ASIA, WORLD

A stone statue (Balbal) with a height of up to 3 meters found in the Issyk-Kul region of Kyrgyzstan

A stone statue (Balbal) with a height of up to 3 meters found in the Issyk-Kul region of Kyrgyzstan

A balbal (stone statue) with a height of up to 3 meters was found during agricultural work in the Ak-Bulun village of Tyup district in the Issyk-Kul region of Kyrgyzstan.

Balbal, is the name given to the tombstone that was erected around the grave of some of the kurgan people for the memory of the person in ancient Turks.

Erkin Turbaev, 60, discovered the balbal on October 15 in the evening. When the plow suddenly broke on something, he was preparing to plant potatoes. Turbaev made the decision to dig it out and discovered a more than two-meter-long stone statue at a depth.

According to Turbaev, who leased 80 acres of land between the Ak-Bulak and Belovodskoye settlements, ” A great historical find for this village. It will bring good fortune.”

Many Balbals have been found in Kyrgyzstan before. Many stone warriors (balbals) of the nomadic Turks are found in Çolpan Ata and Karakol on the shores of Issyk Kul. It is estimated that the balbals were erected in the 6th century.

These grave markers in Kyrgyzstan and throughout Central Asia were erected by nomadic Turkish tribes, and almost all of the balbals in Kyrgyzstan are distributed in the Chuy Valley.

The Balbals to the sculptures of the Central Asian Turks, usually in the form of a sword and figure, usually carved on a piece of stone, symbolizing the enemies that the warrior had killed, and the people believed to be his servants in the other world, planted around the tombs of the deceased warriors at the time of widespread preservation of the validity of the shamanic religion.

A stone statue (Balbal) with a height of up to 3 meters found in the Issyk-Kul region of Kyrgyzstan
Stone statue (Balbal) with height up to 3 meters found in Issyk-Kul

When the number of these stones is the right of the dead person; the power, the courage, the hero of the hero.

The balbals, which is prevalent in the pre-Islamic period, left its place to gravestones after acceptance of Islamic religion. Balbal word is a word from the Old Turkic language and means, to strike. However, the meaning of the word is disputed.

The stone balbals in Kyrgyzstan, which are located on the outskirts of the townships of Sai and Bulak villages, are exhibited in the Kara-Batkak museum.

Historian Zhanbolot Abdykerimov said that many historical monuments can be located on the territory of the rural municipality.

“There are historical kurgans (burials) that date back to the 3rd century BC between the settlements of Ak-Bulun and Frunze. There are such kurgans in Fergana and Almaty. There is historical evidence that the ancient city of Sarybulun [Chigu or Chiguchen – in Chinese sources, the “City of the Red Valley”] was in the eastern part of Issyk-Kul,” the historian noted.

According to Abdykerimov, the statue has special marks: inscriptions on the head, a pendant in the neck area and a hand in the middle indicating belonging to some title.

There are pictures on the back and a belt. A short sword similar to an akinak is drawn. Such weapons were actively used during the Saka period. It is difficult to determine without archaeologists to which period the balbal belongs, the historian noted.

Balbal, which was slightly damaged by tractor drivers during excavations, is 2 meters and 70 centimetres long. It was stated that such stone sculptures had not been encountered before in the village.

EUROPE, TURKEY, WORLD

A 3200-year-old trepanned skull was discovered in eastern Turkey’s Van province

A 3200-year-old trepanned skull was discovered in eastern Turkey’s Van province

Trepanated skull of a woman-Tumb 3 Corseaux-En Seyton-on display 6, Cantonal Museum of Archeology and History.

A 3,200-year-old skull was recently uncovered in Turkey’s eastern Van province. This find was made even more intriguing by the skull’s clearly man-made triangle-shaped hole, indicating that the deceased owner had undergone an ancient medical procedure now called preparation.

Trepanation, a procedure that involves drilling a hole into the patient’s skull, is one of the oldest known surgical procedures in human history and a practice used by ancient humans all over the world.

Archaeologists have found trepanned skulls in Europe, the Americas, Africa and China. 

Skull-drilling in the 21st century

The practice is still used today to treat subdural hematomas, but surgeons have refined the process and now refer to it as a craniotomy or a burr hole. 

