The History Blog

In a switch from the usual direction of these things, Egypt has returned an ancient bronze statue which had been looted from Iraq.

According to Zawi Hawass, the smuggler, an Egyptian national working in Jordan, was captured at Nuweiba Sea Port trying to sneak the statue into Egypt.

Not that this wasn’t a fine opportunity for Hawass grind his own axe, of course.

“When the invasion of Iraq began in 2003, we wrote to the British and American governments asking them to protect Iraq’s heritage and museums,” said Hawass. “But that didn’t happen.”

Hawass said that since then his office has been tracking stolen Iraqi artifacts and has recovered some 5,000 items.

Hawass, who is a vigorous campaigner to recover Egypt’s own stolen antiquities, said he will not do business with museums that buy stolen Iraqi artifacts.

It’s all a part of Zawi’s master plan. As are we all. But flies as wanton boys are we to Hawass.

Meanwhile, the statue seems to be of a Mesopotamian fertility goddess, but authorities aren’t certain which one or even how old the figure is.

Okay, the so title is a tad misleading. I snatched it from the British press which, I don’t know if you’ve heard, can on occasion tend towards the sensationalistic.

The actual story is that Stonehenge has perfect acoustics. It’s not that the standing stones would have been dedicated explicitly to musical performances, but that whatever the hell they were doing there most likely involved music and they wanted it to sound great.

In conclusions which were far from revelatory, Till used a computer model of Stonehenge and a concrete replica in America’s Washington State to recreate the sounds of the space 5,000 years ago, adjudging it to have possessed perfect acoustics.

Hey wait. There’s a Stonehenge replica in Washington? Well I’ll be damned. It’s a WWI memorial in Maryhill, overlooking the Columbia river.

This Stonehenge is the creation, not of Druids, but of Sam Hill, a dreamer and entrepreneur who founded the Maryhill community along the shores of the Columbia in the early 1900s.

Back then it was generally believed the English Stonehenge was built for human sacrifice. Hill believed that war was mankind’s greatest sacrifice. Thus he built his own Stonehenge to honor Klickitat County soldiers who died in World War I. Plaques bearing the names of the 13 soldiers killed in this war are attached to the inner circle of pillars.

That’s kind of cooler than the acoustics news. It looks like a beautiful place.

The mummified remains of Queen Seshestet have been found in a Saqqara pyramid.

She was mother of King Teti, founder of the Sixth Dynasty of pharaonic Egypt. Her name was not found but “all the signs indicate that she is Seshestet”.

Such old royal mummies are rare. Most date from dynasties after 1800 BC.

Female royal mummies are even rarer, since only a small number of women are thought to have ruled Egypt.

Seshestet ruled for 11 years.

No artifacts facts were found in the tomb or sarcophagus. Tomb raiders got to it long before Zawi Hawass.

Rowdy taverns feature prominently in Greek literature, but there haven’t been any actual confirmed taverns found. A researcher at the University of Leeds thinks she’s figured out why.

She reviewed archaeolgoical remains unearthed at several prominent sites dating from 475 to 323 BC, including the Villa of Good Fortune in Olynthus, and a residence known as building Z in Athens.

To many archaeologists, the vast numbers of mugs, erotic graffiti and objects found at the sites indicate no more than well-off families that threw lavish parties. But Kelly Blazeby will tell the Archaeological Institute of America meeting in Philadelphia this week that a more plausible explanation is that residents turned over rooms in their houses to selling wine, gambling and even prostitution.

“If you look at the remains coming from ancient Greek homes, it seems very clear to me that these buildings had another function, that some areas were used for commercial purposes,” she said.

It’s seems a reasonable interpretation to me. Even a wealthy home doesn’t have much need for hundreds of drinking vessels, never mind the cubicles that surrounded the cup room. OMG champagne room before champagne!

Anyway, Google tells me that one of the homes in question, Building Z, is already being marketed to tourists as a brothel, so not everyone finds the theory controversial.

And now because what’s a story about a bawdy-house without some bawd, here are some Greek erotic objects from random times and places.

*tl;dr warning. This one is a prolix one.*

Last year I posted a macabre story about researcher and amateur historian Dee Brecheisen who was found after his death to have looted multiple graves in forts and Indian burial grounds. He even kept the mummy of a black Union soldier in his home.

Here’s a follow-up story with much more detail.

Basically, Bureau of Land Management agents got a tip that there was the skull of another buffalo soldier on Brecheisen’s property. They found it, complete with bits of hair and skin, and searched the rest of the place.

They were particularly looking for a veritable looter’s treasure map Brecheisen had shown people when he was alive.

The archaeologists were particularly interested in trying to find a cemetery plot map, because Brecheisen had told people that with it, he was able match up burial registries and determine whom he’d dug up.

