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It won’t catch any fish, but the discovery of as many as 20,000 silver coins and pieces of jewelry dates back to the early Middle Ages. Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story: A fisherman digging for worms at his summer home in Sweden instead discovered over 13 pounds of buried silver treasure. The hoard comes from the early Middle Ages, and includes mostly coins (and some jewelry). The entire cache of silver was tucked inside a copper pot. A Swedish fisherman searching for gooey, juicy worms to use as bait near his summer home near Stockholm instead...

Austrian archaeologists have found a Babylonian seal in Egypt that confirms contact between the Babylonians and the Hyksos during the second millennium B.C. Irene Forstner-Müller, the head of the Austrian Archaeological Institute's (ÖAI) branch office in Cairo, said today (Thurs) the find had occurred at the site of the ancient town of Avaris near what is today the city of Tell el-Dab'a in the eastern Nile delta. The Hyksos conquered Egypt and reigned there from 1640 to 1530 B.C. She said a recently-discovered cuneiform tablet had led archaeologists to suspect there had been contact between the Babylonians and the Hyksos....

Georgeos Diaz-Montexano, scriptologist and Egyptologist amateur, has been able to identify the names of the Hyksos kings like pertaining to the group of languages and proto-Greek or Mycenaean's dialects. The true ethnic origin of the mysterious Hyksos that were able to take control of the power of a considerable part of Old Egypt, during centuries XVII to the XVI before Christ, has been always a true challenge for the Egyptologists. However, the generalized opinion more for a long time has been that the Hyksos would be Semitic towns, fundamentally coastal inhabitants of the strip Syrian-Palestine, that is, Canaanites or proto-Phoenicians....

While some depict the Bible’s Passover meal and Jews’ Exodus from Egypt as a fable, archeological and other evidence squares with the Bible’s account.Tonight begins Passover, or Pasach, celebrated worldwide by Jews. As recounted in Exodus 13:3-10, this ritual meal marks their ancestors’ escape from Egyptian captivity.About three weeks earlier, Christians celebrated Easter to commemorate Jesus’ Resurrection. Judaism and Christianity share not merely monotheism, but also recount their miraculous foundations as history.Together they form the moral foundation for Western culture, a foundation that is collapsing, in part due to post-Enlightenment critiques of the historicity of these religions. But, as a...

The tip came from a lawyer, a faithful reader from Brooklyn named Harvey Herbert- An Egyptian hieroglyphic papyrus now in the Brooklyn Museum mentions an Asiatic slave named Shiphrah. Shiphrah, of course, is the name of one of the Hebrew midwives (the other is Puah) whom Pharaoh summoned to carry out his order that all boys born to the enslaved Israelites be killed (Exodus 1-15)... And here was an Asiatic slave with this same name mentioned in an Egyptian papyrus written in hieroglyphics... All I can do is report what to some (surely, to me) are previously unknown facts that...

A team of archaeologists digging at Tel-Habuwa, near the town of Qantara East and three kilometres east of the Suez Canal... chanced upon a cachet of limestone reliefs bearing names of two royal personalities and two seated statues of differing sizes. The larger statue is made of limestone and belongs to a yet unidentified personage, but from its size and features archaeologists believe that it could be a statue of Horus, the god of the city. In 2001 archaeologists unearthed remains of a mud-brick temple dedicated to this deity. The second is a headless limestone statue inscribed on the back...

For over a century, everyone believed that The Devil's Checkmate (1831), the famous painting by Friedrich August Moritz Retzsch, depicted the ultimate defeat of the human soul at the hands of the devil -- a dark scene with no apparent way out. But in 1888, chess champion Paul Morphy saw the painting... and noticed something no one else had. According to the story, he studied the board, analyzed the position of the pieces, and revealed that the young man wasn't lost after all -- he still had one move left. This discovery not only changed how we look at the...

The clay tablet is part of a guide to exorcising ghosts held in the collections of the British Museum, reports Dalya Alberge for the Observer. Irving Finkel, a curator in the London museum’s Middle Eastern department and the author of the forthcoming book The First Ghosts: Most Ancient of Legacies, says the image on the tablet is only visible when viewed from above under a light. The museum acquired the artifact in the 19th century, but it has never been exhibited.

An amateur metal detectorist profoundly believes in that maxim and it came true when he uncovered up to 15,000 Roman coins buried in a hoard that could be Wales' biggest-ever treasure find.The BBC reports David Moss, 36, from Cheshire, made the discovery that left him in disbelief after he dug up up two clay pots in an undisclosed northern part of the country.But the epic find in a muddy field left him fearing they could be stolen, so he slept with the treasure in his car for three days before taking the coins to experts, the BBC notes.The coins are...

Possible identity of "Mona Lisa of the North" has been revealed by a British art historian.A mysterious girl with a pearl earring from Johannes Vermeer's famous painting was likely the daughter of the painter's commissioner, a historian has revealed. The 17th-century Dutch painter Vermeer worked almost exclusively for Pieter van Ruijven and Maria de Knuijt, a Dutch husband and wife in Delft. This has been revealed by Andrew Graham-Dixon, the art historian and TV presenter, claiming the girl wearing the pearl earring in the renowned oil painting is likely the couple's daughter, Magdalene. The wealthy family were members of a...

