The earliest domesticated horses on the archaeological record were discovered at Botai in Central Asia and date to around 3,500 B.C. They are not, however, the ancestors of any modern domesticated horse lineage. To pinpoint the unknown geographic origins of the domesticated horse, an interdisciplinary team of researchers embarked on the largest genetic study of horses to date, analyzing the skeletal remains of 273 equids from the Iberian Peninsula and other regions of Eurasia ranging in date from 50,000 years ago to 200 B.C.

The genetic information extracted from the remains was sequenced at the geneticists at the University of Toulouse III-Paul Sabatier and the University of Évry, and then compared to the genomes of modern domestic horses. The study found that the ancestor horses of all domesticated horses in existence today were first domesticated in the northern Caucasus steppes.

Thanks to the large battery of statistical analyses carried out, it has been possible to establish that between 2,200 and 2,000 BC, a drastic change took place in which the genetic profile existing in the Pontic steppes began to spread beyond its region of origin, thus replacing in a few centuries all wild horse populations from the Atlantic to Mongolia.

According to L. Orlando, “this replacement in the genetic composition of Eurasian populations is associated with significant genomic differences between this new type of horse and the horses of the populations that disappeared. On the one hand, this new type of horse from the steppes of the northern Caucasus had a more docile behaviour and, on the other hand, a more robust constitution in the vertebral skeleton”. The researchers suggest that these characteristics triggered the successful selection of these animals, at a time when horse travel was becoming widespread in Eurasia.

According to Pablo Librado (CNRS), first author of this research, “this study has also shown that the distribution of this new type of horse in Asia coincides with the appearance of light carts and the spread of Indo-Iranian languages. In contrast, the migration of Indo-European populations from the steppe zone to the heart of Europe during the third millennium BC did not use this new type of horse as a vector for its expansion. This result demonstrates the importance of also incorporating the genetic history of animals when analysing the dimension of human migrations and intercultural contacts”.

Interesting to note, there is no evidence that the movement of horses westward was connected to horse-back warfare. Rather, a decline of population in the late Neolithic made space for the pastoral horse-breeding peoples like the Yamnaya culture of the steppes.

The study also solved another horse-related mystery: the origins of the tarpan horse, aka the Eurasian wild horse, which went extinct in the first decade of the 20th century. The tarpan genome was a mixture of native European horses and wild ancestors in western Ukraine, not a feral offshoot of modern domesticated horses or a hybrid of domesticated horses and Przewalski’s horses from Mongolia, the only surviving wild horses in the world and critically endangered.

The study has been published in the journal Nature and can be read in its entirety here.

An amateur scuba diver has discovered a 900-year-old sword believed to have belonged to a crusader knight off the Carmel coast of northern Israel. Shlomi Katzin found the sword on a dive last Sunday. It and other artifacts had been exposed by shifts in sands after a storm.

It is encrusted in shells and marine life that attached themselves to the oxidizing iron of the sword. The three-foot blade and foot-long hilt are intact underneath the thick concretions, and archaeologists believe it was well-preserved in the steady temperature of the Mediterranean water.

“The Carmel coast contains many natural coves that provided shelter for ancient ships in a storm, and larger coves around which entire settlements and ancient port cities developed, such as Dor and Atlit,” explains Kobi Sharvit, Director of the Israel Antiquities Authority’s Marine Archaeology Unit. “These conditions have attracted merchant ships down the ages, leaving behind rich archaeological finds. The recently recovered sword is just one such find.”

The site where the anchors and the sword were found has been monitored by the Israel Antiquities Authority since June, when it was first discovered by Boaz Langford and Rafael Bahalul. The site’s finds are very elusive, since they appear and disappear with the movement of the sands.

The sword is now in the Israel Antiquities Authority’s conservation laboratory where it will be cleaned and studied before it is put on public display. 

Here is video from Shlomi Katzin’s GoPro camera when he found the sword.

Well, the oldest known drawing of a ghost, at any rate, although who can say whether he haunts the tablet to this day. The fine line drawing incised on the back of a 3,500-year-old Babylonian tablet depicts a male ghost bound at the wrists and being led by a woman to the afterlife. It is an illustration of the cuneiform text on the obverse which explains how to get rid of a ghost who has attached himself to someone and won’t let go because he’s desperate for love.

The tablet was acquired by the British Museum in the 19th century. Half of it is missing and the cuneiform was originally mistranslated, so it was deemed comparatively unremarkable and has never been exhibited. Nobody even noticed the figures on the back because they are so faint they can only be seen under bright light when viewed from directly above it. Enter the one, the only, the living legend, Dr. Irving Finkel.

Dr Irving Finkel, curator of the Middle Eastern department at the British Museum, said the “absolutely spectacular object from antiquity” had been overlooked until now.

“It’s obviously a male ghost and he’s miserable. You can imagine a tall, thin, bearded ghost hanging about the house did get on people’s nerves. The final analysis was that what this ghost needed was a lover,” he said.

“You can’t help but imagine what happened before. ‘Oh God, Uncle Henry’s back.’ Maybe Uncle Henry’s lost three wives. Something that everybody knew was that the way to get rid of the old bugger was to marry him off. It’s not fanciful to read this into it. It’s a kind of explicit message. There’s very high-quality writing there and immaculate draughtsmanship.

