ENGLAND, EUROPE, WORLD

15th-Century Theater Floorboards Uncovered in Norfolk

15th-Century Theater Floorboards Uncovered in Norfolk

A theater in Norfolk believes it has discovered the only surviving stage on which William Shakespeare performed. St George’s Guildhall in King’s Lynn is the oldest working theater in the UK, dating back to 1445.

William Shakespeare acted as well as writing some of the greatest works of English drama

During recent renovations, timber floorboards were found under the existing auditorium, and they have been dated back to the 15th century. The theater claims documents show that Shakespeare acted at the venue in 1592 or 1593.

At the time, acting companies left the capital when theaters in London were closed due to the plague. The Earl of Pembroke’s Men, thought to include Shakespeare, visited King’s Lynn.

“We have the borough account book from 1592–93, which records that the borough paid Shakespeare’s company to come and play in the venue,” explains Tim FitzHigham, the Guildhall’s creative director.

15th-Century Theater Floorboards Uncovered in Norfolk
Dr Jonathan Clark showing Colin Paterson the original floorboards

The floorboards were uncovered last month during a renovation project at the Guildhall. They had been covered up for 75 years after a replacement floor was installed in the theater.

Dr. Jonathan Clark, an expert in historical buildings, was brought on board to research the venue. “We wanted to open up an area just to check, just to see if there was an earlier floor surviving here. And lo and behold, we found this,” he says, pointing through a temporary trapdoor.

A couple of inches below the modern floor are what he believes to be boards trodden by the Bard, each 12 inches (30cm) wide and 6 inches deep.

Dr. Clark used a combination of tree-ring dating and a survey of how the building was assembled (“really unusual as the boards locked together and were then pegged through to some massive bridging beams”) to date the floor to between 1417 and 1430 when the Guildhall was originally built.

“We know that these [floorboards] were definitely here in 1592, and in 1592 we think Shakespeare was performing in King’s Lynn, so this is likely to be the surface that Shakespeare was walking on,” he says.

“It’s this end of the hall where performances took place.”

St George’s Guildhall in King’s Lynn is hosting a discussion about the discovery

Dr. Clark believes this is a hugely important discovery because not only is it the largest 15th-century timber floor in the country, but it would also be the sole surviving example of a stage on which Shakespeare acted.

“It’s the only upper floor, which is in something of its original state, where he could have been walking or performing,” he says.

There has been much academic debate over the years about whether Shakespeare did act in King’s Lynn, but experts say the discovery is significant.

Tiffany Stern, professor of Shakespeare and early modern drama at the University of Birmingham, tells the BBC: “The evidence he was there has to be patched together but is quite strong.”

It was “very likely” that he was a member of the Earl of Pembroke’s Men because they performed his plays Henry VI and Titus Andronicus, and they did visit King’s Lynn in 1593, she says.

Michael Dobson, director of the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford-upon-Avon, says: “The uncovering of the actual boards really trodden by Shakespeare’s troupe during their tours of East Anglia should be far more significant to archaeologists of the Elizabethan theatre than is the conjectural replica of the Globe theatre erected near the real, long-demolished Globe’s foundations in central London in the 1990s.”

Upstart crow

Back at the venue, FitzHigham believes a number of theories strengthen the argument that Shakespeare performed there.

Shakespeare’s comedian Robert Armin was born just one street away, he notes, while a Norfolk writer called Robert Greene famously described the Bard as an “upstart crow” in what was essentially a bad review in 1592.

The debate will continue. On Thursday, the discovery will be discussed at a talk at the venue called Revealing the Secrets of the Guildhall. Finally, FitzHigham takes me underneath the stage, making us squeeze between beams and using a torch, to allow a closer look at the huge expanse of medieval floorboards, which he explains is the size of a tennis court.

“600 years old,” he says with a real sense of wonder.

“Not just Shakespeare’s trodden on it, but everyone in between and we’re trying to make that safe and share it with everybody for the next hundreds of years going forward.”

