Ancient History (3500 BC – 499 AD)

[wjfox]

General news, articles and discussions regarding the ancient world, preceding the Middle Ages.

[Time_Traveller]

Herodotus lied about famous Greek battle against Carthage, new study finds

3 days ago

Herodotus, the famed ancient Greek historian, lied about a pivotal battle between the Greeks and the Carthaginians, a new study finds.

In his magnum opus "The Histories," Herodotus detailed the First Battle of Himera on Sicily in 480 B.C. He wrote that when the "barbarian" Carthaginians attacked the Greek colony of Himera, a coalition of Greek allies from other Sicilian cities joined the fray, leading to a Greek victory.

But now, a chemical analysis of the bones of the soldiers who fought at the First Battle of Himera reveals that those Greek "allies" were actually foreign mercenaries, likely hired by the Greeks to help vanquish their foes.

https://www.livescience.com/herodotus-l ... attle.html

[weatheriscool]

Researchers unearth oldest gold find in southwest Germany
https://phys.org/news/2021-05-unearth-o ... rmany.html
by Janna Eberhardt, University of Tübingen

rchaeologists working in the district of Tübingen in southwest Germany have discovered the region's earliest gold object to date. It is a spiral ring of gold wire unearthed in autumn 2020 from the grave of an Early Bronze Age woman. It is about 3,800 years old, according to analyses. Precious metal finds from this period are very rare in southwestern Germany. The gold probably originates from Cornwall in southwest Britain. The archaeologists say it is unusually early proof of the far-reaching trade in luxury objects of the people of that time. The excavation was led by Professor Raiko Krauss from the Institute of Prehistory and Medieval Archaeology at the University of Tübingen and Dr. Jörg Bofinger from the Baden-Württemberg State Office for Cultural Heritage Management, based in Esslingen.

[Time_Traveller]

Māori connections to Antarctica may go as far back as 7th century

June 7, 2021

Over the last 200 years, Antarctic narratives have been of those carried out by predominantly European male explorers. However, a research project led by Manaaki Whenua—Landcare Research and Te Rūnanga o Ngāi Tahu researchers looked into the connection of Māori with Antarctica to better document and understand the contributions and perspectives of under-represented groups who are missing from current narratives.

In the project, researchers scanned literature and integrated this with oral histories to provide a compiled record of Māori presence in, and perspectives of, Antarctic narratives and exploration. Māori (and Polynesian) journeys to the deep south have been occurring for a long time, perhaps as far back as the seventh century, and this work highlights the tradition of Māori Antarctic exploration and contribution to New Zealand's work in the Ross Sea continues into the future.

"We found connection to Antarctica and its waters have been occurring since the earliest traditional voyaging, and later through participation in European-led voyaging and exploration, contemporary scientific research, fishing, and more for centuries," says project lead Dr. Priscilla Wehi.

https://phys.org/news/2021-06-mori-anta ... ntury.html

[wjfox]

[Time_Traveller]

A Drought May Be Behind the “Bronze Age Collapse”

June 19, 2021

Archaeologists and historians have long debated the cause of the “Bronze Age Collapse,” or the period when multiple, distinct ancient civilizations all collapsed one after the other around 3,200 years ago.

New research published in the journal PLOS ONE suggests that a 300-year-long drought may be the cause of the collapse of multiple cultures of the Bronze Age, including those of ancient Greece.

During the time preceding the period, vast civilizations of the Bronze Age in the Mediterranean, Levant, and North Africa — including the Hittites in Anatolia and the Mycenaeans in Greece — were either destroyed or weakened significantly.

https://greekreporter.com/2021/06/19/a- ... -collapse/

[Yuli Ban]

Egypt discovers warship wreck from Greek Ptolemaic era

The Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities has shared the discovery of the wreck of a warship from the Ptolemaic era and the remains of a Greek funerary area dating back to the beginning of the fourth century BC, in the sunken city of Heracleion in Alexandria's Abu Qir Bay.

Head of the Supreme Council of Antiquities in Egypt Mustafa Waziri said in a July 19 statement, “The ship was moored in the canal that flowed along the upper side of the Temple of Amun. It sank after being hit by huge blocks falling from the temple of Amun, which collapsed due to a cataclysmic earthquake that occurred in the second century BC. The falling stone blocks pinned the ship down under the deep channel.”

Ehab Fahmy, head of the underwater archaeology department at the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities, told Al-Monitor the Egyptian-French archaeological mission of the European Institute for Underwater Archeology (IEASM) has been working in the city of Heracleion for a long time. “A few days ago, the mission found the warship wreck under around five meters of mud at the seabed.”

