A lost ancient Egyptian city submerged beneath the sea 1,200 years ago is starting to reveal what life was like in the legendary port of Thonis-Heracleion.

For centuries it was thought to be a legend, a city of extraordinary wealth mentioned by Herodotus, visited by Helen of Troy and Paris, her lover, but apparently buried under the sea.

In fact, Heracleion was true, and a decade after divers began uncovering its treasures, archaeologists have produced a picture of what life was like in the city in the era of the pharaohs.

The city, also called Thonis, disappeared beneath the Mediterranean around 1,200 years ago and was found during a survey of the Egyptian shore at the beginning of the last decade.

Now its life at the heart of trade routes in classical times are becoming clear, with researchers forming the view that the city was the main customs hub through which all trade from Greece and elsewhere in the Mediterranean entered Egypt.

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Egypt discovers ancient port and writings

Egypt’s state minister of antiquities says a Franco-Egyptian exploration team has discovered a Red Sea port dating back about 4,500 years to Great Pyramid builder King Cheops of the Fourth Dynasty of the Old Kingdom.

Mohammed Ibrahim said Thursday the port was discovered at Wadi el-Jarf, nearly 180 kilometers (110 miles) south the coastal city of Suez.

In a statement, Ibrahim said the port was used to transfer copper from Sinai to the Nile valley.

The team working in the Suez archaeological area also discovered hieroglyphic papyri, considered the oldest found in Egypt.

Ibrahim said the papyri reveal details about port workers and their daily lives. Most date back to the 27th year of the reign of Cheops, also known as Khufu.

The documents were transferred to the Suez museum.

breakingnews:

Robot finds surprise in Mexico’s ancient Temple of Quetzalcoatl

NBC News: A diminutive robot helped researchers make a substantial discovery during preliminary tests conducted in a tunnel running under the Temple of Quetzalcoatl at the archaeological site of Teotihuacan, the team said Monday.

The team expected to find only one chamber in the last section of the tunnel — but instead, they found three, team leader Sergio Gomez said in a report published by the Mexican newspaper El Universal. The chambers are thought to have been used by Teotihuacan’s rulers roughly 2,000 years ago for royal ceremonies or burials, but they’re so choked with mud and rubble that they haven’t been explored in modern times.

Photo: A worker from the National Institute of Anthropology and History walks next to a robot used to explore ruins at the entrance of a tunnel in the archaeological area of the Quetzalcoatl Temple, near the Pyramid of the Sun at the Teotihuacan archaeological site.

(Henry Romero / Reuters)

discoverynews:

Gold-Adorned Skeleton Could Be First Windsor Queen

British archaeologists have unearthed the remains of what might be the first queen of Windsor in a 4,400-year-old female skeleton adorned with some of Britain’s earliest gold jewels. The find could predate Windsor’s royal connection by more than three millennia.

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mothernaturenetwork:

Mysterious stone structure discovered beneath Sea of Galilee

The megalith is definitely human-made and probably was built on land, only later to be covered by the Sea of Galilee as the water level rose.

queergiftedblack:

Scientists have unearthed a 600-year-old Chinese coin on the Kenyan island of Manda that shows trade existed between China and east Africa decades before European explorers set sail and changed the map of the world. (Credit: John Weinstein/The Field Museum)

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mothernaturenetwork:

Ancient Egyptian sundial discovered at Valley of the Kings

A sundial discovered outside a tomb in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings may be the world’s oldest ancient Egyptian sundials, say scientists.

Dating to the 19th dynasty, or the 13th century B.C., the sundial was found on the floor of a workman’s hut, in the Valley of the Kings, the burial place of rulers from Egypt’s New Kingdom period (around 1550 B.C. to 1070 B.C.).

“The significance of this piece is that it is roughly one thousand years older than what was generally accepted as time when this type of time measuring device was used,” said researcher Susanne Bickel, of the University of Basel in Switzerland. Past sundial discoveries date to the Greco-Roman period, which lasted from about 332 B.C. to A.D. 395.

