All posts by Archaeology World Team

AFRICA, EGYPT, WORLD

Scientists Reconstruct Face Of ‘world’s First Pregnant’ Egyptian Mummy, Died 2000 Yrs Ago

Scientists Reconstruct Face Of ‘world’s First Pregnant’ Egyptian Mummy, Died 2000 Yrs Ago

Scientists Reconstruct Face Of 'world's First Pregnant' Egyptian Mummy, Died 2000 Yrs Ago

With an aim to re-humanize mummified individuals, Forensic scientists have reconstructed the face of the world’s first pregnant ancient Egyptian mummy more than 2,000 years after her death, using 2D and 3D techniques.

The Mummy known as ‘The Mystery Lady’ is believed to have died 28 weeks into her pregnancy between the ages around 20 and 30.

The embalmed woman was analyzed last year by a team of Polish researchers, who discovered evidence of a fetus inside her stomach.

Forensic experts have used her skull and other remains to produce two images showing what she may have looked like when alive in the first century BC.

Chantal Milani, an Italian forensic anthropologist and member of the Warsaw Mummy Project said, “Our bones and the skull, in particular, give a lot of information about the face of an individual.”

“Although it cannot be considered an exact portrait, the skull like many anatomical parts is unique and shows a set of shapes and proportions that will appear in the final face,” Chantal Milani further said.

The fetus was located in the lower part of the lesser pelvis: Warsaw Mummy Project

The Warsaw Mummy Project on Facebook wrote, “The face that covers the bone structure follows different anatomic rules, thus standard procedures can be applied to reconstruct it, for example, to establish the shape of the nose.”

As per reports, the fetus, which had been ‘pickled like a gherkin’, was located in the lower part of the lesser pelvis and partly in the lower part of the greater pelvis and was mummified together with its mother. 

Its head circumference was 9.8 inches, which the forensic team used to determine it was between the 26th and 30th week of life.

Forensic artist Hew Morrison said, “Facial reconstruction is mainly used in forensics to help determine the identity of a body when more common means of identification such as fingerprint identification or DNA analysis have drawn a blank.

Reconstructing an individual’s face from their skull is often considered a last resort in an attempt to establish who they were.”

Notably, the mummy was taken out of Egypt and into Warsaw in December 1826, around the time of some of the most important discoveries from the Egyptian Valley of the Kings. Her body had been carefully wrapped in fabrics and left with a rich set of amulets to see her into the afterlife.

Here are some pictures of the facial reconstruction of ‘The Mysterious Lady’

Image: The facial reconstruction of ‘The Mysterious Lady’
Image: The embalmed woman was analyzed last year by a team of Polish researchers, and X-ray scans and CT images revealed evidence of a fetus inside her stomach.
Image: Forensic experts used her skull (pictured) and other remains to produce two images showing what ‘The Mysterious Lady; may have looked like when alive in the first century BC.
Image: The mummy was discovered in 2016 as an embalmed woman.
Image: An examination using tomographic imaging revealed that the woman was between 20-30 years old when she died and was in the 26th to 30th week of her pregnancy.
WORLD

Did Humans Cause the Demise of Madagascar’s Megafauna?

Did Humans Cause the Demise of Madagascar’s Megafauna?

Two thousand years ago, lemurs the size of humans and giant “elephant birds” roamed Madagascar. A thousand years later, they were nearly gone.

Did Humans Cause the Demise of Madagascar’s Megafauna?
Human population growth likely spurred the extinction of Madagascar’s elephant birds, illustrated here.

This mass extinction coincided with a boom in Madagascar’s human population, according to a new study, when two small groups of people linked up and took over the island.

It’s an “exciting” study, says Laurie Godfrey, a palaeontologist at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, who was not involved.

The results, she says, add genetic support to the idea that a growing human population and a shift to agricultural lifestyles did in these giant animals.

The new study traces back to 2007, when Jean-Aimé Rakotoarisoa, an archaeologist at the University of Antananarivo, and a multidisciplinary group of researchers created the Madagascar Genetic and Ethnolinguistic project to study the long-debated question of the ancestry of the Malagasy, the island’s major native ethnic group.

