone tools. Large scale excavation ceased in 1937 when the Japanese army invaded China.

Paleoanthropologists carried out several small-scale excavations over the past 72 years but never a project of this scale, Gao said.

Zhoukoudian Caves was listed by UNESCO as a World Heritage site in December 1987.

China had reinforced the other 13 caves in Zhoukoudian between 2004 and 2006 at a cost of 5.5 million yuan (US$797,000), but not including Locality 1.

Dozens of decapitated bodies found in mass Roman war grave unearthed on the route of Olympic Highway.  Agencies.  2009.06.11.

    A gruesome discovery in the Dorset countryside has shed fresh light on the brutal invasion of the Roman legions nearly 2,000 years ago.  Maiden Castle in Dorset: The mass grave was found near the site of this hill fort - where Celtic tribesmen are said to have staged their last stand against Roman general Vespasian.

  Amazed archaeologists have discovered up to 50 headless corpses nearby

  General Vespasian is believed to have attacked Maiden Castle as he marched through the south-western counties of Britain.

    A skull recovered from the site at Ridgeway Hill .  Ancient find: Hand bones recovered from the site together with an ancient piece of pottery.

Remains of a Roman temple discovered at Maiden Castle, Europe's biggest earthwork fort

Great Wall stretches far longer. 2009.04.20. by Lin Shujuan & Wang Hauzhona (China Daily) and Malcolm Moore (Daily Telegraph). Images: GETTY and Xinhua News Agency.   That the Great wall extends 10,000 li (5,000km or 3,100+ miles) is the popular belief, but researchers released the latest evidence that the length of the wall, mostly constructed or restored during the Ming Dynasty (1364-1644) stretches more than 8,800km (5,488 miles) from east to west.    Based on figures conducted in a 2 year mappng and investigation carriesd out jointly by the State Administration of Cultural Hritage (SACH), and the State Bureau of Surveying & Mapping (SBSM), the survey has shown at 6,256km, about 70%, is constructed of stone blocks, with 359km and 2,232km are trenches and natural defenses including rivers and mountains, respectively.   The Ming Dynasty section of the wall begins in Hushan, Lianing Province and ends at the Jiayu Pass in Guanshu Province, passing through 10 provinces, municipalities or administrative areas; Liaoning, Hebei, Tianjin, Beijing, Shanxi, Inner Mongolia, Shaanxi, Ningxia and Qinghai.   Global Positioning Systems, infra-red and other mapping techniques were used in the first systematic mapping of the Wall over a two year period.  The Great Wall, originaly built by China's first Emperor, Qin Shi Huang (259-210BC), was listed as a World Heritage Site in 1987.  The sections built by the Ming Emperors is the most visually striking and well preserved.   However, Shan Jixiang, Direstor of SACH said that The Great Wall was under threat from climate change and China's massive infrastructure building plans.  Historian, Zhu Zhewen explained that the monument consisted of more than the well known features of websites and travelogues.  It also included trenches and natural barriers such as rivers and mountains.   In the western sections, lying mainly in desert areas, the Wall was built using sand and mud, making it vulnerable to extreme weater conditions.  Human activity has also damaged some sections of The Wall.   Found: Skeleton of the younger sister Cleopatra had murdered By Daily Mail Reporter 2009.03.18 Archeologists and forensic experts believe they have identified the skeleton of Princess Arsinöe, the younger sister Cleopatra had murdered.  The remains of Princess Arsinöe, who was murdered more than 2,000 years ago on the orders of the Egyptian queen, are the first relics of the Ptolemaic dynasty to be identified.  The breakthrough, by an Austrian team, also suggests the Egyptian queen was part-African.  Traditional thinking has always been that the monarch  was Greek Caucasian.     Cleopatra (left) ordered the murder of her younger sister, Princess Arsinöe. Her  skeleton was discovered in Turkey   Princess Arsinoe's remains were found in a tomb in Ephesus, Turkey.   There was no love lost between her and her powerful sister - it is believed that Cleopatra ordered Mark Antony to murder her.   Dr Hilke Thuer, from the Austrian Academy of Science, who led the  discovery, told the Sunday Times: 'It is unique in the life of an archaeologist to find the tomb and the skeleton of a member of Ptolemaic dynasty.  'The results of the forensic examination and the fact that the facial reconstruction shows that Arsinoe had an African mother is a real sensation which leads to a new insight on Cleopatra's family and the relationship of the sisters Cleopatra and Arsinoe.'   Scientific papers on the remains will be presented by Dr Fabian Kanz from The Medical University of Vienna at the American Association of Physical Anthropologists in Chicago, Illinois on March 31, 2009.  Footnote:  Archaeologists say ancient Egyptian temple could house tombs of Cleopatra and Mark Anthony. 2009.04.16. Archaeologists are to begin searching three historic sites at a temple in Egypt for the tombs of doomed lovers Cleopatra and Mark Anthony.  Several spots near the Mediterranean Sea will be excavated in a hunt to find the last resting place of the celebrated queen of Egypt and her lover, a Roman general.  They committed suicide after being defeated in the battle of Actium in 31 BC.    Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton starring in the 1963 film Cleopatra Ever since, questions have lingered over where the lovers' bodies are buried.  Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities said today that the three sites were identified last month during a radar survey of the temple of Taposiris Magna.  It is located on Lake Abusir, once known as Lake Mariut, near the northern coastal city of Alexandria and was built during the reign of King Ptolemy II from 282 to 246 BC. Teams from Egypt and the Dominican Republic have been excavating the temple for the last three years.  They have already discovered a number of deep shafts inside the holy site, three of which were possibly used for burials.   The leaders of the excavation believe it's possible Cleopatra and Mark Anthony could have been buried in a deep shaft similar to those already found. Last year, archaeologists at the site unearthed a bronze statue of the goddess Aphrodite, the alabaster head of a Queen Cleopatra statue, a mask believed to belong to Mark Anthony and a headless statue from the Ptolemaic era at the excavation site.  The expedition also found 22 coins bearing Cleopatra's image. Zahi Hawass, Egypt's top archaeologist, said the statue and coins - which show an attractive face - debunk a recent theory that the queen was 'quite ugly'.  'The finds from Taposiris reflect a charm... and indicate that Cleopatra was in no way unattractive,' he said in a statement. Academics at the University of Newcastle concluded in 2007 that the fabled queen was not especially attractive.   Their conclusion was based on Cleopatra's depiction on a Roman denarius coin which shows her as a sharp-nosed, thin-lipped woman with a protruding chin. The oldest archaeological discovery  By Tom Cox  28th February 2009 For the old Kurdish shepherd, it was just another burning hot day in the rolling plains of eastern Turkey.  Following his flock over the arid hillsides, he passed the single mulberry tree, which the locals regarded as 'sacred'.  The bells on his sheep tinkled in the stillness.  Then he spotted something. Crouching down, he brushed away the dust, and exposed a strange, large, oblong stone.   