Innholdsfortegnelse for January/February 2024 i ARCHAEOLOGY

WHEN IT RAINS, IT POURS It didn’t rain frequently in ancient Egypt, but when it did, says Sapienza University of Rome archaeologist Aneta Skalec, it could come down so violently that it led to legal quarrels between neighbors. Skalec examined a papyrus known as the Demotic Legal Code of Hermopolis West, which was recorded in the time of the pharaoh Ptolemy II Philadelphus (reigned 285–246 b.c.), although its origins are likely centuries earlier. The document contains the most extensive known collection of Egyptian laws, many of them concerning leasing of property and rules of inheritance. “Among the various regulations, we find those concerning neighborly disputes,” Skalec says. “I was surprised when I came across the regulations relating to rain.” One passage stipulates how to handle a complaint brought forward by…

King Harald Bluetooth, who reigned from his royal seat in Jelling during the tenth century a.d., is a towering historical figure, credited with having established the state of Denmark. New research finds that his mother, Queen Thyra, about whom little is known, was also seen as an extremely important personage in her time. Thyra’s name appears on two runestones at Jelling—one dedicated to her by her husband and Harald’s father, Gorm, and another raised by Harald to commemorate his parents. This is unusual, given that very few women are named on runestones in Denmark. Two other runestones, found in the nearby village of Laeborg and the town of Baekke, also include the name Thyra, though it was unclear whether they, too, referred to Harald’s mother. To try to clarify the…

Cutting tools known as Acheulean hand axes, made by Homo erectus and other early human species from about 1.76 million to 130,000 years ago, represent humanity’s most enduring technology. They are particularly plentiful at the Tanzanian site of Isimila, the subject of a lecture Dartmouth College art historian Steve Kangas attended in 2021. The shape of the tools seemed familiar to Kangas, and he approached his colleague, paleoanthropologist Jeremy DeSilva, with a startling observation. To Kangas, the Acheulean hand axes in the lecture looked uncannily like a strangely shaped rock depicted in the fifteenth-century painting Étienne Chevalier with Saint Stephen by French artist Jean Fouquet. DeSilva agreed, and they collaborated with University of Cambridge archaeologists Alastair Key and James Clark to test out the idea. Key and Clark compared the…

SACRED SPRING San Casciano dei Bagni, Italy At the beginning of the first century A.D.,lightning struck a sanctuary at a site known as Bagno Grande, or Large Bath. For centuries, the thermal pool there had been sacred to both Etruscans and Romans. When lightning hit, the sanctuary’s priests were compelled, according to both Etruscan and Roman beliefs, to bury under a layer of terracotta tiles hundreds of votive offerings that had been brought by pilgrims over the years. This ancient ritual, known as fulgur conditum, or “buried thunderbolt,” was intended to seal the objects in and mark the spot as especially sacred. Archaeologist Jacopo Tabolli of the University for Foreigners of Siena describes the discovery of these offerings, which include bronze statues of men, women, children, divinities, and individual body…

While investigating a house dating to the sixteenth century in Old Dongola, once the capital of the medieval Nubian Kingdom of Makuria (ca. A.D. 400–1400), a team from the Polish Centre of Mediterranean Archaeology at the University of Warsaw discovered a puzzling network of rooms beneath the floor. On the walls of one of these rooms—a narrow, vaulted space measuring just three feet wide and nine feet long—archaeologists found several unorthodox paintings that they believe date to the thirteenth century. One of these paintings portrays the Virgin Mary. The other depicts a scene in which the archangel Michael holds a Nubian king in his arms and presents him to Jesus, who sits on a cloud and extends a hand for the king to kiss. “This is completely uncommon for Byzantine…