Though Madagascar is located about 425 kilometres off the east coast of Africa, the Malagasy language is similar to the Austronesian languages spoken 7000 kilometres across the Indian Ocean. There’s long been “a question about when, who, [and] how people came to Madagascar,” and how they influenced the mass extinction, Rakotoarisoa says.

Between 2007 and 2014 the team travelled to 257 villages around the island. They collected saliva samples and musical, linguistic, and other social science data.

In 2017, the researchers concluded the modern Malagasy population is most closely related to the Bantu-speaking people of eastern Africa and the Austronesian-speaking people of southern Borneo, in southeast Asia.

In the new study, the scientists genetically analyzed the saliva and used a computer program to model Malagasy ancestry and estimate how it changed over generations.

They found the modern Malagasy population is descended from a small ancestral Asian population made up of only a few thousand people that stopped mixing with other groups about 2000 years ago.

When exactly the Asian population travelled to Madagascar is a mystery. But by 1000 years ago, this small group had made it to the island. It began to mix with a similar-size African population in Madagascar, and the population began to grow right at the peak of the megafaunal mass extinctions about 1000 years ago, the researchers report today in Current Biology.

Other studies have found that at the same time the population of Madagascar exploded, the lifestyle of the people changed as well, says study co-author Denis Pierron, an evolutionary geneticist at Paul Sabatier University.

Before, humans had lived alongside animals and hunted and foraged in small groups. Now, they were building large settlements, planting rice, and grazing cattle on the landscape, archaeological evidence shows.

The authors suggest that population growth and these changes, paired with a hotter and drier climate, likely triggered the demise of the giant creatures. Godfrey agrees on the timing lines up, give or take 100 years, but she believes the changing climate played less of a role.

Though he says the study is well done, Yale University evolutionary geneticist Diyendo Massilani cautions “there are limits to using present-day data to infer something about the past.” If archaeologists discovered and analyzed ancient DNA from buried remains of Madagascar’s past inhabitants, he argues, that could help solidify when past populations mixed and grew.

Understanding humans’ role in the Madagascar extinction is urgent today, Godfrey says, especially as modern giants such as elephants and rhinoceroses are threatened. “We need to know what causes major changes, so we can save ourselves from a future potentially dire for the planet.”

EUROPE, GREECE, WORLD

Roman-Era Odeon Uncovered in Crete

Roman-Era Odeon Uncovered in Crete

Roman-Era Odeon Uncovered in Crete
Ancient odeons like this one in Crete were used for lectures, literary and musical contests, or theatrical performances.

Tucked into a mountain-ringed cove in southwest Crete are the ruins of Lissos, an ancient town whose archaeological remains are accessible only by sea or a long hike. Because of its isolation, Lissos had not been investigated by archaeologists for several decades. New work at Lissos, though, has uncovered an odeon, similar to a modern auditorium and indicative of the prosperity of the town.

Previous research showed that Lissos was inhabited long before its name made it into history books in the fourth century B.C. Its location across the Mediterranean Sea from Cyrene, a major ancient Greek city in present-day Libya, likely meant that Lissos was an important stop on Mediterranean trade routes.

Structures from various time periods at Lissos are relatively well preserved, including a unique temple to Asclepius, the ancient Greek god of medicine; a residential area; an impressive cemetery with two-story tombs; Roman baths; and Christian churches.

Archaeologists have now added an odeon to this list of structures following the first excavation at Lissos in more than half a century.

Katerina Tzanakaki, deputy head of the Department of Prehistoric and Classical Antiquities and Museums at the Ephorate of Antiquities of Chania, directed the new project and told Live Science in an email that odeons “were used for lectures, literary and musical contests or theatrical performances.” 

During excavations, archaeologists found part of the odeon’s stage, 14 rows of seats and two vaulted side chambers.

In the first phase of the odeon’s excavation, Tzanakaki and her team found part of the stage, 14 rows of seats and two vaulted side chambers.

The odeon dates to the Roman period, roughly the first to fourth centuries A.D., a time when the sanctuary to Asclepius at Lissos was transformed into a political centre with a new mosaic floor and portraits of the Roman emperors Tiberius and Drusus. 

