ASIA, ISRAEL, WORLD

Stash of pure, 24-carat gold coins unearthed in Israel

Stash of pure, 24-carat gold coins unearthed in Israel

During the summer break, two Israeli teens discovered a cache of hundreds of gold coins dated back 1,100 years. In an archaeological excavation in Yavne in central Israel, the cache, buried in a clay pot, was uncovered by the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA).

The dig site in central Israel where the coins were unearthed.

The coins date back to the end of the 9th century when the region was under the control of the Islamic Abbasid Caliphate, a dynasty that controlled the area from modern Algeria to Afghanistan, Robert Kool, a coin specialist with the IAA, said. The coins, 425 in total, were made of pure 24-karat gold and weighed 1,86 pounds (845 grams).

“With such a sum, a person could buy a luxurious house in one of the best neighbourhoods in Fustat, the enormous wealthy capital of Egypt in those days,” said Kool.

The haul included pieces of gold dinars cut to be used as small change.

The teenagers, who were taking part in pre-military national service, initially thought they had found some very thin leaves buried in a jar.
“It was amazing. I dug in the ground and when I excavated the soil, saw what looked like very thin leaves,” Oz Cohen, one of the youths who found the coins, said in a statement.

Hiker finds the rare gold coin in Israel

“When I looked again I saw these were gold coins. It was really exciting to find such a special and ancient treasure.”

Finding such a large cache of gold coins is exceedingly rare, said the directors of the excavation site, since gold was often melted down and reused by later civilizations.

“The coins, made of pure gold that does not oxidize in air, were found in excellent condition as if buried the day before.

Their finding may indicate that international trade took place between the area’s residents and remote areas,” said Liat Nadav-Ziv and Elie Haddad from the IAA.

“The person who buried this treasure 1,100 years ago must have expected to retrieve it and even secured the vessel with a nail so that it would not move. We can only guess what prevented him from returning to collect this treasure,” they added.

The collection of gold coins contains full gold dinars, but also smaller cuttings of gold coins — used as small change, said Kool.

One of the cuttings is an exceptionally rare piece, he added, showing a fragment of Byzantine emperor Theophilos, which would have been minted in the neighbouring empire’s capital of Constantinople.

X-rated medieval doodles reveal our ancestors had a sense of humour
Kool said the fragment of a Christian emperor found in an Islamic coin hoard speaks to the connections between the empires, both in times of war and peace.

In 2016, a hiker found a 2,000-year-old gold coin carrying the face of a Roman emperor in eastern Galilee.

The coin is so rare that only one other such example is known to exist, experts said at the time.

And in 2015, divers found a trove of nearly 2,000 gold coins in the ancient Mediterranean harbour of Caesarea, which had languished at the bottom of the sea for about 1,000 years.

The largest hoard of gold coins found in Israel was discovered in the seabed of a harbour in the Mediterranean Sea port of Caesarea National Park.
ASIA, ISRAEL, WORLD

2,000-year-old seal depicting Greek god Apollo found in Jerusalem

2,000-year-old seal depicting Greek god Apollo found in Jerusalem

Archaeologist Eli Shukron told The Times of Israel that the finding of a rare 2000-year-old signet ring carved with the Greek sun god Apollo provides fresh evidence of a pluralistic Jewry walking the streets of ancient Jerusalem during the Second Temple period.

“It helps us to see a Jerusalem that wasn’t an ultra-Orthodox city of any kind, it was more pluralistic,” said Shukron, who is convinced that the ring must have decorated the finger of a Jew. The fact that a Jew wanted a Greek god’s symbol, “shows the wide variety of practices in Jerusalem. Everyone was a Jew, but there were different groups and perspectives,” he said.

The dark brown jasper gem sealing (intaglio) was recently discovered at the Archaeological Sifting Project at Tzurim Valley National Park during the wet sifting of earth taken from ongoing City of David excavations of the foundations of the Western Wall.

Shukron said there is absolutely no doubt that it is Apollo who is engraved on the tiny, oval-shaped, 13 millimetre-long, 11 millimetre-wide, and 3 millimetre-thick sealing. It would usually have been used as a signature stamp on beeswax to seal contracts, letters, wills, and goods or bundles of money, according to a City of David press release.