EUROPE, SPAIN, WORLD

Paleolithic ‘art sanctuary’ in Spain contains more than 110 prehistoric cave paintings

Paleolithic ‘art sanctuary’ in Spain contains more than 110 prehistoric cave paintings

Archaeologists have discovered more than 110 prehistoric cave paintings and engravings dating to at least 24,000 years ago near Valencia, Spain.

Paleolithic 'art sanctuary' in Spain contains more than 110 prehistoric cave paintings
An archeologist illuminates a part of the cave in Spain that’s rich with artistic motifs.

The Paleolithic, or Stone Age, rock art is “arguably the most important found on the Eastern Iberian Coast in Europe,” the team said in a statement about the finding.

Locals and hikers have long known about Cova Dones (also spelled Cueva Dones), a 1,640-foot-long (500 meters) cave in the municipality of Millares. Although Iron Age finds were known from the cave, the Paleolithic artwork wasn’t documented until researchers discovered it in 2021.

At first, the team found four painted motifs, including the head of an aurochs (Bos primigenius), an extinct cattle species. Additional work in 2023 revealed the site as a “major Palaeolithic art sanctuary,” the researchers wrote in a study published Sept. 8 in the journal Antiquity.

“When we saw the first painted auroch[s], we immediately acknowledged it was important,” Aitor Ruiz-Redondo, a senior lecturer of prehistory at the University of Zaragoza in Spain and a research affiliate at the University of Southampton in the U.K., said in the statement.

Spain has the most Paleolithic cave-art sites in the world, including the up to 36,000-year-old cave art at La Cueva de Altamira, but most are found in the northern part of the country, making the location of the new find unique. “Eastern Iberia is an area where few of these sites have been documented so far,” Ruiz-Redondo said.

An engraved hind (female red deer) etched into the wall of the cave.

The Paleolithic compositions stand out due to the sheer number of motifs and techniques used to make them.

The cave may even exhibit the most Stone Age motifs of any cave in Europe; the last big discovery of this kind was the finding of at least 70 cave paintings from up to 14,500 years ago at Atxurra in Spain’s northern Basque Country, in 2015.

In the new study, the researchers documented at least 19 depictions of animals, including horses, hinds (female red deer), aurochs and a stag.

The other art includes signs like rectangles, isolated lines and “macaroni” shallow-groove lines made by dragging fingers or tools across a soft surface. Many of the motifs were made using red, iron-rich clay — a technique rarely seen in Paleolithic art, the researchers said.

“Animals and signs were depicted simply by dragging the fingers and palms covered with clay on the walls,” Ruiz-Redondo said.

The cave’s humid environment helped the paintings dry slowly, “preventing parts of the clay from falling down rapidly, while other parts were covered by calcite layers, which preserved them until today,” he said.

Some of the engravings were crafted by scraping limestone on the cave’s walls, the team added.

The investigations of the “rich graphic assemblage” are still in the early stages, as there are still more areas of the cave to survey and panels to document, the researchers wrote in the study.

EUROPE, TURKEY, WORLD

The Marble Head of Alexander the Great was Unearthed in Turkey

The Marble Head of Alexander the Great was Unearthed in Turkey

The head of a marble statue of Alexander the Great unearthed in Turkey shows the enduring popularity of the ancient ruler hundreds of years after his death, experts say.

The Marble Head of Alexander the Great was Unearthed in Turkey
The head of the marble statue was found last month amid the ruins of a second-century theater at Konuralp, in northwest Turkey near the city of Düzce.

The object was found amid the ruins of the upper levels of a Roman-era theater at Konuralp, north of Düzce and near Turkey’s northwest coast, and is thought to date to the second century. Alexander the Great died in 323 B.C, so the statue may have been made more than 400 years after his death.