Unfortunately, the odeon was heavily damaged in antiquity by large falling boulders, likely as the result of a powerful earthquake in A.D. 365.

Jane Francis, a classical archaeologist at Concordia University in Montreal who was not involved in this project, explained in an email to Live Science that “a tsunami with destructive force as far away as Alexandria, Egypt, was associated with the earthquake.

The whole site of Lissos was uplifted by several meters, so the town would have been larger than today and the theatre thus closer to the coast.”

The ancient ruins of Lissos in Crete are accessible only by boat or a lengthy hike.
The new excavation is the first one at Lissos in more than half a century.

As the odeon was adjacent to the city center, Tzanakaki thinks it also might have operated as a bouleuterion, a building for meetings of the city council. Francis and her husband, George W. Harrison, a classical archaeologist at Carleton University in Ottawa, told Live Science by email that the size and date of the building mean that it was most likely an odeon, but the fact that “it was designed and used as a covered theatre does not preclude secondary use as a council house.”

While the precise definition of the newly uncovered building may have to wait for future work, “the discovery of a public service building at a central point of the ancient city, near the temple to Asclepius, adds new information to the archaeological and historical horizon of the area,” according to a translated statement from the Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports. Francis and Harrison agree that the discovery is rare. “There aren’t many well-preserved theatres on Crete and even fewer bouleuteria,” they said.

Future work will help Tzanakaki determine whether there was an outside wall supporting the odeon, and that finding will influence the restoration work. In the meantime, the archaeological site of Lissos remains open to the public; it is accessible by a short boat trip or a two-hour hike from the nearby town of Sougia.

ASIA, IRAN, WORLD

A 4,000-Year-Old Writing system that finally makes sense to Scholars

A 4,000-Year-Old Writing system that finally makes sense to Scholars

You could be forgiven for never having heard of the civilization of Elam. Elam flourished in southern Iran, in the modern state of Khuzestan, about four or five thousand years ago. The Elamites had close cultural ties to the Mesopotamian civilizations to the west, like the Babylonians; they built ziggurats, for instance (via Britannica).

They had a number of unique customs, though, including royal succession, and possibly property rights being passed down matrilinearly, from mothers to sons (instead of fathers to sons), which suggests that Elamite women enjoyed a degree of importance. The Elamites were eventually swallowed up by other cultures, and their capital, Susa, would become the home of the kings of Persia.

But what vexed archaeologists and philologists for centuries was the Elamite language. They simply couldn’t read it. According to Smithsonian, the earliest Elamite script looked like Mesopotamian cuneiform, but no one could quite decode it.

LINEAR ELAMITE

Smithsonian notes that only 43 examples of this early script, called Linear Elamite, have ever been discovered. It had fallen out of use by about 1800 B.C., replaced by western forms of cuneiform and then by Greek. It wasn’t clear whether the words expressed or depicted by Linear Elamite were words of the same language as the later, readable texts. Perhaps it was a different language altogether.

In 2015 came a breakthrough. A certain François Desset, professor of archaeology at the University of Teheran, was curious about the inscriptions on a collection of silver beakers once thought to be a hoax to fleece collectors, but recently confirmed as genuine.

On many of them, he found two parallel inscriptions: one in the familiar Elamite language, and another in Linear Elamite. He had found the key to the puzzle.

The Linear characters were pictograms, rather than alphabetical letters, which made them hard to translate, but Desset guessed from the context that some of them stood for names. Slowly the language revealed its secrets. Desset would translate 72 Linear characters, leaving only a handful still unclear.

LIKE THE ROSETTA STONE

Desset’s work bears a remarkable resemblance to the translation of the Rosetta Stone.

The first archaeologists could not decipher Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, with their suns and birds and abstract shapes instead of letters. But when Napoleon invaded Egypt, his men found a tablet inscribed with three languages (shown above) in the Nile mud near the town of Rosetta. 

According to the British Museum, this was one of many “mass-produced” tablets from the year 196 B.C., a kind of public bulletin. It repeated the same message in three kinds of script: hieroglyphics, “demotic” Egyptian, and Greek.

