Tag: ancient history

4,700-Year-Old Discovery Reveals Clues to Cult of Ishtar’s Spread Throughout the Ancient World

Hidden beneath an ancient temple in Assur, Iraq, archaeologists have made a discovery that holds potentially crucial evidence for the cult of Ishtar’s origins in the area.

The researchers behind the discovery date the temple’s foundation to between 2896 BCE and 2702 BCE, saying that it provides crucial evidence for the spread of Mesopotamian ritual practice to northern Iraq and urban life at Assur over 4,700 years ago, revealing the growth of cult worship.

The findings were published in The Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports.

Assur’s Ishtar Temple

Assyria was a major Mesopotamian civilization that began as Assur—initially a meager city-state—and eventually expanded into a much larger empire.

The city itself is located on the western bank of the Tigris River, and during the first millennium BCE, the Neo-Assyrian empire became well established, leaving a rich corpus of well-preserved records about these later periods. Yet, earlier records are murkier or nonexistent, leaving Assur’s beginnings shrouded in mystery.

German archaeologist Walter Andrae first excavated the Ishtar Empire between 1903 and 1914.  However, the deepest layers remained covered until the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich’s Assur Excavation Project in 2024. Modern coring technology has enabled archaeologists to access the temple cella.

“The excavators of the Ishtar temple simply didn’t report it, so we assume they didn’t see it,” lead author Mark Altaweel told The Debrief in an email. “The sand is below the last floor level of the temple, so it is possible they just didn’t dig far enough or reach the bedrock. We basically cored until we hit the bedrock.”

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New Analysis Suggests That The Great Pyramid Of Giza Is Potentially 20,000 Years Older Than Experts Thought

The Great Pyramid of Giza, generally believed to have been built as the tomb of Pharaoh Khufu around 2575 B.C.E., is one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. But what if it’s even older than that?

Alberto Donini, an engineer from the University of Bologna, recently applied a new dating system that he calls the “Relative Erosion Method” (REM) to the pyramid. Now, he’s claiming that his research suggests the famous landmark may have actually been built nearly 25,000 years ago.

When Was The Great Pyramid Of Giza Built? The Origins Of Egypt’s Ancient Wonder

Scientific studies of the pyramids at Giza have been ongoing for centuries, so the current timeline of their construction is widely accepted. As it stands, the Great Pyramid was seemingly built during the reign of Pharaoh Khufu, who ruled over Egypt from roughly 2589 B.C.E. to 2566 B.C.E. The Pyramid of Khafre came shortly thereafter, followed by the Pyramid of Menkaure.

This timeline was determined using both historical records and scientific study. Ancient authors like Herodotus wrote that Khufu had the Great Pyramid constructed as his tomb, noting that he “brought the people to utter misery” by making them transport impossibly heavy limestone blocks from quarries — possibly located hundreds of miles away — in order to erect the 481-foot structure. Exactly how they managed this remains a mystery to this day, though several promising theories have been put forth, such as the use of a ramp system.

Then, in the 1800s, archaeologists discovered graffiti inside the Great Pyramid that mentioned Khufu by name. It was seemingly scrawled by the workers who built the monument, adding another layer of evidence that the structure was built during that pharaoh’s reign.

Archaeologists later used scientific methods to date the pyramid. They radiocarbon dated the mortar used to secure the stone blocks, which was made using ashes and thus contained organic matter. These results suggested that the mortar was likely mixed between 2620 and 2484 B.C.E., once again aligning with the reign of Khufu.

With so much proof pointing to a construction date of roughly 2575 B.C.E., it seems unlikely that there’s any additional information out there that could significantly change the timeline. However, Alberto Donini claims that his research could completely rewrite this story.

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Hidden for Centuries, “Lost” Portions of a Mysterious Ancient Star Map Have Been Revealed Using X-Rays

Researchers at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Menlo Park, California, have used X-ray beams to reveal once-hidden references to an ancient star map from a centuries-old document.

