World’s oldest-known coin mint identified in China
A team of researchers from Zhengzhou University, the Modern Analysis and Computer Center of Zhengzhou University and Peking University, all in China, has found evidence of what appears to be the oldest coin-minting operation ever uncovered.
Spatial distribution of the minting remains in the foundry’s excavation area: red dots: deposit with clay molds; green dots: deposits with fragments of finished spade coins (drone photograph by Z. Qu; figure by H. Zhao).
In their paper published on the Cambridge University site Antiquity, the group describes their discovery and study of coins and minting molds found at a dig site in Henan Province, China, and what they have learned about it.
Up until now, researchers have believed that the use of coins as a form of currency was first developed in Greece or Turkey.
Coins dug up in what is now modern Turkey, created and used by people of the Lydian Empire, have been dated as far back as 630 B.C. But there is still debate as to their true age due to the dating techniques used.
In this new effort, the researchers found coins in China in the same location as a minting facility, which left behind ashes that could be used for carbon dating—a very accurate means of dating the minting operation.
The coins and molds were found at a site identified as the ancient city of Guanzhuang, which was founded around 800 B.C.
Items found by the researchers included multiple bronze, spade-shaped coins and the clay molds that were used to make them.
Testing of the ashes left by the fires used to melt the metal showed them to be approximately 2,600 years old, which would mean the facility was used to make coins as recently as 550 B.C. and as long ago as 640 B.C., making it the oldest known coin-making facility ever discovered.
Coin SP-1 (pictured) was found in such an excellent state of preservation that its complete shape could be reconstructed. Restored, it has a full length of 143mm, a thickness of 0.9mm, and an original weight of no less than 31g. It bears no inscriptions of its face value or where it was cast – as is typical of the earliest spade coins. Of the second spade coin discovered (Coin SP-2), only the handle and clay core survive.
The researchers suggest the facility was first used to make tools, weapons and other objects as early as 770 B.C. It took another century for the people there to start using their technology to create coins.
They also note that historians have still not agreed on the reason for the creation of currency in the form of coins; some suggest it made buying and selling things easier, while others believe it came about as a way for governments to collect taxes.
Archaeologists have discovered the ruins of a castle that they believe dates from the 13th century. They’ve been working on a mound of land in Wem, Shropshire, that belongs to Soulton Hall, an Elizabethan mansion.
The remains are thought to date back to 1250
The hall was built in the 16th Century, but experts believe the castle remains could date back as far as 1250. Site manager Nat Jackson, of Dig Ventures, said the find was “just amazing”.
“We found what we think might possibly be a castle on the mound.
“We’ve got a substantial wall and substantial blocks of wood dating to about the 13th to 15th century. It’s very, very, exciting,” he told BBC Radio Shropshire.
A stone wall was uncovered at Soulton Hall
A test dig on the previously untouched mound was carried out in 2019, but teams returned in July to continue excavation work. Tim Ashton, the landowner, said his family have been curious about the lumps in the land for over 100 years.
“We’ve always had questions, my grandfather was born in the 1920s and always wondered what it was,” he said.
“The team is fairly comfortable in the time because of the objects we’ve been finding.
“The finds are all from that period, a pilgrims badge, ceramics, and ampulla which is a medieval way of carrying holy water and it was not made for a great deal of time.
“The moat bridge is colossal and we can be confident of the dating on that,” he said.
A pilgrims badge was among the medieval items found
Mr Jackson added: “We think it was quite a small one, dominating the road to Wem and there would have been a moat around it.
“We think we might have found the evidence of the bridge that went over the moat, but this is for further exploration next.”
Dig Ventures has been working with Cardiff University students in their field school.
Students from Cardiff University have been helping out at the site
Mr Ashton said for many of the students, have never met in person since beginning their course due to the pandemic, but others, could not graduate from their course without the field experience.
“They have had very little access to the field, some of them couldn’t graduate until they came to the dig, we’ve been planning it for eight months.
“It’s one of the first teaching digs [taken place since the pandemic] and they essentially found a perfectly preserved timber structure.”
3,700-year-old Babylonian tablet rewrites the history of maths – and shows the Greeks did not develop trigonometry
Tucked away in a seemingly forgotten corner of the Istanbul Archaeology Museum, Daniel Mansfield found what may solve one of ancient math’s biggest questions. First exhumed in 1894 from what is now Baghdad, the circular tablet — broken at the centre with small perpendicular indentations across it — was feared lost to antiquity. But in 2018, a photo of the tablet showed up in Mansfield’s inbox.
