The oldest coin is from around the year 610. The most recent coin has been dated back to roughly 820 AD.

“The discovery of Arabic coins at the coast of the Baltic sea proves that there was global trade more than 1,200 years ago,” said Greifswald historian Fred Ruchhoeft.

The coins were minted in regions belonging to modern-day Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan or northern Africa. They are thought to have reached Northern Europe via trading routes along the Black Sea, the Dnieper river and the Volga, before reaching the Baltic sea.

The find is near a former Slavic settlement, and gives new information about the importance of the region, in Pomerania, during the early Middle Ages.

Anklan is on the Peene river, a bustling source of trade for the Slavic settlement. The Viking town of Menzlin — a hub of trade with both east and west — was right next door. The Vikings traded with the Arabs and the Slavs, so they could have been the means by which Arabic coins ended up in Pomerania. Alternatively, Arabic traders could have made their way directly or Slavic traders might have returned from a voyage bearing Arabic currency.

The coins wouldn’t have had the monetary value they carried in their lands of origin. Their value would have been purely the weight of the silver, which is why coin fragments were found. People cut them up to trade as silver pieces. The full weight of the silver in the cache was 200 grams. That would have been the price of 4 oxen or 1 human slave.

It’s like The 13th Warrior only not really, really stupid.

The anchor logo visible on the intact corks suggested that the champage cargo was from an early run of Veuve-Clicquot, possibly sent by ship from King Louis XVI to the Russian imperial court of Catherine the Great. Those initial reports are still possible, but experts from Veuve-Clicquot now think that the champagne came from another high-end brand, long since defunct. That expands the potential date range to the early 1800s.

Because the corks still retained a trace of an anchor logo, experts at first thought the champagne might have come from the historic Veuve-Clicquot estate, still one of the world’s top brands of bubbly.

After inspecting and trying a sample of the perfectly preserved vintage, the firm however said at the beginning of August it was in fact from the now defunct Juglar house.[...]

Veuve-Clicquot’s chief cellarman Dominique Demarville, one of a tiny number of people who has been allowed to taste a few millilitres of the find, estimated that the wine dated from the first third of the 19th century.

This means it is not clear whether it is the oldest champagne ever drunk, as an 1825 Perrier-Jouet was tasted by experts in London last year.

You can see video footage of the divers recovering the champagne bottles from the wreck in this BBC story. Once all the champagne is salvaged, experts will be able to make more precise assessments. They’ll have plenty of time to examine the haul since Aaland authorities haven’t yet decided what they’ll do with the champagne.

Meanwhile, divers found another potential oldest drinkable beverage from another part of the same shipwreck. This time it’s 200-year-old beer still sealed in its bottles. One of the bottles exploded from the pressure when they brought it to the surface and they saw a dark liquid seeping out, so they knew it wasn’t champagne.

“At the moment, we believe that these are by far the world’s oldest bottles of beer,” Rainer Juslin, permanent secretary of the island’s ministry of education, science and culture, told CNN on Friday via telephone from Mariehamn, the capital of the Aland Islands.

“It seems that we have not only salvaged the oldest champagne in the world, but also the oldest still drinkable beer. The culture in the beer is still living.”

Juslin said officials had talked to a local brewer about whether the new-found beer might be able to yield its recipe after experts decipher the brew’s ingredients.

The cold (water remains a constant 4-5 degrees Celsius, 39-41 degrees Fahrenheit) and dark conditions of the Baltic make it an outstanding long-term cooler. The beer was still foaming when it leaked from the broken bottle, and some of the crew couldn’t resist taking a wee drappie.

The previous record-holder for oldest beer dates from 1869, so even if the shipwreck does turn out to be from the third decade of the 19th century, the beer will retain a world record that the champagne might have to give up.

It’s the only Roman lamp of its kind ever found in the UK. The British Museum has some fragments of similar lamps, but the only other place a lamp so complete has been uncovered is in Pompeii.

Conservator at Colchester and Ipswich Museums, Emma Hogarth, who restored the object said it is a rare and exquisite example of craftsmanship.[...]

