Tag: Stone

Chinese Legion of Guizai Stone Statues outnumbers Terracotta Army

Though not quite as pretty and detailed as the famous Terracotta Warriors in Xi’an, a new discovery of statues in Guizai Mountain, Hunan, China outnumbers the Qin Emperor’s army of stone soldiers, and date back over 5,000 years -over 2,500 years earlier than Qin Shi Huang’s Terracotta Army.

Located on what is an ancient worship site, the discovery of over 5,000 statues arespread over 15 square kilometres and the vast majority are believed to have been carved before the Qin dynasty era.

The anthropoid stone statues range from 30cm to 100cm in height, and take the form of several ranks of soldiers and military officiers, as well as civilian officials and pregnant women. Some are believed to be buried up to two metres below the ground.

Guizai Mountain, part of the Nanling Mountain range, is believed to have been chosen as an altar by a prehistoric civilisation in the region and adorned the site with sculptured stone statues for ritualistic and commemorative purposes.

Tang Zhongyong, director of the Dao County Administrative Office, described the statues to China’s People’s Daily as being “another wonder of the world”. The mountain’s name is derived from locals’ name for the statues – “Guizaizai”.

The announcement comes during the Xiang Gan Yue Gui Archaeology Summit Forum held in Yongzhou, Hunan Province and the find represents some of the oldest stone statues to have been found in China with a third of the stone sculptures dating back over 5,000 years. The remainder are believed to have been produced between 2,000 to 5,000 years ago during the Qin, Han, Wei and Jan dynastic eras.

The discovery comes just a few months after 114 Terracotta Warriors were discovered in the Mausoleum of Qin Shi Huang after excavations were carried out in Pit 1 (Watch the Video) in Xi’an. The latest finds in Guizai Mountain represent the latest in a series of archaeological discoveries in a country which continues to uncover it’s ancient past.

You can read more about the famous Terracotta Warriors on Heritage Key, including the Top 10 Interesting Facts and watch Ann’s pick of Terracotta Army videos from Youtube. Not enough for you?Then see the Terracotta Warriors in 3D detail in Heritage Key Virtual – register here for free!

Ancient British Language Discovered: Pictish Symbols are Scotland’s Hieroglyphs

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 be seen ona numberof them.

Researchers have long grappled with the question of what they represent. Are theymere symbols? Or are they full-fledged texts (albeit un-deciphered) which communicate a written language?

This kind of debate is common among scholars trying to unravel ancient symbols. The Indus Valley Script, used in the South Asia 4,000 years ago, is another example of an un-deciphered script that could be either symbols or language, and it was recently proposed that eggshells discovered in Africa could also demonstrate an unknown early language.

Is There Order in the Chaos of Symbols?

A team of language experts, led by Professor Rob Lee of Exeter University, used a system of analysis that looks at how random the symbols are.

It is extremely unlikely that the observed values for the Pictish stones would occur by chance

If symbols are being written willy nilly, with little in the way of order, than its unlikely that they can be a written language. Imagine a writing systemwhere there are no rules how could anyone hope to communicate information?

On the other hand if there is order to the symbols, if things are being written in the same way over and over again, then there is a good chance that it does communicate written language.

Measuring the amount of randomness in an un-deciphered script is tricky because thereare usuallya limited number of examples (only a few hundred for the Pictish language) and quite often these havent been compiled together and published. This means that researchers have to work with small datasets, making this analysis tricky.

Next Step: Crack the Code

Working with the symbols available to them, the team was able to determine that there is some predictability in the Pictish symbols, enough so that it seems likely to be a written script. It is extremely unlikely that the observed values for the Pictish stones would occur by chance, the researchers said in a paper published recently in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society.

The next step is to expand their dataset and get a record of every Pictish symbol ever recorded. Researchers can then hone in on the language and, hopefully, decipher it.

Demonstrating that the Pictish symbols are writing, with the symbols probably corresponding to words, opens a unique line of further research for historians and linguists investigating the Picts and how they viewed themselves, said the team.

What we need now of course is a Scottish version of the Rosetta Stone or the Behistun Inscriptions to help researchers decipher the language. If the Pictish code can be cracked, we could be about to learn a lot more about the ancient people of Scotland, and open up our understanding of ancient Britain.

CSI Ancient Greece – Who chiseled what?

From ‘Mummy CSI‘, we jump to ‘CSIAncient Greece’. At least, according to the NewScientist. There Ewen Callaway reports on how Stephen Tracy – Greek scholar and epigrapher – makes good use of human intelligence and machine’s computing power to attribute 24 ancient Greek inscriptions to their individual masons. Together with Michail Panagopoulos and Constantin Papaodysseus – both computer scientists at the National Technical University of Athens – they succeeded at attributing the chisel marks to six different cutters, between the years 334BCand 134BC. How?

Panagopoulos’ team determined what different cutters meant each letter to look like by overlaying digital scans of the same letter in each individual inscription. They call this average a letter’s “platonic realisation”. After performing this calculation for six Greek letters selected for their distinctness , , , , and across all 24 inscriptions, Panagopoulos’ team compared all the scripts that Tracy provided.