[Time_Traveller]

‘No parallels’: 2,300-year-old solar observatory awarded Unesco world heritage status

Wed 28 Jul 2021



The oldest solar observatory in the Americas has been awarded Unesco world heritage status and dubbed “a masterpiece of human creative genius”.

The 2,300-year-old archaeological ruin Chankillo which lies in a desert valley in northern Peru was one of 13 new global sites added to the list of cultural monuments.

Thirteen towers that align on a ridge are the best-known feature of the ancient site which dates between 250 and 200 BCE. The towers functioned as a calendar using the rising and setting arcs of the sun to mark not only equinoxes and solstices but even to define the precise time of year to within one or two days. The site also includes an imposing triple-walled hilltop complex, known as the Fortified Temple set in the barren landscape of the Casma river valley.

Iván Ghezzi, the Chankillo programme director, told the Guardian that while he was “truly overwhelmed” by the recognition he was not surprised that the UN agency found Chankillo worthy of inclusion in the list.

“It is the only observatory from the ancient world that we know of that is a complete annual solar calendar,” said Ghezzi, an archeologist who has studied and worked on the site for two decades.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/ ... age-status

[caltrek]

This 3,700-Year-Old Tablet Shows The Oldest Known Example of Applied Geometry
by Michelle Starr
August 4, 2021

https://www.sciencealert.com/this-3-700 ... d-geometry

Introduction:

(Science Alert) An ancient fragment of clay tablet dating back to 3,700 years ago, during the Old Babylonian period, contains what is now the oldest known example of applied geometry, a mathematician has discovered. That's more than a millennium prior to the birth of Pythagoras.

And this history-altering artifact, known as Si.427, had just been sitting in a museum in Istanbul for more than 100 years.

"Si.427 dates from the Old Babylonian (OB) period - 1900 to 1600 BCE," said mathematician Daniel Mansfield of the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Australia.

"It's the only known example of a cadastral document from the OB period, which is a plan used by surveyors to define land boundaries. In this case, it tells us legal and geometric details about a field that's split after some of it was sold off."

That plan uses sets of numbers known as Pythagorean triples to derive accurate right angles, or sets of numbers that fit trigonometric models for calculating the sides of a right-angled triangle. This makes the timing of the artifact particularly interesting, with important implications for the history of mathematics, Mansfield noted.

[wjfox]

oops... wrong thread.

[Time_Traveller]

Long-Lost Fragment of Stonehenge Gives Unprecedented Glimpse Inside Ancient Monument

5 AUGUST 2021

A long-lost piece of Stonehenge that was taken by a man performing restoration work on the monument has been returned after 60 years, giving scientists a chance to peer inside a pillar of the iconic monument for the first time.

In 1958, Robert Phillips, a representative of the drilling company helping to restore Stonehenge, took the cylindrical core after it was drilled from one of Stonehenge's pillars – Stone 58. Later, when he emigrated to the United States, Phillips took the core with him.

Because of Stonehenge's protected status, it's no longer possible to extract samples from the stones. But with the core's return in 2018, researchers had the opportunity to perform unprecedented geochemical analyses of a Stonehenge pillar, which they described in a new study.

They found that Stonehenge's towering standing stones, or sarsens, were made of rock containing sediments that formed when dinosaurs walked the Earth. Other grains in the rock date as far back as 1.6 billion years.

https://www.sciencealert.com/rediscover ... -pillars-2

[Time_Traveller]

1,000-year-old remains in Finland may be non-binary iron age leader

Mon 9 Aug 2021



Modern analysis of a 1,000-year-old grave in Finland challenges long-held beliefs about gender roles in ancient societies, and may suggest non-binary people were not only accepted but respected members of their communities, researchers have said.

According to a peer-reviewed study in the European Journal of Archaeology, DNA analysis of remains in a late iron age grave at Suontaka Vesitorninmäki in Hattula, southern Finland, may have belonged to a high-status non-binary person.

First discovered in 1968 during building work, the grave contained jewellery in the form of oval brooches as well as fragments of woollen clothing suggesting the dead person was dressed in “a typical feminine costume of the era”, the researchers said.

But unusually, the grave also held a hiltless sword placed on the person’s left side, with another sword, probably deposited at a later date, buried above the original grave – accoutrements more often associated with masculinity.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/ ... rchers-say

[weatheriscool]

Evidence of ancient earthquake found in Jerusalem
https://phys.org/news/2021-08-evidence- ... salem.html
by Bob Yirka , Phys.org

A team of researchers with the Israel Antiquities Authority has found evidence of a strong earthquake occurring in the city of Jerusalem approximately 2,800 years ago. The group has posted their initial findings on their Facebook page.

