Free Republic

Once mistaken for the Great Wall of China, archeologists have unearthed an ancient city complete with a 70-meter (230-foot) pyramid, decapitated heads, and a bounty of precious gems. The 4,300-year-old stone city is now named Shimao, although its ancient name is unknown. At 400 hectares... Shimao is found in a region often been described in Chinese histories as a home to "barbarians". While little is known about the ancient city, its grandeur and intricacy suggest it was once politically and economically important in the region. The buildings were quarried from nearby sandstone whose extraction, transportation, and use were labor-intensive and...

A recent discovery at a ruined city in north-west China has amazed archaeologists and other experts. Researchers at the Bronze Age archaeological site of Shimao have identified a large step pyramid. This unusual find is bound to add to our knowledge of early China and throw some light on the mysterious culture that thrived for centuries in the city of Shimao. It is also challenging notions as to when and where Chinese civilization began to develop and where it first emerged.

Archaeologists unearth a portrait of a king carved into stone in a 4,300-year-old Chinese Pyramid A team of archaeologists say they have found what could be the portrait of a king carved into stone at the foot of the 4,300-year-old Shimao Pyramid in Shenmu, Shaanxi province in northwest China. Shimao archaeological site is located in the northern part of the Loess Plateau, on the southern edge of the Ordos Desert. The site dates to about 2000 BC towards the end of the Longshan period and covers an area of about 400 ha. The walls at Shimao, the largest known walled...

An Oxford University-led... research team... will be looking at a group of artefacts in excavations and museum collections that are traditionally described as ‘Celtic’ because of their use of spirals, circles, interlaced designs, or swirling representations of plants or animals. One main line of enquiry is the relationship between the central European Celts and their nomadic Eurasian neighbours (often referred to as Scythians or Sarmatians), who inhabited the European end of a grassland (steppe) corridor that stretched east towards Central Asia and China... Iron Age tombs frozen in the mountains of Siberia, Mongolia, and Kazakhstan have yielded Roman glass, Chinese...

URUMQI (China): An exhibit in the museum in Urumqui gives the government's unambiguous take on the history of this border region: "Xinjiang has been an inalienable part of the territory of China," says one prominent sign. But walk upstairs and the ancient corpses on display seem to tell a different story. One called the Loulan Beauty lies on her back with her shoulder-length hair matted down her high cheekbones and long nose the most obvious signs that she is not what one thinks of as Chinese. The Loulan Beauty is one of more than 200 remarkably well-preserved mummies discovered in...

Excavation of ancient desert tombs ends, riddles waiting to answer www.chinaview.cn 2005-03-20 15:33:59 URUMQI, March 20 (Xinhuanet) -- Chinese archaeologists finished the excavation of an ancient tomb complex in the Lop Nur Desert, northwest China, but researchers say the finds are puzzling and need more time to be understood. By mid March, archaeologists in Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region unearthed 163 tombs of the Xiaohe Tomb complex, which sprawls on a 2,500-square-meter oval-shaped dune, 174 km from the ruins of the Loulan Kingdom, an ancient civilization that vanished 1,500 years ago. The complex contains about 330 tombs, but about 160 of...

The mysterious origins of ancient bronzeware found in a part of northern China may have been uncovered, with the discovery of the ruins of a complete Bronze Age town in the area.Archaeologists have now recovered hundreds of astonishing artifacts — including bronze drinking vessels, painted pottery, ornaments inlaid with turquoise and carved pieces of jade — at the vast Zhaigou archaeological site, about 70 miles (110 kilometers) south of the modern city of Yulin in Shaanxi province.The relics, dating from more than 3,000 years ago, were made during the Shang Dynasty, which ruled northern China from about 1600 B.C. to...

A gold funeral mask, thought to be more than 3,000 years old, has been discovered in the tomb of an ancient noble in the city of Zhengzhou in central China. It's one of the oldest gold objects ever found in central China, as contemporary treasures tend to be crafted from bronze and jade, raising questions about possible links to other early Chinese states where gold was more common.The gold mask is 7.2 inches (18.3 centimeters) long and 5.7 inches (14.5 cm) wide — large enough to cover the entire face of an adult...Finds from three other ancient Chinese archaeological sites...

The complex of 24 tombs was discovered at an archaeological site within the city of Anyang in Henan province, less than 2 miles (2.4 km) from the UNESCO World Heritage archaeological site of Yinxu at the city's center. The ruins there are from the ancient city of Yin, the capital of the Shang dynasty, which ruled between about 1600 B.C. to 1046 B.C. — the earliest dynasty ever recorded in China. The newfound tomb complex includes several pits that hold war chariots, the remains of horses that drew them and the remains of warriors. Some of the warriors were wearing...

Ancient map of Africa poses questions The unveiling in South Africa's parliament on Monday of a replica of an ancient Chinese map of the then known world which includes a recognisable outline of Africa is raising intriguing questions of which foreigners first explored the continent. "The idea is to take us beyond what we have been ... brainwashed into believing" declared Speaker Frene Ginwala at the opening of the exhibition, which includes other maps and rock art. The "Da Ming Hun Yi Tu", the Amalgamated Map of the Great Ming Empire, dates back to 1389, decades before the first European...

