Category Archives: WORLD

NORTH AMERICA, U.S.A, WORLD

Ancient Americans made art deep within the dark zones of caves throughout the Southeast

Ancient Americans made art deep within the dark zones of caves throughout the Southeast

A group of recreational cavers explored a small, muddy stream tunnel south of Knoxville, Tennessee, on a cold winter day in 1980. They navigated a slippery mud slope and a tight keyhole through the cave wall, trudged through the stream itself, ducked through another keyhole and climbed more mud. Eventually, they entered a high and relatively dry passage deep in the cave’s “dark zone” – beyond the reach of external light.

Human figure from Mud Glyph Cave with raised right hand and Chunkey game piece in the left hand

On the walls around them, they began to see lines and figures traced into remnant mud banks laid down long ago when the stream flowed at this higher level. No modern or historic graffiti marred the surfaces. They saw images of animals, people and transformational characters blending human characteristics with those of birds, and those of snakes with mammals.

Ancient cave art has long been one of the most compelling of all artefacts from the human past, fascinating both to scientists and to the public at large. Its visual expressions resonate across the ages as if the ancients speak to us from deep in time. And this group of cavers in 1980 had happened upon the first ancient cave art site in North America.

Since then archaeologists like me have discovered dozens more of these cave art sites in the Southeast. We’ve been able to learn details about when cave art first appeared in the region, when it was most frequently produced and what it might have been used for. We have also learned a great deal by working with the living descendants of the cave art makers, the present-day Native American peoples of the Southeast, about what cave art means and how important it was and is to Indigenous communities.

Cave art in America?

Few people think of North America when they think about ancient cave art. A century before the Tennessee cavers made their own discovery, the world’s first modern discovery of cave art was made in 1879, at Altamira in northern Spain. The scientific establishment of the day immediately denied the authenticity of the site.

Subsequent discoveries served to authenticate this and other ancient sites. As the earliest expressions of human creativity, some perhaps 40,000 years old, European palaeolithic cave art is now justifiably famous worldwide.

But similar cave art had never been found anywhere in North America, although Native American rock art outside of caves has been recorded since Europeans arrived. Artwork deep under the ground was unknown in 1980, and the Southeast was an unlikely place to find it given how much archaeology had been done there since the colonial period.

Nevertheless, the Tennessee cavers recognized that they were seeing something extraordinary and brought archaeologist Charles Faulkner to the cave. He initiated a research project there, naming the site Mud Glyph Cave. His archaeological work showed that the art was from the Mississippian culture, some 800 years old, and depicted imagery characteristic of ancient Native American religious beliefs. Many of those beliefs are still held by the descendants of Mississippian peoples: the modern Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Coushatta, Muscogee, Seminole and Yuchi, among others.

After the Mud Glyph Cave discovery, archaeologists here at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville initiated systematic cave surveys. Today, we have catalogued 92 dark-zone cave art sites in Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Virginia and West Virginia. There are also a few sites known in Arkansas, Missouri and Wisconsin.

What did they depict?

There are three forms of southeastern cave art.

  • Mud glyphs are drawings traced into pliable mud surfaces preserved in caves, like those from Mud Glyph Cave. 
  • Petroglyphs are drawings incised directly into the limestone of the cave walls.
  • Pictographs are paintings, usually made with charcoal-based pigments, placed onto the cave walls.

Sometimes, more than one technique is found in the same cave, and none of the methods seems to appear earlier or later in time than the others. Some southeastern cave art is quite ancient. The oldest cave art sites date to some 6,500 years ago, during the Archaic Period (10,000-1000 B.C.). These early sites are rare and seem to be clustered on the modern Kentucky-Tennessee state line. The imagery was simple and often abstract, although representational pictures do exist.

Archaic Period pictograph of a hunter and prey dated to 6,500 years ago.
Woodland Period petroglyph of a box-shaped human-like creature with a long neck and u-shaped head.

Cave art sites increase in number over time. The Woodland Period (1000 B.C. – A.D. 1000) saw more common and more widespread art production. Abstract art was still abundant and less worldly. Probably more spiritual subject matter was common. During the Woodland, conflations between humans and animals, like “bird-humans,” made their first appearance.

