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JERUSALEM (AP) — One of the oldest surviving biblical manuscripts, a nearly complete 1,100-year-old Hebrew Bible, could soon be yours — for a cool $30 million. The Codex Sassoon, a leather-bound, handwritten parchment tome containing almost the entirety of the Hebrew Bible, is set to go on the block at Sotheby’s in New York in May. Its anticipated sale speaks to the still bullish market for art, antiquities and ancient manuscripts even in a worldwide bear economy. Sotheby’s is drumming up interest in hopes of enticing institutions and collectors to bite. It has put the price tag at an eye-watering...

In Hoogwoud, a city in the Netherlands, a 27-year-old historian named Lorenzo Ruijter struck medieval gold with his metal detector. More specifically, he found four crescent-moon-shaped gold pendant earrings, two gold leaf pieces that fit together, and thirty-nine small, precious silver coins, all from the Middle Ages, the Dutch National Museum of Antiquities announced. The museum dates the gold treasure back to roughly A.D. 1050. Ruijter has been metal detecting for most of his life and now it's paid off big time. "It was very special discovering something this valuable, I can't really describe it. I never expected to discover...

...near the town of Buckingham in Buckinghamshire, England... the site was part of an earlier Anglo-Saxon estate that developed after the year 949.Excavations revealed that the site was first occupied during prehistory, with the discovery of a possible ring ditch and a Mesolithic mace head found in a post-medieval quarry pit. The mace head possibly originated from a truncated deposit internal to the putative ring ditch.The first depiction of a watermill can be found in 17th century historic maps, which fell in disuse by 1825 and was repurposed until eventually being demolished in the 1940's.Archaeological remains suggest that the watermill...

The cave is one of Ireland's largest natural caves, running for around 402 metres to a depth of 46 metres...The earliest historical reference to the cave is in the Trecheng Breth Féne "A Triad of Judgments of the Irish", more widely known as "The Triads of Ireland". The Triads are a series of manuscripts that date from the 14th to the 19th century AD, describing Dunmore Cave (written as "Dearc Fearna") as one of "the three darkest places in Ireland".This may be in reference to events in the "Annals of the Four Masters", a chronicle of medieval Irish history compiled...

ANCIENT BEVERAGE BREWED IN MILWAUKEE MILWAUKEE, WISCONSIN — NPR reports that archaeologist Bettina Arnold of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and her research team worked with Lakefront Brewery to try to re-create an alcoholic beverage that had been placed in a bronze cauldron and buried in a grave sometime between 400 and 450 B.C. in what is now Germany. The recipe was based upon the research of paleobotanist Manfred Rösch, who analyzed the residues in the Iron Age cauldron. He found evidence of honey, meadowsweet, barley, and mint—ingredients in a type of beverage known as a braggot.

Bones, ancient grooming tools, even gold – these are all things you might expect to find if you go poking around an Iron Age burial site. What you might not expect to find is your new favorite tipple. But, back in 2016, archaeologists were stunned to uncover a 2,500-year-old cauldron that contained the remnants of an ancient alcoholic beverage.Project lead Bettina Arnold, from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, was investigating a burial mound – called a tumulus – dating back to between 400 and 450 BCE, when she and her team came across what appeared to be a bronze cauldron. But...

Elephant Bird Egg What a whole Aepyornis egg would have looked like when freshly laid, seen in a market near the town of Toliara on the southwest coast of Madagascar. Credit: Gifford Miller More than 1,200 years ago, flightless elephant birds roamed the island of Madagascar and laid eggs bigger than footballs. While these ostrich-like giants are now extinct, new research from the University of Colorado at Boulder (CU Boulder) and Curtin University in Australia reveals that their eggshell remnants hold valuable clues about their time on Earth. Published on February 28 in the journal Nature Communications, the study describes...

In the Middle Ages, the Roman alphabet and runes lived side by side. A new doctoral thesis challenges the notion that runes represent more of an oral and less of a learned form of written language....Johan Bollaert, Senior Lecturer at the Department of Linguistics and Scandinavian Studies... has investigated written language used in public inscriptions in Norway from the 1100s to the 1500s. Last autumn, he defended his doctoral thesis "Visuality and Literacy in the Medieval Epigraphy of Norway."The assumption that runes represent a more oral tradition is based on the idea that runic inscriptions are contextually bound and are...

arch 3 is World Wildlife Day. It is a United Nations International Day to celebrate wild animals and plants on the planet and the contribution that they've made to our lives and the health of the earth. In northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, thousands of Marco Polo Argali sheep were recently spotted migrating across the Pamir Plateau. The species is second-class national protection status in China, and its gradually growing population hovers around 20,000 in Taxkorgan Tajik Autonomous County.

A mikveh is a bath used for the purpose of ritual immersion to achieve ritual purity in Judaism. The traditional rules regarding the construction of a mikveh are based on those specified in regulations laid down in the Torah and in classical rabbinical literature.The text describes how a mikveh must be connected to a natural spring or well of naturally occurring water, and thus can be supplied by rivers and lakes which have natural springs as their source. A cistern filled by rainwater is also permitted to act as a mikveh’s water supply, so long as the water is never...

