Ancient Chinese tomb dating back 2,500 years uncovered to shed light on obscure kingdom
Archaeologists in Luoyang, central China, unveiled a 2,500-year-old tomb they’ve been excavating since 2009.
The tomb contained copper bells and ceremonial pots. It is the largest site of around 200 tombs in the area. There was also a horse burial pit that contained whole horse skeletons and chariots.
Experts believe that the burial site belongs to a nobleman or royal of a little-known kingdom, called Lukun, that only existed between 638 BC to 525 BC, reported People’s Daily Online.
Archaeologists found a horse burial pit in Luoyang, China which contained several whole skeletons and chariots
The area had ground water damage, which needed to be pumped out (above), but it was still well preserved despite the damage
The local government has been excavating in the Yinchuan area, just south of Luoyang city, since 2009 after a spate of grave robberies. An initial survey of the area revealed around 200 rectangular gravesites, eight horse and carriage burial pits, 30 storage pits and 10 kilns.
The largest site had a tomb that around approximately three feet below ground. It measured 21 feet long, 17 feet wide and 28 feet deep.
Due to groundwater in the area, the exterior of the tomb already has visible water damage. There were also signs of damage as a result of grave robbery.
However, the interior coffin was protected by plaster and coffin board. It was in the space between the plaster and the coffin board that the copper wares were discovered.
The relics from the tomb have yet to be catalogued but they showed influences from the neighbouring regions at the time
The full count of the relic has yet to be completed but owing to its size, experts believe that the site was for a noble family, which didn’t have great political power.
At a nearby site, excavation of a horse burial site has been carried out since 2013. In a pit that measured 25 feet long, 20 feet wide and nine feet deep, a total of 13 horses and six chariots were found.
The horses had been neatly arranged and were left on their side. They even had decorative items on top. In a corner of the pit, there were also large quantities of cow and sheep heads and hooves.
Experts believe that the shape of the items belonged to a kingdom called Luhun, which existed between 638 BC to 525 BC. It had been detailed in historic texts but little was known about the kingdom since it only lasted for a short time.
The horses carried intricate adornments on them (pictured), giving archaeologists clues to the period that the tombs were built
Cow and sheep’s heads and hoofs were also found in the burial site, which was said to be a Luhun Kingdom tradition at the time
Experts hope the site will help them uncover and track the movements of the ethnic minority groups in the area during that time
Experts now believe that the burial showed evidence of the Luhun people’s migration.
The Rong people, an ethnic minority group who made up the population of the kingdom, had a tradition of burying the cattle parts in the horse burial pits, which was not seen in other burial sites of the same period.
However, the designs of the objects that were buried also showed the stylistic influence from the surrounding regions during the Spring-Autumn period (722 BC to 481 BC).
This showed that the country had absorbed influences from its surroundings and combined them with its own traditions.
It is now hoped that the site will help historians and archaeologists uncover the movements of the ethnic minority groups in the area.
Turkish archaeologists find 2,400-year-old monument at Haydarpaşa
Hurriyet Daily News reports that a semicircular structure dated to the third century B.C. has been uncovered at the site of the Haydarpașa train station in Istanbul, which is located on the Asian side of the Bosporus.
The structure, discovered at the station’s waiting platforms, covers a large area and is apsidal in form, a feature common in ancient churches.
These remains give significant hints about Khalkedon, the ancient ‘Land of the Blind’ from some 2,500 years ago.
While the site’s architecture does not lend any clues to its function, archaeologists believe it was considered sacred.
However, they also estimate that the building is the oldest architectural structure unearthed in these excavations.
Speaking to Demirören News Agency, Mehmet Ali Polat, Chief archaeologist of the Haydarpaşa excavation, gave information about the field works and finds.
Remains were found in an area of 350,000 square meters, including the area surrounding the station, said Polat, adding that small finds, pots, coins dating from around 6 B.C. to the modern-day were found, all from various eras.
“This is the northwestern port of the ancient city of Khalkedon, a large structure that could be a warehouse. On the other side of the road, we see a group of buildings that could be a small summer palace,” Polat said.
The Haydarpaşa Train Station was shut down for restorations, in which ancient artefacts were unearthed, and since then, Haydarpaşa has been an excavation site.