The profile of Apollo has long flowing hair spilling over his sturdy neck. He has a large nose, thick lips, and small prominent chin, according to the press release. The styled hair is braided above his forehead, with long curls reaching the shoulder.

All of this adds up to the god Apollo in the eyes of a trained archaeologist. “You cannot miss it,” Shukron said.

Illustrative: Eli Shukron, an archaeologist formerly with Israel’s Antiquities Authority, walks in the City of David archaeological site near Jerusalem’s Old City

The question then arises, what is a nice Jewish neighbourhood such as 1st century CE Jerusalem doing with a pagan Greek god?

2,000-year-old seal with the image of Apollo discovered in the City of David near Jerusalem’s Western Wall.

According to Shukron, there are already a handful of archaeological artefacts dated to the Second Temple period in which Apollo plays a starring role: Two other Apollo gem sealings were discovered at Masada and another two were found in Jerusalem, one also from the Western Wall drainage tunnels excavations and one in a tomb on Mount Scopus.

Shukron noted that whereas during the Roman period, other members of the Greek and Roman pantheon make appearances, for the centuries surrounding the turn of the Common Era, only Apollo has been found. The god symbolized light, health and general well-being and success — something everyone generally aspires to, he said, which is why the symbol was considered “kosher” for these Second Temple Jews.

“It’s important to see that Jerusalem is more than conservatism, there are people like this who [as evidenced by his adoption of a pagan symbol as his signature] would have had more freedom in their thinking,” said Shukron. What is also clear, through his very public use of the symbol, is that there would have been a group of Jews who accepted this usage as well.

Expert of engraved gems Prof. Shua Amorai-Stark made an assessment of the sealing and noted that “at the end of the Second Temple period, the sun god Apollo was one of the most popular and revered deities in Eastern Mediterranean regions.

Apollo was a god of manifold functions, meanings, and epithets. Among Apollo’s spheres of responsibility, it is likely that association with sun and light (as well as with logic, reason, prophecy, and healing) fascinated some Jews, given that the element of light versus darkness was prominently present in Jewish worldview in those days,” he said.

It’s likely that a Jewish person owned this ancient carving about 2,000 years ago.

Amorai-Stark said that this polarization of light versus dark is seen in that the craftsman’s choice of a dark stone layered with yellow-golden and light brown.

“The choice of a dark stone with the yellow colouring of hair suggests that the creator or owner of this intaglio sought to emphasize the dichotomous aspect of light and darkness and/or their connectedness,” he wrote.

Whether the craftsman was going for a cup half empty or half full view of the world in his workmanship on the sealing, for Shukron the fact of its existence and use during the Second Temple period is an anchor between Jews of two millennia ago and today.

ENGLAND, EUROPE, WORLD

Decapitated Skeletons, with Heads Between Their Legs, Unearthed in Roman Cemetery

Decapitated Skeletons, with Heads Between Their Legs, Unearthed in Roman Cemetery

Archaeologists discovered that a third of the skeletons were decapitated at a fourth-century Roman grave site in England, an unusually high percentage, even for the Roman Empire.

“Low proportions of decapitated burials are a common component of Roman cemeteries,” said Andy Peachey, an archaeologist at the site, to the East Anglian Daily Times. “It is rare to find such a high proportion of decapitated burials in Britain… Perhaps only half a dozen other sites in Britain demonstrate this.”

Out of the 52 skeletons archaeologists have identified in Suffolk county’s Great Whelnetham village, 17 are decapitated with their head placed between their legs. These beheadings occurred after the people had already died—meaning that none of them was executed in this fashion.

A decapitated Roman burial with the head placed between the feet, and a second human skull possibly from an adjacent grave.
Cleaning and recording Roman burials by the Archeological Solutions team. Out of the 52 skeletons archaeologists have identified in Suffolk county’s Great Whelnetham village, 17 are decapitated with their head placed between their legs.

“This appears to be a careful funeral rite that may be associated with a particular group within the local population, possibly associated with a belief system (cult) or a practice that came with a group moved into the area,” Peachey said.

The 17 beheaded skeletons are male and female, with one belonging to a child around nine or ten years old.

