A Corinthian Helmet from the Battle of Marathon found with the warrior’s skull Inside
The Corinthian helmet type is one of the most immediately recognisable types of helmet, romantically associated with the great heroes of Ancient Greece, even by the Ancient Greeks themselves who rapidly moved to helmet types with better visibility, but still depicted their heroes in these helmets.
In modern portrayals of Ancient Greek warriors, it is always the Corinthian type that is depicted, although often modified to suit the look desired – for instance in one movie the helmet was modified to expose more of the face of the actor.
It was a helmet made of bronze which in its later styles covered the entire head and neck, with slits for the eyes and mouth. A large curved projection protected the nape of the neck. Out of combat, a Greek hoplite would wear the helmet tipped upward for comfort.
This practice gave rise to a series of variant forms in Italy, where the slits were almost closed since the helmet was no longer pulled over the face but worn cap-like.
Although the classical Corinthian helmet fell out of use among the Greeks in favour of more open types, the Italo-Corinthian types remained in use until the 1st century AD, being used, among others, by the Roman army.
This helmet was excavated by George Nugent-Grenville, 2nd Baron Nugent of Carlanstown, on the Plain of Marathon in 1834, according to letters from Sutton dated 2 & 20 August 1826.
Mound (Soros) in which the Athenian dead were buried after the battle.
2,500 years earlier, on the morning of September 17, 490 BC, some 10,000 Greeks stood assembled on the plain of Marathon, preparing to fight to the last man. Behind them lay everything they held dear: their city, their homes, their families. In front of the outnumbered Greeks stood the assembled forces of the Persian empire, a seemingly invincible army with revenge, pillage and plunder on its mind.
The two sides faced each other directly, waiting for the fight to start. The Athenians stalled for days, anticipating reinforcements promised by Sparta. But they knew they could not wait for long.
The Persians, expecting as easy a victory as they had won against enemies so many times before, were in no hurry.
The Greeks, knowing the time for battle had come, began to move forward. Ostensibly, they advanced with focus and purpose, but beneath this firm veneer, as they looked on a vastly larger enemy — at least twice their number — many must have been fearful of what was to come.
The Persian archers sat with their bows drawn, ready to loose a barrage of arrows that would send fear and confusion through the Greek ranks. Eventually, though, the infantry on both sides engaged in battle. Moving towards each other and perhaps with the Greeks running the final 400 metres whilst undoubtedly under fire from the Persian archers, the two armies clashed.
A few hours later the bloody battle ended. Herodotus records that 6,400 Persian bodies were counted on the battlefield, and it is unknown how many more perished in the swamps. The Athenians lost 192 men and the Plataeans 11.
Pheidippides giving the word of victory at the Battle of Marathon
One final legend of Marathon and one which has carried its name up to the present day is Herodotus’ account of a long-distance messenger (hēmerodromos) named Phidippides.
He was sent to enlist the help of the Spartans before the battle and he ran to Sparta, first stopping at Athens, a total distance of 240 km (a feat repeated by an athlete in 1983 CE).
Later sources, starting with Plutarch in the 1st century CE, confuse this story with another messenger sent from Marathon after the battle to announce victory and warn of the Persian fleet’s imminent arrival in Athens.
In any case, it was from this second legend that a race – covering the same distance as the 42 kilometres between Marathon and Athens – was established in the first revival of the Olympic Games in 1896 CE to commemorate ancient Greek sporting ideals and the original games at Olympia.
Fittingly, the first marathon race was won by a Greek, Spiridon Louis.
Here is the list of top 10 Archaeological Discoveries of 2021
Archaeology is the closest thing we have to a time machine. Instead of using flux capacitors, however, archaeologists rely on technology like ground-penetrating radar, scanning electron microscopes, DNA sequencing, and of course, the good-old-fashioned shovel.
Equipped with the right tools and techniques, the work of these scientists allows us to reconstruct the past and imagine things as they once were.
Years from now, when we look back on the year that was 2021, archaeology won’t be the first thing that comes to mind. But that’s not to say it wasn’t a good year for this important scientific discipline, here is the list of the 10 most prominent archaeological discoveries to hit the headlines in 2021.
10. Slave Tag
A tag worn by an enslaved person who was hired out by his or her enslaver has been discovered in the remnants of a mid-nineteenth-century kitchen on the campus of the College of Charleston. Such tags, which were issued from the late eighteenth century until 1865, bore registration numbers and identified enslaved people by their trades, such as carpenter, blacksmith, fisherman, or domestic servant. This example, badge number 731, dates to 1853 and is stamped with the word “servant.”