The man looked left and right: there were similar stone rectangles, peeping from the sands. Calling his dog to heel, the shepherd resolved to inform someone of his finds when he got back to the village. Maybe the stones were important.   They certainly were important. The solitary Kurdish man, on that summer's day in 1994, had made the greatest archaeological discovery in 50 years.  Others would say he'd made the greatest archaeological discovery ever: a site that has revolutionised the way we look at human history, the origin of religion - and perhaps even the truth behind the Garden of Eden.     The site has been described as 'extraordinary' and 'the most important' site in the world A few weeks after his discovery, news of the shepherd's find reached museum curators in the ancient city of Sanliurfa, ten miles south-west of the stones.  They got in touch with the German Archaeological Institute in Istanbul. And so, in late 1994, archaeologist Klaus Schmidt came to the site of Gobekli Tepe (pronounced Go-beckly Tepp-ay) to begin his excavations.  As he puts it: 'As soon as I got there and saw the stones, I knew that if I didn't walk away immediately I would be here for the rest of my life.'   Schmidt stayed. And what he has uncovered is astonishing.  Archaeologists worldwide are in rare agreement on the site's importance. 'Gobekli Tepe changes everything,' says Ian Hodder, at Stanford University.    The site of Gobekli Tepe is simple enough to describe. The oblong stones, unearthed by the shepherd, turned out to be the flat tops of awesome, T-shaped megaliths. Imagine carved and slender versions of the stones of Avebury or Stonehenge.   Most of these standing stones are inscribed with bizarre and delicate images - mainly of boars and ducks, of hunting and game. Sinuous serpents are another common motif. Some of the megaliths show crayfish or lions.   The stones seem to represent human forms - some have stylised 'arms', which angle down the sides. Functionally, the site appears to be a temple, or ritual site, like the stone circles of Western Europe.  To date, 45 of these stones have been dug out - they are arranged in circles from five to ten yards across - but there are indications that much more is to come. Geomagnetic surveys imply that there are hundreds more standing stones, just waiting to be excavated.   The first is its staggering age. Carbon-dating shows that the complex is at least 12,000 years old, maybe even 13,000 years old.  That means it was built around 10,000BC. By comparison, Stonehenge was built in 3,000 BC and the pyramids of Giza in 2,500 BC.   Gobekli is thus the oldest such site in the world, by a mind-numbing margin. It is so old that it predates settled human life. It is pre-pottery, pre-writing, pre-everything. Gobekli hails from a part of human history that is unimaginably distant, right back in our hunter-gatherer past.   How did cavemen build something so ambitious? Schmidt speculates that bands of hunters would have gathered sporadically at the site, through the decades of construction, living in animal-skin tents, slaughtering local game for food.   The many flint arrowheads found around Gobekli support this thesis; they also support the dating of the site.   This revelation, that Stone Age hunter-gatherers could have built something like Gobekli, is worldchanging, for it shows that the old hunter-gatherer life, in this region of Turkey, was far more advanced than we ever conceived - almost unbelievably sophisticated.   This is where we come to the biblical connection, and my own involvement in the Gobekli Tepe story.  The Garden of Eden story, in the Bible (Genesis), tells us of humanity's innocent and leisured hunter-gatherer past, when we could pluck fruit from the trees, scoop fish from the rivers and spend the rest of our days in pleasure.    When people make the transition from hunter-gathering to settled agriculture, their skeletons change - they temporarily grow smaller and less healthy as the human body adapts to a diet poorer in protein and a more wearisome lifestyle. Likewise, newly domesticated animals get scrawnier.   This begs the question, why adopt farming at all? Many theories have been suggested - from tribal competition, to population pressures, to the extinction of wild animal species. But Schmidt believes that the temple of Gobekli reveals another possible cause.   'To build such a place as this, the hunters must have joined together in numbers. After they finished building, they probably congregated for worship. But then they found that they couldn't feed so many people with regular hunting and gathering.   'So I think they began cultivating the wild grasses on the hills. Religion motivated people to take up farming.'   The reason such theories have special weight is that the move to farming first happened in this same region. These rolling Anatolian plains were the cradle of agriculture.   The world's first farmyard pigs were domesticated at Cayonu, just 60 miles away. Sheep, cattle and goats were also first domesticated in eastern Turkey. Worldwide wheat species descend from einkorn wheat - first cultivated on the hills near Gobekli. Other domestic cereals - such as rye and oats - also started here.   The stones unearthed by the shepherd turned out to be the flat tops of T-shaped megaliths But there was a problem for these early farmers, and it wasn't just that they had adopted a tougher, if ultimately more productive, lifestyle. They also experienced an ecological crisis. These days the landscape surrounding the eerie stones of Gobekli is arid and barren, but it was not always like this.  As the carvings on the stones show - and as archaeological remains reveal - this was once a richly pastoral region. There were herds of game, rivers of fish, and flocks of wildfowl; lush green meadows were ringed by woods and wild orchards. About 10,000 years ago, the Kurdish desert was a 'paradisiacal place', as Schmidt puts it. So what destroyed the environment?  The answer is Man.  As we began farming, we changed the landscape and the climate. When the trees were chopped down, the soil leached away; all that ploughing and reaping left the land eroded and bare. What was once an agreeable oasis became a land of stress, toil and diminishing returns.   And so, paradise was lost. Adam the hunter was forced out of his glorious Eden, 'to till the earth from whence he was taken' - as the Bible puts it.   Of course, these theories might be dismissed as speculations. Yet there is plenty of historical evidence to show that the writers of the Bible, when talking of Eden, were, indeed, describing this corner of Kurdish Turkey. In the Book of Genesis, it is indicated that Eden is west of Assyria. Sure enough, this is where Gobekli is sited.   Likewise, biblical Eden is by four rivers, including the Tigris and Euphrates. And Gobekli lies between both of these.   In ancient Assyrian texts, there is mention of a 'Beth Eden' - a house of Eden. This minor kingdom was 50 miles from Gobekli Tepe.   Another book in the Old Testament talks of 'the children of Eden which were in Thelasar', a town in northern Syria, near Gobekli.   The very word 'Eden' comes from the Sumerian for 'plain'; Gobekli lies on the plains of Harran.   Thus, when you put it all together, the evidence is persuasive. Gobekli Tepe is, indeed, a 'temple in Eden', built by our leisured and fortunate ancestors - people who had time to cultivate art, architecture and complex ritual, before the traumas of agriculture ruined their lifestyle, and devastated their paradise. The Genesis Secret by Tom Knox is published by Harper Collins on March 9, priced £6.99. To order a copy (P&P free), call 0845 155 0720.

