Category Archives: WORLD

EUROPE, SPAIN, WORLD

Iron Age Artifact May Shed Light on Origins of Basque Language

Iron Age Artifact May Shed Light on Origins of Basque Language

More than 2,000 years after it was probably hung from the door of a mud-brick house in northern Spain to bring luck, a flat, lifesize bronze hand engraved with dozens of strange symbols could help scholars trace the development of one of the world’s most mysterious languages.

Iron Age Artifact May Shed Light on Origins of Basque Language
The Hand of Irulegi was discovered last year near Pamplona.

Although the piece – known as the Hand of Irulegi – was discovered last year by archaeologists from the Aranzadi Science Society who have been digging near the city of Pamplona since 2017, its importance has only recently become clear.

Experts studying the hand and its inscriptions now believe it to be both the oldest written example of Proto-Basque and a find that “upends” much of what was previously known about the Vascones, a late iron age tribe who inhabited parts of northern Spain before the arrival of the Romans, and whose language is thought to have been an ancestor of modern-day Basque, or euskera.

Until now, scholars had supposed the Vascones had no proper written language – save for words found on coins – and only began writing after the Romans introduced the Latin alphabet. But the five words written in 40 characters identified as Vasconic, suggest otherwise.

The first – and only word – to be identified so far is sorioneku, a forerunner of the modern Basque word zorioneko, meaning good luck or good omen.

Javier Velaza, a professor of Latin philology at the University of Barcelona and one of the experts who deciphered the hand, said the discovery had finally confirmed the existence of a written Vasconic language.

“People spoke the language of the Vascones in the area where the inscriptions were found,” he said.

“We had imagined that to be the case but until now, we had hardly any texts to bear that out. Now we do – and we also know that the Vascones used writing to set down their language … This inscription is incontrovertible; the first word of the text is patently a word that’s found in modern Basque.”

Velaza’s colleague Joaquín Gorrochategui, a professor of Indo-European linguistics at the University of the Basque country, said the hand’s secrets would change the way scholars looked at the Vascones.

“This piece upends how we’d thought about the Vascones and writing until now,” he said. “We were almost convinced that the ancient Vascones were illiterate and didn’t use writing except when it came to minting coins.”

According to Mattin Aiestaran, the director of the Irulegi dig, the site owes its survival to the fact that the original village was burned and then abandoned during the Sertorian war between two rival Roman factions in the first century BC. The objects they left behind were buried in the ruins of their mud-brick houses.

“That’s a bit of luck for archaeologists and it means we have a snapshot of the moment of the attack,” said Aiestaran. “That means we’ve been able to recover a lot of day-to-day material from people’s everyday lives. It’s an exceptional situation and one that has allowed us to find an exceptional piece.”

Despite the excitement surrounding the deciphering of the inscription, Velaza counselled calm study rather than giddy conjecture. After all, he added, the hand hails from one particular moment in time and tells us only that the people in the area then spoke and wrote the Vasconic language.

“That doesn’t mean we know how long they’d been there, nor what their future was after that moment,” he said.

“It’s true that this is an extraordinarily important text but I’d urge a bit of caution about using it to extrapolate too many conclusions about what happened afterwards. But linguistically speaking, it’s going to provide linguists who specialise in the Vasconic language and Proto-Basque with something they haven’t had until now.”

He added: “I think we should be excited – but we should still be very rigorous scientifically speaking.”

Not every recent Basque language discovery has lived up to its billing. Two years ago, a Spanish archaeologist was found guilty of faking finds that included pieces of third-century pottery engraved with one of the first depictions of the crucified Christ, Egyptian hieroglyphics, and Basque words that predated the earliest known written examples of the language by 600 years.

Although the archaeologist, Eliseo Gil, claimed the pieces would “rewrite the history books”, an expert committee examined them and found traces of modern glue as well as references to the 17th-century French philosopher René Descartes.