The digs, started in 2018 by Turkey’s Culture and Tourism Ministry and Istanbul Archeological Museums, have been done with the utmost care for the last three years.
Digs revealing historical structures shed light on the deep roots of Anatolia and Istanbul, a cradle of civilizations.
2,000-year-old remains of nomadic ‘royal’ unearthed by Russian farmer includes ‘laughing man,’ haul of jewels and weapons
Russian farmer unearths the remains of a 2,000-year-old nomadic ‘royal’ buried alongside a ‘laughing’ man. A farmer found the haul when digging on his land in the south of Russia near the Caspian Sea.
Stunning gold and silver jewellery, weaponry, valuables and artistic household items were found next to the chieftain’s skeleton in a grave close to the Caspian Sea in southern Russia. Local farmer Rustam Mudayev’s spade made an unusual noise and it emerged he had struck an ancient bronze pot near his village of Nikolskoye in the Astrakhan region.
A chieftain was buried with his head raised as if on a pillow (pictured). It is believed the individual was a high-ranking ‘royal’ of a nomadic society more videos He took it to the Astrakhan History museum for analysis and an experts opinion on the find.
A skeleton uncovered by researchers in Russia.
‘As soon as the snow melted we organised an expedition to the village,’ said museum’s scientific researcher Georgy Stukalov.’After inspecting the burial site we understood that it to be a royal mound, one of the sites where ancient nomads buried their nobility.’
WERE THE SARMARTIANS?
The Sarmatians were a group of people who lived for almost a millennium from the 5th century BC to the 4th century AD. Their range stretched, at its largest in the 1st century AD, from the Caspian Sea across Eurasia and towards modern-day Poland.
The territory was known as Sarmatia and included today’s Central Ukraine, South-Eastern Ukraine, Southern Russia, Russian Volga and South-Ural regions, also to a smaller extent north-eastern Balkans and around Moldova. They had conflicts with the Roman Empire as they expanded east at their peak, allying themselves with Germanic tribes.
Towards the end of their reign, they faced competition from Germanic Goths and the Huns. The Sarmatians were eventually decisively assimilated by the burgeoning populations in Eastern Europe.
The burial is believed to belong to a leader of a Sarmatian nomadic tribe that dominated this part of Russia until the 5th century AD, and other VIPs of the ancient world, including a ‘laughing’ young man with an artificially deformed egg-shaped skull and excellent teeth that have survived two millennia.
‘We have been digging now for 12 days,’ said Mr Stukalov.’We have found multiple gold jewellery decorated with turquoise and inserts of lapis lazuli and glass.’The most ‘significant’ find is seen as a male skeleton buried inside a wooden coffin.
This chieftain’s head was raised as if it rested on a pillow and he wore a cape decorated with gold plaques. Archaeologists found his collection of knives, items of gold, a small mirror and different pots, evidently signalling his elite status. They collected a gold and turquoise belt buckle and the chief’s dagger along with a tiny gold horse’s head which was buried between his legs, and other intricate jewellery.
Treasures uncovered by a farmer in southern Russia
Another grave was of an elderly man – his skeleton broke by an excavator – but buried with him was the head of his horse, its skull still dressed in an intricate harness richly decorated with silver and bronze when a farmer digging a pit on his land unearthed 2,000-year-old treasure inside the ancient burial mound of the tomb of a nomadic ‘royal’, along with a ‘laughing’ man (pictured) with an artificially deformed egg-shaped skull. Shaping and elongating the skull in this way was popular on various continents among ancient groupings like the Sarmatians, Alans, Huns and others.
An artificially deformed skull found by researchers in southern Russia.
The burial is believed to belong to a leader of a Sarmatian nomadic tribe that dominated this part of Russia until the 5th-century pieces of jewellery were found in the burial pit alongside the dead humans and animals and experts believe they were gifts for the dead.
The chief’s dagger was buried with him and places alongside his body, between his hand and leg (pictured)They collected a gold and turquoise belt buckle and the chief’s dagger along with a tiny gold horse’s head which was buried between his legs and other intricate jewellery.
Nearby was a woman with a bronze mirror who had been buried with a sacrificial offering of a whole lamb, along with various stone items, the meaning of which is unclear. Another grave was of an elderly man – his skeleton broke by an excavator – but buried with him was the head of his horse, its skull still dressed in an intricate harness richly decorated with silver and bronze.