The ancient palimpsest—a portion of the Codex Climaci Rescriptus—has been revealed to contain fragmentary references to an ancient star catalog once used by the Greek astronomer Hipparchus. The ancient star maps in question were created by the astronomer as early as 150 B.C., copies of which were made several centuries later.

Now, the “lost” ancient writing has been made discernible as bright orange markings the X-rays have revealed, according to Minhal Gardezi, a physicist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison who was involved in the research.

A “Phaenomena” Emerges

The text revealed by SLAC researchers comprises portions of the poem “Phaenomena,” which dates to around 275 B.C. and is attributed to the Greek poet Aratus of Soli. The copies of the poem the SLAC team studied had likely been made sometime in the 6th century, at which time the unknown scribe also included sections comprising appendices relating to the positions of stars in various constellations, which were a perfect match for work known to have been undertaken by Hipparchus.

Originally transcribed on portions of animal hide, the remnants of the ancient poem were held within Saint Catherine’s Monastery in Egypt’s Sinai desert for centuries. At some point between the 9th and 10th centuries, the original text on the palimpsest appears to have been erased and reused to record a series of monastic treatises, seemingly destroying the ancient scientific information the ancient record once contained.

SLAC’s particle accelerator has now revealed these “lost” portions of the ancient poem using powerful X-rays, making the invisible records from long ago visible again for the first time in centuries (images of which can be seen here).

In the past, very little from Hipparchus’s writings has been recovered, and most of our knowledge of the ancient Greek astronomer stems from secondhand sources. Based on such information, scholars are aware that he can be credited with the creation of one of the earliest star catalogs, as well as early mathematical innovations that include the invention of trigonometry.

The team’s discovery is important, since it offers a rare glimpse at such records from the ancient world, which were often recorded on perishable materials like papyrus, which seldom survive through the ages.

Going beyond even the surprise discovery of these ancient astronomical records, the SLAC team’s process reveals a promising new means by which researchers may be able to retrieve similar “lost” information from surviving ancient records, especially those kept on more rugged materials that were often reused throughout time.

The recent discovery represents a veritable cornucopia of ancient information related to a crucial period in the emergence of science close to two millennia ago. However, this is not the first indication that traces of earlier ancient writing had been present on the palimpsest. In the past, earlier use of advanced imaging techniques had already shown that some form of writing was discernible.

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Resurfaced 3,300-year-old Egyptian document hints at biblical giants being real

Historians are scratching their heads at a resurfaced Egyptian scroll held by the British Museum that might support the claim that biblical giants were, in fact, real.

Genesis chapter 6 of the Bible is about God’s response to the widespread human “wickedness” and corruptness, which was supposedly caused by Nephilim, powerful beings that were the sons of “fallen angels” and human women.

It was these sons who were described as giant beings and referred to as “men of reknown” that caused widespread chaos which prompted God to cleanse the earth by “destroying all creatures under the sky” with “flood waters.”

Fast forward to now, Anastasi I, a 3,300-year-old document that’s been in the British Museum since 1839 and has reignited the interest of the Associates for Biblical Research, a religious organization in Pennsylvania, has historians and researchers believing that these “men of reknown” giants may have actually been real.

The ancient document, that is believed to be from the 13th century, BCE, mentions run ins with the Shosu people, who were supposedly eight feet tall, which scared Israelites, as originally reported by the Daily Mail.

To connect the dots that Anastasi I is proof beyond what is said in the Bible that giants existed, Numbers 13:33, a verse from the Old Testament, also hints at Israelites coming across these large figures, “And there we saw the giants, the sons of Anak, which come of the giants: and we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight.”

The scroll, which reseachers believe to be a letter written by a scribe says, “The narrow defile is infested with Shosu concealed beneath the bushes; some of them are of four cubits or of five cubits, from head to foot, fierce of face, their heart is not mild, and they hearken not to coaxing.”

“Four cubits or five cubits” tall, translates to a figure close to 8 feet tall.

