Crusader Feces, Bat Feces, Latin swear words, and building a village - medieval news roundup

Here are some news stories from the medievalverse, and a few from beyond it...

Crusader Feces

An article in the International Journal of Paleopathology shows that many Crusaders would have been suffering from worms or other diseases. Test done by two researchers from the University of Cambridge at Saranda Kolones castle in Cyrpus showed that two species of parasite, the roundworm and the whipworm, were prevalent among the crusaders. The castle was built after the Third Crusade and abandoned in 1222.

Evilena Anastasiou and Piers D. Mitchell write that "the discovery of these parasites highlights how medieval crusaders may have been at risk of malnutrition at times of siege and famine, as these worms competed with them for nutrients."

You can read more about this story from Reuters.

The article 'Human intestinal parasites from a latrine in the 12th century Frankish castle of Saranda Kolones in Cyprus' is available here.

One stone at a time

While we have reported on groups in France and Arkansas that are building medieval castles, we now have a team of 25 workers in Germany who have just started constructing a replica of a ninth century monastic settlement and town. Bert Geuten is leading the effort to build the medieval site near the southern German town of Meßkirch in Baden-Württemberg. Because they are using authentic historical tools and techniques, it will take over 40 years before the project is complete, which will include a 2,000 seat cathedral.

They began last weekend by starting construction on a small church. “In the ninth century the monks would have built a small church first – they didn't want to wait until the cathedral was ready to be able to pray. So we're doing the same,” Geuten explained.

Click here to read the full article from The Local.

Bat Feces

Churches in England are again facing danger, but not from thieves stealing their metal or declining attendance. Instead, bats are the new threat, according to a report in the Daily Telegraph. An environmental directive from the European Union prohibits building owners from killing bats or destroying their roosts, and this is apparently leading to church interiors being contaminated with bat droppings.

Tony Baldry, a Member of Parliament who officially speaks for the Church of England, said, "the church of St Peter ad Vincula at South Newington in my own constituency has some very fine, almost unique, medieval wall paintings which seem to have been spared Thomas Cromwell's men. But having survived the ravages of the Reformation they are now threatened by bat urine. And these are irreplaceable parts of our natural heritage."

Click here to read the article from Daily Telegraph

How to Swear like a Roman

One of my daily reads The Atlantic magazine occasionally has articles related to history. Last month, they looked at ancient cursing with Futuo! How the Romans Swore. It focuses on the new book, Holy Sh*t! A Brief History of Swearing by Melissa Mohr, and explains the meaning behind Latin words such as futuo, landica, cinaedus, mingo, cacare and verecundum. You can read that article here.

What it takes to run the IMC

The International Medieval Congress is taking place at the University of Leeds from June 30th to July 4th. Over 2000 people will be attending (I wish I was there too). Anthony Lowe, event manager for MeetInLeeds is in charge of making sure everything goes smoothly “This has been three years in the planning as it is the largest conference we have hosted on the campus,” he explains to ConferenceNews. “It’s been great working with all the different departments to create a medieval campus, with special exhibitions in the university art gallery, library and academic meeting rooms, as well as themed menus and medieval street food."

He adds, “It’s going to be incredibly busy but we’re extremely well-prepared for it and will be working hard to ensure that everyone has a fabulous experience and remembers their medieval experience for many years to come. Leeds is a very attractive campus and we are looking forward to showing it at its very best.”

Click here to read the full article from ConferenceNews

Social Networking in the 1600s

Tom Standage is the author of the forthcoming book, Writing on the Wall: Social Media — The First 2,000 Years. In this article from the New York Times, he writes about how the coffeehouse was the social-networking site of the 17th century. He explains:

People went to coffeehouses not just to drink coffee, but to read and discuss the latest pamphlets and news-sheets and to catch up on rumor and gossip. Coffeehouses were also used as post offices. Patrons would visit their favorite coffeehouses several times a day to check for new mail, catch up on the news and talk to other coffee drinkers, both friends and strangers. Some coffeehouses specialized in discussion of particular topics, like science, politics, literature or shipping. As customers moved from one to the other, information circulated with them.

You can read the article here.