A team working at the Shimao archaeological site in Shaanxi province made the discovery during a recent excavation of the city’s Neolithic ruins, which are thought to date back to about 2,000BC, state broadcaster CCTV reported on Monday. “The beast-face patterns found in Shimao might have had a significant influence on the motifs of China’s Bronze Age,” Sun Zhouyong, president of the Shaanxi Provincial Institute of Archaeology, said in the report. Researchers unearthed about 30 carvings at the site with designs similar to those found on the elaborately decorated bronze vessels of the Shang and Zhou dynasties (1600-256BC). While most...

BEIJING — Archaeologists say they have discovered some of the world’s oldest known primitive writing, dating back about 5,000 years, in eastern China, and some of the markings etched on broken axes resemble a modern Chinese character. The inscriptions on artifacts found at a relic site south of Shanghai are about 1,400 years older than the oldest written Chinese language. Chinese scholars are divided over whether the markings are words or something simpler, but they say the finding will shed light on the origins of Chinese language and culture. The oldest writing in the world is believed to be from...

Chinese archaeologists studying ancient rock carvings say they have evidence that modern Chinese script is thousands of years older than previously thought.State media say researchers identified more than 2,000 pictorial symbols dating back 8,000 years, on cliff faces in the north-west of the country. They say many of these symbols bear a strong resemblance to later forms of ancient Chinese characters. Scholars had thought Chinese symbols came into use about 4,500 years ago. The Damaidi carvings, first discovered in the 1980s, cover 15 sq km (5.8 square miles) and feature more than 8,000 individual figures including the sun, moon,...

'Earliest Chinese Characters' Unearthed Archaeologists have discovered pottery bearing inscriptions dating back 4,500 years, which could prove to be China's earliest example of written language. These pottery fragments, found in the ruins of an ancient city in Huaiyang County of Henan Province, are believed to be parts of a spinning wheel, according to a report released by the county government. A photo, posted on the local government's website, showed a piece of black pottery bearing white strokes. The fragment formed half of a round spinning wheel, with a diameter of 4.7 centimeters and a thickness of 1.1 centimeters. The inscriptions...

'Earliest writing' found in China By Paul Rincon BBC Science First attempt at writing .. on a tortoise shell Signs carved into 8,600-year-old tortoise shells found in China may be the earliest written words, say archaeologists. The symbols were written down in the late Stone Age, or Neolithic Age. They predate the earliest recorded writings from Mesopotamia - in what is now Iraq - by more than 2,000 years. The archaeologists say they bear similarities to written characters used thousands of years later during the Shang dynasty, which lasted from 1700-1100 BC. But the discovery has already generated controversy, with...

The Norwegian archaeologists Helge and Anne Stine Ingstad's famous identification, in 1961, of a Viking settlement at L'Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland, from just after A.D. 1000 is, of course, a notable exception, no longer in dispute. But that discovery has so far gone nowhere. The Norse settlers, who may have numbered as many as 160 and stayed for three years or longer, seem to have made no lasting impression on the aboriginal skraellings that, according to Norse sagas, they encountered, and to have avoided being influenced in turn. The traditions of the Micmac people, modern-day inhabitants of the area, have...

The 7,500- to 11,000-year-old remains suggest the oldest settlers of the Americas came from different genetic stock than more recent Native Americans. Modern Native Americans share traits with Mongoloid peoples of Mongolia, China, and Siberia, the researchers said. But they found dozens of skulls from Brazil appear much more similar to modern Australians, Melanesians, and Sub-Saharan Africans. A Brazilian study involving a large collection of South American skulls suggests at least two distinct groups of early humans colonized the Americas. Anthropologists Walter Neves and Mark Hubbe of the University of Sao Paulo studied 81 skulls of early humans and found...

Inscriptions on the seal and plaque display important elements of later scripts employed by civilizations in Mexico and Central America, the researchers say. These include a mix of language-related symbols and drawings, as well as references to a sacred calendar and specific kings. According to the scientists, the seal carries two sets of symbols emanating from the beak of a bird to show that the signs represent spoken words. Pohl and her coworkers interpret these hieroglyphics as representing the name "King 3 Ajaw." ...The researchers couldn't translate the two complete hieroglyphic signs and two possible partial ones on the plaque...

Ancient civilisations in Mexico developed a writing system as early as 2,000 years ago, new evidence suggests. The discovery in the state of Veracruz of a block inscribed with symbolic shapes has astounded anthropologists. Researchers tell Science magazine that they consider it to be the oldest example of writing in the New World. The inscriptions are thought to have been made by the Olmecs, an ancient pre-Columbian people known for creating large statues of heads. The finding suggests that New World people developed writing some 400 years before their contemporaries in the Western hemisphere. ...... "I think it could...

Earliest evidence of tar used as waterproofing material was found in Veracruz and is more than 3,500 years old. Olmeca cultures that inhabited the Gulf of Mexico vicinity used it to protect soil, terracotta or wooden constructions, floor and wall covering, boat sealant, as well as glue. Earliest remains of containers with tar are those recovered in the municipality of Hidalgotitlan, Veracruz, as part of El Manati archaeological project. Containers found by INAH archaeologists may have been used to heat up tar... Contemporary inhabitants of the Gulf coast vicinity still use tar to flatten the entrance of their houses, patios,...