Burr holes tend to be used in emergency situations after a traumatic head injury to relieve pressure due to fluid buildup in the skull which puts undue pressure on brain tissue.

Craniotomies, per the National Cancer Institute, resemble ancient trepanation more so than burr holes; the surgeon removes a small piece of the skull in order to gain access to the brain.

This is sometimes used to relieve pressure, but can also be used to remove a tumour or a tissue sample, as well as to repair a skull fracture or brain aneurysm (a bulge in a blood vessel wall). 

Unlike in ancient trepanation practices, modern surgeons nearly always replace the removed piece of the skull once they have finished their procedure. 

Detail from The Extraction of the Stone of Madness, a painting by Hieronymus Bosch depicting trepanation (c.1488–1516).

What was the practice used for in ancient times?

According to the science news website Live Science, trepanation was used in ancient times to treat head injuries and pain, and some scientists believe it was used to ritually remove evil spirits from the body. 

A 2013 article published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology concluded that often, patients did survive the procedure and would heal after surgery.

Researchers found scarring from trepanation, but the injury to the skull had healed. 

Researchers have not yet determined whether the skull found recently in Turkey belonged to a survivor or a victim of trepanation. They also do not yet know – and perhaps never will find out – whether the procedure was performed in order to treat a medical issue or exorcise demons. 

PERU, SOUTH AMERICA, WORLD

Archaeologists In Peru Unearth 800-year-old Mummy Buried In Underground Tomb In Lima

Archaeologists In Peru Unearth 800-year-old Mummy Buried In Underground Tomb In Lima

Recently on Peru’s central coast, archaeologists have discovered a mummy that is thought to be approximately 800 years old. The remains of the mummy were believed to match an individual who belonged to a society that flourished prior to the Inca Empire which rose to power during the 1400s.

Archaeologists In Peru Unearth 800-year-old Mummy Buried In Underground Tomb In Lima

Archaeologists claimed that the society was settled between Peru’s coastline and mountains, Sky News reported.  

According to archaeologist Pieter Van Dalen Luna of the State University of San Marcos, the mummified remains have been unearthed in an underground structure in the suburbs of Lima, the capital city of the nation. 

However, the gender of the mummy has yet to be determined, as per the Independent. Further, archaeologist Dalen Luna claimed that the fossils belong to a person who has lived in the nation’s high Andean area. 

‘The main characteristic of the mummy is that the whole body was tied up

“The main characteristic of the mummy is that the whole body was tied up by ropes and with the hands covering the face, which would be part of the local funeral pattern,” Sky News reported, citing archaeologist Dalen Luna. He went on to explain that after evaluating carbon dating, more exact dates will be obtained. Further, it has been reported that Ceramics, vegetable remnants, as well as stone tools were also discovered within the tomb with the mummy. 

As per the Sky News, hundreds of archaeological places are found in Peru which are from civilizations that existed during and after the Inca Empire. From the south of Ecuador and Colombia to central Chile, the empire ruled over the southern half of South America. 

25 individuals were discovered in Peru’s ancient city of Chan Chan

Furthermore, earlier this month, archaeologists unearthed the bones of 25 individuals in Peru’s ancient city of Chan Chan.

According to BBC, the bones were excavated in a 10-square-meter area in what was once the Chim empire’s capital.

The collective grave, according to experts, was a burial location for Chim royalty. As per archaeologist Sinthya Cueva, the majority of the bones belonged to young women, all of them were under the age of 30.

According to local media, the burial also included roughly 50 pieces of pottery. 

According to the British news organisation, even though the Chim was notorious for performing human sacrifices, particularly those of children, archaeologist Jorge Meneses Bartra claimed there was no confirmation that individuals found in the cemetery died as a result of human sacrifice, BBC reported. 

One of the bones’ placements, according to Meneses, indicated that it was buried quickly after the individual died. 