Also in the burial mound was the skeleton of a young man with an artificially deformed egg-shaped skull. Local farmer Rustam Mudayev’s spade made an unusual noise and it emerged he had struck an ancient bronze pot near his village of Nikolskoye in the Astrakhan region.
A horse’s head buried on top of the old man’s body still carries an intricate silver and bronze harness which was also uncovered after the farmer took his find to the Astrakhan History museum for analysis and an experts opinion on the find. ‘As soon as the snow melted we organised an expedition to the village,’ said museum’s scientific researcher Georgy Stukalov.
‘After inspecting the burial site we understood that it to be a royal mound, one of the sites where ancient nomads buried their nobility,’ the archaeologist said we have been digging now for 12 days,’ said Mr Stukalov. ‘We have found multiple gold jewellery decorated with turquoise and inserts of lapis lazuli and glass’
A chieftain was buried with his head raised as if on a pillow and wearing a cape adorned with gold plagues the most ‘significant’ finds is seen as a male skeleton buried inside a wooden coffin. This chieftain’s head was raised as if it rested on a pillow and he wore a cape decorated with gold plagues.
The shape is likely to have been ‘moulded’ either by multiple bandaging or ‘ringing’ of the head in infancy. Such bandages and or rings were worn for the first years of a child’s life to contort the skull into the desired shape. Shaping and elongating the skull in this way was popular on various continents among ancient groupings like the Sarmatians, Alans, Huns and others.
Such deformed heads were seen as a sign of a person’s special status and noble roots, and their privileged place in their societies, it is believed. The burials date to around 2,000 years ago, a period when the Sarmatian nomadic tribes held sway in what is now southern Russia.
‘These finds will help us understand what was happening here at the dawn of civilisation,’ said Astrakhan region governor Sergey Morozov. Excavation is continuing at the site. Nearby was a woman with a bronze mirror who had been buried with a sacrificial offering of a whole lamb, along with various stone items, the meaning of which is unclear.
The gold jewellery and the buckle (pictured) are thought to be signs of the person’s nobility and would only have been afforded to the most wealthy people.
600-year-old Medieval lingerie set found in an Austrian castle
It is hardly racy by today’s standards but this skimpy lingerie has certainly shocked historians. The lace and linen undergarments date back to hundreds of years before women’s underwear was thought to exist.
Foundations of history: This bra was discovered hidden in a vault at Lengberg Castle in East Tyrol and is thought to date back to the 15th century
They had lain hidden in a vault beneath the floorboards of an Austrian castle since the 15th century.
Despite their state of decay, the knickers bear more than a passing resemblance to the string bikini briefs popular today, while the bra has the fitted cups and delicate straps of its modern-day counterparts.
While it was known that medieval men wore undergarments like modern-day shorts, it was thought that women simply wore a smock or chemise.
It was thought that knickers didn’t make an appearance until the late 18th century. Bras were thought to be an even more modern invention, not appearing until around 100 years ago.
Revealing relic: A pair of knickers found in Lengberg Castle
Hilary Davidson, the fashion curator at the Museum of London, said the discovery ‘totally rewrites’ fashion history, adding: ‘Nothing like this has ever come up before.’
She believes it is ‘entirely probable’ that something similar was worn by Britain’s medieval women.
‘These finds are a very exciting insight into the way people dressed in the Middle Ages,’ she continued.
‘It’s rare that everyday garments of any kind survive from this period, let alone underwear.’
Hidden treasure: Lengberg Castle in East Tyrol, Austria, where the amazing haul was unearthed during restoration work
The undergarments were among almost 3,000 fragments of clothing and other detritus found in Lengberg Castle in East Tyrol during recent renovations.
It is thought that they were buried when the building was extended in 1480 and that the exceptionally dry conditions stopped the fragile garments from disintegrating over the centuries.
Beatrix Nutz, of Innsbruck University, who made the find, initially faced scepticism but radiocarbon-dating tests confirmed her suspicions.
The haul included four bras and two pairs of pants. Two of the bras resemble modern counterparts but the others are described rather bluntly as ‘shirts with bags’, the August issue of the BBC History Magazine reports.
A 5,000-year-old stepwell has been found in one of the largest Harappan cities, Dholavira, in Kutch. It is part of a reservoir that is three times bigger than the Great Bath at Mohenjo Daro.