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Researchers: We may have found a fabled sunstone

A rough, whitish block recovered from an Elizabethan shipwreck may be a sunstone, the fabled crystal believed by some to have helped Vikings and other medieval seafarers navigate the high seas, researchers say.

In a paper published earlier this week, a Franco-British group argued that the Alderney Crystal — a chunk of Icelandic calcite found amid a 16th century wreck at the bottom of the English Channel — worked as a kind of solar compass, allowing sailors to determine the position of the sun even when it was hidden by heavy cloud, masked by fog, or below the horizon.

That’s because of a property known as birefringence, which splits light beams in a way that can reveal the direction of their source with a high degree of accuracy. Vikings may not have grasped the physics behind the phenomenon, but that wouldn’t present a problem.

“You don’t have to understand how it works,” said Albert Le Floch, of the University in Rennes in western France. “Using it is basically easy.”

Vikings were expert navigators — using the sun, stars, mountains and even migratory whales to help guide them across the sea — but some have wondered at their ability to travel the long stretches of open water between Greenland, Iceland, and Newfoundland in modern-day Canada.

Le Floch is one of several who’ve suggested that calcite crystals were used as navigational aids for long summer days in which the sun might be hidden behind the clouds. He said the use of such crystals may have persisted into the 16th century, by which time magnetic compasses were widely used but often malfunctioned.

Le Floch noted that one Icelandic legend — the Saga of St. Olaf — appears to refer to such a crystalwhen it says that Olaf used a “sunstone” to verify the position of the sun on a snowy day.

Read More.

breakingnews:

Medieval knight found beneath a Scottish parking lot

TIME: The tomb of a medieval nobleman that was discovered during building work at a Scottish parking lot will likely be moved to make way for a new environmental development, the BBC reports.

The ornately carved grave was found amid the ruins of a 13th century monastery in the Old Town area of Edinburgh. The site has been earmarked for a rainwater-harvesting tank for the city’s new Centre for Carbon Innovation.

Photo: Grave of a medieval knight that has been discovered under an old city car park in Edinburgh.

Cyrus the Great artifact shown in U.S. for first time

A nearly 2,600-year-old clay cylinder described as the world’s first human rights declaration is being shown for the first time in the United States.

The Cyrus Cylinder from ancient Babylon will be displayed beginning Saturday at the Smithsonian’s Sackler Gallery. It will be in Washington through April 28, on loan from the British Museum. A year-long US tour will follow, with exhibitions planned in Houston, New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles.

The cylinder carries an account, written in cuneiform, of how Persian King Cyrus conquered Babylon in 539 BC and would allow freedom of worship and abolish forced labor. The account also confirms a story from the Bible’s Old Testament, describing how Cyrus released people held captive to go back to their homes.

The cylinder was buried under a foundation wall of the city of Babylon. It’s long been held as a model of good governance for a vast, multicultural society, and it made Cyrus famous from accounts in the Bible and writings by Greek authors.

When the cylinder was discovered on a British expedition in modern-day Iraq in 1879, it was considered the first physical evidence of the biblical account.

“It’s the first evidence we have of people reflecting on how you run a society of diversity, without just forcing uniformity,” British Museum Director Neil MacGregor said. “The big question is: How can you manage a state that doesn’t have one faith?”

The museum pairs the American football-size cylinder with other artifacts from Cyrus’ era to show how the Persian empire grew to span many religions, languages and cultures, its borders stretching from China to Egypt and the Balkans. It includes seals showing the king’s authority, Persian coins, and religious symbols in gold and silver.

Also on view are two pieces of a flat tablet with matching words from the cylinder, showing it was published as a proclamation. The pieces were discovered in the British Museum’s collection in 2009.

The cylinder carries ongoing relevance in the world today, Sackler Gallery Director Julian Raby said. “Here is a document that in its time declared a new way of ruling … in which diversity was respected within a culture,” he said.

