Two golden tongues were found still inside the mouths of an ancient Egyptian man and woman who died over 2,500 years ago, the country’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities announced on Sunday.
A golden tongue was found inside the skull of an ancient mummy in Egypt, December 2021.
The identities of those interred are unknown, but the stone sarcophaguses were placed alongside each other.
A University of Barcelona archaeological mission discovered the pair of tombs containing the golden prosthetics at Oxyrhynchus, modern-day El Bahnasa, which is located some 220 kilometres south of Cairo.
The tombs are believed to be from the Saite dynasty, a late period of ancient Egypt that ended in 525 BC.
According to the ministry, golden tongues were placed inside the mouths of the dead to enable them to speak with Osiris, the ancient Egyptian god of the underworld, who judged those on their way to the afterlife.
The male’s tomb was still sealed, an unusual find, keeping the mummy inside in a good state of preservation, according to Esther Pons Melado, co-director of the archaeological mission of Oxyrhynchus
“This is very important because it’s rare to find a tomb that is totally sealed,” she told the National News in a Monday report on the discovery.
During excavation work carried out by a Spanish archaeological mission from Barcelona University and IPOA, at El-Bahnasa archaeological site in Meniya, has uncovered two Saite tombs with human remains with golden tongues.
Along with the mummy, there were four canopic jars that were used to preserve the internal organs of the deceased. In addition, archaeologists found a scarab, other amulets, and about 400 funerary figurines made of faience, a tin-glazed earthenware.
The woman’s tomb appeared to have been opened in the past and the contents were not in a good condition, Melardo said.
An additional three golden tongues were also found outside the tombs, according to the Tourism and Antiquities Ministry. They were dated to the Roman period in Egypt that began in 30 BC.
The excavation team of 14 included members from Spain, Italy, France, the US and Egypt.
In February, archaeologists at the ancient Egyptian site of Taposiris Magna found over a dozen tombs, one of which contained a mummy with a similar golden tongue in the skull.
A 4.6-billion-year-old meteorite is the oldest volcanic rock ever found
A lonely meteorite that landed in the Sahara Desert in 2020 is older than Earth. The primaeval space rock is about 4.6 billion years old and is the oldest known example of magma from space.
The EC 002 meteorite is “relatively coarse-grained, tan and beige,” with crystals that are green, yellow-green and yellow-brown.
Its age and mineral content hint that the rock originated in our early solar system from the crust of a protoplanet — a large, rocky body in the process of developing into a planet, according to a new study.
The meteorite, called Erg Chech 002 (EC 002), is likely a rare surviving chunk of a lost baby planet that was destroyed or absorbed by bigger rocky planets during our solar system’s formation.
Pieces of EC 002 were found in Adrar, Algeria, in May 2020, and the fragments were “relatively coarse-grained, tan and beige,” sporadically studded with crystals that were “larger green, yellow-green and less commonly yellow-brown,” according to a description by the Lunar and Planetary Institute (LPI).
EC 002 is an achondrite, a type of meteorite that comes from a parent body with a distinct crust and core, and lacks round mineral grains called chondrules, according to the Center for Meteorite Studies at Arizona State University.
Approximately 3,100 known meteorites originated in crust and mantle layers of rocky asteroids, but they reveal little about protoplanet diversity when our solar system was young. About 95% come from just two parent bodies, and around 75% of those originated from one source — possibly the asteroid 4 Vesta, one of the largest objects in the asteroid belt, the researchers reported.
Two views of a piece of EC 002. The main mass of the meteorite resides at the Maine Mineral and Gem Museum.
A meteoritic rarity
Among the thousands of rocky meteorites, EC 002 stood out. Radioactive versions, or isotopes, of aluminium and magnesium, indicated that the meteorite’s parent was an ancient body dating to 4.566 billion years ago, and EC 002’s chemical composition revealed that it emerged from a partly-melted magma reservoir in the parent body’s crust.
Most rocky meteorites come from sources with basaltic crusts — rapidly cooled lava that is rich in iron and magnesium — but EC 002’s composition showed that its parent’s crust was made of andesite, which is rich in silica.