Prior research had uncovered evidence of a large earthquake in Israel in the mid-eighth century B.C. at sites such as Hatzor and Tell es-Safi/Gath, but no evidence had been found in Jerusalem. In this new effort, the researchers found evidence of damage from the time at a dig site in the City of David National Park, along with references to the earthquake in the Hebrew Bible.

[weatheriscool]

New evidence about Roman Britain executions revealed
https://phys.org/news/2021-08-evidence- ... ealed.html
by King's College London

King's research has helped uncover new evidence showing the portrayal of the execution of captives in the arena by throwing them to lions. The evidence follows the discovery of an elaborately-decorated Roman bronze key handle.

The handle, discovered by archaeologists in Leicester, portrays a "Barbarian" grappling with a lion, together with four naked youths cowering in terror.

The key handle was discovered by University of Leicester Archaeological Services (ULAS), buried below the floor of a late Roman town house excavated in the city in 2016. After conservation, this unique object was studied at King's and the findings are now published in the journal Britannia.

Dr. John Pearce, Senior Lecturer in Archaeology, (Classics), is a co-author of the study, and helped decipher the key handle.

[caltrek]

Pre-modern Christian Attitudes on Marriage and Reproductive Rights
by Luis Josué Salés
September 2, 2021

https://theconversation.com/as-texas-ba ... ent-167170

Extract:

(The Conversation) Choices beyond celibacy

Pre-modern Christian women had options besides celibacy as well, although the state, the church and mediocre medicine limited their reproductive choices.

In 211, the Roman emperors Septimius Severus and Caracalla made abortion illegal. Tellingly, though, Roman laws surrounding abortion were centrally concerned with the father’s right to an heir, not with women or fetuses in their own right. Later Roman Christian legislators left that largely unchanged.

Conversely, Christian bishops sometimes condemned the injustice of laws regulating sex and reproduction. For example, the bishop Gregorios of Nazianzos, who died in 390, accused legislators of self-serving hypocrisy for being lenient on men and tough on women. Similarly, the bishop of Constantinople, Ioannes Chrysostomos, who died in 407, blamed men for putting women in difficult situations that led to abortions.

…But over time, these legal and religious opinions did not seem appreciably to affect women’s reproductive choices. Rather, pregnancy prevention and termination methods thrived in premodern Christian societies, especially in the medieval Roman Empire. For example, the historian Prokopios of Kaisareia claims that the Roman Empress Theodora nearly perfected contraception and abortion during her time as a sex worker, and yet this charge had no impact on Theodora’s canonization as a saint.

Some evidence even indicates that pre-modern Christians actively developed reproductive options for women. For instance, Christian physicians, like Aetios of Amida in the sixth century and Paulos of Aigina in the seventh, provided detailed instructions for performing abortions and making contraceptives. Their texts deliberately changed and improved on the medical work of Soranos of Ephesos, who lived in the second century. Many manuscripts contain their work, which indicates these texts circulated openly.

[caltrek]

Research Has Found Evidence of a Cosmic Airburst Destroying a Biblical City Called Tall el-Hammam
by Sonia Fernandez
September 21, 2021

https://www.futurity.org/cosmic-airburs ... y-2629942/

Introduction:

(Futurity) In the Middle Bronze Age (about 3,600 years ago or roughly 1650 BCE), Tall el-Hammam was ascendant. Located on high ground in the southern Jordan Valley, northeast of the Dead Sea, the settlement in its time had become the largest continuously occupied Bronze Age city in the southern Levant, having hosted early civilization for a few thousand years.

At that time, it was 10 times larger than Jerusalem and five times larger than Jericho.

“It’s an incredibly culturally important area,” says James Kennett, emeritus professor of earth science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “Much of where the early cultural complexity of humans developed is in this general area.”

A favorite site for archaeologists and biblical scholars, the mound hosts evidence of culture all the way from the Chalcolithic, or Copper Age, all compacted into layers as the highly strategic settlement was built, destroyed, and rebuilt over millennia.

But there is a 1.5-meter interval in the Middle Bronze Age II stratum that caught the interest of some researchers for its “highly unusual” materials. In addition to the debris one would expect from destruction via warfare and earthquakes, they found pottery shards with outer surfaces melted into glass, “bubbled” mudbrick, and partially melted building material, all indications of an anomalously high-temperature event, much hotter than anything the technology of the time could produce.

[caltrek]

This sounds very much like a program that was recently featured on the Science Channel:

Startling Discovery Reveals Mysterious Citadel Hidden in Ancient Maya City
by David Nield

https://www.sciencealert.com/experts-ju ... mayan-city

Introduction:

(Science Alert) Modern-day imaging technology is able to uncover ancient buildings and structures not visible on the surface, and we just got another excellent example: the discovery of a hidden neighborhood in one of the biggest historical Maya cities.

