A tale of Visigothic treasure lost and found

It was August 25th, 1858. The night before had been dark and stormy, but this one was moonlit and clear. Francisco Morales and María Pérez were traveling on the road to Guadamar with their daughter Escolástica and a donkey when they reached the Guarrazar spring six miles outside Toledo. While answering the call of nature, Escolástica spied under the white glimmer of the moonlight a square hole barely covered with two flat stones. In the gap between them something shone gone. That something turned out to be a priceless treasure of gold crosses, goblets and other objects festooned with precious stones, pearls and glass. Francisco, María and Escolástica dug up everything they could find, rinsed the artifacts in the spring and quickly made off with their ill-gotten gains.

They didn’t know it, but they weren’t alone that night. Domingo de la Cruz, a gardener who owned an orchard near Guarrazar spring, had observed them digging up buried treasure. The next night, he went back to the site and did some of his own digging, finding a second, smaller collection of treasure. He too made off with it. Nobody told the authorities.

It was a hideous free-for-all. Within days unusual gold begemmed pieces began cropping up in the shops of Toledo’s famed gold and silversmiths. Many of them were broken up, melted down and reused making them untraceable. It’s said that one smith was so torn over what to do with a unique gold dove that he threw it in the Tagus. Gemstone trader José Navarro took a different approach. He had a yen for archaeology, so he bought numerous fragments and painstakingly pieced them back together, reconstructing the votive crowns commissioned by Visigothic royalty as donations to the Church, royals that can be identified with precision because pendant letters spell out the name of the exalted donors. Navarro did all this work under strictest secrecy. In 1859, his work as complete as he could get it, Navarro sold the crowns, pendants and assorted pieces to to Edmond Du Sommerard, director of the Musée National du Moyen Âge in Cluny, France.

That’s when the news of this exceptional discovery finally broke wide. Cluny published their acquisition in the scientific press and Spain was horrified to discover that incalculably precious cultural patrimony had been found only after it was lost. The Spanish government repeatedly demanded that France return the treasure, but was blown off by Napoleon III and subsequent governments.

José Amador de los Ríos, art historian, archaeologist and a pioneer in recognizing the literary and artistic wealth of Medieval Spain, was enlisted to excavate and document the find site in 1859 after the treasure had made headlines. He found a few loose pearls and gemstones that had fallen off the jewels, graves, some architectural remains and lots of evidence that the site had been thoroughly picked over by local looters who had heard about the treasure through the gossip mill.

It was Ríos who recognized that while the form of the votive crown and the decoration were of Byzantine design, the pieces were manufactured locally. The conventional wisdom among European historians at that time was that Spain was a penurious backwater in the early Middle Ages and that the splendors of the Visigoths which had so astounded the Umayyad conquerors who took Toledo in 712 A.D. had to have been Germanic in origin.

In 1861, a very nervous Domingos de la Cruz went to the Royal Estate of Aranjuez where Queen Isabel II was staying and offered her majesty what was left of the treasure he’d discovered. Much hemming and hawing and hypothetical “if somebody happened to have purloined gold Visigothic treasure a few years back and wanted to hand it in, would he get thrown in the dungeon or paid off?” kind of talk ensued. Queen Isabel agreed to accept the remaining treasure — including the votive crown of King Suintila (r. 621-631) — and give Domingos de la Cruz a fabulous pension of 4,000 reals a year in return. The Suintila crown was stolen in 1921 and has never been found.

Cluny kept Guarrazar’s Visigothic treasure for 80 years until Heinrich Himmler stepped into the picture. In 1941, with France under Nazi occupation, Himmler returned most of the treasure to fellow fascist General Francisco Franco. Six votive crowns, a goblet and crosses are now in the National Archeological Museum in Madrid while the Cluny Museum still holds three of the crowns and a few smaller objects. The Royal Palace in Madrid has one crown left.

With all the loss that has bedeviled Spain’s greatest Visigoth treasure since it was discovered, proper scientific study was long in coming. The first comprehensive study took place in 1995 and revealed that the gemstones traveled great distances. The cabochon sapphires are from Sri Lanka. The emeralds are from the Austrian Tyrol.

The question of why they had been buried in the first place was still open, however. Historians speculated that the priceless religious artifacts had been secreted in consecrated graves to keep them safe from the invasion force of Táriq Ibn Ziyad. Spanish archaeologist Juan Manuel Rojas found this explanation wanting.

With the help of the Guadamur City Hall, Rojas embarked on an investigation that led to the establishment of an archeological site that the public can now visit.