ASIA, PAKISTAN, WORLD

New York returns nearly 200 looted antiquities to Pakistan

New York returns nearly 200 looted antiquities to Pakistan

New York returns nearly 200 looted antiquities to Pakistan

The Manhattan district attorney’s office has returned 192 looted antiquities with a value of nearly $3.4 million to Pakistan. District Attorney Alvin L. Bragg, Jr. announced the repatriation in a press release on Thursday.

US museums return trove of looted treasures to Nigeria
The return is the culmination of a years-long investigation into the sale of artifacts looted from countries all over the world.

According to the release, 187 of the items are linked to the Indian American antiquities dealer Subhash Kapoor, who stands accused of running a multi-million-dollar trafficking network via his Manhattan gallery, Art of the Past.

The district attorney’s office returned the antiquities during a repatriation ceremony on Thursday at the Pakistan Consulate in New York, according to the release.

“Mehrgarh dolls,” some of the earliest examples of figurines created by humans, were among the artefacts returned to Pakistan.

“These remarkable works of art were ruthlessly removed from their rightful home and trafficked without regard for their immense cultural and spiritual value,” said Ivan J. Arvelo, New York special agent in charge at Homeland Security Investigations (HSI).

Earlier this month, Kapoor was sentenced by an Indian court to 10 years in prison for smuggling offences. He has also been indicted alongside seven co-defendants in the US, where investigators say he helped traffic thousands of treasures stolen from temples, ruins and archaeological sites across Asia.

The Manhattan district attorney’s Antiquities Trafficking Unit has seized more than 2,500 artefacts, worth an estimated $143 million, as part of its investigations into Kapoor.

Speaking to CNN earlier this month, the disgraced dealer’s lawyer said he intends to challenge attempts to extradite his client to the US.
According to Consul General Ayesha Ali, Thursday’s repatriation ceremony follows an earlier return of 45 stolen artefacts, linked to another convicted smuggler, to Pakistan.

Dozens of artefacts seized from the Metropolitan Museum of Art
“We began this journey with the DA’s Office and (the Department of Homeland Security) in November 2020, 45 pieces of stolen Gandhara artefacts were returned and today we are very fortunate that another batch of 192 antiquities valued at $3.4 million is being returned,” Ali said in the release.

The objects returned on Thursday include “Mehrgarh dolls,” which are some of the oldest known human-crafted figurines in the world. The ancient statues were looted from a Neolithic archaeological site in Pakistan, according to the release.

EUROPE, TURKEY, WORLD

U.S. Repatriates Looted Artifacts to Turkey

U.S. Repatriates Looted Artifacts to Turkey

U.S. Repatriates Looted Artifacts to Turkey

The items of unique historical heritage, including the human-sized bronze statue of the Roman Emperor Lucius Verus and the columnar sarcophagus fragments from the ancient city of Perge in Antalya, have been returned to Türkiye from the United States.

Six artefacts, including nine pieces, which were taken from two different auction houses and a collector in the U.S., were taken under protection in the Antalya Museum.

The artefacts, which were returned to the county on Oct. 22, were introduced yesterday at a ceremony attended by the Culture and Tourism Minister Mehmet Nuri Ersoy.

The historical artefacts, which were illegally taken abroad from Anatolia, were returned to Türkiye as a result of the joint efforts of the Culture and Tourism Ministry, the Antalya and Burdur Museum Directorates, the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office and the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

Based on the work of Türkiye’s first female archaeologist, the late Professor Jale İnan, and the information provided by journalist and writer Özgen Acar, the ministry prepared a file for the return of the historical artefacts.

Examinations have been made in the archival and international publications and interviews were also made with the witnesses. Professor Ramazan Özgan and Professor Ertekin Doksanaltı made scientific reports.

The results of the examinations and the reports were sent to the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office and the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

Finally, the human-sized bronze statue of the Roman Emperor Lucius Verus, which was taken out of the country from the ancient city of Bubon in the southern province of Burdur, and the four-piece Roman-era sarcophagus originating from the ancient city of Perge in Antalya were returned.

The statue of Verus is one of the rare human-sized bronze statues that have survived to the present day.

The fact that many of the ancient bronze cast statues were melted and used for various purposes gives the statue of the emperor special importance.

