Rare 2,800-year-old Assyrian Scarab Seal-Amulet Found in Tabor Nature Reserve
A hiker in northern Israel found a rare scarab seal amulet from the First Temple period on the ground in the Tabor Nature Reserve in Lower Galilee.
A scarab amulet used by an Assyrian official was found recently by Erez Abrahamov, 45, of Paduel. Abrahamov found the scarab near the bottom of Tel Rekhesh, associated with the city of Anaharath mentioned in the Book of Joshua.
The find, announced by the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA), hints at the possible presence of Assyrian or Babylonian officials in the region during the eighth century BCE.
It may have been used by an Assyrian or perhaps Babylonian official almost 2,800 years ago, at the time of the First Temple.
At first, I thought it was just a stone, but when I picked it up I could see it was engraved, said Erez Avrahamov. Upon closer inspection, he realized it depicted a mythical creature. He contacted the Israel Antiquities Authority about his discovery.
The rare find was transferred to the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) as required by law, and Abrahamov received a certificate of appreciation for his efforts.
Photo: Israel Antiquities Authority
The scarab, a reddish-brown carnelian stone, is roughly the size of a fingernail. One side of the stone depicts a beetle, while the other is intricately engraved with the figure of a griffin or winged horse. This style of art is typical of the Assyrian and Babylonian civilizations that flourished during this time.
Scarabs were considered sacred by the Egyptians and represented renewal and rebirth.
However, their significance went beyond the spiritual realm. They were used as administrative seals, particularly by high-ranking officials.
The discovery of this scarab in Israel’s Lower Galilee region suggests that Assyrian or Babylonian officials were present at Tel Rekhesh during Assyrian rule.
Archaeologist Itzik Paz, who excavated Tel Rekhesh, studied the find to gain more context. One of the most significant seals discovered here, according to him.
According to Paz, This beetle seal gives us a glimpse into the Assyrian administration that was here. If we can precisely date this seal, it could shed light on Assyrian presence at this strategic site, added Paz.
Archaeologists discover 800-year-old ‘treasure tunnels’ built-in Israel by the Knights Templar Christian warriors
The secrets of the Knights Templar have been unearthed by archaeologists in Israel.
A set of ‘lost’ tunnels leading to a treasure tower were discovered, which the legendary warrior monks would have used to transport their gold around 800 years ago.
Remnants of the soldiers’ extravagant headquarters were also uncovered in the ancient city of Acre, on the coast of Israel.
Researchers found a new network of secret tunnels buried underneath the Israeli city of Acre.
Years of excavations have unearthed historical relics left by the Knights Templar order, which was disbanded by Pope Clement V in 1312 following conflicts between France’s King Philip IV and the crusading monks.
As part of a new documentary series by National Geographic called Lost Cities, archaeologist and show host Albert Lin and his team utilize light detection and ranging technology known as LiDAR.
This innovative tool allows researchers to detect hidden artifacts underneath the Earth’s surface through aerial scanning to produce accurate 3D maps.
According to IFL Science, Lin’s team scanned an area in the port of Acre, where the Knights Templar’s fortress headquarters stood some 800 years ago. The LiDAR survey found a sprawling network of tunnels, and what appears to be a guardhouse, buried underneath today’s modern city of Acre.
Researchers believe these tunnels may have connected the Knights Templar’s fortress with the city’s port, allowing the Templars to carry treasure safely to their treasure tower.
“These warrior monks are the stuff of legend, and so is their gold,” Lin said in the documentary. “During the Crusades, the Knights Templar battle for God, gold, and glory. Somewhere in the modern city of Acre lies their command center, and possibly their treasure.”
The city of Acre was once controlled by the Knights Templar for about 100 years after they lost their headquarters in Jerusalem to the Muslim ruler Saladin in 1187. Following the recent discovery, researchers suspect that the Templars’ gold could still be buried somewhere in these underground tunnels.
The Knights Templar monks were trained as skilled fighters with the objective of protecting and advancing Christianity through the means of warfare. The order also successfully raised a tremendous amount of funds to fuel the Crusades.
