Three medieval archaeological discoveries: Newfoundland, Egypt and Cambodia

Here are three reports of medieval discoveries from around the world...

Newfoundland

We know that the Vikings tried to create a settlement at L'anse aux Meadows on Newfoundland around the year 1000. A report by Owen Jarus at LiveScience adds that these Norsemen also visited the Notre Dame Bay region of that island as well.

Kevin Smith, deputy director and chief curator of the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology at Brown University, explained at a recent conference that two jasper artifacts had been discovered on the site of L'anse aux Meadows, and when they underwent chemical tests it revealed they had most likely come from around Notre Dame Bay, which lies about 230 km southeast of the Viking settlement.

The report also suggests that this might also be the area where the Vikings encountered the Beothuk or other native peoples. Jarus writes, "Ever since the discovery of L'Anse aux Meadows nearly 50 years ago, archaeologists and historians have been trying to uncover the story of Norse exploration in the New World. Previous research has revealed the presence of butternut seeds at L'Anse aux Meadows, indicating the Norse made a trip to the Gulf of St. Lawrence or possibly even a bit beyond. Additionally, Norse artifacts (and possibly a structure) have been discovered in the Canadian Arctic, indicating a trading relationship with the indigenous people there that might have lasted for centuries."

Click here to read the full article

Egypt

The Atlantic reports on the underwater archaeology that has discovered the remains of the Egyptian port of Heracleion/Thonis. They write that "sometime around the 8th century AD, Thonis sank into the sea. Most scientists believe that a combination of factors contributed to the cataclysm: a rise in sea level, coupled with a sudden collapse of the sediment-heavy earth on which the city was built. Whatever the causes, though, the results were clear: Heracleion -- Thonis -- essentially collapsed into itself. The city built upon the water plunged into it."

In the year 2000, a team led by Franck Goddio found and explored the ruins. Here is their video of what remains of the ancient port:



Click here to read the full article.

Cambodia

Archaeologists from the University of Sydney have discovered the lost city of Mahendraparvata. The Sydney Morning Herald tells the story of how the archaeologists used airborne laser technology to scan the area, which lies in northern Cambodia. Damian Evans, director of the University of Sydney's archaeological research centre in Cambodia, explains "with this instrument - bang - all of a sudden we saw an immediate picture of an entire city that no one knew existed which is just remarkable."

This city was built by the Khmer people in the 5th century AD and included dozens of temples. In 802 AD the famous city of Angkor Wat was founded 40 kilometres to the south. Mahendraparvata was abandoned and gradually became covered over with jungle.



Click here to read the full article.

Israeli library unveils medieval manuscript collection discovered in Afghanistan

A trove of ancient manuscripts in Hebrew characters rescued from caves in a Taliban stronghold in northern Afghanistan is providing the first physical evidence of a Jewish community that thrived there a thousand years ago.

 On Thursday Israel's National Library unveiled the cache of recently purchased documents that run the gamut of life experiences, including biblical commentaries, personal letters and financial records. 

Researchers say the "Afghan Genizah" marks the greatest such archive found since the "Cairo Genizah" was discovered in an Egyptian synagogue more than 100 years ago, a vast depository of medieval manuscripts considered to be among the most valuable collections of historical documents ever found.

 The Afghan collection gives an unprecedented look into the lives of Jews in ancient Persia in the 11th century. The paper manuscripts, preserved over the centuries by the dry, shady conditions of the caves, include writings in Hebrew, Aramaic, Judea-Arabic and the unique Judeo-Persian language from that era, which was written in Hebrew letters.

Click here to read this article from NPR

Ancient Bones That Tell a Story of Compassion

While it is a painful truism that brutality and violence are at least as old as humanity, so, it seems, is caring for the sick and disabled.

 And some archaeologists are suggesting a closer, more systematic look at how prehistoric people — who may have left only their bones — treated illness, injury and incapacitation. Call it the archaeology of health care.

 The case that led Lorna Tilley and Marc Oxenham of Australian National University in Canberra to this idea is that of a profoundly ill young man who lived 4,000 years ago in what is now northern Vietnam and was buried, as were others in his culture, at a site known as Man Bac.

 Almost all the other skeletons at the site, south of Hanoi and about 15 miles from the coast, lie straight. Burial 9, as both the remains and the once living person are known, was laid to rest curled in the fetal position. When Ms. Tilley, a graduate student in archaeology, and Dr. Oxenham, a professor, excavated and examined the skeleton in 2007 it became clear why. His fused vertebrae, weak bones and other evidence suggested that he lies in death as he did in life, bent and crippled by disease.