Most of the 52 skeletons in the graveyard are middle-aged or older. They show signs of poor dental hygiene but were well-nourished. Some of them had tuberculosis.

The reason archaeologists examined the site in the first place is that there is a planned housing development there. In Europe, archaeological discoveries are often made in preparation for public works projects.

That’s how researchers found a pair of medieval thigh-high boots in the mud of the River Thames, an ancient Roman library in Germany and a motley collection of artefacts in the city of Rome.

Archaeologists are still studying the skeletons in Great Whelnetham and will publish a report on their findings when they have finished. Until then, it’s difficult to speculate on why these 17 skeletons were singled out for beheading rites; previous examples of Roman beheadings don’t necessarily shed light on the reason these skeletons were decapitated.

In the city of York, England, there’s a second- and third-century Roman grave site where most of the 80-some skeletons were decapitated. Researchers found that these decapitated people migrated to York from as far away as modern-day Syria or Palestine.

But unlike the Great Whelnetham skeletons, the decapitated skeletons of York were all men whose remains suggest they were gladiators or soldiers. For some of them, decapitation probably was the way they died.

The skeletons at Great Whelnetham seem to have met a gentler fate.

AFRICA, EGYPT, WORLD

An Ancient Papyrus Reveals How The Great Pyramid of Giza Was Built

An Ancient Papyrus Reveals How The Great Pyramid of Giza Was Built

Stones of up to fifteen tonnes were shipped to a man-made port on wooden boats across the Nile. It has been one of the major enigmas of the world for centuries: how did a simple culture with no sophistication build Giza’s Great Pyramid.

The earliest and only survivor of the Ancient World’s Seven Wonders? It was the tallest man-made building on Earth for almost 4,000 years, at 146 metres high.

Archaeologists also discovered the diary of Merer, an official involved in the building of Giza’s great pyramid, in what is regarded by some to be one of the greatest discoveries in Egypt in the 21st century.

The 4,500-year-old papyrus is the oldest in the world and describes how wooden boats and ingenious system of waterworks transported blocks of limestones and granite weighing up to 15 tonnes from 13 kilometres away. In it, Merer (which means beloved) describes how he and a crew of 40 elite workmen shipped the stones downstream from Tura to Giza along the Nile River.

In the last few years, the papyrus and other archaeological excavations have revealed new information about how the pyramids were constructed. Here are some of the findings uncovered in Nature of Things documentary Lost Secrets of the Pyramid.

A papyrus Tallet found at Wadi al-Jarf from 2,600 B.C., the world’s oldest, refers to the “horizon of Khufu,” or the Great Pyramid at Giza.

Water was harnessed to transport huge stones.

Every summer, when the Nile flooded, giant dykes were opened to divert water from the river and channel it to the pyramid through a manmade canal system creating an inland port which allowed boats to dock very close to the worksite — just a few hundred metres away from the growing pyramid.

A recreation of the port from the documentary Lost Secrets of the Pyramid

The construction of artificial ports was a huge turning point for Egyptians, opening up trade and new relationships with people from distant lands.

Wooden boats built with rope instead of nails.

The limestone was carried along the River Nile in wooden boats built with planks and rope that were capable of hauling two-and-a-half tonne stones. 

Using ancient tomb carvings and the remains of an ancient dismantled ship as a guide, archaeologist Mohamed Abd El-Maguid has recreated one Egyptian boat from scratch.

3D scans of the ship planks revealed that the boats were full of holes that lined up perfectly with each other. Instead of nails or wood pegs, these boats were sewn together with rope like a giant jigsaw puzzle.

With 1,000 holes and five kilometres of rope the new boat was assembled and Abd El-Maguid and in Secrets of the Pyramid, attempts to re-create every step of Merer’s journey down the Nile with two-tonne limestone rock.

These boats were rowed carefully with the current down the Nile to the worksite. Once the rocks were unloaded, the wind helped propel the vessel back to the quarry.

Workers were valued and lived nearby in a huge settlement

Archaeologist Mark Lehner has uncovered artefacts that provide evidence of a vast settlement that held as many as 20,000 people. Average workers lived in huge dormitories, but team leaders like Merer lived in relative luxury with homes of their own.