When the cylinder was shown in 2010 and 2011 in Iran, it drew at least half a million visitors, showing that Iranians are still proud of the artefact as a central piece of their history, curators said. Before the current tour, it had been shown only in Tehran, Barcelona and London.

In the US, it’s being shown with one of President Thomas Jefferson’s copies of Cyropaedia, a book by Greek historian Xenophon about the philosophies of Cyrus, to illustrate how the Persian king inspired America’s founding fathers.

Curator John Curtis said the story of Cyrus also is a reminder of the rich history of the Middle East as a region of diverse cultures that included relations between Israel and Iran.

Though the cylinder is a small object, it raises big political questions, MacGregor said. Both Europeans and Americans looked to the Cyrus model to manage a state with more than one faith.

“Only the Americans get to the Cyrus model of a state that’s equidistant from every faith so that you acknowledge the value of faith, but you don’t endorse any one variety,” MacGregor said.

“Of course, we’re all trying now to live in cities and countries that have an unprecedented diversity in faith, language, ethnicity … and this is the first model of someone who got it to work for several hundred years.”

archaeologicalnews:

Polish archaeologists working in Sudan have found remains of human settlements that appear to date back as far as 70,000 years.

If confirmed, the discovery in the Affad Basin of northern Sudan will challenge existing theories that our distant ancestors only began building permanent residences on leaving Africa and settling in Europe and Asia.

“The Middle Palaeolithic discoveries in Affad are absolutely unique,” enthused Dr Marta Osypinska, one of the members of the team, in an interview with the Polish Press Agency (PAP).

“Last season, we came across a few traces of a light wooden construction. But it’s only with ongoing research that we have been able to locate the settlement precisely and identify other utility areas: a large workshop for processing flint… and an area for cutting up the carcasses of dead animals.”

More information on the project, which is funded by Poland’s National Science Centre, can be found at archeosudan.org.

(source)

nativeamericannews:

FEMA Archaeologists Discover Native Artifacts in New Orleans

Pottery sherds, animal bones and pieces of clay tobacco pipes weren’t what they were expecting to find, but it’s what a team of archaeologists contracted by the Federal Emergency Management Agency found while surveying land near Bayou St. John in New Orleans, Louisiana this month.

“It was a bit of a surprise to find this,” said FEMA Louisiana Recovery Office Deputy Director of Programs Andre Cadogan, referencing a small, broken pottery fragment. “We clearly discovered pottery from the late Marksville period, which dates to 300-400 A.D. The pottery was nice, easily dateable, and much earlier than we expected. This is exciting news for historians and tribal communities as it represents some of the only intact prehistoric remains of its kind south of Lake Pontchartrain.”

According to The Woodland Southeast (University of Alabama Press, 2002), edited by David G. Anderson and Robert C. Mainfort Jr., “Early Marksville pottery include birds, curvilinear designs, stamping and deep U-shaped incisions. These motifs, as well as specific rim modes and vessel shapes, may indicate close ties with Havana-Hopewell groups in the Illinois Valley.”

Other sources also suggest the Marksville were influenced in their mound building by the Hopewell culture. The Hopewell flourished in Ohio and Illinois at about the same time the Marskville were in Louisiana. “By at least the first century A.D., groups of Louisiana Indians had met Hopewell travelers and had learned about their culture,” states Louisiana Prehistory (Louisiana Geological Survey, 1969) by Robert W. Neuman and Nancy W. Hawkins. “Marksville burial mounds, pottery, pipes, and ornaments resembled those of the Hopewell Culture.”

Bayou St. John has, since the time of the Marksville Indians, seen a French fort, a Spanish fort, an American fort, a resort hotel and an amusement park. FEMA archaeologists have found evidence of the Marksville, the colonial period and the hotel.

“The historical record tells us that the shell midden (or mound) created by the Native American occupation was destroyed by the French when they built their fort here,” said Cadogan in a FEMA press release. “However, we’ve discovered, through archaeology, that rather than destroy the midden, the French cut off the top of it and used it as a foundation for their fort.”