AFRICA, EGYPT, WORLD

Scientists Reconstruct Face Of ‘world’s First Pregnant’ Egyptian Mummy, Died 2000 Yrs Ago

Scientists Reconstruct Face Of ‘world’s First Pregnant’ Egyptian Mummy, Died 2000 Yrs Ago

Scientists Reconstruct Face Of 'world's First Pregnant' Egyptian Mummy, Died 2000 Yrs Ago

With an aim to re-humanize mummified individuals, Forensic scientists have reconstructed the face of the world’s first pregnant ancient Egyptian mummy more than 2,000 years after her death, using 2D and 3D techniques.

The Mummy known as ‘The Mystery Lady’ is believed to have died 28 weeks into her pregnancy between the ages around 20 and 30.

The embalmed woman was analyzed last year by a team of Polish researchers, who discovered evidence of a fetus inside her stomach.

Forensic experts have used her skull and other remains to produce two images showing what she may have looked like when alive in the first century BC.

Chantal Milani, an Italian forensic anthropologist and member of the Warsaw Mummy Project said, “Our bones and the skull, in particular, give a lot of information about the face of an individual.”

“Although it cannot be considered an exact portrait, the skull like many anatomical parts is unique and shows a set of shapes and proportions that will appear in the final face,” Chantal Milani further said.

The fetus was located in the lower part of the lesser pelvis: Warsaw Mummy Project

The Warsaw Mummy Project on Facebook wrote, “The face that covers the bone structure follows different anatomic rules, thus standard procedures can be applied to reconstruct it, for example, to establish the shape of the nose.”

As per reports, the fetus, which had been ‘pickled like a gherkin’, was located in the lower part of the lesser pelvis and partly in the lower part of the greater pelvis and was mummified together with its mother. 

Its head circumference was 9.8 inches, which the forensic team used to determine it was between the 26th and 30th week of life.

Forensic artist Hew Morrison said, “Facial reconstruction is mainly used in forensics to help determine the identity of a body when more common means of identification such as fingerprint identification or DNA analysis have drawn a blank.

Reconstructing an individual’s face from their skull is often considered a last resort in an attempt to establish who they were.”

Notably, the mummy was taken out of Egypt and into Warsaw in December 1826, around the time of some of the most important discoveries from the Egyptian Valley of the Kings. Her body had been carefully wrapped in fabrics and left with a rich set of amulets to see her into the afterlife.

Here are some pictures of the facial reconstruction of ‘The Mysterious Lady’

Image: The facial reconstruction of ‘The Mysterious Lady’
Image: The embalmed woman was analyzed last year by a team of Polish researchers, and X-ray scans and CT images revealed evidence of a fetus inside her stomach.
Image: Forensic experts used her skull (pictured) and other remains to produce two images showing what ‘The Mysterious Lady; may have looked like when alive in the first century BC.
Image: The mummy was discovered in 2016 as an embalmed woman.
Image: An examination using tomographic imaging revealed that the woman was between 20-30 years old when she died and was in the 26th to 30th week of her pregnancy.
WORLD

Did Humans Cause the Demise of Madagascar’s Megafauna?

Did Humans Cause the Demise of Madagascar’s Megafauna?

Two thousand years ago, lemurs the size of humans and giant “elephant birds” roamed Madagascar. A thousand years later, they were nearly gone.

Did Humans Cause the Demise of Madagascar’s Megafauna?
Human population growth likely spurred the extinction of Madagascar’s elephant birds, illustrated here.

This mass extinction coincided with a boom in Madagascar’s human population, according to a new study, when two small groups of people linked up and took over the island.

It’s an “exciting” study, says Laurie Godfrey, a palaeontologist at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, who was not involved.

The results, she says, add genetic support to the idea that a growing human population and a shift to agricultural lifestyles did in these giant animals.

The new study traces back to 2007, when Jean-Aimé Rakotoarisoa, an archaeologist at the University of Antananarivo, and a multidisciplinary group of researchers created the Madagascar Genetic and Ethnolinguistic project to study the long-debated question of the ancestry of the Malagasy, the island’s major native ethnic group.

Though Madagascar is located about 425 kilometres off the east coast of Africa, the Malagasy language is similar to the Austronesian languages spoken 7000 kilometres across the Indian Ocean. There’s long been “a question about when, who, [and] how people came to Madagascar,” and how they influenced the mass extinction, Rakotoarisoa says.

Between 2007 and 2014 the team travelled to 257 villages around the island. They collected saliva samples and musical, linguistic, and other social science data.

