Luxurious 1,200-year-old mansion found in southern Israel
Between two mosques in Rahat, archaeologists uncover an opulent home with a finished basement that likely belonged to a wealthy landowner in the early Islamic Period
Luxury can be found in unexpected places. Archaeologists announced Tuesday the discovery of a 1,200-year-old estate in Israel’s southern Negev desert, boasting unique underground structures that allowed its owners to overcome the searing summer heat.
In a statement on the discovery, the Israel Antiquities Authority said the sprawling property may have been the residence of a wealthy landowner overseeing farmsteads in the area.
It was discovered during excavations conducted ahead of the expansion of the Bedouin city of Rahat, just north of Beersheba.
Archaeologists said the mansion, dated to the early Islamic Period in the 8th or 9th century CE, had four wings and was erected around the main courtyard. Finely coloured frescoes adorned the walls and floor in one of the wings, they said, while other rooms featured very large ovens, likely used for cooking.
The most surprising discovery, however, was made under the courtyard – a three-meter-deep cistern dug into the rock that provided the residents with cool water throughout the year, and adjoining vaulted structures.
Workers are seen on a 1,200-year-old rural estate, discovered during excavations by the Israel Antiquities Authority during the expansion of the town of Rahat.
Aerial view of the rural estate uncovered in Rahat, with the vaulted complex in the centre.
The archaeologists directing the IAA excavation, Oren Shmueli, Elena Kogan-Zehavi and Noé D. Michael, said that the subterranean vaulted structures were used to store foodstuffs, and enabled the residents to move around freely underground without having to emerge into the punishing sun.
“The luxurious estate and the unique impressive underground vaults are evidence of the owners’ means,” the archaeologists said in the statement.
The water cistern.
“Their high status and wealth allowed them to build a luxurious mansion that served as a residence and for entertaining; we can study the construction methods and architectural styles, as well as learn about daily life in the Negev at the beginning of Islamic rule,” they said.
Eli Eskosido, the director of the IAA, touted the archaeologists’ cooperation with the local community in Rahat, among whom he said the discovery was generating “interest and excitement.”
The estate, he added, “was uncovered in an area located between two ancient mosques, perhaps among the earliest ever discovered.
The Israel Antiquities Authority and the Authority for the Development and Settlement of the Bedouin are planning together to conserve and exhibit the finds to the general public.”
The IAA said that on Thursday the site would be open to the public for free public tours, including family digging and sieving activities.
Ancient DNA adds to evidence of Native Americans’ east Asian ancestry
An ancient woman’s skull from south-west China suggests she was related to a population that migrated from east Asia to North America 14,000 years ago, DNA has shown.
Researchers have sequenced the genomes of ancient human fossils from the Late Pleistocene in southern China for the first time. Current Biology publishes data that suggests the mysterious hominid may have been related to an extinct maternal branch of modern humans that may have contributed to Native American origins.
Bing Su of the Kunming Institute of Zoology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences says ancient DNA techniques are compelling. The Red Deer Cave dwellers were modern humans rather than archaic species like Neanderthals or Denisovans, despite their unusual morphological features.
Side view of an ancient skull found in Red Deer Cave, China
Genomes from these fossils were compared with genomes from people around the globe. Upon further investigation, they determined that the bones belonged to someone with roots in East Asian Native American culture.
These findings, combined with data from earlier research, led the researchers to propose that some South East Asians had reached Siberia tens of thousands of years ago via Japan along the coast of present-day East China.
In this way, they reached North America for the first time by crossing the Bering Strait, which separates Asia from North America. Almost 30 years ago, Chinese archaeologists discovered large bone fragments in a cave in the Yunnan province, in the south of the country, called Maludong or Red Deer, kickstarting the path to the recent find.
According to carbon dating, the fossils date from the Late Pleistocene, approximately 14,000 years ago, when modern humans were migrating around the globe.
Researchers recovered a hominid’s skull with modern and archaic features in the cave. For example, a Neanderthal-like skull shape and smaller brains were seen in the specimens.
Due to this, some anthropologists believed that the skull likely belonged to an unknown archaic human species or to a hybrid population of archaics and modern humans.
In 2018, Bing Su and his colleagues successfully extracted ancient DNA from the skull in collaboration with Xueping Ji.
This was in collaboration with the Yunnan Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology. The genome of the hominid shows that it descended from an extinct maternal lineage of modern humans. These descendants live in East Asia, the Indochinese peninsula, and the Southeast Asian islands.