The work FEMA is conducting in New Orleans is part of an agreement with the State Historic Preservation Office, Native American tribes and the state to do archaeological surveys of parks and public lands in the city.

When FEMA funding was used to reconstruct homes throughout Louisiana, the release states it would have been nearly impossible to evaluate every property for archaeological remains, so FEMA and various other agencies agreed to conduct alternate archaeological surveys.

“The surveys not only offset potential destruction of archaeological resources on private property from the home mitigations but also give us a leg up on any future storms. We are helping the state of Louisiana learn about its history as well as provide information that leads to preparedness for the next event,” said Cadogan.

nativeamericannews:

FEMA Archaeologists Discover Native Artifacts in New Orleans

Pottery sherds, animal bones and pieces of clay tobacco pipes weren’t what they were expecting to find, but it’s what a team of archaeologists contracted by the Federal Emergency Management Agency found while surveying land near Bayou St. John in New Orleans, Louisiana this month.

“It was a bit of a surprise to find this,” said FEMA Louisiana Recovery Office Deputy Director of Programs Andre Cadogan, referencing a small, broken pottery fragment. “We clearly discovered pottery from the late Marksville period, which dates to 300-400 A.D. The pottery was nice, easily dateable, and much earlier than we expected. This is exciting news for historians and tribal communities as it represents some of the only intact prehistoric remains of its kind south of Lake Pontchartrain.”

According toThe Woodland Southeast(University of Alabama Press, 2002), edited by David G. Anderson and Robert C. Mainfort Jr., “Early Marksville pottery include birds, curvilinear designs, stamping and deep U-shaped incisions. These motifs, as well as specific rim modes and vessel shapes, may indicate close ties with Havana-Hopewell groups in the Illinois Valley.”

Other sources also suggest the Marksville were influenced in their mound building by the Hopewell culture. The Hopewell flourished in Ohio and Illinois at about the same time the Marskville were in Louisiana. “By at least the first century A.D., groups of Louisiana Indians had met Hopewell travelers and had learned about their culture,” statesLouisiana Prehistory(Louisiana Geological Survey, 1969) by Robert W. Neuman and Nancy W. Hawkins. “Marksville burial mounds, pottery, pipes, and ornaments resembled those of the Hopewell Culture.”

Bayou St. John has, since the time of the Marksville Indians, seen a French fort, a Spanish fort, an American fort, a resort hotel and an amusement park. FEMA archaeologists have found evidence of the Marksville, the colonial period and the hotel.

“The historical record tells us that the shell midden (or mound) created by the Native American occupation was destroyed by the French when they built their fort here,” said Cadogan in a FEMA press release. “However, we’ve discovered, through archaeology, that rather than destroy the midden, the French cut off the top of it and used it as a foundation for their fort.”

The work FEMA is conducting in New Orleans is part of an agreement with the State Historic Preservation Office, Native American tribes and the state to do archaeological surveys of parks and public lands in the city.

When FEMA funding was used to reconstruct homes throughout Louisiana, the release states it would have been nearly impossible to evaluate every property for archaeological remains, so FEMA and various other agencies agreed to conduct alternate archaeological surveys.

“The surveys not only offset potential destruction of archaeological resources on private property from the home mitigations but also give us a leg up on any future storms. We are helping the state of Louisiana learn about its history as well as provide information that leads to preparedness for the next event,” said Cadogan.

theatlantic:

1 Kitty, 2 Empires, 2,000 Years: World History Told Through a Brick

At some moment a few years after Jesus Christ died but before the second century began, someone made a brick on the island that would become the cornerstone of Great Britain. 

Two thousand years later, a Sonoma State master’s student named Kristin Converse was poking around the holdings of the Fort Vancouver National Historic Site in Washington state. A brick caught her eye. In one corner, there were the footprints of a cat. Where had this cat lived?

Read more.

[Image: Fort Vancouver Historical National Historic Site]

guardian:

It’s him! Scientists confirm that skeleton found in car park is that of Richard III.

Latest here.

Photo: University of Leicester