In 2017, the researchers concluded the modern Malagasy population is most closely related to the Bantu-speaking people of eastern Africa and the Austronesian-speaking people of southern Borneo, in southeast Asia.

In the new study, the scientists genetically analyzed the saliva and used a computer program to model Malagasy ancestry and estimate how it changed over generations.

They found the modern Malagasy population is descended from a small ancestral Asian population made up of only a few thousand people that stopped mixing with other groups about 2000 years ago.

When exactly the Asian population travelled to Madagascar is a mystery. But by 1000 years ago, this small group had made it to the island. It began to mix with a similar-size African population in Madagascar, and the population began to grow right at the peak of the megafaunal mass extinctions about 1000 years ago, the researchers report today in Current Biology.

Other studies have found that at the same time the population of Madagascar exploded, the lifestyle of the people changed as well, says study co-author Denis Pierron, an evolutionary geneticist at Paul Sabatier University.

Before, humans had lived alongside animals and hunted and foraged in small groups. Now, they were building large settlements, planting rice, and grazing cattle on the landscape, archaeological evidence shows.

The authors suggest that population growth and these changes, paired with a hotter and drier climate, likely triggered the demise of the giant creatures. Godfrey agrees on the timing lines up, give or take 100 years, but she believes the changing climate played less of a role.

Though he says the study is well done, Yale University evolutionary geneticist Diyendo Massilani cautions “there are limits to using present-day data to infer something about the past.” If archaeologists discovered and analyzed ancient DNA from buried remains of Madagascar’s past inhabitants, he argues, that could help solidify when past populations mixed and grew.

Understanding humans’ role in the Madagascar extinction is urgent today, Godfrey says, especially as modern giants such as elephants and rhinoceroses are threatened. “We need to know what causes major changes, so we can save ourselves from a future potentially dire for the planet.”

EUROPE, GREECE, WORLD

Roman-Era Odeon Uncovered in Crete

Roman-Era Odeon Uncovered in Crete

Roman-Era Odeon Uncovered in Crete
Ancient odeons like this one in Crete were used for lectures, literary and musical contests, or theatrical performances.

Tucked into a mountain-ringed cove in southwest Crete are the ruins of Lissos, an ancient town whose archaeological remains are accessible only by sea or a long hike. Because of its isolation, Lissos had not been investigated by archaeologists for several decades. New work at Lissos, though, has uncovered an odeon, similar to a modern auditorium and indicative of the prosperity of the town.

Previous research showed that Lissos was inhabited long before its name made it into history books in the fourth century B.C. Its location across the Mediterranean Sea from Cyrene, a major ancient Greek city in present-day Libya, likely meant that Lissos was an important stop on Mediterranean trade routes.

Structures from various time periods at Lissos are relatively well preserved, including a unique temple to Asclepius, the ancient Greek god of medicine; a residential area; an impressive cemetery with two-story tombs; Roman baths; and Christian churches.

Archaeologists have now added an odeon to this list of structures following the first excavation at Lissos in more than half a century.

Katerina Tzanakaki, deputy head of the Department of Prehistoric and Classical Antiquities and Museums at the Ephorate of Antiquities of Chania, directed the new project and told Live Science in an email that odeons “were used for lectures, literary and musical contests or theatrical performances.” 

During excavations, archaeologists found part of the odeon’s stage, 14 rows of seats and two vaulted side chambers.

In the first phase of the odeon’s excavation, Tzanakaki and her team found part of the stage, 14 rows of seats and two vaulted side chambers.

The odeon dates to the Roman period, roughly the first to fourth centuries A.D., a time when the sanctuary to Asclepius at Lissos was transformed into a political centre with a new mosaic floor and portraits of the Roman emperors Tiberius and Drusus. 

Unfortunately, the odeon was heavily damaged in antiquity by large falling boulders, likely as the result of a powerful earthquake in A.D. 365.

Jane Francis, a classical archaeologist at Concordia University in Montreal who was not involved in this project, explained in an email to Live Science that “a tsunami with destructive force as far away as Alexandria, Egypt, was associated with the earthquake.

The whole site of Lissos was uplifted by several meters, so the town would have been larger than today and the theatre thus closer to the coast.”