Uncovering the lost treasure belonging to a religious order of soldier monks from the time of the Third Crusade is an appealing prospect, no doubt.
But researchers have not found any evidence to confirm the existence of gold belonging to the Knights Templar in the city of Acre. Thus, plans to excavate the newly discovered tunnels have yet to be made.
Acre was controlled by the Knights Templar for about 100 years during the 12th century.
Following the fall of Jerusalem into the hands of Saladin, the founder of the Ayyubid dynasty in Egypt, Pope Gregory VIII called upon Europe’s three Christian monarchs — the rulers of France, Germany, and England — to conduct another crusade to take back the Holy Land.
The first major battle of the campaign was at Acre, located on Jerusalem’s coast. Although the Third Crusade was unsuccessful, it did result in a treaty deal granting safe passage for Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land.
LiDAR technology has been proven to significantly improve methods of scouting hidden artifacts without the need for archaeologists to conduct excavations.
A separate team of researchers in Cambodia recently uncovered a lost city of the Khmer Empire using LiDAR technology.
The ancient site was located deep in the mountainous Cambodian jungles where landmines still covered the fields, making it impossible for archaeologists to have conducted examinations of the site physically.
With LiDAR-driven discoveries popping up around the world, we’re sure to uncover more hidden treasures buried underneath the Earth’s surface—even though those treasures might not all be made of gold.
Ancient treasures found in massive tomb of wealthy family in China
Archaeologists exploring a small village in China announced recently that they discovered three tombs filled with ancient treasures, including gold ornaments, a jade sword and ivory lacquerware.
The tombs are actually a “high-level family cemetery” from the Wei and Jin dynasties, a period of time from 220 A.D. to 589 A.D., experts said.
These are the first such tombs found in the Shunzhuang Village, in China’s Eastern Mengjin district, according to anews release about the discovery.
The tombs are large, and one was determined to be the second-largest tomb from this time period found in the area, second only to the imperial mausoleum in Luoyang, a nearby city. That tomb has multiple chambers and passages, while the other two tombs are smaller in size.
The architecture of the tombs is still being studied by archaeologists.
The excavated tomb.
The three tombs have been robbed “many times,” according to the news release, but still contained treasures including gold ornaments, pottery, coins and more.
There were over 200 artifacts found overall, according to the news release, including ivory lacquerware that had never been seen before.
Those items are believed to be high-end crafts or practical items, and are “symbols of status” showing the wealth and power of the family in the tomb.
Archaeologists also found bone earrings, which are “relatively rare,” with phoenix and bird patterns, and jade objects including a sword and belt hook. Those jade items are believed to be family heirlooms.
One of the pieces of ivory lacquerware
Using the dates of these artifacts and others found in the tombs, archaeologists were able to determine when in the dynasty the tombs were built. The largest tomb was likely built first.
Research in the area will continue, according to the news release. There was no information found about the tomb owners or those buried there, so archaeologists said they will try to determine who might have owned the cemetery and unveil “more historical mysteries.”
2,000-year-old ‘celestial calendar’ discovered in ancient Chinese tomb
Wooden slips marked with Chinese characters that relate to the traditional Tiangan Dizhi astronomical calendar.
Archaeologists in China have unearthed a mysterious set of rectangular wooden pieces linked to an ancient astronomical calendar. The artifacts were discovered inside an exceptionally well-preserved 2,000-year-old tomb in the southwest of the country.
Each of the 23 wooden slips is about an inch (2.5 centimeters) wide and 4 inches (10 cm) long and displays a Chinese character related to the Tiangan Dizhi, or “Ten Heavenly Stems and 12 Earthly Branches” — a traditional Chinese astronomical calendar established during the Shang dynasty, which ruled from about 1600 B.C. to about 1045 B.C.
Archaeologists think one of the slips may have represented whatever was the current year and that the other 22 slips could have been used to specify any particular year in the ancient calendar, according to a translation of a story on the China News website, an agency run by the Chinese government.
A well-preserved tomb, dated to about 2200 years ago, unearthed in the Wulong district of China’s Chongqing municipality.