The Mississippian Period (A.D. 1000-1500) is the last precontact phase in the Southeast before Europeans arrived, and this was when much of the dark-zone cave art was produced. The subject matter is clearly religious and includes spirit people and animals that do not exist in the natural world. There is also strong evidence that Mississippian art caves were compositions, with images organized through the cave passages in systematic ways to suggest stories or narratives told though their locations and relations.

Mississippian Period pictograph showing an animal with talons for feet, a blunt forehead and long snout, with a long curving tail over the back.

Cave art continued into the modern era

In recent years, researchers have realized that cave art has strong connections to the historic tribes that occupied the Southeast at the time of the European invasion. In several caves in Alabama and Tennessee, mid-19th-century inscriptions were written on cave walls in Cherokee Syllabary.

This writing system was invented by the Cherokee scholar Sequoyah between 1800 and 1824 and was quickly adopted as the tribe’s primary means of written expression.

On a cave wall in Alabama, an 1828 Cherokee syllabary inscription relating to a stickball ceremony.

Cherokee archaeologists, historians and language experts have joined forces with nonnative archaeologists like me to document and translate these cave writings. As it turns out, they refer to various important religious ceremonies and spiritual concepts that emphasize the sacred nature of caves, their isolation and their connection to powerful spirits. These texts reflect similar religious ideas to those represented by graphic images in earlier, precontact time periods.

Based on all the rediscoveries researchers have made since Mud Glyph Cave was first explored more than four decades ago, cave art in the Southeast was created over a long period of time.

These artists worked in ancient times when ancestral Native Americans lived by foraging in the rich natural landscapes of the Southeast all the way through to the historic period just before the Trail of Tears saw the forced removal of indigenous people east of the Mississippi River in the 1830s.

As surveys continue, researchers uncover more dark cave sites every year – in fact, four new caves were found in the first half of 2021. With each new discovery, the tradition is beginning to approach the richness and diversity of the Paleolithic art of Europe, where 350 sites are currently known. That archaeologists were unaware of the dark-zone cave art of the American Southeast even 40 years ago demonstrates the kinds of new discoveries that can be made even in regions that have been explored for centuries.

ASIA, IRAQ, WORLD

Ancient maps of Jupiter’s path show Babylonians’ advanced maths

Ancient maps of Jupiter’s path show Babylonians’ advanced maths

Analysis of an ancient codebreaking tablet has revealed that Babylonian astronomers had calculated the movements of Jupiter using an early form of geometric calculus some 1,400 years before we thought the technique was invented by the Europeans.

This means that these ancient Mesopotamian astronomers had not only figured out how to predict Jupiter’s paths more than 1,000 years before the first telescopes existed, but they were using mathematical techniques that would form the foundations of modern calculus as we now know it.

“This shows just how highly developed this ancient culture was,” historian Matthieu Ossendrijver from Humboldt University in Germany told Maddie Stone at Gizmodo. “I don’t think anybody expected something like this would be discovered in a Babylonian text.”

The key to figuring this out was a single, 50-year-old photograph of an astronomical tablet, which Ossendrijver used to decode the meaning of a strange trapezoid that had been carved into the stone more than 2,000 years ago.

For decades, researchers had been confounded by four Babylonian tablets held by London’s British Museum that all cite this trapezoid shape in the text referring to Jupiter’s movements across the sky. While we have plenty of archaeological evidence that basic geometry was often used in Babylonian mathematics, until now, we’ve only seen signs of them using arithmetic. 

So why would they be referring to geometrical calculations based on the long and short sides of a trapezoid? Without the codebreaking tablet in the photograph above, it just didn’t add up.

These cuneiform tablets were excavated from sites in Babylon and Uruk (now Iraq) in the 19th century and transported to the British Museum. Ossendrijver has known the contents of the four tablets like the back of his hand for decades, but until encountering this photograph, he’d never seen the fifth. 

“When I found this tablet last year, I immediately thought of these other tablets that I knew about, a few of which I translated myself,” Ossendrijver told Joshua Sokol at New Scientist. “But I never understood them.”

