Category Archives: Archaeology

Goddess Sekhmet statues discovery in Egypt

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This video says about itself:

Iconic: Statue of Sekhmet

March 19, 2009

Dating to the reign of King Tutankhamun‘s grandfather, this Egyptian sculpture is a very fine example of one of the oldest known Egyptian deities, the lion-headed warrior goddess also known as Mistress of Dread and Lady of Slaughter. On display in the Galleries of Africa: Egypt at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, the statue is one of the Museum’s iconic objects.

From Ahram Online in Egypt:

More Sekhmet statues unearthed at Amenhotep III‘s temple in Luxor

Black granite statues of the ancient Egyptian lioness goddess Sekhmet were unearthed Monday at King Amenhotep III‘s temple on the west bank of Luxor

Nevine El-Aref, Monday 11 March 2013

Egyptian and European excavators unearthed a collection of black granite statues depicting the ancient Egyptian lioness Goddess Sekhmet during their routine excavation at the King Amenhotep III funerary temple in the Kom Al-Hittan area on the west bank of Luxor.

The statues depict the goddess Sekhmet in her usual form, sitting on the throne with a human body and lioness’s head.

“This is not the first time statues of the lioness goddess have been unearthed at Kom Al-Hittan,” said Mohamed Ibrahim, minister of state for antiquities adding that the Egyptian-European mission led by German Egyptologist Horig Sourouzian has previously unearthed 64 statues of Sekhmet of different shapes and sizes.

Ibrahim explained that such a large number highlights the important role of the goddess during the reign of the 18th dynasty king Amenhotep III, father of the monotheistic king Akhnaten and grandfather of the golden king Tutankhamun.

Sekhmet was believed to be a protective goddess as she was also the goddess of war and destruction. “Some Egyptologists,” pointed out Ibrahim, “believe that king Amenhotep constructed a large number of goddess Sekhmets in an attempt to cure him of a specific disease that he suffered during his reign.” Sekhmet was well known of her supposed ability to cure critical deseases.

Mansour Boreik, supervisor of Luxor antiquities, told Ahram online that the statues are very well preserved and each one is two metres tall. He continued saying that the newly discovered statues prove Amenhotep III’s funerary temple was once filled with Sekhmet statues of different sizes and shapes, similar to his temple on the east bank of Luxor, known as goddess Mut temple. This temple acted as a symbol of stability and prosperity during Amenhotep III’s reign.

10 years ago, the archeologists unearthed a large number of statues of Amenhotep III and his wife Queen Tiye; they also unearthed some parts of the temple’s walls.

“The work we are doing here is not only about advancing historical knowledge, but also about saving the last remnants of a temple that was once very prestigious; it is unfortunate that it been badly damaged,” Sourouzian said.

The teams aim to produce a virtual reconstruction of the temple using the latest computer programmes, she added, saying that this reconstruction would show the original position of every surviving piece within the original temple.

See also here.

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Prehistoric rock art and modern computer animation

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From Cambridge News in Britain:

Prehistoric rock art has been brought back to life at a Cambridge museum.

Some of the world’s oldest engravings of the human form – prehistoric rock art from the Italian Alps – have been revived by digital technology at Cambridge University’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.

The Pitoti exhibition is on display until March 23. This is the first time it has been shown in the UK.

It brings some of the earliest human figures in European rock art to life with interactive graphics, 3D printing and video games; exploring the potential links between the world of archaeology and the world of film, digital humanities and computer vision. The engravings were made from as early as 7,000BC.

Dr Frederick Baker, senior research associate at the McDonald Institute of Archaeological Research, said: “Human beings have engraved the rocks with their everyday lives and stories. It’s a kind of visual autobiography.

“Through the help of digitisation we discover this tribe and get insight into the symbols which actually adorn the rock, to get these symbols moving.”

“Ice Age Art: Arrival of the Modern Mind”, the British Museum, London, until 26 May: here.

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Roman art discoveries in Colosseum

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This video is about the Colosseum in Rome.

From Huffington Post:

Colosseum Cleaning Yields Ancient Art Discoveries Including Old Frescos, Graffiti

NICOLE WINFIELD

01/18/13 12:02 PM ET EST

ROME — A long-delayed restoration of the Colosseum’s only intact internal passageway has yielded ancient traces of red, black, green and blue frescoes – as well as graffiti and drawings of phallic symbols – indicating that the arena where gladiators fought was far more colorful than previously thought.

Officials unveiled the discoveries Friday and said the passageway – between the second and third levels of the 1st Century Colosseum – would open to the public starting this summer, after the (EURO)80,000 ($100,000) restoration is completed.