Mansfield, a senior lecturer of mathematics at the University of New South Wales Sydney, had suspected the tablet was real. He came across records of its excavation and began the hunt. Word got around about what he was looking for, and then the email came. He knew what he had to do: travel to Turkey and examine it at the museum.
Hidden within this tablet is not only the oldest known display of applied geometry but a new ancient understanding of triangles. It could rewrite what we know about the history of mathematics, Mansfield argues. These findings were published Wednesday in the journal Foundations of Science.
It’s generally thought that trigonometry — a subset of geometry and what’s displayed on the tablet in a crude sense — was developed by ancient Greeks like the philosopher Pythagoras. However, analysis of the tablet suggests it was created 1,000 years before Pythagoras was born. Babylonian mathematics, which already holds a place of renown in the pantheon of ancient math, might’ve been more sophisticated than historians have given it credit for.
“The way we understand trigonometry harks back to ancient Greek astronomers,” Mansfield tells Inverse. “I like to think of the Babylonian understanding of right triangles as an unexpected prequel, which really is an independent story because the Babylonians weren’t using it to measure the stars, they were using it to measure the ground.”
Dr. Mansfield observes the tablet.
WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW FIRST — Mansfield is no stranger to a pair of white gloves and following his mathematical curiosity. Years before discovering this latest tablet, dubbed Si.427, Mansfield was hot on the trail of another ancient Babylonian “document:” Plimpton 322. While the location of this artefact was known (it’s located at Columbia University) its true purpose was not.
Like Si.427, which dates back to roughly 1900 to 1600 BCE, Plimpton 322 is covered in geometric markings — riddles academics have tried to decipher for years. While the reigning theory was that these markings were a kind of teacher’s cheat code for Babylonian homework problems, Mansfield and colleagues were not convinced. In a 2017 paper, Mansfield and colleagues propose Plimpton 322 might be a kind of proto-trigonometry table of values — suggesting it predates the development of trigonometry as we know it today.
The Plimpton 322 clay tablet: it’s about the size of a postcard.
“A modern analogy would be to say that it contains a mix of elementary school problems alongside the unsolved conjectures of mathematics,” writes Mansfield in the new paper.
WHAT’S NEW — Now, Mansfield argues the discovery of Si.427 could confirm his Plimpton 322 hunch. In essence, Si.427 is argued to be a case study of how this proto-trig could be used in practice.
Si.427 is what’s known as a cadastral document. These are used to document the boundaries of land ownership. There are other examples on record, but Mansfield argues this tablet is the oldest known example from the Old Babylonian period — a range that stretches from 1900 BCE to 1600 BCE. On the tablet are legal and geometry details about a field that was split after some of it were sold.
This research suggests Plimpton 322 was used similarly: It might have been a surveyor’s cheat sheet, instead of a teacher’s. It’s possible Plimpton 322 was the theoretical solution to the practical problems a surveyor using Si.427 might have encountered.
“It’s a discovery that has come to us far outside our mathematical culture,” Mansfield says. “It seems new and fresh to us, even though it’s almost 4,000 years old.”
Using the principles of right triangles and perpendicular lines, ancient surveyors could evenly divide the land to avoid disputing neighbours.
WHY IT MATTERS — While these tablets are the kind of thing you might easily walk past on display in a museum, Mansfield said this discovery could actually have a huge implication for how we understand these ancient mathematics. Namely, it means mathematicians were working with so-called Pythagorean triples (trios of numbers that satisfy the infamous a^2+b^2 = c^2 equation) long before Pythagoras himself was even born. It also helps answer a slightly less academic question: How do you evenly divide up disputed land?
“This is from a period where land is starting to become private — people started thinking about the land in terms of ‘my land and your land,’ wanting to establish a proper boundary to have positive neighbourly relationships,” Mansfield explains in a statement.
“And this is what this tablet immediately says. It’s a field being split, and new boundaries are made.”
HOW DOES IT WORK? — As for how triangles sketched in clay translate to farmer’s fields, it all comes down to perpendicular lines. Essentially, surveyors would choose two Pythagorean triples (which were inherently right triangles) and extend the boundary line of the resultant rectangle by eye to create true perpendicular lines that spread across the entire field.
“This proves that our Babylonian surveyor had a solid theoretical understanding of the geometry of rectangles and right triangles and used it to solve practical problems,” Mansfield says in the video.
Extending the boundary of these triangles allowed surveyors to create incredibly straight lines without manually measuring or laying them out beforehand.