While other southern cities had similar hired labour arrangements, Charleston is the only one that produced such tags, says archaeologist R. Grant Gilmore III of the College of Charleston. “What is uncommon about this discovery is that this object was found in context, unlike many other examples now in the hands of private collectors that have no provenance,” he says. “An enslaved person living in the house may have discarded the tag in the hearth, or someone on loan from across town may have lost it one day.” Property records for the kitchen and those who worked in it may help connect the object with specific enslaved individuals. “These objects are emblematic of urban slavery and the way it worked in Charleston,” says Bernard Powers, a College of Charleston historian. “You have a designation of an occupation and a connection to an individual that breaks through an amorphous group of enslaved humanity and allows for an identity and a personhood to emerge.”
9. Crusader Mass Grave
A mass burial containing the remains of at least 25 soldiers who were killed defending Christian-held Sidon during the Crusades was uncovered during excavations close to the town’s Saint Louis Castle. Archaeologists uncovered a belt buckle of a style worn by French-speaking Crusaders, as well as a coin dating to between 1245 and 1250. These objects led them to conclude that the men were likely killed during a 1253 attack by an army of the Mamluk Sultanate, an Islamic empire that spanned Egypt, much of the Levant, and part of the Arabian Peninsula from 1250 to 1517. Bournemouth University archaeologist Richard Mikulski says the large number of wounds to the men’s necks suggests they were killed by assailants on horseback wielding heavy medieval weapons, such as swords, axes, and war clubs or maces, possibly while fleeing. This is one of only two archaeologically documented mass burials of Crusaders. “For a period that is meant to be so full of violence and conflict,” says Mikulski, “we actually have very little physical evidence of battle from the Crusades.”
8. When the Vikings Crossed the Atlantic
When a settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows, at the northern tip of Newfoundland, was first excavated in the 1960s, the style of its buildings made clear they were constructed by Vikings who had arrived from Greenland in the tenth or eleventh century. But exactly when they made their voyage, becoming the first Europeans to cross the Atlantic Ocean, was a matter of debate. Now, a team of researchers led by Margot Kuitems of the University of Groningen has used a new method of dating wood associated with the settlement to determine precisely when the Vikings were there. The researchers took advantage of a rare solar storm that occurred in A.D. 992, significantly increasing the amount of radioactive carbon-14 absorbed by trees the next year. By identifying the tree ring containing elevated levels of radiocarbon in each of three wood samples and then counting the number of rings to the bark edge of the wood, they found that the wood all came from trees that had been felled in A.D. 1021.
The Vikings do not appear to have intended to colonize L’Anse aux Meadows, says Birgitta Wallace, a retired Parks Canada archaeologist who has worked at the site for decades. “It was a base for further exploration, a gateway to other sites,” she says. “They were going to see what there was in this new territory that could benefit them.” Among the coveted resources they collected from farther south, most likely from present-day New Brunswick, were hardwood lumber, butternuts, and possibly even grapes. After a decade or so, the Vikings headed back across the seas. “They decided, ‘It is very good land, but there is danger here because of the Indigenous people,’” says Wallace, “‘so we’ll go home to Greenland and stay there.’”
7. Rare Boundary Marker
A rare stone that once demarcated the boundary of ancient Rome’s sacred precinct was unearthed by workers renovating the city’s sewer system. The six-foot-tall limestone block was found embedded in the ground where it had been placed almost 2,000 years ago and is one of only 10 of its kind ever discovered. The marker, which is known as a cippus, was one of the dozens that were installed around the city to mark the pomerium, a hallowed zone where activities were dictated by a strict set of rules. For example, no one could be buried within its limits, and crossing the boundary bearing arms was forbidden. This symbolic barrier was the border between Rome proper—the urbs—and its outlying territory—the ager—and separated religious activities from civic and military life.
The pomerium was periodically expanded as Rome grew outward from its original core. Roman legend holds that Romulus, the city’s mythical founder, created the original pomerium in the eighth century B.C. around his fledgling settlement. An inscription on the newly discovered cippus indicates it was erected in A.D. 49 when the emperor Claudius (r. A.D. 41–54) significantly redrew the city’s limits.
6. Bronze Age Map
When a team of researchers led by Clément Nicolas, an archaeologist at Bournemouth University, first saw archival photographs of a broken schist slab held at France’s National Archaeology Museum, they were intrigued. Because the seven-by-five-foot slab was carved with repeated motifs linked by a network of lines, they suspected it might be some sort of map. The slab had been excavated in 1900 from a barrow in Brittany, where it formed one of the walls of a stone tomb dating to the end of the Early Bronze Age, from roughly 1900 to 1640 B.C. The artefact, which weighs more than a ton, had been in storage for over a century when Nicolas and his colleagues, including Yvan Pailler of the University of Western Brittany and France’s National Institute of Preventive Archaeological Research, retrieved it to take a closer look.
