The History Blog

In January, a plumber installing pump pipes for an in-ground pool in the backyard of a one-year-old house in Winter Garden, Florida found a piece of bone in the sand. He reported it to the police who brought the fragment to Orange-Osceola County Medical Examiner Dr. Jan Garavaglia. She determined that the bone had come from the face of a child of around 10 years. There was some mummified tissue still attached to the bone, which concerned her because most archaeological remains are devoid of any tissue. She informed police that there might be a recently dead child illegally buried on the work site.

University of Central Florida archaeologist Dr. John Schultz worked with the forensic specialists to ensure the site was handled as an archaeological dig instead of just as a pure crime scene. They didn’t find the remains of a murdered child, but they did find two crania, a dozen shards of pottery, bits of newspaper from 1978, textiles including an embroidered purse still carrying woven slings and a netted bag with a strap made out of non-human hair. When Dr. Garavaglia X-rayed the skulls, she and Dr. Schultz were able to confirm that they were at least hundreds of years old.

The skulls belonged to an adult male and a child, and they both had “Inca bones,” a triangular interparietal bone that sometimes develops where the posterior fontanelle used to be. It’s not exclusive to them, but it is highly characteristic of Peruvian mummies, particularly Andean Inca tribes between 1200 and 1597 A.D. Researchers identified the style of the pottery and textiles as coming from the Chancay culture of coastal Peru. Their dates are in keeping with the Inca bone period, between 1200 and 1470 A.D.

At this point it became clear that the Winter Garden swimming pool was a secondary burial site. Someone had placed these artifacts in the ground after March 16, 1978 (the date of the newspaper), but who and exactly when remains a mystery. We do know that the land which is now a subdivision used to be a camp for migrant orange pickers. For thirty years until the mid-1980s, migrants from all over Central America and the Caribbean lived in wooden barracks in the area. It’s possible that the remains and artifacts could have been buried by one of those migrant workers, perhaps as part of a religious ritual, perhaps for safekeeping. It’s also possible that tourists brought them back from a trip to South America, although the purchase and removal of archaeological artifacts has been illegal in Peru since the early 20th century.

Developers bought the land and built it into a subdivision four years ago. They had to grade it extensively in order to build the orderly houses and streets, so it’s an incredible stroke of luck that they missed the spot that happened to contain ancient human remains and incredibly delicate textiles. Then the house was built on the property just a year ago, and they fortuitously missed the spot too.

The bones and artifacts will remain at the Medical Examiner’s office for now. Dr. Schultz intends to study them extensively with an eye to publishing the results so they can be used as examples for future crime scene/archaeological finds. The ultimate goal, however, is to return the pieces to Peru.

A group of seventh graders from Sandia Preparatory School in Albuquerque made the discovery of a lifetime on a field trip to the El Malpais National Conservation Area near Grants, New Mexico. They were exploring the lava tube caves as part of the school’s Outdoor Leadership Program when students spotted a pot underneath a pile of rocks. They didn’t touch it or disturb it, but they could see that it was a cream-colored pot with a complex pattern of black zigzags and dashes all around.

One of the parents was knowledgeable about the laws regarding Native American artifacts, so the group left the pot in place and reported it to the U.S. National Park Service who in turn alerted the New Mexico Bureau of Land Management which protects and manages the 13 million acre conservation zone.

BLM archaeologists removed the pot this week. It is 18 inches high and 14 to 16 inches wide, and was discovered almost intact. Because of this stroke of good luck, archaeologists were able to determine from its size, shape and decoration that the pot is between 800 and 1,000 years old, possibly the work of the Mogollon culture which inhabited the area from 150 to 1400 A.D. It is a major find and the first significant piece discovered on New Mexico Bureau of Land Management land in ten years.

Donna Hummel of the BLM said the find could be unique and the students may not fully understand its importance. “This is very significant. We hope they appreciate that this could be a once in a lifetime discovery,” said Humme.

When told that the pot could be around 900-years-old, students expressed amazement.