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430,000-Year-Old Wooden Tools Are the Oldest Ever Found 

Early hominins in Europe were creating tools from raw materials hundreds of thousands of years before Homo sapiens arrived there, two new studies indicate, pushing back the established time for such activity. From a report:The evidence includes a 500,000-year-old hammer made of elephant or mammoth bone, excavated in southern England, and 430,000-year-old wooden tools found in southern Greece — the earliest wooden tools on record.

The findings suggest that early humans possessed sophisticated technological skills, the researchers said. Katerina Harvati, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Tubingen in Germany and a lead author of the wooden-tool paper, which was published on Monday in the journal PNAS, said the discoveries provided insight into the prehistoric origins of human intelligence. Silvia Bello, a paleoanthropologist at London’s Natural History Museum and an author on the elephant-bone study, which was published last week in Science Advances, concurred.

The artifacts in both studies, recovered from coal-mine sites, were probably produced by early Neanderthals or a preceding species, Homo heidelbergensis. Homo sapiens emerged in Africa more than 300,000 years ago, and the oldest evidence of them in Europe is a 210,000-year-old fossil unearthed in Greece. By the time Homo sapiens established themselves in Britain 40,000 years ago, other hominins had already lived there for nearly a million years.

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160,000-year-old sophisticated stone tools discovered in China may not have been made by Homo sapiens

Archaeologists have found that early humans in what is now China were using sophisticated stone tools as far back as 160,000 years ago.

“This discovery challenges the perception that stone tool technology in Asia lagged behind Europe and Africa during this period,” the research team wrote in a statement about the discovery.

At the site of Xigou, discovered in 2017 in Henan province in central China, the archaeological team found the remains of more than 2,600 stone tools and determined that some of them were “hafted,” or attached to a piece of wood or other form of stick.

“The identification of the hafted tools provides the earliest evidence for composite tools in Eastern Asia, to our knowledge,” the team wrote in a study published Tuesday (Jan. 27) in the journal Nature Communications.

Researchers already knew of extremely early tool use in East Asia, with the oldest known wooden tools there dating to 300,000 years ago. However, the new findings, which were excavated between 2019 and 2021, are the earliest known tools consisting of two materials, as is evidenced by the hafted artifacts.

Hafting “is a new technological innovation whereby the stone tool is inserted or bound to a handle or a shaft,” Michael Petraglia, director of the Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution at Griffith University and a co-author of the paper, told Live Science in an email. “This improved tool performance by allowing the user to increase leverage and providing more force for actions such as boring.”

It appears that the tools were used to process plant materials. “Microscopic analysis on the edges of the stone tools indicate boring actions, used against plant material, likely wood or reeds,” Petraglia said.

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Archaeologists: Half a Million-Year-Old Elephant Bone Hammer Wasn’t Made by Modern Humans

Archaeologists from the University of Central London and the city’s Natural History Museum studying a nearly 500,000-year-old elephant bone hammer have determined the ancient tool was made by Neanderthals or another early human ancestor, Homo heidelbergensis, millennia before the first modern humans (Homo sapiens) walked the Earth.

The research team behind the new analysis said that the unexpectedly sophisticated craftsmanship of the elephant bone hammer, the oldest such prehistoric tool ever found in Europe, offers an “extraordinary glimpse” into humanity’s earliest ancestors.

Elephant Bone Hammer Hundreds of Thousands of Years Older Than Previous Finds

According to a statement detailing the new analysis, the tool was originally discovered in the early 1990s at an archaeological site in Boxgrove, near Chichester in West Sussex, England. Numerous ancient tools made from flint, none and antlers have been found at the site, but the hammer is the only tool made from elephant bone.

Elephant bone tools have been discovered in Tanzania, dating back 1.5 million years. The oldest elephant bone tools found in Europe are tens of thousands of years younger, and those were discovered in southern Europe.

To date, very few elephant bone tools older than 43,000 years have been previously identified. As a result, researchers didn’t immediately identify the Boxgrove artefact as a tool until it was studied in detail.

3D Microscopic Analysis Reveals Ancient Tool’s Manufacture and Use

In the team’s published study, the elephant bone hammer is described as triangular, measuring 11 centimeters long, 6 meters wide, and 3 centimeters thick. The researchers said the tool also bears marks that suggest it was “intentionally shaped” for specific utility.