The frescoes were hidden under decades of calcified rock and grime, and were revealed during a cleaning and restoration project over the last two months. The traces confirmed that while the Colosseum today is a fairly monochrome gray travertine rock, red brick and moss-covered marble, in its day its interior halls were a rich and expensive Technicolor.

“We’re used to thinking that during excavations, archaeological surprises are a risk for builders and for the city’s development,” Rome archaeological heritage superintendent Mariarosaria Barbera said. “But here is a beautiful archaeological surprise … a monument that has been studied and known and appreciated across the world, yet still provides surprises.”

While intriguing, none of the fragments restored so far rival the gorgeous frescoes found in other nearby ruins of the Roman Forum, such as the 6th century biblical scenes in the Santa Maria Antiqua church. But officials stressed that they are nevertheless remarkable because they give a very different impression of what the Colosseum must have looked like in its heyday.

Colosseum director Rosella Rea said less than 1 percent of the painted surfaces of the Colosseum remain. And while the exposed seating area was covered in white marble, “the insides, the galleries, all the corridors and transverse hallways were completely colored.”

“We need to imagine a building with extreme contrasts of color,” she said. “This was a surprise.”

Many of the splashes of color are covered with layers of more recent graffiti. “Ricciu” signed his name there with the date 1943. “Maria” and “Filippo” did as well. Someone else left some drawings in 1620.

But there are also older types of graffiti as well that officials say may date from the 3rd century, after the Colosseum was restored following a fire in A.D. 217.

A red palm frond and a drawing of a crown are believed to have been drawn by a gladiator fan as he or she passed through the passageway, officials said. Another restored section has images of a phallus, which officials said was commonly drawn for good luck.

Asked how such details could have gone undetected for nearly 2,000 years, officials said flatly: money. There simply wasn’t funding available to carry out the restoration of the passageway, which Rea said had been a goal for her office for 20 years.

Aside from the hallway cleaning, the Colosseum is set to undergo (EURO)25 million ($33.31 million) head-to-toe restoration funded by Italian businessman Diego Della Valle, founder of the Tod’s shoe empire. The effort is primarily designed to shore up the monument, one of the world’s most famous, which is crumbling under years of neglect.

Pieces of masonry and rock have fallen from the rafters, and the travertine is covered in gray dirt from car exhaust and pollution. The nearby subway rattles its foundations, such that the Colosseum has begun sinking in the same way the Leaning Tower of Pisa does, with a 40-centimeter (nearly 16-inch) inclination on its south side.

“It’s not serious, but it needs to be restored,” Rea said, noting the last major restoration was carried out in the 1970s. “The later you start, the worse it is.”

Work has been delayed because of court challenges to the contract bidding process, with the latest hearing this week put off until the end of the month.

Egyptian lion goddess Sekhmet discovery

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Newly discovered Sekhmet statue

From Ahram Online in Egypt:

The lioness for real

A granite statue of the ancient Egyptian warrior goddess Sekhmet was unearthed today in the Mut Temple at Karnak on Luxor’s east bank

Nevine El-Aref, Wednesday 16 Jan 2013

During excavation and cleaning works in the Mut Temple at Karnak, a mission from the American Research Centre in Egypt (ARCE) stumbled on a very well preserved statue of the goddess Sekhmet. The statue is 180 cm tall and depicts Sekhmet as a lioness wearing the cobra and the Aten sun disk on her head and holding the ankh sign in her right hand and the lotus flower in her left.

“This is the first time a standing statue of the goddess Sekhmet in her original lioness form was found in the Mut Temple,” Mansour Boreik, the supervisor of Luxor antiquities, told Ahram Online. He added that previously discovered statues there depict Sekhmet seated with the facial features of the goddess Mut, the consort of the god Amun Re, not her original lioness figure.

The ARCE mission uncovered this statue within the sands of the Mut Temple’s second hall, within the framework of comprehensive restoration work carried out in collaboration with the Ministry of State for Antiquities (MSA). The project, which began in May 2012, aims at restoring the temple and its surroundings so that it can reopen to the public, as it has been closed since 1976.

The original plan includes the establishment of a visitor centre where a documentary about the goddess Mut and her role in ancient Egypt would be screened alongside photos of the temple before and after restoration.

The Mut Temple is one among several located at Karnak. For many years it stood in ruins beyond the south gate, some 200 meters south of Karnak’s 10th pylon. For some time now it has been undergoing restoration. The Napoleonic Expedition recorded one of the earliest plans of the Mut Temple as well as explorers and historians of the 19th century such as Nestor L’Hôte, whose drawings, made in 1839, recorded details of such temple. The Royal Prussian Expedition in 1842, led by Karl Lepsius and the first directors of the Department of Antiquities of Egypt, August Mariette and Gaston Maspero, had their own record of the monument. However, the first excavation and restoration work started in 1895 by two English women, Margaret Benson and Janet Gourlay.