The lantern resembles a modern hurricane lamp and the naked flame would have been protected by a thin sheet of horn — now decomposed — that had been scraped until it was translucent.

“What is particularly amazing about the lantern is that the chains it was suspended from still look and move like any modern chain and had not corroded into a metal lump,” said Hogarth.

The lamp dates to between the 1st and 3rd centuries A.D. Suffolk had a number of wealthy villas in the 2nd century. The quality of the lantern suggests that it may have come from one of them.

And now in an even rarer treat, here’s some video taken of the find on the day of the rally:

They’re at least 2,000 years old and may have been painted earlier. Very few examples of Hellenistic painting have survived, and what’s left is mainly fragments. We have very little Nabatean art at all, so finding such extensive pieces with intact color and detail under the layers of filth is remarkable.

At the instigation of the Petra National Trust (PNT), conservation experts Stephen Rickerby and Lisa Shekede restored the paintings to life. The work took three years, and was completed only last week. “The paintings were a real mess,” Rickerby said.

He described what has emerged from the blackened layers as “really exceptional and staggeringly beautiful, with an artistic and technical quality that’s quite unlike anything else”.

Three different vines, grape, ivy and bindweed – all associated with Dionysus, the ancient Greek god of wine – have been identified, while the birds include a demoiselle crane and a Palestine sunbird with luscious colours. The scenes are populated by putti-like figures, one winged child playing a flute while seated in a vine-scroll, others picking fruit and fighting off birds pecking at the grapes. The paintings are exceptional in their sophistication, extensive palette and luxurious materials, including gold leaf.

Petra, in what is now Jordan, was the epicenter of an immense trade network linking East and West. As traders in everything from Indian spices to Levant aromatics, Nabatean culture was influenced by its trading partners, hence the Hellenstic style of these paintings which decorate the dining room, main chamber and a smaller recess of what appears to have been a rock-carved spa for the elite.

The Nabateans were experts in water control; a marked advantage, you can imagine, in the middle of a desert. Nabateans took advantage of the canyon flash flooding, channeling it with a system of dams and conduits, creating an artificial oasis that would last for hundreds of years until an earthquake in the 4th century A.D.

Christie’s claimed when they put up for sale that they were bought in 1969 and “similar” to the 8 identical pairs of elaborate gold earrings found in 1988 in the royal tombs at Nimrud, the ancient capital of Assyria. Iraqi officials spotted them in the catalogue and reported them to Interpol, stopping the sale.

Donny George, the former director of the Iraq Museum who was on the Nimrud excavation and who personally photographed the treasures, recognized the earrings as from Nimrud. He pointed out that the gold work at Nimrud was exceptional and unique, that there was no such thing as a “similar” piece.

The earrings were among the 613 items of jewellery and funeral ornaments that make up the Treasure, found in 1988 in two previously unexplored burial chambers, belonging to a ninth-century BC queen and princess, in the ancient city of Nimrud.

Sent to the central bank at the time of the first Gulf War in 1991, the Treasure has hardly ever been on show. But it was once described by an American investigator seeking to recover lost Iraqi artefacts as making the tomb of the Egyptian King Tutankhamun “look like Walmart”.

The treasure remained in the vault of the central for 20 years, surviving the 1990 Gulf War, depredations of Saddam Hussein’s son Qusay (he helped himself to almost a billion dollars in cash plus hundreds of gold bars from the bank), Shock and Awe, looters trying to break into it with rocket-propelled grenades and AK-47s, and a major flood. A team of Iraqi, US and British archaeologists, plus an awesome reservist Marine Col. Matthew Bogdanos who in civilian life is a New York prosecutor with a classics degree along with his legal one, were able to rescue the Nimrud treasure from the flood.

At the time they thought it was fully accounted for, but somewhere between the summer of 2003 and winter of 2008, those earrings migrated out of Iraq into Christie’s hot little ask-no-questions hands. Even now Christie’s refuses to say who the seller was or even comment on the story at all. New York Customs enforcement will only say that no legal action has been taken.