Circular perforations at the edges of each slip suggest they were once tied together.
However, it’s not yet clear how the set of calendrical wooden slips would have functioned, an expert told Live Science.
This is the first time such objects have been found in an ancient tomb, although the practice of writing characters on strips of wood or bamboo was common in China before the invention of paper.
Golden age
The wooden slips and many other artifacts were discovered earlier this year in a tomb in the Wulong district, about 870 miles (1,400 kilometers) southwest of Beijing, archaeologists from the Chongqing municipal government told the Global Times — which is also run by the Chinese government.
The tomb contains a written list of all the burial items, which also states that it was built in 193 B.C. That places the tomb during the time of the Western Han dynasty, which ruled much of China from 206 B.C. to A.D. 9; it was followed by the Eastern Han dynasty, which ruled until A.D. 220, and together they are considered a “golden age” when many Chinese traditions were established.
Archaeologists and university students working at an archaeological site in the Wulong district.
Archaeologist Wang Meng said the tomb was the best-preserved wooden-chamber tomb ever found in China’s southwest.
Project leader Huang Wei told the Global Times that the tomb also contained more than 600 cultural artifacts, including lacquerware bowls, boxes, jars and plates. It also held bamboo utensils and musical pipes, spears and cooking tripods made from copper, wooden figurines, as well as pottery and bronze objects.
As well as the mysterious wooden slips, more than 600 cultural artifacts were found inside the tomb and indicate that a high-status person had been buried there.
The hundreds of artifacts buried in the tomb include ornate objects of pottery, copper, bronze, wood, bamboo, and lacquerware, such as this plate.
Archaeologists said the tomb was undisturbed and most of the artifacts are undamaged, although they needed cleaning after so long underground.
Calendar mystery
Astronomer Ed Krupp, the director of the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles and author of “Echoes of the Ancient Skies: The Astronomy of Lost Civilizations” (Dover, 2003), who was not involved in the Wulong discovery, told Live Science that while the Tiangan Dizhi calendar is mainstream — it is used in Chinese astrology, for example — the wooden slips found in the Wulong tomb were unusual.
Archaeologists say the newly discovered tomb in Wulong district Is the best preserved from this period in the southwest of China.
As well as recovering the artifacts buried in the ancient tomb, archaeologists have carefully mapped and photographed its interior.
“The wooden slips with calendric notations are significant as the first and only known example of that kind of inscription on that kind of object,” he said in an email.
But it doesn’t appear that the set of wooden slips could have functioned as a calendar; instead, it seems they could have been used to reference any year of the 60-year calendrical cycle, he said.
“If so, they are not ‘books,’ but objects used to highlight a particular year,” he said. He noted the similarity to a practice followed at a Taoist temple in the Chinese city of Suzhou, where each year in the cycle is represented by a statue that is specially marked when it becomes current.
Krupp said that the finds from the Wulong tomb showed that a person of high status had been buried there. “The artifacts interred with the deceased are numerous and very, very fine,” he said. “This is rich, expensive material.”
Scientists discover hundreds of thousands of animal, and human bones in Saudi Arabia cave
Although hyenas look and hunt like canines, they’re members of the mongoose family and therefore more closely related to a cat. However, just like dogs, hyenas have an affinity for hiding bones — it’s just that they can tend to go a bit overboard.
The Umm Jirsan lava tube in Saudi Arabia.
Case in point, archaeologists were left speechless after they stumbled across a lava tube cavern in northwestern Saudi Arabia that is packed with hundreds of thousands of bones gathered by striped hyenas over the course of 7,000 years.
The ultimate hoarders
The gruesome floor filled with ancient animal bones was found deep in a lava tube system — a network of caverns carved by lava flow. The site, known as Umm Jirsan, was discovered in 2007, but it was only recently that researchers ventured deep into the dark caverns.
Mathew Stewart, a zooarchaeologist at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Germany, led a team of researchers who catalogued nearly 2,000 bones and teeth belonging to at least 14 different species, including cattle, horses, camels, rodents, and even humans.
