The mummified face of Pharaoh Seti I hailed for its superior preservation
The mummified face of Menmaatre Seti I known as Sety I of the New Kingdom’s Nineteenth Dynasty pleasantly surprised Egyptologists with its superior preservation. His face is regarded as one of the best preserved in the world as well as in Ancient Egypt’s annals.
The mummified face of Pharoah Seti I.
Dying about 3,298 years ago, Seti I is reckoned to have ruled when Egypt was at one of its most affluent peaks from 1290 to 1279 BCE. He was the father to perhaps ancient Egypt’s most beloved pharaoh Ramesses II. His father, Ramses I, reigned for only two years.
The tomb of this extremely powerful and handsome ruler was brought to the world’s attention by the rebellious researcher Giovanni Battista Belzoni on October 16, 1817.
The tomb located in the Valley of the Kings, known as KV17, is the longest tomb in the entire necropolis. It’s about 137 meters (449 ft.).
Seti’s mummified body was neatly prepared and covered with a yellow shroud. However, tomb looters had messed with his bandages and smashed his abdomen. Worse still, Seti’s head was separated from the rest of his battered body.
Fortunately, his face remained untouched. Now, the remains of Seti I rest among other royal mummies in the Cairo museum.
In the early years of his reign, Seti led his army northward to restore Egyptian prestige, which had been partly lost during the troubled years of the late 18th dynasty under Akhenaton.
He battled in northern Palestine and Syria and fought at least one battle with the Hittite king Muwatallis; he subsequently concluded a peace treaty that may have established the frontier at Kadesh on the Orontes River between the Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon mountains.
Mummy of Pharaoh Seti I.
Seti in his 11 or 15-year rule did much to promote the prosperity of Egypt. He fortified the frontier, opened mines and quarries, dug wells, and rebuilt temples and shrines that had fallen into decay or been damaged; and he continued the work begun by his father on the construction of the great hypostyle hall at Karnak, which is one of the most impressive monuments of Egyptian architecture.
Another important work is his memorial temple at Abydos, which he dedicated to Osiris and six other deities of which much of the original colour remains.
Holding hands for 5,000 years, a couple with mysterious jade rings and dagger
Bronze Age burial near Lake Baikal intrigues archaeologists who have not yet revealed the contents of the leather pouch between man’s kneecaps.
The man’s skeleton had a ring made of rare white jade over one eye socket.
Experts speculate that this ancient couple is an elderly man and his wife or concubine, buried for eternity in a show of affection. There are some unique aspects to the couple who are believed to be from the Bronze Age Glazkov culture.
The man’s skeleton had a ring made of rare white jade over one eye socket. Three more were on his chest. Archaeologist Dr Dmitry Kichigin said: ‘It was probably somehow connected with their ideas about the afterlife.’
Samples of the bone of the couple have been sent to Canada for radiocarbon analysis, but the Russian team involved in the excavations believe the couple to be 4,500 to 5,000 years old.
The site is a sacred burial place since Neolithic times overlooking the waters of Lake Baikal, the oldest and deepest lake in the world.
‘In the grave we found male and female skeletons, lying on their backs, heads to the west, hand in hand,’ he said. The site is a sacred burial place since Neolithic times overlooking the waters of Lake Baikal, the oldest and deepest lake in the world.
The male skeleton is complete but rodents destroyed the upper part of the female. Near the woman was a ‘massive’ knife made of jade, some 13 centimetres in length and 7 cm in width.
Pendants of red deer and musk deer teeth were found on the male skull, and around the feet. Most likely, they decorated the hat and footwear.
‘Were they relatives, or an owner and his concubine?’ asked the archaeologist. For now, the answer is unclear: he would like to conduct DNA tests to check if the pair were related, but this appears to be too expensive.
The burial unearthed this summer is located at a cape on Maloe More, the strait that separates the mainland and the Olkhon island, close to Chernorud settlement, some 260 kilometres north-east of Irkutsk.