Army personnel at the fort between 1854 and 1886 were mandated to maintain such a map — and sometimes criticized for the sloppiness of their record-keeping — to keep tabs on who was buried there. The Army had exhumed remains in 1876 and reburied them at Fort Marcy in Santa Fe, and again in 1886, and reburied the remains at Fort Leavenworth, Kan.

They didn’t find it or much of anything else, sadly, but to build a criminal case against the family and friends who knew of the loot and sold off his estate full of grave robberies without a peep, they had to connect the skull they had to Fort Craig.

So a volunteer team of archaeologists and FBI agents, state troopers, and sheriff’s office folks dug a trench next to a grave an anonymous tipster was marked as a buffalo soldier’s final resting place.

They found empty coffins and bits of bones and sent them to a military department I didn’t know existed but is very cool.

Samples of those remains were sent to the Joint POW/ MIA Accounting Command in Hawaii, which is responsible for bringing back and identifying remains of service personnel from past conflicts — though most are far closer in time.

“It was within their mission, even though these Soldiers were from the 1870s and 1880s,” Hanson said.

Unfortunately, they were unable to identify any remains, so there was no evidence for a criminal case, and by then, the cemetery was so dug up that they couldn’t leave it like that to be looted even further.

So they hired a contract archaeology firm and they’re the ones who found the remains of 60 men, women and children, including one child found mummified with “eyelashes, lips, combed hair, gown and tiny hands folded across the chest that held desiccated flowers.”

The map which might identify all these people is still MIA, both Brecheisen’s copy and any original that might have been in the files. The archives police are on the job.

(Yes. There is such a profession as archives police. If I had known this as a child, my life might have turned out very, very different.)

The bodies will be reburied in handmade coffins in a national cemetery.

Meanwhile, a wealth of knowledge about post-Civil War era frontier medicine has been unearthed. That’s one good thing to come out of this horrid episode.

Although you might think so from the name. The Trypilians were a Stone Age people who lived in what is now Ukraine from 5400–2700 B.C. Apparently they created the largest settlements in the world (that we know of), only to burn them down and fade away.

The Royal Ontario Museum is putting on an exhibit of Trypilian artifacts on loan from the Ukrainian government.

Highly sophisticated, the Trypilians were both farmers and hunters. Their ability to adapt to different terrain led to their prosperity, and soon they had the largest population growth of any other Neolithic people. They built the largest settlements in Europe at that time, some with an estimated population of 10-15,000 people. Every 60 to 80 years, they burned some settlements to the ground and moved to settle another location.

In 1896, Ukrainian archaeologist Vikenty Khvoika discovered one of these settlements near the village of Trypillia. The artifacts he uncovered were instrumental in reconstructing the daily lives of this prehistoric civilization.

Many of those artifacts are among the 300 on display in the exhibit. Star Trek-sounding civilizations I’ve never heard of are definitely worth a trip to ROM, imo.

Nor a Clovis indian’s, either. Nanodiamonds are teeny tiny invisible-to-the-naked-eye fragments of diamonds created by enormously high pressure and heat.

Researchers have found thin layers of them all over North America right at the 13,000 year old level, which is when a global cooling period called the Younger Dryas began, extinguishing the human and large mammal populations of the continent.

Bones of these animals, and Clovis artifacts, are abundant before this time. Excavations show a dark “mat” of carbon-rich material separates the bones and artifacts from emptier and younger layers.

Writing in the journal Science, Kennett and colleagues report they have evidence of the nanodiamonds from six sites across North America, fitting in with the hypothesis that a giant explosion, or multiple explosions, above the Earth’s surface cause widespread fire and pressure.

There is evidence these minerals can be found in other sediments, too, they said, and help explain the “black mat”.

“These data support the hypothesis that a swarm of comets or carbonaceous chondrites (a type of meteorite) produced multiple air shocks and possible surface impacts at 12,900 (years ago)” they wrote.

The nanodiamonds were only found in Younger Dryas layers, not above or below, so their discovery supports the catastrophic comet theory.

There are no major craters indicating impact, though, so if the comet idea is true, it might have exploded in the atmosphere generating a huge shockwave of heat and pressure that layered the continent in invisible diamonds, killing every beast around and plunging the world into an ice age.

Not everyone buys it.

Nicholas Pinter, a geologist at Southern Illinois University, said he had yet to see classic evidence of an asteroid impact.

The so-called discrete layers of material were not of a uniform age, he said. Microspherules, for example, rain down all the time and are present throughout the geological record.

“My graduate student found some on his mailbox,” said Dr Pinter.

While Dr Kennett proposed that ordinary carbon was forged into diamonds in the intense pressure of an airburst, Dr Pinter said nano-diamonds are now being identified at other locations and times without credible evidence of any impact.

The suggestion that they could have been produced by an airburst event is “untested and highly implausible,” he argued.