Hundreds of thousands of other bones that are yet to be analyzed still lie on the cavernous floor.
Radiocarbon dating of the samples suggests the animal remains range from 439 to 6,839 years ago, which can only mean these lava tubes had been used as dens for at least 6,000 years.
Images of Saudi Arabia’s Umm Jirsan “hyena cave”: A: Entrance to the western passage and surrounding area. B: Entrance to the western passage. Note the team members on the right-hand wall for scale. C: The back chamber in which the excavation was carried out. D: Plotted sampling square before surface collection and excavation. Credit: Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences.
The striped hyena (Hyaena hyaena) is a bit smaller than spotted and brown hyenas. They have a broad head with dark eyes, a thick muzzle, and large, pointed ears, with a mane of long hair growing along the back.
Their most striking feature is the legs: the front legs are much longer than the hind legs. This gives hyenas their distinctive walk, making them seem like they’re always limping uphill.
Hyenas are nocturnal or crepuscular predators that stay out of sight during the day, preferably in a natural cave or a burrow dug into the hillside. Sometimes they may take over the dens of other creatures where they transport bones to be eaten, fed to the young, or cached for later use.
It’s a well-established fact that hyena dens aren’t tidy at all, being normal to find leftover bones scattered across the floor. However, the lava tube horde stunned even the researchers who were most familiar with the hyenas.
Hyenas will eat an entire human body — except for the skull cap
Although they didn’t find hyenas at the site, the researchers are certain this was one of their dens judging from the cuts, bites, and digestion marks left on the bones.
The presence of human skull fragments was also telling of hyena presence since the animals are known to scavenge through burial grounds in search of food. They normally will consume everything except for the top of the skull.
“The size and composition of the bone accumulation, as well as the presence of hyena skeletal remains and coprolites, suggest that the assemblage was primarily accumulated by striped hyena (Hyaena hyaena),” the authors wrote in a study published in the journal Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences.
Molars and mandibles belonging to wild cows, rabbits, wild goats, camels, and wolves.
It’s highly unlikely that the six skullcaps with gnaw marks on them found at the site belong to humans who were killed by a hyena hunting party.
The mammals are mostly scavengers but when they do hunt they prefer to target hares, birds, and antelopes. However, the possibility that some hunter-gatherers were killed by hyena packs cannot be entirely ruled out.
Today, striped hyenas are a threatened species in Saudia Arabia but thousands of years ago they were common across the Arabian Peninsula.
The current investigation at Umm Jirsan was undertaken as part of the Paleo deserts Project, a large-scale research initiative aimed at tracking environmental and climate change in the Arabian Desert region over the past one million years.
Of particular interest is how human and animal migration in the region waxed and waned with the changing climate. This is a challenging goal since the unforgiving desert climate in the region tends to destroy any exposed organic matter. Luckily, the Umm Jirsan lava tubes create a perfect time capsule that will give scientists material to work with for years to come.
Well-Preserved Cave Lion Cub Found to be a 28,000-Year-Old Female
A nearly 28,000-year-old cave lion cub discovered frozen in the Siberian permafrost is so well preserved, you can still make out each and every one of her whiskers.
Researchers in Sweden claim the cub, nicknamed Sparta, is probably the best-preserved Ice Age animal ever uncovered and describe Sparta in Quaternary. Her teeth, skin, and soft tissue have all been mummified by the ice. Even her organs remain intact.
To date, Sparta is the fourth cave lion cub (Panthera spelaea) found buried in the permafrost of Yakutia, which lies in the northeast corner of Russia. She was discovered in 2018 by local resident Boris Berezhnev who was looking for ancient mammoth tusks among the tundra.
As wildlife hunting and trade have become more restricted, ‘tusk hunters’ like Berezhnev have begun to search for ancient ivory in the icy north. With climate change weakening the permafrost and extending the tusk hunting season, we’re finding more ancient remains – and not just from woolly mammoths. In the past few years, residents in Siberia have pulled woolly rhinos, wolves, brown bears, horses, reindeer, and bison out of the permafrost, and some of these carcasses date as far back as 40,000 years.