The Rise of the Novel

Staying in Early Modern England, Penn State News has an interesting profile of Leah Orr, a specialist in 18th-century literature. She just completed her PhD on Did the Novel Rise? Fiction and Print Culture in England, 1690-1730, which "rebuts the longstanding notion that the novel as we now know it became a recognized form and rose to prominence during that time period. That conception of early fiction, she argues, is based on close readings of a few famous texts by major authors, such as Daniel Defoe and Aphra Behn, and neglects the broader literary context in which those texts were written and first read."

Click here to read more from Penn State.

Other news bits:

Medieval herb garden unveiled at Northumberland Park

Medieval Polish Treasures Revealed at Down Museum Exhibition

Rachel Koopmans wins Margaret Wade Labarge Prize for Books in Medieval Studies

Video: Students studying Archaeology at Queen's University take part in an excavation which discovers a Medieval Lime Kiln, which may have been used during the construction of Dundrum Castle.

Colosseum Cleaning Yields Ancient Art Discoveries Including Old Frescos, Graffiti

A long-delayed restoration of the Colosseum's only intact internal passageway has yielded ancient traces of red, black, green and blue frescoes – as well as graffiti and drawings of phallic symbols – indicating that the arena where gladiators fought was far more colorful than previously thought. 

Officials unveiled the discoveries Friday and said the passageway – between the second and third levels of the first century Colosseum – would open to the public starting this summer, after the 80,000 euro restoration is completed.

 The frescoes were hidden under decades of calcified rock and grime, and were revealed during a cleaning and restoration project over the last two months. The traces confirmed that while the Colosseum today is a fairly monochrome gray travertine rock, red brick and moss-covered marble, in its day its interior halls were a rich and expensive Technicolor.

 "We're used to thinking that during excavations, archaeological surprises are a risk for builders and for the city's development," Rome archaeological heritage superintendent Mariarosaria Barbera said. "But here is a beautiful archaeological surprise ... a monument that has been studied and known and appreciated across the world, yet still provides surprises."

Click here to read the full article from the Huffington Post

Famed Roman shipwreck reveals more secrets

Ancient artifacts resembling the Antikythera mechanism, an ancient bronze clockwork astronomical calculator, may rest amid the larger-than-expected Roman shipwreck that yielded the device in 1901.


Marine archaeologists report they have uncovered new secrets of an ancient Roman shipwreck famed for yielding an amazingly sophisticated astronomical calculator. An international survey team says the ship is twice as long as originally thought and contains many more calcified objects amid the ship's lost cargo that hint at new discoveries.

At the Archaeological Institute of America meeting Friday in Seattle, marine archaeologist Brendan Foley of the Woods Hole (Mass.) Oceanographic Institution, will report on the first survey of Greece's famed Antikythera island shipwreck since 1976. The ancient Roman shipwreck was lost off the Greek coast around 67 BC,filled with statues and the famed astronomical clock.

"The ship was huge for ancient times," Foley says. "Divers a century ago just couldn't conduct this kind of survey but we were surprised when we realized how big it was."

Click here to read this article from USA Today

Ancient Carving Shows Stylishly Plump African Princess

By Owen Jarus

A 2,000-year-old relief carved with an image of what appears to be a, stylishly overweight, princess has been discovered in an "extremely fragile" palace in the ancient city of Meroë, in Sudan, archaeologists say.

 At the time the relief was made, Meroë was the center of a kingdom named Kush, its borders stretching as far north as the southern edge of Egypt. It wasn't unusual for queens (sometimes referred to as "Candaces") to rule, facing down the armies of an expanding Rome.

 The sandstone relief shows a woman smiling, her hair carefully dressed and an earring on her left ear. She appears to have a second chin and a bit of fat on her neck, something considered stylish, at the time, among royal women from Kush.

Click here to read this article from LiveScience

Hadrian's hall: archaeologists finish excavation of Roman arts centre

Archaeogists who have completed the excavation of a 900-seat arts centre under one of Rome's busiest roundabouts are calling it the most important Roman discovery in 80 years.

 The centre, built by the emperor Hadrian in AD123, offered three massive halls where Roman nobles flocked to hear poetry, speeches and philosophy tracts while reclining on terraced marble seating.