Otzi - the Iceman

Otzi, the 5,000-year-old Iceman survived a fight a few days before an arrow attack by tribal rivals in which he was injured and later bled to death, it has been disclosed.   By Nick Squires in Rome.  30th January, 2009.

  Frozen for 5,300 years.  Photo: GETTY.

 

The Stone Age tribesman sustained a hand injury possibly a tribal fight but then died when he was attacked in a mountain pass on what is now the border between Italy and Austria, Italian and German scientists believe.  The latest examination of Otzi's preserved body has revealed a nasty gash to his hand that "may have been the result of a brawl", according to the researchers at the Institute for Pathology in Bolzano, northern Italy, and Munich's Ludwig Maximilian University.

A few days later the prehistoric hunter is believed to have embarked on a trek into the mountains, where he was killed by unknown attackers.

 

He was shot in the back with an arrow and finished off with a blow from a blunt object, most likely a club or a rock.

A fresh analysis of the arrows he was carrying has shown that they were not sharpened properly, suggesting that he may have had to leave his Neolithic village in a hurry, the research team said.

 

After being frozen in ice for 5,300 years, Otzi's remains were found remarkably well-preserved by hikers in 1991, entombed in an Alpine glacier, and have since been subjected to rigorous analysis in one of the world's most intriguing anthropological detective stories.

"We are now able to make the first assertions as to the age and chronology of the injuries," said Professor Andreas Nerlich, who led the study.  It is now clear that Otzi endured at least two events resulting in injury in his last days, which may imply two separate attacks."

 

Close scrutiny of the Iceman's clothes and weapons has given an extraordinary insight into life in Europe more than five millennia ago.  His copper axe, for example, reveals that metalworking was already much more advanced in the Neolithic age than was previously thought.