Roman emperors were known for many things, among them displaying their superior military and diplomatic skills, penning enduring philosophical treatises, and raising great buildings. The emperor Nero (reigned A.D. 54–68) was famous for, among other less entertaining quirks, his singing. According to several ancient Roman authors, one of Nero’s favorite venues in which to stretch his vocal cords was a private theater he built in the Gardens of Agrippina, a luxurious villa that belonged to his mother in the Roman neighborhood near the Vatican now called Vaticano. Nero’s theater is known from literary sources—the Roman historian Tacitus may have been referring to this building when he wrote about the emperor singing of the fall of Troy as he watched Rome burn in July of A.D. 64. The structure was largely…

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Ancient Mesopotamians believed that if they followed a proper set of instructions, they would have dreams that included contact with the gods. Assyriologist Aino Hätinen of Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich has studied a set of cuneiform tablets featuring guidelines for conjuring this sort of dream. The earliest of the tablets dates to around 1100 to 800 b.c., and the instructions are referenced in tablets dating to as late as the first century b.c. Often written by royal advisers, scholars, and scribes considered experts in omen literature, the texts were discovered in the ancient cities of Nineveh, Assur, Uruk, Sippar, and Babylon, in what is now Iraq. Hätinen has found that the texts offer counsel that varies based on the 12 lunar months of the year. “Usually it’s centered around…

Rarely has a single find changed scholars’ views of the capabilities of people of the past as radically as the discovery of the world’s earliest known wooden architecture, which dates to nearly half a million years ago. The pair of interlocking logs joined by an intentionally cut notch was unearthed beneath a bank of Zambia’s Kalambo River by a team led by University of Liverpool archaeologist Larry Barham. Researchers believe the logs may have formed part of a walkway or the foundation of a platform built over wetlands. Prior to this discovery, the oldest known surviving wooden structures were built by people living in northern England around 11,000 years ago. The 476,000-year-old log structure predates the appearance of the first modern humans by some 150,000 years and was likely the…

The Templo Mayor, including the massive pyramids at the heart of the Aztec, or Mexica, capital of Tenochtitlan, is like a Russian doll, says archaeologist Leonardo López Luján of Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History. “When you dig within a Mesoamerican pyramid, you find another that is older and smaller,” he says. In the ninth of 13 total layers, López Luján and his team have uncovered a small chestmade of volcanic stone that, like the Templo Mayor complex itself, contains many layers of meaning. Inside the chest, they found 15 perfectly preserved anthropomorphic figurines made of serpentine, along with Aztec symbols of water and fertility such as marine sand, a pair of rattlesnake-shaped scepters, hundreds of greenstone beads, and seashells, snails, and coral. The layer of the temple in…

A 10-by-6-inch piece of papyrus is, researchers now believe, part of the world’s first book. And, like many of the volumes that fill offices, libraries, and homes, it has had many lives. The papyrus fragment, which was unearthed along with hundreds of other pieces of papyrus at the site of El Hibeh in 1902, began as a bound document dating to 260 B.C. that recorded taxation rates for beer and oil scrawled in Greek letters using black ink. The sheet was then removed from its binding and sent as a letter before being transformed once again when its other side was painted with images, including one depicting a son of the falcon-headed god Horus, and reused as wrapping for a mummy during the Ptolemaic period (304–30 B.C.). Using microscopic and…

MORE THAN 40 YEARS AGO, a Turkish sponge diver named Mehmet Çakir caused a stir among Anatolian archaeologists when he showed them sketches of objects that he had seen lying 150 feet deep on the seafloor off the coast of Kas, in southeastern Turkey. He described them as “metal biscuits with ears,” but experts immediately recognized them as a type of metal bar known as an oxhide ingot that was commonly traded during the Bronze Age, 3,500 years ago. Authorities immediately began to search for the site, and soon came across the artifacts that Çakir had spotted not far offshore of Uluburun, or the Grand Cape. In addition to the ingots, there were so many other ancient objects scattered about that archaeologists and divers would spend a decade returning to…