Essentially, this tablet held the key to understanding how the Babylonians used the trapezoid shape to predict Jupiter’s position, which was integral to their beliefs about the weather, the price of goods, and the fluctuating river levels throughout the year.

“The now-decoded ‘text A’ describes a procedure for calculating Jupiter’s displacement across the ecliptic plane, the path that the Sun appears to trace through the stars, over the course of a year,” says Maddie Stone at Gizmodo.

“According to the text, the Babylonians did so by tracking Jupiter’s speed as a function of time and determining the area under a time-velocity curve.”

Pretty impressive, right?

And what’s fascinating is French and British scholars had been using the same technique during the 14th century – using trapezoids to calculate measurements of velocity and displacement – and everyone had assumed it originated with them.

“In 1350, mathematicians understood that if you compute the area under this curve, you get the distance travelled,” Ossendrijver told Gizmodo. “That’s quite an abstract insight about the connection between time and motion. What is shown by [these texts] is that this insight came about in Babylonia.”

His findings have been published in Science.

MEXICO, NORTH AMERICA, WORLD

El Pital: A Massive Ancient Port City Home to 150 Pyramids

El Pital: A Massive Ancient Port City Home to 150 Pyramids

The remains of a huge, ancient port city believed to have flourished for 500 years during the decline of the Roman Empire have been discovered on Mexico’s Gulf Coast, the National Geographic Society announced Thursday.

With more than 150 earthen pyramids and other buildings, the biggest 100 feet high, the port seems to have been North America’s largest coastal city 1,500 years ago. The site, in the state of Veracruz, has been named El Pital for a nearby town.

Although digging has not begun at the site, an examination of the surface has already yielded artefacts and information that establish the city’s importance as a multiethnic political, commercial and agricultural centre from AD 100 to 600.

150 pyramids

El Pital could provide important clues to gaps in ancient Mexican history in areas bordering the seats of the Mayan and Aztec empires, said American archaeologist S. Jeffrey K. Wilkerson of the Institute for Cultural Ecology of the Tropics in Tampa, Fla. He is directing the exploration, which is partly funded by National Geographic.

El Pital residents probably traded with their contemporaries at Teotihuacan, the site of the famous pyramids north of the capital that was built by a civilization that predated the Aztecs.

The city is likely to have been an early rival of El Tajin, a later city 40 miles away that until now was the biggest archaeological site in northern Veracruz. El Pital appears to have been larger than El Tajin, controlling an area that included more than 40 square miles of suburbs and farmland and probably influencing an area several times that large.

The discovery could also have significant ecological implications because the ancient civilization seems to have supported more than 20,000 people–similar to the population of the area today–using farming techniques less harmful to the environment than the intensive chemical agriculture now practised there.

“The (population) density we’re seeing far exceeds anything that preceded it in this area and even those that follow until the end of the 20th Century,” Wilkerson said. “Something special was going on technologically that allowed that to happen and that has not occurred in the intervening 1,500 years.”

The fields around El Pital were made highly productive by some of the largest earth-moving projects of their time. Canals were dug to drain wetlands or to channel fresh water into rich estuaries that brackish water would otherwise have left infertile.

Residents also appear to have constructed an artificial island to guard the two slow-moving rivers that provided access to their city from the Gulf of Mexico. One of those rivers is the Nautla, Mexico’s 26th-largest river, notable because it floods every year, like the ancient Nile, leaving farmers a layer of rich silt.

The city’s demise may have been connected to a megacycle of El Nino, a climatic phenomenon that resulted in six months a year of the cold, windy rains known as nortes , Wilkerson theorized.

Some cocoa farmers still lived in the region at the time of the Spanish conquest, but the disease had mainly wiped them out by the end of the 16th Century. The jungle reclaimed the area until plantation owners cleared it again in the 1930s and 1940s.

Today’s farmers rely on chemicals to fertilize plantations in what is now one of Mexico’s most important banana and citrus regions. Those chemicals have stained ancient ceramic fragments–whose varied patterns led scientists to believe that the area was multiethnic–and even obsidian, an extremely dense volcanic material seldom penetrated, Wilkerson said.

