The History Blog

The United States is returning a beautifully painted 21st Dynasty wooden sarcophagus to Egypt. Customs officials confiscated the coffin from a Spanish national at Miami International Airport in 2008 when they found it had no documentation of ownership.

They contacted the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities in October 2008 to let them know that they had the piece in custody. Since it had been shipped from Spain with the likely intent of selling it in the US without documentation, they figured (correctly) that it had been smuggled out of Egypt illegally at some point.

Egypt immediately provided documentation of their ownership of the coffin, but the Spanish dealer shamelessly refused to relinquish it until Zahi Hawass filed a suit against him in a US court.

The coffin of Imesy, a beautifully ornate piece with colorful religious scenes painted on it, had been a piece the council had been demanding be returned.

Zahi Hawass, the SCA Secretary-General said last year that the coffin likely belongs to pharaoh Ames from the 21st Dynasty, which ruled Egypt from 1070-945 BC.

A US investigation found that it was likely smuggled out of Egypt after 1970 (the dividing line established by the UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property), kept underground for a few decades, only to surface in an exhibit in Madrid in 2007. The dealer who shipped it to Miami apparently has family ties with the owner of the Egyptian museum in Barcelona.

According to Hawass’ statement, the sarcophagus was first smuggled out of Egypt in 1884. It’s always challenging to pinpoint the movement of looted artifacts. That’s one of the many reasons looting sucks. David Gill at Looting Matters looks at the smuggling trajectory of the coffin, especially the Spanish connection.

The sarcophagus is scheduled to be returned officially in a gala ceremony on March 10th in Washington, D.C. Zahi Hawass, of course, will be there with bells on.

A dramatic find of stone tools dating to at least 130,000 years ago on the island of Crete has revolutionized assumptions about how long humans have been navigating the seas.

Crete has been surrounded by sea for five million years or so, and no human species evolved independently on the island, so the tools found there have to have been wielded by people who got there by crossing the water.

Many researchers have hypothesized that the early humans of this time period were not capable of devising boats or navigating across open water. But the new discoveries hint that these human ancestors were capable of much more sophisticated behavior than their relatively simple stone tools would suggest.

“I was flabbergasted,” said Boston University archaeologist and stone-tool expert Curtis Runnels. “The idea of finding tools from this very early time period on Crete was about as believable as finding an iPod in King Tut’s tomb.”

Archaeologists went to Crete expecting to find stone tools from 11,000 years or so ago, but instead found stone axes hewn from local quartz that looked much like tools carved by our ancestors — possibly Homo heidelbergensis — in Africa and Europe 175,000 years ago.

They combed the island and found over 30 more of the hand axes, plus some other stone tools from the same time frame at 9 different locations on the coast. As time had moved what were once beaches up from the shore into what are now terraces, the tools moved with them.

Geologists date the earliest of these hand axe-having terraces to 130,000 years ago. The youngest is at least 45,000 years old.

The number, ages and locations of the tools suggest that these weren’t the remnants of the occasional lost-at-sea-clinging-to-a-log castaway. For people to get to Crete repeatedly over a hundred thousand years or so, they had to make a point of it.

Maps of the coastal shelves suggest that even when the Mediterranean reached its lowest known point, plummeting some 440 feet (144 meters) below current sea level, people leaving from Turkey or Greece would have had to make three separate water crossings ranging from 12 to 24 miles (19 to 39 kilometers) each to reach Crete. If, on the other hand, the seafarers departed from Africa, they would have voyaged over 125 miles (200 kilometers) of open water.

“The fact that we have several hundred stone tools in nine different locations suggests that a large enough number of people came in order to sustain the populations and leave a visible archaeological trace,” Runnels said. “That means they didn’t just raft over once.”

This assumes the artifacts are in fact hand axes and that they have been dated correctly, of course. Other archaeologists urge caution in accepting the new data until we have some confirmation, like for instance a Cretan site where the axes might have been produced and duplicated radiocarbon dating results.

That’s the title of an exhibit opening today at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia. Created in partnership with Italy’s Ministry of Cultural Heritage & Activities and Contemporanea Progetti of Florence, this exhibit traces the connections between the myths, ideals, culture, government, military of the nascent US republic and the Roman Republic.