“That’s crazy. I think we were probably some of the first people to see so that’s really cool,” seventh-grader Cole Schoepke said.

The Bureau has yet to release any photographs of the pot because they want to consult with the surrounding pueblos first, but there’s a charming interview with some of the students who made the discovery in this TV news story.

Archaeologists mapping the Classic period (200 to 900 A.D.) Maya city of Xultun in northeast Guatemala have discovered a room painted with murals including hundreds of numbers and astronomical tables that are the oldest Maya calendar calculations ever found. The calendar dates to 813 or 814 A.D., which we know so precisely because the inscribers generously dated their work. Before this discovery, the earliest calendrical calculations known to survive the bonfires of the post-Columbian missionaries were in the 11th-12th century Dresden Codex. There is enough overlap with the calendar texts in the Dresden Codex that it’s likely they both relied on earlier texts that have not survived, or at least not been found yet.

The hieroglyphs include columns of numbers reflecting the 260-day ceremonial calendar, the 365-day solar calendar, the 584-day cycle of Venus and the 780-day cycle of Mars. Tables track the phases of the moon, and some calculations appear to be attempts to reconcile the lunar and solar calendars. In a touching link to educators 1200 years later, there are numbers painted in red that correct the calculations painted in black next to them.

The real headline-grabber is that the calendar counts through 17 Bak’tuns. That’s a total of 7,000 years and takes us far past our current 13th Bak’tun cycle which is scheduled to end on December 23rd of this year in the fiery apocalypse that will destroy us all. How convenient that “scholars” and “experts” who have always claimed that the Maya 2012 apocalypse notion is a ludicrous misinterpretation of Maya calendar cycles find four more cycles JUST IN THE NICK OF TIME.

The calendar is not the only uniquely important aspect of this find. The murals are painted on the walls and ceiling of a small dwelling. It’s a room about six and a half feet wide, six feet long and 10 feet tall. This is the first time murals have been found somewhere that is not a temple or palace. Also, the room was filled in an unusual way, from the inside backing out through the doorway. Usually the Maya just flattened the roof of a building when they were done with it, and then built on top of that. The peculiar filling approach taken with this room ensured that the paintings on three of the four walls plus the ceiling were preserved.

The archaeologists working on the site never expected that. Boston University undergraduate Maxwell Chamberlain was looking into an old looting trench during his lunch break when he saw some faded paint on the wall. BU archaeologist and team leader William Saturno figured it was worth exploring the chamber in case there was any paint left, but he assumed there’d be only traces at best so they’d just map the room and perhaps be able to figure out its dimensions at the time the murals were painted.

Instead they pulled a Howard Carter and found an archaeological treasure trove (minus the gold). In addition to the calendar hieroglyphs on the east and north walls, they found several unusual murals. On the north wall:

An off-center niche in the wall features a painting of a seated king, wearing blue feathers. A long rod made of bone mounted on the wall allowed a curtain to be pulled across the king’s portrait, hiding it and revealing a well-preserved painting of a man whose image is wrapped around the wall; he is depicted in vibrant orange and holds a pen. Maya glyphs near his face call him “Younger Brother Obsidian,” a curious title seldom seen in Maya text. Based on other Maya sites, Saturno theorizes he could be the son or younger brother of the king and possibly the artist-scribe who lived in the house. “The portrait of the king implies a relationship between whoever lived in this space and the royal family,” Saturno said.

On the west wall:

Three male figures loom on this wall, all of them seated and painted in black, wearing only white loincloths, medallions around their necks and identical single-feathered, miter-style head dresses. “We haven’t seen uniform head dresses like that anywhere before,” Saturno said. “It’s clearly a costume of some kind.” One of the figures is particularly burly, “like a sumo wrestler,” and he is labeled “Older Brother Obsidian.” Another is labeled as a youth.

Saturno thinks the room was a writing room, a study for Maya scribes. The figure holding a pen indicates a connection to scribes and the repetition of hieroglyphs on the east wall complete with corrections in red suggests that the calculations could have been practice for later work in the formal halls of religious and political power.

