Archaeologists from the University of Barcelona excavating the ancient Egyptian city of Oxyrhynchus have uncovered a cache of mummies dating to the Ptolemaic period. Some of the mummies, which seem to have escaped the attentions of looters down the centuries, have golden tongues. Oxyrhynchus, known today as Al-Bahnasa, has been under excavation since 1992, producing
A gruesome discovery in the United Kingdom has thrown a shadow over Bronze Age England. The find, at the ancient site of Charterhouse Warren in Somerset, has been described as “something horrible.” Here archaeologists have found a great pit, dug by our ancestors and at least 15 meters deep. In the pit were the remains
In 1922 the British archaeologist Sir Leonard Woolley discovered something unexpected during his excavation of the Royal Cemetery of Ur, in Mesopotamia. Amidst the grave goods and treasures he uncovered a rectangular piece of wood, heavily ornamented and with indentations along the sides. Woolley had found an ancient game, complete with pyramidal dice and pieces.
Archaeologists working in the Manot Cave system in Galilee have found a mysterious carving deep within the darkness. The sculpture, apparently of a tortoise or turtle, is extremely unusual. For one, it is incredibly old, a Paleolithic relic thought to date back 35,000 years. Perhaps even more intriguingly, we do not know whose god this
This is a big one, especially at this time of year: excavations at the Church of St. Nicholas in Demre, on the southern Mediterranean coast of Turkey, have found a sarcophagus. And they have reason to believe it might be the final resting place of the church’s namesake, Saint Nicholas of Myra, better known as
A new study has revealed that the cooperative bond between humans and canines in the Americas may date back as far as the Late Pleistocene, some 12,000 years ago. This pushes back the evidence of our first interspecies interactions by some two millennia. The study, led by Dr. François Lanoë from the University of Arizona’s