“This meteorite is the oldest magmatic rock analyzed to date and sheds light on the formation of the primordial crusts that covered the oldest protoplanets,” the study authors reported.
While EC 002 is highly unusual, other studies have found that such silica-infused andesite crusts were likely common during our solar system’s protoplanet-forming stage, “contrary to what the meteorite record suggests,” the researchers wrote.
“It is reasonable to assume that many similar chondritic bodies accreted at the same time and were capped by the same type of primordial crust,” the study authors said. Yet, when the scientists peered at distant cosmic objects’ spectral “fingerprints” — wavelength patterns in the light they emit or reflect — and compared them to EC 002, they found no matches.
Even after comparison with 10,000 objects in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey database, EC 002 was “clearly distinguishable from all asteroid groups,” the scientists reported. “No object with spectral characteristics similar to EC 002 has been identified to date.”
Where are all the protoplanets with andesite crusts today? During our solar system’s volatile period of planetary birth, most of these protoplanets likely didn’t make it past infancy, according to the study.
Either they were smashed to bits in collisions with other rocky bodies, or they were absorbed by bigger and more successful rocky planets, such as Earth, Mars, Venus and Mercury, leaving few traces behind to spawn meteorites such as EC 002.
“Remains of primordial andesitic crust are therefore not only rare in the meteorite record, but they are also rare today in the asteroid belt,” the scientists wrote.
Researchers in Israel have discovered an intact chicken egg laid about 1,000 years ago—though the delicate object cracked in the lab
Researchers in Israel have discovered an intact chicken egg laid about 1,000 years ago—though the delicate object cracked in the lab.
“We were astonished to find it,” Alla Nagorsky, an archaeologist with the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA), tells Haaretz’s, Ruth Schuster. “From time to time we find fragments of eggshells, but a whole egg is extraordinary.”
The team discovered the egg in a cesspit in the industrial zone of the ancient city of Yavneh. As Amy Spiro reports for the Times of Israel, the egg remained unbroken for so long because it was pillowed in soft human waste, which created anaerobic, or oxygen-free, conditions and prevented its decay.
“Even today, eggs rarely survive for long in supermarket cartons,” says Nagorsky in a statement. “It’s amazing to think this is a 1,000-year-old find!”
Per the statement, the shell cracked despite staff taking “extreme caution” when removing it from the cesspit under the supervision of an experienced conservationist. Luckily, Ilan Naor, director of the IAA’s Organic Materials Conservation Laboratory, was able to repair the crack. While much of the egg’s contents leaked out, some of the yolks remained, and the researchers preserved it for future DNA analysis.
Alla Nagorsky and her colleagues examined the ancient egg.
The discovery was part of an excavation conducted ahead of the development of a new neighbourhood in the Israeli city. The cesspit also contained three dolls made out of bone—toys typical of the period—and an oil lamp.
Nagorsky tells Haaretz that the team was able to date the finds using the lamp, which was of a type only made in the late Abbasid period.
The Abbasid caliphate ruled much of the Middle East from 750 until the Mongol invasion of 1258. It lost control of Jerusalem when Europeans captured the city during the First Crusade in 1099.
Lee Perry Gal, an IAA archaeologist and expert on poultry in the ancient world, tells the Jerusalem Post’s Rossella Tercatin that broken eggshells are relatively common finds during excavations of ancient sites—but discovering a complete egg is extremely unusual.
“Chickens were domesticated in southeast Asia relatively recently, around 6,000 years ago, but it took time for them to enter the human diet,” she says. “They were used for other purposes, such as cockfighting, and they were considered beautiful animals, exhibited in ancient zoos and given as presents to kings.”
Perry Gal adds that one of the earliest known sites with evidence of chicken farming is also located in Israel. People living in Maresha appear to have raised the fowl 2,300 years ago, after Alexander the Great conquered Jerusalem.
