Category Archives: ASIA

ASIA, IRAQ, WORLD

Archaeologists stunned by ancient Babylonian device: ‘More advanced than we thought’

Archaeologists stunned by ancient Babylonian device: ‘More advanced than we thought’

Babylon was the city where some of the most influential empires of the ancient world ruled. For a long time, it was the capital of the Babylonian Empire, and was considered to be the global centre of commerce, art and learning, and is even estimated to have been the largest early city in the world — perhaps the first to reach a population of more than 200,000 people.

Today, it resembles more of an archaeological excavation site in progress and has only several thousand residents and a few villages within its boundaries. It holds some of the greatest secrets of the ancient world, including the Tower of Babel, which is first mentioned in Genesis in the Bible.

In 1894, Edgar Banks, an American archaeologist, discovered a stone device and sold it to antique collector George Plimpton. He eventually passed it on to Columbia University in the 1930s, and the tablet is today known as Plimpton 322.

Archaeologists stunned by ancient Babylonian device: 'More advanced than we thought'
Archaeology: Researches have been stunned by the Babylonian tablet
Babylon: The ancient city is located in modern-day Iraq

At the time, researchers did not realise how important the tablet was, and it was not until 1945 that experts realised it contained Pythagorean triples.

But then the tablet was forgotten, and it was not until this year that Dr Daniel Mansfield, from the University of New South Wales, Australia, was given access to it, revealing the full extent of the device’s wonder.

Speaking to the BBC’s reel exploring the tablet, titled, ‘Evidence ancient Babylonians were far more advanced than we thought, he described it as the, “most interesting, most sophisticated mathematical document from the ancient world”.

It tells us that past civilisations understood mathematics a lot better than we thought.

In particular, it shows how the Mesopotamians understood Pythagorean triples at a level of sophistication “that we never expected”, according to Dr Mansfield.

Ancient tablet: The clay tablet shows how the Babylonians used Pythagorean triples

Traditionally, the history of geometry starts in Ancient Greece, where astronomers used the technique to understand the movement of celestial bodies through the night sky. The most famous relation in geometry is the relation between the sides and the hypotenuse of a right triangle, in modern times known as Pythagoras’ Theorem.

But, as Dr Mansfield noted: “In reality, elements of this understanding are apparent throughout history.”

The tablet proves that about a thousand years before the Greek astronomers were looking at the night sky, Babylonian surveyors had their own unique understanding of right triangles and rectangles.

But, rather than using the technique to look at the night sky, they applied it on the ground in day-to-day life.

They did not have what we today call the theorem.

Pythagoras: Some of the calculations found on the tablets
Dr Daniel Mansfield: The Australian researcher further deciphered the tablet’s engravings

Instead, they knew all the particular cases where the theorem held true, myriad examples of rectangles that had pleasant, easy to manage measurements. New research from Dr Mansfield and his team has since shed light on a long-standing mystery: how the ancient Babylonians may have actually used these tablets.

He explained: “This tablet shows us that the application is actually surveying, these people are making boundaries and making really accurate boundaries using their understanding of geometry.

“Pure mathematics is the study of mathematics for its own sake.

Ancient history: One of the tablets that were used during the research project

“But it’s often motivated by the problems of the day.

“Plimpton 322 arguably fits into this category because we see a mathematician generating all these rectangles and then analysing them to see which ones have regular sides, which is a relevant problem in contemporary surveying.”

The tablet shows us that Babylonian surveying became a lot more accurate during this time.

Mesopotamia: The region is believed to have been at the centre of global commerce, art and culture
ASIA, INDIA, WORLD

The real utopia: This ancient civilisation thrived without war

The real utopia: This ancient civilisation thrived without war

Many believe the idea of a utopian society is an impossible fantasy. But there may have been one mysterious, ancient group of people that was able to fulfil the dream of life without conflict or rulers.

Remains of the Indus civilisation, which flourished from 2600 to 1900 BC, show no clear signs of weapons, war or inequality. Many believe the idea of a utopian society is an impossible fantasy.

But there may have been one mysterious, ancient group of people that was able to fulfil the dream of life without conflict or rulers.

Many people believe that one mysterious, ancient society may have led a Utopian life. The Indus civilisation flourished from 2600 to 1900 BC, and it has been suggested that they lived in a real, functioning utopia

Remains of the Indus civilisation, which flourished from 2600 to 1900 BC, show no clear signs of weapons, war or inequality.

Robinson points out that archaeologists have uncovered just one depiction of humans fighting, and it is a partly mythical scene showing a female goddess with the horns of a goat and the body of a tiger.