Again, during the examinations, an early Bronze-Age marble Kusura-type idol, which was one of the schematized female figures common in Western Anatolia in the third B.C. and mentioned in both Greek and Roman mythology, and a silver figurine of Apollo from the northern province of Balıkesir that have been smuggled out of the country was found at an auction house in the U.S.

Also, a sitting Attis statuette and a terracotta earth plate from the ancient city of Pisidia Antiokheia of Isparta were found in another auction house.

The sale of four works that were determined to be smuggled from Anatolia was stopped. In total, six artefacts of nine pieces were returned to their homeland.

EUROPE, SPAIN, WORLD

“Unprecedented” Phoenician necropolis found in southern Spain

“Unprecedented” Phoenician necropolis found in southern Spain

“Unprecedented” Phoenician necropolis found in southern Spain

A 4th or 5th-century B.C Phoenician necropolis has been found at Osuna in Southern Spain. A well-preserved underground limestone vault necropolis, where the Phoenicians living in the Iberian peninsula buried their dead, was discovered during water utility upgrades.

Council workers have found a well-preserved necropolis from the Phoenician era with at least eight subterranean limestone burial vaults and a staircase.

Archaeologists said the “unprecedented” Phoenician-Carthaginian cemetery. Such sites are normally found in coastal areas rather than so far inland, they say.

It is a unique find because the only comparable necropolises that have been unearthed so far are coastal, dotting the area around the ancient Phoenician colony of Cádiz. Osuna is inland, about 55 miles east of Seville.

Preliminary surveys have so far turned up eight burial vaults as well as staircases and areas that are thought to have served as atriums. These were elite graves, and unprecedented in what would have been practically the hinterlands of Phoenician Spain.

The phoenician-Punic necropolis was discovered in Osuna, Spain.

The lead archaeologist, Mario Delgado, described the discovery as very significant and very unexpected. “To find a necropolis from the Phoenician and Carthaginian era with these characteristics – with eight well tombs, atriums, and staircase access – you’d have to look to Sardinia or even Carthage itself,” he said.

“We thought we might find remains from the imperial Roman age, which would be more in keeping with the surroundings, so we were surprised when we found these structures carved from the rock – hypogea [subterranean vaults] – perfectly preserved beneath the Roman levels.”

Rosario Andújar, the mayor of Osuna, said the find had already prompted a re-examination of the area’s history.

The mayor said that while more research needed to be done, the luxurious nature of the necropolis suggested it had been built for those at “the highest level” of the social hierarchy.

Excavation work is currently underway in order to reach the ground levels of a possible atrium, officials said.

The Phoenicians were amongst the greatest Mediterranean traders from approximately 1,500 to 600 BC. Based on archaeological remains, the consensus now is that colonisation began around 800, when settlements were founded along the south coast of the peninsula.

They settled in southern Spain, not long after the founding of Phoenicia’s greatest colony, Carthage.

They set to work exploiting the region’s rich and untapped deposits of tin, gold, and silver and expanding their trade networks.

The trade of metals and consumer goods (fish, textiles) made the Phoenician settlements of what is now Andalusia enormously prosperous.

Archaeologists believe that the rich tombs found on the coast were built for the shipping dynasties that ran Phoenician commerce.

The Spanish town of Osuna came to the spotlight when it became the location for parts of the fifth season of the HBO series, Game of Thrones.

AFRICA, EGYPT, WORLD

New Thoughts on Egypt’s Ancient Branding Irons

New Thoughts on Egypt’s Ancient Branding Irons

New Thoughts on Egypt’s Ancient Branding Irons
Several of the ancient Egyptian branding-irons — actually made of bronze — were too small for large animals like cattle and were probably used to brand human slaves.

Small branding irons from ancient Egypt were likely used to mark the skin of human slaves, a new study suggests. Several ancient texts and illustrations, as well as 10 branding irons dating to 3,000 years ago, suggest that ancient Egyptians branded slaves.

These branding irons, actually made of bronze, are now in the collections of the British Museum and the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology at University College London.