 

Estimated to be 46 years old and to have lived 53 centuries ago in 3300BC, he was named after the Otz Valley in which he was found, still wearing goatskin leggings and a cape made from woven grass.

Ancient Persians were the first to use chemical weapons.  Ancient Persians were the first to use chemical weapons when they gassed Roman soldiers with toxic fumes 2,000 years ago, researchers have discovered.

Archeologista have found evidence of the use of early chemical weapons. Photo: AP

 

Archeologists have found the oldest evidence of chemical warfare yet after studying the bodies of 20 Roman soldiers' found underground in Syria 70 years ago.   Clues left at the scene revealed the Persians were lying in wait as the Romans dug a tunnel during a siege – then pumped in toxic gas – produced by sulphur crystals and bitumen – to kill all the Romans in minutes.

 

Dr Simon James, who solved the mystery, said: "It's very exciting and also quite gruesome. These people died a horrible death.  "The mixture would have produced toxic gases including sulphur dioxide and complex heavy petrochemicals. The victims would have choked, passed out and then died.

 

They had been part of a large Roman garrison defending the empire outpost city of Dura-Europos, on the Euphrates river in modern day Syria, against a ferocious siege by an army from the powerful new Sassanian Persian empire in around AD 256.  There are no historical texts describing the siege but archaeologists have pieced the action together after excavations in the 1920s and 1930s, which have been renewed in recent years.

 

Evidence shows the Persians used the full range of ancient siege techniques to break into the city, including mining operations to dig under and breach the city walls.  Roman defenders responded with 'countermines' to thwart the attackers.

 

He said:  "Careful analysis of the disposition of the corpses shows they had been stacked at the mouth of the countermine by the Persians, using their victims to create a wall of bodies and shields, keeping Roman counterattack at bay while they set fire to the countermine, collapsing it and allowing the Persians to resume sapping the walls.

 

Finds from the tunnel revealed that the Persians used bitumen and sulphur crystals to get the fire burning – and this was to prove the vital clue.  Dr James believes the Persians placed braziers and bellows in their gallery, and when the Romans broke through, they added the chemicals to the fire and pumped choking clouds of dense, poisonous gas into the Roman tunnel.

  Lost city in Peruvian jungle

A team of archaeologists on Tuesday announced they had discovered a fortified citadel in the remote Amazonian rainforest of northeast Peru that appears to be from the pre-Inca era.

The main encampment comprises circular stone houses overgrown by lush jungle over an area of five hectares (12 acres), said archaeologist Benedict Goicochea Perez, quoted by the official Andina news agency.

The citadel sits atop a chasm that the former inhabitants may have used as a lookout to spy on approaching enemies, said Goicochea Perez.Rock paintings cover some of the fortifications, and next to the dwellings are large platforms believed to have been used to grind seeds and wild plants for food and medicine, he said.The citadel is tucked away in the remote Jamalca district of Utcubamba province, part of the northern Amazonas department, said Jamalca Mayor Ricardo Cabrera Bravo, who had joined the expedition.

The area, about 800 kilometers (497 miles) northeast of Lima, is famed for its vast, isolated natural beauty, surrounded by verdant foliage and soaring waterfalls, said Cabrera Bravo.  It is likely the citadel belonged to the Chachapoyas civilization -- an ancient people whose glory days over a thousand years ago pre-date the hegemony of the powerful Incas.

The Chachapoyas culture (known as the Cloud Forest people) also built the imposing Kuelap fortress atop a mountain in Utcubamba, which can only be compared in scale to the Inca's Machu Picchu retreat, built hundreds of years later.

 