The archaeologists recognized that a triangular hollow at the slab’s left edge resembles the shape of the Odet River Valley near where it was discovered. A square motif in this hollow appears to represent a prominent granite mass in the landscape. Likewise, the lines on the slab closely match the area’s river network. Nicolas’ team concluded that the slab is a map of an area measuring some 19 miles by 13 miles and that it dates to approximately 2150 to 1600 B.C. “This is the oldest map of a territory that we can recognize in Europe,” says Nicolas. A motif in the centre of the slab may mark an enclosure, leading the researchers to suggest that the map depicts the realm of a small Bronze Age kingdom and that its purpose was to stake a claim to this territory.
5. Oldest Animal Art
Twelve panels depicting images of camels and wild donkeys are now known to be the oldest life-size animal reliefs in the world. By using techniques such as analyzing tool marks and erosion, as well as radiocarbon dating associated artefacts, researchers have dated the reliefs at what is known as the Camel Site to the middle of the sixth millennium B.C.—some 5,000 years earlier than they had originally thought. During the Neolithic period (ca. 8000–3000 B.C.), northern Arabia was much wetter than it is now, and nomads herded sheep, cattle, and goats and hunted abundant wildlife. Animals would have had a crucial role in the herders’ existence, which may help explain why they created the massive reliefs.
Archaeologist Maria Guagnin of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History explains that the site was clearly used for centuries, and possibly even millennia and new reliefs were periodically added or old ones re-carved when details began to fade. “I wonder if the site was visited regularly, but reliefs were only added on special occasions,” she says. “Or was it only visited for special occasions, when new reliefs were added or existing ones repaired?” Guagnin has no question, however, regarding the mastery displayed by the Neolithic artists, who worked high atop cliffs where they would never have been able to see the entire animal while carving it. “The level of naturalism and detail is astonishing,” she says, “and the technical skill and community effort involved in the creation of these reliefs is evidence of the importance of rock art in the social and symbolic life of the Neolithic herders of northern Arabia.”
4. The First Americans
Over the past two decades, archaeologists have discovered a number of sites that show that people first arrived in the Americas as early as 16,000 years ago. Some scholars have explored sites that have yielded even earlier dates, but other researchers have questioned the legitimacy of these discoveries, arguing that artefacts recovered from them are not unambiguously the work of human hands. Now, radiocarbon dating of material associated with fossilized human footprints at White Sands National Park has shown that people were living in North America up to 23,000 years ago.
The prints are part of hundreds of fossilized human trackways archaeologists have found at the park that was left in what were once muddy surfaces surrounding an extinct lake. A team including Cornell University archaeologist Tommy Urban identified a series of such trackways, left mainly by teenagers and younger children, that were superimposed on top of each other over the course of millennia. Radiocarbon dating of aquatic plant seeds found below and above six of these trackways shows they were created between 23,000 and 21,000 years ago. “Scholars can question whether a stone or bone artefact was actually shaped by humans,” says Urban, “but there’s no mistaking who made a human footprint.”
3. Earliest Leatherworkers
While sorting through some 12,000 bone fragments excavated from Contrebandiers Cave near the Atlantic coast of Morocco, archaeologist Emily Hallett of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History noticed that some were smooth and shiny, as if they had been intentionally shaped by human hands. Upon consultation with colleagues, she determined that 62 of the fragments are bone tools dating to between 120,000 and 90,000 years ago. These include a number of tools made from animal rib bones of a type well known for its use in fur and leatherworking. “Once you have an animal skin, there are a lot of steps that have to be taken to process it so it’s supple, smooth, and ready to wear,” says Hallett. “These tools remove the connective tissues and fats from the skin without piercing and damaging it.”
Amid the assemblage, Hallett also identified bones of carnivores such as sand foxes, golden jackals, and wildcats that had marks indicating they had been skinned for their hides or fur. Together, the carnivore bones and bone tools appear to provide the earliest known evidence of people making clothes. This fits well with previous genetic studies of clothing lice that suggested clothing was first worn by humans in Africa up to 170,000 years ago. Hallett says it’s also possible that people at Contrebandiers Cave produced leather to string small beads together to make symbolic personal ornaments. Pierced shells from the snail genus Nassarius dating to around the same time as the bones have also been found in the cave.
2. World’s First Artists
The world’s earliest rock art may have been made by two creative children who lived in Tibet between 226,000 and 169,000 years ago. The young artists, probably either Neanderthals or members of the related Denisovan species, left a series of closely grouped handprints and footprints on an outcrop of a type of limestone called travertine. Travertine, which builds up around mineral springs, is initially soft enough to hold impressions. These can eventually harden after the spring changes course. Other ancient prints have been found preserved in travertine near the hot spring where the children’s prints were discovered, says Guangzhou University geologist and environmental archaeologist David Zhang. “The local people associate them with the Buddha,” he says, “but they were puzzled by these prints because they are so small.”
