POTSDAM, Germany - German archaeologists working in Egypt have uncovered a stone with writing in two languages and dating from pre-Christian times, the first find of its kind in more than 100 years.
The 99-centimetre (39-inch) high "bilingual stone", which dates to 238 BC, was found in Tell Basta in the Nile Delta region, said a representative for the team from Potsdam University in eastern Germany.
Now we just need one with Linear B.
Missing Link Clue to 2000-Year-Old 'Boudica' Necklace
Amateur archaeologists believe they have found the missing link to a 2,000 year-old necklace unearthed by a farm labourer in 1965.
The gold torc had one of its two terminals – or end rings – missing when found in a field at Sedgeford, Norfolk, 29 years ago.
Now local historians have found an Iron Age terminal in a nearby field, which they think fits the torc.
Way to rune a good story Documents may prove ancient runestone fake
Scholars who believe the Kensington Runestone is a 19th-century prank -- and not concrete evidence that Norsemen beat Columbus to America by 100-plus years -- say they have found the smoking gun to prove it.
The latest in the century-old controversy centered in Minnesota came in documents written in 1885 by an 18-year-old Swedish tailor named Edward Larsson. He sometimes wrote in runes -- an ancient Scandinavian language that differs from the English alphabet. But Larsson's runes were not the usual runes used over the centuries.
The scholars contend that parts of his documents seem to be written in a secret runic alphabet used by tradesmen in Sweden in the late 1800s, rather like codes that tramps have used over time to leave secret messages for one another.
Looting update Grave Robbers Destroy Ancient Peru Mural
LIMA, Peru - Grave robbers destroyed a 1,000-year-old mural at an ancient Peruvian ceremonial site, a museum archaeologist said Monday.
The thieves entered the Huaca Bandera site, 425 miles northeast of Lima, sometime over the past few days, Marco Fernandez, from the Bruning Museum in Peru's Lambayeque region, told The Associated Press.
He said they probably used picks or wooden poles in a futile effort to steal the mural — a black, yellow and white dragon in sculpted relief on a painted red background — but only succeeded in destroying it.
Iraq update Archaeologists review loss of valuable artifacts one year after looting
A year after the looting of the Iraqi National Museum, Oriental Institute archaeologists continue to track missing artifacts. And their work is playing a pivotal role in helping recover items stolen from the museum in Baghdad between April 9 and 11, 2003.
“This event provoked great outrage around the world and attracted new attention by both media and the public on the Mesopotamian civilization, Iraq’s cultural heritage,” said Oriental Institute Research Associate Clemens Reichel. Reichel initiated a Web-accessible database to document the destruction and theft of artifacts last April, following the museum’s looting.
Not to minimize the importance of looting, but. . .mass graves have been found with an estimated 300,000 victims of the previous regime, and the world was outraged about this?? Someone once commented that, while the Taliban was murdering hundreds in Afghanistan and brutalizing women simply for reading books, the only thing that produced international outrage was their blowing up of a couple of statues. We need some perspective.
Those crazy Magdelenians. . .Dancing girls and the merry Magdalenian
The people who created the first surviving art in Britain were committed Europeans, belonging to a common culture spanning France, Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands, according to the man who discovered the cave art in Creswell Crags, Nottinghamshire.
And the essential preoccupations of this single market in ice-age art, it seems, were hunting and naked dancing girls.
The discovery of 13,000-year-old rock paintings in Nottinghamshire last year rewrote ice-age history in Britain. Today, archaeologists from all over Europe are in Creswell to discuss how the finds form part of a continent-wide culture known as the Magdalenian.
Paul Pettitt, of Sheffield University's archaeology department, said: "The Magdalenian era was the last time that Europe was unified in a real sense and on a grand scale."
. . .
"You see a naked women in profile, with jutting out buttocks and raised arms. It appears to be a picture of women doing a dance in which they thrust out their derrières.
They knew how to party.