A mass ancient cemetery, seven rooms large and revealing a number of human bodies, has been discovered dug into rocks near the city of Tartus in western Syria, archaeologists from the Syrian Department of Antiquities have reported. One of the rooms contained a large basalt sarcophagus, with a human face engraved on it. Other small items located have included vessels, two small golden pieces and a clay lamp. The sarcophagus is a large, human-shaped basin with a lid and a protruding shelf all around the edges (see here for a picture of it). Details of the face such as sunken…
-
-
A hat-trick of victories have been won around the world this week in the global fight against the theft and sale of archaeological artefacts a multi-million dollar international industry. The arrest of three men in Bulgaria in connection with their possession of a number of precious Roman coins and other items is particularly heartening, since it offers some sign that the tide might be turning in the struggle against a black-market industry that has been destroying the countrys rich ancient heritage. In the US on Wednesday, the former head of Long Island Universitys Hillwood Museum Barry Stern, was arrested and…
-
We all get a bit ticked off when someone else uses our favourite coffee mug. But for the Jews in ancient Jerusalem, keeping their best cups sacred was apparently a matter of the gravest importance. A stone drinking receptacle dating from around the time of Jesus Christ, found recently on historic Mount Zion, has shed light on strict religious ritual when it came to mugs in Biblical times. It bears tens lines of strange script scratched into its side, which while not yet deciphered are nevertheless believed to indicate that the cup wasnt to be casually used by just anybody.…
-
The literary world is waiting for a bombshell. Controversial Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown is about to release his latest historical fantasy tale – The Lost Symbol – on the public. But what does this mean for the history books industry at large, and should the work of Dan Brown be considered historical fiction at all, or merely fantasy? Judging by the healthy state of historical fiction at the moment, it could be that history pulp has helped stimulate readers’ and writers’ interest in proper historical fiction. In his review of Ben Kanes The Forgotten Legion, Roger Michael Kean…
-
Andrew Collins’ book ‘Beneath the Pyramids’ in which he claims to have (re)discovered the Lost Underworld of the Pharaohs starts with the assumption that the cave complex was last explorered in 1817 by Henry Salt and sadly forgotton or ignored after this; only an obscure reference in Salt’s memories references to the ‘catacombs’, which might even be the mythical Hall of Records. Dr. Zahi Hawass – Secretary General of the SCA – did already issue a statement saying the tomb’s location is well known to the SCA (thus the opposite of ‘lost’) and that there is no underground cave complex…
-
Not a week after we flagged up the archaeological site of Birne as the place to visit during Scottish Archaeology Month, its been announced that the remains of another Iron Age roundhouse have been discovered there. Archaeologists have speculated that the erstwhile multi-storey structure these days reduced to just a hard floor and rotting timber beams may once been the very centre of what was a Celtic power base in the north east of Scotland some 2,000 years ago. 20 roundhouses have been found at Birnie so far five in the last year alone. But this one, located at Dykeside…
-
Less than 24 hours is all your need to build Rome these days: a team of developers from the University of Washington and Cornell University has come up with an algorithm that can aggregate thousands of tourist photos from social network photo-sharing websites and create a three-dimensional virtual city model from them. Highly popular tourist sites such as Rome work well currently there are more than two million photos of Rome on Flickr. The Washington University team has also used its technology to recreate the cities of Venice and Dubrovnik. But how does the technology work? And how can the…
-
One of the ‘most important, but least understood, Roman sites in Britain’ is how the University of Nottingham has described the Roman town of Venta Icenorum at Caistor St Edmund in Norfolk. Excavation work began at the site at the end of August, as mentioned in this previous blog, but the archaeologists working there had little idea of the mysterious discovery they were about to make. In the past few days a highly unusual burial has come to light, with a Roman-era skeleton interred in a shallow grave and placed in an unconventional pose. It could be that they were…
-
Nazi Egyptology is a complex subject. As Professor Thomas Schneider said, there is no uniform ‘Nazi Egyptology’ discipline. Instead there are a number of German Egyptologists who were thrown into the academic hole of the Third Reich – who each reacted to it in their own way. An interesting story that I didnt put into the article The Real Story of Nazi Egyptology, forbrevity reasons, is that of Friedrich Wilhelm von Bissing. Bissing was a professor at Munich. He is perhaps most noted for his work at Abu Ghurab, done at the turn of the century, where he excavated the…
-
Attribution: gordontour Khartoum Sudan Key Dates The National Museum of Sudan was founded in 1971, with the building itself having been constructed in 1955. The location of Sudan’s largest and most visited museum is along the El Neel (Nile) Avenue in Khartoum, overlooking the point at which the White Nile and the Blue Nile at Al-Mugran area, converge. It contains a variety of Sudanese relics from the First Stone Age to the Al Saltan Al-Zarqa era (black sultanate), including glassware, pottery, statuary from the ancient Cush kingdom and frescoes and murals from the church ruins of Ancient Nubia’s Christian period from the…