Clearly, these icy steppes were once home to numerous large mammals. In fact, a year before finding Sparta near the Semyuelyakh River, Berezhnev found another cave lion carcass just 15 meters (49 feet) away. This one, named Boris, showed slightly more damage, possibly from its permafrost cave collapsing, but it was still remarkably intact.
Researchers in Sweden, who have since helped analyze the carcasses, claim both Boris and Sparta are about one to two months old. Yet despite their physical proximity and similar appearances, Boris is thought to be roughly 15,000 years older, give or take a few centuries.
Today, the little we know about cave lions mostly comes from fossils, tracks, and ancient cave art.
Mummified bodies found in permafrost are some of the best evidence we have of their existence. Their frozen carcasses look remarkably similar to modern lions in many ways, just on a much larger scale and with a much warmer coat. But one of the most iconic features of African lions, their mane, seems to be missing on cave lions.
Figure 6 from the Quaternary study: The appearance of the frozen cave lion cub mummies: (a) female Sparta; (b) male Boris. Photos of lion cubs’ heads from the side: (c) Sparta; (d) Boris; (e) Sparta mummy as seen from above; (f) dark brown ‘brush’ of Sparta’s tail.
In fact, early human artwork from the time suggests cave lions rarely sported manes, or if they did, they were extremely discrete. Some Ice Age paintings, for instance, show dark patterns of colouring on the cave lion’s face, but it’s unclear what that represents.
Boris and Sparta are both juvenile cave lions, which means it’s hard to say how their coats would have developed as they aged. Apart from some dark colouring on the backs of their ears, researchers say they are mostly covered in yellowish-brown fur.
If the cubs had a chance to grow up, experts think their fur would probably have turned more of a light grey to help them camouflage in the cold Siberian Arctic.
The presence of a mane is important because it could tell us about the social structures of cave lions. For example, whether they live by themselves or in groups with clear hierarchies.
At the moment, scientists are still debating whether cave lions during the Ice Age roamed the steppes of Siberia on their own or in pride like modern African lions.
There’s one particular painting in France’s Chauvet cave from the Ice Age that depicts nearly a dozen cave lions, both male and female, in the act of hunting bison.
“Hunting in groups can be more effective than solitary hunting when the prey is large, and cave lions would have had many such prey species available in their ecosystem, for example, mammoths and rhinoceros, when there were no other options available to them,” the authors of the recent analysis write.
“In addition, large pride would have helped to protect their kill from the competition and also to protect the cubs and young from predators.”
For now, this is all just guesswork. Even though we have found some astonishingly intact cave lions in recent years, we still don’t have enough information about these extinct predators to reach any conclusions about their social structures.
Perhaps one day, that could change. Maybe we will unearth another cave lion with some hint about their long-lost lives. Or maybe one day, we will successfully bring cave lions back to life.
“There is a very realistic chance to recreate cave lions, and it would be a lot easier than to clone a woolly mammoth,” palaeontologist and one of the study’s authors Albert Protopopov told the Siberian Times.
Some scientists have suggested we do this with woolly mammoths as well, but cave lions are a much younger species. Protopopov suggests that we could supplement their clones with some of the genes from modern African lions, making the work a bit easier. That’s obviously a controversial idea, and the reality of it is probably still a ways off.
For now, the next step is to sequence the entire genome of both Sparta and Boris. Then, we can figure out what to do with the information we collect.
Tajik Buddha in Nirvana – the Largest in the World: 42 feet long and 9 feet high
In the past, while Taliban soldiers in Afghanistan destroyed two immense statues of Buddha, art historians in neighboring Tajikistan meticulously restored a huge reclining Buddha from the same period. The world’s largest “Buddha in Nirvana.”
Tajikistan carefully preserves the artifacts of Buddhism. The country is also home to the world’s largest clay statue of Buddha in Nirvana.
It is not for nothing that the Buddha in Dushanbe attracts thousands of tourists and pilgrims every year. This is the largest statue of Buddha in Nirvana in the world. Its length is about 14 meters, and it was created as much as 1600 years ago.