The findings also demonstrate that southern East Asian hominins possessed more genetic and morphological diversity than northern East Asians during the Late Pleistocene. Based on this, Su suggests that the first humans in East Asia settled in the south before some moved north.
The study provides important evidence for understanding early human migration, Su says. Next, the team plans to sequence more ancient human DNA using fossils from southern East Asia, especially those that predate the Red Deer Cave dwellers.
In addition to a better understanding of how our ancestors migrated, these data will also be helpful in understanding how humans have changed their physical appearance over time as they adapted to a changing environment. Su concludes: “These data may provide us with information about how humans have changed their physical appearance as they have adapted to local environments over time.”
Have Scholars Finally Deciphered a Mysterious Ancient Script?
A mysterious writing system that is nearly as old as cuneiform but used a different set of symbols and that has remained undeciphered for centuries may have finally been deciphered.
Over the past century, archaeologists have uncovered more than 1,600 Proto-Elamite inscriptions, but only about 43 in Linear Elamite, scattered widely across Iran.
Based on ancient silver vessels, the researchers propose a new method for decoding the Linear Elamite script, which contains 80 symbols written left to right in vertical columns.
Ancient writing systems are among the most difficult to crack.
The Rosetta Stone, which translated a Demotic decree (the language of everyday ancient Egyptians) into Greek and hieroglyphics, gave us an understanding of Egyptian hieroglyphics in 1799. Had a French soldier not stumbled across it by chance, we would have had a pretty difficult time understanding Egyptian writing. But even with the discovery of the precious stone, Jean-Francois Champollion spent over two decades trying to decipher the strange Egyptian symbols.
Among millennia-old scripts, only a few are unreadable. An obscure system used in what is now Iran might finally be deciphered thanks to a team of European scholars led by French archaeologist Francois Desset.
“This is one of the major archaeological discoveries of the last decades,” explains Massimo Vidale, an archaeologist at the University of Padua who was not involved in the research. “It was based on the same approach of Champollion’s breakthrough—identifying and reading phonetically the names of kings.”
Proto-Elamite, derived from Linear Elamite, was used between 2500 and 2220 BC and is named such because its registers are similar to Linear Cretan. Inscriptions on 40 documents from Susa, the ancient urban oasis and capital of Elam, a bustling society that was once one of the first to use written symbols, are the only indications of its existence. Only a partial decipherment of this writing had been accomplished.
Those circumstances have now changed, according to Desset, who gained access to an unusual collection of silver vases encircled with cuneiform and Linear Elamite script.
They were excavated in the 1920s and sold to Western merchants, so their authenticity and provenance have been questioned. Nevertheless, analysis of the vessels revealed that they were ancient rather than modern forgeries.
This image depicts the 72 deciphered alpha-syllabic signs used in Linear Elamite’s transliteration system.
It is thought that they were discovered in a royal cemetery hundreds of kilometres southeast of Susa, dating back to around 2000 BC, as for their origin. According to experts, Elamite linear script was in use around this time.
The silver vases, according to the study, contain the oldest and most complete examples of Royal Elamite inscriptions in cuneiform script. They belonged to two different dynasties.
According to Desset, the vessels were ‘the jackpot’ for deciphering Linear Elamite due to their juxtaposition of inscriptions.
Several cuneiform names, including those of well-known Elamite kings, could now be compared with symbols in Linear Elamite, including Šilhaha. The French professor used repeated symbols that are likely proper names to interpret the geometric shapes of the inscriptions. The verbs “made” and “gave” were also translated by him.
More than 96 per cent of known linear Elamite symbols were able to be read by Desset and his co-authors. “Even if a complete decipherment cannot yet be claimed, mainly due to the limited number of inscriptions, we are not far away,” the experts write in their study.
These findings may shed light on a previously unknown society that flourished between ancient Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley in the dawn of civilization if the researchers are right and their peers are debating the claim hotly.
Archaeologists uncover the ancient city and hundreds of artefacts close to Baghdad
An archaeological dig in Al-Suwaira, some 60km south of Baghdad, has revealed an ancient Parthian (247BC to 224AD) city and unearthed more than 200 artefacts.
A Parthian site has been discovered south of Baghdad
According to a statement from Iraq’s State Board of Antiquities and Heritage (SBAH) the recently completed 150-day mission took place in Abu Ghafil, near the Al-Suwaira air base, and revealed wooden residential structures as well as 233 artefacts that were sent to the Iraq Museum in Baghdad.