Sweden's Arkeologerna announced that archaeologists working in Viggbyholm, Täby, outside of Stockholm, unearthed a stunning 1,000-year-old Viking Age treasure trove. The site was inhabited from around a.d. 400 to 1050 and contains more than 20 houses and other buildings. Beneath the flooring of one structure, former occupants concealed an array of valuables they were never able to retrieve, for reasons that are still unknown. The collection includes eight silver neck torcs, two silver armbands, one ring, two pearls, and 12 coins that were turned into pendants. These had been carefully wrapped in a cloth purse and placed in a ceramic...

A man hunting for fishing worms near his summer house in the Stockholm area has made an amazing discovery: a large hoard of silver coins and jewelry from the early Middle Ages. The hoard, weighing around six kilograms (13 pounds), consists of thousands of silver coins mixed with rings, pendants, and beads. The finder immediately informed the Stockholm County Administrative Board, which began an archaeological excavation of the site. The hoard is described by experts as unusually large and well-preserved. The items were placed in a copper cauldron that has mostly decayed over the centuries. “This is likely one of...

Nor were written documents neglected in those days. Led by John Hunwick, R.S. O'Fahey, and others, historians increasingly tapped the many Arabic and other written documents of Islamic Africa to reconstruct the past of those societies. The Arab Literature of Africa series of catalogues, published by E. J. Brill in the Netherlands, has continued to attract attention to this formerly neglected area of the Islamic world, which has had much impact not only on other parts of Africa but even on the central Islamic lands themselves but which had been shamefully and systematically neglected in Brockelmann's monumental five volume history...

In the rugged hills of Karaman province, Türkiye, a remarkable archaeological discovery has emerged from Topraktepe, the site of ancient Eirenopolis. During recent excavations, archaeologists uncovered five carbonized bread loaves dating back to the 7th–8th centuries CE, including one with a depiction of Christ and a Greek inscription translating to, “With our thanks to Blessed Jesus.”Unlike the traditional Pantokrator imagery of Christ as ruler and savior, this loaf portrays a “farmer” or “sower Christ,” symbolizing the connection between faith, labor, and agricultural fertility. The remaining loaves bear cross-shaped imprints, suggesting their possible use in early Christian rituals as Eucharistic or...

In 2nd century AD Egypt, the legendary Greco-Roman scientist Claudius Ptolemy put the extent of the known world onto paper. From his home in Alexandria, he gathered reports from sailors who had made perilous journeys to India and possibly beyond. Though details were sparse, a voyager named Alexander described a distant port called Kattigara on the Sinus Magna (Great Gulf) to the east of the Golden Chersonese peninsula - widely considered to be mainland Malaysia. Halfway across the world around the same time, the bustling seaport Oc Eo was part of the flourishing Funan Kingdom, the earliest known pre-Angkorian civilisation...

The University of Aberdeen announced that an incredibly rare carving depicting a human face was recently unearthed at the ancient hillfort site of East Lomond in Fife. The five-inch-long object was originally dismissed as insignificant, but closer examination by University of Aberdeen archaeologist Gordon Noble identified faint details, including two eyes, a nose, and even a small bit of hair, that resembled characters from medieval manuscripts. Noble believes that it may not be a depiction of just any ordinary figure but the portrait of an ancient Pict. The Picts were a somewhat mysterious people that inhabited parts of Scotland between...

A new analysis of artwork left behind by the enigmatic inhabitants of the abandoned Mesoamerican city Teotihuacan suggests the colorful pictures and shapes may constitute a rudimentary language that ultimately evolved into the language of the Aztecs.If the team of researchers behind the discovery can successfully decipher the "lost language," they believe it could offer clues about the identity of Teotihuacan's builders and the reasons they abandoned the once thriving metropolis...Previous excavations and decades of research have determined that Teotihuacan was founded sometime around 100 AD. Researchers have also determined that the massive complex of buildings and roadways likely supported...

00:00 - What was Tolkien's issue? 01:44 - Tolkien's comment on 'ofer hronrade' 03:57 - Line 10a in Beowulf translations 06:06 - Who's right and who's wrong? 07:21 - Reading the gloss to Psalm 73 09:57 - The case for "hron" as a large delphinid Tolkien's Problem with Beowulf Translations | 11:41 Graham Scheper | 3.44K subscribers | 47,184 views | September 23, 2025

Detail from Fra Mauro's map, a work of unprecedented thoroughness and accuracy. PUBLIC DOMAIN If you had landed in Venice during the mid-15th century, you might have been accosted by a monk with a prominent nose and baggy, smurf-like hat. Ignoring your exhaustion and atrocious body odor after a long sea journey, he would have dragged you to a nearby tavern and cross-examined you about your travels. What was the weather like? What kind of precious gems were mined? What animals did you encounter, and how many heads did they have?The monk was Fra Mauro, a 15th-century version of Google...

Arctic carving shows complexity of ancient hunting groups. Northern hunters may have been killing whales 3,000 years ago and commemorating their bravery with pictures carved in ivory. Archaeologists working in the Russian Arctic have unearthed a remarkably detailed carving of groups of hunters engaged in whaling — sticking harpoons into the great mammals. The same site also yielded heavy stone blades that had been broken as if by some mighty impact, and remains from a number of dead whales. All of this adds up to the probability that the site, called Un’en’en, holds the earliest straightforward evidence of the practice...