The precise location is being kept secret, for now, to avoid amateur diggers wrecking a site which is likely to contain more burials, possibly older than this one.
‘We were lucky to find at least one skeleton in excellent condition, with implements and decorations – it is the dream of many archaeologists,’ said Kichigin. ‘It would be very interesting to find out the purposes the massive jade knife, which we found near the woman, was used for.
‘We also found some metal implement in a small leather bag between male’s kneecaps.’ The analysis will begin with the finds in the autumn.
‘The cape, where we conducted excavations, was obviously a sacred place for ancient people,’ he said. It was not a settlement but used for religious rites and as a graveyard from ancient times.
‘We can expect a lot of interesting discoveries on this archaeological site, so we plan to continue our work next year.’
The archaeological team led by Dr Kichigan is from Irkutsk National Research Technical University, with the assistance of Yuliana Yemelyanova, from the Laboratory of Archeology, Paleoecology, and Life Support Systems of the Peoples of North Asia.
The burial unearthed this summer is located at a cape on Maloe More, the strait that separates the mainland and the Olkhon island, close to Chernorud settlement.
Why ancient Romans used sketchy, lopsided dice to gamble and play board games
A tessera or a Roman six-sided die from the Vidy Roman Museum Rama
People have been rolling dice for a long, long time. The first dice were made from sheep knucklebones more than 5,000 years ago in ancient Sumer, and you won if it landed on the right one of the four flat sides. Around 3,000 years ago, somebody from modern-day Iraq and Iran sculpted bits of wood and ivory into the familiar six-sided dice, with different numbers of spots on each side from one to six.
People all over the world adopted this configuration long before Arabic numerals were invented. But few people of the ancient world loved to play dice as much as the Romans did.
The Romans called their 6-sided dice tesserae, and they often used them to move the pieces on a game board or for gambling, with the highest number providing the win. Since hard cash was on the line, one would expect these dice to be “fair”, or equally likely to land on any of their six sides.
However, most of them were actually lopsided, with some sides obviously much larger than others, making them more likely to land on them. These Roman-era dice were a total mess when it came to their shape, with no two sides shaped entirely alike.
Why would the Romans make their dice so asymmetrical? It’s not like the builders of great aqueducts and roads weren’t capable of carving a uniform cube, after all.
At first glance, it would seem like tesserae was made this way as a form of cheating, in order to increase the probability of showing a certain side. The vast majority of Roman dice were biased towards the numbers one and six. However, this doesn’t explain why virtually all Roman dice were designed this way. Did all the players cheat? The games would have collapsed if that were the case, and people would stop using them if cheating was done on purpose. This all suggests that the lumpy and lopsided design is a feature, not a bug.
The die has been cast — and that is the will of the gods
In a new study, archaeologist Jelmer Eerkens, a professor of anthropology at the University of California Davis, and Alex de Voogt, a professor at the department of economics and business of Drew University in New Jersey, present a different perspective: the asymmetrical features of the dice were related to the way the ancient Romans viewed the role of fate and the gods in the world.
Ancient Roman asymmetrical dice were found in the Netherlands.
In a previous study, the two researchers showed that over 90% of Roman dice found in the archaeological record are visibly asymmetrical, meaning one of their sides differs in size from the others by at least 5%. In their new work, the pair of scientists analyzed a sample of 28 dice from the Roman era excavated in the Netherlands. Unsurprisingly, 24 of the 28 objects made from clay, metal, and bone were visibly asymmetrical.
The larger the difference in size between the six sides of a dice, the greater the odds of rolling the number opposite the side with the largest surface area. In a perfect cube, there should be a 1 in 6 chance of rolling any number, but the odds of landing on the largest side of a Roman dice could be as high as 1 in 2.4. Surely, these kinds of visible biases couldn’t have been missed, especially by the hardcore gamblers playing for hours at end in Rome’s slums.
To get a better understanding of what the ancient Romans were thinking when they made their lopsided dice, Eerkens and de Voogt enlisted 23 psychology majors for an experiment.