“It was a salvage project to dig two mounds at the site of Abu Ghafil,” the archaeologist Mohammed Sabri, the head of the expedition, explains.
“The main discovery was a manufacturing and residential settlement of the Parthian period, which I believe was a kind of a vassal settlement.”
The artefacts that were found during excavation, he says, are mainly household items and include “a typical, simple Parthian jar with a tipped base that was common in that era”.
The Parthian empire was located on the Silk Road trade route between the Roman Empire in the Mediterranean Basin and the Han Dynasty of China, and it encompassed Persian, Hellenistic and regional cultures.
Around 233 artefacts have been sent to the Iraq Museum in Baghdad, including this well-preserved vase
Sabri says that the site, near the air base that defended Baghdad against Iranian missiles in the 1980s, was officially discovered in 2017 but that it may have been referenced in a mid-20th century survey conducted by the US archaeologist and scholar McGuire Gibson.
“In accordance with the latest surveys conducted by Iraqi staff of the SBAH, we have about 15,000 archaeological sites, registered and non-registered [in Iraq]” he explains.
“Some were registered from the beginning of the last century and even before that. To dig this number of sites we will need millions of years since it is a precise, scientific work that requires patience, trillions of dinars, and tens of thousands of archaeologists to supervise the work.”
The SBAH has long-term plans, he says, “to dig a specific number of sites for scientific and other practical reasons, besides the restoration, rehabilitation and survey projects in our ancient and heritage sites”.
Chaos and instability unleashed after the 2003 invasion, Isis’s reign of terror, as well as the recent pandemic, have slowed some of SBAH’s work. But the archaeologist Tobin Hartnell of the American University of Iraq, Sulaimani—who will accompany a tour of ancient sites this fall organised by the Detroit-based tourism company Spiekermann Travel—notes that, even before 2003, “Under Saddam, the Parthian era sites were often overlooked as their restoration could appear to be glorifying the Persian empire at the time of the Iran/Iraq war”.
The exception, Hartnell says, was Hatra (recently restored post-Isis) which was celebrated and maintained by Saddam because of its association with “Arab kings”.
He says: “Lots of major projects were focused more on the ancient Tigris/Euphrates area rather than Wasit that was further east and closer to Iran. Just another reason why this is an underappreciated part of Iraq’s heritage.”
Hartnell says the new discovery is significant. “Wasit was a major industrial region of ancient and medieval Iraq whose history will be illuminated by this project.”
Construction workers employed in road building near the Onon River in the Khentii province of Mongolia, have discovered a mass ԍʀᴀvᴇ containing the remains of many ᴅozᴇɴs of human coʀᴘsᴇs lying upon a large rudimentary stone structure.
Forensic experts and archaeologists were called to the site, which was revealed to be a Mongolian royal tomb from the 13th century that the scientists believe to be Genghis Khan’s.
The team of scientists affiliated with the University of Beijing has concluded that the numerous skeletons ʙuʀιᴇᴅ on top of the structure were most likely the slaves who built it and who were then мᴀssᴀcʀᴇᴅ to keep the secret of the location.
The remains of twelve horses were also found on the site, certainly sᴀcʀιғιcᴇᴅ to accompany the Great Khan in death.
A total of 68 skeletons were found ʙuʀιᴇᴅ together, almost directly over the top of a rather crude stone structure
The content of the tomb was scattered and badly deteriorated, presumably due to the fact that the site was located beneath the river bed for hundreds of years until the course of the Onon river changed in the 18th century. The ʀᴇмᴀιɴs of a tall male and sixteen female skeletons were identified among hundreds of gold and silver artefacts and thousands of coins.
The women are presumed to have been wives and concubines of the leader, who were κιʟʟᴇᴅ to accompany the warlord in the afterlife. The amount of treasure and the number of sᴀcʀιғιcᴇᴅ animals and people immediately led the archaeologists to consider that the site was certainly the ʙuʀιᴇᴅ site of a really powerful Mongol warlord.
After realizing an extensive set of tests and analysis, they were able to confirm that the ʙoᴅʏ belonged to a man aged between 60 and 75, who ᴅιᴇᴅ between 1215 and 1235 AD. Both the age, the date, the location, and the opulence of the site seem to confirm that the tomb does indeed belong to Genghis Khan
The simple rock dome discovered by the archaeologists was presumably ʙuʀιᴇᴅ beneath the Onon river for centuries.
