Month: July 2009

Rural Egypt oasis provides glimpse of daily life

Ancient, Education, Treasures

The ancient town of Amheida on the Dakhleh Oasis was and is hundreds of miles away from the political and cultural capitals of Egypt, but it’s been inhabited since the Stone Age and excavations indicate they kept up with the times.

The early settlers were farmers, maybe even before the Nile valley got famous as a center of agriculture. Irrigation is a lot easier when you have a steady supply of water rather than a yearly flooding, as the copious remains of figs and olives indicate.

They also seemed to have been tapped in to the dominant culture, despite their physical distance from it. The Roman and Greek era art found on the site features contemporary mythology and deities.

Then there’s the school. Conventional wisdom has it that teachers were poorly paid and widely reviled generalists hired by parents of would-be functionaries to ensure salable literacy. Amheida’s school, however, tells a different story.

Divided into three rooms lined with benches for more than 50 students, it more closely resembled today’s formal institutions. Students were segregated by subject and age, and the teacher’s lessons were scrawled on the walls, which were treated like blackboards at the time. What remains of that writing has caught Cribiorre’s attention.

“There you have a poem written on the wall in the column in red ink. The poem speaks of rhetoric. It says, ‘come on, get up, get to work,'” she explained. “It’s encouragement from a teacher of rhetoric to his students. But it’s all poetry. In Greek.”

Scholars had thought that rhetoric, not poetry, was taught in Roman Egyptian schools. The schools churned out politicians and bureaucrats, aristocratic young men destined for leadership. Prior to the find, Cribiore had suspected that they might also have learned poetry, and this confirmed it. The teacher had written his lessons in verse, showing that schools from the period were more formal than once believed.

The only tomb of an Aztec king?

Ancient, Treasures

Archaeologists have been crossing their fingers ever since excavations at the Templo Mayor uncovered a monolith of an Aztec goddess in 2006.

Now they’re crossing all their toes too, because they’ve found a lavishly decorated canine skeleton guarding a sealed entrance.

The animal was found wearing wooden earflaps mounted with turquoise mosaic, a collar of greenstone beads, and golden bells around its four feet.

If it’s a dog, it suggests a tomb because in Aztec mythology the dog leads its master through the underworld. And if it’s a tomb and those seals are really still sealed, then this might be a major all-time find.

The existence of multiple seals suggests that the tomb, if it’s there, could be a collective crypt containing the king and his successors, López Luján said.

“Each time they buried a newly deceased [dignitary], they sealed the entrance with a plaster seal,” he speculated.

That the seals are unbroken suggests that the potential tomb has not been looted.

Droolworthy though the thought may be, they’re doing this in a painstaking way, so it’ll be a long time before we know either way.

It’s hard out there for a knight

Medieval

A 14th c. skeleton found buried under the floor of the chapel in Stirling Castle, Scotland, has yielded new clues to what a hard-scrabble existence being a knight errant really was. The skeleton was first uncovered in 1997 and radio-carbon dated to circa 1390 AD.

It wasn’t until until recent advances in laser scanning, though, that they found out how many hits the poor guy had to take during his young life.

He appears to have survived for some time with a large arrowhead lodged in his chest, while the re-growth of bone around a dent in the front of his skull indicates that he had also recovered from a severe blow from an axe.

He eventually died when he was struck by a sword that sliced through his nose and jaw. His reconstructed skull also indicates that he was lying on the ground when the fatal blow was delivered. […]

However, it was only recently re-examined following advances in laser scanning techniques that not only revealed the nature of the three wounds, but also showed that the knight had lost teeth, probably from another blow or from falling from his horse.

They think they know who he was: one Robert Morley, killed in tournament at Stirling Castle in 1388.

He had bone stress on his ankles from riding and muscle injuries from heavy lifting. His right arm was bigger than the other from all the swordplay. He was between 18 and 26 when he died.

I’m sure courtly love was on high his list of priorities, right after surviving axe blows to the skull.

2,000 year old makeup found intact

Ancient, Treasures

An intact cosmetics case was found in the tomb of a wealthy Etruscan woman.

Dating to the second half of the second century B.C., the intact tomb was found sealed by a large terracotta tile. The site featured a red-purple painted inscription with the name of the deceased: Thana Presnti Plecunia Umranalisa.

“From the formula of the name, we learn that Thana Plecunia was the daughter of a lady named Umranei, a member of one of the most important aristocratic families of Chiusi,” the researchers wrote.

Indeed, the wide rectangular niche tomb certainly represents the noble origins of the deceased.

The ashes of Thana rested in a small travertine urn, decorated with luxuriant foliate elements and the head of a female goddess, most likely the Etruscan Earth goddess Cel Ati.

The highly decorated cosmetics case was found nearby. Blocked from oxidation by a clay layer that had built up over time, the expensive imported Egyptian ointment survived intact, all the more remarkable when you consider that the unguentarium had no lid. The clay formed a seal with the alabaster vessel, keeping the air out.

Ancient cosmetics have been found before, but the elements had already gotten to them, which makes this find unique. It can be chemically analyzed in depth.

“The natural resins were the pine resin, exudated from Pinaceae, and the mastic resin, from Anacardiaceae trees. The lipid was a vegetable oil, most likely moringa oil, which was used by the Egyptians and Greeks to produce ointments and perfumes,” Ribechini said.

Also called myrobalan oil, moringa oil was mentioned by Roman scholar Pliny the Elder (23 A.D. – 79 A.D.) in his celebrated Natural History as one of the ingredients in the recipe of a “regal perfume” for the king of Parthes.

Since moringa trees were not found in Italy — they are native to Sudan and Egypt — and given the Egyptian origins of the alabaster unguentarium, the researchers concluded that the ointment was imported to Etruria.

Thana Presnti Plecunia Umranalisa had expensive tastes. Researchers believe the fancy cosmetics represented an important moment in her life, possibly her wedding.

Interesting note: she uses her mother’s family name. By the Roman naming convention — which is otherwise very similar — her first and last names would be feminized versions of her father’s name. Etruscan women were astonishingly emancipated, especially compared to the Greek and Roman societies that bracketed them.

Update: Copernicus had blue eyes

Modern(ish)

I posted a while back about the recent genetic tests comparing hair found in a book Copernicus owned with the remains thought to be his.

That was a big deal because even though people know what church he was buried in, the actual location was unknown, so the DNA confirmed that the excavated remains were his.

Now more details about the genetic analysis have been released and it turns out that Copernicus looked even more like James Cromwell than we realized.

The genetic analysis also found a variation in a gene called HERC2, which is usually found in people with blue eyes and is very common in Northern Europe.

Recent studies have shown that this HERC2 variant is also associated with lighter hair color and lighter skin.

“Indeed, Copernicus most probably had blue eyes and should also have lighter skin and hair color,” Wojciech Branicki, at the Institute of Forensic Research in Krakow, Poland, told Discovery News.

The finding is rather unexpected, since the great astronomer is usually portrayed with dark eyes.

Why would he have been so portrayed? The researchers point to a common contemporary portraiture technique called chalcography, which is an engraving on copper or brass. It didn’t render color accurately, so artists might have repeated an original chalcography error in their potraits of Copernicus.