There are also instances of resizing these triangles to better fit the physical shape of the field at hand, which surveyors would’ve liked done by referencing a table of trig values like Plimpton 322, the study suggests. This table would’ve been a comprehensive list of Pythagorean triples and the steps to resizing them.
WHAT’S NEXT — This discovery may have laid to rest one ancient math mystery, there’s still plenty more where that came from, Mansfield says.
“Ancient mathematics is not as sophisticated as modern mathematics,” he says. “But sometimes you want to simple answers instead of sophisticated ones.”
He’s not “just talking about how mathematics students want their exams to be.” The advantage of a simple approach is its quickness — and Mansfield wants to examine whether or not this approach has any real-world applications.
“This approach might be of benefit in computer graphics or any application where speed is more important than precision,” he says.
Abstract: Plimpton 322 is one of the most sophisticated and interesting mathematical objects from antiquity. It is often regarded as teacher’s list of school problems, however new analysis suggests that it relates to a particular geometric problem in contemporary surveying.
Iraq says the US returning 17,000 looted ancient treasures
Gilgamesh was a major hero in ancient Mesopotamian mythology and the protagonist of the Epic of Gilgamesh
Next month, museum-goers in Iraq are in for a surprise. Eighteen years after it was looted from the city, a clay tablet bearing the Epic of Gilgamesh, regarded as one of the world’s oldest surviving pieces of literature, is set to return to the place of its birth.
Iraq Tuesday reclaimed more than 17,000 ancient artefacts looted and smuggled out of the country after the US invasion in 2003, reported The New York Times.
About 12,000 of the returned artifacts had been housed in the Museum of the Bible in Washington DC and 5,381 had been held by Cornell University. Both institutions have been pulled up by US authorities in the past for holding artifacts that were not acquired through appropriate means.
Artifacts seized by the U.S. government and returned to Iraq are displayed at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Baghdad, Iraq August 3, 2021.
Iraqi culture and foreign ministries disclosed to the NYT that US authorities had reached an agreement with Iraq to return items seized from dealers and museums in the US. Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi brought back the artifacts on his plane, after making an official visit to the US last week.
After 1991, when the Iraqi government lost control of parts of southern Iraq following the first Gulf War, widespread looting occurred at historical sites. The looting continued after the US-led invasion in 2003 — the year that also witnessed the end of the Saddam Hussein regime.
Many artefacts were also smuggled or destroyed by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) militants during the period between 2014 and 2017 when it controlled some parts of Iraq.
The Gilgamesh tablet
The Gilgamesh tablet is a prized and much-anticipated retrieval.
The 3,500-year-old clay tablet bearing the Epic of Gilgamesh is considered one of the world’s first pieces of notable literature. The epic is believed to predate Homer’s Iliad by 1,500 years and is one of the beloved tales of Mesopotamia — present-day Iraq.
The Epic of Gilgamesh is a 3,500-year-old Sumerian tale considered one of the world’s first pieces of literature
The epic is based on the many adventures of the handsome athletic king of Uruk, Gilgamesh (2900–2350 BC).
Many of the other clay tablets and seals that have been returned by the US also are linked to Mesopotamia — one of the world’s earliest civilisations — and even to Irisagrig, a lost ancient city.
The tablet will return to Iraq in September after legal procedures are wrapped up, Iraq’s Culture Minister Hassan Nadhem told Reuters. Speaking on the cultural value of the artifacts, he told The New York Times: “This is not just about thousands of tablets coming back to Iraq again — it is about the Iraqi people.”
Back to places of origin
In 2013, the US Justice Department urged Cornell University to give back thousands of ancient tablets believed to have been looted from Iraq in the 1990s, according to the Los Angeles Times.
In 2019, US authorities seized the Gilgamesh tablet displayed at the Washington museum after it was revealed to have been smuggled, auctioned and sold to an art dealer in Oklahoma.
An American antiquities dealer had bought the tablet from a London-based dealer in 2003, the US Department of Justice said in a statement last week.
Australia, too, in a statement last week, announced it would return 14 works of art, worth a combined $3 million, to the Indian government.
Machu Picchu in Peru is 20 Years Older Than Previously Thought, Finds Study
The Inca citadel of Machu Picchu in Peru was occupied from around 1420-1530 AD, several decades earlier than previously thought, according to a new study.
A team of researchers, led by Richard Burger, a professor of anthropology at Yale University, used radiocarbon dating to reveal that the emperor Pachacuti, who built Machu Picchu, rose to power earlier than expected, according to a news release published Tuesday.
