Category: archaeology

Yerebatan Samici: Basilica Cistern

The Yerebatan Samici  (Basilica Cistern)

The Yerebatan Samici, or Basilica Cistern, is the largest of several hundred cisterns located beneath the city of Istanbul in Turkey. Built in the sixth-century during the reign of Byzantine Emperor Justinian I, it is located one hundred-fifty meters southwest of the Hagia Sophia and currently maintained as a tourist site.

Before the construction of the cistern, a public building serving as a commercial, legal and artistic center, called the Stoa Basilica, was located  on the site of the large public square at the First Hill of Constantinople. After assuming control of the empire in 324 AD, the Emperor Constantine built the Basilica Cistern on that site. The cistern served as a water filtration system for the extensive palace complex of Constantinople and other public buildings on the hill. After the Nika Riots of 532 destroyed nearly half of the city of Constantinople, the original cistern was rebuilt and enlarged during the reign of Emperor Justinian.

The Basilica Cistern/s chamber is about ninety-eight hundred square meters and is capable of holding eighty-thousand cubic meters of water. The ceiling, nine meters in height, is supported by twelve rows, spaced five meters apart, of twenty-eight marble columns, with capitals of mainly Corinthian and Ionic styles. The majority of the columns, carved and engraved from various types of marble and granite, were likely brought to Constantinople from other parts of the empire

Entrance to the Basilica Cistern is reached through a descent down fifty-two stone steps to the water storage. The source for the cistern’s water supply is the current Eğrikapı Water Distribution Center in the Belgrade Forest, located nineteen kilometers north of Istanbul. The water’s long journey includes a one-thousand meter run through both the Valens and Mağlova Aqueducts to reach the storage basin of the cistern.

The Basilica Cistern has undergone several restorations since its foundation. During the eighteenth-century reign of Ottoman Emperor Ahmed III, architect Muhammad Agha of Kayseri oversaw a major restoration in 1723. A second major restoration during the nineteenth-century was conducted during the reign of Sultan Abdulhamid II. The Metropolitan Museum of Istanbul also undertook two repairs to cracks in the masonry and damage to the columns, the first in 1968 and the second in 1985. 

During the 1985 restoration, fifty thousand tons of mud were removed from the Basilica Cistern, and platforms for tourists were built to replace the former tour boats. The cistern was opened to the public on the 9th of September in 1987. It has appeared as settings in fiction novels, video games, and films, including the 1063 James Bond “From Russia with Love” and Jean-Baptiste Andrea’s 2013 thriller “Brotherhood of Tears”

Calendar: December 18

Year: Day to Day Men: December 18

Locker Room Moment

On the 18th of December in 1912, amateur archaeologist Charles Dawson claimed he had discovered fossilized remains of a previously unknown early human, the missing link between apes and man. This human ancestor was named Eoanthropus dawsoni, but became known as Piltdown Man from the gravel pit in which the remains were found. 

Although there were doubts about its authenticity from early 1912, the Piltdown Man remains were widely accepted for many years. In November of 1953, Time magazine published evidence gathered by anthropologist Kenneth Oakley, primatologist Sir Wilfrid Le Gros Clark, and biologist Joseph Weiner that proved the Piltdown Man was a forgery composed of three distinct species. This hoax was notable for the attention it generated on the subject of human evolution and the fact that it took forty-one years to its definitive exposure as a forgery.

In February of 1912, Dawson contacted the Keeper of Geology at London’s Natural History Museum, Arthur Smith Woodward, that he had found a section of a human-like skull in Pleistocene gravel beds near Piltdown, East Sussex. Later in the summer, Dawson and Woodward purportedly discovered a jawbone, skull fragments, a set of teeth, and primitive tools at the site. From the outset, the reconstruction of the skull was strongly challenged by researchers.

Waterston, Boule and Miller’s evidence proved the remains of the Piltdown Man was a forgery. The fossils consisted of a human skull of medieval age, a five-hundred year old lower jaw of an orangutan and fossil teeth from a chimpanzee. Someone had simulated age by staining the bones with an iron solution and chromic acid. A microscopic examination of the teeth showed file-marks that had modified the teeth to a shape more suited for human diet. The identity of the forger remains unknown; however the focus on Dawson is supported by evidence regarding other archaeological hoaxes he had perpetrated in the previous two decades.

Notes: The fossil was introduced as evidence by Clarence Darrow in defense of John T. Scopes during the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial. Darrow died in 1938, fifteen years before the Piltdown Man was exposed as a fraud.