The branding irons are thought to date roughly to Egypt’s 19th dynasty, from around 1292 B.C. until the 25th dynasty, which ended in 656 B.C., according to a study published Oct. 15 in The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology.

Until now, most Egyptologists had assumed that they were used to brand cattle — a practice seen in ancient Egyptian paintings — or perhaps horses. But the brands in the museums are too small for that purpose, said Ella Karev, an Egyptologist at the University of Chicago and the study’s author.

“They are so small that it precludes them from being used on cattle or horses,” she told Live Science. “I’m not excluding the possibility, but we have no evidence of small animals like goats being branded, and there is so much other evidence of humans being branded.”

Modern cattle-branding guidelines call for a brand that’s larger than at least 4 inches (10.6 centimetres) long so the scar it leaves won’t become illegible as a calf grows — an issue that the ancient Egyptians likely knew about, too. 

But the brands in the British Museum and the Petrie Museum are typically a third of that size — far too small for cattle, Karev wrote. The cattle brands in ancient Egyptian paintings are also square or rectangular, and look larger than the brands in the museums. 

Branding people

Some of the ancient Egyptian branding irons are almost exactly the same size as branding irons used by Europeans on African enslaved people during the trans-Atlantic slave trade many centuries later, Karev said. “Human branding-irons from the mid-and late 19th century parallel the size and shape of the smaller branding irons discussed here,” she wrote in the study.

Ancient Egyptian writings also talk about “marking” slaves, which was assumed to be a reference to the practice of tattooing, Karev told Live Science. For instance, branding is seen in a depiction of prisoners of war in a carving at Medinet Habu near Luxor in Upper (southern) Egypt dated to the 20th dynasty, perhaps around 1185 B.C.

An Egyptian carving from about 1185 B.C. shows the “marking” of prisoners-of-war and was thought to depict tattooing. But the new study argues it depicts branding instead.

But research shows that tattooing in ancient Egypt was almost exclusively performed on women and for religious purposes, she said, and the marking of prisoners of war in the Medinet Habu carving is unlikely to be tattooing.

“Practically speaking, ‘hand-poking’ a tattoo [without a tattoo machine] takes quite a lot of time and skill — and if you’re doing that on a large scale, it’s not easily replicable,” Karev said. “It would make much more sense for this to be branding.”

Moreover, the tools used to mark the prisoners in the Medinet Habu carving look different from the cattle brands used in ancient Egyptian paintings. It’s been suggested that’s because they were needles for tattooing, and that the carving shows them placed in a bowl of pigment. But Karev argues that the depiction instead shows small brands being heated to red hot in a portable heater known as a brazier.

Egyptian slavery

The practice of slavery in Egypt was very different from the modern conception of slavery informed by the trans-Atlantic slave trade, Karev said. 

“The way that we define slavery, serfdom, indentured servitude, debt bondage — all of these are modern classifications and categorizations,” she said. “The ancient Egyptians did not have these classifications, and so it is up to historians to figure out what, in context, is actually going on.”

While ancient writings state that people were sometimes bought and sold as property, and perhaps with the land they subsisted on — what are called “serfs” today — there’s also evidence that the dowry for the marriage of a slave might be paid by their owner and that many slaves were adopted into families.

In addition, there is evidence that people were often manumitted, or freed from slavery, and became regular members of Egyptian society, she said.

In such cases, the brand of a slave might be a “permanent marker of an impermanent status,” Karev said. “They clearly had no issue with an ex-slave adopting a new name, becoming fully Egyptian, marrying an Egyptian free person and moving up the ranks.”

Antonio Loprieno, an Egyptologist at the University of Basel in Switzerland who wasn’t involved in the study, said the paper was a “fantastic piece of scholarship.”

Only foreigners, rather than native Egyptians, seem to have been marked in this way, so “assuming that the branding-bronzes were used for humans … is empirically more probable at this time, where the number of foreign workers and soldiers in Egypt was at its peak,” he told Live Science in an email.