Located in the eastern reservoir of Dholavira by experts from the Archaeological Survey of India working with IIT-Gandhinagar, the site represents the largest, grandest, and the best furnished ancient reservoir discovered so far in the country.
It’s rectangular and approximately 241 ft. long, 96 ft. wide, and 31 ft. deep. Another site, the ornate Rani ki Vav in Patan, called the queen of step-wells, is already on Unesco list.
“We will conduct spot analysis in December as various surveys have indicated other reservoirs and step-wells may be buried in Dholavira,” V.N. Prabhakar told TOI.
“We also suspect a huge lake and an ancient shoreline are buried in the archaeological site that’s one of the five largest Harappan sites and the most prominent archaeological site in India belonging to the Indus Valley civilization,” he added.
Experts will investigate the advanced hydraulic engineering used by Harappans for building the stepwell through a 3D laser scanner, remote sensing technology and ground-penetrating radar system.
Newly Discovered Cave Paintings Suggest Early Man Was Battling A Lot Of Inner Demons
The discovery of cave drawings in northern Spain by a team from the University of Cambridge suggests that prehistoric people struggled with a range of inner demons, nagging worries, and anxieties as they struggled with life’s demands in the Paleolithic era.
The paintings indicate that early humans had “some pretty heavy stuff” weighing on their minds, archaeologists said.
According to lead researcher Alan Reddy, the images found on the limestone walls and ceiling of the cave trace back to 14,000 B.C. and seem to indicate that early hunter-gatherers were often anxious about their ability to kill game animals, reeled from the challenges of raising a family, and “generally had a really hard time keeping it together.”
“While these pictographs are crude in terms of their rendering of human anatomy, they have a vivid expressive quality that led our team to surmise that Ice Age humans had an awful lot of personal stuff going on,” said Reddy, showing reporters a photo of a rudimentary figure painted in smeared charcoal that appeared to be on its knees weeping into its hands.
“Although we don’t want to read too much into these images at this point, it’s hard not to deduce that our prehistoric ancestors were often desperately lonely and felt like they had no one else to turn to.”
“This one seems as if it’s suddenly waking up in the middle of the night,” added Reddy, pointing to a figure that appeared to be sitting bolt upright on a mat of antelope skin. “If you look carefully, you can still see how the artist used daubs of yellow clay to drench him in sweat.”
Reddy confirmed that other images in the cave include a downcast man apparently being mocked by potential mates for his inability to start a fire, a woman using a stone chopping implement to cut her own body, and a seated man seemingly resigned to his fate at the approach of a charging mastodon.
Further chemical analysis will have to be conducted to determine if the ominous red handprints along the walls were symbolic works rendered in red ochre or simply the result of anguished early humans striking the stone surface until they started to bleed.
“What’s remarkable is how, with just a few basic pigments and the most primitive painting tools, our ancestors could so intensely portray their dread of dying alone or their toxic jealously of alpha males,” said Reddy, adding that only a highly-skilled but extremely alienated artist could use nothing but melted animal fat blown through a hollow bone to convey his dismay at having no one he could consider a close friend and realizing he was too old to make new ones.
“It’s clear that these humans felt so disconnected from one another, so unable to constructively address their problems, that they used these sad, disturbing paintings as their sole outlet for comfort.”
According to Reddy, the paintings not only represent the ability of Late Stone Age humans to express their immediate emotional torment but perhaps also to construct larger, more elaborate narratives of their prolonged, agonizing downward spirals.
Through paint-application analysis and radiocarbon dating methods, Reddy said his team was able to determine that individual artists sometimes depicted their unravelling over a series of months or even years.
“Here you can see the same figure gorging on bison and growing more and more obese, apparently stuck in a lengthy cycle of compulsive overeating,” said Reddy, adding that the self-destructive pattern was broken only once by an extremely brief sequence of dynamic images suspected to be a quickly abandoned attempt at the aerobic activity.
“The drawings finally stop after about 20 meters with a half-finished pictograph of what we speculate is the poor man attempting and failing to fit into his deer-hide frock and pants and then, out of apparent shame, opting not to leave his cave all day.”
“Honestly, I’m glad the paintings didn’t go on much longer,” added Reddy. “Archaeological discovery or not, it’s hard to watch a guy like this.”