Zhang and his colleagues used uranium-series dating, which examines trace amounts of uranium and thorium in calcium carbonate deposits such as travertine, to determine when the prints were left on the outcropping’s surface. Since uranium decays to thorium at a known rate, the researchers were able to calculate the age of the travertine from the ratio of the two elements. “I was shocked by the date,” says Zhang. “They are so early and there is no utilitarian explanation for how they are grouped together. They had to have been deliberately composed.” Zhang acknowledges that some might consider the prints childish doodles rather than true art. “What is play and what is art?” he asks. “We think these prints are both.”
1 Golden City
A settlement that was buried beneath the sand for thousands of years—and eluded archaeologists for centuries—is believed to be one of the largest ancient Egyptian cities ever unearthed. The site was discovered by a stroke of good luck when archaeologists began searching for the mortuary temple of the boy pharaoh Tutankhamun (r. ca. 1336–1327 B.C.) along the west bank of the Nile in Luxor. What they found instead was a well-preserved urban settlement filled with houses, streets, and walls, some of which still stand 10 feet tall. Hieroglyphic inscriptions indicate the city was called tehn Aten, or “dazzling” Aten, and that it was founded by Tutankhamun’s grandfather Amenhotep III (r. ca. 1390–1352 B.C.). “I call this the ‘Golden City’ because it dates to the reign of Amenhotep III, which was the golden age of ancient Egypt,” says project director Zahi Hawass.
Aten was Egypt’s main administrative and industrial center. The city’s remarkable state of preservation is providing researchers with an unprecedented view of life there more than 3,000 years ago. Although only about one-third of the site has been excavated thus far, archaeologists have uncovered houses containing everyday objects including ceramic vessels, children’s dolls, and limestone gaming pieces. They have also identified bakeries, kitchens, and other areas associated with food production, as well as a vessel containing more than 20 pounds of dried meat prepped by a butcher named Luwy. There are also workshops that produced mudbricks and decorative amulets, and a residential and administrative neighbourhood that was encircled by distinctive zigzag walls. Scholars do not yet understand why Aten fell into decline, but it may have been abandoned when Amenhotep III’s son, Akhenaten (r. ca. 1349–1336 B.C.), moved the Egyptian capital from Luxor to Amarna, 250 miles away.
Russian Statue Discovered to Be Older Than the Pyramids
Gold prospectors first discovered the so-called Shigir Idol at the bottom of a peat bog in Russia’s Ural mountain range in 1890. The unique object—a nine-foot-tall totem pole composed of ten wooden fragments carved with expressive faces, eyes and limbs and decorated with geometric patterns—represents the oldest known surviving work of wooden ritual art in the world.
Hunter-gatherers in what is now Russia likely viewed the wooden sculpture as an artwork imbued with ritual significance.
More than a century after its discovery, archaeologists continue to uncover surprises about this astonishing artefact.
As Thomas Terberger, a scholar of prehistory at Göttingen University in Germany, and his colleagues wrote in the journal Quaternary International in January, new research suggests the sculpture is 900 years older than previously thought.
Based on extensive analysis, Terberger’s team now estimates that the object was likely crafted about 12,500 years ago, at the end of the Last Ice Age. Its ancient creators carved the work from a single larch tree with 159 growth rings, the authors write in the study.
“The idol was carved during an era of great climate change, when early forests were spreading across a warmer late-glacial to postglacial Eurasia,” Terberger tells Franz Lidz of the New York Times.
“The landscape changed, and the art—figurative designs and naturalistic animals painted in caves and carved in rock—did, too, perhaps as a way to help people come to grips with the challenging environments they encountered.”
According to Sarah Cascone of Artnet News, the new findings indicate that the rare artwork predates Stonehenge, which was created around 5,000 years ago, by more than 7,000 years. It’s also twice as old as the Egyptian pyramids, which date to roughly 4,500 years ago.
As the Times reports, researchers have been puzzling over the age of the Shigir sculpture for decades. The debate has major implications for the study of prehistory, which tends to emphasize a Western-centric view of human development.
The wood used to carve the Shigir Idol is around 12,250 years old.
In 1997, Russian scientists carbon-dated the totem pole to about 9,500 years ago.
Many in the scientific community rejected these findings as implausible: Reluctant to believe that hunter-gatherer communities in the Urals and Siberia had created art or formed cultures of their own, says Terberger to the Times, researchers instead presented a narrative of human evolution that centered European history, with ancient farming societies in the Fertile Crescent eventually sowing the seeds of Western civilization.
Prevailing views over the past century, adds Terberger, regarded hunter-gatherers as “inferior to early agrarian communities emerging at that time in the Levant. At the same time, the archaeological evidence from the Urals and Siberia was underestimated and neglected.”
In 2018, scientists including Terberger used accelerator mass spectrometry technology to argue that the wooden object was about 11,600 years old. Now, the team’s latest publication has pushed that origin date back even further.
