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Unearthed: the humble origins of world diplomacy By David Keys, Archaeology Correspondent 19 January 2003 Archaeologists have discovered evidence of an invasion of the Middle East by one of the world's first superpowers, which destroyed much of the region 33 centuries ago. Under the ruins of a 3,800-year-old royal palace in western Syria they have found part of an ancient diplomatic and administrative library, the most important archaeological discovery of its kind for more than 20 years. Accounts on clay tablets describe the region's conquest by one of the Bronze Age's superpowers, the Hittite Empire, in 1340BC. This helped to...

The remains of a vast Bronze Age town... has been discovered in Gaza, and has now been shown to be a rich trading hub. The prosperity of its Canaanite inhabitants is evident in discoveries of elaborate gold jewelry, vast amounts of imported pottery and an unprecedented number of scarabs... trade between the seaside Canaanite town and other Mediterranean peoples, notably the ancient Cypriots. Among the clay sherds discovered were over 200 of white slip I type of pottery, a type of ware rarely found outside of Cyprus. Tell el-Ajjul, which lies right on the Gazan coast, was first explored by...

The discovery suggests that not only did this spectacular site in the Greek Bronze Age (between 3500 and 1100 BC) recover from the collapse of the socio-political system around 1200 BC, but also rapidly grew and thrived as a cosmopolitan hub of the Aegean and Mediterranean regions. Antonis Kotsonas, a University of Cincinnati assistant professor of classics, will highlight his field research with the Knossos Urban Landscape Project at the 117th annual meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America and Society for Classical Studies. The meeting takes place Jan. 7-10, 2016 in San Francisco. Kotsonas explains that Knossos, "renowned as...

DNA sheds light on Minoans Crete’s fabled Minoan civilization was built by people from Anatolia, according to a new study by Greek and foreign scientists that disputes an earlier theory that said the Minoans’ forefathers had come from Africa. The new study – a collaboration by experts in Greece, the USA, Canada, Russia and Turkey – drew its conclusions from the DNA analysis of 193 men from Crete and another 171 from former neolithic colonies in central and northern Greece. The results show that the country’s neolithic population came to Greece by sea from Anatolia – modern-day Iran, Iraq and...

...In the course of both Boyd's and Watrous' excavations, more than 50 houses or areas with evidence of industrial activity have been uncovered -- 20 areas producing pottery, 15 producing stone vases, 18 producing bronze and bronze implements, and some with evidence for textile production. At one location on the north edge of the settlement, Buell points out an area of burned bedrock inside a space identified as a foundry. 'Here we have all sorts of scraps of bronze crucibles, bronze drips, copper scraps, and iron used for flux. Elsewhere, we also found a tin ingot, the closest known source...

A four-sided red jasper sealstone is among the finds unearthed during this season's excavation of the Minoan peak sanctuary at Vrysinas, located south of the city of Rethymnon. The whole area was officially announced and included in the archaeological sites list by the Central Archaeological Council of Greece. The sealstone, which is carved on all four surfaces with characters of the Minoan Hieroglyphic script, constitutes the sole evidence to date for the presence of this earliest Minoan style of writing in Western Crete. The excavation, which began in 2004, is conducted by the Ephorate of Prehistoric and Classical Antiquities under...

A staple complaint of the climate sceptic, that it’s impossible to determine the impact of historical volcanic eruptions on the climate, is a step closer to being spiked, courtesy of work at the University of Copenhagen. The university’s Matthew Johnson, an associate professor in the Department of Chemistry, has published work conducted with the Tokyo Institute of Technology in which he uses the isotopes captured in old sulphur to determine the scale of eruptions. As explained in the university’s announcement, the work is designed to resolve the often-conflicting dates attached to recorded eruptions. Dating is difficult from ancient records, since...

In Greece, underwater excavations of Lechaion, ancient Corinth's partially submerged harbour town, reveal the infrastructure of more than a thousand years of flourishing maritime trade. Researchers from the Greek Ministry of Culture and Sports and the University of Copenhagen are using cutting-edge methods to uncover the configuration and scale of the harbour. Corinth ranked among the most economically and militarily powerful, and enduring, cities of the Greek, Roman and Byzantine periods. The city had an exceptional geographical advantage in the North East corner of the Peloponnese and controlled the Isthmus that facilitated land travel between Northern and Southern Greece, and...

Foley, a marine archaeologist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, and his colleagues at Greece's Ephorate of Underwater Antiquities in Athens have spent the day diving near the cliffs of the tiny island of Dia in the eastern Mediterranean. They have identified two clusters of pottery dating from the first century BC and fifth century AD. Together with other remains that the team has discovered on the island's submerged slopes, the pots reveal that for centuries Greek, Roman and Byzantine traders used Dia as a refuge during storms, when they couldn't safely reach Crete. It is a nice...

The tomb was built sometime between 800 B.C. and 760 B.C., a time when Corinth was emerging as a major power and Greeks were colonizing the coasts of the Mediterranean Sea. The tomb itself consists of a shaft and burial pit, the pit having a limestone sarcophagus that is about 5.8 feet (1.76 meters) long, 2.8 feet (0.86 m) wide and 2.1 feet (0.63 m) high. When researchers opened the sarcophagus, they found a single individual had been buried inside, with only fragments of bones surviving. The scientists found several pottery vessels beside the sarcophagus, and the tomb also contained...