Three hundred Ancient Roman and post-Revolutionary artifacts illustrate how much the founding of America owes to Rome, culturally and politically. There are items in the exhibit that I’ve never seen — like a bronze eagle from a standard of the Roman legions — and I grew up in Rome.

The new republic (from res publica, literally “public thing” or “public affair”) was a dangerous undertaking, Winterer says, and all parties knew it. “They examined Rome and its history as if it were a cadaver at an autopsy,” she says. “And they examined it closely. They asked: ‘What worked? What should we do? What mistakes should we avoid?’ “

Grey says that “the founders deliberately appropriated images, themes and language from Rome to build up their self-image.” People had their portraits painted in Roman dress. They aspired to the dignity and grandeur of the world’s most famous republic.

This is why you find so many delicious anachronisms in D.C. like a statue of George Washington half nekkid in a toga.

That cultural bond with ancient Rome continued for the first century of the United States’ life. Roman style informed US architecture, school curriculums, statuary, even the government itself with its elected representatives and a strong but revolving executive.

These links to Rome are so ubiquitous they’ve almost become white noise. The aim of this exhibit is to renew consciousness of the Roman roots of our Republic.

The exhibit is divided into three parts (like all of Gaul!). The first section is “Building a Republic” and looks at the beginnings of both the Roman and the American republics. Roman artifacts are displayed along with early (and even some contemporary) US artifacts, like Roman gladiator helmet juxtoposed with a helmet worn by Philadelphia Eagles receiver Harold Carmichael.

The second section, “A Classical Revival,” presents Roman arts and culture through Pompeiian artifacts and how they influenced American arts and culture. The third section is called “Expansion and Empire” and displays artifacts from the post-Republican empire that Rome became, comparing its growth to that of the United States from the original 13 colonies to the Manifest Destiny expansion across the continent.

The Constitution Center’s website has a nice overview of the exhibit. They call it a walkthrough but it’s not as comprehensive as the name suggests. Still, it gives a tantalizing glimpse into the artifacts on display.

Here’s a quick YouTube about the 18th and 19th century American affinity for ancient Rome by Stanford associate professor of history Caroline Winterer who helped craft the exhibit.

Researchers published in the journal Science have dusted off fossils uncovered 40 years ago by the Marion Bonner family in western Kansas and found a new genus of giant plankton-eating bony fish among them.

Filter-feeding fish known as pachycormids were previously thought to have been a brief phase in evolutionary history, appearing 170 million years ago and then leaving the scene until whales, sharks and rays stepped into the niche 56 million years ago.

The new finds suggest that instead the pachycormids were a hugely successful species who set up shop in oceans all over the world from 170 million years ago until 65 million years ago, when the K-T extinction event that killed the dinosaurs killed them (and most everything else on earth) too.

Co-author Kenshu Shimada, a research associate in paleontology at the Sternberg Museum of Natural History, told Discovery News that one of the fish he and his colleagues identified, Bonnerichthys, grew to around 20 feet in length and swam through a seaway covering what is today the state of Kansas. [...]

For the study, led by University of Oxford scientist Matt Friedman, the researchers analyzed both old and new fish fossils found in England, the U.S. and Japan. The Kansas fish was previously thought to have been like a gigantic swordfish, bearing fang-like teeth on its jawbones.

“However, our close examination of the specimen showed that such a long snout and fang-like teeth were not present in the fish,” Shimada said. “Rather, with a blunt massive head, the fish had long toothless jawbones and long gill-supporting bones that are characteristic of plankton-feeding fishes.”

The European Jurassic species Leedsichthys was even larger at 30 feet. Their huge mouths were an asset in keeping their even huger bodies fed off tiny plankton. Like baleen whales today, pachycormids opened their mouths wide and gulped as much water as they could, filtering the plankton-packed water through its gills.

There’s some great background on the fossil-hunting Bonner family in this article.

Over the seven decades that Marion climbed and combed the chalk buttes; and over the four decades his children accompanied him, the Bonners helped science immeasurably. They were resourceful and careful; when they found unusual-looking bones, they gave them to scientists and let them take published credit for the scientifically described “discoveries.”