There is also no evidence of horses – an animal that late became common in the region – suggesting they were not use to raid other towns and cities.

In the almost 100 years since the Indus civilisation was discovered, not a single royal palace or grand temple has been uncovered.

Mohenjo-daro – an archaeological site in the province of Sindh, Pakistan – is 400 metres long, and five metres tall, and would have required a huge amount of man power to build

Speaking to Robinson, Neil MacGregor, former director of the British Museum, said: ‘What’s left of these great Indus cities gives us no indication of a society engaged with, or threatened by, war.

‘Is it going too far to see these Indus cities as an early, urban Utopia?’.

While Mr MacGregor sees the utopian theory as credible, others cast doubt on the total absence of war.

Richard Meadow, Director of the Zooarchaeology Laboratory at the Peabody Museum of Harvard University, said: ‘There has never been a society without conflict of greater or lesser scale.’

He argues that until the Indus script is deciphered, we cannot really know whether they lived this idyllic life. Large societies are usually overseen by a central government, yet findings suggest otherwise for the Indus civilisation.

So far, the only sculpture that might depict a ruler is of a bearded man, dubbed the ‘priest-king’ – due to his resemblance to Buddhist monks and Hindu priests.

Many of the structures and buildings, however, would have taken the coordination of tens of thousands of men, which some argue would have required a leader of sorts.

For example, Mohenjo-Daro – an archaeological site in the province of Sindh, Pakistan – required a huge amount of manpower to build. 

The Indus covered more than 1,000 settlements across at least 800,000 square kilometres of what is now Pakistan, India and Afghanistan. Its remains were only discovered in the 1920s, yet it is now regarded as the beginning of Indian civilisation
Andrew Robinson, author of several books about the Indus, believes the key in understanding this civilisation, is cracking their script
The bust of the king or priest found in Mohenjo-Daro is shown on the left. The right image shows the lower town of the Mohenjo Daro archaeological site

While the Indus might sound like they lived a utopian fantasy, the civilisation mysteriously came to an end in around 1900 BC. Robinson believes the key in understanding this civilisation, is deciphering their script.

In an article published in Nature last year, he said: ‘More than 100 attempts at decipherment have been published by professional scholars and others since the 1920s.

‘Now – as a result of increased collaboration between archaeologists, linguists and experts in the digital humanities – it looks possible that the Indus script may yield some of its secrets.’

A board game was discovered from the Indus Valley Civilisation. Along with Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, it was one of three early civilisations of the Old World
ASIA, CHINA, WORLD

2,700-year-old leather armour proves technology transfer happened in antiquity

2,700-year-old leather armor proves technology transfer happened in antiquity

Researchers at the University of Zurich have investigated a unique leather scale armour found in the tomb of a horse rider in Northwest China. Design and construction details of the armour indicate that it originated in the Neo-Assyrian Empire between the 6th and 8th centuries BCE before being brought to China.

In 2013, a nearly complete leather scale armour was found in the tomb of an approx. 30-year-old male near the modern-day city of Turfan in Northwest China.

This unprecedented find, which survived the millennia thanks to the area’s extremely arid climate, provided the international team led by Patrick Wertmann from the Institute of Asian and Oriental Studies of the University of Zurich with new insights on the spread of military technology during the first millennium BCE.

2,700-year-old leather armor proves technology transfer happened in antiquity
The ancient leather shed armour could be dated to the period between 786 and 543 BC.

Scale armours protect the vital organs of fighters like an extra layer of the skin without restricting their mobility. The armours were made of small shield-shaped plates arranged in horizontal rows and sewn onto a backing.

Due to the costly materials and laborious manufacturing process, armours were very precious, and wearing them was considered a privilege of the elite. It was rare for them to be buried with the owner. However, the emergence of powerful states with large armies in the ancient world led to the development of less precious but nevertheless effective armours made of leather, bronze or iron for ordinary soldiers.

Standard military equipment for horsemen

The researchers used radiocarbon dating to determine the age of the armour to between 786 and 543 BCE.

It was originally made of about 5,444 smaller scales and 140 larger scales, which together with leather laces and lining weighed between 4 and 5kg.

The armour resembles a waistcoat that protects the front of the torso, hips, sides and the lower back of the body. It can be put on quickly without the help of another person and fits people of different statures.

“The armour was professionally produced in large numbers,” says Patrick Wertmann. With the increasing use of chariots in Middle Eastern warfare, a special armour for horsemen was developed from the 9th century BCE.

These armours later became part of the standardized equipment of military forces of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, which extended from parts of present-day Iraq to Iran, Syria, Turkey and Egypt.