The discovery has been published in the May issue of the journal Science (subscription only). There’s a fascinating interview with Saturno in the latest Science podcast which I’m embedding below.

Pictures are courtesy of National Geographic which sponsored the expedition. Their website has an awesome gigapixel zoomable image of the mural here, and a video of the find here:

In the centuries before flossing, fluoride and Waterpiks became standard in human populations, tartar would build up on teeth in layers, sometimes creating dental superstructures of majestically disgusting size; see the technicolor example on the right. Now researchers from the University of Nevada, Reno have discovered that small samples of plaque removed from the teeth of ancient human remains can reveal information about the food they once chewed.

Analysis of stable isotopes like oxygen, strontium, lead, carbon and nitrogen performed on teeth and bone can provide a wealth of detail about ancient diet and migration, but the analysis requires the destruction of the sample. Museum curators are obviously not keen to allow destructive procedures on the remains in their charge, but since dental calculus is technically an accretion on the body, scraping off bits of it and destroying them doesn’t count.

[Researcher G. Richard] Scott obtained samples of dental calculus from 58 skeletons buried in the Cathedral of Santa Maria in northern Spain dating from the 11th to 19th centuries to conduct research on the diet of this ancient population. After his first methodology met with mixed results, he decided to send five samples of dental calculus to Poulson at the University’s Stable Isotope Lab, in the off chance they might contain enough carbon and nitrogen to allow them to estimate stable isotope ratios.

“It’s chemistry and is pretty complex,” Scott explained. “But basically, since only protein has nitrogen, the more nitrogen that is present, the more animal products were consumed as part of the diet. Carbon provides information on the types of plants consumed.”

Scott said that once at the lab, the material was crushed, and then an instrument called a mass spectrometer was used to obtain stable carbon and nitrogen isotope ratios.

“It was a long shot,” he said. “No one really thought there would be enough carbon and nitrogen in these tiny, 5- to 10- milligram samples to be measurable, but Dr. Poulson’s work revealed there was. The lab results yielded stable carbon and nitrogen isotope ratios very similar to studies that used bone collagen, which is the typical material used for this type of analysis.”

Extracting collagen requires dissolving the bone samples in multiple acid baths. It’s time-consuming, dangerous, expensive and highly destructive. Scraping off a small amount of plaque from thousand-year-old dental stalactites is quick and easy. Then all you have to do is grind it up and put it in the mass spectrometer to find the stable isotope ratios. If this procedure turns out to be repeatable and accurate, our long, scabrous history of poor dental hygiene will finally have meaning.

Archaeologists excavating the Iron Age site of Frienstedt, near Erfurt in central Germany, discovered a 5-inch wide comb with runes engraved on it. The comb dates to the 3rd century A.D., which makes the runes on it the earliest Germanic writing found in central Germany and the southernmost runes known.

Carved from deer antler, the comb was discovered in a sacrificial pit broken into pieces during an excavation that took place between 2000 and 2003. The pieces were stored for later analysis. Scientists cleaned the fragments then painstakingly put them back together to find a runic inscription spelling “kaba,” pronounced “kamba” and the equivalent of the modern German word for comb, “kamm.”

It’s apparently an important linguistic discovery because it’s an instance of a masculine word ending in “a” very early in the history of Germanic language. It’s a newly discovered step in the evolution from Proto-Germanic (spoken in the first century B.C.) and the West Germanic language family whence sprang today’s German, Dutch and parts of English.

Archaeologists have excavated about half of the Friendstedt Iron Age site. The site was occupied from the 1st to the 5th century A.D. Radiocarbon dating of pottery found in the sacrificial pit along with the comb fragments date it to right in the middle of the site’s occupation: the 3rd century A.D.

The remains discovered include inhumation graves, evidence of a center of cult worship and Roman bronze artifacts a full 125 miles from the frontier. It seems likely the bronze objects were obtained north of Roman territory and then recycled by Germanic smiths. A brooch from Gotland was also discovered on the site, testifying to local interaction with Scandinavian traders up north as well as Romano-Germans down south.