As Artnet News reports, the complex symbols carved into the object’s wooden surface indicate that its creators made it as a work of “mobiliary art,” or portable art that carried ritual significance. Co-author Svetlana Savchenko, the curator in charge of the artifact at the Sverdlovsk Regional Museum of Local Lore, tells the Times that the eight faces may contain encrypted references to a creation myth or the boundary between the earth and sky.
“Wood working was probably widespread during the Late Glacial to early Holocene,” the authors wrote in the 2018 article. “We see the Shigir sculpture as a document of a complex symbolic behavior and of the spiritual world of the Late Glacial to Early Mesolithic hunter-gatherers of the Urals.”
The fact that this rare evidence of hunter-gatherer artwork endured until modern times is a marvel in and of itself, notes Science Alert. The acidic, antimicrobial environment of the Russian peat bog preserved the wooden structure for millennia.
João Zilhão, a scholar at the University of Barcelona who was not involved in the study, tells the Times that the artefact’s remarkable survival reminds scientists of an important truth: that a lack of evidence of ancient art doesn’t mean it never existed. Rather, many ancient people created art objects out of perishable materials that could not withstand the test of time and were therefore left out of the archaeological record.
“It’s similar to the ‘Neanderthals did not make art’ fable, which was entirely based on the absence of evidence,” Zilhão says. “Likewise, the overwhelming scientific consensus used to hold that modern humans were superior in key ways, including their ability to innovate, communicate and adapt to different environments. Nonsense, all of it.”
More evidence has emerged that humans have been altering the environment for much longer than the current climate crisis. A new study published in Science Advances Wednesday found evidence that humans used fire to change the landscape around Lake Malawi in Africa as early as 92,000 years ago.
Archaeologists made their discoveries in the Karonga District in Northern Malawi.
“This is essentially what we call the earliest anthropogenic landscape on Earth,” study co-author and University of Oslo archaeology professor David Wright said in a press release.
The finding was the result of a collaboration between scientists who study ancient ecosystems and scientists who study ancient humans, Scientific American explained.
In 2018, Pennsylvania State University paleoecologist and study coauthor Sarah Ivory published a study on climate conditions around Lake Malawi over the past 636,000 years.
Pollen, fossil, and sediment records showed that forests would grow around the lake during wet periods and disappear during dry periods. This remained unchanged until around 86,000 years ago.
At this point, the forest returned briefly during the wet period, only to suddenly fade and shift into grassland along with some fire-resistant tree species.
Yale University paleoanthropologist Jessica Thompson was also working around Lake Malawi. She told Ivory about a spike in human artefacts around 92,000 years ago, suggesting that humans had moved to the area.
Investigating further, the researchers found increasing evidence of charcoal deposits in cores drilled from the lake bed following human arrival. Could humans have burned down the forests and permanently altered the vegetation?
“Hunter-gatherers who go after hooved mammals can find it hard to hunt prey when it’s in a closed tree environment. So we suspect the humans who arrived in the Karonga district [around Lake Malawi] started burning down the forest to open the landscape for hunting,” Wright explained in the University of Oslo release. “It may also have provided new foods like starchy tubers that like to grow in open areas.”
Professor David Wright has discovered that early humans altered the landscape and ecology in Northern Malawi using fire.
There are other possible explanations, Thompson acknowledged in a Yale University press release. It is possible that the fires were not lit intentionally, but were started accidentally. The charcoal could just come from smaller fires lit for cooking or warmth.
But, either way, it shows that humans have long had a transformative impact on their environments.
“One way or another, it’s caused by human activity,” Thompson told Yale. “It shows early people, over a long period of time, took control over their environment rather than being controlled by it. They changed entire landscapes, and for better or for worse that relationship with our environments continues today.”
Though it dates from the earliest point, the study is not the first to present data that hunter-gatherers altered landscapes with controlled burns. Other evidence has emerged from 50,000 years ago in Borneo, 45,000 years ago in New Guinea and 40,000 years ago in Australia, Scientific American pointed out.
For Wright, this may set back the date for the Anthropocene — the term for when human presence and activity altered the geologic record. On local levels, Wright says, this process began tens of thousands of years ago.
“Wherever humans are, we transform landscapes because of our natural vulnerabilities as a species,” Wright told the University of Oslo. “We cannot manage landscapes without changing them.”
Israeli archaeologists find Roman, medieval treasures in ancient shipwrecks off Mediterranean coast
Archaeologists in Israel have discovered the remnants of two shipwrecks off the Mediterranean coast, replete with a sunken trove of hundreds of Roman and medieval silver coins.
A gold ring with a green gemstone engraved with the figure of the good shepherd was discovered submerged at Caesarea harbour.
