Scans Reveal Archangel Michael Tattoo on Mummy’s Thigh

High-tech testing on eight Egyptian mummies from the British Museum by a team of scientists from London uncovered fascinating information, including discoveries that one of the mummies has a tattoo symbolizing the Archangel Michael on her inner thigh.

The 8 mummies were from different eras, from kings to people who passed through the Nile. They came from different walks of life.

One of the mummies was only around two years of age when he died, while others lived to see their 50th birthday.

The oldest mummy tested is more than 5,500 years old, while the most recent lived around 1,300 years ago.

The mummies underwent computerized tomography scans (CAT scans) and infra-red reflectography at London hospital, which revealed what lay underneath their wrappings for the first time.

The scans enabled the scientists to build up a 3D image of the ancient remains, revealing bones, tissue, and vital organs.

The results revealed that the Egyptians suffered from some of the same health issues that plague us today, including high cholesterol, fatty diets, heart problems, and dental issues.

But most fascinating of all was the discovery of a tattoo on a female mummy, aged between 20 and 35, which Dr. David Antoine, curator of physical anthropology at the British Museum, described as “truly a unique and remarkable find”.

The 1,300-year-old female mummy was different from the others in that her remains were found in Sudan and she had been naturally-preserved by the hot and arid environment.

Her tattoo represents the symbol of the Archangel Michael, who features in both the Old and New Testaments, and who was the Patron Saint of Medieval Sudan.

“The tattoo on her right inner thigh represents a monogram that spells Michael in ancient Greek,” said Dr. Antoine. “We have found other examples of the monogram, but never in the form of a tattoo.

Michael is an archangel in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic teachings. In the New Testament Michael leads God’s armies against Satan’s forces in the Book of Revelation, where during the war in heaven he defeats Satan.

Christian sanctuaries to Michael appeared in the 4th century, when he was first seen as a healing angel, and then over time as a protector and the leader of the army of God against the forces of evil.

By the 6th century, devotions to Archangel Michael were widespread both in the Eastern and Western Churches.

The mummies and the detailed results of the scans will be available for the first time in a new exhibition opening on at the British Museum titled “Ancient Lives: New Discoveries”.

Archaeologists discovered 1,700-year-old Roman eggs

In England, archeologists found a very rare discovery, but one that is very interesting. They found an approximately 1,700 years old unbroken egg dating back to the Roman Empire.

This remarkable finding is of importance as it provides insights into the beliefs and ritualist practices of Romans and Britons. It is the only complete egg ever discovered in the British Isles.

The discovery was found in the area of Berryfields housing and community development near Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, by Oxford Archeology. The search was carried out for nine years.

Here they found “a middle Iron Age settlement and the agricultural hinterland of the putative nucleated Roman settlement of Fleet Marston” according to Oxford Archaeology.

This was situated on a major thoroughfare and was once an important trading, administrative, and agricultural center.

Down the years the archaeologists have uncovered many remarkable artifacts, dating from between the 1st century AD and the 4th century AD when the site was abandoned.

Among the items found were coins, pottery, and metal items. The Daily Mail reports that they all throw light on “Roman Fleet Marston which had previously only been understood from incidental finds”.

Archaeologists were working in the area, which is very waterlogged when they came across an unusual number of deposits in a pit. These were largely items that were organic in nature and they would typically have disintegrated over time.

Among the items that were recovered were leather shoes, wooden tools, and a wicker basket, which may have once held the bread.

The remains of an oak tree and wooden piles from a bridge were also unearthed from the waterlogged earth. Edward Biddulph, of Oxford Archaeology, stated that “the pit was still waterlogged, and this has preserved a remarkable collection of organic objects” according to the BBC.

Among the organic items found were four eggs, that turned out to be chicken eggs. They were all found intact but as they were being moved, three of them broke, as they were so fragile.

The broken eggs emitted a very powerful and unpleasant smell, this was not a surprise as they were centuries old, after all.

However, one of the eggs was extracted intact from the muddy ground, after some painstaking work. This was astonishing as only fragments of eggshells had been found, previously in Britain, mainly from Roman-era graves.

The archaeologist had found the only complete chicken egg from Roman Britain. To find any intact egg from the past is very rare but to find one from 1,700 years ago is astonishing. The BBC reports that Mr. Biddulph said the discovery of the complete egg and other organic items “was more than could be foreseen”.

To understand why there were eggs and other items simply left in the ground we need to understand the area where they were found. It appears that the site was once a waterlogged pit, which was possibly used in a similar way to a wishing well.

People would toss objects into the pit for good luck. A Roman mirror and some pots had also been discovered in the location with the organic items.