 With the dig now completed, the terracing and the hulking brick walls of the complex, as well as stretches of the elegant grey and yellow marble flooring, are newly visible at bottom of a 5.5 metre (18ft) hole in Piazza Venezia, where police officers wearing white gloves direct chaotic traffic like orchestra conductors and where Mussolini harangued thousands of followers from his balcony.

Click here to read this article from The Guardian

Greek court gives life sentences to 2 convicted of dealing in illegally excavated antiquities

A Greek court has imposed life sentences on two men convicted of dealing in ancient treasure worth an estimated €12 million ($15.85 million), which had been illegally excavated from a cemetery in northern Greece.

 The court in the northern city of Thessaloniki jailed two more men for 20 and 16 years, respectively, after finding them guilty of digging up and transporting the antiquities.

 The severity of Friday’s sentences was due to the high market value of the loot — more than 70 artifacts from the 6th century B.C.

Click here to read this article from the Washington Post

“In the beginning”...bringing the scrolls of Genesis and the Ten Commandments online

A little over a year ago, we helped put online five manuscripts of the Dead Sea Scrolls—ancient documents that include the oldest known biblical manuscripts in existence. Written more than 2,000 years ago on pieces of parchment and papyrus, they were preserved by the hot, dry desert climate and the darkness of the caves in which they were hidden. The Scrolls are possibly the most important archaeological discovery of the 20th century.

Today, we’re helping put more of these ancient treasures online. The Israel Antiquities Authority is launching the Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library, an online collection of some 5,000 images of scroll fragments, at a quality never seen before. The texts include one of the earliest known copies of the Book of Deuteronomy, which includes the Ten Commandments; part of Chapter 1 of the Book of Genesis, which describes the creation of the world; and hundreds more 2,000-year-old texts, shedding light on the time when Jesus lived and preached, and on the history of Judaism.

Click here to read this article from Google

Oops! Brain-Removal Tool Left in Mummy's Skull

A brain-removal tool used by ancient Egyptian embalmers has been discovered lodged in the skull of a female mummy that dates back around 2,400 years.

Removal of the brain was an Egyptian mummification procedure that became popular around 3,500 years ago and remained in use in later periods.

Identifying the ancient tools embalmers used for brain removal is difficult, and researchers note this is only the second time that such a tool has been reported within a mummy's skull.

Located between the left parietal bone and the back of the skull, which had been filled with resin, the object was discovered in 2008 through a series of CT scans. Researchers then inserted an endoscope (a thin tube often used for noninvasive medical procedures) into the mummy to get a closer look and ultimately detach it from resin to which it had gotten stuck.

Click here to read this article from LiveScience

A ‘City of Gold’ unearths new educational opportunities at Princeton University

At the beginning, surrounded by verdant farmland, the archaeological secrets of two ancient cities lay dormant below the surface on a Mediterranean island. That changed when William Childs, Professor of Art and Archaeology Emeritus, arrived at that rustic spot on the northwest coast of Cyprus in the early 1980s to explore the possibility of establishing an archaeological expedition for Princeton.

 Childs brought with him a handful of graduate students who, under hardscrabble conditions, worked with basic tools — pickaxes, shovels, trowels, brushes and wheelbarrows — while all along taking notes. Little did they know that their efforts would unearth a Cypriot “City of Gold” that would lead to decades of educational opportunities for Princeton students.

 Since a course called “Archaeology” was introduced on campus in 1843, the University has challenged students in the classroom and on excavations abroad to experience the culture, history, art, architecture and politics of the ancient world. In 1883, a formal Department of Art and Archaeology was founded.

 A century later, the Princeton University Archaeological Expedition at Polis Chrysochous — that scrap of land in Cyprus — was established with Childs as director. The excavation set the stage for hands-on learning experiences for hundreds of Princeton students; new academic courses; and a major loan exhibition, “City of Gold: Tomb and Temple in Ancient Cyprus,” on view until January 20, 2013, at the Princeton University Art Museum.

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

Polish archaeologists find unknown tomb in Egypt

Polish archaeologists have discovered the entrance to a previously unknown tomb during excavation work in Egypt.


The discovery was made at the historic necropolis of Saqqara, which had functioned as a burial ground for the Ancient Egyptian capital of Memphis.