Loprieno, too, noted that modern ideas of slavery did not apply in Egypt at this time and that further evidence is needed of the “moral connotations” of slavery in ancient Egypt.

WORLD

Genetic Study Suggests Neolithic Mesopotamia Was a Melting Pot

Genetic Study Suggests Neolithic Mesopotamia Was a Melting Pot

Genetic Study Suggests Neolithic Mesopotamia Was a Melting Pot
Cranial features of the cay008 toddler.

A team of researchers affiliated with multiple institutions in Turkey, working with one colleague from Austria and two from Sweden, has found evidence via genetic analysis of a blend of demographics in Neolithic people living in the Upper Tigris portion of Mesopotamia.

In their paper published in the journal Science Advances, the group describes how they extracted tissue samples from the remains of people buried in Çayönü Tepesi from the period 8500–7500 BCE.

Upper Mesopotamia was a region between the Tigress and Euphrates rivers in what is now Turkey and Iran.

Researchers believe the region played a major role in the Neolithic Transition when people began to transition away from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to one based on agriculture. It was also a time of many other cultural changes.

For many years, historians have wondered if the shift in Mesopotamia came about due to the efforts of locals who lived there, or if it was a melting pot of sorts with ideas coming from people from many different places.

To answer that question, the researchers conducted a genetic analysis of the DNA of 13 people who lived and died during that time and were buried in a way that preserved some of their tissue—two adult men, six adult women, two male children and three female children.

By comparing the samples via multidimensional scaling to the genomes of others from nearby regions, they found evidence that the people had blended backgrounds—they had a three-way admixture of people from South Levant, Central Anatolia and Central Zagros.

There was also an exception—one of the women had a Caucasus/Zagros background. This showed that there was migration into the region of people from much farther north, and perhaps other areas as well.

The researchers also found that one of the children, a toddler, had experienced intentional skull shaping and cranial cauterization—the latter of which might have been part of a medical procedure.

The researchers suggest that the Upper Tigris portion of Mesopotamia during the Neolithic era was likely a vibrant hub with people coming and going, bringing with them both goods and culture.

EUROPE, ITALY, WORLD

Large Temple Found in Italy’s Etruscan City of Vulci

Large Temple Found in Italy’s Etruscan City of Vulci

Archaeologists from the universities of Freiburg and Mainz identify one of the largest known sacred buildings of the Etruscans

An interdisciplinary team headed by archaeologists Dr. Mariachiara Franceschini of the University of Freiburg and Paul P. Pasieka of the University of Mainz has discovered a previously unknown Etruscan temple in the ancient city of Vulci, which lies in the Italian region of Latium.

The building, which is 45 meters by 35 meters, is situated west of the Tempio Grande, a sacred building which was excavated back in the 1950s.

Archaeologists and other colleagues uncover the walls of the Etruscan temple in Vulci.

Initial examination of the strata of the foundation of the northeast corner of the temple and the objects they found there, led the researchers to date the construction of the temple towards the end of the sixth or beginning of the fifth century BCE.

“The new temple is roughly the same size and on a similar alignment as the neighbouring Tempio Grande, and was built at roughly the same Archaic time,” explains Franceschini. “This duplication of monumental buildings in an Etruscan city is rare, and indicates an exceptional finding,” adds Pasieka.

The team discovered the temple when working on the Vulci Cityscape project, which was launched in 2020 and aimed to research the settlement strategies and urbanistic structures of the city of Vulci.

Vulci was one of the twelve cities of the Etruscan federation and in pre-Roman times was one of the most important urban centres in what is now Italy.

New discoveries about city design and development

“We studied the entire northern area of Vulci, that’s 22.5 hectares, using geophysical prospecting and Ground Penetrating Radar,” explains Pasieka.

“We discovered remains from the city’s origins that had previously been overlooked in Vulci and are now better able to understand the dynamics of settlement and the road system, besides identifying different functional areas in the city.”

The researchers were able in 2021 to uncover the first sections of wall, made of solid tuff.