Thousands of tiny bits of detritus of everyday life reveal that these hungry workers were well taken care of. An entire city was formed near the pyramid site to provide food and drink.

For most of the workers, building the pyramids was a source of prestige; these people have valued servants of the state.

Workers belonged to teams

Ankhhaf, Pharoah Khufu’s half-brother is mentioned in Merer’s diary and is thought to have been in charge of the operation.  He divided the workforce into ‘phyles’ teams of 40 men — of which someone like Merer oversaw.

Artefacts with team names on them have been discovered by archaeologist Pierre Tallet at a remote desert outpost in Wadi Al-Jarf about 250 kilometres away. Merer’s phyle was called “The Followers of the Boat named after the Snake on its Figurehead.”

Four phyles formed a gang of elite labourers. Each team has specific roles in the construction of the pyramid or the transportation of materials to the worksite.

Thousands of men, working together for over 20 years, succeeded in building the tallest, heaviest structure on earth. They transformed the landscape, and in doing so, also created a new society which archaeologist Mark Lehner says is the real achievement, “Once they had put all these systems and all this infrastructure in place there was no going back. They became more important than the pyramid itself and set Egyptian civilization off on a course for the next two or three millennia.”

ASIA, CHINA, WORLD

A 520-Million-Year-Old Five-Eyed Fossil Reveals Arthropod Origin

A 520-Million-Year-Old Five-Eyed Fossil Reveals Arthropod Origin

Since the Cambrian Period, around 520 million years ago, arthropods have been among the most prolific animals on Earth. They are the most familiar and ubiquitous, and constitute nearly 80 per cent of all animal species today, far more than any other animals.

Ecological reconstruction of Kylinxia zhangi.

So how did arthropods evolve and what did they look like to their ancestors? This has been a major conundrum in animal evolution puzzling generations of scientists for more than a century.

A shrimp-like fossil with five eyes has now been found by researchers from the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (NIGPAS), giving valuable insights into the early evolutionary  history of arthropods. The study was published in Nature on November 4, 2020.

Anatomical reconstruction of Kylinxia.

The fossil species, Kylinxia, was collected from the Chengjiang fauna in southwest China’s Yunnan Province. The fauna documents the most complete early animal fossils in the Cambrian time.

Prof. HUANG Diying, the corresponding author for the study from NIGPAS, said, “Kylinxia is a very rare chimeric species. It combines morphological features from different animals, which is analogous to ‘kylin,’ a chimeric creature in traditional Chinese mythology.”

“Owing to very special taphonomic conditions, the Kylinxia fossils exhibit exquisite anatomical structures. For example, nervous tissue, eyes and digestive system — these are soft body parts we usually cannot see in conventional fossils,” said Prof. ZHAO Fangchen, co-corresponding author of the study.

Kylinxia shows distinctive features of true arthropods, such as a hardened cuticle, a segmented trunk and jointed legs.

However, it also integrates the morphological characteristics present in very ancestral forms, including the bizarre five eyes of Opabinia, known as the Cambrian “weird wonder,” as well as the iconic raptorial appendages of Anomalocaris, the giant apex predator in the Cambrian ocean.

A 520-Million-Year-Old Five-Eyed Fossil Reveals Arthropod Origin
Holotype of Kylinxia zhangi.

Among the Chengjiang fauna, Anomalocaris is a top predator that can reach two meters in body length and has been regarded as an ancestral form of arthropod.

But huge morphological differences exist between Anomalocaris and true arthropods. There is a great evolutionary gap between the two that can hardly be bridged. This gap has become a crucial “missing link” in the origin of arthropods.

The research team conducted detailed anatomical examinations of the fossils of Kylinxia. They demonstrated that the first appendages in Anomalocaris and true arthropods were homologous.

The phylogenetic analyses suggested that there was an affinity between the front appendages of Kylinxia, small predatory appendages in front of the mouth of Chelicerata (a group that includes spiders and scorpions) and the antennae of Mandibulata (a subdivision of arthropods including insects such as ants and bees).

“Our results indicate that the evolutionary placement of Kylinxia is right between Anomalocaris and the true arthropods. Therefore, our finding reached the evolutionary root of the true arthropods,” said Prof. ZHU Maoyan, a co-author of the study.