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Roman age medicine discovery

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This video says about itself:

Aug 29, 2012

Remembering the great German physicist, ophthalmologist and philosopher, Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholtz, on his 191st birthday. He brought unto us, amongst other pearls, the principle of modern ophthalmoscopy.

Translated from Dutch NOS TV:

Monday, January 7, 2013, 21:09

Italian scientists have discovered medicine that is more than 2000 years old. The goo, a lump of hardened eye ointment, was found years ago in a wrecked ship.

Researchers from the University of Pisa say the ophthalmological medicine included zinc, starch, resin, and plant remains.

The medicine was found in the remains of a ship which about 130 years before Christ sank off the coast of Tuscany. Probably it came from Cyprus or Syria. In 1974 the wreck was discovered. In the 1980s and 90s divers already took vases and lamps from the wreck.

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Piltdown Man hoax, 1912

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This video is called Piltdown Man Hoax on Discover Science Part 1.

And here is Part 2.

By Peter Frost in Britain:

Why Britain lapped up the story of Piltdown Man

Thursday 03 January 2013

Once Christmas 1912 was over and Edwardian society had welcomed in the new year of 1913 the public had only one interest – the amazing discovery of the skull of the Piltdown Man.

The fossil find in the gravel beds of Sussex provided the missing link between apes and the human species.

Today we know Eoanthropus dawsoni, as Piltdown Man was named, was a complete fraud – perhaps the biggest scientific fraud in fact until Tony Blair’s famous dossier on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.

The Piltdown hoax, created by combining parts of a medieval human skull with the lower jawbone of an orangutan, lasted for 41 years and was only finally exposed in 1953.

So who was it that invented this huge nonsense and, perhaps more important, why was the British scientific establishment so quick to accept it as gospel?

Let’s go back to those sepia-tinted days of the autumn of the British empire a century ago.

At the time it was said that the sun never set on the British empire – cynics joked that was because God didn’t trust the British in the dark.

The writing was on the wall for the empire however. In South Africa the forerunner of the African National Congress had just been established.

Also in South Africa a young Indian lawyer named Gandhi was learning his politics leading a strike of African miners.

Very few fossils of early humanoids had ever been discovered in Britain before – and they still haven’t today.

So what could have been more welcome than a discovery that the proud origins of the human race had happened in the English home counties?

Here was proof that the first big-brained upright-walking human species were white and, indeed, English – just what Britain wanted to hear.

This was proof that would give the white supremacist ideas that had underpinned British imperialism a real shot in the arm.

It would also get one up on those awful French paleontologists across the Channel who, it seemed, were digging up Cro-Magnons and Neanderthals all the time.

The Piltdown specimen was given the scientific name Eoanthropus dawsoni, or “Dawson’s dawn man.”

It honoured Charles Dawson, the Lewes lawyer and amateur paleontologist who claimed he had uncovered the Piltdown skull along with other fossils in the gravel of the Ouse valley in Sussex.

Dawson had form for scientific deceits. E. dawsoni was not the only species that he foisted on the scientific community.

Back in the 1890s, Dawson had announced the find of the teeth of what appeared to be a missing link between reptiles and mammals. This too gained sufficient credibility to be given a scientific name – Plagiaulax dawsoni.

He had made a cast-iron statue he claimed was Roman, found perfectly fossilised toads inside local flints, observed sea serpents in the English Channel, discovered a unique hafted stone axe and a unique form of ancient timber boat.

Dawson also found cart horses with horns. He also seems to have patched together a strange hybrid between the goldfish and the carp.

Today it is reckoned that Dawson perpetrated nearly 40 scientific frauds or hoaxes.

Within the social circles of his home county, these amazing discoveries earned him the title “the Wizard of Sussex.”

In March 1909 Dawson wrote to a friend complaining that he was “waiting for the big ‘find,’ which never seems to come along.”

A little while later after meeting Arthur Conan Doyle, Dawson conceived his greatest hoax – Piltdown Man.

He hoped it would gain him a fellowship of the Royal Society and earn him a knighthood.

With this fraud Dawson gave British palaeontology what it had craved for so long – a British ancestor, a missing link from the home counties.

His motives have never been properly explained. Was Dawson after fame and fortune? He never got the knighthood he thought Piltdown Man should have earned him.

Some have suggested his main aim was, as an amateur scientist, to get one over on the academic establishment. He certainly achieved that.

After Dawson’s death no bones or fossils were ever found in the Piltdown pits yet Piltdown Man was part of scientific theory until the 1950s.