“Our knowledge about the appearance and organization of Etruscan cities has been limited until now,” says Franceschini. “The intact strata of the temple are offering us insights into more than a thousand years of development of one of the most important Etruscan cities.”

Over the coming years scientists want to study the different phases of use and the precise architectural appearance of the temple in more depth, in order to learn more about the religion of the Etruscans, the social structures in Vulci and what the lives of the city’s inhabitants were really like.

Fritz Thyssen Foundation and Gerda Henkel Foundation are funding the excavation

The project is being funded by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation (2020-2022) and the Gerda Henkel Foundation (2022-2023) along with the University of Mainz’s research area “40,000 Years of Human Challenges: Perception, Conceptualization and Coping in Premodern Societies”.

The departments of classical archaeology at the University of Freiburg and at the University of Mainz are working together with the Vulci Foundation, which administers the archaeological park “Parco Naturalistico Archeologico di Vulci”, and the Italian national monument authority, Soprintendenza Archeologia, Belle Arti e Paesaggio per la provincia di Viterbo e per l’Etruria meridionale.

ASIA, ISRAEL, WORLD

Fish fossils show first cooking may have been 600,000 years earlier than thought

Fish fossils show first cooking may have been 600,000 years earlier than thought

Early human ancestors living 780,000 years ago liked their fish well done, Israeli researchers have revealed, in what they said was the earliest evidence of fire being used for cooking.

Fish fossils show first cooking may have been 600,000 years earlier than thought
The skull of a modern carp is housed at the Steinhardt Museum of Natural History in Tel Aviv. The scientists’ claims are based on 16 years of work at a site near the Jordan River.

Exactly when our ancestors started cooking has been a matter of controversy among archaeologists because it is difficult to prove that an ancient fireplace was used to prepare food, and not just for warmth.

But the birth of the culinary arts marks an important turning point in human history because, by making food easier to chew and digest, it is believed to have greatly contributed to our eventual expansion across the world.

Previously, the first “definitive evidence” of cooking was by Neanderthals and early Homo sapiens 170,000 years ago, according to a study published in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution on Monday.

The study, which pushes that date back by more than 600,000 years, is the result of 16 years of work by its first author, Irit Zohar, an archaeologist at Tel Aviv University’s Steinhardt Museum of Natural History.

During that time she catalogued thousands of fish remains found at a site called Gesher Benot Ya’aqov in northern Israel.

The site near the banks of the Jordan River was once home to a lake, where a treasure trove of ancient fish fossils helped the team of researchers investigate exactly when the first cooks started getting inventive in the kitchen.

“It was like facing a puzzle, with more and more information until we could make a story about human evolution,” Zohar told AFP.

The first clue came in an area that contained “nearly no fish bones” but lots of teeth, she said.

This could point to cooking because fish bones soften and disintegrate at temperatures under 500C (930F), but their teeth remain.

In the same area, a colleague of Zohar’s found burnt flints and other evidence that it had previously been used as a fireplace.

And most of the teeth belonged to just two particularly large species of carp, suggesting they had been selected for their “succulent” meat, the study said. Some of the carp were over two metres (6.5 feet) long.

The “decisive” proof came from studying the teeth’s enamel, Zohar said.

The researchers used a technique called X-ray powder diffraction at the Natural History Museum in London to find out how heating changes the structure of the crystals that make up the enamel.

Comparing the results with other fish fossils, they found that the teeth from the key area of the lake were subjected to a temperature of between 200-500C (400-930F). That is just the right range for well-cooked fish.

Whether our forerunners baked, grilled, poached or sautéd their fish remains unknown, though the study suggested they may have used some kind of earth oven.

Fire is thought to have first been mastered by Homo erectus some 1.7 million years ago. But “because you can control fire for warming, that does not mean you control it for cooking – they could have eaten the fish next to the fire”, Zohar said.

Then the human ancestors might have thrown the bones in the fire, said Anaïs Marrast, an archaeozoologist at France’s National Museum of Natural History, who was not involved in the study.

“The whole question about exposure to fire is whether it is about getting rid of remains or a desire to cook,” she said.