The incontestable historical importance of Genghis Khan makes this new discovery one of the most important in the history of archaeology. Born Temüjin (which means “of iron”), he was the founder and ԍʀᴇᴀтκнᴀɴ (emperor) of the Mongol Empire, which became the largest contiguous empire in history after his demise.
He is known for uniting the tribes of Mongolia and merging them into one before launching a series of military campaigns in cнιɴᴀ, Central Asia, the Middle East and even Eastern Europe.
He conquered more than 31 million square kilometres of land during his lifetime. His legacy has taken many forms besides his conquest and can still be found today, making him one of the most influential men in the history of mankind.
He connected the East and the West through the creation of the Silk Route, a trade route that would become and remain for centuries, the main network of trade and cultural transmission in Eurasia, opening long-distance, political and economic interactions between the civilizations.
Genghis Khan also has an incredible number of descendants, as some genetic studies have shown that he could be the direct ancestor of 1 human out of every 200 who are alive today. In Mongolia alone, as many as 200,000 of the country’s 2 million people could be Genghis Khan descendants.
Reconstruction Offers a Glimpse of the Face of “Penang Woman”
GEORGE TOWN: Five years after researchers from Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM) found a prehistoric human skeleton, dubbed the “Penang Woman”, believed to be at least 5,000 years old, they scored another major breakthrough.
Prehistoric 5,000-year-old ‘Penang Woman’ finally has a face
This time around, the same researchers have put a face to the Penang Woman using the Forensic Facial Approximation method. The skeleton was found during the construction of a gallery for the Guar Kepah neolithic site in Kepala Batas in 2017.
With the help of Cicero Moraes, a 3D graphics expert from Brazil, they used the 3D virtual reconstruction method to create the Penang Woman’s facial features based on a scientific date obtained from a CT scan performed on the skeleton.
The same team was also instrumental in reconstructing the facial features for the more than 10,000-year-old “Perak Man” using the same method last year.
Shaiful Idzwan Shahidan, the team’s correspondent author, said they took between three and four months to come out with the facial features, which was completed on July 5.
A paper, titled “Forensic Facial Approximation of 5000-Year-Old Female Skull from Shell Midden in Guar Kepah, Malaysia”, was published in the Journal of Applied Sciences on Aug 5.
Shaiful said when they found the skeleton back in 2017, one of their objectives was to conduct a more in-depth study about the life of the Penang Woman.
“We were curious to know how the Penang Woman really looked back then. From the facial features, we can tell that Penang Woman is possibly a mixture between the Australomelanesoid and Mongoloids.
“It is likely that the Guar Kepah population then was a mixture of the Australomelanesian and Mongoloid races,” he said.
Shaiful, however, said a more detailed study could be conducted if Malaysia brought back the 41 skeletons from three shell middens in Guar Kepah, which were excavated by British archaeologists between 1851 and 1934 and are currently at the National Natuurhistorisch Museum in Leiden, Holland.
When the Penang Woman skeleton was found in April 2017, researchers came across a skull, a femur bone and a rib cage beneath the floor of a house which had been demolished to make way for the gallery.
The skeletal remains were the first and only remaining Neolithic skeleton found in a shell midden in Malaysia. Shell middens refer to mounds of kitchen debris consisting mostly of shells and other food remnants and indicate ancient human settlements and are sometimes used as burial sites.
The remains were discovered in shell midden C with her arms folded and surrounded by pottery, stone tools and several types of shells, a sign of her important position in her society.
In total, 41 skeletons from three shell middens, identified as A, B and C in Guar Kepah, were excavated by British archaeologists between 1851 and 1934 and those skeletons are now at the National Natuurhistorisch Museum in Leiden, Holland.
The original Penang Woman is being carefully conserved in USM as it had to be in a temperature and humidity-controlled environment, which meant the skeleton currently showcased at the gallery is a replica of the original.
The cache of Ancient Knucklebones Discovered in Israel
In this vale of tears, any help peering into the future would be useful. Now, archaeologists report finding over 600 astragali – small bones from quadruped feet – in the ancient city of Maresha, central Israel. Dating to the city’s Hellenistic period some 2,300 years ago, what the bones were used for must remain in the realm of speculation. But there are clear indications that some were used to attempt to contact the gods and others were used to play games.
Ovine or caprine knuckle and ankle bones, or even artificial versions thereof – and sometimes small bones from cow feet or gazelle as well – were popular throughout the Levant and classical world, and even beyond. However, the amount found in recent excavations in Maresha was unusually large. Their discovery was reported recently in the British archaeological journal the Levant, by Dr. Lee Perry-Gal of the Israel Antiquities Authority, Prof. Adi Erlich of the Zinman Institute of Archaeology at the University of Haifa and Dr. Ian Stern of the Hebrew Union College, Jerusalem.