In other ancient chicken news, Allison Robicelli of the Takeout reports that researchers examining 3,000-year-old bird bones found in Britain learned that domestic fowl of that time lived, on average, for 2 to 4 years. That’s much longer than the 33- to the 81-day lifespan of chickens in modern industrial farming systems. Writing in the International Journal of Osteoarchaeology, the researchers posit that the chickens were used in ritual sacrifices or cockfighting.
“Domestic fowl were introduced in the Iron Age and likely held a special status, where they were viewed as sacred rather than as food,” says lead author Sean Doherty, an archaeologist at the University of Exeter, in a statement. “Most chicken bones show no evidence for butchery, and were buried as complete skeletons rather than with other food waste.”
The findings build on previous evidence suggesting that early cultivation of animals often took place for reasons other than consumption, reported Rory Sullivan for CNN last year.
As Julius Caesar wrote in Commentarii de Bello Gallico, “The Britons consider it contrary to divine law to eat the hare, the chicken or the goose. They raise these, however, for their own amusement or pleasure.”
Princely tomb of Iron Age mystery man discovered in Italy. And there’s a chariot inside.
A lavish ‘Princely tomb’ belonging to an Iron Age man was found in Italy full of treasures including a bronze helmet, weapons and a whole chariot. The tomb of a pre-Roman prince has been saved from ‘imminent’ destruction after aerial photos revealed the ancient treasure trove before it could be built over.
The body of the unidentified prince has not been found and no mound remains to mark his resting place – it may have been lost while the site was used for farming. The hoard, found in Corinaldo, Italy, was on the site of a future sports complex and wasn’t spotted until a survey of the land was carried out before the building started.
The value of the discovery and the site is now being assessed before any decision over whether to move the tomb or move the sports complex is made.
Inside the tomb archaeologists found the remains of a complete chariot, it’s chassis can be seen on the outer edge of this block, as well as weapons and armour
The full study of the pottery and other finds within the tomb, including the chassis of what was likely a chariot (seen here) will likely prompt entirely new insights into the cultural, trading and gift-exchange relationships of the aristocracy in the area
‘Aerial photography led to the first identification of the site,’ said Professor Boschi. The grey area in this photo highlights where the tomb was found
The tomb is believed to date back to the seventh century BC when it was constructed for a prince of the largely-unknown Piceni people, whose land was eventually annexed by Rome in 268 BC.
‘We identified circular crop marks, comparable to large funerary ring ditches,’ said Federica Boschi, an archaeologist at the University of Bologna.
‘A large and slightly off-centre pit contained an extraordinary collection of cultural material.’
It is the only discovery of its kind in the region, the archaeologist confirmed.
‘As the first such monument identified and excavated in northern Marche this has provided an extraordinary opportunity to investigate a site of the Piceni culture,’ said Professor Boschi.
‘Until now, this culture has been poorly documented and little understood despite its undoubted importance in the pre-Roman development of the area.’
She added: ‘The recovery from complete obscurity and imminent danger of archaeological material of this scale and importance is a rare event within contemporary European archaeology.’
The body of the unidentified prince has not been found and no mound remains to mark his resting place – possibly both were destroyed during the land’s long history of agricultural use.
Nonetheless, Professor Boschi believes that the lavish tomb is evidenced enough of his status.
She said: ‘The extraordinarily rich funerary deposit testifies to a high-status tomb dedicated to a princely leader within the early Iron Age society of the region.
‘One outstanding find among the hundred or more ceramic vessels recovered from the pit was an olla imported from ancient Daunia.
‘This undoubtedly symbolises the commemorated leader’s significant political, military and economic power.
‘The full study of the pottery and other finds will undoubtedly prompt entirely new insights into the cultural, trading and gift-exchange relationships of the aristocracy in the area.’
After seeing aerial photos of the tomb site, archaeologists initially performed a resistivity survey, where electrical currents are run through the ground to see if anything metallic is buried there.
‘Aerial photography led to the first identification of the site,’ said Professor Boschi.
‘A resistivity survey then provided an initial understanding of the extent and internal articulation of the funerary area, including a third ring-ditch not revealed by the aerial photographs.