The discovery of the images comes just weeks after archaeologists uncovered a separate set of cave paintings in southern France, whose artists reportedly hunted, reared children, and otherwise did the best they could without taking themselves so goddamn seriously.
FBI cracks the case of the 4,000-year-old mummy’s head
A team of forensic scientists has managed to extract DNA from a 4,000-year-old mummy, and their finding has solved a century-old mystery of its ransacked tomb.
If the F.B.I.’s scientists could extract DNA from the 4,000-year-old mummy, they would add a powerful tool to their forensics arsenal and also unlock a new way of deciphering Egypt’s ancient past
The Egyptian mummy wasn’t a fully preserved corpse, but rather a decapitated, mutilated, bandage-wrapped head that archaeologists found on top of a coffin when they excavated a tomb back in 1915. And that was the source of the mystery.
As the researchers explained in a paper published March 1 in the journal Genes, the tomb belonged to an Egyptian Middle Kingdom governor named Djehutynakht.
But by the time modern scientists found the tomb, it had been ransacked; it was robbed in ancient times. In an article describing the discovery, The New York Times reported that the robbers had set the place on fire “to cover their tracks.”
All that remained of the tomb’s occupants was a dismembered torso in one corner of the tomb and a head placed on top of Djehutynakht’s coffin. For more than a hundred years, researchers have wondered and disagreed about whether these mummified remains belonged to Djehutynakht himself or to his wife.
Deepening the mystery, the head had been altered during the mummification process, with several bones removed from the jaw and cheek in an effort to enable the deceased to eat and drink in the afterlife, the Times reported. Those bones might have offered clues as to whether the body was male or female.
That left DNA analysis. But extracting DNA from ancient Egyptian mummies, after centuries in hot, DNA-degrading environments, had never been achieved before. The Times reported that earlier attempts failed or produced contaminated results.
Still, FBI forensic researchers gave it a shot. They had access because the head, along with many artefacts from the tomb, had long since made its way to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. (Shipping artefacts out of Egypt would be illegal today under Egyptian law.) They drilled into a molar extracted from the head “in pristine condition” back in 2009, producing 105 milligrams (0.004 ounces) of tooth dust.
After exposing the dust to a liquid mixture designed to copy and amplify existing DNA, they found that it came from a biological male. The head, in other words, most likely belonged to Djehutynakht and not his wife.
A team at the Department of Homeland Security, working with a smaller tooth-dust sample, later confirmed the results. In both cases, the DNA was damaged, demonstrating that it came from the ancient mummy and not modern contamination.
Interestingly, it remains unclear which Djehutynakht the head (and tomb) belonged to. Two governors with that name ruled an area call Hare Nome, and, the researchers wrote, “while they shared the same name (which means Thoth [the main local deity] is Strong), there is no evidence they were related.”
The pyramids of Egypt are a marvel of archaeology, soaring high above the desert sands and visible for miles. Who were the people who managed to construct these pyramids, which was obviously a monumental task?
A Bedouin man on a camel by the Pyramids of Khafre and Menkaure at the Giza Necropolis in Egypt.
Many hypotheses exist concerning who constructed Egypt’s pyramids, including massive groups of enslaved Jewish and wilder ideas, such as inhabitants of the ‘lost city of Atlantis or even aliens.
None of these theories, however, have evidence to back them up.
The pyramids could not have been constructed by Jewish slaves, as no archaeological remains that can be directly linked to the Jewish people have been found in Egypt that date back to 4,500 years ago, when the Giza pyramids were built, archaeological research has revealed.
Additionally, the story told in the Hebrew Bible about Jews being slaves in Egypt refers to a city named “Ramesses.” A city named pi-Ramesses was founded during the 19th dynasty (about 1295-1186 B.C.) and was named after Ramesses II, who ruled 1279–1213 BC. This city was constructed after the era of pyramid construction had ended in Egypt.
“We have no clue, not even a single word, about early Israelites in Egypt: neither in monumental inscriptions on walls of temples, nor in tomb inscriptions, nor in papyri,” wrote archaeologists Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman in their book “The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of its Sacred Texts” (The Free Press, 2001).
What’s more, no archaeological evidence has ever been found for the lost city of Atlantis in any time period, and many scholars believe that the story is fictional. As for aliens, well, that idea is out of this world.