Like today, Roman dice were numbered in the ‘sevens’ configuration, meaning the pips (little holes or divots) on opposite sides to each other add up to the number 7, so 1 is opposite to 6, 2 is opposite to 5, and 3 is opposite to 4.
The students were handed reproductions of Roman dice and were asked to place pips on the sides. Other than having to respect the sevens configuration, the participants were given no further instructions and were virtually oblivious to the purpose of the experiment.
Most of the students placed the one and six pips on the largest opposing surfaces of the lopsided dice — that’s exactly how the Romans chose to number their dice. Since both ancient Romans and modern students with no interest in gambling placed pips in locations that favour a one or six suggests both groups involuntarily chose this configuration, rather than making a conscious effort to cheat and stack the odds in their favour.
When asked about what prompted them to place the pips the way they had, the students said it felt natural to place one and six on the largest sides, especially since six requires the most pips to place.
This experiment suggests that the Romans didn’t actually care that much for ‘fair’ odds, perhaps because they did not grasp the concept of probability. Instead, the ancient Romans put all their fate in the gods like Fortuna, the personification of luck. Since gods and fate played such a central role in the lives of these people, any side that rolled on the dice was the ‘right’ side — the one chosen by the gods. Of course, some experienced gamblers may have noticed the bias and used it to their advantage, but the unfair odds were likely not common knowledge at the time.
“Knowing that it makes sense that Romans probably did not think that die shape mattered because even with a non-cubic die all sides can still be thrown,” Eerkens told Haaretz. “Today we would say that, yes, each side can be thrown but with unequal probabilities – however, most people in Roman times probably would not understand that way of thinking.”
Such thinking may have persisted until well into the Middle Ages. It wasn’t until the Renaissance period that we start seeing perfectly fair cube-shaped dice, and it is perhaps no coincidence that around this time great thinkers like Galileo Galilei or Blaise Pascal were publishing papers about chance and probability, in some cases, they were actually consulting with local gamblers. These new ideas about fairness, chance, and mathematical probability may have spread among the ‘gamers’ of the time and finally led to fairer dice.
Colonial-Period Burials Found on Ancient Temple in Peru
A team of Peruvian archaeologists uncovered three burials from the Spanish colonial period on top of a pre-Hispanic temple, which may be up to 500 years old, a researcher said Thursday.
A team of Peruvian archaeologists uncovered three burials from the Spanish colonial period on top of a pre-Hispanic temple
Peru was under Spanish rule for nearly 300 years, from 1532 when they invaded and defeated the Inca empire until 1821 when popular uprisings led to independence.
“We are working with the hypothesis that the remains belong to a colonial cemetery,” Lucenida Carrion, head of the Archaeology Directorate of the Park of Legends in the Peruvian capital, told AFP.
The park’s 54 archaeological monuments and sanctuaries have been the subject of study for decades.
“In this summit, we have discovered the burials of two adults and a child who were wrapped in cotton cloth,” the archaeologist added.
The temple, or pre-Hispanic sanctuary known as “Tres Palos” where the burial site is located, is more than 1,000 years old and is located on land adjacent to the park.
After the pre-Hispanic era, the site was inhabited by settlers from colonial Lima.
“We are considering whether the remains are from the colonial era,” Carrion said, pointing to the clothes, hair and a Christian crucifix found on one of the remains.
“This finding is important because it will help us determine if there has been a continuous occupation at this site since pre-Hispanic times.”
During the 15th and 16th centuries, the “Tres Palos” sanctuary was used by the Incas as a Tambo (food deposit) and during the colonial era, adobe (mud and straw) houses were built.
– Wooden cross –
“What stands out is the cross carried on the chest of one character. This cross indicates the moment of transformation to Christianity of the natives or inhabitants that populated this place,” Carrion said.
Other than the brown wooden cross, sandals, textile fragments, bracelets, funeral mantles and the remains of ceramic vessels were also discovered.