Folding stools built on a cross-frame are depicted on the walls of Egyptian tombs going back 4,000 years, and on Mesopotamian seals 500 years before that. By the time of the New Kingdom (ca. 1550-1070 B.C.), folding chairs were ubiquitous in the upper echelons of Egyptian society. Two were found in Tutankhamun’s tomb, including one with an additional back piece so elaborately decorated and inlaid it is known as his throne, and many others have been discovered in the tombs of officials such as Kha, a foreman of works at Deir El-Medina under the reign of several pharaohs.

Although the x-frame design — a pin acting as a hinge between two crossed slats with animal skin or fabric stretched across the top for a seat — is among the simplest of furniture shapes, they were symbols of status and importance to the Egyptians. They ensured that even while on the move, the big shots got to sit up higher than everyone else who had to stand or sit on the ground. In Egypt women are never depicted sitting on a folding stool (rigid stools and chairs, yes, folding stools, no), although there are murals from around the same time (16th century B.C.) in the Palace of Knossos on Crete depicting aristocratic women sitting on x-frame chairs. Through the centuries, the form continued to be used by the likes of Augustus Caesar, medieval abbesses and Ming emperors.

It’s no surprise that the Egyptian cross-frame design spread far and wide over thousands of years, but what is surprising is that the Germanic and Nordic tribes of Bronze Age Europe were making x-frame folding stools as early as 1400 B.C., in parallel with New Kingdom Egyptians. The remains of at least 20 folding stools from the Bronze Age have been found north of the Elbe River in Germany and what is now Denmark. They are locally produced, so not imports from way down south.

Some historians think the tribal artisans came up with the folding stool form independently, but archaeologists Bettina Pfaff and Barbara Grodde have a different theory: Germanic furniture makers copied Egyptian ones. They posit that the chairs are so similar to each other in design, materials and dimension that the Nordic models must have been copies of Egyptian originals.

There were extensive trade networks supplying the elites with luxury goods from Northern Europe to Greece. Objects and raw materials were transferred from one area to the next by traders through a kind of relay system. The Bronze Age folding chairs, however, don’t follow the usual pattern. You find them in Egypt and you find them in northern Europe, but you don’t find them anywhere in between.

Is it possible, then, that a northern trader made the long journey from the Baltic Sea to Egypt, stole the design and brought it back home? As farfetched as the idea might seem, it is certainly plausible. Archaeologists have recently concluded that there were long-distance scouts more than 3,000 years ago who brought tin from Germany’s Erz Mountains all the way to Sweden. They probably traveled in oxcarts on dirt roads. Such ancient caravans probably also traveled along southern routes heading toward Africa.

Scholars are also determining the dates of such knowledge transfers. Egypt became a major power under Thutmose III (1479 to 1426 B.C.), whose armies reached the borders of modern-day Turkey. This changed the flows of goods. Even the Greek mainland fell under the spell of the pharaohs.

It was precisely at this time that a messenger from the North Sea coast could have been in Egypt and copied the chair’s design onto papyrus. Starting in 1400 B.C., the stools started being made in the far north and abruptly became fashionable. It appears that every prince of the moors was suddenly determined to have one of the new thrones from the south.

Craftsmen copied the exotic chairs down to the last detail. They often used oak or ash for the frame. A particularly fine piece discovered in Bechelsdorf, in the northern German state of Schleswig-Holstein, has elaborate ornamentation, with decorative metal tassels that chime and a deerskin seat.

The only complete Nordic Bronze Age folding chair discovered thus far was discovered in 1891 from a barrow named Guldhøj (Gold Hill) near Vamdrup in Southern Jutland. Three oak coffins were found in the barrow, one looted in the Bronze Age, one belonging to a child, and the third holding a man wearing a woven jacket, leather shoes, a hat and the remnant of a mitten. Buried with him were a bronze weapon axe, a bronze dagger in a scabbard, a bronze pin, a turned wooden bowl decorated with hammered tin tacks, a box of bark, a horn spoon, and lying at his feet, a cross-frame folding stool.