It is mostly composed of cortical bone, which is the dense outer layer of bone tissue. The tool’s density suggests it may have been made from a mammoth, but the fragment is too incomplete to identify the exact species or body part the bone comes from.

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2.6 million-year-old jaw from extinct ‘Nutcracker Man’ is found where we didn’t expect it

Fragments of a 2.6 million-year-old fossil jaw discovered in northeastern Ethiopia are transforming the picture of early human evolution in Africa. The jaw, from a bipedal hominin — an extinct relative of humans — shows that its kind journeyed far north, to a region where other hominins were already living.

The ancient jaw belongs to the genus Paranthropus and was found more than 620 miles (1,000 kilometers) farther north than any other fossil of its kind.

“Until now, not a single fossil of Paranthropus had been identified” in the Afar region of Ethiopia, researchers wrote in a study published Wednesday (Jan. 21) in the journal Nature. “Hundreds of fossils representing over a dozen species” of hominins had been found in the Afar, study lead author Zeresenay Alemseged, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Chicago, said in a statement, “so the apparent absence of Paranthropus was conspicuous and puzzling to paleoanthropologists, many of whom had concluded the genus simply never ventured that far north.”

The genus Paranthropus contains three species distantly related to humans: P. robustus, P. boisei and P. aethiopicus, collectively known as the “robusts.” These species walked upright beginning around 2.7 million years ago, but they are unique in having massive teeth and jaws, which earned one fossil skull the nickname “Nutcracker Man.” Paranthropus fossils were previously found in locations from southern Ethiopia to southern Africa and have been dated to between 2.8 million and 1.4 million years ago.

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Rock art from at least 67,800 years ago in Sulawesi

The Indonesian archipelago is host to some of the earliest known rock art in the world1,2,3,4,5. Previously, secure Pleistocene dates were reported for figurative cave art and stencils of human hands in two areas in Indonesia—the Maros-Pangkep karsts in the southwestern peninsula of the island of Sulawesi1,3,4,5 and the Sangkulirang-Mangkalihat region of eastern Kalimantan, Borneo2. Here we describe a series of early dated rock art motifs from the southeastern portion of Sulawesi. Among this assemblage of Pleistocene (and possibly more recent) motifs, laser-ablation U-series (LA-U-series) dating of calcite overlying a hand stencil from Liang Metanduno on Muna Island yielded a U-series date of 71.6 ± 3.8 thousand years ago (ka), providing a minimum-age constraint of 67.8 ka for the underlying motif. The Muna minimum (67.8 ± 3.8 ka) exceeds the published minimum for rock art in Maros-Pangkep by 16.6 thousand years (kyr) (ref. 5) and is 1.1 kyr greater than the published minimum for a hand stencil from Spain attributed to Neanderthals6, which until now represented the oldest demonstrated minimum-age constraint for cave art worldwide. Moreover, the presence of this extremely old art in Sulawesi suggests that the initial peopling of Sahul about 65 ka7 involved maritime journeys between Borneo and Papua, a region that remains poorly explored from an archaeological perspective.

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The earliest elephant-bone tool from Europe: An unexpected raw material for precision knapping of Acheulean handaxes

Organic knapping tools made from bone, antler, and wood were essential to early human toolkits but are rarely preserved in the archeological record. The earliest known soft hammers, dating to ~480,000 years ago, come from Boxgrove (UK), where modified antlers and large mammal bones were used alongside flint hard hammers. These tools facilitated complex knapping techniques, such as platform preparation and tranchet flake removal, contributing to the production of finely worked ovate handaxes typical of the Boxgrove Acheulean industry. This study presents a cortical bone fragment from an elephant, deliberately shaped into a percussor for resharpening flint tools. It represents the earliest known use of elephant bone in Europe and the first documented case of its use as a knapping hammer. Reconstructing its life history offers further insights into Middle Pleistocene hominin technological adaptations, resourcefulness, and survival strategies that enabled humans to endure harsh northern environments.

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