Archaeologists excavating the medieval ghost city of Dongola in Sudan have discovered a previously unknown complex of rooms covered with Christian wall paintings that are unique on the archaeological record. They include depictions of a Nubian king bowing to Christ while under the protective embrace of the Archangel Michael. This scene has no parallels in Nubian art.

Located on the east bank of the Nile, Dongola was built in the 5th century as a heavily fortified citadel. It became the capital of the Coptic kingdom of Makuria in the mid-6th century and prospered mightily thanks to trade agreements with Muslim Egypt. The city grew, expanding well beyond the original defensive walls of the citadel, reaching its economic, artistic and religious zenith between the 9th and 11th centuries. Makuria became one of the most important states in medieval Africa until its conquest by the Mamluk Sultan of Egypt in the 14th century. After that, the process of urbanization ground to a halt and Dongola contracted. It was finally abandoned in the 18th century.

There are more than a dozen churches in Dongola and two monasteries within the expanded urban periphery. The Monastery of the Holy Trinity is notable for its unique wall paintings dating to the city’s heyday in the 11th-13th century. More than 100 paintings adorn its walls, depicting Jesus, Mary, the Apostles, angels, saints and scenes from the Old and New Testaments.

The newly-discovered wall paintings are not in any of the churches or monasteries. They were found under private homes from the Funj period (16th-19th c.)

The paintings within it showed the Mother of God, Christ, as well as a scene depicting a Nubian king, Christ, and Archangel Michael. However, this was not a typical representation of a Nubian ruler under the protection of saints or archangels. The king bows to Christ, who is seated in the clouds, and kisses his hand. The ruler is supported by Archangel Michael, whose spread wings shield both the king and Christ himself. Such a scene finds no parallels in Nubian painting. The dynamism and intimacy of the representation contrasts with the hieratic nature of the figures shown on the side walls. Neither does the figure of the Virgin Mary on the north wall of the chamber belong to the typical repertoire of depictions of Mary in Nubian art. The Mother of God, shown in a dignified pose, is dressed in dark robes. In her hands she holds a cross and a book. Christ is depicted on the opposite wall. His right hand is shown in a gesture of blessing, and in His left he holds a book, which is fragmentarily preserved.

The paintings are accompanied by inscriptions currently studied by Dr. Agata Deptuła from PCMA UW. A preliminary reading of the Greek inscriptions has led to their identification as texts of the Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts. An inscription in Old Nubian that accompanies the main scene is extremely difficult to decipher. Thanks to a preliminary reading by Dr. Vincent van Gerven Oei, the researchers learned that it contains several mentions of a king named David and a plea to God for protection of the city. The city mentioned in the inscription is probably Dongola, and King David is likely the royal figure depicted in the scene. David was one of the last rulers of Christian Makuria, and his reign marked the beginning of the end of the kingdom. For reasons unknown, King David attacked Egypt, which retaliated by invading Nubia and, as a result, Dongola was sacked for the first time in its history. Maybe the painting was created as the Mamluk army was approaching the city or already laying siege to it?

The biggest puzzle, however, is the complex of rooms in which the paintings were found. The spaces themselves, covered with vaults and domes and made of dried brick, are quite small. The room with the painted scene showing king David resembles a crypt, but it is 7 meters above the medieval ground level. The building is adjacent to a sacral building identified as the Great Church of Jesus, which was probably the cathedral of Dongola and the most important church of the kingdom of Makuria. Arab sources recounting King David’s attack on Egypt and the capture of the port of Aidhab and Aswan, maintain that this act was instigated by the Great Church of Jesus. Did the Archbishop of Dongola, much like Pope Urban II, incite King David to launch a crusade?

When the excavation came to end last month, the immediate priority was the conservation of the fragile wall paintings. Sections of plaster had detached from the walls and needed to be re-adhered, a challenging job in the confined spaces of the room complex in the hot temperatures of March in Sudan. Conservators from the Polish Centre of Mediterranean Archaeology, University of Warsaw, and the Department of Conservation and Restoration of Works of Art of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw worked together to stabilize the wall paintings, injecting putties in the gaps behind the plaster and preserving the paint on the plaster itself. The complex of rooms will be excavated further when the dig season resumed in the fall.