Ancient city discovered deep in Amazonian rainforest linked to the legendary white-skinned Cloud People of Peru By Daily Mail Reporter  04th December 2008 A lost city discovered deep in the Amazon rainforest could unlock the secrets of a legendary tribe. Little is known about the Cloud People of Peru, an ancient, white-skinned civilisation wiped out by disease and war in the 16th century. But now archaeologists have uncovered a fortified citadel in a remote mountainous area of Peru known for its isolated natural beauty.      An ancient Chachapoyas village located close to the area where the lost city was found.  The area where the lost city was discovered by a team of archaeologists.  Secret civilisation: a map of the region where the settlement was found. It is thought this settlement may finally help historians unlock the secrets of the 'white warriors of the clouds'.  The tribe had white skin and blonde hair - features which intrigue historians, as there is no known European ancestry in the region, where most inhabitants are darker skinned. The citadel is tucked away in one of the most far-flung areas of the Amazon. It sits at the edge of a chasm which the tribe may have used as a lookout to spy on enemies.      A mummy of a baby from the Chachapoyas culture The Chachapoyas, also called the Warriors of the Clouds, were an Andean people living in the cloud forests of the Amazonian region of present-day Peru The main encampment is made up of circular stone houses overgrown by jungle over 12 acres, according to archaeologist Benedict Goicochea Perez. Rock paintings cover some of the fortifications and next to the dwellings are platforms believed to have been used to grind seeds and plants for food and medicine.   The Cloud People once commanded a vast kingdom stretching across the Andes to the fringes of Peru's northern Amazon jungle, before it was conquered by the Incas. The city was found in Amazonian rainforest in northern Peru   Named because they lived in rainforests filled with cloud-like mist, the tribe later sided with the Spanish-colonialists to defeat the Incas. But they were killed by epidemics of European diseases, such as measles and smallpox.  Much of their way of life, dating back to the ninth century, was also destroyed by pillaging, leaving little for archaeologists to examine. Remains have been found before but scientists have high hopes of the latest find, made by an expedition to the Jamalca district in Peru's Utcubamba province, about 500 miles north-east of the capital, Lima.  Until recently, much of what was known about the lost civilisation was from Inca legends. Even the name they called themselves is unknown. The term Chachapoyas, or 'Cloud People', was given to them by the Incas.   Their culture is best known for the Kuellap fortress on the top of a mountain in Utcubamba, which can only be compared in scale to the Incas' Machu Picchu retreat, built hundreds of years later. Two years ago, archaeologists found an underground burial vault inside a cave with five mummies, two intact with skin and hair.  Chachapoyas chronicler Pedro Cieza de Leon wrote of the tribe: 'They are the whitest and most handsome of all the people that I have seen, and their wives were so beautiful that because of their gentleness, many of them deserved to be the Incas' wives and to also be taken to the Sun Temple. 'The women and their husbands always dressed in woollen clothes and in their heads they wear their llautos [a woollen turban], which are a sign they wear to be known everywhere.'   The Chachapoyas' territory was located in the northern regions of the Andes in present-day Peru.  It encompassed the triangular region formed by the confluence of the Maranon and Utcubamba rivers, in the zone of Bagua, up to the basin of the Abiseo river. The Maranon's size and the mountainous terrain meant the region was relatively isolated.

Archaeologists unearth ancient tribe members sacrificed 1,300 years ago By Daily Mail Reporter  27th August 2008

Piercing blue eyes undimmed by the passing of 1,300 years, this is the Lady of the Mask – a mummy whose discovery could reveal the secrets of a lost culture. She was found by archaeologists excavating a pyramid in Peru’s capital city Lima, alongside two other adult mummies and the sacrificial remains of a child.

 

It is the first time a tomb from the region’s Wari culture has been discovered intact and gives historians the chance to pin down exactly how the pre-Incas buried their dead.

      Researchers gently lift the well-preserved mummy from the tomb.  Archaeologists have uncovered this mummy and three others belonging to the ancient Wari culture in Peru.  The mummy is believed to be more than 1,300 years old.

 

The mummy - assumed to be a noblewoman because of the ornate mask - was found in a crouching position surrounded by ceramics and textiles associated with female weavers.  “Her face startled me at first,” said 19-year-old Miguel Angel, one of the workers who carried her body out of the tomb.   “I wasn’t expecting to find anything like that.”   Earlier in the week, workers at the Huaca Pucllana site removed two adult mummies found lying near the lady of the mask.

 

Archaeologists have been excavating the area for three years and while they found plenty of artefacts, the 30 other tombs uncovered had been looted.

 

The Wari, who came from Peru’s southern highlands and ruled a vast area of the country from 500 to 1000 AD, conducted multiple burials and sent their loved ones into the afterlife with provisions and the tools of their trade.

“We’d discovered other tombs before,” Isabel Flores, the dig’s director, said. “But they always had holes or were damaged. Never had we found a whole tomb like this one – intact.   “The sacrifices were very common, particularly of children and young girls. They were part of their ritual offerings to the sea and the land.”        

    An archaeologist take notes at the tomb, uncovered at the Huaca Pucllana ruins in Lima.  Scientists also discovered the remains of a child as well as an assortment of artefacts

 

Two other masks were found near the bodies but the archaeologists believe the blue-eyed mummy was the only important woman among the dead. “The mask had very firm eyes, they seemed very strong, and it shocked the workers as much as the archaeologists,” Ms Flores said.

 

Tests are being carried out on the other adult mummies to find out what sex they are but Ms Flores said identifying the noblewoman’s gender was relatively simple.  When in good condition, Wari tombs can be identified by the ceramic and textile offerings placed around the dead.

 

Small children were often sacrificed and it is common to find their bodies alongside adult ones. Archaeologists said the child discovered with the adult mummies at Huaca Pucllana was most likely sacrificed.

 

The discovery confirms the Wari people buried their dead in what is now Lima and offers a more complete picture of how burials were carried out.

Skeletons Discovered: First African Slaves in New World

By LiveScience Staff  - 2006 - from Best of the web - Daily Mail  (London)

  A grave where skeletons of Africans were found in the cemetery in Campeche, Mexico. Photo:: T. Douglas Price

 

Archaeologists have found what they think are the oldest remains of slaves brought from Africa to the New World.   The remains, in a colonial era graveyard in one of the oldest European cities in Mexico, date between the late-16th century and the mid-17th century, not long after Columbus first set foot in the Americas.

 

The African origin of the slaves was determined by studying a chemical in their tooth enamel that reveals plant and rock types of their native land. The chemical enters the body through the food chain as nutrients pass from bedrock through soil and water to plants and animals. It is an indelible signature of birthplace, the researchers said, because it can be directly linked to the bedrock of specific locales.