The finds made near the ancient city of Caesarea were dated to the Roman and Mamluk periods, about 1,700 and 600 years ago, archaeologists said.
They include hundreds of Roman silver and bronze coins dating to the mid-third century, as well as more than 500 silver coins from the middle ages, found amid the sediment.
An aerial view of the Caesarea port.
They were found during an underwater survey conducted by the Israel Antiquities Authority’s marine archaeology unit in the past two months, said Jacob Sharvit, the head of the unit, on Wednesday.
Among the other artefacts recovered from the site near the ancient city of Caesarea were figurines, bells, ceramics, and metal artefacts that once belonged to the ships, such as nails and a shattered iron anchor.
The underwater discovery of a gemstone submerged at Caesarea harbour.
The IAA underscored the discovery of a Roman gold ring, its green gemstone carved with the figure of a shepherd carrying a sheep on his shoulders.
Robert Cole, the head of the authority’s coin department, called the item “exceptional.”
The IAA uncovered the ancient treasures from the wrecks of two ships.
“On the gemstone is engraved an image of the ‘good shepherd’, which is really one of the earliest symbols of Christianity,” he said.
Sharvit said that the Roman ship was believed to have originally hailed from Italy, based on the style of some of the artefacts. He said it was still unclear whether any remnants of the wooden ships remained intact beneath the sands.
Spanish researchers claim to have found lost ancient building dedicated to Hercules
The legendary temple of Hercules Gaditanus, who was known as Melqart in Phoenician times, was a key pilgrimage site in ancient times.
According to classical records, the temple witnessed the passage of historical figures such as Julius Caesar and the Carthaginian conqueror Hannibal, and dated at least as far back as the ninth century BC.
But thousands of years later, its location remains a mystery, and finding the temple has become something of a holy grail for historians and archeologists, who have been searching for it for centuries.
Aerial view of the temple’s possible location.
Now there is a possible answer to this great mystery. Ricardo Belizón, a Ph.D. student at Seville University in southern Spain, has come up with a new hypothesis, which is backed by scientists from his university and the Andalusian Institute of Historical Heritage (IAPH).
Thanks to free software and digital terrain modeling, Belizón has identified traces of a monumental building in the Caño de Sancti Petri, a shallow channel in the Bay of Cádiz, between the towns of Chiclana de Frontera and San Fernando, in the southern region of Andalusia.
The hypothetical view that the archaeologist García y Bellido made of the Hercules temple, in 1968, based on the one in Jerusalem.
The temple of Hercules Gaditanus is mentioned in classical Greek and Latin literature as the place where Julius Caesar wept bitterly before a representation of Alexander the Great and where the Carthaginian conqueror Hannibal went to offer thanks for the success of his military campaign a century and a half earlier.
All these references mention “a changing environment, in contact with the sea, subject to the changing tides, in a temple where there must have been port structures and a seafaring environment,” says Milagros Alzaga, head of the Center for Underwater Archaeology (CAS), who also participated in the research.
A 3D model showing the Boqueron point in San Fernando (Cádiz) and the rectangular structure of the possible temple of Hercules Gaditanus now submerged under the Caño of Sancti Petri
Following decades of academic controversy and different proposals for the temple’s location, the one put forward now by Seville University and the IAPH falls within a radius earmarked as the most obvious.
The site is a huge marshy channel dominated by an islet and the castle of Sancti Petri, which rises above it.
For more than two centuries, the area has been yielding important archaeological finds, now on show in the Museum of Cádiz, such as large marble and bronze sculptures of Roman emperors and various statuettes from the Phoenician period.
All these discoveries helped to delineate the location of the temple of Hercules Gaditanus as lying somewhere between the slopes of the islet itself and a slither of fine sand and a rocky intertidal zone, known as Boquerón point.
World’s oldest family tree reconstructed from Stone Age tomb
A nearly 6,000-year-old tomb unearthed in England holds the remains of 27 family members, representing a five-generation lineage descended from one man and four women, researchers have found using DNA analysis.
An artist’s impression of how the Hazleton North barrow would have looked when it was newly built about 5,700 years ago.
The findings suggest there were polygamous marriages in the upper echelons of Neolithic society at that time because the researchers think it was unlikely that the ancestral man had four wives one after another; instead, he probably had more than one wife at the same time.
The analysis reconstructs one of the oldest family trees ever charted, said Iñigo Olalde, a population geneticist at the University of Basque Country in Bilbao, Spain, and one of the lead authors of a study published Tuesday (Dec. 22) in the journal Nature. Scientists from Harvard University in Massachusetts, Newcastle University in the United Kingdom and the University of Vienna in Austria were also involved in the research.
The new techniques are likely to be quickly applied to other collections of ancient human DNA, he said. “This study is important because it’s the first large family tree that we get from prehistory,” he said. “But probably in the next few months or a year, we will get many more.”