Besides everyday ceramics, archaeologists have found a mask that resembles the image of the ancient rain god Tlaloc and a four-inch clay head believed to depict a sacrificed ballgame player. Residents of El Pital seem to have been major fans of ballgames: Eight courts have already been identified in the area.

“This is an extensive site with huge monuments for that period,” said Enrique Nalda, technical secretary of Mexico’s National Institute of Archeology and History, which granted Wilkerson a permit to explore the El Pital area.

Some of the pyramids at El Pital.

Ironically, Wilkerson discovered El Pital because the institute nearly two years ago refused to allow him to continue working in an area farther upriver, where he has carried out investigations over the last three decades.

ASIA, KAZAKHSTAN, WORLD

A Valley in Kazakhstan Home to Countless Massive Stone Spheres

A Valley in Kazakhstan Home to Countless Massive Stone Spheres

Close to the town of Shetpe in Western Kazakhstan lies the Valley of Balls – or Torysh, as it is known in Kazakh. It consists of numerous ball-like rock formations strewn across a wide range of steppe land. The balls range in size from tiny marble-like rocks to huge boulders the size of a car.

The Torysh Valley in Kazakhstan is home to a unique landscape. Scattered across the surface are countless stone spheres of different sizes.

It’s as if in the distant past, it rained massive spheres from the heavens. The unique Kazakhstani spheres are found in the southwestern part of the country, amidst mountains, valleys, deserts, and tundra.

The spheres are believed to be more than 150 million years old, and they are unusual not only because of their age but by their shape and impressive size. Some of the Spheres are as large as a car, while some spheres are only a few centimetres in diameter.

How they came into existence is also exciting and is the result of science facts mixed with folklore or even legends.

Scientists say the region is home to a geological wonder and that the spheres most likely date back from the Jurassic to the early Cretaceous period, between 180 and 120 million years.

Furthermore, it is thought that the stone spheres are composed of silicate or carbon cement.

The researchers that travelled to Kazakhstan to study the spheres believe they are the result of massive concretions. However, alternative researchers hold that these massive stone spheres are the ‘ancestors’ of more recent spheres discovered in Costa Rica and Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Those who believe they are not naturally made argue the massive stone spheres of Kazakhstan result from long-lost civilizations that existed on Earth before written history.

But the truth is that the valley of spheres is poorly reached.

Nonetheless, there could be various geological explanations ranging from megaspherulites – crystalline balls created in volcanic ash and then exposed by weathering – to cannonball concretions – a process where an area’s sediment tends to accumulate around a more rigid core.

In addition, some argue that the speeches are also the result of a process called spheroidal weathering, where the conditions are perfect for eroding rocks, giving them a spherical form.

However, since not all the spheres in the enigmatic valley are of the same size, researchers believe the stone ‘balls’ are most likely the result of megaspherulites.

NEW ZEALAND, WORLD

42,000-Year-Old Trees Enable Accurate Analysis of Earth’s Last Magnetic Field Reversal

42,000-Year-Old Trees Enable Accurate Analysis of Earth’s Last Magnetic Field Reversal

Humans today take Earth’s magnetic North Pole for granted. But over the course of the planet’s history, the direction of its magnetic field has shifted. A new study suggests that the last time the field flipped around and flopped back again, the effects on Earth’s surface were cataclysmic, Carolyn Gramling reports for Science News.

The study begins with fossilized Kauri trees (pictured) that died over 41,000 years ago.

The study, published on February 19 in the journal Science, makes use of massive, fossilized Kauri trees from New Zealand to create a timeline of how cosmic rays impacted Earth’s atmosphere during their lifetimes, which overlapped with a magnetic field flipping event called the Laschamps excursion.

By comparing the chemicals preserved in the tree rings to atmospheric records found in ice cores and soil, the researchers drew conclusions about the magnetic field’s effect on the ozone layer, as well as solar activity and space weather.

After that, the researchers laid out a series of theories about how the changes may have impacted ancient people and wildlife on Earth. The Science study is the first to consider a wide swath of possible consequences.

The study begins with fossilized Kauri trees that died over 41,000 years ago. One, which was discovered last January and delivered to Ngāwhā Marae, was the first tree found to have lived during the entirety of the Laschamps excursion, an 800-year period when the magnetic field flipped backwards and corrected itself again.