Ivory bag rings discovered in Anglo-Saxon women’s graves have been identified as elephant ivory from contemporary African elephants. A new study published in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports has taken a multi-disciplinary approach to examine the ivory and narrow down its origin.

Bag rings have been unearthed in the graves of high-status Anglo-Saxon women in more than 70 cemeteries across England ranging in date from the late 5th to the 7th century A.D. (Ivory rings of around the same date have been found in graves in northern Germany, but far fewer of them than in England.) They are placed at the hip and originally formed the opening of an organic bag worn at the waist along with other objects (tools, knives, girdle hangers).

The rings were smoothed and polished to a high shine and reconstructions based on traces of textile remains indicate the bags hung off the rings so that the ivory was visible. Ivory was a rare and expensive material in early Anglo-Saxon England. Showing it off would have been a conspicuous display of wealth and status.

The source of the ivory for the bag rings has been subject of scholarly debate since they were first discovered in the 19th century. Elephant ivory was not seen as a likely candidate because the trade in African and Asian elephant ivory was believed to have ground to a halt with the fall of the western Roman Empire. Walrus ivory was the dominant source in the later Anglo-Saxon era. Prehistoric mammoth ivory was another possibility. The bag rings are circular and of a larger diameter than the oval, narrow walrus tusks, however, and in several instances, radiocarbon dating of the rings contradicted the mammoth hypothesis.

Between 2017 and 2019, an excavation of an Anglo-Saxon cemetery in Scremby, Lincolnshire, unearthed 49 inhumations, seven of them containingi the remains of adult females with circular ivory rings at their hips. Researchers have undertaken a multidisciplinary analysis of five of the rings from the Scremby burials in the hopes of pinpointing the origin of the ivory. Radiocarbon dating was employed to confirm the era of the elephantid species, Zooarchaeology by Mass Spectrometry (ZooMS) to distinguish between Asian and African elephantid species and strontium isotope analysis to determine where the animals lived at the time the tusks were formed.

Radiocarbon dating found that the ivory was roughly contemporaneous with the burials, dating between 428 and 598 A.D. This rules out mammoths, the last of which had died out in Siberia 2,500 years before that. ZooMS identified the Scremby ivories as African elephant. Strontium isotope analysis narrowed down the probable biosphere range of the elephants to the East African Rift Valley in what are now Kenya and Ethiopia.

Armed with this information, researchers believe the elephant ivory was traded by the Kingdom of Aksum in what is now Eritrea. The powerful kingdom had dominated trade in the Red Sea after the fall of Rome, and archaeological evidence of ivory working as late as the 6th century has been found at Aksum sites. The lack of ivory waste at Anglo-Saxon sites indicates the rings were manufactured elsewhere and imported into England. Aksum’s ivory trade declined in the 7th century with the Islamic conquests in North Africa and African ivory was rerouted to China and India where demand was high. In addition to a sharp decline in the supply of elephant ivory rings, the shift in funerary practices as Anglo-Saxons became increasingly Christianized may have decreased demand, a combination that led to disappearance of African elephant ivory bag rings on the archaeological record in the 7th century A.D.

The Gokstad ship is the largest preserved Viking ship in Norway and contains an unparalleled quantity and quality of Viking shields. The image of rows of round shields mounted to the exterior of a Viking longship springs directly from the Gokstad discovery.

The Gokstad ship burial was discovered in 1880 on a farm near Sandefjord, Vestfold, southeastern Norway. The burial mound had been looted for its valuable gold, silver, jewelry and armaments hundreds of years earlier, but the 9th century clinker-built ship was virtually intact, its wood components and contents preserved for a thousand years in the cold, wet soil. The oak timber ship was 76 feet long and 17 feet wide with 16 oar holes on each side of the hull. There was room enough for about 70 people inside. The remains of many wooden treasures which meant nothing to looters but were precious to archaeologists were discovered in the excavation: furniture, a game board, six beds and 64 shields (one for each of the crew, perhaps?).

