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Take a unique walk inside one of the best preserved monuments of ancient Rome: Trajan's Column. Ascend the spiral staircase- rarely open to the public- to the top viewing platform for a one-of-a-kind view of Ancient Rome, and learn about the construction and meaning of this funerary monument that narrates the battles against the Dacians (modern Romania). Walk inside and ascend Trajan's Column | 8:22Darius Arya Digs | 28.1K subscribers | 127,903 views | August 14, 2023

Scholars made significant advancements in understanding ancient Mesopotamian culture through the translation of 4,000-year-old cuneiform tablets that interpret lunar eclipses as ominous signs, Live Science reported Tuesday. These tablets, which were discovered over a century ago and are now part of the British Museum’s collection, detail predictions of death, destruction and disease linked to specific celestial events, according to Live Science. The research, conducted by Andrew George, an emeritus professor of Babylonian at the University of London, and Junko Taniguchi, an independent researcher, was published in the Journal of Cuneiform Studies. 'A king will die': 4,000-year-old lunar eclipse omen tablets...

Latter-Day Saint filmmakers are planning a new TV series inspired by ‘The Chosen’, except instead of featuring Jesus in the Gospels, it will feature characters and stories from the Book of Mormon. According to the promo material, the TV series The Promised, created by Ashley Troncoso, “aims to unite faith-based and secular audiences through the highest-quality scripture series ever made” by having similar production values as Dallas Jenkin’s mega-hit Jesus show. Described as a story “as inspired as The Chosen, as epic as The Lord of the Rings, and as gritty as Apocalypto,” the series will take place “600 years...

The B-52s - Mesopotamia - Live in Dortsmund - 1983

Brick dates to the reign of Nebuchadnezzar II (ca. 604 to 562 BCE) based on the interpretation of the inscription. This object was looted from its original context before being acquired by the Slemani Museum and stored in that museum with agreement from the central government. Image courtesy of the Slemani Museum. Credit: Slemani Museum ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ In a novel study, researchers utilized ancient Mesopotamian bricks to gain insights into Earth’s magnetic field changes 3,000 years ago. This archaeomagnetic approach provides a more precise method for dating ancient artifacts and understanding historical magnetic field fluctuations. Ancient bricks inscribed with the names...

I’ve been trying to put my finger on the Taylor Swift phenomenon for some time now. Evidently people pay obscene amounts of money to see her, and she is breaking world records on her latest tour. By all accounts (well, not quite all) it’s worth seeing, as Miss Swift parades out on the stage in outfit after outfit and dazzles swarms of people with a show like Superbowl halftime on crack.What’s going on here really, though?

The development of the earliest cities in Mesopotamia and the Middle East led to a substantial increase in violence between inhabitants. Laws, centralized administration, trade and culture then caused the ratio of violent deaths to fall back again in the Early and Middle Bronze Age... This is the conclusion of an international team of researchers from the Universities of Tübingen, Barcelona and Warsaw. Their results were published in Nature Human Behaviour.The researchers examined 3,539 skeletons from the region that today covers Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Israel and Turkey for bone trauma which could only have occurred through violence. This...

Archaeologists have uncovered a mysterious sanctuary in the central Netherlands made of burial mounds and ancient offerings of human and animal bones that has striking similarities to Stonehenge. The 4,000-year-old site was discovered in the town of Tiel and, like prehistoric stone circle Stonehenge, tracked the position of the sun on the solstices. “The largest mound served as a sun calendar, similar to the famous stones of Stonehenge in England,” the municipality of Tiel said in a statement. “This sanctuary must have been a highly significant place where people kept track of special days in the year, performed rituals and...

The Legio X Fretensis “Tenth legion of the Strait”, was a legion of the Imperial Roman army formed around 41/40 BC. The legion was centrally involved in the Great Jewish Revolt (AD 66–73), the first of three major rebellions by the Jews against the Roman Empire. Around AD 70, most of Roman rule was restored in Judea except for several fortresses and Jerusalem. The city was placed under siege by the X Fretensis, in conjunction with the V Macedonica, XII Fulminata, and XV Apollinaris. After several battles, Jerusalem and the Second Temple was destroyed, with contemporary historian, Titus Flavius Josephus,...

Polish scientists discovered that Legion X Fretensis, known for its brutal suppression of Jewish uprisings, was stationed in the early 2nd century AD in the Roman fort of Apsaros in Colchis on the Black Sea coast.Until now, researchers were unaware of their presence in such a distant region.This legion of the Imperial Roman army known as the Legio X Fretensis, or "Tenth Legion of the Strait," was formed around 41/40 BC. The legion played a key role in the Great Jewish Revolt (AD 66-73), the first of three major Jewish rebellions against the Roman Empire.This finding was made possible through...