Neolithic bones
The bones in the study were from the human remains of 35 people excavated in the 1980s from the Hazleton North barrow in the Cotswold Hills, near the twin cities of Cheltenham and Gloucester in western England.
The barrow, or burial mound, was in a farmer’s field where hundreds of years of ploughing had threatened to destroy it completely, so archaeologists carried out the excavation to preserve what was left, Olalde said.
A few years ago, a different team of researchers extracted genetic material from the bones and teeth of the entombed remains, and Olalde worked with the DNA sequences they contained to piece together how the individuals were related.
It soon became clear that the interrelationships were very complex. “When this became apparent, I thought ‘Oh my God,'” he said. “It was quite surprising, but quite fun, to find all this family.” The analysis could pin down the interrelationships from just 27 of the 35 bodies, including two young girls.
Genetic analysis of the 35 people buried in two tomb chambers in the barrow shows that 27 of them were close biological relatives.
The genetic analysis shows that five generations of one family descended from one man and four women, were buried in the two tomb chambers of the Hazleton North barrow.
The Hazleton North tomb consisted of two L-shaped chambers within a much larger barrow made of earth and stone.
The barrow had been badly damaged by farmers ploughing the land for crops, and the tomb chambers were excavated in the 1980s to preserve what was left. The bones of 35 people were found.
The results showed that the men were usually buried near their fathers and their brothers. This finding suggested that descent was patrilineal — in other words, later generations buried at the tomb were connected to the earliest generation through their male relatives, the researchers said.
But the tomb was also split into two L-shaped chambers, located in the north and south of the structure, and the choice of which chamber individuals were buried in depended on the first-generation women they were descended from — the descendants of two of the women were buried in the northern chamber, and the descendants of the other two women were buried in the southern chamber.
That finding suggested these first-generation women were also socially significant in their community and that their status was recognized when the tomb was built, Olalde said.
Family matters
Olalde also identified four men buried in the tomb whose mothers had been part of the lineage but whose fathers were not — termed “stepsons.” These stepsons could have been adopted into the family when their mothers joined it, although it was also possible that the women bore children from men outside the family who were not recognized as their partners, he said.
Two of the daughters of the lineage who had died in childhood were buried in the tomb, but no adult daughters of the lineage were buried there; instead, they may have been interred in the family tombs of their male partners, Olalde said.
In the same tomb, he also identified the remains of three women and five men who had no genetic relationship to the family. It’s possible that the women were married to men buried in the tomb and had either no children or only adult daughters who were then buried somewhere else, he said.
The significance of the five unrelated men is not known, but they may have been adopted into the family or somehow connected through relationships that can’t be determined genetically, Olalde said. The Hazleton North tomb dates to very early in the Neolithic period in England, and it’s likely that the immediate ancestors of the people buried there had come to Britain from continental Europe as part of an immigrant wave of Neolithic farmers at that time, he said.
While Neolithic tombs found on the European continent don’t show such complexity, Olalde said, the relationships between those buried in the Hazleton North tomb probably reflect much earlier kinship structures within the immigrant society.
Billionaire hands over $70 million of stolen artefacts
Michael H. Steinhardt, the billionaire hedge fund pioneer and one of New York’s most prolific antiquities collectors, has surrendered 180 stolen objects valued at $70 million and been barred for life from acquiring any other relics, the Manhattan district attorney’s office said in a statement Monday.
The prosecutor’s office struck an agreement with Mr. Steinhardt after a four-year multinational investigation that determined that the seized pieces had been looted and smuggled from 11 countries, trafficked by 12 illicit networks and appeared on the international art market without lawful paperwork, the office said.
“For decades, Michael Steinhardt displayed a rapacious appetite for plundered artifacts without concern for the legality of his actions, the legitimacy of the pieces he bought and sold, or the grievous cultural damage he wrought across the globe,” District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. said, adding: “This agreement establishes that Steinhardt will be subject to an unprecedented lifetime ban on acquiring antiquities.”
Mr. Steinhardt, a Brooklyn native who turns 81 on Tuesday, is a major contributor to New York University and to numerous Jewish philanthropies. There is a Steinhardt conservatory at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden and a Steinhardt Gallery at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
In a statement on Monday, his lawyer, Andrew J. Levander, said: “Mr. Steinhardt is pleased that the District Attorney’s yearslong investigation has concluded without any charges, and that items wrongfully taken by others will be returned to their native countries.
Many of the dealers from whom Mr. Steinhardt bought these items made specific representations as to the dealers’ lawful title to the items, and to their alleged provenance. To the extent these representations were false, Mr. Steinhardt has reserved his rights to seek recompense from the dealers involved.”
According to prosecutors, 171 of the 180 seized antiquities first surfaced in the possession of accused antiquities traffickers, including two who have been convicted in Italy — Giacomo Medici and Giovanni Becchina.