42,000-Year-Old Trees Enable Accurate Analysis of Earth’s Last Magnetic Field Reversal
The kauri tree was unearthed during the expansion of the Ngāwhā Generation geothermal power plant.

The research team analyzed levels of a radioactive form of carbon in the trees’ rings. The idea is that when Earth’s magnetic field is weak, cosmic radiation causes more radioactive carbon to form in the atmosphere, so it shows up in higher amounts in the tree rings.

Because tree rings form with a predictable yearly pattern, they could match magnetic field strength with time. They found that during the Laschamps excursion, the magnetic field was about 28 per cent of its usual strength and even weaker in the centuries leading up to this time period.

From about 41,600 to 42,300 years ago, Earth’s magnetic field was only six per cent of its full strength. Because this period centres on about 42,000 years ago, the researchers named the period the Adams Event after Douglas Adams, author of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which states that 42 is the answer to “the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything.”

It would be bad enough if just Earth’s magnetic field was weakened, but ice core data showed an unfortunate coincidence: during the Adams Event, the sun was also in a period of lowered activity. While that might have meant fewer solar flares, it also means that the protective shield the sun creates against cosmic rays—called the heliosphere—was also weakened.

With both its magnetic field and heliosphere diminished, Earth was doubly at risk from cosmic radiation, according to the study.

That would be really bad news today, given space weather’s effect on satellites and the power grid. But what would it mean for life 42,000 years ago?

“It must have seemed like the end of days,” says University of New South Wales geoscientist Chris S.M. Turney, a co-author of the new study, to Alanna Mitchell at the New York Times.

The effects may have included a thinning ozone layer, the aurora borealis approaching close to the equator, an increase in ultraviolet radiation reaching the surface, raging electrical storms, and Arctic air reaching across continents, the authors write on the Conversation.

They link the environmental effects to the extinction of large animals in Australia, the eventual demise of Neanderthals and humans’ use of red ocher pigment for cave art and sunscreen.

“One of the strengths of the paper just from the perspective of its scholarly work, not necessarily the analytical science that it does, is just the degree to which it stitches together all of these disparate sources of information to make its case,” says climate scientist Jason E. Smerdon of Columbia University to the New York Times.

The paper has sparked conversations among scientists about the theories it presents, and how future research might provide evidence to back them up or not, John Timmer reports for Ars Technica.

Experts have wondered for over 50 years about whether or not magnetic field shifts affect life on Earth, but lacked clear avenues to find answers, geophysics expert James E. T. Channell tells the Times.

“The biggest value of the paper is that it’s putting out several ideas that should be investigated further,” says GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences geomagnetism Monika Korte to Science News.

ASIA, LEBANON, WORLD

Roman Temple Discovered in Ancient City of Tyre

Roman Temple Discovered in Ancient City of Tyre

A new Roman temple has been discovered by archaeologists in the ancient Phoenician city of Tyre, located off the coast of Lebanon. The joint excavation, led by María Eugenia Aubet (Pompeu Fabra University of Barcelona), Ali Badawi (General Directorate of Antiquities of Lebanon), and Francisco J. Núñez (Polish Centre of Mediterranean Archaeology, University of Warsaw), focused on the massive structure.

Roman Temple Discovered in Ancient City of Tyre
View of the excavated area from the southwest.

Two phases of construction have been identified, placing the temple in the early Roman period (about 31 B.C.E. to 193 C.E.) with a major modification in the late Roman period (about 284 C.E. to 476 C.E.). The temple is situated in the Tyre Acropolis, the highest point of the landmass, which Greek and Phoenician inscriptions describe as a sacred area. Researchers believe many cult-related rituals and worship activities would have taken place here.

Aerial view of the site, 2021.

“Its location on a podium in the most elevated area of the ancient island highlights this building’s particular status,” said Núñez in an email.

The rectangular building is east-west in orientation, with a vestibule flanked by two columns, and a podium on the other side. Temple walls were originally comprised of sandstone blocks, and the building stood on a platform made of limestone and sandstone.

The 26-foot-high columns were made of Egyptian pink granite, and the stepped entryway was decorated with engraved slabs featuring geometric motifs.