Their discoveries lay now in museums in Kansas, Chicago, Los Angeles and elsewhere. Grateful scientists named discoveries after the family: A few invertebrates. Pecten bonneri, a small-fin fish, pterandon bonneri, a flying reptile, niobrarateuthis bonneri, an ancient squid, found by Melanie.

This is their first genus, though.

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Using the latest radiological and genetic techniques, a team of researchers from Egypt, Germany and Italy have determined that the boy pharaoh King Tutankhamun most likely died of malaria and a degenerative bone disease which also forced him to walk using canes, 130 of which (some with signs of wear) were found in his tomb.

The study, reported Tuesday, turned up no evidence of foul play, as had been suspected by some historians and popular writers familiar with palace intrigues in ancient Egypt. Previous examinations of the Tut mummy had revealed a recent leg fracture, possibly from a fall. This might have contributed to a life-threatening condition in an immune system already weakened by malaria and other disorders, the researchers said. [...]

The researchers said that several other pathologies were diagnosed in the Tut mummy, including a bone disorder known as Kohler disease II, which alone would not have caused death. But he was also afflicted with avascular bone necrosis, a condition in which diminished blood supply to the bone leads to serious weakening or destruction of tissue. The finding led to the team’s conclusion that it and malaria were the most probable causes of death.

Three other of mummies tested also had genetic traces of malaria tropica, the most virulent form of the disease, and several mummies shared a variety of genetic disorders like cleft palates, club feet and flat feet.

The mummies all seem to have been related to Tut. One was his father, Akhenaten, another his mother, Tiye, a third his grandmother, all of whom shared Tut’s blood group. The genetic testing indicates that Akhenaten and Tiye were siblings, and it’s thought Tut and his queen were also brother and sister, so it’s no surprise they are so many genetic disorders in the family.

There are more details about the methodology of the testing in this Scientific American article.

The Discovery Channel will be showing a two-part documentary of this study called “King Tut Unwrapped” on Sunday and Monday. You can see some clips of the shows on TDC’s website.

The ship itself seems to have disintegrated over the past 3000 years, but its cargo of, among other things, 27 tin ingots, 259 copper ingots and 3 gold wrist torcs has stayed where it went down 300 feet from the Devon shore.

Other Bronze Age wrecks have been found in the area, but they left just a few dozen artifacts. This one carried such a huge cargo from all over Europe that it suggests an extensive trade network between England and the continent a thousand years before Christ.

Archaeologists believe the ship would have been large for the period, a bulk carrier of Bronze Age metal trade goods, about 40 feet long and 6 feet wide, manned by a crew of 15 and powered by paddles.

Archaeologists believe it would have been able to cross the Channel directly between Devon and France to link into European trade networks, rather than having to travel along the coast to the narrower crossing between modern day Dover and Calais.

Although the vessel’s cargo came from as far afield as southern Europe, it is unlikely it would have been carried all the way in the same craft, but in a series of boats, undertaking short coastal journeys.

This amazing find was made last year by amateur divers with a love of history from the South West Maritime Archaeological Group. They brought the recovered ingots to Dr. Peter Northover of the University of Oxford who analyzed several of the ingots.

Based on the composition of two of the copper ingots (low level of impurities and high sulfur content) he determined they were typical of Late Bronze Age copper ingots, most likely from the Ewart Park period, ca 10th-9th century B.C.

The flat tin ingots are also from Late Bronze Age, but the 9 kg (20 lb) one is far larger than any British ingot from the period. Though it is thought that Bronze Age Britons mined their own tin during this era, they did not melt that much metal at a time.

An appeals court in Pesaro, Italy, has ruled that the Greek bronze known as the Victorious Youth should be confiscated from the Getty Museum in Malibu and returned to Italy. This ruling comes as a surprise and not just to the Getty. Previous rulings on the ownership of the statue have all come down on the side of the Getty due to the nebulous circumstances of the bronze’s discovery and sale.

The life-size statue was fished out of the Adriatic off the coast of Fano in 1964. The fishermen never declared it to customs officials as required by law. Instead they buried it in a cabbage patch before selling it to Italian middlemen that same year for a measly $5,600. They hid it in a priest’s bathtub then smuggled it out of the country into the hands of dealer Elie Borowski in Switzerland, who in turn sold it to the Artemis Consortium. The Getty bought it 13 years later for $3.9 million.