Two armors, distinct units

While there is no direct parallel to the 2,700-year-old armour in the whole of Northwest China, there are some stylistic and functional similarities to a second contemporary armour of unknown origin held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (the Met).

It is possible that the two armours were intended as outfits for distinct units of the same army, i.e. the Yanghai armour for cavalry and the armour in the Met for infantry.

It is unclear whether the Yanghai armour belonged to a foreign soldier working for the Assyrian forces who brought it back home with him, or whether the armour was captured from someone else who had been to the region.

“Even though we can’t trace the exact path of the scale armour from Assyria to Northwest China, the find is one of the rare actual proofs of West-East technology transfer across the Eurasian continent during the early first millennium BCE,” says Wertmann.

ARMENIA, ASIA, WORLD

Water Surprise: Ancient Aqueduct Unearthed At Edge Of Roman Empire

Water Surprise: Ancient Aqueduct Unearthed At Edge Of Roman Empire

Archaeologists have unearthed what they say is the easternmost aqueduct built by the Roman Empire. Researchers from the National Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Armenia and from the University of Münster in Germany said they discovered the remains of the arched aqueduct in the ancient Armenian city of Artaxata.

Excavation of the aqueduct began in 2019, and the University of Münster released a statement this month detailing the findings of a study published in the journal Archäologischer Anzeiger.

Professor Achim Lichtenberger of the University of Münster said Romans constructed the aqueduct between A.D. 114 and 117.

Samples taken from the soil near the construction site were dated to between A.D. 60 and 460. This led the researchers to conclude that the aqueduct was most likely built under the reign of Emperor Trajan, during which the Roman Empire reached its territorial peak.

Trajan was considered a successful military ruler who oversaw the second-greatest military expansion in the history of the Roman Empire, after Augustus.

Torben Schreiber, the paper’s co-author, said that the construction was never actually completed, as Trajan died in A.D. 117 and the next emperor, Hadrian, gave up the province of Armenia, leaving the aqueduct half-completed.

The excavation area in Artaxata, Armenia, where researchers found what they say is the easternmost aqueduct built by the Roman Empire, with Mount Ararat visible behind it just over the modern border in Turkey.

Hadrian ruled from A.D. 117 to 138 and abandoned many of his predecessor’s expansionist military campaigns including the one in Armenia, resulting in disapproval from much of the empire’s elite.

He is known in Britain for having built Hadrian’s Wall, which served as a marker for the northernmost point of Roman-controlled Britannia.

Aqueducts were a cornerstone of Roman cities and towns, used to bring water into the populated territories from the surrounding areas.

German and Armenian experts used a variety of methods drawn from the fields of geophysics, archaeology, and geochemistry in the excavation work.

Geomagnetic examinations were carried out to locate areas of interest in Artaxata, then samples were taken using drills to pinpoint the aqueduct’s location. Mkrtich Zardaryan, a co-author of the study, said satellite and infrared imagery was then used to chart the path of the aqueduct’s pillars.

“We reconstructed the planned course of the aqueduct by means of a computer-assisted path analysis between the possible sources of the water and its destination,” he said.

The researchers concluded from the findings that the incomplete aqueduct in Armenia is evidence of the empire’s failure to expand into the region.

ASIA, EUROPE, RUSSIA, WORLD

Russian Statue Discovered to Be Older Than the Pyramids

Russian Statue Discovered to Be Older Than the Pyramids

Gold prospectors first discovered the so-called Shigir Idol at the bottom of a peat bog in Russia’s Ural mountain range in 1890. The unique object—a nine-foot-tall totem pole composed of ten wooden fragments carved with expressive faces, eyes and limbs and decorated with geometric patterns—represents the oldest known surviving work of wooden ritual art in the world.

Hunter-gatherers in what is now Russia likely viewed the wooden sculpture as an artwork imbued with ritual significance.

More than a century after its discovery, archaeologists continue to uncover surprises about this astonishing artefact.

As Thomas Terberger, a scholar of prehistory at Göttingen University in Germany, and his colleagues wrote in the journal Quaternary International in January, new research suggests the sculpture is 900 years older than previously thought.

Based on extensive analysis, Terberger’s team now estimates that the object was likely crafted about 12,500 years ago, at the end of the Last Ice Age. Its ancient creators carved the work from a single larch tree with 159 growth rings, the authors write in the study.

“The idol was carved during an era of great climate change, when early forests were spreading across a warmer late-glacial to postglacial Eurasia,” Terberger tells Franz Lidz of the New York Times.

“The landscape changed, and the art—figurative designs and naturalistic animals painted in caves and carved in rock—did, too, perhaps as a way to help people come to grips with the challenging environments they encountered.”