Researchers examined remains of four individuals from among 180 burials found in a multiethnic burial ground associated with the ruins of a colonial church in Campeche, Mexico, a port city on the Yucatan Peninsula.

 

"This is the earliest documentation of the African Diaspora in the New World," said study co-leader T. Douglas Price of University of Wisconsin-Madison. "It does mean that slaves were brought here almost as soon as Europeans arrived."  The discovery will be detailed in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology.

 

Over a span of nearly 400 years, as many as 12 million people were placed in bondage and brought across the Atlantic under horrific conditions to work, primarily, in the mines and plantations of the New World, Price and his colleagues said.

 

In early colonial Mexico, Campeche was an important Spanish gateway to the New World. It served as a base for exploration and conquest and was a key defensive outpost in a region infested with pirates, the researchers say. They think slaves from the infamous West African port of Elmina were shipped to Campeche where they may have been used as domestic servants.

 

The discovery of the remains of slaves born in Africa from such an early date shows that slavery became an integral aspect of the New World economy not long after the Conquistadors completed the subjugation of Mexico, Price said.

 

Archaeological and historical evidence, including a map of colonial Campeche, suggest the graveyard was in use from about 1550 to the late 1600s. It was uncovered, along with the foundations of a colonial era church, in 2000 by construction workers digging around Campeche's central park. The site was excavated under the direction of Tiesler.

 

Notes:  Every great civilisation and Empire in the world has hisorically depended on its riches by using slavery as its base for cheap labour.  Cities in the UK such as Bristol and Liverpool; great businessmen became wealthy from their reliance on slave labour in the colonies in the West Indies, north and south America, Africa, South-east Asia and Australia.  More links will be added soon. AC.

The REAL King Solomon's mines - but will the mystery end here?

By Tony Rennell  01st November 2008

 

The galleys arrived off the scorching shores of Palestine, loaded with fabulous treasures for a legendary king.  As the banks of rowers glided their vessels into the harbour, slaves rushed to the dockside to unload the precious cargo - silver, sweet-smelling sandalwood, wine, ivory, apes and peacocks. But the most important gift of all was gold.

Gold fires the imagination. It does so today, hoarded as security in our troubled times, and it did 3,000 years ago, when King Solomon, the ruler of Israel, accumulated it in abundance. The evidence is in the Bible. The Old Testament tells us he was the possessor of 'gold according to all his desire'.

Treasure hunt: The 1950 film King Solomon's Mines won several Oscars

And his desire was great. His drinking cups were made of it; he had 300 shields beaten from it. His great throne in Jerusalem was ivory 'overlaid with the best gold', and on steps leading up to it stood 12 golden lions facing 12 golden eagles.

 

A seven-branched candelabra of gold hung above his royal seat. The walls of the Temple he built to house the Ark of the Covenant were adorned with it, too. Centuries later, 'Solomon in all his glory' would become St Matthew's yardstick for riches untold and magnificence unsurpassed. He was a real King Midas.

Where did this wealth come from? The Bible tells us that, too. Solomon's servants, it says, went to Ophir 'and fetched from thence gold, 420 talents' - roughly 20 tons. But that is where the clues stop and the trail goes cold. The location of Ophir, it seems, was meant to remain a mystery.

 

Out of this mystery grew a tale that obsessed the ancient Greeks, Renaissance adventurers and Victorian explorers and, with its aura of romance and greed, still has the power to draw us in today. Indeed, the search for King Solomon's mines is as timeless as that for the Holy Grail.

The astronomer and geographer Ptolemy calculated that Ophir was located in what today is Pakistan, at the mouth of the Indus river. Alternatively, he placed it near the Straits of Malacca, between Malaysia and Indonesia.

 The story has inspired countless explorers to hunt for a legendary golden treasure trove

 

A Portuguese explorer of the 15th century, meanwhile, claimed it was in the Shona lands of Zimbabwe in Africa, a link embraced by the English poet John Milton in his epic poem Paradise Lost.  Either way, the prospect of boundless booty inspired ambitious men to set sail into vast and dangerous oceans and stretch the limits of the known world. Christopher Columbus believed he had found Ophir in Haiti, and Sir Walter Raleigh in the jungles of Surinam.

In 1568 a Spanish captain discovered an archipelago in the Pacific and named them the Solomon Islands because he believed they were Ophir.  Just over a century ago, the Victorians were captivated by a tale of British grit, ancient curses, African warriors and black magic, all suffused with the glamour of diamonds and gold.

Henry Rider Haggard's best-selling book King Solomon's Mines caught the mood of the moment and set pulses racing for a generation of imperial wannabes intent on opening up previously untracked swathes of the world. It was as gripping at the time as an Indiana Jones film.

 Rider Haggard's 1885 novel was heralded as 'the most amazing book ever written'

 

At the time, Cecil Rhodes, David Livingstone and Henry Stanley were discovering cultures, tribes and natural wealth in abundance in Africa. If the lost mines of Ophir were anywhere, this vast and largely unexplored land was surely the place to find them.  In the real world, however, the mines remained as elusive as ever.