During recent years, the walls of a building more than 30 meters long have been unearthed as well as a basilica, the remains of what appears to have been a palace, a Visigoth graveyard and even a guest house for pilgrims. Rojas’ research has led to the revelation that the place where the treasure was hidden was not a field at all but a religious complex not unlike the one at Lourdes, France, with its own healing water that sprung from the well where Morales cleaned the jewels. So, far from being buried in an ignominious field, the royal treasure had been hidden in a prestigious site whose own ceilings were decked with votive crowns.

When its occupants found out about the unstoppable advance of the Muslim and Berber forces, they sought somewhere to hide the jewels and decided on the graveyard. Raising two tombstones, they removed the bodies, buried the treasure, covered it with cloths and sand and put the corpses back on top. When Escolástica went to relieve herself at the spot more than 1,000 years later, she ducked behind what had once been the wall around the cemetery.

You can see the crown of King Reccesvinth (649-672) in a 3D scan here, another votive crown here and a third here. I regret to inform you that the 360 degree views of the crowns requires Flash to run, but the resolution is great and there are a paucity of good images of the treasure out there, so it’s worth the annoyance to check them out.

Giant buffalo skull found in Fens quarry

Palaeontologist Jamie Jordan has discovered a rare complete skull of an extinct species of giant buffalo in a Cambridgeshire quarry. Jordan has been excavating the quarry for years and discovered hundreds of bones from the steppe bison (bison priscus), including sections of skull, but this is the first complete skull he’s unearthed.

The bison priscus ranged widely over Europe, Asia and North America 150,000 to around 10,000 years ago. An adult male could reach as high as six-and-a-half feet at the withers and weigh 2,000 pounds, which made them popular subjects by early modern human artists. The cave paintings at Altamira in Spain and Lascaux in France feature steppe bison. We don’t have to rely on contemporary depictions or reconstructions from skeletal remains, because steppe bison mummies have been recovered in exceptional condition from the permafrost, two in Alaska and one in Siberia. Blue Babe, the first one discovered in Alaska which was an international sensation, is on permanent display at the University of Alaska Museum in Fairbanks.

Jamie and his team first discovered some splintered pieces of bone at the site, which cannot be named due to safety reasons, before they uncovered the entire fossil. The skull is currently in several pieces but Jamie said once the skull has been cleaned and dried it will fit together again perfectly.

He added: “We have got all the pieces of the skull. The skull is wider than my chest and will weigh around 30kg-35kg when it is complete.”

The conservation and reconstruction of the skull is expected to take around two months to complete. The process will be done in public view at Fossils Galore in March, the non-profit private museum and educational center Jordan created to house the millions of fossils he has collected since he found his first one on a family vacation when he was four years old. Once the bison skull is complete, it will go on display at the museum.

The oldest clove in the world

An excavation at the ancient port of Mantai in Sri Lanka has unearthed what is likely to be the oldest clove in the world.

Located on the northwest coast of Sri Lanka, Mantai was a pivotal hub of trade between the Arabian Sea, the Bay of Bengal, the east and west coasts of India and the interior of Sri Lanka from the time it was founded around 200 B.C. Merchant ships stopped at the port in the middle of the Indian Ocean laden with goods from the East (China, southeast Asia islands and mainland) and West (Europe, Africa, Middle East), part of a complex network of trade routes that linked the ancient world for the duration of Sri Lanka’s Anuradhapura Kingdom and beyond, from the middle of the 1st millennium B.C. through the 13th century.

Archaeological exploration of Mantai was still in its infancy when it was brusquely interrupted by civil war in 1983. In the three seasons of excavations, archaeologists had unearthed a rich assortment of ceramics and semi-precious stone beads from India, Arabia, the Mediterranean and China. Much of the context of those finds was lost or damaged during the war, as were the records detailing the stratigraphy of the site.

Excavations resumed in 2009-2010. With so much ground to cover and not much time to cover it, the team of archaeologists from the Sri Lankan Department of Archaeology, the European Research Council-funded Sealinks Project and the University College London Institute of Archaeology focused on an in-depth investigation of the material in a single very deep trench south of the central occupation mound. The trench was 10 x 10 feet wide and a whopping 33 feet deep, reaching middle Holocene layers. The goal was to recover a multitude of small finds from ceramics to organic remains to fossilized particles of plant tissue that would allow the team to establish a series of precise radiocarbon dates to serve as a much-needed baseline for future excavations.

Among the organic remains recovered from the deep trench are spices that were some of the most valuable trade goods that moved across the East-West routes through Sri Lanka, notably cloves and black peppercorns.