It is also possible that the eggs and the basket, were offerings of food to the dead, possibly after a burial. This was very common in funerary customs in the classical era. Eggs were highly symbolic, for many ancient peoples and “In Roman society, eggs symbolized fertility and rebirth” according to the Daily Mail.

They were associated in particular with the Roman gods Mercury and Mithras, a deity of Persian origin. The eggs may have been placed in the pit to win the favor of one of these gods.

The excavation was financed by the construction company, Berryfields Consortium. The dig finished in 2016 and for the past three years, researchers have been carefully analyzing the numerous finds.

A monograph that “describes the results of the fieldwork and analysis of an exceptional range of the artifactual and environmental evidence” reports Oxford Archaeology was published this year.

Eroding World War II-Era Graffiti in England Recorded

Researchers have discovered the identities of over 30 United States soldiers graffitiing a wall 75 years ago during World War Two.

On the Western Esplanade in Southampton the 62 ft (19 m) ‘ D-Day Wall ‘ has more than 70 names grafted by soldiers who are waiting for the day D to embark on Normandy.

The naval archeology Trust has documented their war records and lives back in the US. Many took part in the Battle of the Bulge from the end of 1944.

The trust began a project to digitally record the wall after historians warned the names were in danger of wearing away.

The wall enclosed the old town mortuary and soldiers queued alongside it as they waited to board ships at what is the current-day Red Funnel ferry dock.

Volunteers used specialist photography to decipher the names before using online genealogy sources and US military records to identify the soldiers and learn more about their stories.

The soldiers are believed to have belonged to the 99th and 106th Infantry Divisions and were among the two million Americans who transited through Southampton to mainland Europe.

Many fought in the Battle of the Bulge from December 1944 – the last major German offensive faced by the allies as they fought their way towards Berlin.

Helen Wallbridge from the trust said finding the military record of Curt Hodges from Chicago proved a “breakthrough”, as it allowed the names of fellow members of his unit to be confirmed.

“Looking at the spacing of the inscriptions, it seems plausible that the men stood in a line and carved their names together.”

“It’s detective work and a jigsaw so it’s great when you get the pieces to fit and you get a name,” she added.

The researchers traced the name William Paul Urban and found he came from Chicago and reached the rank of sergeant before he was killed in action aged 29 in March 1945.

Two of the men named – Robert Golden and William Knight – were found to have been captured and spent the remainder of the war as POWs.

Among others who survived the war, William Mueller from New York went on to become an aeronautical engineer. Twenty-two-year-old Ralph Odom went to work in construction before his death in 2008.

The trust has attempted to contact family members of the veterans, providing them with an unexpected memorial to their departed loved ones.

The daughter of one said: “My gratitude and appreciation are emotions words can’t reach.”

The 19m (62ft) long wall is already a listed war memorial although the names are expected to erode further in the coming years.

Student’s Lucky Find Worth £145,000 Is Rewriting Anglo-Saxon History

A student in Norfolk certainly never dreamed that he could rewrite Anglo Saxon history with a finding of a female skeleton wearing a pendant – but experts say that the “exquisite” gold piece is doing just that.

“A discovery of a female skeleton bearing a gold pendant imported from Sri Lanka with coins bearing the marks of a continental king is prompting a fundamental reassessment of the seats of power in Anglo Saxon England.”  Stated by the Telegraph.

The items are known as the Winfarthing Woman’s treasure An examination of grave objects, i.e. two inscribed coins, suggests that the grave’s owner was buried between 650 to 675 AD and was an elite member of society, possibly even royalty.

One of the large gold pendants found on the skeleton is inlaid with hundreds of tiny garnets. That artifact alone has been valued at £145,000 (almost $190,000).

A delicate gold filigree cross found in the burial suggests that the woman may have been one of the earliest Anglo Saxon converts to Christianity. Other items found in the grave included two identical Merovingian gold coins which had been made into pendants and two gold beads.

Senior Curator of the Norwich Castle Museum Dr. Tim Pestell said the craftsmanship of these objects is “equal” to the famous Staffordshire Hoard.

In an amusing turn of events, the discovery was made at a site that has been overlooked by archaeologists over the years due to the poor soil.

But Thomas Lucking, who found the site in 2015 decided that the location was worth an examination. “We could hear this large signal.

We knew there was something large but couldn’t predict it would be like that,” he said, “When it came out the atmosphere changed.”

The Guardian reports the first artifact unearthed was a bronze bowl placed at the feet of the skeleton when the human remains were noted Lucking paused the dig to call the county archaeology unit in.

Work continues at the site first identified by Lucking as it has been identified as a cemetery, possibly with a settlement located nearby as well. Mr. Lucking now works as a full-time archaeologist.