“It is one of but a few buildings of this character found in Tyre to date,” Núñez wrote. “Our knowledge of Tyre in Antiquity, despite the great prominence of the city, is unfortunately quite limited.”

Researchers believe there may have been a subterranean chamber located south of the entrance. The exact object of veneration at the massive temple remains a mystery. “At least, for now, the name of the deity worshipped in this building remains elusive to us,” wrote Núñez.

The porticoed street that descends from the temple intersects with a narrower street leading to a nearby shrine, with two rooms and a courtyard. This smaller structure is oriented north-south, with one room featuring an Egyptian relief that portrays the goddess Isis breastfeeding her son Horus as a child.

Work in the location of the Roman temple’s facade, with the foundation of a column in the foreground.

Tyre is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world, with a long history of settlement dating back to the 3rd millennium B.C.E. It has long been a significant port and trading centre in the Mediterranean region.

During the Bronze Age and Iron Age, around 1,200 B.C.E. to 868 B.C.E., it was an independent Phoenician city and a site of major economic importance, including industry, commerce, and crafts. Originally located on an offshore island, Tyre was connected to the mainland by a causeway built by Alexander the Great.

Buildings constructed over five millennia by various cultures have made Tyre a difficult archaeological site to investigate, with layers of occupation overlapping each other.

“The superimposed architectural remains, along with natural catastrophes, the rise of the sea level, and the dynamic land development and public works in the recent decades efficiently obscured the character of ancient architecture,” Núñez said in a statement.

The area around the temple was severely damaged and reconstructed in the Early Byzantine era. The temple itself was dismantled and replaced by a large basilica, which was eventually destroyed along with other parts of the city during a tsunami in the 6th-century C.E.

Work will continue at the site in 2022, with further investigations of the Roman temple and surrounding area. Researchers plan to determine whether a second monumental building, located to the north, is another temple.

EUROPE, TURKEY, WORLD

Gate to Temple of Zeus Unearthed in Magnesia, Turkey

Gate to Temple of Zeus Unearthed in Magnesia, Turkey

Archaeologists have been excavating Magnesia for decades. The ancient Greek city in Turkey’s Aydin province is home to two temples: one dedicated to Artemis, and the other, to Zeus.

Archaeologists found the entrance gate for the Zeus Temple in the ancient city Magnesia, located in Aydin’s Germencik district in western Turkey. The excavations that continue in the Ortaklar neighbourhood are being led by Associate Professor Gorkem Kokdemir of Ankara University Archaeology Department.

“I have been working on the Magnesia excavations for 23 years, since 1998,” Kokdemir tells TRT World. The excavations were being led by Professor Orhan Bingol, and when he retired, the Ministry of Culture and Tourism saw me fit for the job.”

According to Kokdemir, Magnesia was first dug up during the erstwhile Ottoman Empire’s reign. A German archaeologist, Carl Humann, in the 1890s, around 1891-1892, on behalf of the German government – who also dug in Bergama, and many other cities in western Anatolia – excavated Magnesia.

“He spends two years in Magnesia and digs up the Zeus Temple, the one we rediscovered and is now in the news, in the agora,” Kokdemir says on the phone. “It is significant because of architectural history. It is dated back to the 3rd century BC, one of the earliest temples of the Hellenistic period.”

Magnesia in Turkey’s Aydin province was first dug up before the establishment of the Republic of Turkey by a German archaeologist.

Kokdemir adds that Humann “reveals the architectural elements of this temple and he takes about ten per cent of the temple to Berlin. He takes many goods to Berlin such as sculptures and inscriptions, along with parts of the Zeus Temple. Today in Berlin’s Pergamon Museum there is on display the Zeus temple’s parts 5.5-6 metres tall, they have been completed with 90 per cent imitation parts. You can see this temple when you go to the museum today.”

Kokdemir tells TRT World that the Zeus Temple is one of the most important sacred areas of Magnesia, one of the most important temples.

“There is the Artemis sacred space there, there is also a sacred agora, the Zeus Temple is in the sacred agora. It is very significant, it is the second important cult [of Magnesia].”