Click here to read this article from the New York Times

Hun tombs discovered in Mongolia

Scientists and researchers from the Institute of History of the Mongolian Academy of Sciences (IHMAS) have found tombs from the Hun people dating back to the 2nd century BC. In total, 31 Huns were buried in the tombs that were discovered at the foot of Salkhit of Rashaant Soum in Khuvsgul Province. After three years of research and excavation, the experts from IHMAS finally found the tombs of the Huns. Further detailed information about the tombs will be available to the public soon.

Below is an interview from Unuudur Newspaper with S.Ulziibayar, an expert on the research on Ancient History at the IHMAS.

Unprecedented finds were discovered from the tombs of the Huns in Khuvsgul. Can you give us more information on the discovery? 

There are indeed numerous finds with the potential of creating a stir. We conducted an excavation at the foot of Salkhit, which lies four kilometres away from the Rashaant Soum of Khuvsgul Province. A joint expedition, with officials from IHMAS and the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology from the National University of Mongolia discovered the tombs in 2006, and excavation work continued from 2009 to 2011. As the anniversary of the first state of Mongolia, the Huns, occurred in 2011, we were able to conduct the excavation rather intensely last year using the funds received from the Anniversary Commission. We excavated 29 separate tombs in total and the field research has now finished. Our institute is set to release a book about the tombs discovered at Salkhit. As we didn’t announce the book formally through a research conference, it’s too early to publicise it. We also want to make people aware that we didn’t cooperate with any foreign partners on this excavation. It was the first ever joint expedition of native Mongolians during the past 20 years in this country.

Click here to read the full interview from The UB Post

Thousand-year-old Buddhist statue was created from a meteorite, new study reveals

It sounds like an artifact from an Indiana Jones film; a 1,000 year-old ancient Buddhist statue which was first recovered by a Nazi expedition in 1938 has been analysed by scientists and has been found to be carved from a meteorite. The findings, published in Meteoritics and Planetary Science, reveal the priceless statue to be a rare ataxite class of meteorite.

 The statue, known as the Iron Man, weighs 10kg and is believed to represent a stylistic hybrid between the Buddhist and pre-Buddhist Bon culture that portrays the god Vaisravana, the Buddhist King of the North, also known as Jambhala in Tibet.

Click here to read this article from Medievalists.net

Descendants of Alexander the Great’s army fought in ancient China, historian finds

A recent article is examining the possibility that a contingent of soldiers from the Mediterranean fought at the Battle of Talas River in 36 BC, but instead of being Roman forces, new research suggests they may have been descendants of the armies of Alexander the Great.

 Christopher A. Matthew’s proposes this idea in his article, “Greek Hoplite in an Ancient Chinese Siege”, which appears in the latest issue of Journal of Asian History. It re-examines a theory put forward more than 70 years ago by Homer H. Dubs, in which the historian believed that Roman legionaries were serving as mercenaries in a city besieged by Han Chinese nearly 2,000 miles to the east of Roman territory. When the city fell, these men were captured and take east and eventually settled in a town on the fringes to the Han Empire.

Click here to read this article from History of the Ancient World

Should We Rebuild the Buddhas of Bamiyan?

When you've spent 18 months writing a book called The Buddhas of Bamiyan, and - let's be honest - when you'd quite like to flog a copy or two, all the recent talk about reconstructing one of the colossal statues demolished by the Taliban can seem heaven-sent. Those 18 months were spent discovering that places don't come any more historically significant than Bamiyan.

 In AD 629 the Buddhas were visited by Xuanzang, the great Chinese traveller sometimes described as the Marco Polo of the East: he left a precious account of their original, brightly-coloured decoration. Later they were celebrated wonders of the Islamic world, monuments of which it was said that there were "no equals in this world."

 At the end of the 18th century an eccentric but influential British author proposed that Bamiyan was the Garden of Eden: a string of dropouts, spies, and Christian missionaries visited Bamiyan from British India in his wake, and though all of them found a place of breathtaking natural beauty, the earthly paradise proved more elusive. Even the destruction of the Buddhas in 2001 was connected in murky ways to the greatest historical turning-point of recent times, in New York later the same year.

So yes, by all means let's investigate the feasibility of reconstructing the smaller (38 m.) Buddha - what remains of the bigger (55 m.) statue is just too fragmentary for it to be an option there. If it can be done well, if the daunting technical obstacles can be overcome, and if the cost (which will be exorbitant) can be justified by the benefits it will bring to a renascent tourist industry, who could possibly object? It's certainly what the local population want, and leaving empty the niche of the larger Buddha would even satisfy the purists who see the space where the Buddhas once were as a powerful memorial in itself. In all sorts of ways, a profoundly apt gesture.