Calendar: July 15

A Year: Day to Day Men: 15th of July

Sunflowers in Blue Vase

On July 15, 1799, French Captain Pierre-Francois Bouchard finds the Rosetta Stone.

The Rosetta Stone is a granodiorite stele, inscribed with three versions of a decree issued at Memphis, Egypt in 196 BC on behalf of King Ptolemy V. The top and middle texts are in Ancient Egyptian using the Hieroglyphic script and the Demotic script, respectively, while the bottom is in Ancient Greek. As the decree had only minor differences between the three versions, the Rosetta Stone proved to be the key to deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs.

The Rosetta Stone is a fragment of a larger stele; no additional fragments were found in later searches. Owing to its damaged state, none of the three texts is absolutely complete. This fragment of the stele is 3 feet 8 inches high at its highest point, 2 feet 6 inches wide and 11 inches thick. It weighs approximately 1,680 pounds. The front surface is polished smooth with the incised text; the sides are smooth; and the back is only roughly worked as this would not have been visible when erected.

The stone, carved in black granodiorite, similar to granite, is believed to have been originally in a temple, possibly at nearby Sais. It was moved during the medieval period, and was eventually used as building material in the construction of Fort Julien near the town of Rashid in the Nile Delta. During the Napoleonic campaign in Egypt, Pierre-Francois Bouchard discovered the stone and was immediately convinced of its importance. It was the first Ancient Egyptian bilingual text recovered in modern times; it aroused widespread interest with its potential to decipher previously untranslated hieroglyphic language.

Study of the decree was already under way when the first full translation of the Greek text appeared in 1803. It took another 20 years, however, before the transliteration of the Egyptian scripts was announced by Jean-Francois Champollion in Paris in 1822.  It took longer still before scholars were able to read the Ancient Egyptian inscriptions and literature confidently.

The major advances in the decoding of the Rosetta Stone were: The recognition in 1799 that the stone offered three versions of the same text; It became known in 1802 that the demotic text used phonetic characters to spell foreign names; Thomas Young recognized in 1814 that the hieroglyphic text did so as well, and had pervasive similarities to the demotic text; Champollion saw in his 1822-1824 studies that. in addition to being used for foreign names,  the phonetic characters were also used to spell native Egyptian words.

Calendar: May 31

A Year: Day to Day Men: 31st of May

Curvature of Nature

Ramesses II assumed the throne on III Shemu day 27 (May 31, 1279 BC), becoming the third Pharaoh of the 19th Dynasty of Egypt.

Ramesses II is often regarded as the greatest, most celebrated and the most powerful pharaoh of the Egyptian Empire. The Greek sources knew him as Ozymandias from the transliteration into Greek of a part of his throne name Usermaatre Setepenre, “The justice of Rê is powerful- chosen of Rê”.

Ramesses II led several military expeditions into historical Syria, reasserting control over Canaan, the area of Phoenicia, Philistia, and Israel. He also led expeditions into the south to restore possession of previously held territories that had been lost to the Nubians and Hittites. The Egyptian army during his reign was formidable, estimated to have totaled about one hundred thousand men- a force he used to strengthen Egyptian influence.

After reigning for 30 years, Ramesses II joined a select group that included only a handful of Egypt’s longest-lived rulers. By tradition, in the 30th year of his reign, Ramesses celebrated a jubilee called the Sed Festival. These were held to honor and rejuvenate the pharaoh’s strength. Only halfway through what would be a 66-year reign, Ramesses already had eclipsed all but a few of his greatest predecessors in his achievements. He had brought peace, maintained Egyptian borders, and built great and numerous monuments across the empire. Ramesses’ kingdom was more prosperous and powerful than it had been in nearly a century.

Ramesses built extensively throughout Egypt and Nubia, and his cartouches are prominently displayed even in buildings that he did not construct. There are accounts of his honor hewn on stone, statues, and the remains of palaces and temples—most notably the Ramesseum in western Thebes and the rock temples of Abu Simbel.  Ramesses covered the land from the Nile Delta to Nubia with buildings in a way no monarch before him had. He also founded a new capital city in the Delta during his reign, called P-Ramesses.

By the time of his death, Ramesses, now near ninety years of age, was suffering and plagued by arthritis and hardening of the arteries. He had outlived many of his wives and children and left great memorials all over Egypt.  Nine future Egyptian pharaohs took the name Ramesses in his honor.