The archaeological team’s findings are among the most important in recent years and add to the study of numerous material testimonies uncovered inside the archaeological complex of Maranga, located near the coast of Lima.
“The works carried out in the place allow us to establish that its history dates back approximately 2,000 years and that they were occupied by the Lima culture, the Ychsma and finally the Incas,” Carrion said.
The Park of Legends, built in 1964, is named after the pre-Hispanic legends illustrated at the entrance of the enclosure.
In 2018, a team of archaeologists found a 1,300-year-old cemetery from the pre-Hispanic Lima culture near the park.
New Pompeii finds highlight middle-class life in the doomed city
A trunk with its lid left open. A wooden dishware closet, its shelves caved in. Three-legged accent tables topped by decorative bowls. These latest discoveries by archaeologists are enriching knowledge about middle-class lives in Pompeii before Mount Vesuvius’ furious eruption buried the ancient Roman city in volcanic debris.
In this image provide by the Pompeii Archeological site press office, an archaeologist works on the site of a new discovery. The latest discoveries in the ancient city of Pompeii are enriching knowledge about the everyday lives of middle-class households. The director of the archaeological site, Gabriel Zuchtriegel, said on Saturday, Aug. 6, 2022, that excavations of rooms in a home first unearthed in 2018, revealed the environment of ordinary citizens of the city, which was flourishing before being destroyed by the volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 A.D.
Pompeii’s archaeological park, one of Italy’s top tourist attractions, announced the recent finds on Saturday. Its director, Gabriel Zuchtriegel, said the excavation of rooms in a “Domus,” or home, first unearthed in 2018 had revealed precious details about the domestic environment of ordinary citizens of the city, which was destroyed in 79 A.D.
In past decades, excavation largely concentrated on sumptuous, elaborately frescoed villas of Pompeii’s upper-class residents. But archaeology activity in the sprawling site, near modern-day Naples, has increasingly focused on the lives of the middle class as well as of servants and other enslaved people.
“In the Roman empire, there was an ample chunk of the population that struggled with their social status and for whom ‘daily bread,’ was anything but a given,″ Zuchtriegel said. ”
A vulnerable class during political crises and food shortages, but also ambitious about climbing the social ladder.”
The finds unveiled on Saturday include furnishings and household objects in the Domus, which was dubbed the House of the Larario for an area of a home devoted to domestic spirits known as lares. The home unearthed in 2018 has one in the courtyard.
Zuchtriegel noted that while the courtyard also had an exceptionally well-adorned cistern, “evidently, the (financial) resources weren’t enough to decorate the five rooms of the home.″ One room had unpainted walls and an earthen floor apparently used for storage.
In a bedroom, archeologists found the remains of a bed frame with a trace of fabric from the pillow.
The kind of bed is identical to three, cot-like beds unearthed last year in a tiny room in another residence that archaeologists believe doubled as a storeroom and sleeping quarters for a family of enslaved inhabitants of Pompeii.
The bedroom findings announced Saturday also included the remains of a wooden trunk with an open lid.
Although the weight of beams and ceiling panels that crashed down in the wake of the volcanic explosion heavily damaged the trunk, among the objects found inside was an oil lamp decorated with a bas relief depicting the ancient Greek deity Zeus being transformed into an eagle.
Nearby was a small, three-legged round table, similar to the accent tables in vogue today.
Exposing the storeroom revealed a wooden closet, its backboard still intact but the shelves caved in.
Archaeologists believe the closet had at least four-panel doors and held cookware and dishes for the nearby kitchen. The excavators found a hinge from the enclosure.
Other objects found in the house include a large fragment of what had been a translucent, rimmed plate in brilliant hues of cobalt blue and emerald, and a well-preserved incense burner, shaped like a cradle.