Click here to read this article from the Huffington Post

Ancient Statue Reveals Prince Who Would Become Buddha

In the ruins of a Buddhist monastery in Afghanistan, archaeologists have uncovered a stone statue that seems to depict the prince Siddhartha before he founded Buddhism.

 The stone statue, or stele, was discovered at the Mes Aynak site in a ruined monastery in 2010, but it wasn't until now that it was analyzed and described. Gérard Fussman, a professor at the Collège de France in Paris, details his study in "The Early Iconography of Avalokitesvara" (Collège de France, 2012).

 Standing 11 inches (28 centimeters) high and carved from schist — a stone not found in the area — the stele depicts a prince alongside a monk. Based on a bronze coin found nearby, Fussman estimates the statue dates back at least 1,600 years. Siddhartha lived 25 centuries ago.

Click here to read this article from LiveScience

16th-Century Korean Mummy Provides Clue to Hepatitis B Virus Genetic Code

The discovery of a mummified Korean child with relatively preserved organs enabled an Israeli-South Korean scientific team to conduct a genetic analysis on a liver biopsy which revealed a unique hepatitis B virus (HBV) genotype C2 sequence common in Southeast Asia.

 Additional analysis of the medieval HBV genomes may be used as a model to study the evolution of chronic hepatitis B and help understand the spread of the virus, possibly from Africa to East-Asia. It also may shed further light on the migratory pathway of hepatitis B in the Far East from China and Japan to Korea as well as to other regions in Asia and Australia where it is a major cause of cirrhosis and liver cancer.

 The reconstruction of the medieval hepatitis B virus genetic code is the oldest full viral genome described in the scientific literature to date. It was reported in the May 21 edition of the scientific journal Hepathology by a research team from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s Koret School of Veterinary Medicine, the Robert H. Smith Faculty of Agriculture, Food and Environment; the Hebrew University’s Faculty of Medicine, the Hadassah Medical Center’s Liver Unit; Dankook University and Seoul National University in South Korea.

Click here to read this article from Medievalists.net

An Ancient Civilization, Upended by Climate Change

The Vedas, a collection of texts composed over 3,000 years ago in India, speak of a mythical sacred river called the Sarasvati from which the Hindu goddess of science and learning emerged. Hers was a river “surpassing in majesty and might all other waters.” But around 4,000 years ago, all was lost when climate change kicked in.

 That is the conclusion of a group of geologists, geomorphologists, archaeologists and mathematicians who joined forces to answer a question that has dogged scholars for centuries: what became of the Indus civilization?

 This colossal civilization rose about 4,500 years ago, flourished for 600 years and then began a steady and relentless decline. Previous scholars hypothesized that regional strife or a foreign invasion led to its unraveling, while others suggested that environmental factors may have been to blame. The researchers who took part in the new study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, had a hunch that the latter theory was correct.

 “What we thought was missing was how to link climate to people,” said Liviu Giosan, a geologist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts and the lead author of the study. “The answer came when we looked at the wide-scale morphology.”

Click here to read this article from the New York Times

See also Migration of monsoons created, then killed Harappan civilization

Marco Polo really did go to China, new study finds

It has been said that Marco Polo did not really go to China; that he merely cobbled together his information about it from journeys to the Black Sea, Constantinople and Persia and from talking to merchants and reading now-lost Persian books. But in Marco Polo was in China: New Evidence from Currencies, Salts and Revenues, Hans Ulrich Vogel, Professor of Chinese Studies at the University of Tübingen, puts paid to such rumors.

He begins with a comprehensive review of the arguments for and against, and follows it up with evidence from relevant Chinese, Japanese, Italian, French, German and Spanish literature. The result is compelling: despite a few, well-known problems with Marco Polo’s writings, they are supported by an overwhelming number of verified accounts about China containing unique information given over centuries.

Click here to read this article from Medievalists.net

11th century medallion from Portugal found in a shark off Malaysia

A medieval medallion, believed to be from the 11th century, was found in the stomach of a baby shark in southern Malaysia, a news report said Wednesday.

The medallion, engraved with a profile of a woman on one side and a crucifix with inscription ANTONII on the other side, was recovered Tuesday by a housewife while cleaning the fish to be cooked.