In the middle of the 19th century, an archaeologist discovered fragments of multiple clay tablets in what is modern-day Iraq. Translated, the cuneiform writing on these and other tablets subsequently found revealed the “Enuma Elish,” the Babylonian account of the creation of the world. The Enuma Elish starts with formless chaos and water. The waters divide into a god and a goddess, who have children who are also gods. War breaks out between mother and father, and between mother and children. Ultimately, the offspring of the first two gods create human beings to be their servants. Other ancient cultures have...

Researchers have discovered a 5,000-year-old tavern hidden 19 inches underground in southern Iraq, according to a Jan. 23 press release from the University of Pennsylvania (Penn). Archaeologists from the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Pisa conducted the excavation beginning in 2019, Smithsonian Magazine reported. The team used advanced technology, including drone imagery and magnetometry, to identify the site’s layout. The site, located in the ancient city of Lagash, offers clues about the lives of everyday people who lived in southern Mesopotamia around 2700 B.C.E. Inside the open-air eating space, archaeologists found benches, an oven, a clay refrigerator called...

Two ancient clay tablets discovered in Iraq and covered from top to bottom in cuneiform writing contain details of a "lost" Canaanite language that has remarkable similarities with ancient Hebrew. The tablets, thought to be nearly 4,000 years old, record phrases in the almost unknown language of the Amorite people, who were originally from Canaan — the area that's roughly now Syria, Israel and Jordan — but who later founded a kingdom in Mesopotamia. These phrases are placed alongside translations in the Akkadian language, which can be read by modern scholars. In effect, the tablets are similar to the famous...

Meluhha: the Indus Civilization and Its Contacts with MesopotamiaMark Kenoyer, University of Wisconsin, MadisonThe Oriental Institute | 211,313 views | October 7, 2010

Researchers from several institutions, led by Ernst Pernicka, scientific director of the Curt-Engelhorn Center for Archaeometry (CEZA) at the Reiss-Engelhorn Museums in Mannheim and director of the University of Tübingen’s Troy project, applied a portable laser ablation system (pLA) to analyse samples of Bronze Age jewellery found in Troy and Poliochni...Poliochne, often cited under its modern name Poliochni, was an ancient settlement on the east coast of the island of Lemnos. It was settled in the Late Chalcolithic and earliest Aegean Bronze Age, and is believed to be one of the most ancient towns in Europe, preceding the construction of...

New remote-sensing studies at southern Iraq’s massive Tell al-Hiba site, shown here from the air, support an emerging view that an ancient city there largely consisted of four marsh islands.A ground-penetrating eye in the sky has helped to rehydrate an ancient southern Mesopotamian city, tagging it as what amounted to a Venice of the Fertile Crescent. Identifying the watery nature of this early metropolis has important implications for how urban life flourished nearly 5,000 years ago between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, where modern-day Iraq lies...Because Lagash had no geographical or ritual center, each city sector developed distinctive economic practices...

What was the shape of Noah’s Ark? For millennia Jewish and Christian clerics, scholars, and academics, as well as others with too much time on their hands, have pondered this question. Artist rendering of the one true shape of Noah’s Ark, scientifically provenILLUSTRATION: JON BERKELEY What makes it tantalizing is the precision of the numbers in Genesis 6 (here, in the King James translation): [13] And God said unto Noah, The end of all flesh is come before me; for the earth is filled with violence through them; and, behold, I will destroy them with the earth. [14] Make thee...

Four-thousand years ago, an urban civilization lived and traded on what is now the border between Pakistan and India. During the past century, thousands of artifacts bearing hieroglyphics left by this prehistoric people have been discovered. Today, a team of Indian and American researchers are using mathematics and computer science to try to piece together information about the still-unknown script. The team led by a University of Washington researcher has used computers to extract patterns in ancient Indus symbols. The study, published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows distinct patterns in the symbols'...

Mesopotamian climate change Geoscientists are increasingly exploring an interesting trend: Climate change has been affecting human society for thousands of years. At the American Geophysical Union annual meeting in December, one archaeologist presented research that suggests that climate change affected the way cultures developed and collapsed in the cradle of civilization — ancient Mesopotamia — more than 8,000 years ago. Archaeologists have found evidence for a mass migration from the more temperate northern Mesopotamia to the arid southern region around 6400 B.C. For the previous 1,000 years, people had been cultivating the arable land in northern Mesopotamia, using natural rainwater...

It is a commonly accepted view in mainstream archaeology that civilization started in ancient Mesopotamia with the great civilization of Sumer in what is now modern-day Iraq. However, at the beginning of the 20th century, archaeologists excavating at Tell Al’Ubaid in Iraq made an unusual discovery when they unearthed several 7,000-year-old artifacts which appear to represent humanoid figures with reptilian features. The domestic architecture of the Ubaidians included large T-shaped houses, open courtyards, paved streets, as well as food processing equipment. According to the Metropolitan Museum of Art , some of these villages began to develop into towns, temples began...