1,000-year-old bison skeleton unearthed in Mitchell
What a completely unusual find. Two students found the bones of an ancient bison while digging last week at the Prehistoric Indian Village. The estimated 1,000-year-old bones discovered by the University of Exeter students help reveal how the Ame…
Two students from the University of Exeter discovered the pelvis, spine and tail of a bison. The rib slabs were removed, but the portions of the pelvis, spine and tail the students found were intact. They did not find the head, but they hope, as they continue digging, that they will find it.
What a completely unusual find.
Two students found the bones of an ancient bison while digging last week at the Prehistoric Indian Village.
The estimated 1,000-year-old bones discovered by the University of Exeter students help reveal how the American Indians butchered the animals they hunted.
Amy Chamberlain-Webber, 18, and Megan Stealey, 20, thought finding the bison bones was exciting. The women found the bones in a cache pit where American Indians stored food, weapons and other valuables.The cache pit later became a trash pit that the bones were thrown into.
Chamberlain-Webber and Stealey uncovered the pelvis of the bison, and they found other bones as they continued digging. The group found portions of the bison since its arrival in mid-June, but Friday realized the magnitude of the find.
It is unusual to find large portions of the animals still in tact, said Alan Outram, professor of archaeological science at the University of Exeter, located in South West England, United Kingdom. The pelvis, spine and tail were intact, as were the feet bones.
“It revealed itself slowly to us,” Outram said. “There were hints of it, and we sort of slowly discovered it.”
In total, the group found the pelvis, spine, articulations of the ribs, some ribs, portion of the tail, in-tact foot bones and the leg bones. The group did not find all of the ribs or the skull while they were excavating the trash pit.
According to Outram, the way a group butchers an animal reveals a lot about the group’s culture.
“That sort of food culture is really a part of their identity,” he said.
Outram believes the bison was killed in the summer and the bones were thrown into the pit after it was butchered. The meat of the bison was likely cooked using hot rocks.
This discovery, Outram said, brings understanding into the “daily activities” of the past. He notes that it is common to find remains mixed in with other objects, but this particular bison, found in the pit, is from “one day’s activities.”
“It’s a day frozen in time,” said Cindy Gregg, executive director of the Prehistoric Indian Village. “… It’s pretty exciting stuff.”
Stealey hopes the next part of the bison to be found is the skull, but Outram is unsure if it will be found. Many times, American Indians would cut off the head of the animal because it was heavy.
The group will continue searching the trash pit in hopes of finding the skull until its final day at the Prehistoric Indian Village on Aug15.
(Left) Amy Chamberlain-Webber and Megan Stealey (right) discovered the bison pelvis during their time at the Prehistoric Indian Village. Both women are studying archaeology and forensics at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom.
Construction in Rome Reveals Well-Preserved, 2,000-Year-Old Dog Statue
Archaeologists in Rome recently unearthed an ancient terracotta statue with a dog’s head that was buried below an urban road.
The canine figurine may have been a decorative structure for a tomb’s rooftop.
The statue, which is palm-size, shows a pointy-eared pup with long, wavy fur flowing over its head and neck. It appears to be wearing a collar dangling a small emblem over its chest, and a circular object rests between its carved paws.
Experts with the archaeology branch of the Italian Ministry of Culture were inspecting a site at Via Luigi Tosti in the city’s Appio Latino district, in preparation for a waterway replacement project.
They discovered the dog-headed statue about 1.6 feet (0.5 meters) below street level, among other funerary artefacts dating from the first century B.C. to the first century A.D., Roma Today reported on Jan. 1.
Officials identified three mausoleums that were part of a larger burial complex on the Via Latina, an important ancient Roman road that is more than 2,000 years old.
“Once again, Rome shows important traces of the past in all its urban fabric,” representatives of the Special Superintendency of Archeology, Fine Arts and Landscape of Rome wrote on Instagram.
In addition to the dog-headed statue, archaeologists at the site also discovered an intact ceramic funerary urn containing bones and the remains of a young man who was buried “in the bare earth,” according to the post.
Charred marks in one of the tombs hinted that there had been a fire, which may have led Roman citizens to abandon the burial complex, ArtNews reported.