The remains of other marble statues, including heads of the Greek god Apollo and the mythical monster Medusa, have also been found in the ruins of the theater, the Düzce Municipality wrote in a statement in Turkish.

Alexander was a popular figure in the ancient world long after his untimely death at age 32 at Babylon beside the Euphrates river, historian Paul Cartledge, a professor at the University of Cambridge and the author of “Alexander the Great: the Hunt for a New Past” (Overlook Press, 2004), told Live Science.

One reason for Alexander’s enduring popularity was that his successors promoted him as an ideal ruler whom they hoped to emulate. “The contenders for his throne, and therefore his empire, used his name and said ‘he was terrific,'” said Cartledge, who wasn’t involved in the new discovery.

It also became common for later rulers to make coins containing Alexander’s image as a way to legitimize their reigns, he said.

Experts say the marble head has many distinctive features from a statue of Alexander the Great, including a hairstyle meant to look like a lion’s mane and upward-looking eyes.

Macedonian king

After analyzing the marble head, historical experts determined it was a portrayal of Alexander, according to the statement.

“[He] is depicted with deep and upward-looking eyes … and a slightly open mouth that barely reveals its teeth,” Düzce Municipality officials said in the statement, which also noted the distinctive hairstyle on the statue.

“The two tufts of hair in the middle of the forehead, which are separated from the back and sides, are like a lion’s mane,” they said in the translated statement. “This depiction is a hairstyle unique to Alexander the Great.”

Alexander was one of the most famous rulers of the ancient world. Born in 356 B.C., he became the king of Macedonia, a territory north of Greece, in 336. His father, Philip II of Macedon, had already succeeded in uniting Greece under his rule.

Although not born in Greece, Alexander was enamored of Greek culture and spread it as he began a campaign of military conquests to the south and east, which culminated in his defeat of the powerful Persian Empire in a series of battles between 334 B.C. and 331 B.C.

Alexander the Great died in 323 B.C. but he remained a popular figure for hundreds of years under the Roman Empire, which ruled this region at that time.

Mighty empire

At its height, Alexander’s empire stretched from Greece and Egypt to Bactria, roughly in what’s now Afghanistan, to the Punjab in what’s now Pakistan. But his army refused to go any farther, and Alexander returned to Babylon, where he died a few years later—probably from an illness, but possibly from drinking too much or because he was poisoned, Cartledge said.

When the Romans conquered much of the ancient world—including the kingdom of Bithynia, in the region where the new statue was found—they, too, regarded Alexander the Great as an ideal ruler.

Indeed, Alexander’s habit of shaving his face—as opposed to sporting beards, like most past rulers did—influenced Roman emperors and led Romans to shave, because it was thought to be the correct thing for rulers to do, Cartledge said.

Alexander seemed to have taken up the habit because he wanted to be seen like the Greek god Apollo, who was portrayed without a beard.

For the same reason, many statues of Alexander portrayed his eyes looking upward toward the gods, Cartledge said, and upward-looking eyes are one feature of the statue discovered at Konuralp.

WORLD

Our Ancestors Collected Shells 100,000 Years Ago To Create Personal Identity

Our Ancestors Collected Shells 100,000 Years Ago To Create Personal Identity

Scientists have found evidence suggesting the ancient use of ochre in Africa and Europe indicates that body painting, clothing decoration, and tattooing may date back to more than 300,00 years ago, or perhaps even 500,000 years ago. But when did our ancestors start showing signs of the early creation of personal identity?

Our Ancestors Collected Shells 100,000 Years Ago To Create Personal Identity

According to scientists, early ancestors collected eye-catching shells that radically changed the way we looked at ourselves and others. A new study confirms previous scant evidence and supports a multistep evolutionary scenario for the culturalization of the human body.

The study, which was conducted by Francesco d’Errico, Karen Loise van Niekerk, Lila Geis and Christopher Stuart Henshilwood, from Bergen University in Norway and the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) in Johannesburg, South Africa, is published in the Journal of Human Evolution.