This means Pachacuti’s early conquests took place earlier, helping to explain how the Inca Empire became the largest and most powerful in pre-Columbian America.
Based on historical documents, it was thought that Machu Picchu was built after 1440, or maybe even 1450. However, Burger and his team used accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) dating of human remains to get a more accurate picture.
AMS works on even small amounts of organic material, which enlarges the pool of skeletons that can be studied. The team looked at 26 individuals from cemeteries at Machu Picchu that were recovered from the site during excavations in 1912.
Machu Picchu is pictured in 1911.
The bodies were buried under boulders, overhanging cliffs or shallow caves, sealed with masonry walls, according to the study. There were also grave goods such as ceramics and bronze and silver shawl pins.
“This is the first study based on scientific evidence to provide an estimate for the founding of Machu Picchu and the length of its occupation,” Burger said in the news release.
The historical records were written by Spanish conquistadors following their takeover of the area, and the results of the study question the merit of drawing conclusions based on these kinds of documents, according to researchers.
Although the study acknowledges the “limitations” of radiocarbon dating, the researchers said the documentary evidence is unreliable.
“Perhaps the time has come for the radiocarbon evidence to assume priority in reconstructions of the chronology of the Inca emperors and the dating of Inca monumental sites such as Machu Picchu,” reads the study.
The study was published in the journal Antiquity.
Revered as one of the world’s great archaeological sites, Machu Picchu perches between two mountains.
The site is made up of roughly 200 stone structures, whose granite walls remain in good shape although the thatched roofs are long gone.
These include a ceremonial bathhouse, temples, granaries and aqueducts. One, known as the Hut of the Caretaker of the Funerary Rock, is thought to have been used for embalming dead aristocrats.
Archaeologists digging near the ancient Talayotic settlement of Son Catlar in Menorca, Spain have unearthed a treasure trove of artefacts from Roman soldiers, dating back to around 100 B.C.
The discovery, which happened in late July, includes an assortment of items found at the site, according to a statement from the University of Alicante.
Included in the find were ‘weapons, knives, three arrowheads, spearheads, projectiles, surgical tools, a bronze spatula probe, and so on,’ the statement explained.
Son Catlar is the largest Talayotic settlement in the area, surrounded by a stone wall that measures 2,850 feet (870m) in length, according to Heritage Daily.
Occupation in the area started between 2,000 and 1,200 B.C. and lasted until the late Roman period, which ended around 476 A.D.
Archaeologists digging near the Talayotic settlement in Menorca, Spain have unearthed a treasure trove of artefacts from Roman soldiers
Other items include three arrowheads, spearheads, projectiles, surgical tools, a bronze spatula probe and more
It’s likely that the stone barrier was built several hundred years prior, between the 5th and 4th centuries, B.C., according to Spanish news outlet La Vanguardia.
It’s possible that the Roman soldiers, who conquered the area in the second century B.C., associated the stone barrier with Janus – the Roman god of doors, gates and transitions – given how superstitious they were, Heritage Daily added.
‘This type of gate was characteristic of Punic culture, and it was used as a defence system to protect against possible sieges by the Romans,’ the statement from the university explained.
‘Roman soldiers were very superstitious and used to perform these rites. At that time, the world of gates was charged with magic.
The Romans gave a sacred value to the gates of the cities, and sealing one definitively would entail certain actions of a magical nature.’
The dig leader, Fernando Prados, suggested it was the Roman superstitions that may have led to the discoveries being in such good condition, as the soldiers believed they had a ‘magical protective character … against evil spirits when sealing doors.’
‘The conservation of the entire perimeter of the wall at Son Catlar makes the site a source of great value, as it provides a great deal of scope for studying the archaeology of conflict and war,’ Prados added in the statement.
The wall also has sentry boxes and square towers known as Talayots, which gives the region its name, according to the World Heritage Convention.
It was built using cyclonic masonry, which according to the WHC, meant it was constructed ‘without mortar,’ only using the blocks themselves.
The wall was later strengthened, possibly due to the Roman conquest of the territory or the Punic Wars, the university added.
The Punic Wars took place from 264 to 146 B.C., and artefacts stemming from these times have been recovered in recent years.
In 2013, archaeologists found a treasure trove of items, including helmets, weapons and ancient bronze battle rams found off the Sicilian coast from 2013, from the First Punic War.
A gold and garnet sword pyramid lost by a Sutton Hoo-era lord “careening around the countryside” on his horse has been discovered by a metal detectorist. The Anglo-Saxon object was found in the Breckland area of Norfolk in April.