In fact, all the evidence shows that the ancient Egyptians built the pyramids, Egyptologists say. But how the pyramid builders lived, how they were compensated and how they were treated is a mystery that researchers are still investigating.
The pyramids and their builders
Egypt has more than 100 ancient pyramids, but it’s most famous include the first step pyramid, built during the reign of the pharaoh Djoser (about 2630-2611 B.C.), and the first true pyramid — one that has smooth sides — built under the rule of pharaoh Snefru (about 2575-2551 B.C.), Mark Lehner wrote in his book, “The Complete Pyramids: Solving the Ancient Mysteries” (Thames & Hudson, 2008). The Great Pyramid was constructed at Giza during the reign of pharaoh Khufu (about 2551-2528 B.C.), and two of his successors, Khafre (about 2520-2494 B.C.) and Menkaure (about 2490-2472 B.C.), also had pyramids built at Giza.
Pharaohs gradually stopped building pyramids during the New Kingdom (1550-1070 B.C.), choosing instead to be buried in the Valley of the Kings, which is located about 300 miles (483 km) south of Giza, Lehner noted in his book. Over the past few decades, archaeologists have found new pieces of evidence that provide clues as to who the pyramid builders were and how they lived.
The step pyramid, built during the reign of the pharaoh Djoser, at the necropolis of Saqqara, Egypt.
Surviving written records, including papyri discovered in 2013 at Wadi al-Jarf on Egypt’s Red Sea coast, indicate that large groups of workers — sometimes translated as “gangs” — helped bring material to Giza. The papyri found at Wadi al-Jarf tell of a group of 200 men headed by an inspector named Merer. The group of workers transported limestone by boat along the Nile River a distance of about 11 miles (18 kilometres) from Tura to the Great Pyramid, where the stone was used to build the outer casing of the monument.
In the past, Egyptologists had theorized that the pyramid builders were largely made up of seasonal agricultural workers who had reached a point in the year in which there was little agricultural work to be done. However, it remains to be seen whether this is actually true.
The papyri detailing the pyramid’s histories are still in the process of being deciphered and analyzed, but the results indicate that the gang led by Merer did far more than help with pyramid construction. These workers appear to have travelled over much of Egypt, possibly as far as the Sinai Desert, carrying out various construction projects and tasks that had been assigned to them. This raises the question of whether they were part of a more permanent professional force rather than a group of seasonal agricultural workers who would return to their fields.
According to the papyri, the workers were given a diet that included dates, vegetables, poultry and meat, said Pierre Tallet, an Egyptology professor at Paris-Sorbonne University who is deciphering the papyri and is co-leader of the team that found them. In addition to the healthy diet, the papyri describe members of the work team regularly getting textiles that were “probably considered as a kind of money at that time,” Tallet told Live Science.
Additionally, officials in high-ranking positions who were involved in pyramid construction “might have received grants of land,” said Mark Lehner, director of Ancient Egypt Research Associates (AERA), a research institute based in Massachusetts. Historical records show that at times in Egypt’s history, land grants were given out to officials. However, it’s unknown whether land grants were also given to officials involved with pyramid construction.
Lehner’s team has been excavating a town at Giza that was lived in and frequented by some of the workers who were constructing the pyramid of Menkaure. So far, the archaeologists have found evidence that this town’s ancient inhabitants used to bake large amounts of bread, slaughter thousands of animals and brew copious amounts of beer. Based on the animal bones found at the site, and considering the nutritional needs of the workers, archaeologists estimate that about 4,000 lbs. (1,800 kilograms) of animals — including cattle, sheep and goats — were slaughtered every day, on average, to feed the workers.
The remains of workers buried in graves near the pyramids show that the workers had healed bones that were set properly — suggesting that they had access to the medical care that was available at the time. The rich diet of the pyramid builders, combined with the evidence for medical care and receiving textiles as a form of payment, has led Egyptologists to generally agree that the workers were not enslaved people.
But this doesn’t mean all of the workers got equal accommodations. AERA’s excavations show that some of the higher-ranking officials lived in large houses and had the choicest cuts of meat. In contrast, Lehner suspects that the lower-ranking workers likely slept in simple dwellings or “lean-tos” at the pyramids themselves.