Archaeologists had been carrying out excavations at the tomb of a dignitary named Ichi, who served at the court of Pharaoh Pepi over 4000 years ago.

The newly discovered tomb, which is connected to that of Ichi, lies within an area referred to as “the Dry Moat.”

Click here to read this article from TheNews.Pl

New light on the Nazca Lines

The first findings of the most detailed study yet by two British archaeologists into the Nazca Lines – enigmatic drawings created between 2,100 and 1,300 years ago in the Peruvian desert – have been published in the latest issue of the journal Antiquity.

As part of a five-year investigation, Professor Clive Ruggles of the University of Leicester’s School of Archaeology and Ancient History and Dr Nicholas Saunders of the University of Bristol’s Department of Archaeology and Anthropology have walked 1,500 km of desert in southern Peru, tracing the lines and geometric figures created by the Nasca people between 100 BC and AD 700.

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

Ancient hieroglyphics meet cutting-edge technology at Loughborough University

Engineers from Loughborough University have used the latest cutting-edge technology to bring to life an ancient Egyptian inscribed tablet.

Working with The Manchester Museum, Loughborough’s Professor John Tyrer has created a high-tech interactive display that will enable visitors to immerse themselves in the story behind the Stela of Hesysunebef.

Stelae were set up at religious sites to commemorate individuals or groups of people. They formed a permanent record of someone and allowed them to participate eternally in religious rituals.

The Stela of Hesysunebef is separated into three horizontal sections, called registers. The top register shows Neferhotep, the foreman of a gang of workmen who lived at the village of Deir el-Medina. He stands on the prow of a boat used to carry the statue of the goddess Mut. The middle register shows Hesysunebef, the adoptive son of Neferhotep and his family, who are all kneeling in adoration before the foreman. The lower register shows five more people including the parents-in-law of Hesysunebef. It dates back to around 1600 BC.

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

Ancient Scythians were a genetic blend of Europeans and Asians, researchers find

A group of researchers led by the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) has discovered the first scientific evidence of genetic blending between Europeans and Asians in the remains of ancient Scythian warriors living over 2,000 years ago in the Altai region of Mongolia. Contrary to what was believed until now, the results published in PLoS ONE indicate that this blending was not due to an eastward migration of Europeans, but to a demographic expansion of local Central Asian populations, thanks to the technological improvements the Scythian culture brought with them.

The Altai is a mountain range in Central Asia occupying territories of Russia and Kazakhstan to the west and of Mongolia and China to the east. Historically, the Central Asian steppes have been a corridor for Asian and European populations, resulting in the region’s large diversity in population today. In ancient times however the Altai Mountains, located in the middle of the steppes, represented an important barrier for the coexistence and mixture of the populations living on each side. And so they lived isolated during millennia: Europeans on the western side and Asians on the eastern side.

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

Tomb of Ancient Egyptian Princess Discovered

The tomb of an ancient Egyptian princess has been discovered south of Cairo hidden in bedrock and surrounded by a court of tombs belonging to four high officials.

Dating to 2500 B.C., the structure was built in the second half of the Fifth Dynasty, though archaeologists are puzzled as to why this princess was buried in Abusir South among tombs of non-royal officials. Most members of the Fifth Dynasty's royal family were buried 1.2 miles (2 kilometers) to the north, in the central part of Abusir or farther south in Saqqara.

The researchers aren't sure whether the remains of the princess are inside tomb, as the investigation is still in progress, Miroslav Bárta, director of the mission, told LiveScience. Even so, they also found several fragments of a false-door bearing the titles and the name of Sheretnebty, the king's daughter.

Click here to read this article from LiveScience

Turkey: Ancient mosaics found in Anatolian city

An archaeological city dating back 1,700 years has been unearthed during excavations in İzmir’s Kemalpaşa neighborhood, raising officials’ hopes the area will draw tourists’ attention.

The Cultural Beings and Museums’ General Director Osman Murat Süslü held a press conference Oct. 21 regarding the discovery of the archaeological city, which Culture and Tourism Minister Ertuğrul Günay has defined as “good news that will draw the world’s attention.”