A metal detectorist discovered the mount on 11 April
Finds liaison officer Helen Geake said the garnets are Indian or Sri Lankan, revealing the far-flung nature of trade links in the 6th and 7th Centuries.
Sword pyramids come in pairs so its loss “was like losing one earring – very annoying”, she said.
The tiny 12mm by 11.9mm (0.4in by 0.4in) mount dates to about AD560 to 630, at a time when Norfolk was part of the Kingdom of East Anglia.
Dr Geake said: “It would have been owned by somebody in the entourage of a great lord or Anglo-Saxon king, and he would have been a lord or thegn [a medieval nobleman] who might have found his way into the history books.
“They or their lord had access to gold and garnets and to high craftsmanship.”
The extremely fine foil on its back is believed to have been created by techniques like a modern pantograph, used to reduce the size of the design.
The mounts were part of the system that bound a sword to its scabbard.
“It’s believed they made it a bit more of an effort to get the sword out of the scabbard, possibly acting as a check on an angry reaction,” Dr Geake said.
Norfolk finds liaison officer Helen Geake said it revealed the remarkable craft skills of the Anglo-Saxons
They are less commonly found in graves, but are “increasingly common” as stray finds, probably as accidental losses. Dr Geake said: “Lords would have been careening about the countryside on their horses and they’d lose them.”
The find has been reported to the Norfolk Coroner, as required by the Treasure Act.
German Museum Returns Native American Leader’s Shirt
With German institutions placing a renewed emphasis on the repatriation of various objects in their holdings, the Weltkulturen Museum in Frankfurt said this week that it had given the leather shirt of Chief Daniel Hollow Horn Bear (Mato He Oklogeca), of the Teton Lakota, to his great-grandson Chief Duane Hollow Horn Bear. In a press release, the museum cited “moral and ethical reasons” for the return.
The leather shirt was handed over to Duane Hollow Horn Bear on June 12 in Rosebud, South Dakota. Duane Hollow Horn Bear had visited the Weltkulturen Museum in 2019 and submitted a request for the shirt’s return that included a historic portrait photograph, dated to 1900, by John Alvin Anderson.
The picture showed Chief Daniel Hollow Horn Bear, who died in 1913, wearing the shirt. Chief Daniel Hollow Horn Bear was a well-respected leader and politician who advocated for the rights of his people and was often a chief negotiator with the U.S. government.
Daniel Hollow Horn Bear, photographed in 1900, wearing the shirt formerly in the collection of the Weltkulturen Museum, Frankfurt
In 2019, when he requested the shirt’s return, Chief Duane Hollow Horn Bear said in a video documenting the repatriation process, “It’s been a hard journey just to come here today. I’m humbled not just to see [his shirt] in a picture, but to hold it in my hand like I’m holding his hand. . . . Grandpa come home. We need you.”
In a statement, the Weltkulturen Museum said, “The Chief’s shirt is a culturally specific, identity-forming object of religious significance to the Teton Lakota Indigenous community.
Chief Daniel Hollow Horn Bear (Mato He Oklogeca)’s a leather shirt.
It bears special patterns of brightly coloured glass beads and human hair, which are undoubtedly attributable to the Hollow Horn Bear family and prove personal possession prior to 1906.
For Chief Duane Hollow Horn Bear and his family, the return of the shirt is like the return of the great-grandfather himself.”
The Weltkulturen Museum came into possession of the shirt in 1908 through an exchange with the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
For the past 30 years, the shirt had been on permanent loan and display to the German Leather Museum in the nearby town of Offenbach.
The AMNH had received the shirt only two years earlier as part of a larger donation by James Graham Phelps Stokes, a New York millionaire and philanthropist whose family’s wealth came from the Phelps-Dodge Company.
In its release announcing the shirt’s repatriation, the Weltkulturen Museum said, “The circumstances under which the shirt previously came into the possession of J.G. Phelps could not be reconstructed.”
In a statement, Ina Hartwig, deputy mayor in charge of Culture and Science for the City of Frankfurt am Main, said “Provenance research is one of the great challenges facing museums in the 21st century.
The Frankfurt museum landscape has been taking this challenge very seriously for years and is subjecting its collections to a systematic revision.
Even if it represents a loss for the collection and the object was legally acquired by the Weltkulturen Museum: I see the return of the leather shirt to Chief Duane Hollow Horn Bear as an obligation that outweighs the formal legal situation.”