Wear and tear on the oar ports and the recently-discovered evidence of the youthful footprint carved into the deck indicate the ship was an actual seafaring vessel in active use for at least a decade. It was retired still in working order to serve as a burial for the deceased who must have been of very high status to warrant so fine a conveyance to his final destination.

The ship and its associated archaeological material have been in Oslo’s Viking Ship Museum since 1932. While much scholarship has been done of the ship since it was first published by Norwegian archaeologist Nicolay Nicolaysen in 1882, the shields have been somewhat neglected. Nicolaysen listed them in his publication and included a hypothetical rendering of the ship with its shields, but there has been no in depth research on the material remains of the shields themselves. A few shields were patched together from surviving parts purely for display purposes, but that’s pretty much it.

The conventional interpretation of the Gokstad ship shields was that they were ceremonial, which is a bit of a fall-back for archaeological artifacts that have no obvious function. Researchers reexamined the shields for the first time in 2019, investigating their construction and shaping for a new reconstruction, and assessing the materials used as a first step in a later comprehensive investigation.

The study found that the shields were made of tapered wooden planks around a hemispherical central iron boss. On the other side of the boss was a wooden handle (only one of the Gokstad shields’ handles has survived). The shields were painted either yellow or black so when mounted overlapping each other on the ship’s side, they would have looked like alternating yellow and black half-moons. They were fastened to the side of the ship with a cord run through the handles.

Organic residue on the planks and perforations around the rim of the shields indicate they were probably covered with rawhide, processed and stretched so that it was as thin as parchment allowing the painted wood to show through. The rawhide would have formed a protective layer to strengthen shields in combat. Some notches and marks on the shield bosses may also be evidence they were used in combat, not just hung on the ship in the burial ceremony or to make it look more threatening as a war vessel.

The study has been published in the journal Arms & Armour and may be read in its entirety here.

The Sandomierz chessmen, a chess set from the 12th or 13th century discovered at Sandomierz Castle in southeastern Poland, were made from the bones of horses, cows and deer, DNA analysis has revealed. They were originally believed to have been carved from deer antlers, or the bones of an exotic large animal like an elephant.

University of Warsaw researchers were able to drill small samples from the underside of the pieces and extract an almost complete mitochondrial genome identifying the more elaborately decorated side of the set as having been made from horse bone while its opponents were made from cow bones. One pawn (believed to have been carved later than the others) was made from the bone of a red deer.

The chessmen were discovered in 1962 during archaeological excavations of what had been the heart of the medieval city. Only about 50 medieval chess pieces have been found in Poland, but most of them were individual finds. The Sandomierz chessmen, on the other hand, compose a practically complete matched set with only three missing pieces.

The pieces were carved by hand, ground down and polished to a gloss. It’s possible one side was originally dyed or painted another color, but all traces of that are gone so today they’re both just plain bone-colored. Some of them were created in twos, connected by a base that was then cut apart to separate the individual pieces. Carved in the abstract style typical of medieval Islamic chess sets in keeping with the religious prohibition against realistic depiction of human figures, they were embellished with incised parallel lines and dot-and-circle markings carved using a compass.

The Gothic-style Sandomierz Castle was built by King Casimir III the Great in the 14th century. All that remains of that castle today are some of the foundations of the tower. (The rest was blown up in the 17th century by Swedish troops during the Deluge.) It was preceded by an earlier stronghold dating to the 10th century. In the 12th century, the castle was the seat of Henry I of Sandomierz, Piast dynasty prince and son of Boleslaus III, ruler of Poland. Henry led the Polish troops in the Second Crusade (1147) and returned again to the Holy Land in the 1150s.

At the time of the find, archaeologists believe that Henry may have brought the chessmen back from his travels in the Middle East, but the DNA evidence that they were carved from the bones of native European animals opens other possibilities, even as it cannot conclusively determine where they were manufactured. For example, they could have been brought to the city by Dominican friars from Italy — the find site was next to the Dominican church of St. Joseph’s, founded in 1226 — or via the trade routes connecting Kiev to Western Europe. They could even be locally produced. The incised lines and compass decorations have been found on other early Polish antler and bone products.