EXCAVATE Recently, the American Journal of Archaeology (AJA)—the scholarly journal of the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA)—expanded its statement of geographic and temporal scope to better reflect the range of research areas of its audience. Pick up the July 2023 issue, for example, for a report on previously unknown cave art ranging from the Achaemenid (550–330 B.C.) to Parthian (247 B.C.–A.D. 224) periods in Aškawt-i Daya Cave, located in the Zagros Mountains of Iran. Archaeologist Sajjad Alibaigi and his colleagues describe the numerous inscriptions and human and animal figures painted on the walls of the nearly inaccessible cave and conclude that it was used for ritual activities for many centuries, eventually becoming a place for worship of the god Mithra. Or you can turn to the January 2024 issue and…

When you were a child, you probably had toys such as plastic or porcelain dolls and plush, furry animals that may have included mythical beings such as unicorns. You may have created skits in which they interacted with each other and with the people who were watching. Each toy and how you played with it communicated something about you, your family, and the society you grew up in. This is not a new phenomenon. Excavations have revealed some of the toys that children in the second half of the Classic Maya period (a.d. 250–950) played with. “Children are so underrepresented in the archaeological record even though they make up a very large component in a household,” says archaeologist Daniela Triadan of the University of Arizona. “Artifacts like these are one…

DIVINE FELINE Excellent article on Isis in the Roman world (“Worshipping a Forbidden God-dess,” November/December 2023). There was another divinity that was worshipped with Isis, the Egyptian cat goddess Bubastis (also known as Bastet). The two were frequently worshipped together and mentioned together in inscriptions through-out the empire. Black was Isis’ sacred color—she was Queen of the Black Robe. Furthermore, Isis could become incarnate in Bubastis: An Egyptian inscription reads, “Isis is the soul of Bubastis.” The belief that divinities could become incarnate in animals was common in ancient Egypt. Donald Engels Fayetteville, AR GOTHIC ADVENTURES Your very interesting article (“Who Were the Goths?”) in the November/December 2023 issue discredits the idea that the Goths came from Sweden via an event like D-Day. However, please consider that two major areas…

People who lived throughout Europe during the Ice Age may have practiced ritual cannibalism. Between 23,500 and 13,500 years ago, these hunters left traces of their culture, known as Magdalenian, on the landscape, including cave paintings, bone harpoons, sewing needles, and animal fgurines sculpted from mammoth ivory. While examining bones from the Magdalenian site of Gough’s Cave in England, Silvia Bello, a paleoanthropologist at London’s Natural History Museum, discovered human skulls shaped into cups, parts of skeletons that had been butchered and chewed, and an arm bone engraved with a zigzag pattern. Given the decorative flourishes on the human remains and the presence of bones from more appetizing animals, she concluded the cave’s inhabitants had held funerals involving cannibalism. “They were not just eating each other because they were hungry,”…

In a cave near the ancient settlement of Ein Gedi on the banks of the Dead Sea, archaeologists from the Israel Antiquities Authority have discovered an assemblage of four extremely well-preserved iron swords. For the investigators, just getting to the cave was a challenge, as it is located around 500 feet up a remote cliff face. Accessing the swords required reaching deep into a narrow crevice in the cave’s upper section. The three longer blades, which measure between 17 and 25 inches, are spatha swords, which replaced the shorter gladius as the primary weapon used by Roman mounted and infantry troops. The shortest weapon is a ring-pommel sword, which was also commonly used by Roman soldiers stationed in the ancient province of Judea beginning in the first century A.D. Three…

Researchers have learned that the earliest known fortresses in the world were built by Neolithic hunter-gatherers around 6000 b.c. in the taiga of western Siberia. Archaeologists have long been aware that Indigenous people in the region lived in fortified settlements defended by palisades, banks, and ditches, but believed such sites dated to no earlier than the early Iron Age, around 1000 b.c. They were puzzled, then, when radiocarbon dates obtained in the 1980s at one such site suggested a fortification there had been constructed millennia before, in the Neolithic period. The researchers wondered, were hunter-gatherers of the era sophisticated enough to build such elaborate defense works? “They doubted the accuracy of the dating,” says archaeologist Ekaterina Dubovtseva of the Institute of History and Archaeology of the Russian Academy of Sciences.…