The city in question is Tikal, now in Guatemala. Thought to have been one of the most dominant settlements in the ancient Maya empire, particularly between 200-900 CE, at its peak it could have had as many as 90,000 people living there.

Using LIDAR scanning equipment, researchers found evidence of development under what was thought to be a natural area. What's more, the hidden ruins look to match the style of buildings in Teotihuacan – a sprawling metropolis established centuries before the rise of the Aztecs, built by a largely unknown culture.

The newly discovered structures match buildings in Teotihuacan.
Thomas Garrison/Pacunam

[weatheriscool]

Discovery of ancient Peruvian burial tombs sheds new light on Wari culture

Undated handout picture released by the Royal Tombs of Sipan Museum of one of the 29 human remains discovered at an ancient ceremonial site in Lambayeque.

A team of archeologists in northern Peru discovered the remains of 29 people, including three children, that could help experts rewrite the history of the pre-Incan Wari civilization, the lead researcher said on Friday.

The skeletons were buried more than 1,000 years ago in Huaca Santa Rosa de Pucala, an ancient ceremonial center in the coastal region of Lambayeque, 750 kilometers to the north of Lima.

The burials of the three children and a teenager at the front of the temple indicated they were human sacrifices from the Wari culture, Edgar Bracamonte, the lead researcher, told AFP.

It is the first time a discovery linked to the Wari civilization has been made this far from their area of influence, said Bracamonte.

"These discoveries allow us to rethink the history of the Lambayeque region, especially the links to Wari and Mochica occupations in the area," said Bracamonte.

The Wari culture flourished in the central Peruvian Andes from the seventh to 13th centuries.

The Huaca Santa Rosa de Pucala enclosure, in the form of the letter 'D', was built between 800 and 900 AD.

https://phys.org/news/2021-10-discovery ... tombs.html

[wjfox]

The moment domesticated horses changed the course of human history is now revealed

Updated 2035 GMT (0435 HKT) October 22, 2021

The domestication of horses changed the course of human history, but scientists have tried for years to figure out when and where this crucial event happened. Now, evidence from a new study using DNA analysis suggests horses were first domesticated 4,200 years ago in the steppes of the Black Sea region, part of modern-day Russia, before spreading across Asia and Europe in the centuries that followed.

It has been incredibly difficult to pin down when and where horse domestication occurred because it's a less obvious shift than that seen with animals like domesticated cattle, which experienced a change in size. Instead, the researchers had to work off of indirect evidence, such as tooth damage that suggested the wearing of bridles or even horse symbolism across cultures, said lead study author and paleogeneticist Ludovic Orlando, research director at the French National Center for Anthropobiology & Genomics of Toulouse for University of Toulouse--Paul Sabatier in France.

"Tracing human activity in the archaeological record is a difficult task, and even more difficult when it comes to reconstructing ancient relationships with horses, from which we often have only fragmented material, like horse bones, available to study," said study coauthor William Taylor, an assistant professor and curator of archaeology at the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History.

With this latest study, an international team of scientists collected and sequenced genomes from the remains of 273 ancient horses found across Europe and Asia and compared them to the DNA of modern horses to determine their origin.

The study published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

https://edition.cnn.com/2021/10/22/worl ... index.html

[caltrek]

Speaking of horses...

The Horse Bit and Bridle Kicked Off Ancient Empires – a New Giant Dataset Tracks the Societal Factors That Drove Military Technology
by Peter Turchin and Daniel Hoyer

https://theconversation.com/the-horse-b ... ogy-170073

Introduction:

(The Conversation) Starting around 3,000 years ago, a wave of innovation began to sweep through human societies around the globe. For the next millennium the continued emergence of new technologies had a dramatic effect on the course of human history.

This era saw the advancement of the ability to control horses with bit and bridle, the spread of iron-working techniques through Eurasia that led to hardier and cheaper weapons and armor and new ways of killing from a distance, such as with crossbows and catapults. On the whole, warfare became much more deadly.

During this era, many societies were consumed by the crucible of war. A few, though – the Achaemenid Persian Empire, the Roman Empire and Han China – not only survived, but thrived, becoming megaempires encompassing tens of millions of people and controlling territories of millions of square miles.

So what drove this cascade of technological innovation that literally changed the course of history?

We are a complexity scientist, Peter Turchin, and a historian, Dan Hoyer, who have been working since 2011 with a multidisciplinary team to build and analyze a large database of past societies. In a new paper published in PLOS One on Oct. 20, 2021, we describe the main societal drivers of ancient military innovation and how these new technologies changed empires.*

*https://journals.plos.org/plosone/artic ... ne.0258161