‘A targeted geomagnetic survey then produced significant information about the survival of the underground deposits, providing supporting secure evidence for a massive deposit of ironwork.’
It’s not entirely clear what will happen to the site next, whether the tomb and its contents will be moved or whether a new home will be found for the sports centre. The findings have to be properly valued, both for their financial worth and their cultural worth, before anything can happen.
‘The next steps are going to move toward the valorization and public fruition of the site within and in agreement with the project of the new sports complex,’ said Professor Boschi.
Mysterious Papyrus found Indside a Hidden “Crypt in Agia Sophia: What do they say?
The reason for identifying this special find was the observation of a Muslim believer who went to Hagia Sophia to pray (UNESCO condemned Turkey’s court decision to turn Hagia Sophia into a mosque).
The Muslim saw that a stone about 10 cm long and 30 cm wide had come off a wall and notified the authorities.
Surprised, the police could not believe their eyes when they rushed to the spot, discovering five parchments with Hebrew writing (as they first estimated) hidden in a bag.
“The parchments are not written in Hebrew as originally written,” Selçuk Eracun told CNN Turk, adding that “one is written in Romanian and one in runic writing.”
“Some parchments contain wishes. The person who wrote the parchment in Romanian wishes good luck to his family. He also writes about his dream of living in America. “There are also the names of the children of his family,” he said.
“As we can see, the parchments are not very old. Those who go to Hagia Sophia to pray, write wishes and leave them. It’s a tradition,” said the art historian.
“It is not uncommon to find parchments in crypts on the walls, as marble often falls,” he concluded.
3000-Year-Old Gold Jewellery Found Inside Bronze Age Tombs in Cyprus
Since 2010, the New Swedish Cyprus Expedition (The Söderberg Expedition) has had several rounds of excavations in Cyprus. In 2018, archaeologists discovered two tombs in the form of underground chambers, with a large number of human skeletons.
Managing the finds required very delicate work over four years since the bones were extremely fragile after more than 3,000 years in the salty soil.
In addition to the skeletons of 155 individuals, the team also found 500 objects. The skeletons and ritual funeral objects were in layers on top of each other, showing that the tombs were used for several generations.
The same five-year-old also had this necklace.
“The finds indicate that these are family tombs for the ruling elite in the city. For example, we found the skeleton of a five-year-old with a gold necklace, gold earrings and a gold tiara.
This was probably a child of a powerful and wealthy family,” says Professor Peter Fischer, the leader of the excavations.
One of the skeletons belonged to a five-year-old buried with lots of gold jewellery, including this tiara.
The finds include jewellery and other objects made of gold, silver, bronze, ivory and gemstones and richly decorated vessels from many cultures.
Large vessel with war chariots from Greece (ca. 1350 BCE). The ceramic vessels, particularly those imported from Greece and Crete, are decorated with painted scenes of horse-drawn chariots, individuals carrying swords, animals and flowers.
“We also found a ceramic bull. The body of this hollow bull has two openings: one on the back to fill it with a liquid, likely wine, and one at the nose to drink from. Apparently, they had feasts in the chamber to honour their dead.”
A message thousands of years old
One particularly important find is a cylinder-shaped seal made from the mineral hematite, with a cuneiform inscription from Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq), which the archaeologists were able to decipher.
“The text consists of three lines and mentions three names. One is Amurru, a god worshipped in Mesopotamia.
The other two are historical kings, father and son, who we recently succeeded in tracking down in other texts on clay tablets from the same period, i.e., the 18th century BC.
We are currently trying to determine why the seal ended up in Cyprus more than 1000 kilometres from where it was made.”
Among the finds is the red gemstone carnelian from India, the blue gemstone lapis lazuli from Afghanistan and amber from around the Baltic Sea, which shows that the city had a central role in trade during the Bronze Age.
The gold jewellery, along with scarabs (beetle-shaped amulets with hieroglyphs) and the remains of fish imported from the Nile Valley, tells the story of intensive trade with Egypt.