“That somebody thinks they can get rid of a ghost by giving them a bedfellow is quite comic.”

Finkel was the first to decipher it correctly and recognize it as a ghost magic text complete with visual aid on the reverse. The instructions explain how to “seizes hold of a person and pursues him and cannot be loosed.” Spoiler: dress a woman in red, equip her with a bed and he’ll fall right into the trap.

The ritual involves making figurines of a man and a woman: “You dress the man in an everyday shift and equip him with travel provisions. You wrap the woman in four red garments and clothe her in a purple cloth. You give her a golden brooch. You equip her fully with bed, chair, mat and towel; you give her a comb and a flask.

“At sunrise towards the sun you make the ritual arrangements and set up two carnelian vessels of beer. You set in place a special vessel and set up a juniper censer with juniper. You draw the curtain like that of the diviner. You [put] the figurines together with their equipment and place them in position… and say as follows, Shamash [god of the sun and judge of the underworld by night].”

The text ends with a warning: “Do not look behind you!”

As you may or may not recall, Finkel shared his gleeful appreciation of Babylonian ghost lore in a wonderful video I posted four years ago. (No word on whether he received all the chameleon bristles, frog claws and left wings of grasshoppers he needed to raise the dead according to the recipe on that tablet.) That enthusiastic embrace of ancient ghost-related ritual, not to mention Finkel’s vast intellect and witty writing style, are sure to be on full display in his forthcoming book on ancient Mesopotamian belief in ghosts. The First Ghosts: Most Ancient of Legacies is set for publication on November 11th but not yet available for pre-order anywhere (and yes, I checked). You can get your Finkel fix earlier than that at a British Museum webinar discussing the history of Assyrian ghostology on October 28th, the perfect amouse-bouche for a Halloween candy binge.

New research into a 1st century A.D. Roman lead figurine found in Wall, Staffordshire, almost 100 years ago has found that it does not represent an enslaved African as archaeologists originally thought, but rather a warrior. The tell-tale clue had been overlooked: a small socket in his right hand that would originally have held a weapon, probably a bronze spear.

Now part of the parish of Wall in Staffordshire, the Roman site of Letocetum was founded as a temporary military marching camp in the late 40s A.D., the early ears of the Roman conquest of Britain. The first timber fort was built around 55 A.D. during the campaign of governor Aulus Didius Gallus against the rebel Brigantes king Venutius.

(Juicy sidenote: His rebellion was really against his ex-wife Cartimandua, Queen of the Brigantes and ally of Rome, who had scandalously divorced him to marry his lowly armour-bearer Vellocatus. She wasn’t Venutius’ consort; she had inherited the crown in her own right, so when she dumped him she remained queen. He went to war to wrest leadership of the Brigantes out her hands and that meant fighting Rome too when they came to her defense. He had no particular beef with them.)

A hilltop fort was built around 58 A.D. to garrison Legio XIV Gemina. They moved on within a couple of years, but the fort only grew in importance because it occupied a central position at the junction of the Roman military road network, linking Watling Street (which ran northwest from the Kentish coast to Wroxeter, Shropshire) and Ryknield Street (which ran south to north from Gloucester to York). It was reconstructed several times. In the late 1st century, a large public bathhouse and a mansio, a sort of private inn that lodged imperial officials traveling the roads, were built. The Roman remains visible above-ground at the site today are parts of the baths and mansio.

The figurine is believed to have been discovered in the 1920s at a 1st and 2nd century burial ground on Watling Street, which is today on the west side of Wall but was outside the town walls of Letocetum. The find was not made in a formal excavation and was not recorded at the time, but archaeologists believe it was a grave good interred with cinerary remains. The bottom half of it is partially melted, something that could have happened when the ashes from the funeral pyre were scattered in the grave over the goods.

Just over two inches high, the figurine wears armlets on his upper arms and a necklace of beads. It was the seemingly pained expression on his face that spurred the original interpretation of the figure as slave bent over in suffering. While distorted from the heat, the legs appear to be crossed as if he were sitting on the ground. In the 1990s, with many more examples of Roman artworks depicting African figures known, the figurine was reassessed and his cross-legged posture reinterpreted as a seated wrestler as seen in many comparable examples discovered in Continental Europe.

The spear socket was spotted only this year when the figurine was photographed in great detail.

With the addition of a spear we can now see that the figurine stood upright, holding out his weapon, rather than sitting with legs folded as previously suggested. The image of an African man shown with his spear appeared in art in the Classical period as well as more recently, and is often called the African Warrior. The figurine from Wall is now reinterpreted as a representation of that persona.

As to how the figurine came to be at Letocetum, it is very unlikely that this piece was made in Britain, though once they had been introduced, metal figurines were made here. The Wall figurine is sufficiently unusual to indicate that it was made on the Continent, but it may have come from somewhere much closer to the Mediterranean than Gaul.

During the Roman invasion of Britain huge numbers of people travelled here, originating from many different parts of the Empire. While we do not have a clear provenance for the figurine, the evidence that it was used as a grave good at Wall suggests one possible history – that an individual acquired this unusual piece of art on the Continent, travelled thousands of miles with it, and was buried with it in a foreign land.