Its significant findings provide vital information about how and when we may have started developing modern human identities.

“The discovery of eye-catching unmodified shells with natural holes from 100,000 to 73,000 years ago confirms previous scant evidence that marine shells were collected, taken to the site and, in some cases, perhaps worn as personal ornaments.

This was before a stage in which shells belonging to selected species were systematically, and intentionally perforated with suitable techniques to create composite beadworks,” says van Niekerk.

The shells were all found in the Blombos Cave, on the southern Cape of South Africa’s coastline. Similar shells have been found in North Africa, other sites in South Africa and the Mediterranean Levant, which means that the argument is supported by evidence from other sites, not just Blombos Cave.

Confirms scant evidence of early beadwork

In other words, the unperforated and naturally perforated shells provide evidence that marine shells were collected and possibly used as personal ornaments before the development of more advanced techniques to modify the shells for use in beadworks at around 70,000 years ago.

Van Niekerk says that they know for sure that these shells are not the remains of edible shellfish species that could have been collected and brought to the site for food.

“We know this because they were already dead when collected, which we can see from the condition of most of the shells, as they are waterworn or have growths inside them, or have holes made by a natural predator or from abrasion from wave action.”

The researchers measured the size of the shells and the holes made in them, as well as the wear on the edges of the holes that developed while the shells were worn on strings by humans.

They also looked at where the shells came from in the site to see whether they could be included in different groups of beads found close together that could have belonged to single items of beadwork. These techniques provide insights into the potential use of these shells for symbolic purposes.

Early signs of possibly creation of identity

Van Niekerk says that they identified 18 new marine snail shells from 100,000 to 70,000 years ago, that could have been used for symbolic purposes, and proposed a multistep progression for the culturalization of the human body with roots in the deep past.

“With this study we specifically show that humans gradually complexified practices of modifying their appearance and transformed themselves into tools for communication and storage of information.

We also think we can possibly see a creation of identity that gradually but radically changed the way we look at ourselves and others, and the nature of our societies,” says van Niekerk.

NORTH AMERICA, U.S.A, WORLD

Oldest Fossil Human Footprints In North America Confirmed

Oldest Fossil Human Footprints In North America Confirmed

New research reaffirms that human footprints found in White Sands National Park, NM, date to the Last Glacial Maximum, placing humans in North America thousands of years earlier than once thought.

In September 2021, scientists announced that ancient human footprints discovered in White Sands National Park were between 21,000 and 23,000 years old.

This discovery pushed the known date of human presence in North America back by thousands of years and implied that early inhabitants and megafauna co-existed for several millennia before the terminal Pleistocene extinction event.

Fossil human footprints discovered in White Sands, New Mexico likely date back to between 21,000 and 23,000 years ago, according to scientific evidence.

In a follow-up study, researchers used two new independent approaches to date the footprints, both of which resulted in the same age range as the original estimate.

The 2021 results began a global conversation that sparked public imagination and incited dissenting commentary throughout the scientific community as to the accuracy of the ages.

“The immediate reaction in some circles of the archeological community was that the accuracy of our dating was insufficient to make the extraordinary claim that humans were present in North America during the Last Glacial Maximum.

But our targeted methodology in this current research really paid off,” said Jeff Pigati, USGS research geologist and co-lead author of a newly published study that confirms the age of the White Sands footprints.

The controversy centered on the accuracy of the original ages, which were obtained by radiocarbon dating. The age of the White Sands footprints was initially determined by dating seeds of the common aquatic plant Ruppia cirrhosa that were found in the fossilized impressions.

However aquatic plants can acquire carbon from dissolved carbon atoms in the water rather than ambient air, which can potentially cause the measured ages to be too old.

“Even as the original work was being published, we were forging ahead to test our results with multiple lines of evidence,” said Kathleen Springer, USGS research geologist and co-lead author on the current Science paper.