Today we still have much to learn about the origins of the human species.

Sadly we also still have attitudes that somehow we Britons have some divine right to rule the world.

—-

The other suspect…

Teilhard de Chardin was a young French Jesuit student studying theology in Hastings.

A keen amateur palaeontologist, he helped Dawson with the Piltdown dig.

Progressive US evolution champion Stephen Jay Gould has his suspicions that Chardin was in on the hoax.

The French cleric went on to be a major player in the discovery of Peking Man and also battled within the Catholic church moving Vatican opinion away from creationism to a more intelligent view of evolution and the origins of the human species.

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Medieval Afghan Jewish discovery

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This video is called Evidence of ancient Afghan Jews: Israel showcases Hebrew scrolls.

From Associated Press:

Israeli library unveils ancient Afghan manuscripts

Published: January 3, 2013

By ARON HELLER — Associated Press

JERUSALEM — A trove of ancient manuscripts in Hebrew characters rescued from caves in a Taliban stronghold in northern Afghanistan is providing the first physical evidence of a Jewish community that thrived there a thousand years ago.

On Thursday Israel‘s National Library unveiled the cache of recently purchased documents that run the gamut of life experiences, including biblical commentaries, personal letters and financial records.

Researchers say the “Afghan Genizah” marks the greatest such archive found since the “Cairo Genizah” was discovered in an Egyptian synagogue more than 100 years ago, a vast depository of medieval manuscripts considered to be among the most valuable collections of historical documents ever found.

Genizah, a Hebrew term that loosely translates as “storage,” refers to a storeroom adjacent to a synagogue or Jewish cemetery where Hebrew-language books and papers are kept. Under Jewish law, it is forbidden to throw away writings containing the formal names of God, so they are either buried or stashed away.

The Afghan collection gives an unprecedented look into the lives of Jews in ancient Persia in the 11th century. The paper manuscripts, preserved over the centuries by the dry, shady conditions of the caves, include writings in Hebrew, Aramaic, Judea-Arabic

sic; Judeo-Arabic

and the unique Judeo-Persian language from that era, which was written in Hebrew letters.

“It was the Yiddish of Persian Jews,” said Haggai Ben-Shammai, the library’s academic director.

Holding the documents, protected by a laminated sheath, Ben-Shammai said they included mentions of distinctly Jewish names and evidence of their commercial activities along the “Silk road” connecting Europe and the East. The obscure Judeo-Persian language, along with carbon dating technology, helped verify the authenticity of the collection, he said.

“We’ve had many historical sources on Jewish settlements in that area,” he said. “This is the first time that we have a large collection of manuscripts that represents the culture of the Jews that lived there. Until today we had nothing of this.”

The documents are believed to have come from caves in the northeast region of modern-day Afghanistan, once at the outer reaches of the Persian empire. In recent years, the same caves have served as hideouts for Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan.

It remains unclear how the ancient manuscripts emerged. Ben-Shammai said the library was contacted by various antiquities dealers who got their hands on them.

Last month, the library purchased 29 out of hundreds of the documents believed to be floating around the world, after long negotiations with antiquities dealers. The library refused to say how much it paid for the collection, adding that it hoped to purchase more in the future and didn’t want to drive up prices. The documents arrived in Israel last week.

Comparisons with the other find are inevitable.

The Cairo Genizah was discovered in the late 1800s in Cairo’s Ben Ezra Synagogue, built in the ninth century. It included thousands of documents Jews stored there for more than 1,000 years.

Ben-Shammai said it was too early to compare the two, and it would take a long time to sift through the findings from Afghanistan. He said they were already significant since no other Hebrew writings had even been found so far from the Holy Land.

He said the Jewish community in the region at the time lived largely like others in the Muslim world, as a “tolerated minority” that was treated better than under Christian rule. Afghanistan’s Jewish community numbered as many as 40,000 in the late 19th century, after Persian Jews fled forced conversion.

By the mid-20th century, only about 5,000 remained, and most emigrated after Israel’s creation in 1948. A lone Jewish man remains in Afghanistan, while 25,000 Jews live in neighboring Iran – Israel’s bitter enemy.

The library promises the finds will be digitized and uploaded to its website for all to see.

Aviad Stollman, curator of the library’s Judaica collection, said much more would be gleaned after intense research on the papers, but already it tells a story of a previously little known community.

“First we can verify that they actually existed – that is the most important point,” he said. “And of course their interests. They were not interested only in commerce and liturgy; they were interested also in the Talmud and the Bible,” he said.

“They were Jews living a thousand years ago in this place. I think that is the most exciting part.”

See also here. And here.

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