The ancient ruins of Lissos in Crete are accessible only by boat or a lengthy hike.
The new excavation is the first one at Lissos in more than half a century.

As the odeon was adjacent to the city center, Tzanakaki thinks it also might have operated as a bouleuterion, a building for meetings of the city council. Francis and her husband, George W. Harrison, a classical archaeologist at Carleton University in Ottawa, told Live Science by email that the size and date of the building mean that it was most likely an odeon, but the fact that “it was designed and used as a covered theatre does not preclude secondary use as a council house.”

While the precise definition of the newly uncovered building may have to wait for future work, “the discovery of a public service building at a central point of the ancient city, near the temple to Asclepius, adds new information to the archaeological and historical horizon of the area,” according to a translated statement from the Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports. Francis and Harrison agree that the discovery is rare. “There aren’t many well-preserved theatres on Crete and even fewer bouleuteria,” they said.

Future work will help Tzanakaki determine whether there was an outside wall supporting the odeon, and that finding will influence the restoration work. In the meantime, the archaeological site of Lissos remains open to the public; it is accessible by a short boat trip or a two-hour hike from the nearby town of Sougia.

ASIA, IRAN, WORLD

A 4,000-Year-Old Writing system that finally makes sense to Scholars

A 4,000-Year-Old Writing system that finally makes sense to Scholars

You could be forgiven for never having heard of the civilization of Elam. Elam flourished in southern Iran, in the modern state of Khuzestan, about four or five thousand years ago. The Elamites had close cultural ties to the Mesopotamian civilizations to the west, like the Babylonians; they built ziggurats, for instance (via Britannica).

They had a number of unique customs, though, including royal succession, and possibly property rights being passed down matrilinearly, from mothers to sons (instead of fathers to sons), which suggests that Elamite women enjoyed a degree of importance. The Elamites were eventually swallowed up by other cultures, and their capital, Susa, would become the home of the kings of Persia.

But what vexed archaeologists and philologists for centuries was the Elamite language. They simply couldn’t read it. According to Smithsonian, the earliest Elamite script looked like Mesopotamian cuneiform, but no one could quite decode it.

LINEAR ELAMITE

Smithsonian notes that only 43 examples of this early script, called Linear Elamite, have ever been discovered. It had fallen out of use by about 1800 B.C., replaced by western forms of cuneiform and then by Greek. It wasn’t clear whether the words expressed or depicted by Linear Elamite were words of the same language as the later, readable texts. Perhaps it was a different language altogether.

In 2015 came a breakthrough. A certain François Desset, professor of archaeology at the University of Teheran, was curious about the inscriptions on a collection of silver beakers once thought to be a hoax to fleece collectors, but recently confirmed as genuine.

On many of them, he found two parallel inscriptions: one in the familiar Elamite language, and another in Linear Elamite. He had found the key to the puzzle.

The Linear characters were pictograms, rather than alphabetical letters, which made them hard to translate, but Desset guessed from the context that some of them stood for names. Slowly the language revealed its secrets. Desset would translate 72 Linear characters, leaving only a handful still unclear.

LIKE THE ROSETTA STONE

Desset’s work bears a remarkable resemblance to the translation of the Rosetta Stone.

The first archaeologists could not decipher Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, with their suns and birds and abstract shapes instead of letters. But when Napoleon invaded Egypt, his men found a tablet inscribed with three languages (shown above) in the Nile mud near the town of Rosetta. 

According to the British Museum, this was one of many “mass-produced” tablets from the year 196 B.C., a kind of public bulletin. It repeated the same message in three kinds of script: hieroglyphics, “demotic” Egyptian, and Greek.

A Frenchman named Champollion realized that the names of non-Egyptian people were recognizable in the jumble of hieroglyphics. Slowly, he began to pair Greek words and phrases with ancient Egyptian ones, eventually unravelling the code.

It is remarkable that another Frenchman, 200 years later, should use exactly the same method to decode Linear Elamite: recognizing names in the band of script and deducing the rest from there.