The chair is made of ash wood carved with patterns inlaid with black pitch. The seat is otter skin, although only a small part of it has survived. Dendrochronological analysis of the oak coffin dates the burial to 1389 B.C. The folding chair is a little older, from the second half of the 1400s B.C. The chair and the tin-decorated bowl indicate the deceased was a man of wealth and importance.

Pfaff believes that the Egyptian-style folding stools weren’t just for temporal leaders like chieftains and princes. Many of them were discovered in “poorly furnished graves” rather than in the burials of the wealthy political elite. She thinks these people may have been spiritual leaders or medicine men, so invested with social importance but not necessarily riches.

It’s raining ancient blood, Hallelujah! A research team from Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) and the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) has found blood cells, muscle tissue, tendons, skin and hair on 31 2000-year-old obsidian knives from the ancient Cantona site in the central Mexico state of Puebla. This is the first definitive proof that human sacrifice was practiced in a Mesoamerican culture 1000 years before the Aztecs.

Ancient images showed priests using knives in blood-letting ceremonies and cuts found on bones suggested ritual dismemberment, but they couldn’t conclusively prove human sacrifice. Finding a large number of ancient knives with a variety of human tissues on them from the Cantona culture is strong evidence that there was a systematic ritualized practice of killing people.

INAH researcher Louisa Mainou first detected traces of human blood on a sacrificial knife from the site of Zethé in the state of Hidalgo, eastern Mexico, back in 1992. She continued to examine pieces archaeologists brought to the INAH lab and found more human remains, but they had to combine results from several different finds to get anything more than tiny trace material.

The set of 31 obsidian knives were found together at Cantona, an important religious center for the local pre-Hispanic culture. Mainou’s team received them from the archaeologists who excavated them two years ago. An initial examination found tiny spots on the obsidian. The knives were scanned inch by inch with a stereo microscope. They found that the spots were composed of what appeared to be blood cells, but they needed stronger technology to be sure.

They removed some test spots with different scalpels for each obsidian knife and made samples for a scanning electron microscope which could see the substances in higher magnification and analyze their chemical makeup.

With help from specialists at Mexico’s National Autonomous University, they were studied under the scanning electronic microscope and found to contain red blood cells, collagen, tendon and muscle fiber fragments.

While historical accounts from Aztec times, as well as drawings and paintings from earlier cultures, had long suggested that priests used knives and other instruments for non-life-threatening bloodletting rituals, the presence of the muscle and tendon traces indicates the cuts were deep and intended to sever portions of the victim’s body.

“These finds confirm that the knives were used for sacrifices,” Mainou said. [...]

Some knives in the test had more traces of red blood cells, while others had more skin, and others more muscle or collagen, “which suggest that each cutting tool was used for a different purpose, according to its form,” Mainou said

Like the Bolzano researchers did with the Iceman, this research team also found fibrin, a blood protein involved in the coagulation process indicating that the cutting was done on either living people or very recently deceased ones. The study also found silica, aluminum, calcium and potassium from the mineralization of the organic matter.

Otzi the Iceman never stops giving. The 5300-year-old mummy found embedded in the ice of the Ötztal Alps in 1991 has been an endless bounty of information about prehistoric man ever since. His latest gifts are red blood cells preserved in tissue around his arrow wound and hand laceration for more than 5000 years.

Blood cells degrade fairly quickly after death, and previous scans of the Iceman turned up empty. Researchers used state-of-the-art atomic force microscope technology to scan the surface of tissue samples. A tiny metal probe just a few atoms wide is dragged across the sample. Sensors attached to the probe track its movements, detecting even the smallest unevenness in the surface and creating a 3D map of it in enormously high resolution. They found cells the size and classic donut shape of healthy, recently-dried red blood cells.