A Frenchman named Champollion realized that the names of non-Egyptian people were recognizable in the jumble of hieroglyphics. Slowly, he began to pair Greek words and phrases with ancient Egyptian ones, eventually unravelling the code.

It is remarkable that another Frenchman, 200 years later, should use exactly the same method to decode Linear Elamite: recognizing names in the band of script and deducing the rest from there.

ASIA, ISRAEL, WORLD

Sentence of Canaanite language found in Israel for the first time on the ivory comb

Sentence of Canaanite language found in Israel for the first time on the ivory comb

The alphabet was invented around 1800 BCE and was used by the Canaanites and later by most other languages in the world. Until recently, no meaningful Canaanite inscriptions had been discovered in the Land of Israel, save only two or three words here and there.

Sentence of Canaanite language found in Israel for the first time on the ivory comb
The letters on the comb translate to “may this tusk root out the lice of the hair and the beard”.

Now an amazing discovery presents an entire sentence in Canaanite, dating to about 1700 BCE. It is engraved on a small ivory comb and includes a spell against lice.

The comb was unearthed at Tel Lachish in Israel by a team from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HU) and Southern Adventist University in the United States, under the direction of Professors Yosef Garfinkel, Michael Hasel and Martin Klingbeil. The inscription was deciphered by semitic epigraphist Dr Daniel Vainstub at Ben Gurion University (BGU). The ivory was tested by HU Prof. Rivka Rabinovich and BGU Prof. Yuval Goren and was found to originate from an elephant tusk. Their findings were published in the Jerusalem Journal of Archaeology.

The letters of the inscription were engraved in a very shallow manner. It was excavated in 2017 but the letters were noticed only in subsequent post-processing in 2022 by Dr. Madeleine Mumcuoglu. It was cleaned and preserved by Miriam Lavi.

The ivory comb is small, measuring roughly 3.5 by 2.5 cm. The comb has teeth on both sides. Although their bases are still visible, the comb teeth themselves were broken in antiquity. The central part of the comb is somewhat eroded, possibly by the pressure of fingers holding the comb during haircare or the removal of lice from the head or beard. The side of the comb with six thick teeth was used to untangle knots in the hair, while the other side, with 14 fine teeth, was used to remove lice and their eggs, much like the current-day two-sided lice combs sold in stores.

There are 17 Canaanite letters on the comb. They are archaic in form — from the first stage of the invention of the alphabet script. They form seven words in Canaanite, reading: “May this tusk root out the lice of the hair and the beard.”

“This is the first sentence ever found in the Canaanite language in Israel. There are Canaanites in Ugarit in Syria, but they write in a different script, not the alphabet that is used today. The Canaanite cities are mentioned in Egyptian documents, the Amarna letters that were written in Akkadian, and in the Hebrew Bible.

The comb inscription is direct evidence of the use of the alphabet in daily activities some 3700 years ago. This is a landmark in the history of the human ability to write,” shared Garfinkel.

Ancient combs were made from wood, bone, or ivory. Ivory was a very expensive material and likely an imported luxury object. As there were no elephants in Canaan during that time period, the comb likely came from nearby Egypt — factors indicating that even people of high social status suffered from lice.

The research team analyzed the comb itself for the presence of lice under a microscope and photographs were taken of both sides. Remains of head lice, 0.5-0.6 mm in size, were found on the second tooth. The climatic conditions of Lachish, however, did not allow the preservation of whole head lice but only those of the outer chitin membrane of the nymph stage head louse.

Despite its small size, the inscription on the comb from Lachish has very special features, some of which are unique and fill in gaps and lacunas in our knowledge of many aspects of the culture of Canaan in the Bronze Age.

For the first time, we have an entire verbal sentence written in the dialect spoken by the Canaanite inhabitants of Lachish, enabling us to compare this language in all its aspects with the other sources for it. Second, the inscription on the comb sheds light on some hitherto poorly attested aspects of the everyday life of the time, haircare and dealing with lice.

Third, this is the first discovery in the region of an inscription referring to the purpose of the object on which it was written, as opposed to dedicatory or ownership inscriptions on objects. Further, the engraver’s skill in successfully executing such tiny letters (1-3 mm wide) is a fact that from now on should be taken into account in any attempt to summarize and draw conclusions on literacy in Canaan in the Bronze Age.