“Kylinxia represents a crucial transitional fossil predicted by Darwin’s evolutionary theory. It bridges the evolutionary gap from Anomalocaris to true arthropods and forms a key “missing link” in the origin of arthropods, contributing strong fossil evidence for the evolutionary theory of life,” said Dr. ZENG Han, first author of the study.

ASIA, INDONESIA, WORLD

Rare Ancient Child Burial Reveals 8,000-Year-Old Secrets of the Dead

Rare Ancient Child Burial Reveals 8,000-Year-Old Secrets of the Dead

Humanity has done a pretty good job of recording its collective history over the past two or three thousand years. Earlier time periods, though, are still very much shrouded in mystery. Now, a groundbreaking new archaeological discovery in Indonesia is revealing secrets from 8,000 years ago.

Entrance to Makpan cave, Alor Island, where the burial was discovered.

Archaeologists from The Australian National University have discovered an ancient child burial site located on Alor Island, Indonesia. While a funeral for a child is no doubt a morose and depressing event in any century, this unearthing is providing some invaluable insight on early mid-Holocene era cultural and burial practices.

Stunning burial practices unearthed

Articulated left foot (bottom left) and right foot (center) excavated in the ANU laboratory.

According to lead researcher Dr Sofia Samper Carro, it’s clear that the child was laid to rest with a formal ceremony of some kind. The research team estimates the child was between four and eight-years-old at the time of death.

“Ochre pigment was applied to the cheeks and forehead and an ochre-coloured cobblestone was placed under the child’s head when they were buried,” she says in a university release. “Child burials are very rare and this complete burial is the only one from this time period,”

“From 3,000 years ago to modern times, we start seeing more child burials and these are very well studied. But, with nothing from the early Holocene period, we just don’t know how people of this era treated their dead children. This find will change that.”

Of particular note is the fact that the child’s arms and legs appear to have been removed and stored elsewhere before the rest of the body was buried. This sounds rather odd from a modern perspective, but researchers say it isn’t wholly unprecedented.

“The lack of long bones is a practice that has been documented in several other burials from a similar time period in Java, Borneo and Flores, but this is the first time we have seen it in a child’s burial,” Dr Carro adds.

Why did ancient cultures remove arms and legs before burials?

The answer is probably lost to the sands of time, but researchers theorize some form of religion or spiritual belief is a likely explanation.

“We don’t know why long bone removal was practised, but it’s likely some aspect of the belief system of the people who lived at this time,” Carro adds.

While teeth examinations project the child as being around six to eight-years-old, the full skeleton appears to be closer to four or five-years-old.

“We want to do some further paleo-health research to find out if this smaller skeleton is related to diet or the environment or possibly to being genetically isolated on an island,” the lead researcher comments. “My earlier work from Alor showed adult skulls were also small.

These hunter-gatherers had a mainly marine diet and there is evidence to suggest protein saturation from a single food source can cause symptoms of mal-nourishment, which affects growth. However, they could have been eating other terrestrial resources such as tubers.”

“By comparing other adult burials we have found from the same time period with this child burial in a future project, we hope to build a chronology and general view of burial practices in this region from between 12,000 to 7,000 years ago which at the moment is still scant.”

MEXICO, NORTH AMERICA, WORLD

Long-lost Maya capital discovered in a backyard in Mexico

Long-lost Maya capital discovered in a backyard in Mexico

Archaeologists claim that they discovered the long-lost capital of an ancient Maya kingdom on the Mexico-Guatemalan border.

Schroder (left) and Scherer (right) excavate in the ancient city’s ballcourt. (Charles Golden)

In what is now Chiapas, Mexico, the Sak Tz’i Kingdom has 5,000-10,000 inhabitants from around 750 BCE by 900 AD, an associate professor of anthropology at Brandeis University, Charles Golden, said to LiveScience.

Golden said the empire was not particularly powerful and was surrounded by some of the superpowers of the day. He said that in inscriptions found in other cities, the Sak Tz’i’ kingdom was frequently mentioned.

“The reason we know about the kingdom from the inscriptions is that they get beat up by all these superpowers, their rulers are taken captive, they’re fighting wars, but they’re also negotiating alliances with those superpowers at the same time,” he said.