When one finds bones from the feet of herbivores in a cultural context, they’re usually remnants from meals, Perry-Gal points out. Sheep and goat have been staples in the Levantine diet since their domestication about 10,000 years ago in southeast Turkey. The hint to archaeologists that a bone is more than a bone is when it is found in disproportion, she explains.
Say you find a thigh bone; fine; with it you find a few toe bones, fine; if you find 500 toe bones per thigh bone, you have a phenomenon that begs interpretation, Perry-Gal says.
It bears adding that another vast collection of astragali had been discovered at Megiddo, about 680 of the things. Around the ancient world, sometimes astragali were found in the context of foundation deposits (built into the house foundations), likely because of their association with fortune (hopefully good).
Cave dwellings at the biblical site of Maresha, central Israel.
Forecasting and fun in Maresha
Located in the Judean foothills, Maresha appears in the Bible in the context of the inheritance of the tribe of Judah, which included – among many other cited names – “Libnah, and Ether, and Ashan; and Iphtah, and Ashnah, and Nezib; and Keilah, and Achzib, and Mareshah; nine cities with their villages” (Joshua 15:42-44). It was one of the cities King Rehoboam fortified, according to the biblical account, which also cites it as the site of Asa of Judea’s fight against an invading army led by Zerah the Ethiopian.
In the Hellenistic period from the fourth to the second centuries B.C.E., Maresha was not Judahite. It was a multicultural city with as many as four or five different populations living together, Perry-Gal says.
The profession, or art, of divination using knucklebones, is called astragalomancy and, at least in the historic period, the practice was based on markings on the bones: names of gods and goddesses, other words, numbers. The underlying theory is that casting dice – or in this case, small bones – is a way to invoke or contact the superpowers. How the osteo-mediated message from the invoked deity is interpreted is another matter.
Dr. Lee Perry-Gal of the Israel Antiquities Authority held some of the knucklebones discovered at Maresha.
Some believe cleromancy using bones goes back to prehistory, in some form, though if it was used before writing, the bones presumably wouldn’t have alphabetic cues. In any case, by the classical period astragali were so prized that “bones” sculpted in glass have even been discovered at Tel Kedesh in Galilee and in ancient Greece, also from the Hellenistic period in the third and second centuries B.C.E. Examples also exist of ersatz astragali in ivory, stone and metal. Bone astragali have also been discovered in ancient Jerusalem.
In fact, Perry-Gal observes, ethnographic studies find astragali used in games to this very day in Australia and the Near East, though just for games: presumably their users have gotten over the hope that deceased feet can serve in divination.
Back to Maresha, the site of the huge collection of astragali dates to the Hellenistic period. Bones for forecasting and fun, as well as some possibly employed in the hope of persuading the deity to torment other people, were found in artificial caves carved into the bedrock of the lower city. Many of the astragali were found, the archaeologists say, in large concentrations in specific caves.
Asked if none were found aboveground, Perry-Gal says Maresha consists of its upper part above ground, of which little remains following serial conquests (as is typical of this region). Beneath the homes, however, people carved caves in the soft limestone. There are hundreds of these caves, which served for sundry purposes, including storage for grains and water cisterns – and possibly worship.
In the context of the perennial unease and hostilities in the Middle East, “all the materials from the domestic areas above-ground were tossed into the underground areas. They became a time capsule,” Perry-Gal explains. So we cannot say whether the astragali of Maresha were used in the glare of sunshine or dank inner sanctums, only a small proportion of which have been excavated.
A burial cave from the Hellenistic period is located at Maresha.
Cops and robbers, Maresha style
But there are clues. “In Area 89, underground, there is a small altar with wall etchings, and there we found a huge collection of astragali and ostracons [pottery with writing on it],” Perry-Gal says. “This cave may have served as a place of worship. So the astragali there may not have fallen from above-ground.”
In worshipful contexts one finds astragali bearing the names of Aphrodite and Eros, the great Hera herself, Hermes, and others. Meanwhile, in the domestic neighbourhood of Maresha, the team found astragali bearing the name of Nike, the goddess of fortune, and speculate that those found in that context served to play games. “It’s a peek into their lives,” Perry-Gal says.