Ramesses II originally was buried in the tomb KV7 in the Valley of the Kings, but because of looting, priests later transferred the body to a holding area, re-wrapped it, and placed it inside the tomb of queen Inhapy. Seventy-two hours later it was again moved, to the tomb of the high priest Pinudjem II. All of this is recorded in hieroglyphics on the linen covering his body. Ramesses’ mummified body is today in Cairo’s Egyptian Museum.

Top Insert Image: Ramesses II Burning Incense and Pouring Water, 19th Dynasty, Frescoe Painting, Valley of the Kings, Thebes, Egypt

Bottom Insert Image: Ramesses II (Ramessess the Great), 19th Dynasty, Pink/Gray Granite, One of a Pair, Ramesseum, Thebes, Luxor West Bank, Egypt, British Museum

Calendar: February 16

Year: Day to Day Men: February 16

A Daydream Moment

The sixteenth of February in 1923 marks the opening of the sealed door to the burial chamber of the Eighteenth Dynasty Pharaoh, Tutankhamun. During his reign of ten years, Tutankhamun restored the traditional polytheistic form of the ancient Egyptian religion from the religious-political changes enacted by the former pharaoh Akhenaten.

Born in May of 1874, British archaeologist and Egyptologist Howard Carter was from an early age interested in Egyptian artifacts; he would often visit and draw illustrations of specimens in the collection owned by the Amherst family. Impressed by his skills, Lady Amherst made arrangements for seventeen year-old Carter to assist British Egyptologist Percy Newberry in an excavation at Middle Kingdom tombs on the Lower Nile River.

After training under Egyptologists Flinders Petrie and Édouard Naville, Carter was appointed in 1899 as Inspector of Monuments for Upper Egypt by the Egyptian Antiquities Service. Based at Luxor, he oversaw excavations at nearby Thebes and supervised American archaeologist Theodore Davis’s systematic exploration of the Valley of the Kings. During his service, Carter improved the protection and accessibility to existing excavations and developed a grid-block system for tomb searching.

In 1907, Carter began his employment with George Edward Herbert, 5th Lord of Carnarvon, a financial backer for Egyptian antiquities research. Lord Carnarvon received in 1914 the concession to dig in the Valley of the Kings. Carter led a systematic search for any tombs that were missed in previous expeditions, including that of Tutankhamun. The search was halted during the years of the First World War and resumed in 1917. After five years with no major finds, Carnarvon became dissatisfied with the project; howver, after a discussion with Carter, he agreed to fund one more season of work in the Valley of the Kings. 

On the fourth of November in 1922, a water boy discovered a buried flight of stairs cut into the bedrock. After partially digging out the steps, a mud-plastered doorway was found stamped with indistinct cartouches. Howard Carter had the staircase refilled and notified Lord Carnarvon of the find by telegram. On November twenty-third, Carnarvon arrived accompanied by his daughter Lady Evelyn Herbert. The full extent of the stairway was cleared on the next day; it revealed Tutankhamun’s cartouche on the outer doorway. The doorway was removed and the corridor behind it was cleared of rubble.

With Lord Carnarvon, Lady Evelyn and Carter’s assistant Arthur Callender present, Howard Carter opened a tiny breach in the door of the tomb and was able to see the many gold and ebony treasures within. Carter had in fact discovered the burial tomb of Pharaoh Tutankhamun. The site was secured until the morning of the twenty-seventh of November, at which time the tomb was officially opened in the presence of a member of the Egyptian Department of Antiquities.

Tutankhamun’s tomb was virtually intact with all its furnishings and shrines, in spite of previous ancient break-ins. Two life-sized statues of Tutankhamun guarded the sealed doorway to the inner burial chamber. Assisted by staff members of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art which included archeologist Arthur Mace and photographer Harry Burton, Howard Carter over the next several months catalogued and preserved the contents of the chambers. 

On the sixteenth of February in 1923, Howard Carter opened the sealed inner doorway and confirmed it led to a burial chamber that contained the sarcophagus of Pharaoh Tutankhamun. His tomb was considered the best preserved and most intact pharaonic tomb ever found in the Valley of the Kings. Carter’s meticulous assessing and cataloguing the thousands of objects in the tomb took nearly ten years; the final work was completed in February of 1932.

Despite the significance of the find, Howard Carter received no honors from the British government. In 1926, he received the Order of the Nile, third class, from Egypt’s King Fuad I. Carter was also award an honorary Doctor of Science from Yale University and a honorary membership in Madrid’s Real Academia de la Historia.