The statue is thought to be from the 2nd or 3rd century B.C., possibly from the workshop of the great Greek sculptor Lyssipos, who was Alexander the Great’s court sculptor and the teacher of Chares of Lindos, the artist who built the Colossus of Rhodes. It is one of very few extant Greek bronzes. Most of what we have are Roman copies.

Italian prosecutors have tried to retrieve it for 40 plus years. In 1966 they prosecuted the Italian middlemen and the priest. They were convicted but their convictions were reversed on appeal in 1970 due to insufficient evidence. The statue itself was still in the shadowy antiquities underground at this point, so the prosecution didn’t even have stolen goods as evidence.

Most recently a case in 2007 prosecuted by Francesco Rutelli (who also prosecuted today’s case) was dismissed by the same Pesaro court who ruled in his favor today. It was a different judge though, and he ruled that the statute of limitations had expired, that since the fishermen were long dead there was no longer anyone to prosecute, and that the Getty had purchased the bronze in good faith.

So what changed, you asked? Some recent news cast serious doubt on the Getty’s good faith. An article in the LA Times last month pointed to a shady series of correspondence over the purchase of the bronse.

“It is clearly understood by us that no commitment is to be made by me on your behalf for the Greek Bronze until certain legal questions are clarified,” wrote Met director Thomas Hoving to Getty in a June 1973 letter. Hoving promised that the Met’s attorneys would talk with Italian officials to clarify the circumstances under which the statue had left Italy and whether the Italians were still pursuing a legal claim, records show.

The Met’s antiquities curator, Dietrich von Bothmer, raised legal concerns of his own, warning Hoving that the 1970 acquittal “does not permit the legal conclusion that the statue was . . . legally exported from Italy.”

In his acquisition proposal to the Met’s board, Von Bothmer wrote, “I recommend that legal opinions be solicited as to the possibility that a foreign government may at a later time, especially after publication of the statue, claim it as ‘artistic patrimony.’ “

The deal fell through for reasons neither the Met nor the Getty will discuss. After John Paul Getty died in 1976, however, the museum bought the statue for more than JP had offered and without the legal assurances from the Italian government that JP had required. Instead they just took the word of the dealers’ lawyers, which, let’s face it, is worth pretty much nothing.

Anyway, nasty horsetrading shenanigans aside, the legal questions surrounding the find remain thorny and the precedent of several failed cases is on the Getty’s side. The Getty said in a statement that they would pursue the case to Italy’s highest court. Given the glacial pace of the Italian legal system, the Victorious Youth won’t be leaving the Getty Villa in Malibu any time soon.

DNA testing performed on a 4000-year-old tuft of hair and bone chips embedded in the Greenland permafrost has overturned conventional wisdom on how the Arctic regions were settled and by whom.

The hair and bone are the only human remains ever found of the Saqqaq culture who lived on the coast of Greenland from around 2,500 B.C. until they petered out around 800 B.C.

University of Copenhagen researcher Eske Willerslev led a team that exhaustively analysed the precious Qeqertasussuk find.

They teased out nearly 80 percent of the genetic code and identified 353,151 single variations in DNA that are telltale signs of body characteristics.

“What we can see from the genomic data is a number of traits,” Willerslev told journalists in a teleconference.

“For example, we can see the guy had most likely brown eyes, brown skin, he had shovel-form front teeth and he had dry earwax, which increased the chance of getting infection in the ear,” said Willerslev.

“We can also see that he had a tendency to baldness and because we found quite a lot of hair from this guy we presume he actually died quite young, and we can see he was genetically adapted to cold temperatures, living in the Arctic.”

Previously anthropologists thought Greenland was settled by people whose ancestors had crossed the Bering Strait via the Beringia land bridge 15,000 years ago then moved south, eventually reaching as far as the tip of South America, or from the second New World migration 6,000 to 8,000 years ago by the ancestors of western Native Americans in the Na-Dene language group.

But in fact Inuk’s DNA sequence indicates that Greenland — the Neolithic Saqqaq part of it anyway — seems to have been settled by direct descendants of Siberians who crossed the Bering Strait either by kayak or by walking over winter ice and then kept going east. This is solid evidence of a third New World migration, something that linguistic analysis has only hinted at before.