Lachish was a major Canaanite city-state in the second millennium BCE and the second most important city in the Biblical Kingdom of Judah. To date, 10 Canaanite inscriptions have been found in Lachish, more than at any other site in Israel.

The city was the major centre for the use and preservation of the alphabet for some 600 years, from 1800-1150 BCE. The site of Tel Lachish is under the protection of the Israel Nature and Parks Authority.

AFRICA, EGYPT, WORLD

‘Lost golden city’ found in Egypt reveals the lives of ancient pharaohs

‘Lost golden city’ found in Egypt reveals the lives of ancient pharaohs

'Lost golden city' found in Egypt reveals the lives of ancient pharaohs

Archaeologists have found a “Lost Golden City” that’s been buried under the ancient Egyptian capital of Luxor for the past 3,000 years, the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities announced Thursday.

The city, historically known as “The Rise of Aten,” was founded by Amenhotep III (ruled 1391-1353 BCE), the grandfather of Tutankhamun, or King Tut. People continued to use the “Golden City” during Amenhotep III’s co-regency with his son, Amenhotep IV (who later changed his name to Akhenaten), as well as during the rule of Tut and the pharaoh who followed him, known as Ay.

Despite the city’s rich history – historical documents report that it was home to King Amenhotep III’s three royal palaces and was the largest administrative and industrial settlement in Luxor at that time – its remains eluded archaeologists until now.

“Many foreign missions searched for this city and never found it,” Zahi Hawass, the archaeologist who led the Golden City’s excavation and the former minister of state for antiquities affairs, said in a translated statement. His team began the search in 2020 with the hopes of finding King Tut’s mortuary temple. They chose to look in this region “because the temples of both Horemheb and Ay were found in this area,” Hawass said.

They were taken aback when they began uncovering mud bricks everywhere they dug. The team soon realized that they had unearthed a large city that was in relatively good shape.

“The city’s streets are flanked by houses,” some with walls up to 10 feet (3 meters) high, Hawass said. These houses had rooms that were filled with knickknacks and tools that ancient Egyptians used in daily life.

“The discovery of this lost city is the second most important archaeological discovery since the tomb of Tutankhamun,” which occurred in 1922, Betsy Brian, a professor of Egyptology at John Hopkins University, said in the statement.

“The discovery of the Lost City not only will give us a rare glimpse into the life of the ancient Egyptians at the time when the empire was at [its] wealthiest but will help us shed light on one of history’s greatest [mysteries]: Why did Akhenaten and [Queen] Nefertiti decide to move to Amarna?”

(A few years after Akhenaten started his reign in the early 1350s BCE, the Golden City was abandoned and Egypt’s capital was moved to Amarna).

Once the team realized they had discovered the Lost City, they set about dating it.

To do this, they looked for ancient objects bearing the seal of Amenhotep III’s cartouche, an oval filled with his royal name in hieroglyphics. The team found this cartouche all over the place, including on wine vessels, rings, scarabs, coloured pottery, and mud bricks, which confirmed that the city was active during the reign of Amenhotep III, who was the ninth king of the 18th dynasty.

After seven months of excavation, the archaeologists uncovered several neighbourhoods. In the southern part of the city, the team also discovered the remains of a bakery that had a food preparation and cooking area filled with ovens and ceramic storage containers. The kitchen is large, so it likely catered to a large clientele, according to the statement.

In another, still partially covered area of the excavation, archaeologists found an administrative and residential district that had larger, neatly arranged units. A zigzag fence – an architectural design used toward the end of the 18th Dynasty – walled off the area, allowing only one access point that led to the residential areas and internal corridors.

This single entrance likely served as a security measure, giving ancient Egyptians control over who entered and left this area, according to the statement. In another area, archaeologists found a production area for mud bricks, which were used to build temples and annexes. These bricks, the team noted, had been sealed with the cartouche of King Amenhotep III.

The team also found dozens of casting moulds that were used to make amulets and decorative items – evidence that the city had a bustling production line that made decorations for temples and tombs.