An archaeological team excavating the ancient site of Alacahöyük, one of the most significant centers of the ancient Hittite civilization, cooked pastries belonging to Hittite cuisine that dates back 4,000 years. The foods found on Hittite tablets were cooked without modern technology or equipment. The 4,000-year-old Hittite cuisine was cooked in Alacahöyük, an important Neolithic settlement and Turkey's first nationally excavated area. Aykut Çınaroğlu, the head of the excavations and professor of archaeology at Ankara University, told Anadolu Agency (AA) that Chef Ömür Akkor, an excavation team member, prepared a special Hittite menu in light of the available archaeological findings....

'Using just a small hand trowel these archaeologists are painstakingly working to unlock the secrets of an ancient kingdom. Historians believe they have unearthed tombs dating back over 2,800 years in Van, eastern Turkey. The pithos burial chambers, which are like large ceramic jars, are thought to be from the Kingdom of Uratu, which ruled the country from the mid-ninth century BC until its defeat by the Medes. Historians at work in the Turkish town of Vans, which was the capital of the Urartian Kingdom. Vans was the capital of the Urartian Kingdom until it fell early in the sixth...

The name Goliath, like Achish, is not Semitic, but rather Anatolian (McCarter 1980, 291, Mitchell 1967, 415; Wainwright 1959, 79). Not all agree though; the International Standard Bible Encyclopedia (2:524) proposes that Goliath may have been a remnant of one of the aboriginal groups of giants of Palestine who now were in the employ of the Philistines. [1. Naveh (1985, 9, 13 n. 14) states that Ikausu, the name of the king of Ekron in the seventh century b.c., is a non-Semitic name that can be associated with that of the Achish of Gath in David's time. The name in...

Jewelry used by women and men in the Urartian era provide detailed information about social class differences, Van Yuzuncu Yil University Head of Archaeology Department Associated Professor Rafet Cavusoglu has said. Artifacts and jewelry from the Urartian Kingdom 3,000 years ago, unearthed during excavations in the eastern province of Van, shed light on the mentality of life style and management of the era. Cavusoglu, who has been working on Urartian civilization for 21 years and examining these artifacts, said that as well as agriculture and stockbreeding, the Urartians were developed in metal embroidery, too. "The Urartians used jewelry such as...

A new Lemnian inscription was discovered recently during excavation of an ancient sanctuary at Efestia on the island of Lemnos. The inscription was incised in two lines on the upper portion of a rectangular altar measuring 50 cm. in length and 13.05 cm. in height (see photograph below). The direction of writing is boustrophedon. The upper line reads from left-to-right, the lower line from right-to-left. The inscription has 26 letters plus punctuation marks in the form of three vertically-aligned points separating words. The transcription provided below is that given by de Simone (2009). The letter âi (= palatal sibilant) is...

A group of nine Indus Valley copper plates (c. 2600–2000 BC), discovered from private collections in Pakistan, appear to be of an important type not previously described. The plates are significantly larger and more robust than those comprising the corpus of known copper plates or tablets, and most significantly differ in being inscribed with mirrored characters. One of the plates bears 34 characters, which is the longest known single Indus script inscription. Examination of the plates with x-ray fluorescence (XRF) spectrophotometry indicates metal compositions, including arsenical copper, consistent with Indus Valley technology. Microscopy of the metal surface and internal structure...

Found in Tarquinia, a hill town about 50 miles northwest of Rome, famous for its Etruscan art treasures, the 2,600 year old intact burial site came complete with a full array of precious grave goods. "It's a unique discovery, as it is extremely rare to find an inviolate Etruscan tomb of an upper-class individual. It opens up huge study opportunities on the Etruscans," Alessandro Mandolesi, of the University of Turin, told Discovery News. Mandolesi is leading the excavation in collaboration with the Archaeological Superintendency of Southern Etruria. A fun loving and eclectic people who among other things taught the French...

They taught the French to make wine and the Romans to build roads, and they introduced writing to Europe, but the Etruscans have long been considered one of antiquity's great enigmas. No one knew exactly where they came from. Their language was alien to their neighbors. Their religion included the practice of divination, performed by priests who examined animals' entrails to predict the future. Much of our knowledge about Etruscan civilization comes from ancient literary sources and from tomb excavations, many of which were carried out decades ago. But all across Italy, archaeologists are now creating a much richer picture...

An ancient Etruscan home dating back more than 2,400 years has been discovered outside Grosseto in central Italy. Hailed as an exceptional find, the luxury home was uncovered at an archeological site at Vetulonia, 200 kilometres north of Rome. Archeologists say it is rare to find an Etruscan home intact and believe the home was built between the 3rd and 1st century BC. Using six Roman and Etruscan coins uncovered at the home, archeologists believe the house collapsed in 79 AD during wars unleashed by Roman general and dictator, Lucio Cornelio Silla. Archeologists have discovered a large quantity of items...

In Roman mythology, the bough was a tree branch with golden leaves that enabled the Trojan hero Aeneas to travel through the underworld safely. They discovered the remains while excavating religious sanctuary built in honour of the goddess Diana near an ancient volcanic lake in the Alban Hills, 20 miles south of Rome. They believe the enclosure protected a huge Cypress or oak tree which was sacred to the Latins, a powerful tribe which ruled the region before the rise of the Roman Empire. The tree was central to the myth of Aeneas, who was told by a spirit to...