Two other interesting discoveries described at the launch of the Portable Antiquities Scheme and Treasure annual reports at the British Museum include two Bronze Age hoards and a Roman coin collection.

One of the Bronze Age hoards consisted of 158 axes and ingots while the other consisted of 27 axes and ingots. Both were found in Driffield, East Yorkshire, and date to around 950-850 BC.

The Roman coins numbered more than 2,000 and were discovered inside a pottery vessel in Piddletrenthide, Dorset.

Brain dead: 2600-year-old perfectly preserved British brain found

In England, a 2 600-year-old human skull discovered was less surprising than what it was: the brain. The discovery of the yellowish, crinkly, shrunk brain led to questions about the survival of such a fragile organ and the intensity of its preserving.

Except for the brain, all of the skull’s soft tissue was gone when the skull was pulled from a muddy Iron Age pit where the University of York was planning to expand its Heslington East campus. 

“It was just amazing to think that a brain of someone who had died so many thousands of years ago could persist just in wet ground,” said Sonia O’Connor, a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Bradford. O’Connor led a team of researchers who assessed the state of the brain after it was found in 2008 and looked into likely modes of preservation.

“It’s particularly surprising because if you talk to pathologists who deal with fresh dead bodies they say the first organ to really deteriorate and to basically go to liquid is the brain because of its high-fat content,” O’Connor said.

When it was found, the skull – which belonged to a man probably between 26 and 45 years old – was accompanied by a jaw and two neck vertebrae, bearing evidence of hanging and then decapitation.

Cut marks on the inside of the neck indicate that the head was severed while there was still flesh on the bones, O’Connor said. There is, however, no indication of why he was hanged, and the rest of his remains have yet to be found.

More than a decade earlier, O’Connor was involved in the discovery of 25 preserved brains within medieval-era remains from Kingston-upon-Hull in England. Aside from the brains, only bones remained, and all other soft tissue was gone.

In this regard, the so-called Heslington brain and the medieval remains are quite different from mummies, frozen bodies, or intentionally preserved remains because in these cases other soft-tissue – skin, muscles and so on – is preserved as well. None of the recently discovered remains showed any signs that they were intentionally preserved.

The Heslington remains, along with others O’Connor has discovered, appear to have been buried quickly after death in wet environments where the absence of oxygen prevented the brain tissue from putrefying.

But while the oxygen-free environment seems key, it is not possible to rule out other factors like certain diseases or physiological changes, such as those that accompany starvation, that might predispose the brain to be preserved this way, according to O’Connor.

After being deposited in the water-logged pit, the Heslington brain began to change chemically, developing into a durable material and shrinking to a quarter of its size. The chemical details of the new material are still under investigation, she said.

In a study in an upcoming issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science, O’Connor’s team amassed a list of other, similarly preserved brains found since 1960.

Reports like these typically fly under the radar and do not appear in the mainstream archaeological science publications and when archaeologists do discover a preserved brain, they tend to think it is the first of such a find, she said. This is why collections of science publications and articles are so important, but also why it is so important for archaeologists and other scientists to be keeping up to date with new ones. They can always Request a PubMed article from libraries here if they don’t know where to access them.

“I think part of the problem is archaeologists are very happy to deal with humans’ skeletal remains but as soon as there is any hint of soft tissue it is psychologically very, very different. You are no longer dealing with a skeleton, you are dealing with the remains of a corpse and, of course, a corpse is a dead individual,” she said.

The skull has been dated to some time between 673 and 482 B.C.; Romans, meanwhile, arrived in the area in A.D. 71, according to Richard Hall, director of archaeology at the York Archaeological Trust, which the university hired to assess the site and handle the excavation in Heslington.

This appears to have been a permanent settlement with ditches that divided the area into fields and walled parkways through which cattle could be driven, Hall told to BBC.

Archaeologists have also found at the site circular features they believe were probably thatched-roof houses, as well as a pond-like feature probably used for water storage, he said.

At this point, the purpose of pits like the one in which the skull was found isn’t clear, he said. No other human remains have been found on the site.

Rogue Metal Detectorists Stole $3.6 Million Treasure

During the years, metal detectorists make numerous remarkable finds in Britain, with a large crowd of 2,600 coins discovered a few months ago.

Yet archeological discoveries by detectorists are subject to stringent rules. Currently, four people are being held guilty of conspiring to disguise and illegally sell a treasure with metal detectors by the British courts.

Two metal detectorists have been jailed for stealing the “emblematic” Viking-era Leominster Hoard of coins and priceless jewellery worth up to £12 million – much of which is still missing.