The artifact was believed to have been worn by Portuguese soldiers, who colonized Malaysia in 1511, for divine protection.

Suseela Menon, 47, a resident of Klebang town in the state of Malacca, about 120 kilometres south of Kuala Lumpur, said she was cleaning the shark she bought from the market when she saw the medallion inside its stomach.

Click here to read this article from Times Live

Medieval Jewish manuscripts discovered in Afghanistan include an unknown work by Saadia Gaon

This much is known: rare, medieval Jewish manuscripts have been discovered along the fabled Silk Road in Afghanistan and are for sale.

Are they authentic? Scholars who have examined them say they are.

The rest — who found them, where they came from, whether there are more to unearth — remains a mystery.

But the discovery of the 200 or more documents, some in good condition and others crumpled or in fragments, has excited academic interest around the world.

“For the first time we have concrete evidence of Jewish existence (in Afghanistan), not only in the material sense of tombstones or household artifacts, but documents that (tell us) about the spiritual world of the people who lived there 1,000 years ago,” says Haggai Ben-Shammai, academic director of the National Library of Israel in Jerusalem.

Click here to read this article from the Toronto Star


Click here to read Medieval Jewish manuscripts discovered in Afghanistan from Medievalists.net

Medieval Jewish manuscripts discovered in Afghanistan

Over 150 medieval Jewish documents have been discovered in Afghanistan. The works were found, purportedly by shepherds looking for sheep, in the mountains of Samangan province, which lies along the Silk Road trade route.

The manuscripts were written in the eleventh century and written in Judeo-Arabic and Judeo-Persian. They included an unknown history of the Kingdom of Judea, passages from the Books of Isaiah and Jeremiah; hitherto unknown works by the tenth-century sage Rabbi Sa’adia Gaon; personal poems of loss and mourning and even bookkeeping records by a Jewish merchant.

Click here to read this article from Medievalists.net

Ancient City of Angkor may have been ruined by drought

The ancient city of Angkor — the most famous monument of which is the breathtaking ruined temple of Angkor Wat — might have collapsed due to valiant but ultimately failed efforts to battle drought, scientists find.

The great city of Angkor in Cambodia, first established in the ninth century, was the capital of the Khmer Empire, the major player in southeast Asia for nearly five centuries. It stretched over more than 385 square miles (1,000 square kilometers), making it the most extensive urban complex of the preindustrial world. In comparison, Philadelphia covers 135 square miles (350 sq. km), while Phoenix sprawls across more than 500 square miles (1,300 sq. km), not including the huge suburbs.

Suggested causes for the fall of the Khmer Empire in the late 14th to early 15th centuries have included war and land overexploitation. However, recent evidence suggests that prolonged droughts might have been linked to the decline of Angkor — for instance, tree rings from Vietnam suggest the region experienced long spans of drought interspersed with unusually heavy rainfall.

Click here to read this article from The Christian Science Monitor

Dogs were first domesticated in East Asia, research finds

Researchers at Sweden’s KTH Royal Institute of Technology say they have found further proof that the wolf ancestors of today’s domesticated dogs can be traced to southern East Asia — findings that run counter to theories placing the cradle of the canine line in the Middle East.

Dr Peter Savolainen, KTH researcher in evolutionary genetics, says a new study released last week confirms that an Asian region south of the Yangtze River was the principal and probably sole region where wolves were domesticated by humans.

Click here to read this article from History of the Ancient World

Golden Horde mausoleum discovered in Kazakhstan

A large mausoleum of the Golden Horde period was discovered in the Pavlodar region in Kazakhstan, the Pavlodar State Pedagogical Institute told Trend.

"The mausoleum, dated to the 14th century AD, is one of the largest archaeological buildings on the territory of Sary-Arka. The mausoleum’s height is 20 meters. The skeleton of a man who was the representative of the ruling elite was discovered at the bottom of the burial pit," the institute said.

Click here to read this article from Trend.Az

Historians cast doubt on the story of Marco Polo's travels in China

His journeys across mountain ranges and deserts opened the eyes of medieval Europe to the exotic wonders of China and the Silk Road, establishing him as one of history's greatest explorers.

But a team of archaeologists believe Marco Polo never even reached the Middle Kingdom, much less introduced pasta to Italy after bringing it back from his travels, as legend has it.

Instead they think it more likely that the Venetian merchant adventurer picked up second-hand stories of China, Japan and the Mongol Empire from Persian merchants he met on the shores of the Black Sea, thousands of miles short of the Orient.

Click here to read this article from Daily News and Analysis