Tutankhamun’s Burial Dagger

Tutankhamun’s Burial Dagger, Blade Composit of Nickel and Cobalt, Egyptian 18th Dynasty

A team of researchers have confirmed that the iron in one of the daggers found in the tomb of Tutankhamun, as well as a number of other precious artifacts from Ancient Egypt, have celestial origins as they were made from meteorites. The research was undertaken by an international team of scientists from the Polytechnics of Milan and Turin, the University of Pisa, the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, the CNR, the University Fayoum, and the XGlab company. Archeologists had suspected for many decades that the iron used during the reign of the New Kingdom Dynasties and earlier, could come from meteorites.

The composition of iron used in Tutankhamun’s dagger, is nickel and cobalt, which is commonly found in meteorites. In addition, the study of the iron beads from Gerzeh, which are c. 5,000 years old, confirmed that in the times of the eighteenth dynasty, ancient Egyptians were advanced in working iron and that the iron used to create them comes from meteorite.  Previously, it had been believed that the Egyptian Iron Age started after 600 BC.

Calendar: February 13

A Year: Day to Day Men: 13th of February

Red Bell Peppers

On February 13, 1961, the Coso artifact is discovered near the town of Olancha, California.

The Coso artifact is an object claimed by its discoverers to be a spark plug found encased in a lump of hard clay or rock. It was found by Wallace Lane, Virginia Maxey and Mike Mikesell while they were prospecting for geodes near the town of Olancha. It has been long claimed as an example of an out-of-place artifact. Such an artifact is an object of historical, archaeological, or paleontological interest found in an unusual context, that challenges conventional historical chronology by being “too advanced” for the level of civilization that existed at the time.

Following its collection, Mikesell destroyed a diamond-edged blade cutting through the rock containing the artifact and discovered the item. In a letter written to “Desert Magazine of Outdoor Southwest” a reader stated that a trained geologist had dated the nodule as at least 500,000 years old and it had contained a manmade object. The identity of the alleged trained geologist and means of geologic dating were never clarified, nor the findings ever published in any known periodical.

At the time that Virginia Maxey reported the Coso artifact being dated at 500,000 years old, there was no known method, including the use of guide fossils, by which either the artifact or concretion could have been dated as being this old. The nodule surrounding the spark plug may have accreted in a matter of years or decades, as demonstrated by examples of very similar iron or steel artifact-bearing nodules, which are discussed and illustrated by J. M. Cronyn’s “Elements of Archaeological Conservation”, a reference work for the conservational excavation of materials at sites.

An investigation carried out with the help of members of the Spark Plug Collectors of America, suggested that the artifact is a 1920s Champion spark plug. Chad Windham, President of the Spark Plug Collectors of America, identified the Coso artifact as a 1920s-era Champion spark plug, which was widely used in the Ford Model T and Model A engines. Other spark plug collectors concurred with his assessment.

The location of the Coso artifact is unknown as of 2008. Of its discoverers, Wallace Lane has died, Virginia Maxey is alive but avoids public comment, and the whereabouts of  Mike Mikesell are not known.

Calendar: January 15

Year: Day to Day Men: January 15

Southern Edge of the Lake

On the fifteenth of January in 1962, the Derveni papyrus was found at a site in Derveni, Macedonia, northern Greece. Discovered among the remnants of a funeral pyre in the necropolis that belonged to the ancient city of Lete, it is the oldest surviving manuscript in the Western tradition and possibly the oldest surviving papyrus written in Greek regardless of provenance. 

The papyrus dates to approximately 340 BC, making it Europe’s oldest surviving manuscript. Composed near the end of the fifth-century BC, its text is a mix of dialects, mainly Attic and Ionic Greek with a few Doric forms. Occasionally the same word appears written in different dialectic forms.

The content of the Derveni papyrus is divided between religious instructions on sacrifices to gods and souls, and an allegorical commentary of a genealogical poem of the gods, ascribed to Orpheus. The identification of the papyrus’s author is a matter of  dispute among scholars. Names like Euthyphron of Prospalta, Diagoras  of Melos, and Stesimbrotus of Thasos have been proposed with varying degrees of likelihood.

The reconstruction of the papyrus involved the exacting job of unrolling and separating the layers of the charred papyrus roll. The surviving two hundred and sixty-six fragments of the papyrus were conserved under glass in descending order of size; however, due to the existence of unplaced smaller fragments, reconstruction is exceptionally challenging. Modern multispectral imaging techniques were used to take digital microphotographs of the papyrus fragments. From this work, twenty-six columns of text were recovered, all with their bottom parts missing, as they had perished on the pyre.