Throughout the city, the archaeologists found tools related to industrial work, including spinning and weaving. They also unearthed metal and glass-making slag, but they haven’t yet found the workshop that made these materials. The archaeologists also found several burials: two unusual burials of a cow or bull, and a remarkable burial of a person whose arms were outstretched to the side and had a rope wrapped around the knees.

The researchers are still analyzing these burials, and hope to determine the circumstances and meaning behind them.

More recently, the team found a vessel holding about 22 pounds (10 kilograms) of dried or boiled meat. This vessel is inscribed with an inscription that reads: Year 37, dressed meat for the third Heb Sed festival from the slaughterhouse of the stockyard of Kha made by the butcher luwy.

“This valuable information not only gives us the names of two people that lived and worked in the city but confirmed that the city was active and the time of King Amenhotep III’s co-regency with his son Akhenaten,” the archaeologists said in the statement.

Moreover, the team found a mud seal that says “gm pa Aton” – a phrase that can be translated into “the domain of the dazzling Aten” – the name of a temple at Karnak built by King Akhenaten.

According to historical documents, one year after this pot was crafted, the capital was moved to Amarna. Akhenaten, who is known for mandating that his people worship just one deity — the sun god Aten – called for this move.

But Egyptologists still wonder why he moved the capital and if the Golden City was truly abandoned at that time. It’s also a mystery whether the city was repopulated when King Tut returned to Thebes and reopened it as a religious center, according to the statement.

Further excavations may reveal the city’s tumultuous history. And there’s still a lot to excavate. “We can reveal that the city extends to the west, all the way to the famous Deir el-Medina” – an ancient worker’s village inhabited by the crafters and artisans who built the royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings and Valley of the Queens, Hawass said.

Furthermore, in the north, archaeologists have found a large cemetery that has yet to be fully excavated. So far, the team has found a group of rock-cut tombs that can be reached only through stairs carved into the rock – a feature that is also seen at the Valley of the Kings and Valley of the Nobles.

In the coming months, archaeologists plan to excavate these tombs to learn more about the people and treasures buried there.

ASIA, ISRAEL, WORLD

‘Extremely rare’ Rameses II-era burial cave found in Israel

‘Extremely rare’ Rameses II-era burial cave found in Israel

'Extremely rare' Rameses II-era burial cave found in Israel
The cave was filled with bowls, chalices and cooking pots to accompany the dead to the afterlife.

A mechanical digger has uncovered a burial cave from the time of ancient Egyptian Pharaoh Rameses II at an Israeli beach.   The square, man-made cave was found last week at Palmahim National Park when the digger hit its roof. 

In a video released by the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA), archaeologists shine flashlights on pottery that dates back to the reign of the ancient Egyptian king, who died in 1213 BC.

It showed bowls — some containing bones — chalices, cooking pots, storage jars, lamps and bronze arrows or spearheads.

The objects were burial offerings to accompany the dead on their journey to the afterlife, untouched since they were put there about 3,300 years ago.

At least one relatively intact skeleton was also found in two rectangular plots in the corner of the cave.

“The cave may furnish a complete picture of the Late Bronze Age funerary customs,” said Eli Yannai, an IAA Bronze Age expert.

He said it was an “extremely rare … once-in-a-lifetime discovery”.

The provenance of the vessels — from Cyprus, Lebanon, northern Syria, Gaza and Jaffa — showed “lively trading activity that took place along the coast”, Dr Yannai said.

Rameses II controlled Canaan, a territory encompassing modern-day Israel and the Palestinian territories.

Another IAA archaeologist, David Gelman, said the people buried there may have been warriors. 

The contents are believed to be evidence of “lively trading activity”.

“The fact that these people were buried along with weapons, including entire arrows, shows that these people might have been warriors, perhaps they were guards on ships — which may have been the reason they were able to obtain vessels from all around the area,” he said.

“Burial caves are rare as it is, and finding one that hasn’t been touched since it was first used 3,300 years ago is something you rarely ever find.

“It feels like something out of an Indiana Jones movie: just going into the ground and everything is just laying there as it was initially — intact pottery vessels, weapons, vessels made out of bronze, burials just as they were.”

The cave has been resealed and is under guard while archaeologists develop a plan to excavate it, the IAA said.