Wide-ranging trading network
By comparing with similar finds from Egypt, the archaeologists were also able to date the jewellery.
“The comparisons show that most of the objects are from the time of Nefertiti and her husband Echnaton around 1350 BCE. Like a gold pendant, we found: a lotus flower with inlaid gemstones. Nefertiti wore similar jewellery.”
Egyptian lotus jewellery with inlaid stones (ca. 1350 BCE).
The ceramic finds are also important.
“The way that the ceramics changed in appearance and material over time allows us to date them and study the connections these people had with the surrounding world. What fascinates me most is the wide-ranging network of contacts they had 3,400 years ago.”
The next step will be DNA analysis of the skeletons.
“This will reveal how the different individuals are related with each other and if there are immigrants from other cultures, which isn’t unlikely considering the vast trade networks,” says Peter Fischer.
In the tombs, the archaeologists found figurines of goddesses with bird faces. This is likely a goddess with a bird’s head holding a child that is half bird and half-human.
Aztec altar with human ashes uncovered in Mexico City
Sometime after Hernan Cortes conquered the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan in modern-day Mexico City in 1521, an indigenous household that survived the bloody Spanish invasion arranged an altar including incense and a pot with human ashes.
The altar was found underneath a modern home near Plaza Garibaldi in Mexico City
The remains of that elaborate display have been unearthed by archaeologists near what is today Garibaldi Plaza, famed for its revelry and mariachi music, Mexico’s culture ministry said on Tuesday.
In the wake of the fall of Tenochtitlan, likely within the years of 1521 and 1610, the offering from the family of the Mexica people was made “to bear witness to the ending of a cycle of their lives and of their civilization,” the culture ministry said in a statement.
The interior patio where rituals took place is about four meters (13 feet) below ground level, according to a team of archaeologists who spent three months analyzing the site.
They found various layers of what had been home over the centuries, the statement said, along with 13 incense burners, five bowls, a cup, a plate and a pot with cremated skeletal remains.
The incense burners found at the altar would have been used during rituals
The pot containing human ashes was one of the items found at the altar
The finding coincides with the 500-year anniversary of the Spanish conquest, which Mexico’s government commemorated by building a towering replica of the Templo Mayor, the Aztec civilization’s most sacred site, in downtown Mexico City.
A number of ancient discoveries in the Mexico City area in recent years, including some in the capital’s bustling downtown, have shone light on the Aztec civilization. They include the remains of a ceremonial ball court, a sacrificial wolf adorned with gold and a tower of human skulls.
President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador had previously sought an apology from Spain and the Vatican for human rights abuses committed during the conquest of what is modern-day Mexico.
Enigmatic footprints, once thought to belong to a bear, linked to unknown human ancestor
Ancient footprints reveal a mysterious relative of humans who may have lived at the same time and in the same area as the famous human ancestor “Lucy” in Tanzania. Strangely, these enigmatic tracks possess an unusual cross-stepping gait where one leg is crossed over the other during walking, a new study finds.
The oldest solid evidence of upright walking among hominins — the group that includes humans, our ancestors and our closest evolutionary relatives — are tracks discovered at Laetoli in northern Tanzania in 1978. The footprints date back about 3.66 million years, and previous research suggested they were made by Australopithecus afarensis, the species that ranks among the leading candidates for direct ancestors of the human lineage and includes the famed 3.2 million-year-old “Lucy.”
Other footprints discovered at the nearby “site A” in 1976 proved more enigmatic. One possibility was that these unusually shaped tracks — five consecutive footprints — were left by an unknown hominin. Another was that they were made by a bear walking on its hind legs.
These strange “Laetoli A” tracks were never fully excavated. To solve the mystery of the origins of these tracks, scientists have now fully examined these footprints and compared them with tracks from humans, bears and chimpanzees.
One of the first major hurdles as the scientists began this research “was our difficulties trying to track down original casts of the Laetoli A prints from their initial discovery,” study lead author Ellison McNutt, a biological anthropologist at the Heritage College of Osteopathic Medicine at Ohio University, told Live Science. “We were unable to locate any original casts and were concerned that exposure to the sun and decades of seasonal rains may have destroyed the original fossil prints.”