The Derveni papyrus is now included in the UNESCO Memory of the World Register, a compendium of the world’s documentary heritage, such as manuscripts, oral traditions, audio-visual materials and library and archive holdings. The papyrus is noted in this register as being the oldest known European book.

Note: The Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington DC is the location of the Interdisciplinary Research Project for the Derveni Papyrus. Over the last forty-five years, the text of the papyrus has undergone extensive reconstruction and study. Among the leaders of the Imouseion Project have been Theokritos Kouremenos, George M. Parássoglou, and Kyriakos Tsantsanoglou. A user-friendly copy of the latest reconstruction of the papyrus is now available online at: https://chs.harvard.edu/derveni-papyrus-introduction/

An extensive and informative review written by Patricia Curd of Purdue University on the 2004 publication “The Derveni Papyrus: Cosmology, Theology and Interpretation” written by Hungarian academic Gábor Betegh, the eighth Laurence Professor of Ancient Philosophy at Cambridge University, can be found in the University of Notre Dame’s “Philosophical Reviews” located at: https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/the-derveni-papyrus-cosmology-theology-and-interpretation/

Unbroken Necropolis Seal

Unbroken Necropolis Seal on King Tutankhamun’s Tomb

This seal was actually a seal to King Tut’s fifth shrine. The king was buried in a series of four sarcophagi, which were in turn kept inside a series of five shrines. This unbroken seal stayed 3,245 years untouched. The late discovery of Tut’s tomb in 1922 resulted from the fact that it was covered by debris from that of Ramesses IV which was located directly above its entrance. While the outermost shrine of the youthful pharaoh had been opened not once but twice in ancient times, the doors of the second of the huge shrines of gilded wood containing the royal sarcophagus still carried the necropolis seal which indicated the pharaoh’s mummy was untouched and intact.

The Nebra Sky Disc

The Nebra Sky Disc

The Nebra Sky Disc is a bronze disk of around 30 centimetres (12 in) diameter and a weight of 2.2 kilograms (4.9 lb), with a blue-green patina and inlaid with gold symbols. These are interpreted generally as a sun or full moon, a lunar crescent, and stars (including a cluster interpreted as the Pleiades. Two golden arcs along the sides, marking the angle between the solstices, were added later. A final addition was another arc at the bottom surrounded with multiple strokes (of uncertain meaning, variously interpreted as a Solar Barge with numerous oars, as the Milky Way, or as a rainbow).

The disk is attributed to a site near Nebra, Saxony-Anhalt, in Germany, and associatively dated to about 1600 BC. It has been associated with the Bronze Age Unetice culture.

The Nebra sky disk features the oldest concrete depiction of the cosmos worldwide. In June 2013 it was included in the UNESCO Memory of the World Registry and termed “one of the most important archaeological finds of the twentieth century.”

Reblogged with thanks to http://museum-of-artifacts.blogspot.com

Temple of Hathor

Painted Ceiling of the Temple of Hathor, Egyot

Seen here is the incredibly well-preserved, painted ceiling at Egypt’s Temple of Hathor. It is the main temple at the Dendera Temple Complex which was built around 2250 BC and is regarded as one of the best-preserved temple complexes in Egypt. Dendera covers an area of about 40,000 square meters and is one of the most tourist-accessible ancient Egyptian places of worship.

The ceiling of the main hall has retained much of its stunning original colour despite being painted thousands of years ago. According to Tour Egypt, the ceiling is “decorated as a complex and carefully aligned symbolic chart of the heavens, including signs of the zodiac (introduced by the Romans) and images of the sky goddess Nut who swallowed the sun disc each evening in order to give birth to it once again at dawn.”

Temples of Tarxien

Temples of Tarxien, Island of Malta

The Temples of Tarxien, date back from 3, 600 B. C. to 2, 800 B. C. These temples are renowned for the detail of their carvings, which include domestic animals carved in relief, altars, and screens decorated with spiral designs and other patterns.

The temples where excavated by the father of archaeology of Malta , Sir Temi Zammit in the beginning of the 20th century and are considered as being the first to be excavated in a scientific method. Most of the original artifacts excavated from the site, today are at The National Museum of Archaeology in Valletta.

Excavation of the site reveals that it was used extensively for rituals, which probably involved animal sacrifice. Especially interesting is that Tarxien provides rare insight into how the megaliths were constructed: stone rollers were left outside the South temple. Additionally, evidence of cremation has been found at the center of the South temple, which is an indicator that the site was reused as a Bronze Age cremation cemetery.