“We were confident in our original ages, as well as the strong geologic, hydrologic, and stratigraphic evidence, but we knew that independent chronologic control was critical.”

For their follow-up study, the researchers focused on radiocarbon dating of conifer pollen, because it comes from terrestrial plants and therefore avoids potential issues that arise when dating aquatic plants like Ruppia.

The researchers used painstaking procedures to isolate approximately 75,000 pollen grains for each sample they dated. Importantly, the pollen samples were collected from the exact same layers as the original seeds, so a direct comparison could be made. In each case, the pollen age was statistically identical to the corresponding seed age.

“Pollen samples also helped us understand the broader environmental context at the time the footprints were made,” said David Wahl, USGS research geographer and a co-author on the current Science article.

This Oct. 2023 photo made available by the National Park Service shows White Sands National Park Resource Program Manager, David Bustos at the White Sands National Park in New Mexico.

“The pollen in the samples came from plants typically found in cold and wet glacial conditions, in stark contrast with pollen from the modern playa which reflects the desert vegetation found there today.”

These fossilized human footprints at the White Sands National Park in New Mexico are 21,000 to 23,000 years old.
Oldest Fossil Human Footprints In North America Confirmed
Fossilized footprints in White Sands National Park.
A single human footprint at the site.

In addition to the pollen samples, the team used a different type of dating called optically stimulated luminescence, which dates the last time quartz grains were exposed to sunlight.

Using this method, they found that quartz samples collected within the footprint-bearing layers had a minimum age of ~21,500 years, providing further support to the radiocarbon results.

With three separate lines of evidence pointing to the same approximate age, it is highly unlikely that they are all incorrect or biased and, taken together, provide strong support for the 21,000 to 23,000-year age range for the footprints.

The research team included scientists from the USGS, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the National Park Service, and academic institutions. Their continued studies at White Sands focus on the environmental conditions that allowed people to thrive in southern New Mexico during the Last Glacial Maximum and are supported by the Climate Research and Development Program | U.S. Geological Survey and USGS-NPS Natural Resources Protection Program.

AFRICA, EGYPT, WORLD

Archaeologists Have Unearthed The Remains of a 7,000-year-old City in Egypt

Archaeologists Have Unearthed The Remains of a 7,000-year-old City in Egypt

Egypt has announced the discovery of the remains of a lost city thought to be more than 7,000 years old, located in the Upper Egypt province of Sohag.

The ancient residential city, found alongside a nearby cemetery, dates back to 5,316 BC, and is being heralded as a major archaeological discovery that pre-dates ancient Egypt’s Early Dynastic Period that began about 5 millennia ago.

A team of archaeologists from the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities found the remains of ancient huts and graves during a dig 400 metres to the south of the mortuary temple of Seti I, a pharaoh who ruled thousands of years later from 1290 to 1279 BC.

Seti I’s temple is located in Abydos – one of the oldest known cities of ancient Egypt and the historic capital of Upper Egypt – and the newly found dwellings and graves could be parts of the long-gone capital now resurfaced, or a separate village that was swallowed by it.

“This discovery can shed light on a lot of information on the history of Abydos,” antiquities minister Mahmoud Afifi said in a press statement.

The recently unearthed structures are thought to have been home to high-ranking officials and grave builders.

In addition to the foundations of ancient huts, the archaeologists found iron tools and pottery, plus 15 giant tombs – the capacious size of which means their intended inhabitants must have been well-established individuals.

“The size of the graves discovered in the cemetery is larger in some instances than royal graves in Abydos dating back to the first dynasty, which proves the importance of the people buried there and their high social standing during this early era of ancient Egyptian history,” the ministry said.

It’s possible that these officials oversaw the construction of royal tombs in nearby Abydos, but the size of their own resting places outside the capital suggests they didn’t want to slum it in eternity either.