George Powell, 38, and Layton Davies, 51, failed to declare an “invaluable” collection of buried treasure dating back 1,100 years to the birth of a united English kingdom, during the time of Alfred the Great.

The items, many of which were Anglo Saxon but are typical of a Viking burial hoard, were dug up on Herefordshire farmland on June 2, 2015.

It is thought the trove was buried by someone within the Great Viking Army in either 878 or 879, which by then was being forced back east by an alliance of Saxon forces.

Powell, who was described as having the “leading” role, was jailed for 10 years while caretaker Davies received eight-and-a-half years.

Both were also convicted alongside two other men, 60-year-old Paul Wells and Simon Wicks, 57, with conspiring to conceal the find. Sentencing at Worcester Crown Court on Friday, Judge Nicholas Cartwright said they had “cheated” not only the landowner but the public of “exceptionally rare and significant” coins.

He said: “90% of the coins or thereabouts remain hidden to this day.

“All four defendants played their respective parts.

“You, Simon Wicks, were part of a conspiracy to conceal the stolen treasure and to sell it.

“Paul Wells, who will be sentenced an on a future occasion, was part of a conspiracy to conceal part of the stolen treasure.”

He added: “The irony in this case is if you, George Powell, and you, Layton Davies, had obtained the permissions and agreements which responsible metal detectorists are advised to obtain, if you had gone on to act within the law after you found this treasure, you could have expected to have either a half share, or at very worst a third share of over £3 million to share between the two of you.

“But you wanted more.”

Among the priceless hoard was a ninth-century gold ring, a dragon’s head bracelet, a silver ingot, a crystal rock pendant dating to the fifth century and up to 300 coins, some dating to the reign of King Alfred.

Only 31 of the coins have been recovered, although mobile phone photographs on Davies’s phone – later deleted, but recovered by police – showed the larger hoard, still intact, in a freshly dug hole.

Five of the coins are examples of the exceptionally rare Two Emperors penny, valued at up to £50,000 apiece, and so-called as they depict King Alfred and a lesser-known monarch, Ceolwulf II, who reigned in the old kingdom of Mercia, sitting together.

Expert analysis of all the jewellery and coinage recovered to date and now held at the British Museum returned a valuation of at least £581,000.

Wicks, Powell, and Davies were also found guilty of converting their ill-gotten gains into cash, after police traced several coins that had been sold on to private collectors, hidden away or left with expert valuers.

Powell, of Kirby Lane, Newport; Davies, of Cardiff Road, Pontypridd; Wells, of Newport Road, Cardiff, and Wicks, of Hawks Road, Hailsham, East Sussex, were also convicted after trial of ignoring the law stating such finds must be properly declared.

1,400-Year-Old Anglo-Saxon Burial Unearthed in Canterbury

On a university campus in Canterbury, the extraordinary remains of a young Anglo-Saxon woman, buried with luxuriant jewels and a knife.

While Archeologists working at Christ Church University at the site of its new £65 million STEM building they Unearthed the burial, which is due to open in September next year.

The female, who had thought she was in her 20s, was found buried with a silver, garnet-inlaid, Kentish disc brooch.

She was also wearing a necklace of amber and glass beads, a belt fastened with a copper alloy buckle, a copper alloy bracelet and was equipped with an iron knife.

Experts say that together, the items found in the grave suggest the woman was buried between AD 580-600.

They believe she would have been a contemporary, and likely acquaintance, of the Kentish King Ethelbert and his Frankish Queen Bertha, whose modern statues can be seen nearby at Lady Wootton’s Green.

The bones have been studied by Dr. Ellie Williams, Lecturer in Archaeology at the University.

“The discovery of another ancient burial on our campus is extremely exciting,” she said.

“It demonstrates the richness of the archaeology that surrounds us, and contributes important new evidence to our understanding of life and death in Canterbury around 1,400 years ago.”

Dr. Andrew Richardson, outreach and archives manager at the Canterbury Archaeological Trust, which made the discovery, says the discovery is “particularly significant”.;

“It suggests that relatively high-status burial was taking place on the site in the years shortly before the establishment of the Abbey.

“One of the primary roles of the Abbey was as the burial place of Augustine and his companions, Archbishops and members of the Kentish royal dynasty.

“This find suggests that this may represent a continuance of existing practice at the site, rather than a completely new development and has implications for our interpretation of this World Heritage site.”

Scientific testing on similar finds has shown the garnets are likely to have come from Sri Lanka rather than a nearer source.

Such brooches, crafted in east Kent from exotic materials, were produced at the behest of the Kentish royal dynasty and distributed as gifts to those in their favor.

The woman’s bones will be retained for further scientific study, which it is hoped will provide insight into her life, death, and burial.