The Museum of Antiquities in Dushanbe became famous precisely thanks to her. Buddha today is one of the main attractions of the country.
The terra-cotta figure, found in the 1960s among the ruins of a temple in southern Tajikistan, depicts a reclining Buddha, one hand resting on his hip, the other on a pile of pillows.
Soviet archaeologists discovered the Buddha in the temple at the ruins of Adjina-Tepa, on a wind-swept field 50 miles north of the Afghan border.
Buddha in Nirvana.
Known as Buddha in Nirvana, it was created in the sixth or seventh century and is believed to be a relic from the time when Buddhism ruled over the high mountains and deep valleys of Central Asia and Afghanistan before the advent of Islam.
Like its Afghan cousins, Tajikistan’s Buddha is huge: 42 feet long and 9 feet high. The statue is housed in a hall that is a replica of the room in a Buddhist monastery where the Buddha was once kept, visited by worshipers who entered the room, walked past the statue, and walked out.
For more than 30 years after its discovery, the statue was kept in three separate pieces in the storage rooms of the Tajik Museum of Architecture and History because there was no money to restore it.
Following independence, Tajikistan invited restorers from Russia’s Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg and solicited foreign grants.
A French non-governmental organization, the Agency for Technological Cooperation and Development, helped pay specialists involved in the restoration.
In early 2001, the United States allocated 30 thousand dollars for the restoration of the clay figure. A little later the Japanese government issued a grant of 260 thousand dollars to the museum.
For the final restoration of the Buddha, restorers from the Hermitage, under the direction of Vera Fomin, came to the aid of their Tajik colleagues of the Museum of Antiquities.
The restoration of the giant statue lasted two years (2000-2001). The largest clay statue of Buddha in the world appeared before the visitors of the Museum of Antiquities on September 9, 2000, the day of the 10th anniversary of the independence of Tajikistan.
More than 97% of the population of Tajikistan today are Muslims, and according to the museum’s management, caring for artifacts and ancient objects of worship from the pre-Islamic era speaks of tolerance and respect for other faiths and demonstrates the true face of a Muslim.
Wounds on Colonial-Era Skull Examined in Indonesia
The injuries on the skull of the woman were examined using both digital and ultraviolet light photography.
A possibly enslaved woman may have been executed with a sharp weapon in what is now the Papua province of Indonesia, a new study finds.
Only the skull of the victim is available for analysis, but it revealed that the woman was between 26 and 42 years old when she was killed.
“Multiple sharp force trauma injuries were identified on the frontal, temporal, and occipital bones of the cranium,” the researchers wrote in a paper published Sept. 16 in the International Journal of Osteoarchaeology. The team used digital and ultraviolet photography to examine the injuries on the skull.
The woman lived in what scholars call Indonesia’s “colonial period,” a time between the 16th and mid-20th century when the country was controlled by European powers.
The skull was found on Biak Island in 1935 by scientists from Airlangga University in Indonesia. The year and the word “Biak” (which may refer to the Biak people) is written on the skull, researchers noted in the study.
During the colonial period, Europeans went on slave raids and captured local people. The Dutch, who controlled Indonesia during much of this time period, practiced widespread enslavement.
It’s possible that the woman was killed as part of these raids, but “it is impossible to differentiate if the cranium analyzed in this study belonged to a victim of inter or intra-tribal warfare, or if they were killed as a slave” study lead author Rizky Sugianto Putri, a forensic anthropologist at Airlangga University, told Live Science in an email.
“However, the execution-style wounds on the cranium support that the individual was kneeling or sitting and was not able to defend themselves actively.”
The team noted that female sorcerers known as “mon” were highly sought during raids. That raises the question as to whether this woman could have been a sorcerer.
The identity of her killers is also unclear. “We do not know who killed her. However, the sharp-force trauma wounds were consistent with a parang, a weapon commonly used by Papuan tribes in the colonial period,” Sugianto Putri said.
Little research has been done on human remains in Indonesia that date to the colonial period. Putri hopes that this paper, and future research, will shed more light on how people lived and died during this period.