Drilling work had started in the area, which is now categorized as a third degree archaeological site, before the construction of a warehouse company was scheduled to begin. Excavations were begun due to an abundance of signs the area may be a hotspot for archaeological treasures, Süslü said. “Scientific excavations started Oct. 1 and a layer from the 4th Century B.C. has been unearthed,” he said.

The newly-unearthed city is believed to date back to around the late Roman or Byzantium period, Süslü said. It was home to a 550-square-meter villa complex with 105-centimeter-thick walls, water channels and 11 rooms.

Click here to read this article from the Hurriyet Daily News

Researchers ‘closer than ever’ to cracking 5000 year old writings

New technology has allowed researchers to come closer than ever to cracking the world’s oldest undeciphered writing system.

Researchers from the University of Oxford and the University of Southampton have developed a Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI) System for Ancient Documentary Artefacts to capture images of some of the world’s most important historical documents. Recently this system was used on objects held in the vaults of the Louvre Museum in Paris.

These images have now been made available online for free public access on the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative website.

Among the documents are manuscripts written in the so-called proto-Elamite writing system used in ancient Iran from 3,200 to 3,000 BC and which is the oldest undeciphered writing system currently known. By viewing extremely high quality images of these documents, and by sharing them with a community of scholars worldwide, the Oxford University team hope to crack the code once and for all.

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

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

Ancient burial cloth reveals Bronze Age trade connections

A piece of nettle cloth retrieved from Denmark’s richest known Bronze Age burial mound Lusehøj may actually derive from Austria, new findings suggest. The cloth thus tells a surprising story about long-distance Bronze Age trade connections around 800 BC. The findings have just been published in Nature’s online journal Scientific Reports.

2,800 years ago, one of Denmark’s richest and most powerful men died. His body was burned. And the bereaved wrapped his bones in a cloth made from stinging nettle and put them in a stately bronze container, which also functioned as urn.

Now new findings suggest that the man’s voyage to his final resting place may have been longer than such voyages usually were during the Bronze Age: the nettle cloth, which was wrapped around the deceased’s bones, was not made in Denmark, and the evidence points to present-day Austria as the place of origin.

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

The Sweet Girl: Annabel Lyon’s last volume on Ancient Greece

Mercifully, Annabel Lyon has left her iPhone in her hotel room, which renders her unable to display a treasured photograph of the Iron Age vaginal dilator she snapped in a museum while visiting Athens to research her latest novel, a sequel to 2009’s award-winning, bestselling The Golden Mean.

“It’s horrifying!” she exults, spreading her arms to show the size of the fearful artifact, technically known as a speculum. “And it’s got this big screw on it, and it’s just ohh….” The novelist shudders.


“And I loved it, of course.”

Lyon loved it so much that she made the instrument a crucial prop in her new novel, The Sweet Girl, which returns to the ancient Greek world of philosophers and kings that she brought to life so successfully in The Golden Mean. But as the lovable speculum suggests, this is “a very different book” from her speculative biography of Aristotle, Lyon says. Chronicling the adventures of the philosopher’s precocious daughter after his death, The Sweet Girl is yin to the former book’s yang.

Whereas The Golden Mean focused on men and public life – “politics, warfare, science and reason and all of that,” according to the author – The Sweet Girl is “much more female, much more interior.”

Click here to read this article from The Globe and Mail

See also The Sweet Girl by Annabel Lyon: A brilliant philosopher’s daughter from the Toronto Star

New dictionary on ancient Egyptian language completes 37-year project

A dictionary of thousands of words chronicling the everyday lives of people in ancient Egypt — including what taxes they paid, what they expected in a marriage and how much work they had to do for the government — has been completed by scholars at the University of Chicago.

 The ancient language is Demotic Egyptian, a name given by the Greeks to denote it was the tongue of the demos, or common people. It was written as a flowing script and was used in Egypt from about 500 B.C. to 500 A.D., when the land was occupied and usually dominated by foreigners, including Persians, Greeks and Romans.

The language lives on today in words such as adobe, which came from the Egyptian word for brick. The word moved through Demotic, on to Arabic and eventually to Spain during the time of Islamic domination there, explained Janet Johnson, editor of the Chicago Demotic Dictionary.

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