The downtown area was about a third of a mile long and a quarter-mile wide (600 meters by 400 meters) and had pyramids, a royal palace, a ball court and a number of houses.

“These are not big empires. They’re small city-states trying to carve out their little, little territories,” Golden said.

Golden and Brown University bioarchaeologist Andrew Scherer is leading the team that has been excavating the site since 2018. They published their findings in the Journal of Field Archaeology.

Golden said they found out about the site after graduate student Whittaker Schroder got a tip from a street food vendor, who introduced him to the rancher who owned the property.

The rancher had a stone tablet that had an inscription and a drawing of a Sak Tz’i’ king dressed as the Maya storm god.

Researchers made a drawing, left, and 3d model of the stone tablet.

Golden said the site had been raided by looters in 1960s and many of its monuments were stolen. The owner found the stone tablet in some rubble while working to protect what is left of the site.

“He found it by accident. There’s a lucky, lucky rescued object the looters had missed,” Golden said.

Golden said the looters used saws and other heavy equipment to cut the off faces of the monuments. The pieces wound up in museums and private collections around the world.

“When you go to the museum and see these objects, you’re seeing something that’s been really butchered from its original piece of stone, so we would try to reconnect it to the original piece of stone that may still be on on-site,” he said.

He said it’s taken years to build trust in the community and get permission to dig at the site.

“We are both excavating to find out how people lived and more about how they built these places, but we also have to conserve these buildings,” Golden said. “They were damaged by looters and we’ll be working with the landowner to stabilize and keep these buildings from further deterioration.”

He said he hopes the discovery will help them learn how these smaller kingdoms and their citizens lived their lives and negotiated to live between their powerful, feuding neighbours.

AUSTRALIA, WORLD

7,000 years old Australian Aboriginal Sites Discovered Underwater

7,000 years old Australian Aboriginal Sites Discovered Underwater

According to a report released July 1 , 2020, in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Jonathan Benjamin of Flinders University, Adelaide, Australia and colleagues, ancient submerged Aboriginal archaeological sites await underwater rediscovery off the coast of Australia.

Sea levels were about 80 metres lower than today when humans first settled in Australia as early as 65,000 years ago. As the global atmosphere cooled, sea levels fluctuated but continued to fall.

As the world plunged into the last ice age, which peaked around 20,000 years ago, sea levels dropped to 130 metres lower than they are now.

Between 18,000 and 8,000 years ago the world warmed up. Melting ice sheets caused sea levels to rise. Tasmania was cut off from the mainland around 11,000 years ago. New Guinea separated from Australia around 8,000 years ago.

The sea-level rise flooded 2.12 million square kilometres of land on the continental shelf surrounding Australia. Thousands of generations of people would have lived out their lives on these landscapes now underwater.

In this study, Benjamin and colleagues report the results of several field campaigns between 2017-2019 during which they applied a series of techniques for locating and investigating submerged archaeological sites, including aerial and underwater remote sensing technologies as well as a direct investigation by divers.

Site location in northwest Australia, left, and the Dampier Archipelago, right.

They investigated two sites off the Murujuga coastline of northwest Australia.

In Cape Bruguieres Channel, divers identified 269 artefacts dating to at least 7,000 years old, and a single artefact was identified in a freshwater spring in Flying Foam Passage, dated to at least 8,500 years old. These are the first confirmed underwater archaeological sites found on Australia’s continental shelf.

A selection of stone artefacts found on the seabed.
A stone tool associated with a freshwater spring, now 14m underwater.

These findings demonstrate the utility of these exploratory techniques for locating submerged archaeological sites.

The authors hope that these techniques can be expanded upon in the future for systematic recovery and investigation of ancient Aboriginal cultural artefacts.

They further urge that future exploration will rely not only on careful and safe scientific procedures but also on legislation to protect and manage Aboriginal cultural heritage along the Australian coastline.

Benjamin says, “Managing, investigating and understanding the archaeology of the Australian continental shelf in partnership with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander traditional owners and custodians is one of the last frontiers in Australian archaeology.” He adds, “Our results represent the first step in a journey of discovery to explore the potential of archaeology on the continental shelves which can fill a major gap in the human history of the continent.”

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