“About a mile behind where this material is said to be we have the necropolis with royal tombs going from before history to the period where we start getting royal names, we start getting identifiable kings,” Egyptologist Chris Eyre from the University of Liverpool in the UK, who wasn’t involved with the excavation, told the BBC.

“So, this appears to be the town, the capital at the very beginning of Egyptian history.”

According to the researchers, the ancient tools and pottery are the leftover traces of a once giant labour force that was engaged in the considerable feat of constructing these royal tombs – and if you’ve seen the kinds of structures we’re talking about, you’ll understand they had a pretty epic responsibility:

Gérard Ducher

The nearby cemetery is made up of 15 mastabas, an ancient Egyptian tomb that takes a rectangular shape, made with sloping walls and a flat roof.

According to lead researcher Yasser Mahmoud Hussein, these mastabas are now the oldest such tombs we know about, pre-dating the previous record holders in Saqqara, which served as the necropolis for another ancient Egyptian city, Memphis.

We’ll have to wait for these new findings to be verified by other scientists, but we’re excited to see what new insights further excavations will bring.

EUROPE, SPAIN, WORLD

Dazzling Treasures Unearthed in Bronze Age Grave Possible Belonged to a Queen

Dazzling Treasures Unearthed in Bronze Age Grave Possible Belonged to a Queen

The burial of a woman who lived and died thousands of years ago may change our perceptions of the El Argar, one of Europe’s most sophisticated Bronze Age civilizations.

It’s one of the most lavish burials from the European Bronze Age, and despite the fact that the woman was buried with a man, the majority of the expensive grave goods belonged to her, indicating that she was of much higher social status.

Dazzling Treasures Unearthed in Bronze Age Grave Possible Belonged to a Queen

Researchers led by archaeologist Vicente Lull of the Autonomous University of Barcelona in Spain concluded that women in this culture may have played a more significant political role than previously assumed by comparing her grave to that of other El Argar women.

The grave itself, a large ceramic jar named Grave 38, was discovered in 2014, at the La Almoloya archaeological site on the Iberian Peninsula, Spain.

It was found beneath the floor of what seems to be the governing hall filled with benches in a palace, an interpretation bolstered by the richness of the grave contents.

“The general lack of artifacts on the floor of [the hall] H9, combined with the structural prominence of the benches, indicate that social gatherings of up to 50 individuals could be held in this large room,” the researchers wrote in their paper.

“We can only speculate as to whether such meetings were intended for discussion and participation in shared decision-making or, rather, for the transmission of orders within a hierarchical chain of command.

That the grave offerings of grave 38 far exceed those from any other contemporaneous tomb in La Almoloya, and in many other sites, suggests the second option.”

The jar contained the remains of two individuals – a man, who died between the ages of 35 and 40, and a woman, who died between the ages of 25 and 30.

Genetic analyses confirmed that they were unrelated, but radiocarbon dating shows they died at the same time or very close together, around 1730 BCE. Remains found not far from the grave were related to both – their daughter.

The man’s bones showed signs of wear and tear consistent with long-term physical activity, perhaps horse-riding, and a healed traumatic injury to the front of his head.

The woman’s bones showed signs of congenital abnormalities, including a missing rib, only six cervical vertebrae, and fused sacral vertebrae. Markings on her ribs could have been produced by a lung infection when she died.

Nevertheless, she seemed to have been wealthy. The pair was buried with 29 items, most of which were made of silver, and most of which seemed to belong to the woman – necklaces, bracelets on her arms, an awl with a silver-coated handle, and silver-coated ceramic pots, the latter two of which would have required a great deal of skill in silversmithing.

The man wasn’t without ornaments: his arm was adorned with a copper bracelet; he wore a necklace of seven large, colored beads; a dagger with silver rivets lay alongside him; and two gold ear tunnels were likely his, too.

But it was what the woman wore on her head that really excited the research team: a silver circlet, or diadem, placed with a silver disc that would have extended down to her forehead or the bridge of her nose. It’s similar to four other diadems found in the 19th century in richly appointed women’s graves.