They confirmed that the samples they found were red blood cells using the Raman spectroscopy method in which a laser illuminates the tissue and examination of the spectrum of the resulting scattered light identifies the molecules doing the scattering. Had the cells been pollen or some other substance, researchers would have been able to tell. Instead, the spectra revealed bands characteristic of the protein hemoglobin. They were an order of magnitude weaker than the bands you get with fresh red blood cells indicating a decrease in hemoglobin due to degradation of the cells.

The laser also found fibrin, a protein found in fresh wounds that helps blood to clot, in the sample from the arrow wound. Fibrin is only present in fresh wounds, which confirms that Otzi died shortly after being hit with the arrow instead of several days later as an earlier theory held.

Despite some degradation, the red blood cells were remarkably well-preserved.

“They really looked similar to modern-day blood samples,” said Professor Albert Zink, 46, the German head of the Institute for Mummies and the Iceman at the European Academy in Bolzano, the capital of Italy’s German-speaking Alto-Adige region.

“So far, this is the clearest evidence of the oldest blood cells,” he said by telephone, adding that the new technique might now be used to examine mummies from Egypt. [...]

“It is very interesting to see that the red blood cells can last for such a long time,” he said.

“This will also open up possibilities for forensic science and may help lead to a more precise determination of the age of blood spots in crime investigations,” he added.

Their research has been published in the Journal of the Royal Society and is available to read in full free of charge.

Whitley Castle, a.k.a. Epiacum, is a Roman fort in Northumberland close to the border with Cumbria, 12 miles south of Hadrian’s Wall. It’s also a scheduled ancient monument, a legal designation that prohibits all excavation on the site. Not even the landowners (Elaine and John Edgar of Castle Nook farm) are allowed to touch the soil. Moles, however, care not for our puny human “laws.” Moles laugh in the court’s collective peruked face and dig with impunity as deep under the fort as their little hearts desire.

Seizing the opportunity afforded by the moles’ tireless efforts, a team of 37 volunteers assembled on the site to sift carefully through the molehills for ancient artifacts under the careful supervision of English Heritage whose presence made the sifting legal and who assessed the artifacts as they were found.

Among the finds were:

A quarter-inch-long piece of rare Samian ware, tableware known as the classic Roman ceramic discovery;

A number of pottery rim fragments from Roman serving bowls and earthenware pots;

A jet bead from a Roman necklace or bracelet.

Roman pieces that had been brought to the surface by the dirt-churning vigor of the moles were found last year too, including a number of nails that confirmed the fort was not solely built out of stone but also of wood. A visitor on a guided walk stumbled on a small bronze dolphin that might have been part of a bath tap.

For now, the Roman artifacts are in the care of Paul Frodshaw, one of the directors of Epiacum Heritage Ltd, a company dedicated to the promotion and development of Epiacum. Elaine Edgar is a co-founder and one of the directors. Frodshaw will catalogue every artifact before returning them to the landowners. Edgar just this month received a £49,200 Heritage Lottery grant which Epiacum Heritage plans to use to raise the profile of the fort as a tourist attraction. The ultimate aim is to have all the artifacts the moles have unearthed be part of an on-site display.

Epiacum is the highest stone Roman fort in Britain. Its unique diamond-shaped structure once housed a garrison of about 500 Roman soldiers who were probably in charge of supervising local lead and silver mining operations. It was built at the same time as Hadrian’s Wall (ca. 122 A.D.), but the wall a dozen miles away gets thousands of visitors each year, while Epiacum, despite its unusual design, extensive remains including a civilian settlement, a bath house, some of the best preserved stone ramparts in the entire Roman Empire, not to mention the in-house mole archaeologists, goes almost entirely unnoticed.

It never really has gotten the attention it is due. Small excavations in the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries turned up a number of important artifacts like intact leather shoes, coins, pottery and altars to Apollo, Hercules, Minerva and Mithras. Nonetheless, even before it became a scheduled monument Epiacum was barely touched.