While the dog statue superficially resembles carved objects that were added to sloping rooftops as part of drainage systems, it lacks any kind of opening for draining water and its purpose was likely ornamental, according to Roma Today.
The Via Latina, which was built during the fourth century B.C., ran from Rome’s Porta Latina to the southeast for approximately 124 miles (200 kilometres), and it likely served as an important military highway, according to a study published in 2013 in the journal Papers of the British School at Rome.
Other funerary buildings and catacombs that have been excavated along this once-major thoroughfare are open to the public as part of the Archaeological Park of the Tombs of the Via Latina in Rome.
Visitors can inspect underground tombs decorated with mosaic and frescoed scenes from ancient myths and legends, according to the park website.
The study used novel computational approaches and linguistic data from more than 400 Bantu languages to reconstruct the historic migration routes. The project was a collaboration between scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and researchers at the University of Auckland in New Zealand.
Bantu men and women working the fields near Kismayo in Somalia.
The Bantu Expansion transformed sub-Saharan Africa’s linguistic, economic, and cultural composition. Today, more than 240 million people speak one of the more than 500 Bantu languages. It is generally accepted that the ancestors of current Bantu speakers lived around 5,000 to 6,000 years before present in a region by the current border of Nigeria and Cameroon. However, until recently, it was not known how and when they succeeded in crossing southward through or around the dense Central African Rainforest to finally settle in their current locations, covering about half of the African continent.
In their current study, researchers analyzed linguistic data from more than 400 Bantu and other closely related languages. From this data, using novel methods, they built a dated language family tree and reconstructed the geographic spread of Bantu speakers.
In contrast to previous claims, the southwards expansion happened approximately 4,000 years ago – a long time before the savanna corridor through the dense rainforest opened. It had previously been thought that agriculturalist populations, such as the early Bantu speakers, would not have been able to maintain their agricultural traditions in a dense rainforest environment.
Linguistic data tells us a story of migrations
Bantu migrations were reconstructed from linguistic data. The homeland is marked with a star, the main nodes are numbered (1-3), and the origins of the main clades (0-23) are marked with their respective colours.
The authors used a novel method, borrowed from genetics, to account for possible geographic biases in the reconstruction: “It turns out that there are actually more than 600 Bantu and other related documented languages, but there is not enough lexical data available for about one-third of them.
Therefore, we implemented a so-called sequence-free sampling – a way to overcome this bias and build a more robust geographic reconstruction, including all documented Bantu languages”, comments Ezequiel Koile, lead author of this research. “It’s really exciting to be able to use these methods to provide the most comprehensive analysis of the Bantu languages to date. These methods give us real power to resolve these long-standing debates about major human population expansions”, adds Simon Greenhill, co-author of the study.
Besides the sequence-free sampling approach, an important methodological improvement in the reconstruction of past migration routes was the use of a “break-away” model.
“According to this model, at every split in the language tree, one of the populations stays in the same place, while the other migrates. This seems more realistic than other diffusion-based methods, where both populations are forced to migrate,” explains Remco Bouckaert, developer of this geographic model.
Agriculturalists can adapt to a dense rainforest
It was previously thought that for a human group characterized by its agricultural practices, such as the early Bantu populations, it would have been hard, if not impossible, to cross the Central African rainforest.
“The idea was that the dense rainforest made it very difficult to transport and maintain the crops and cattle that characterized the Bantu expansion. While changes in the type of subsistence are attested in history, they tend to be relatively rare,” comments Damián Blasi, one of the article’s co-authors.
This is why it had generally been accepted that these populations migrated through the Sangha River Interval – a savanna corridor that opened as a north-south strip along the rainforest around 2,500 years ago – and not directly through the rainforest. This study’s findings fit with recent anthropological results demonstrating the adaptability of humans to tropical forests.
“Our results highlight the importance of niche construction in human population expansions. Of course ecology matters, but it isn’t destiny,” concludes Russell Gray, senior author of the publication.