“The singularity of these diadems is extraordinary. They were symbolic objects made for these women, thus transforming them into emblematic subjects of the dominant ruling class,” said archaeologist Cristina Rihuete-Herrada of the Autonomous University of Barcelona in Spain.

“Each piece is unique, comparable to funerary objects pertaining to the ruling class of other regions, such as Brittany, Wessex and Unetice, or in the eastern Mediterranean of the 17th century BCE, contemporary to our Grave 38.”

The silver in the grave goods had a combined weight of around 230 grams (8 ounces). This is a staggering amount of wealth to bury: in Babylon at this time, the daily wages for a laborer were around 0.23 to 0.26 grams of silver. These two people were buried with 938 days’ worth of Babylonian wages.

Previous analyses had proposed that the women buried in such rich graves were either sovereigns, or the wives of sovereigns. It’s still impossible to tell, but the research team believes that the evidence points towards the former.

“In the Argaric society, women of the dominant classes were buried with diadems, while the men were buried with a sword and dagger,” they explained.

“The funerary goods buried with these men were of lesser quantity and quality. As swords represent the most effective instrument for reinforcing political decisions, El Argar dominant men might have played an executive role, even though the ideological legitimation as well as, perhaps, the government, had lain in some women’s hands.”

As women have wielded political power often throughout history, would that really be such a surprise? The research has been published in Antiquity.

AFRICA, EGYPT, WORLD

Hundreds Of Ancient Sealed Wine Jars Found In Mysterious Tomb Of Meret-Neith In Abydos

Hundreds Of Ancient Sealed Wine Jars Found In Mysterious Tomb Of Meret-Neith In Abydos

Archaeologists excavating in Um Al-Qaab archaeological site in Abydos in Sohag Governorate, Egypt, have discovered hundreds of 5,000-year-old well-preserved wine jars and grave goods in a tomb belonging to an enigmatic woman known as Meret-Neith.

Hundreds Of Ancient Sealed Wine Jars Found In Mysterious Tomb Of Meret-Neith In Abydos

Scientists hope the find can shed new light on the identity of Meret-Neith of Dynasty 1.

Mostafa Waziri, Secretary General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, said ancient inscriptions indicate that Meret-Neith had been in charge of central government offices, like the Treasury, which lends credence to the theory that she played a historically significant role. Still, so little is known about her life and reign.

According to Dietrich Raue, Director of the German Archaeological Institute, “Meret-Neith had been the only woman with her own monumental tomb in Egypt’s first royal cemetery at Abydos and was probably the most powerful woman of her era.

Raue added that recent excavations have provided new information about this “unique woman and her era” and given rise to the speculation that Meret-Neith may have been the first female Queen in Ancient Egypt, thus predating Queen Hatshepsut of the 18th dynasty,” Ahram Online reports.

Her true identity, however, remains a mystery, he concluded.

E. Christiana Köhler, head of the mission, said that Meret-Neith’s monumental tomb complex in the desert of Abydos, which includes her own tomb as well as those of 41 courtiers and servants, was built of unfired mudbricks, mud, and timber.

Köhler added that through meticulous excavation methods and new archaeological technologies, the team demonstrated that the graves had been built in phases over a relatively long period.

“This observation, together with other evidence, radically challenges the oft-proposed but unproven idea of ritual human sacrifice in the 1st Dynasty,” she noted.

Several of the unearthed large wine jars had intact stoppers and contained the well-preserved remains of 5,000-year-old wine.

Dr. Waziry added that “well-preserved jars offer a unique glimpse into the past, providing a window into the culinary and cultural practices of a bygone era,” the Luxor Times reports.

As the excavations continue, archaeologists may eventually learn more about the enigmatic history and identity of Queen Meret-Neith, who may stand alone as the sole woman from the First Dynasty to have a royal tomb discovered in Abydos.

All In One Magazine