It said, “a few items” had been looted between its discovery and when it was closed.

EUROPE, ITALY, WORLD

A trove of Ancient Bronzes Unearthed in Italy

A trove of Ancient Bronzes Unearthed in Italy

Among the well-preserved statues were five almost a metre in height.

An “exceptional” trove of bronze statues preserved for thousands of years by mud and boiling water has been discovered in a network of baths built by the Etruscans in Tuscany.

The 24 partly submerged statues, which date back 2,300 years and have been hailed as the most significant find of their kind in 50 years, include a sleeping ephebe lying next to Hygeia, the goddess of health, with a snake wrapped around her arm.

Archaeologists came across the statues during excavations at the ancient spa in San Casciano dei Bagni, near Siena. The modern-day spa, which contains 42 hot springs, is close to the ancient site and is one of Italy’s most popular spa destinations.

A trove of Ancient Bronzes Unearthed in Italy
The ancient Etruscan spa was developed by the Romans and visited by emperors including Augustus.

Close to the ephebe (an adolescent male, typically 17-18 years old) and Hygeia was a statue of Apollo and a host of others representing matrons, children and emperors.

Believed to have been built by the Etruscans in the third century BC, the baths, which include fountains and altars, were made more opulent during the Roman period, with emperors including Augustus frequenting the springs for their health and therapeutic benefits.

Alongside the 24 bronze statues, five of which are almost a metre tall, archaeologists found thousands of coins as well as Etruscan and Latin inscriptions. Visitors are said to have thrown coins into the baths as a gesture for good luck for their health.

Massimo Osanna, the director general of museums at the Italian culture ministry, said the relics were the most significant discovery of their kind since two full-size Greek bronzes of naked bearded warriors were found off the Calabrian coast near Riace in 1972. “It is certainly one of the most significant discoveries of bronzes in the history of the ancient Mediterranean,” Osanna told the Italian news agency Ansa.

The ancient spa was active until the fifth century when the pools were sealed with heavy stone pillars, which the archaeologists removed.

The excavation project at San Casciano dei Bagni has been led by the archaeologist Jacopo Tabolli since 2019. In August, several artefacts, including fertility statues that were thought to have been used as dedications to the gods, were found at the site. Tabolli, a professor at the University for Foreigners of Siena, described the latest discovery as “absolutely unique”.

The Etruscan civilisation thrived in Italy, mostly in the central regions of Tuscany and Umbria, for 500 years before the arrival of the Roman Republic. The Etruscans had a strong influence on Roman cultural and artistic traditions.

Initial analysis of the 24 statues, believed to have been made by local craftsmen between the second and first centuries BC, as well as countless votive offerings discovered at the site, indicates that the relics perhaps originally belonged to elite Etruscan and Roman families, landowners, local lords and Roman emperors.

The discovery of the well-preserved statues has been hailed as the most significant of its kind in 50 years.

Tabolli told Ansa that the hot springs, rich in minerals including calcium and magnesium, remained active until the fifth century, before being closed down, but not destroyed, during Christian times. The pools were sealed with heavy stone pillars while the divine statues were left in the sacred water.

The treasure trove was found after archaeologists removed the covering. “It is the greatest store of statues from ancient Italy and is the only one whose context we can wholly reconstruct,” said Tabolli.

The recently appointed Italian culture minister, Gennaro Sangiuliano, said the “exceptional discovery” confirms once again that “Italy is a country full of huge and unique treasures”.

The relics represent an important testament to the transition between the Etruscan and Roman periods, with the baths being considered a haven of peace.

“Even in historical epochs in which the most awful conflicts were raging outside, inside these pools and on these altars the two worlds, the Etruscan and Roman ones, appear to have coexisted without problems,” said Tabolli.

Excavations at the site will resume next spring, while the winter period will be used to restore and conduct further studies on the relics.

The artefacts will be housed in a 16th-century building recently bought by the culture ministry in the town of San Casciano. The site of the ancient baths will also be developed into an archaeological park.

“All of this will be enhanced and harmonised, and could represent a further opportunity for the spiritual growth of our culture, and also of the cultural industry of our country,” said Sangiuliano.