After Rome lost 3 legions to Germanic tribes united under Ariminius, aka Hermann, in the 9 A.D. Battle of Teutoborg forest, Augustus ordered that troops withdraw to the Rhine, and there the border stayed pretty much without exception until the empire crumbled.

Germanicus made some incursions past the Rhine 5 years later, but basically historians thought Teutoborg marked the end of a strong Roman military presence east of the Rhine.

Those assumptions now gang agley because archaeologists have found a massive 3rd century Roman battlefield south of Hannover way east of the Rhine, even east of the Teutoborg site.

So far metal detector enthusiasts and archaeologists have uncovered over 600 artifacts over a mile of forest, including spear points, arrows, axe heads, wagon parts, sandal nails, coins, even hippo-sandals, a kind of rudimentary horse shoe.

At least one arrowhead still contained enough of the original wooden shaft to provide organic material for radiocarbon dating, which place it some time in the 3rd century A.D. Coins and other objects support the idea that the battle may have been fought some time between 200 and 250 A.D. [...]

The specialized artillery and hundreds of Roman sandal nails found atop Harzhorn Hill is a good indication the combatants were Romans, not barbarians using Roman weapons. Roman artifacts have been found as far north as the Baltic Sea, but have usually been dismissed as trade goods. “Roman sandals on German feet doesn’t make sense, at least not in that amount,” says Friedrich Lueth, head of the German Archaeological Institute’s Roman German Commission. “At this late stage, it’s quite surprising to see them so far north.”

The artifacts weren’t strewn willy-nilly. The spear points are almost all facing the same direction, so archaeologists have been able to map troop movements during the battle.

Not only did the thousand or so Romans win in something like 30 minutes, but they came from the north, so they were even deeper into Germanic territory before the fight.

Preachable moment: if the metal detectorists hadn’t reported the initial finds but instead just took what they found and kept it or sold it, this battle which reverses conventional historical wisdom on the trajectory of empire would remain unknown.

This is a fine example of why archaeological context matters far beyond the mere value of excavated goods.

Archaeologists excavating a mud pit in York found a 2000-year-old skull with a hunk of brain still rattling inside.

After the skull was discovered in the muddy circular pit close to an Iron Age ditch, the archaeological trust’s finds officer, Rachel Cubitt, felt something move inside the cranium as she cleaned off soil. Peering through the base of the skull, she spotted an unusual yellow substance. She said: “It jogged my memory of a university lecture on the rare survival of ancient brain tissue. We gave the skull special conservation treatment as a result, and sought expert medical opinion.”

Believe it or not, this isn’t the first time ancient brains have been found in ancient skulls — some 8000-year-old skulls with brains in them were found in a peat bog in Florida 24 years ago — but it is the oldest preserved brain tissue ever found in Britain.

Why the brain survived is a mystery. All they found was the single skull and its contents: no skeleton, no other soft tissues, nothing but BRAAAINS. The pit was a mere 3 feet deep, so the skull wasn’t safely ensconced in miles of peat like the Florida ones.

They’ve done a CT scan (hence the piccy), but haven’t carbon dated it or done other chemical or soil analyses yet. We’ll learn more about the mysterious BRAAAINS once they have.

Not even the golden wonders of pharaonic Egypt can lure people out of this winter of economic discontent, as the Dallas Museum of Art is finding out.

They weren’t even looking to make huge money off the traveling exhibit, which has raked in the cash in cities around the US since it opened in Los Angeles 3 years ago. Dallas just wanted to break even, but with an expensive show like this, that means 1 million people have to see the exhibit at full price.

Now that discretionary spending is tight for so many, that number is looking increasingly distant.

The Tut exhibit has drawn more than 270,000 visitors during its first three months, Ms. Pitman said, with 90,000 of those being schoolchildren, who, like other large groups, purchased discounted tickets.

With less than five months to go before the show closes May 17, the DMA would have to draw 730,000 to reach the 1 million mark. That would be an average of 146,000 a month, which exceeds its current average of around 90,000 a month.

Bonnie Pitman, the museum director, and Phillip Jones, president and CEO of the Dallas Convention and Visitors Bureau, are still optimistic that they’ll reach their goal. The holidays will hopefully bring a spike of visitors.

Any shortfall will hit the museum hard. The terms of the loan are confidential, but Zawi Hawass has been bragging about how much bank the Egyptian government is making from the exhibit.

They get their cut first, you see. Then the promoter. Then the museum, assuming there’s anything left. Egypt is guaranteed at least $6 million from the ticket sale proceeds, after that, they get a percentage of profits.

Up until the financial crisis, these kinds of exhibits were sure to be blockbusters and therefore worth the exhorbitant loan fees. Not so much anymore.

For more about the exhibit and to purchase tickets should you be in the area, see the Dallas Museum of Art site.