According to Sarah Cascone of Artnet News, the new findings indicate that the rare artwork predates Stonehenge, which was created around 5,000 years ago, by more than 7,000 years. It’s also twice as old as the Egyptian pyramids, which date to roughly 4,500 years ago.

As the Times reports, researchers have been puzzling over the age of the Shigir sculpture for decades. The debate has major implications for the study of prehistory, which tends to emphasize a Western-centric view of human development.

The wood used to carve the Shigir Idol is around 12,250 years old.

In 1997, Russian scientists carbon-dated the totem pole to about 9,500 years ago.

Many in the scientific community rejected these findings as implausible: Reluctant to believe that hunter-gatherer communities in the Urals and Siberia had created art or formed cultures of their own, says Terberger to the Times, researchers instead presented a narrative of human evolution that centered European history, with ancient farming societies in the Fertile Crescent eventually sowing the seeds of Western civilization.

Prevailing views over the past century, adds Terberger, regarded hunter-gatherers as “inferior to early agrarian communities emerging at that time in the Levant. At the same time, the archaeological evidence from the Urals and Siberia was underestimated and neglected.”

In 2018, scientists including Terberger used accelerator mass spectrometry technology to argue that the wooden object was about 11,600 years old. Now, the team’s latest publication has pushed that origin date back even further.

As Artnet News reports, the complex symbols carved into the object’s wooden surface indicate that its creators made it as a work of “mobiliary art,” or portable art that carried ritual significance. Co-author Svetlana Savchenko, the curator in charge of the artifact at the Sverdlovsk Regional Museum of Local Lore, tells the Times that the eight faces may contain encrypted references to a creation myth or the boundary between the earth and sky.

“Wood working was probably widespread during the Late Glacial to early Holocene,” the authors wrote in the 2018 article. “We see the Shigir sculpture as a document of a complex symbolic behavior and of the spiritual world of the Late Glacial to Early Mesolithic hunter-gatherers of the Urals.”

The fact that this rare evidence of hunter-gatherer artwork endured until modern times is a marvel in and of itself, notes Science Alert. The acidic, antimicrobial environment of the Russian peat bog preserved the wooden structure for millennia.

João Zilhão, a scholar at the University of Barcelona who was not involved in the study, tells the Times that the artefact’s remarkable survival reminds scientists of an important truth: that a lack of evidence of ancient art doesn’t mean it never existed. Rather, many ancient people created art objects out of perishable materials that could not withstand the test of time and were therefore left out of the archaeological record.

“It’s similar to the ‘Neanderthals did not make art’ fable, which was entirely based on the absence of evidence,” Zilhão says. “Likewise, the overwhelming scientific consensus used to hold that modern humans were superior in key ways, including their ability to innovate, communicate and adapt to different environments. Nonsense, all of it.”

ASIA, ISRAEL, WORLD

Israeli archaeologists find Roman, medieval treasures in ancient shipwrecks off the Mediterranean coast

Israeli archaeologists find Roman, medieval treasures in ancient shipwrecks off Mediterranean coast

Archaeologists in Israel have discovered the remnants of two shipwrecks off the Mediterranean coast, replete with a sunken trove of hundreds of Roman and medieval silver coins.

Israeli archaeologists find Roman, medieval treasures in ancient shipwrecks off Mediterranean coast
A gold ring with a green gemstone engraved with the figure of the good shepherd was discovered submerged at Caesarea harbour.

The finds made near the ancient city of Caesarea were dated to the Roman and Mamluk periods, about 1,700 and 600 years ago, archaeologists said.

They include hundreds of Roman silver and bronze coins dating to the mid-third century, as well as more than 500 silver coins from the middle ages, found amid the sediment.

An aerial view of the Caesarea port.

They were found during an underwater survey conducted by the Israel Antiquities Authority’s marine archaeology unit in the past two months, said Jacob Sharvit, the head of the unit, on Wednesday.

Among the other artefacts recovered from the site near the ancient city of Caesarea were figurines, bells, ceramics, and metal artefacts that once belonged to the ships, such as nails and a shattered iron anchor.

The underwater discovery of a gemstone submerged at Caesarea harbour.

The IAA underscored the discovery of a Roman gold ring, its green gemstone carved with the figure of a shepherd carrying a sheep on his shoulders.

Robert Cole, the head of the authority’s coin department, called the item “exceptional.”

The IAA uncovered the ancient treasures from the wrecks of two ships.

“On the gemstone is engraved an image of the ‘good shepherd’, which is really one of the earliest symbols of Christianity,” he said.

Sharvit said that the Roman ship was believed to have originally hailed from Italy, based on the style of some of the artefacts. He said it was still unclear whether any remnants of the wooden ships remained intact beneath the sands.

