Two ancient embalming workshops, one for humans and one for animals, have been discovered at the necropolis of Saqqara southeast of Cairo. The workshops, found beneath a hill near the temple of the cat goddess Bastet, date to the 30th dynasty (380-343 B.C.) and the Ptolemaic dynasty (305-30 B.C.).

The workshops were rectangular in overall shape and divided into rooms that were used for different stages of the mummification process. The animal mummification workshop was made of mud and stone floors. Five stone beds were still inside the room, used to embalm the bodies of sacred animals . Mummification tools and materials were also found in the space.

The human mummification workshop had stone beds as well, albeit larger. They are 6.5 feet long by 20 inches wide. Bodies were laid out on the beds for the mummification process — the cleaning of the body, the removal of organs, the application of embalming fluids. A number of materials, including wooden stirring sticks, rolls of linens, clay pots containing nitrate salts and black resin were found in the workshop.

The team also discovered two tombs, one from the Old Kingdom, one from the New. The New Kingdom tomb belonged to an 18th Dynasty priest named Men Kheber. He died around 1400 B.C. Vividly-colored paintings in his tomb depict the deceased engaged in different functions.

Inscriptions in the Old Kingdom tomb identify its owner as Ne Hesut Ba, 5th Dynasty head scribe and priest of Horus and Maat who died in around 2400 B.C. In addition to his duties as priest and scribe, Ne Hesut Ba was in charge of digging waterways for the pharaoh. An alabaster statue depicting him was found inside a niche of the tomb, and wall paintings depict him engaged in religious rituals and activities from daily life.

Archaeologists have discovered the remains of the earliest Iron Age house in Attica at the archaeological site of Thorikos 40 miles south of Athens. The structure first emerged in a 2019 excavation that uncovered the corner of a wall. Archaeologists first thought it was the corner of a tomb, but a wider excavation found no burial, but rather a building, likely a dwelling, from the 10th or 9th century B.C.

Over the past year, the scientists continued to research the extent of the building and identified five to six rooms. In the largest room there were still numerous pebbles in association, which indicate a paved courtyard. An analysis of inorganic and organic features of the rock confirmed a use from about 950 to 825 BC.

“Existing grinding stones for grain indicate a function as a residential building. The differentiated structure of the residential building speaks for either a complex society or an already developed social hierarchy,” says [Prof. Dr. Johannes Bergemann, Director of the Archaeological Institute at the University of Göttingen]. “Scientific analyzes will show whether there was animal breeding here and whether the silver ore typical of the area was mined at this time.”

Inhabited since the 4th millennium B.C., Thorikos was an early center of mining starting from the Neolithic era, first just lead in the 3rd millennium B.C. and then silver from 1500 B.C. Mycenaean underground beehive tombs from that era have been found at the site, and there is material evidence of Mycenaean mining operations at Thorikos dating to the 12th century B.C.

Thorikos became part of the polis of Athens along with the rest of Attica in around 900 B.C., so the newly-discovered structured dates to the early years of the Athenian synoikismos, the process of combining many small polities into one powerful city-state.

With funding now secured from the Gerda Henkel Foundation, the University of Göttingen team in cooperation with the University of Ghent will be able to complete the excavation over the next two years to unearth the full extent of the building. Discoveries will then be studied and analyzed.

The excavation of the sumptuous Roman bathhouse at the Carlisle Cricket Club has unearthed two monumental statue heads believed to date to the early 3rd century. The sandstone heads are two feet high, three times bigger than life-sized. Extrapolating from the size of the heads, archaeologists believe the original statues must have been between 12 and 15 feet high. These are the first sculptures unearthed at the site.

The heads were discovered yesterday, just two days after the new dig season began by volunteers Carolyn Veit and Ruth Pearce. They were found at the edge of a cobbled Roman road. They appear to have been purposely left there, placed side-by-side on the cobbled surface of the road. They were covered in dark soil when the road fell into disuse in the 5th century.

Archaeologists believe they may have been rejected spolia (ancient building materials stripped and repurposed for later construction), left by the roadside by people looting one of the huge structures in the bathhouse complex for its building materials.

Artifacts like tiles branded with the IMP stamp and an inscription dedicated to Julia Domna underscore the connection between the bath complex and the emperor Septimius Severus who was there in 208 A.D. during his military campaign against the Caledonian tribes north of Hadrian’s Wall. One possibility is that the heads, one of which is female and the other male, may be representations of Septimius Severus and his wife Julia Domna. The female figure has thick, wavy plaits, a hairstyle Julia Domna was famous for throughout the empire. Another possibility is that the monumental statues represented deities.

Lead archaeologist Frank Giecco said they were “unique and priceless”. […]

“In 30 years of being an archaeologist I’ve never found a thing like this before.

“It’s just incredible for Carlisle. It just raises the status of this building.”

Mr Giecco said figures were not an unusual find in bathhouses “but sculptures of this size are really special”.

“You can probably count on one hand examples of this kind in Britain,” he said.

Archaeologists have discovered a group of late Nordic Bronze Age petroglyphs hidden under a thick covering of moss in Bohuslän, southwestern Sweden. Forty figures, including 13 ships, nine horses, seven people and four chariots, cover an area fifty feet wide. It is the largest find of Bronze Age petroglyphs made so far in this century.

The rock was found on pastureland at a farm in the parish of Kville. When the figures were carved 2,700 years ago, the site, now 40 feet above sea level, was on the coastline. The rock was on an island and was partially submerged. The artists must have stood on boats to carve the artwork just above the waterline. The petroglyphs would have been highly visible in the seascape.

Some of the individual carvings are notably large. One of the ships is 6.5 feet wide; one of the humans is more than three feet tall. The engravings are deeply carved, exposing the white rock and standing in sharp contrast to the grey of the background, long-since darkened to a charcoal color by the cyanobacteria in the sea water.

Archaeologists from the Foundation for Documentation of Bohuslän Rock Carvings spotted a small piece of one of the ships peering out from the thick moss cover. When they removed the moss, they found a wealth of other petroglyphs carved into the nearly vertical surface of the stone. That’s an unusual alignment; usually the petroglyphs were engraved on flatter slabs that the artists could easily climb and stand on to carve.

This orientation gave archaeologists the ability to date the work with more precision than is usually possible. Because we know what sea level was at different periods, the rock art cannot have been carved before the 8th century B.C. when the stone emerged from the lowering waters. If it was carved after the 7th century, the artists would have had to use ladders to reach the rock face, and carving in straight lines for meters while on a ladder/platform is prohibitively challenging, if not impossible.

The province of Bohuslän on the rocky coast of southwestern Sweden consists of more than 8000 islands and islets. More than 1,500 rock art sites, the largest concentration of Bronze Age rock art in Scandinavia, have been documented there, and that is a fraction of the estimated total. Historically most of the focus has been on the art found on the more grand cliffs and outcroppings as documenting all of the rock carvings was deemed an impossible goal. The Foundation for Documentation of Bohuslän Rock Carvings has been working for more than 20 years to seek out previously unknown petroglyphs and to document them in a systematic way.