ASIA, ISRAEL, WORLD

Sentence of Canaanite language found in Israel for the first time on the ivory comb

Sentence of Canaanite language found in Israel for the first time on the ivory comb

The alphabet was invented around 1800 BCE and was used by the Canaanites and later by most other languages in the world. Until recently, no meaningful Canaanite inscriptions had been discovered in the Land of Israel, save only two or three words here and there.

Sentence of Canaanite language found in Israel for the first time on the ivory comb
The letters on the comb translate to “may this tusk root out the lice of the hair and the beard”.

Now an amazing discovery presents an entire sentence in Canaanite, dating to about 1700 BCE. It is engraved on a small ivory comb and includes a spell against lice.

The comb was unearthed at Tel Lachish in Israel by a team from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HU) and Southern Adventist University in the United States, under the direction of Professors Yosef Garfinkel, Michael Hasel and Martin Klingbeil. The inscription was deciphered by semitic epigraphist Dr Daniel Vainstub at Ben Gurion University (BGU). The ivory was tested by HU Prof. Rivka Rabinovich and BGU Prof. Yuval Goren and was found to originate from an elephant tusk. Their findings were published in the Jerusalem Journal of Archaeology.

The letters of the inscription were engraved in a very shallow manner. It was excavated in 2017 but the letters were noticed only in subsequent post-processing in 2022 by Dr. Madeleine Mumcuoglu. It was cleaned and preserved by Miriam Lavi.

The ivory comb is small, measuring roughly 3.5 by 2.5 cm. The comb has teeth on both sides. Although their bases are still visible, the comb teeth themselves were broken in antiquity. The central part of the comb is somewhat eroded, possibly by the pressure of fingers holding the comb during haircare or the removal of lice from the head or beard. The side of the comb with six thick teeth was used to untangle knots in the hair, while the other side, with 14 fine teeth, was used to remove lice and their eggs, much like the current-day two-sided lice combs sold in stores.

There are 17 Canaanite letters on the comb. They are archaic in form — from the first stage of the invention of the alphabet script. They form seven words in Canaanite, reading: “May this tusk root out the lice of the hair and the beard.”

“This is the first sentence ever found in the Canaanite language in Israel. There are Canaanites in Ugarit in Syria, but they write in a different script, not the alphabet that is used today. The Canaanite cities are mentioned in Egyptian documents, the Amarna letters that were written in Akkadian, and in the Hebrew Bible.

The comb inscription is direct evidence of the use of the alphabet in daily activities some 3700 years ago. This is a landmark in the history of the human ability to write,” shared Garfinkel.

Ancient combs were made from wood, bone, or ivory. Ivory was a very expensive material and likely an imported luxury object. As there were no elephants in Canaan during that time period, the comb likely came from nearby Egypt — factors indicating that even people of high social status suffered from lice.

The research team analyzed the comb itself for the presence of lice under a microscope and photographs were taken of both sides. Remains of head lice, 0.5-0.6 mm in size, were found on the second tooth. The climatic conditions of Lachish, however, did not allow the preservation of whole head lice but only those of the outer chitin membrane of the nymph stage head louse.

Despite its small size, the inscription on the comb from Lachish has very special features, some of which are unique and fill in gaps and lacunas in our knowledge of many aspects of the culture of Canaan in the Bronze Age.

For the first time, we have an entire verbal sentence written in the dialect spoken by the Canaanite inhabitants of Lachish, enabling us to compare this language in all its aspects with the other sources for it. Second, the inscription on the comb sheds light on some hitherto poorly attested aspects of the everyday life of the time, haircare and dealing with lice.

Third, this is the first discovery in the region of an inscription referring to the purpose of the object on which it was written, as opposed to dedicatory or ownership inscriptions on objects. Further, the engraver’s skill in successfully executing such tiny letters (1-3 mm wide) is a fact that from now on should be taken into account in any attempt to summarize and draw conclusions on literacy in Canaan in the Bronze Age.

Lachish was a major Canaanite city-state in the second millennium BCE and the second most important city in the Biblical Kingdom of Judah. To date, 10 Canaanite inscriptions have been found in Lachish, more than at any other site in Israel.

The city was the major centre for the use and preservation of the alphabet for some 600 years, from 1800-1150 BCE. The site of Tel Lachish is under the protection of the Israel Nature and Parks Authority.

All In One Magazine