Until now. Adventurous souls must have stirred this week when it was revealed that the location of the real King Solomon's mines has, at last, been nailed down.  Archeologists now place the lost mines of the ancient King of Israel in the desert south of the Dead Sea, in modern-day Jordan. A 24-acre site of tunnels and holes, topped with black slag, has been carbon-dated to the 10th century BC, the time of Solomon.   His mines, it seems, were within his kingdom all along. But prospectors and fortune-seekers should not race East just yet. For it appears that the king's slave workers there were not extracting gold, but something rather more prosaic - copper.

For professional archeologists, however, the discovery is pure gold dust. Copper was a sought-after metal at the time and was used in everything from cooking pots and weapons to ornaments and coins.  And Solomon certainly needed lots of it, not least for the 16,000-gallon water tank he built in his Temple, which was supported on 12 bronze bulls. But what of the gold?

Solomon is one of those historical characters in whom fact and fantasy collide.  He was conceived in illicit passion as the son of David, the shepherd boy who slew the giant Goliath and went on to become king.  His mother was the beautiful Bathsheba, whom David stole from her husband, a man he murdered.  The young Solomon became the nation's third king and, under him, the country grew from a city state to a mini empire that dominated the Middle East for four decades between 965BC and 925BC.

He was renowned for the wisdom with which he governed.  He was an epic lover with a reputed 700 wives and 300 concubines. But, then, everything about him was magnificently exaggerated. Some stories ascribe to him a flying carpet, 60 miles square, that could carry 40,000 men and fly from Damascus to Medina in a day.

 

Among his wives was the daughter of the Egyptian Pharaoh and among his sexual conquests the exotic Queen of Sheba. These were important diplomatic liaisons of convenience that helped to safeguard his country's borders. When they came to him, both brought him camel loads of gold.

He was also a romantic to whom some of our culture's most sensuous lyrics have been attributed. 'Behold, thou art fair, my love,' he wrote in the Song Of Songs.  His endearments reflected his opulence. 'Thy cheeks are comely with plaits of hair,/ Thy neck with strings of jewels./ We will make thee plaits of gold/ With studs of silver.'

And all this opulence was fuelled by fabulous cargoes arriving from Ophir. One historian calculates that by the end of his reign, he had 500 tons of gold, which today would be worth around £6 trillion, putting him second only to Alexander the Great on the ancient world's rich list.

 

After his death, his kingdom was split, Jerusalem was sacked and his temple destroyed. But while many of Solomon's monuments were swept away, future generations were always drawn to the mines that filled his once-legendary coffers.

It was Rider Haggard's novel, in 1885, that booted the legend into the modern age. This fictional account of a journey into the heart of Africa was heralded on billboards as 'the most amazing book ever written'.

 

So begins Quatermain's epic expedition. The treasure Quartermain and his companions eventually find in an underground chamber beneath Sheba's Breast is indeed the stuff of dreams - ivory from hundreds of elephants, gold bars and chests filled to the brim with giant diamonds, some as large as pigeons' eggs.

'Hee, hee!' cackles the evil sorceress who has been forced to lead them there. 'Here are the bright stones ye love, white men. Take them. Run them through your fingers. Take as many as ye will. Ha, ha!'

 

Then the old crone shuts them in. And though she dies, crushed beneath the very stone she has used to block their exit, and they escape by the skin of their teeth, they have no choice but to leave the bulk of these riches behind.

But for real explorers, the search for the mines was only just beginning. Some went to China, India and even Peru. But by this time, Africa was the preferred destination. A dozen different locations, from Sierra Leone to Mozambique, were considered at one time or another.

 

A British boy named Frank Hayter read Haggard's book and was enthused. When he grew up, he put on his pith helmet and in the mid-1920s went searching for the mines in Ethiopia.  He ended up finding nothing. More recently, the Anglo-Afghan writer and documentary-maker Tahir Shah followed Hayter's lead. His family had long searched for Solomon's secret. His grandfather launched an expedition to what is now Yemen. His father in Sudan.

Shah took up the mantle, directed by an ancient map he found in the bazaar in Old Jerusalem. He travelled to Ethiopia and came across hellish craters in the ground where desperate men, women and children risked life and limb to find grains of gold dust.  Shah hired a team of mules and trekked into the highlands in perpetual rain. He scoured a peak known as Devil Mountain for hidden caves, but the only one he found ended in a dead end after just 25 feet.

'Yet I felt certain we were close to where Solomon mined the gold for his temple,' he wrote in 2002. For him, the hunt would go on. Such is gold fever. Such is the seductive siren voice of King Solomon.

 

So will the identifying of those copper workings near the Dead Sea end the quest? I hope not. Over the ages, the legend has been revived and re-invented to fit the times, and we may have need of it today. For the real nugget of truth about King Solomon's mines was that they inspired people to brave deeds.

At its heart, it was not a story of easy riches and luxury living but of hard graft and endeavour, of stepping out bravely into the unknown.

That seems an appropriate lesson for the sticky times we're in. Just as investors flee to gold, so golden legends may be preferable to copper-bottomed reality.