Only a handful of cloves have previously been recovered from archaeological sites, including these from France, for example – other archaeological evidence for cloves, such as pollen from cess pits in the Netherlands, only dates from 1500AD onwards – and there are no examples from South Asia.

Earlier finds of clove have been reported from Syria – but these have since largely been discredited as misidentifications. The clove from Mantai was found in a context dating to 900-1100AD, making this not only the oldest clove in Asia – but we think the oldest in the world.

We also found eight grains of black pepper at Mantai, plus a further nine badly preserved grains that we think are probably black pepper too. The earliest are dated to around 600AD, the time when international maritime trade became increasingly large and well established across Asia, Africa and Europe.

Cloves are not native to Sri Lanka. They were grown in the Maluku Islands, more than 4000 miles east of Sri Lanka by sea, and traded to Europe where they were highly prized from Roman times onward. They were used as spices to enhance the flavor of food and drink, but also widely used for medicinal purposes and personal hygiene, like to combat the heartbreak of halitosis. Black pepper was less rare and less distant, but still so desirable that it was known as “black gold” at the apex of the maritime spice trade from the 16th century through the 19th. The peppercorns found at Mantai probably came from the Western Ghats of India.

From the 16th century, Sri Lanka (then known as Ceylon) was colonised by various European powers, from the Portuguese (1500s-1600s) to the Dutch (1600s-late 1700s) to the British (late 1700s-1948). They were all drawn by the island’s profitable trade in spices – although the British turned the fledgling coffee industry there into an incredibly lucrative tea trade which is still important to the island’s economy to this day.

But, whether or not the cloves we unearthed at Mantai turn out to be the oldest in existence, the presence of the spice at this 2,000-year-old site is solid evidence of the ancient spice trade that existed long before these wars of conquest.

World’s oldest classroom periodic table found at St. Andrews


A classroom periodic table of the elements found at the University of St Andrews in Scotland is the oldest known in the world. It was discovered in 2014 by Dr. Alan Aitken in the storage area of the School of Chemistry. He was cleaning out the clutter of chemicals and equipment that had built up since 1968 when he came across a roll of old teaching charts. Among them was a chart of the period table that was so old the paper flaked to the touch.

Siberian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev first arranged the known elements by their atomic mass after seeing them all fall into place in a dream. He was writing a textbook for the chemistry course he was teaching, and realized elements with similar properties also had similar atomic weights, or weights that increased at a regular rate. He presented his chart and the periodicity of the elements to the Russian Chemical Society in 1869. Other scientists had independently realized that the elements could be organized in periods and created tables in the 1860s, but Mendeleev’s was the simplest and made predictions that would be confirmed accurate with the discovery of more elements.

In 1871, he released a second table correcting a few errors in the first. The chart found at St. Andrews is similar to the 1871 version, but printed some years later.

The table is annotated in German, and an inscription at the bottom left – ‘Verlag v. Lenoir & Forster, Wien’­ – identifies a scientific printer who operated in Vienna between 1875 and 1888. Another inscription – ‘Lith. von Ant. Hartinger & Sohn, Wien’ – identifies the chart’s lithographer, who died in 1890. Working with the University’s Special Collections team, the University sought advice from a series of international experts. Following further investigations, no earlier lecture chart of the table appears to exist. Professor Eric Scerri, an expert on the history of the periodic table based at the University of California, Los Angeles, dated the table to between 1879 and 1886 based on the represented elements. For example, both gallium and scandium, discovered in 1875 and 1879 respectively, are present, while germanium, discovered in 1886, is not. […]

A researcher at the University, M Pilar Gil from Special Collections, found an entry in the financial transaction records in the St Andrews archives recording the purchase of an 1885 table by Thomas Purdie from the German catalogue of C Gerhardt (Bonn) for the sum of 3 Marks in October 1888. This was paid from the Class Account and included in the Chemistry Class Expenses for the session 1888-1889. This entry and evidence of purchase by mail order appears to define the provenance of the St Andrews periodic table. It was produced in Vienna in 1885 and was purchased by Purdie in 1888. Purdie was professor of Chemistry from 1884 until his retirement in 1909. This in itself is not so remarkable, a new professor setting up in a new position would want the latest research and teaching materials. Purdie’s appointment was a step-change in experimental research at St Andrews. The previous incumbents had been mineralogists, whereas Purdie had been influenced by the substantial growth that was taking place in organic chemistry at that time. What is remarkable however is that this table appears to be the only surviving one from this period across Europe. The University is keen to know if there are others out there that are close in age or even predate the St Andrews table.