Luckily, when the researchers went back to Laetoli to re-excavate the prints, they found “the rains had actually washed nearby sediment over the original footprints, which protected them and allowed them to remain beautifully preserved,” McNutt said.
Here, a topographic map of the footprints found at Laetoli Site A in Tanzania.
The scientists went on to clean, measure, photograph and 3D-scan the footprints. “Looking at the fully excavated ‘A’ prints, we knew immediately that these were really intriguing and potentially different from the other two bipedal trackways at Laetoli,” McNutt said.
Next, McNutt and her colleagues teamed up with Ben and Phoebe Kilham, who run the Kilham Bear Center, a rescue and rehabilitation center for black bears in Lyme, New Hampshire. They identified four semi-wild juvenile black bears at the centre that have feet similar in size to that of the Laetoli A tracks.
The researchers used maple syrup or applesauce to lure the bears to stand up and walk on their two hind legs across a trackway filled with mud to capture their footprints. They found the gait seen with the Laetoli A tracks bore a closer resemblance to those of hominins than those of bears.
“As bears walk, they take very wide steps, wobbling back and forth,” study senior author Jeremy DeSilva, a paleoanthropologist at Dartmouth University, said in a statement. “They are unable to walk with a gait similar to that of the site A footprints, as their hip musculature and knee shape does not permit that kind of motion and balance.
This image shows a Laetoli A3 footprint (on left) and a cast of the Laetoli G1 footprint (on right).
In addition, the prints suggest feet more like those of hominins than bears. Bear toes and feet are fan-like and they have tapering heels, while the Laetoli A prints, like those of hominins, are squared off with a prominent big toe and a wide heel.
The researchers also collected more than 50 hours of video of wild black bears. The bears walked on their hind legs less than 1% of the total observed time, making it unlikely that a bear made the footprints at Laetoli A, especially given that no footprints were found of this individual walking on four legs. Moreover, the scientists noted that although thousands of animal fossils have been found at Laetoli, none are from bears.
Ellison McNutt, a study author, collects data from a juvenile female black bear (left.) A footprint from one of the juvenile male black bears, right.
However, the Laetoli A tracks are unlike those of any other known hominin. The footprints are unusually wide and short, and the feet that made them may have possessed a big toe capable of thumb-like grasping, similar to the big toe of apes.
All in all, McNutt and her colleagues concluded the Laetoli A prints were made by an as-yet-unidentified hominin, and not by A. Afarensis.
“Our work suggests that the Laetoli A prints are one of the oldest unequivocal pieces of evidence in the hominin fossil record of multiple hominin species coexisting in the same area at the same exact time,” McNutt said. “It is not inconceivable that the individual who made the A trackway could have looked across the landscape and seen A. afarensis individuals.”
Curiously, this hominin walked with an unusual cross-stepping gait — each foot crossed over the body’s midline to touch down in front of the other foot.
“The ability of this individual to demonstrate cross-stepping is actually one of the additional lines of evidence that Laetoli A was made by a hominin,” McNutt said. Primates that primarily walk on all fours, such as chimps, “lack the necessary anatomical adaptations in their hips and knees to allow them to maintain their balance while placing one foot across the midline past the other.”
Although humans typically do not cross-step, “it does happen occasionally,” McNutt said. “It can be used as a strategy to help walk across uneven or slippery surfaces.”
Still, the cross-stepping may not have resulted from a hominin attempting to keep its balance. “Other potential options include that this particular individual hominin walked in a peculiar manner,” McNutt said. “It is also possible that this unknown hominin species was adapted to walk in this way. We’ll be able to answer these questions more clearly as more footprints are discovered.”
In the future, the researchers aim to continue excavations at Laetoli around site A. “Additional prints from this individual or others made by the same species may give us further insight into how they moved across the landscape and what species they belonged to,” McNutt said. The scientists detailed their findings in the Dec. 2 issue of the journal Nature.