The technique used to extract DNA from Inuk’s fallen tufts was actually pioneered on mammoth hairs. It’s unlikely that a clean sample of DNA can be extracted from even relatively well-preserved tissues like bone or mummified skin because they’re highly susceptible to fungal and bacterial contamination.

Now that we know enough about the human genome that we can pinpoint things like ancient people’s ear wax problems, there’s a whole new world of historical discoveries to be found in preserved hair.

Five years ago excavations in the UK city of Colchester uncovered what archaeologists at first thought was an oddly wide road, but then quickly realized was actually a 2nd century A.D. chariot racing circus. This was a major discovery. Not only is it the only Roman circus ever found in the UK, but it’s the only one north of the Alps.

Nothing remains above ground except stones taken for later building, but for almost 2,000 years the 350m outline has remained remarkably intact, under fields and 19th-century army land. The stable blocks that held up to 2,500 horses for a day’s racing may lie under derelict Victorian cavalry stables and barracks. [...]

Since then CAT has traced long stretches of the perimeter, which had banked seats holding up to 15,000 people. In the central reservation they found bases of start and finish posts, and water pipes proving the circus was grand enough to have the elaborate fountain lap markers shown in Roman mosaics.

They also found scraps of beautifully decorated carriage harness right up against the wall – evidence of an F1 style crash when a driver lost control of his team and spun off into the barrier.

The remains were reburied for their protection. Unfortunately, they are located underneath said Victorian army barracks, gardens and public roads, so unless the community can raise £200,000 ($312,000) by the end of February to buy the Victorian garden site from developers, the circus will remain underground and be built upon.

Then they have to come up with another £550,000 ($860,000) to buy the barracks building itself. They tried to get a million pound grant from Heritage Lottery Foundation, but despite the international importance and rarity of the site, the bid was refused. It was just too high a price, ultimately. The HLF could fund tons of smaller projects for that money.

If they are able to buy the site, the next step will be to build a vistor center on the grounds of the barracks, right next to the starting gates of the circus. The boundaries and divider of the track will then be built up into knolls so the entire area can be walked and people can get a sense of the size of the structure, which in its heyday accommodated 15,000 fans.

Go to the Save Colchester’s Roman Circus blog for more news about the fundraising appeal and to donate to the cause.

St. Antony’s Monastery was founded by followers of the saint in 356 A.D. right after he died. Although St. Antony founded several monasteries during his lifetime, none of those survive today.

The monastery, only a mile and a quarter away from the cave over the Red Sea where St. Antony lived his extraordinarily long and ascetic life, is the oldest active Christian monastery in the world, and has just been reopened to the public after an 8-year, $14.5 million restoration.

In the government-sponsored project, workers renovated the fortress-like ancient wall surrounding the monastery and the walls of its two main churches — the 14th century Church of the Apostles and the 6th century Church of St. Anthony. They also renovated monks’ quarters and a 6th century tower into which monks would retreat during attacks by marauding Bedouin tribes throughout the Middle Ages. [...]

Amid the renovations, archaeologists from the American Research Center in Egypt discovered the remains of the original monks’ cells dating back to the 4th century under the Church of the Apostles. After they were excavated, archeologists in 2008 covered them with thick glass so that visitors to the church can see them below their feet. ARCE also renovated stucco paintings in Church of St. Anthony.

The wall paintings had been obscured by years of accumulated soot, candle grease, oil and dust. The oldest of these paintings date to the 7th and 8th centuries, and are attributed to a Coptic master artist known as Theodore. The others are from the 13th century and while we don’t know who the artist was, they appear to be Byzantine in style.

The monastery complex also includes a library with 1700 handwritten documents. There used to be many more, but the Bedouin who sacked the monastery in 1454 used them as fuel for their fires.

The reopening comes at a crucial time in Egyptian sectarian politics. A shooter opened fire in a church on Orthodox Christmas Eve (December 6th) killing seven people. Zahi Hawass emphasized during the unveiling of the monastery renovation that the shooting was a criminal act that can happen “between two brothers”, that Egypt was as committed to protecting its Coptic and Jewish heritage as it is committed to its Muslim heritage.