Foolish? Perhaps, but remember this. Solomon's copper mines may have been found, for who can argue with the archeologists? But the king's gold had to come from somewhere, and that remains as much a mystery as ever.  The legend of Ophir's boundless riches lives on. Get searching.

Ancient temple and roads found at famed fortress in Peru pre-dates the Incas. 14 March 2008

Archaeologists in Peru have found the ruins of an ancient temple, road and irrigation systems at a famed fortress overlooking the Inca capital of Cuzco, it emerged today. The temple on the periphery the Sacsayhuaman fortress includes 11 rooms thought to have held mummies and idols, lead dig expert Oscar Rodriguez revealed.  His team made the discoveries believe the structures predated the Inca empire but were then significantly developed and expanded.

 

Ruins: The remains of a temple found near Cuzco, Peru, is thought to predate the Incas

"It's from both the Inca and pre-Inca cultures, it has a sequence," Washington Camacho, director of the Sacsayhuaman Archaeological Park said.

"The Incas entered and changed the form of the temple, as it initially had a more rustic architecture."

 

Archaeologists are still waiting for carbon dating tests, but Camacho said their calculations about the facilities' age are supported by historical references such as ceramics and construction style.

 

The Inca empire, based in the ancient city of Cuzco, flourished along the western edge of South America during the 1400s, prior to the arrival of the Spanish in the next century.

 

Today, Cuzco is Peru's main tourism hub and a launching point for visitors to the jungle-shrouded ruins of Machu Picchu, 40 miles northwest.

The temple is a mile from zigzagging walls of the Sacsayhuaman fortress, alongside an enormous rock formation believed to be one of the fortress' burial mounds.

 

Renovated: Archaologists believe the stone foundations were retopped by the Incas

"The temple is one of the most important in the Sacsayhuaman site," Señor Camacho said.

 

Part of the structure was destroyed by dynamite blasts in the early 20th century, when the site was used as a stone quarry.  The roadway, buried for hundreds of years under a metre of soil, is believed to have formed part of a network connecting Sacsayhuaman's buildings.  Archaeologists are also busy unearthing an advanced hydraulic system, which may have been used to supply water to Cuzco during the Inca empire.  The team believes the irrigation system was built by the Ayarmaca, who occupied the region from 900 to 1200.  Remnants of Ayarmaca ceramics are scattered throughout the site.

 

The new excavations, directed by Cuzco's National Culture Institute, began in June 2007 and is set to continue for another five years.

Rare fragments.

Mike Collett-White

An unusually large fragment from possibly the oldest copy of part of the Gospel of John will go on sale 3rd December, when the torn piece of papyrus with Greek writing is expected to fetch up to £300,000.

A fragment from a copy of the Gospel of John, circa 200AD, is displayed at Sotheby's …More Enlarge photo

The fragment is believed to date to 200 AD, less than 170 years after the crucifixion of Christ, when Christianity was still illegal and around 100 years after experts believe the original Gospel was first written.

"This is either the first or the second oldest copy of this part of the text of the Gospel of John," Sotheby's specialist Timothy Bolton told Reuters as he held the document displayed between two sheets of clear plastic.  "It is one of the finest and most celebrated of Gospel fragments, as there are very few pieces of this spectacular quality."

The appearance of page number 74 in one corner shows the leaf came from a relatively large volume of the whole Gospel, he explained, and adds to the rarity of the piece.  Its Greek text is an account of Jesus preaching in the temple, where people challenge his right to give evidence on his own behalf. It includes the cryptic and prophetic words: "Whither I go, ye cannot come."

 

The fragment was discovered in 1922 by British archaeologists Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt at the site of the important early Christian community at Oxyrhynchus, about 120 miles (193 km) from Cairo. It is believed to have been written in Alexandria.

Most finds from the site ended up in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and the British Museum, although some pieces, including the fragment, were sent to seminaries and colleges.

 

The U.S. divinity school where it ended up sold the fragment in New York in 2003, and it fetched $400,000, which Sotheby's said was the highest price ever paid at public sale for an early Christian manuscript.

 

MARCO POLO COMPENDIUM

Another highlight at the London sale on December 3 is a large compendium containing a previously unknown, 14th century manuscript of Medieval traveller Marco Polo's adventures along the Silk Road and into China the century before.  According to the auctioneer, only six manuscripts of Polo's account have appeared on the market in the last century and none since one was sold by Sotheby's in 1930.

 

Bolton said the Latin volume was probably copied by a monk from a selection of manuscripts in the library of Glastonbury Abbey which are now almost completely lost or destroyed.  It is believed to have passed into the possession of the Earl of Devon in the 16th century and has passed by descent to the current owner, the 18th Earl of Devon.

 

As well as the Marco Polo account, there are sections on British history, near- and far-eastern affairs and a collection of prophecies.  "This thing has been in England since the 1380s and you could go to a Medieval library and pick this volume off the shelf, and read not only about China but about the whole world wrapped up in one document," said Bolton.

 

The compendium is expected to fetch 200-300,000 pounds.

(Editing by Paul Casciato)tzi the Iceman 'survived attack a few days before being killed'