The new corporation has plans to create an interpretation center and hopefully lure tourists to the “hidden gem of the North pennines” but they’ll need to raise more funds to make it happen. They also need volunteers to help develop the site within the parameters of the scheduled ancient monument designation. For instance, volunteers can help survey the site in more detail, adding to our understanding of the fort and its occupants during its 200 or so years of habitation. If you’re interesting in volunteering, click on the Help Out page of the website and fill in the email form. Follow Epiacum Heritage’s progress on Twitter @epiacum.

Many thanks to Elaine Edgar for correcting some errors in this entry and for sharing information about Epiacum Heritage’s goals.

Another sculpture that has been idling in a museum for ages is getting new attention all of a sudden. Egyptologist Giuseppina Capriotti of the Italian National Research Council believes a statue in the Cairo Museum depicts the twin children of Mark Antony and Cleopatra, Alexander Helios and Cleopatra Selene. The sandstone statue was discovered near the temple of Hathor in Dendera on the west bank of the Nile in 1918. Cleopatra VII is known to have commissioned works in that temple, most famously a monumental pharaonic relief of herself and her son by Julius Caesar, Ptolemy XV Philopator Philometor Caesar, aka Cesarion.

The Cairo Museum bought the five-foot-tall statue but didn’t pay it a great deal of attention, thinking it a representation of the twin gods Shu and Tefnet, son and daughter of the sun god Atum-Ra.

The statue is of two nude children, one male, one female, who bear the attributes of sun and moon respectively. They have an arm over each other’s shoulders while they hold a serpent in their other hands. The coils of two snakes wind around their legs and the base of the statue.

Capriotti noticed that the boy has a sun-disc on his head,‭ ‬while the girl boasts a crescent and a lunar disc. The serpents, perhaps two cobras, would also be different forms of sun and moon, she said. Both discs are decorated with the udjat-eye, also called the eye of Horus, a common symbol in Egyptian art.

“Unfortunately the faces are not well preserved, but we can see that the boy has curly hair and a braid on the right side of the head, typical of Egyptian children. The girl’s hair is arranged in a way‬ similar to the so-called ‭m‬elonenfrisur‭ (‬melon coiffure) an elaborated hairstyle often associated with the Ptolemaic dynasty, and Cleopatra particularly,” said Capriotti.

The statue dates to between 50 and 30 B.C. Mark Antony and Cleopatra’s twins were born in 40 B.C. so the timing fits, but it’s the unusual iconographic choices which suggest this is not just a statue of Shu and Tefnet. In the Egyptian pantheon, Tefnet, the sister, wears the solar disk, but in this piece the female twin wears the crescent moon and the male wears the sun, in keeping with the Greek tradition of the female moon goddess Selene and the male incarnation of the sun, Helios.

The twins’ embrace could suggest a solar eclipse, which is significant because when Mark Antony officially recognized the twins as his children three years after their birth, the event was marked by a solar eclipse. That’s when Cleopatra changed their names from plain Cleopatra and Alexander to Cleopatra Selene and Alexander Helios.

If these are Antony and Cleopatra’s twins, it’s the first representation of the two together ever discovered. The only other image we have is of an adult Cleopatra Selene on coins minted during her reign as Queen of Mauretania. Alexander Helios does not appear to have survived into adulthood, nor his younger brother Ptolemy Philadelphus.

After their parents’ suicides, all three of Antony’s children by Cleopatra were taken to Rome by Octavian in 30 B.C. to march in his triumph as royal captives in gold chains. He handed the three of them over to his sister Octavia, Antony’s third wife, to raise. The boys disappear from the historical record, perhaps dead at Augustus’ hand, perhaps from natural causes. Cleopatra Selene, on the other hand, was married around 20 B.C. to King Juba of Mauretania, a north African client state.

By all accounts she was an accomplished and powerful ruler, working alongside her husband and maybe even bossing him around a little. It’s not often you see coins with the king on the one side and the queen on the other. She even named her son Ptolemy, in keeping with her mother’s tradition rather than the more common practice of naming sons after their fathers, or at least including some reference to the paternal line.