Scholars have discovered an ancient treaty ina cache of Assyrian tablets excavated at Tayinat last summer. It was made by the Assyrian ruler Esarhaddon, who was trying to ensure that his son, Ashurbanipal, would be recognized as his successor. Translation work is ongoing and many details are not yet known. The treaty dates to ca. 672 BC, several decades after Tayinat was conquered by Tiglath-Pileser III. Professor Tim Harrison said in a University of Toronto news release that: The tablet is quite spectacular. It records a treaty – or covenant – between Esarhaddon, king of the Assyrian Empire and a…
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Archaeologists in South Africa have discovered a previously unknown species of human ancestor in the form of the 1.9 million-year-old partial skeletons of an adult female and a young male hidden deep in an underground cave outside Johannesburg. Theyre thought to represent a key period of evolutionary transition between ape and man. The find is believed to be so important that the lead scientist behind their research has described the species dubbed Australopithecus sediba as potentially being the Rosetta Stone that unlocks our understanding of the genus Homo. The find comes hot on the heels of the discovery of the…
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A page on social networking site Facebook has been gathering and publishing historical photos of the city of Rome. Roma Sparita (‘Vanished Rome’) has so far clocked up more than 64,500 fans since January (it’s growing rapidly) and has more than 7,200 ‘vintage’ photos online. The site is becoming far more than its four administrators ever expected. Most of the photos show Rome throughout the 20th century (up until 1990) and there are plenty of iconic scenes of people in the 50s and 60s riding Vespas or in vintage Fiats. Some of the photos also date back as far as…
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King Tut will be staying in Toronto for two more weeks. The Art Gallery of Ontario announced today that his departure will be delayed until May 2 due to demand for the exhibition. The shows next stop is Denver the start date of which remains unaffected. Visiting hours for the Toronto show have also been extended to accommodate the crowds. To accommodate weekend visitors, the Gallery has extended the exhibitions hours on Friday and Saturday evenings. Visitors will now be able to purchase tickets for entry at 4:30 pm, 5:00 pm, and 5:30 pm. The King Tut galleries will remain…
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The 5,000-year-old skeleton of a young girl known as Charlie, found buried on a hilltop at Avebury in Wiltshire, will remain on public display at the nearby Alexander Keiller Museum where it has resided for 50 years.A campaign for its reburial by the Council of British Druid Orders (CoBDO) was defeated overwhelmingly by weight of government guidelines and expert and public opinion. The CoBDO argue that its disrespectful for the bones of our ancient ancestors to be stared at or stored in cardboard boxes in dark basements when not the immediate subject of study. In 2006 they selected Charlie who…
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While creating the next instalment of our Ancient World in London video series on ancient astronomy, we came across an odd little artefact called the Ishango Bone. Exotic-sounding, it’s little more than a knobbled baboon’s fibula, but the 25,000-year-old notches along its length are much more than a caveman’s conquests. Discovered in the then-Belgian Congo by Jean Heinzelin de Braucourt in 1960, the bone was first thought to be around 10,000 years old. Yet later tests pushed its date back another 15,000 years, around 20 millennia before the first-ever civilizations sprang from the Middle East. Today it remains on display…
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Question: What does a gladiator wear on a night out? The answer, of course, is that he puts on his glad rags! Apologies for the terrible joke, but for those who want to know what a gladiator would really have worn, not on a night out in ancient Rome, but in combat in the arena, then an exhibition inside Rome’s Colosseum has opened to show us just that. The exhibition – Gladiatores – is displaying replica gladiatorial weapons, dress and armour made authentically according to nine years of historical research by Silvano Mattesini, a trained architect and expert in ancient…
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New research has shown that the symbols used by the ancient Picts were an actual written language not symbology. The Picts lived in Scotland from AD 300-843, and were a society ruled by kings. Historians know of them through the artefacts they left behind and via the writings of the people whom they had contact with, such as the Romans. In AD 843 they became incorporated into the larger Kingdom of Alba. There are only a few hundred surviving Pictish stones. Some of them have symbols carved onto them like a relief. Christian motifs, such as a cross, can also…
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Its that time of the year again. School is almost out, archaeological field seasons are about to begin and what comes in between? Huge conferences of course! Over the next month there will be three major archaeological conferences taking place in Canada and the US. The American Research Center in Egypt (ARCE) will hold their 61st annual meeting this month in California, and the Canadian Archaeological Association’s 2010 conference will round off the month in Alberta. The first, and biggest, conference is the Society for American Archaeology (SAA) 75th Anniversary meeting in St. Louis Missouri from April 14-18. More than…
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In April 2008 visual artists Khadim Ali and Jayce Salloum travelled from Karachi Pakistan to Kabul Afghanistan, and then into Bamiyan the region famous for its giant Buddha statues that were destroyed by the Taliban in 2001. We spoke to them about their unique experiences of the site. Ali is Hazara, the same background that many of the people who live in Bamiyan are from. His parents were born just to the south of the region. The Taliban treated the Hazara brutally, killing them and burying them in mass graves. Today the Taliban wage an insurgency in the south and…