The years spent rolled up in a chem lab closet have not been kind to this possibly unique artifact of science history. The paper was mounted on a heavy linen backing which exacerbated its fragile condition and an immediate intervention was necessary to conserve it. Experts from the University’s Special Collections secured a grant to treat the chart. Working with private conservator Richard Hawkes, Special Collections conservators cleaned it, separated it from the linen backing, washed it in a neutral solution to remove discoloration, de-acified the paper in an alkaline bath, and repaired areas of loss with Japanese kozo (mulberry bush) paper and wheat starch paste.

The periodic table is now stable and being maintained in climate-controlled conditions in Special Collections’ stores. It is too delicate a piece to go on public display. Thankfully the grant money also made possible the creation of a full-size replica. The facsimile is on display in the School of Chemistry.

Mummy identified as Ptolemy II’s doctor

After more than two years of study, researchers at the National Archaeological Museum of Spain have discovered the identity of a mummy that has been part of the museum collection since the twenties: Nespamedu, a priest and doctor to Pharaoh Ptolemy II or Ptolemy III.

It is not known where the mummy was unearthed. It was donated to the museum in 1925 from the family of Ignacio Bauer. Bauer had acquired it from the Museum of Cairo at an undetermined time. Current research suggests Nespamedu was buried in the ancient necropolis of Saqqara where elite nobles were still being interred in the Ptolemaic era. In order to find out more about the person inside the bandages, the mummy was transported to Madrid’s Quirónsalud University Hospital in 2016 where it was given extensive computed tomography scans.

The remains date to around 300-200 A.D. and the individual was around 50 years old when he died. His body was carefully mummified and coated in a thick layer of resin to preserve it. It was then wrapped in many feet of linen strips, thinner around the head, thicker in the abdomen, lower back and legs to fill in and even out the body. Resins and oils were applied to the first layer of linen, and numerous amulets nestled in key positions before the body was wrapped in a second layer of linen and then a full-body shroud.

Mummification complete, Nespamedu’s body was covered in expensive gilded cartonnage — linen coated in plaster — which has survived in excellent condition. There are five sections of it, a funerary mask, a collar, a breastplate, a single cover for both legs, and feet covers. The first and last of these entirely encase the head and feet. The cartonnage sections are decorated with paint on the surface and reliefs and appliques of religious iconography and inscriptions were embedded in the plaster.

The inscription on the breastplate names the mummy as Nespamedu, meaning “He who belongs to the scepter,” son of Pasenet his father and the lady of the house Tahutnetcher his mother. Nespamedu’s titles are “Server of Imhotep the Great, son of Ptah,” and “Pharaoh’s doctor.” The former title refers to him having been a priest at the temple of Imhotep. The historical Imhotep was chancellor to Pharaoh Djoser and the builder of the step pyramid, but over the centuries he was deified and associated with Thoth, god of architects and scribes. He was still worshiped under the rule of the Ptolemies, only with a twist: the Greeks associated him with Asklepios, god of medicine.

There were at least three temples dedicated to Imhotep/Asklepios in Egypt, one in Memphis, one in Philae and one in Thebes. The temples were sanitariums, containing pools of sacred water in which the sick would be submerged as they awaited a divine cure. The pharaoh’s doctor was at the top of the temple hierarchy. He was in charge of establishing the standards of education and religious practices. So Nespamedu was not just a priest at the sanctuary of Imhotep/Asklepios, he was the high priest and leader thanks to his second exalted title.

While there is no conclusive evidence of a medical specialty, based on the amulets inserted between the linen layers and clearly seen on the CT scans, researchers think Nespamedu may have been an ancient Egyptian version of an ophthalmologist.

[I]t is the charms and plaques stored within his bandages that are the most revealing. Two groups of eight plaques have shown up on different parts of the mummy in which the four sons of the deity Horus are represented. Another two plaques feature the goddesses Isis and Nephthys, while representations of the mummification of the corpse together with the god Anubis were found at the top of Nespamedu’s legs.

There are also two plaques featuring the god Thoth and the Eye of Horus, symbolizing magic, protection and purification together with a solar symbol that stands for cosmic stability. Thoth is the god of ophthalmologists, as it was he who put Horus’ eye back after he lost it in his battle with Set.

This has led specialists to conclude that Nespamedu chose this god on account of his own profession. “There is nothing casual about the iconography and it is clear that he wanted to register his beliefs and the responsibilities that had elevated him to the upper echelons of society,” states a report published in the last National Archeology Museum’s bulletin. “The fact that he was the pharaoh’s doctor makes us think that part of his life was lived in Alexandria, where Ptolemy had his court.”