“In ancient cities, people worship not just one deity, they worship multiple gods or goddesses. In Magnesia the first deity is Artemis, and the second deity is Zeus,” he clarifies.

Kokdemir says the archaeological team is once more excavating the Zeus Temple to access the architectural information, to complete the missing information and to reintroduce the temple to archaeological literature: “It has been underground for a hundred years. It was only seen during Humann’s time and shortly after was buried under four metres of soil.”

The Magnesia excavation team expects to find 60 to 70 per cent of the original materials of the Zeus Temple, planning to carry out a good restoration project and to revive it with five metres pillar height and seven-seven and a half metres including the roof and will make it a proper sight to visit.

Parts of the Zeus Temple in Magnesia are in Berlin, while most of it is being dug up in Turkey’s Aydin province.

Asked about the significance of Magnesia as a city, Kokdemir says it was set up about 2,400 years ago, in the 4th century BC. “Its most striking aspect is the temples built for gods and goddesses and the festivals and games organised for these deities.”

Of the structures in Magnesia, the Artemis temple is the biggest temple, which is open to visitors. Kokdemir says it is the fourth largest temple in Anatolia, following Ephesus’ Artemis Temple – one of the seven wonders of the world–, the Apollo Temple in Didyma, and the Artemis Temple in Manisa, in Sardes.

“The Artemis Temple in Magnesia was built by a prominent architect of its time, think of him like Sinan the Architect was to the Ottoman legacy, an architect of antiquity called Hermogenes. His masterpiece is the Artemis Temple,” Kokdemir enthuses.

Kokdemir notes another detail about the Artemis Temple. “In the 3rd century BC, 2300 years ago, there were games organised that were the equivalent of the most important games in the Mediterranean region, Delphi Apollo Games. A grand organisation. Participants from Italy, from Greece, from many points in Anatolia, from the islands, joined in these games that last five days. The games spoke of the significance of Magnesia and also helped the city grow and thrive.”

Kokdemir points out that there are still many places in Magnesia to be excavated. While they expect the Zeus Temple to be restored to its full glory in a couple of years contingent on funding, there is also the hippodrome with 50,000 capacity, he says. “We may have to wait for 15-20 years to completely experience the amazing city that is Magnesia, but it will be worth it.”

ENGLAND, EUROPE, WORLD

Roman-Era Venus Statuette Unearthed in England

Roman-Era Venus Statuette Unearthed in England

BBC News reports that an excavation ahead of a construction project in the centre of southwestern England’s city of Gloucester has uncovered a 1,800-year-old figurine thought to depict Venus, the Roman goddess of love.

The statuette was discovered in Gloucestershire at the site of the new £107m development, the Forum.

It is one of many finds at the site dating back to Roman times and is believed to be a depiction of Venus, the Roman goddess of love.

17cm-high, the pipeclay figurine dates to the first or second Century

Archaeologist Anthony Beechey said: “This has been the most exciting find of my career in archaeology so far.

“The figurine provides a really important tangible link between the people of Gloucester and their past.”

The archaeologists believe the 17cm-high figurine would have been worshipped as a religious icon.

Andrew Armstrong, city archaeologist at Gloucester City Council, said: “This figurine is in incredibly good condition and a wonderful find for Gloucester.

“We know pieces like these were made in central France and the Rhineland/Mosel region of Germany during the first and second centuries.

“It seems certain the figurine is from this period and is a representation of Venus. She would most likely have stood in someone’s home shrine for the goddess.”

More remains of the city’s medieval Whitefriars Carmelite Friary were also found

Lead archaeologist Marino Cardelli described the find as of “inestimable historical value… a testimony of the city’s history and culture”.

The development of the Forum is the largest regeneration project Gloucestershire has seen for a generation and will create a new social and digital quarter.

The statuette was excavated alongside evidence of the city’s ancient heritage, including the stone foundations of a number of buildings that may have formed part of a large Roman suburb outside the city walls.

Councillor Richard Cook, leader of Gloucester City Council, said: “The Forum site is truly proving a treasure trove of archaeological finds which give us a fascinating insight into how Gloucester has changed over time.

“By bringing forward a development to shape the city as a future-ready digital hub, we are also illuminating its long and intriguing history.”