It bears noting that astragali around the ancient world usually weren’t marked at all; some bore names of divinities, which are associated with attempts at divination or worship; some bore numbers, which are associated with games; and some apparently served for that age-old hobby of cursing one’s enemies.
“During the Roman and Hellenistic period, astragali were used a lot in divination, at Maresha as well. This amount is extraordinary – especially ones with writing, names of gods and goddesses, found in the context of ostracons of prophecy,” Perry-Gal stresses.
Some of the words found on the “divination bones” found at Maresha.
Or parlor games. She suspects that astragali with words like “thief” on them were used in play. Some astragali were weighted with lead (much more than other metals) and likely served in gaming: they would roll better than mere bone, she observes.
Who might have used the astragali for play, prophecy or to (fruitlessly) implement a foul intention? No idea. “Maresha had Phoenicians and Idumaeans and Nabataeans and Jews, though it wasn’t Judahic,” she says. “We couldn’t associate the find with a specific ethos.”
It bears noting that all the ostracons, which are being studied by Dr. Stern, are in Aramaic and include curses and prophecies, but those astragali that bear writing do so in Greek.
Astragali found at Maresha. Their supposed powers of divination couldn’t save the Hellenistic city from its fate.
Curses? More like formulae: “If you do x, y will happen,” Perry-Gal explains. Sort of an attempt to cajole the gods into doing evil to somebody. Okay, Maresha wasn’t the only Hellenistic city in town. What was so special about it to warrant massive use of astragali – or, at least, such a vast collection of them, relatively speaking?
Possibly, the critical mass was achieved under special conditions of extreme multiculturalism (all those peoples): other places could also be mixed, but the extent here may have been unusual, Perry-Gal suggests. Under the pax Hellenistica, conditions were open, global, tolerant and maybe all that came together at Maresha, which really was a special place – this is the first place in the west that chickens seem to have been cultivated, she adds, back in the third millennium B.C.E.
Apparently the magic in the animal feet did not help the city folk foresee the future. Maresha underwent more upheavals and finally met its maker in the year 40 B.C.E., by the Parthians roaring out of ancient Iran, and activity would move next door to the city of Beit Guvrin.
East side of the rampart with the southern staircase
Archaeologists have discovered that the tumulus of Laona, an ancient burial mound, has been hiding an architectural structure that was built by experienced engineers to become a lasting mega-monument, the antiquities department said on Friday.
“The rare and mysterious tumulus, which until recently concealed the existence of the rampart, is a mega-monument whose construction would have required the mobilisation of a huge and experienced workforce under the guidance of expert engineers,” an announcement said.
The rampart, a broad embankment raised as a fortification, on top of which the mound was erected, is believed to be Cypro-Classical and built most probably at the end of the 4th century or early in the 3rd century BC.
The antiquities department said the 2022 field team “was met with another surprise” when the rampart, instead of turning to the west under the mound’s summit, was found crossing over to the north side with its wall following a descending north-west course, which is “in an excellent state of preservation”, it said.
The wall of the rampart exposed on the north slope of the mound
Together with the east section, the total length of “this rare defensive monument” is currently 160 metres and its internal area is at least 1,740 square metres.
The width of the rampart is 5 metres and it is built with stacks of mould-made mudbricks placed between parallel walls of unworked stones.
“From now on, a main goal of the Laona project is to show that Laona is a burial tumulus; also, to identify the political agent behind its construction,” the antiquities department said.
Laona, in the Paphos region, combines two monuments that are so far unique in the archaeology of Cyprus.
The royal dynasty that ruled Paphos to the end of the 4th century BC is credited for the construction of the rampart, which is chronologically and functionally related to the palatial and workshop complexes on the citadel of Hadjiabdoulla, only 70 metres to the south of Laona.
Sections of the floor of the rampart, that were exposed near the foundations of the wall, show that the bedrock had been levelled; a thick layer of river pebbles was placed on top of it and on top of that a layer of red soil, which is full of sherds.
The red soil is currently being analysed to determine whether it has the same consistency as the mudbricks.
A third staircase, less well-preserved than the two staircases on the east wall, was also discovered on the highest surviving sector of the rampart.
The steps are made of mudbricks, but for reasons of safety, their excavation was discontinued after the first five steps were exposed, the antiquities department said.
The mound of Laona. North side before the 2022 excavation
The 2022 fieldwork was carried out with specialised – both archaeology and technology – teams from the University of Cyprus and the Cyprus University of Technology aided by Professor Jacopo Tabolli from the University of Siena