They said the investigation revealed that 101 of the items, all covered in dirt and encrustations, were visible and identifiable in photographs found in the possession of known traffickers.
Christos Tsirogiannis, an associate professor at the University of Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies in Denmark, who specializes in searching photographic archives seized from antiquities dealers, said traffickers use such photos to advertise their looted wares to small groups of wealthy collectors. Dr. Tsirogiannis is one of about 60 researchers, investigators and foreign law enforcement officials credited by the prosecutors’ office with assisting in the case.
As part of its inquiry, Mr. Vance’s office said, prosecutors executed 17 search warrants and worked with officials in 11 countries — Bulgaria, Egypt, Greece, Iraq, Israel, Italy, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Syria, and Turkey.
In explaining the agreement not to prosecute so long as Mr. Steinhardt abides by all its terms, Mr. Vance said the arrangement would allow for the items to be “returned expeditiously to their rightful owners” rather than being held as evidence. It would also help his office to “shield the identity of the many witnesses here and abroad whose names would be released at any trial.”
Nonetheless, the case and other recent seizures demonstrate that the office’s Antiquities Trafficking Unit is ready to reach far back in time to confiscate objects based on a New York state statute that allows prosecutors to return stolen property to its “rightful owners” regardless of when a theft might have occurred.
Mr. Steinhardt’s dealings with prosecutors over suspect antiquities date back to the 1990s. In 1997, a federal judge ruled that Mr. Steinhardt had illegally imported a golden bowl, known as a phiale, from Italy in 1992.
The object, dating to 450 B.C. and costing $1 million, was seized from Mr. Steinhardt’s home in 1995. The judge rejected his contention at the time that he was an “innocent owner” with no knowledge of irregularities.
In 2018, investigators raided his office and Fifth Avenue home and took away several ancient works they said had been looted from Greece and Italy. That seizure came on the heels of a 2017 seizure of a marble statue stolen from a temple in Sidon, Lebanon, which Mr. Steinhardt relinquished and which has been returned.
The 2017 seizure led to the formation of the trafficking unit, which pressed the case that was resolved on Monday. Officials said the unit has recovered more than 3,000 items valued at $200 million, and that at least 1,500 have been returned to their owners and countries of origin. It said hundreds are ready to be repatriated “as soon as the relevant countries are able to receive them amid the pandemic,” and more than 1,000 objects are being held awaiting the outcome of criminal proceedings.
(Separately, in March 2019, Mr. Steinhardt was accused of a pattern of sexual harassment by several women who worked for the nonprofits he supported.)
The confiscated items, which decorated Mr. Steinhardt’s homes and offices, and which he often lent to major museums, came mostly from Italy, Greece and Israel, according to a list compiled by investigators.
The Stag’s Head Rhyton dates back to 400 BC and was looted from Milas, Turkey.
The Larnax, a 1400-1200 BC chest for human remains taken from Crete.
The Ercolano Fresco, looted from a Roman villa in Herculaneum, near Naples.
They include:
A ceremonial libations vessel, or rhyton, that depicts a stag’s head, purchased from the Merrin Gallery of Manhattan for $2.6 million in November 1991. Officials said the item, which dates to 400 B.C., first appeared on the international art market without provenance after rampant looting in Milas, Turkey. In March 1993, prosecutors said, Mr. Steinhardt lent it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where it was when law enforcement officials seized it. It has since been repatriated.
A larnax, or small chest for human remains, from Crete, that dates between 1400-1200 B.C. Officials said the item, valued at $1 million, was purchased from a known antiquities trafficker and traced to Mr. Steinhardt through a financial institution based in Malta.
The “Ercolano Fresco,” purchased from Robert Hecht, who had faced accusations of trafficking in antiquities, “with no prior provenance” for $650,000 in November 1995. Dating to 50 B.C. and valued at $1 million, it depicts an infant Hercules strangling a snake sent by Hera to slay him. The fresco was looted in 1995 from a Roman villa in the ruins of Herculaneum, near Naples, officials said.
A gold bowl looted from Nimrud, Iraq, and purchased without provenance papers, officials said, for $150,000 in July 2020, at a time when objects from Nimrud were being trafficked by the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant. Made of gold with a scalloped-flower design, the object surfaced in October 2019 when a Customs and Border Protection officer notified Mr. Vance’s office that someone on a flight from Hong Kong to Newark was hand-carrying the bowl for Mr. Steinhardt.
Three stone death masks that appeared to be encrusted with soil in photographs recovered by the Israeli authorities. They date to 6000 B.C. and were purchased by Mr. Steinhardt for $400,000 in October 2007.
Prosecutors said Mr. Steinhardt had owned and traded more than 1,000 antiquities since 1987, and his art collection was valued at about $200 million.
