by Sevaan Franks on January 27, 2012
Ancient Mesopotamian riddles translated
A 3,500-year-old clay tablet found in southern Mesopotamia contains ancient riddles written in the Akkadian language. Thanks to the diligence of some researchers, they have now been translated.
Two of the riddles, now in a fragmentary state, are sexual, crude and difficult to understand.
One of them, whose translation is uncertain, reads:
The deflowered (girl) did not become pregnant
The undeflowered (girl) became pregnant (-What is it?)
The answer, strangely enough, appears to be “auxiliary forces,” a group of soldiers that tend not to be reliable.
Wasserman said that the meaning of this riddle eludes him. “I don’t understand what is really going on,” he said, adding that auxiliary forces are often below-average soldiers, “and they are not really trustworthy, sometimes they run away in the middle of the battle.”
[Full story]
Story: Owen Jarus, Live Science | Photo: LiveScience
by Sevaan Franks on January 27, 2012
Archaeologists working in Sudan have found a long-lost temple which dates back to the Meroe period.
The large temple compound is situated 130 km northwards of Khartoum. European travellers saw the remains of the temple in the early 19th century but then the temple disappeared in the desert, said Onderka who leads the Czech archaeology expedition.
He said the Czech expedition revealed a signet ring with a picture of Nubian Lion god Apede-mak, a statuette of the originally Egyptian god Osiris, a stone with a Meroe hieroglyphs and parts of sandstone blocks.
[Full story]
Story: Prague Daily Monitor | Photo: Wikimedia Commons
by Sevaan Franks on January 27, 2012
For years the hill-fort known as the Mound of Down in Ireland has been hidden because of the trees growing across its surface. Now it is being cleared of those trees to expose the fortifications.
The enclosure is defined by a massive bank and ditch that encircles what was once a drumlin island in the Quoile Marshes.
Although the site has yet to undergo archaeological excavation, it is thought that the large earthwork on the mound is a pre-Norman fortification.
It is most likely to be a royal stronghold of the Dál Fiatach, the ruling dynasty of this part of County Down in the first millennium AD.
[Full story]
Story: BBC News | Photo: BBC News
by Sevaan Franks on January 26, 2012
One of the busiest slave ports in the Americas has been uncovered in Rio de Janerio after being buried for almost 200 years.
Not far from here at least 500,000 Africans took their first steps into slavery in colonial Brazil, which took in far more slaves than the United States and where now half of its 200 million citizens claim African descent.
The “Cais do Valongo” – the Valongo Wharf – was the busiest of all slave ports in the Americas and has been buried for almost two centuries under subsequent infrastructure projects and dirt.
That is, until developers seeking to turn Rio’s shabby port neighborhood into a posh tourist center allowed teams of archaeologists to check out what was being unearthed.
[Full story]
Story: Taylor Barnes, Christian Science Monitor | Photo: Wikimedia Commons
by Sevaan Franks on January 26, 2012
by Sevaan Franks on January 26, 2012
by Sevaan Franks on January 26, 2012
Researchers are using underwater robots to search for Minoan shipwrecks in the Aegean sea.
His four-week survey of the waters around Crete last October is part of a long-term effort to catalogue large numbers of ancient shipwrecks in the Aegean Sea. And the grand prize would be a wreck from one of the most influential and enigmatic cultures of the ancient world — the Minoans, who ruled these seas more than 3,000 years ago.
Some researchers believe that quest to be close to impossible. But Foley and a few competitors are using high-tech approaches such as autonomous robots and new search strategies that they say have a good chance of locating the most ancient of shipwrecks. If they succeed, they could transform archaeologists’ understanding of a crucial period in human history, when ancient mariners first ventured long distances across the sea.
[Full story]
Story: Jo Marchant, Nature | Photo: J. Hios/AKG-IMAGES
by Sevaan Franks on January 25, 2012
A fluxgate magnetometer sounds like something that could send you back through time, but really it measures the magnetic properties of soil. This technology has been used on the Shriver Circle, an ancient earthwork in Ohio that is now invisible from ground-level.
Earthworks generally are quite large, and building one involved the rearrangement of large amounts of soil. Wherever soil has been disturbed, the baseline magnetic field is disrupted, and the magnetometer can detect these anomalies. The magnetic “signature” of earthworks usually is highly visible and distinctive.
A case in point is the Shriver Circle, one of the largest circular enclosures ever built in the Ohio Valley. It was mapped by Smithsonian surveyors and was known to be located about 2.5 miles north of Chillicothe. But decades of farming and other development had largely obliterated it from the landscape.
[Full story]
Story: Bradlet T. Lepper, The Columbus Dispatch | Photo: Jarrod Burks