Laser scans have revealed that what was thought to be an Iron Age hillfort in northwestern Spain is, in fact, an early medieval stronghold built in the fifth century A.D. and occupied for the next 200 years...The team found the stronghold on a hilltop in northwestern Spain by using lidar — light detection and ranging — to peer beneath a forest covering the ruins... revealed an early medieval fortress covering about 25 acres (10 hectares), with 30 towers and a defensive wall about three-quarters of a mile (1.2 kilometers) long. The fortress seems to have been built in the first...

In the summer of 1495, King Hans of Denmark and Norway anchored his warship off the southern coast of Sweden. While Hans was on land, his vessel—known as Gribshunden or Griffen—mysteriously caught fire and sank to the bottom of the Baltic Sea.Hans was on his way to Kalmar, where he hoped to be elected king of Sweden and reunite the broader Nordic region under a single ruler. As such, Hans brought many opulent status symbols, including luxurious foods and spices, to help persuade the Swedish leadership to agree to his plan.Remarkably, many of those foods and spices have survived underwater...

World’s Oldest Near-Complete Hebrew Bible Goes to Auction The Codex Sassoon could break auction records, becoming the most valuable historical document ever sold Sarah Kuta Daily Correspondent February 17, 2023 Bible open to a page in the middle, set against a black backdrop The Codex Sassoon, which measures 12 by 14 inches, dates to the late ninth or early tenth century. At more than 1,000 years old, the Codex Sassoon is the world’s earliest near-complete Hebrew Bible. Soon, it could also become the “most valuable historical document ever sold at auction,” according to a statement from Sotheby’s. The auction house...

When the Vikings sailed west to England more than a millennium ago, they brought their animal companions with them and even cremated their bodies alongside human ones in a blazing pyre before burying them together, a new study finds.These animal and human remains were found in a unique cremation cemetery in central England that has long been assumed to hold the remains of Vikings — in particular, the warriors who sailed west to raid the countryside in the ninth century A.D. However, the new analysis revealed that several of the burial mounds didn’t contain just the remains of humans but...

Bubbles Red Arrow Five centuries ago, Leonardo da Vinci observed air bubbles deviating from a straight path in a zigzag or spiral motion. However, the cause of this periodic motion remained unknown until now. Researchers from the universities of Seville and Bristol have solved the mystery surrounding the unsteady path of an air bubble rising in water. Professors Miguel Ángel Herrada of the University of Seville and Jens G. Eggers of the University of Bristol have uncovered a mechanism that explains the erratic movement of bubbles rising in water. The findings, published in the prestigious journal Proceedings of the National...

Japanese researchers discovered a large dakō iron sword and a giant bronze mirror in a 4th-century burial mound in the city of Nara. The two items were found last November in the Tomio Maruyama Tumulus. According to the local government groups, the 125-pound, shield-shaped decorated mirror was the first of its kind to be discovered, and the seven-foot iron serpentine dakō sword is the largest and oldest from the Kofun period (300 CE–710 CE) to be found. Experts say this allows the two items from the Tomio Maruyama Tumulus to be classified as national treasures. The shield-shaped mirror is two...

On this date in 1547, the Duke of Norfolk was to have been beheaded. But thanks to the previous day’s death of the corpulent 55-year-old King Henry VIII, the duke’s death warrant was never signed, and the condemned noble died in bed … seven years later. A force in the gore-soaked arena of English politics for two generations, Thomas Howard had steered two nieces into the monarch’s bed. Both girls had gone to the scaffold,* and the disgrace of the second, Catherine Howard, brought a collapse in the whole family’s fortunes. Thomas Howard’s son Henry was not as lucky as...

Almost exactly 15 years ago, I received a book in the mail entitled El Cid: God's Own Champion. When first flipping through this book, I remember thinking to myself, "This probably won't be very good." After all, it was a work by an unknown author, meant for young readers, and self-published to boot. But as it turned out, I loved it. My kids have read it—even the one with dyslexia read and enjoyed it. Since I wrote the above-linked review in 2008, I have recommended El Cid to hundreds of people. A few years later, Mr. Fitzhenry published another equally...

Serious Comedy: The Philosophical and Theological Significance of Tragic and Comic Writing in the Western Tradition, Patrick Downey, Davenant Press, 470 pages. ============================================================= Teaching Dante’s Inferno to high schoolers has its share of amusements. The expected outrage over Dante’s condemnation of sodomy, the bafflement over the sodomites’ proximity to the usurers (“What is that?” and then: “Why is that a sin?”), the shock at the gruesomeness, even in our desensitized age. The very concept of sin and punishment is a novelty to many. One student, after grasping what “lustful” meant, lamented “so many people are going to hell!” The most...

What did people in the Middle Ages really find funny? It would seem that the same things have been found to be amusing right across the ages. Many of the riddles that the Medievals told have double entendre’s and the jokes are rude with references to sex and bodily functions. No one was exempt from being the target of a Medieval joke; stupid husbands, unfaithful wives, bishops, even royalty.A 'Hilarious' Compilation of Medieval Jokes and Humour!MedievalMadness | 195K subscribers296,201 views | September 2, 2022