ASIA, INDIA, WORLD

Millet bread and pulse dough from early Iron Age South India: Charred food lumps as culinary indicators

Millet bread and pulse dough from early Iron Age South India: Charred food lumps as culinary indicators

Prof.  Jennifer Bates and her coworkers, Kelly Wilcox Black and Prof. Kathleen Morrison, published a new archaeobotanical article, “Millet Bread and Pulse Dough from Early Iron Age South India: Charred Food Lumps as Culinary Indicators, ” in the Journal of Archaeological Science (Vol.137).

Jennifer is a former Postdoc in the Penn Paleoecology Lab, now an Assistant Professor at Seoul National University, Kelly is a PhD student at the University of Chicago, completing her dissertation. Kathleen is a Professor at the University of Pennsylvania. 

In the paper, the authors explore charred lumps from the site of Kadebakele, in southern India, where they have excavated for several years with the support of the Archaeological Survey of India and colleagues.

Millet bread and pulse dough from early Iron Age South India: Charred food lumps as culinary indicators

The site dates from around 2,300 BCE to CE 1600 or so, but these data are from the Early Iron Age, about 800 BC. Charred lumps are usually seen as not identifiable, but using high-quality imaging, they were able to show that (some of) these are charred remains of dough or batter; these would have been used to make bread-like dishes.

Comparing the data with experimental studies done by another lab group, they identified two kinds of food lumps, along with cattle dung lumps (likely fuel). 

They found a dough made primarily from millets that match the experimental results of “flatbreads” most closely. Millet flatbreads are still made in this region.

There was also a batter made primarily from pulses (beans, lentils, etc.). This highlights the great importance of pulses in the diet, something is also seen in the overall botanical assemblage.

As far as we know, there hasn’t been any previous understanding of how these foods might have been prepared, and this paper is the first glimpse at food making in South Asian prehistory. 

The work contributes to our understanding of cooking, diet, and daily life in the South Indian Iron Age, a period without historical documents, and also establishes the value of a data source previously assumed to be too difficult to study on a routine basis (that is, without using SEM).

Professor Bates, Ms Wilcox Black and Professor Morrison argue that work like this allows archaeologists to move beyond “taxa lists” (lists of plants and animals used — you could think of these as possible ‘ingredients’) to approach issues of culinary practice (combinations of ingredients as well as techniques).

ASIA, CHINA, WORLD

Perfectly-preserved dinosaur embryo found inside the fossilized egg in China

Perfectly-preserved dinosaur embryo found inside the fossilized egg in China

A well-preserved dinosaur embryo has been found inside a fossilized egg. The fossilized dinosaur embryo came from Ganzhou, Jiangxi Province in southern China and was acquired by researchers in 2000.

Researchers at Yingliang Group, a company that mines stones, suspected it contained egg fossils, but put it in storage for 10 years, according to a news release.

When construction began on Yingliang Stone Natural History Museum, boxes of unearthed fossils were sorted through.

“Museum staff identified them as dinosaur eggs and saw some bones on the broken cross-section of one of the eggs,” Lida Xing of China University of Geosciences, Beijing, said in a news release. An embryo was found hidden within, which they named “Baby Yingliang.”

The embryo is that of the bird-like oviraptorosaurs, part of the theropod group. Theropod means “beast foot,” but theropod feet usually resembled those of birds. Birds are descended from one lineage of small theropods. 

Perfectly-preserved dinosaur embryo found inside the fossilized egg in China
Reconstruction of a close-to-hatching oviraptorosaur egg.

In studying the embryo, researchers found the dinosaur took on a distinctive tucking posture before hatching, which had been considered unique to birds.

The study is published in the science journal.

Researchers say this behaviour may have evolved through non-avian theropods.

“Most known non-avian dinosaur embryos are incomplete with skeletons disarticulated,” said Waisum Maof the University of Birmingham, U.K.

“We were surprised to see this embryo beautifully preserved inside a dinosaur egg, lying in a bird-like posture. This posture had not been recognized in non-avian dinosaurs before.”

The oviraptorosaur embryo, which has been named “Baby Yingliang.”

While fossilized dinosaur eggs have been found during the last 100 years, discovering a well-preserved embryo is very rare, the researchers said in the release. 

The embryo’s posture was not previously seen in non-avian dinosaurs, which is “especially notable because it’s reminiscent of a late-stage modern bird embryo.”

The researchers will continue to study the rare specimen in even more depth.

They will attempt to image its internal anatomy. Some of its body parts are still covered in rocks. Their findings can also be used in more studies of fossil embryos.