Thursday, June 10, 2004

Please note, gentle readers: More information has been added to the end of this particular post since we are quite unwilling to bump the brassiere story lower down. Thank you for your. . .support (*snicker*).

Best news we've seen today Wonder as 1 000-year-old padded bra dug up

Archaeologists have dug up a thousand-year-old padded bra in Inner Mongolia, China, a news report said on Thursday.

The gold-coloured bra was found in tomb in the province's Aohan region, according to the South China Morning Post.

Archeologist Shao Guotian said the bra dated back to China's Liao dynasty and described it as made of fine silk with shoulder and back straps.

"It is just like brassieres of today," he said. "It's a pity most of the cotton padding in the cups has already decayed."


Artist's rendering of what it may have looked like:



Not nearly as interesting Earthen pot with ancient coins uncovered in Gansu

Cultural heritage officials in the northwest China province of Gansu announced Wednesday that their recent discovery of a centuries-old earthenware pot containing more than 500 kilograms of copper coins.

The coins were of more than 20 varieties and most of them were cast in the Northern Song Dynasty, between 960 and 1127, said ZhaoZuobin, an official with the Kongtong district museum of Pingliangcity, where the heritage was found.

"All the coins were ingrained with Chinese characters in different fonts and indicated the years in which they were made," he added.

Zhao said the coins were first discovered by a teacher named LiDeji in Beihoujie street on June 1.


Pergamon Altar's Restored Frieze Unveiled

After a decade of painstaking cleaning, Berlin's Pergamon Museum has unveiled the restored marble frieze of the Pergamon Altar, the second century B.C. centerpiece of its collection.

The 371 foot-long frieze decorated the outside walls of the altar, which was built between 197 and 156 B.C. in the present-day Turkish town of Bergama. A German engineer discovered fragments of the frieze, which had been taken apart and incorporated into the walls of a fortress, in 1864.

It displays mythological scenes of gods fighting giants, snarling lions and coiling snakes, with the muscular bodies of Artemis, Zeus and Athena clad in delicately sculpted folds of fabric.

"The Pergamon Altar has never looked so beautiful," Gertrud Platz, the city museums' director of antiquities, said Wednesday. The restoration cost $2.8 million.


First news from Bulgaria Orpheus Grave Mystery Unveiled in Bulgaria

An archaeological expedition led by prominent Bulgarian Professor Nikolay Ovcharov unveiled the mystery of the excellently preserved Thracian temple in the region of Tatul village.

Though most of the archaeologists in the expedition assume that the Thracian temple was dedicated to the mythical Orpheus, there are still some suggestions that that it might have been built in honour of a Thracian king.


Antiquities market update Priceless Byzantine artifact stolen from archaeological park

A priceless 1,500-year-old Byzantine-era artifact was stolen early yesterday from an archaeological park near Herzliya, police said.

he thieves took a part of the floor of a glass kiln, one of only three still in existence in Israel. Police suspect the theft had been commissioned by a private antiques collector.

"This was a part of the glass kiln that served the Byzantine city of Apolonia 1,500 years ago," said archaeologist Hagi Yohanan, director of the Apolonia park built over the ruins of the city.


Future cool web site alert Oxford ArchDigital Provides Stonehenge Mapping Site

When English Heritage and Wiltshire County Council wanted to create a virtual tour of the Stonehenge World Heritage Site, they chose Oxford ArchDigital for their expertise in map based websites.

Funded by the New Opportunities Fund (NOF), the new microsite goes live on 11 June as part of the English Heritage website, www.english-heritage.org.uk/stonehenge.


Not up at the time of this report, but we'll check back with it when it goes live and see what it looks like.

Old, bad, unfunny pun alert Can you dig it?

It’s not something most people would get excited about, but for those who were working Tuesday on an archaeological dig south of Lindsborg, a blue bead was a great find.

The Kansas Anthropological Association and the Kansas State Historical Society are sponsoring the Kansas Archeology Training Program field school, which began Saturday and runs through June 20. Volunteers from both groups are working on uncovering the floor of a Middle Ceramic period house that would’ve stood around 1000 to 1500 AD.

The small, blue bead was a trading bead excavated from the site. It shows archaeologists the small, rectangular house that once stood on the site existed during Kansas’ historic period, or the period after Europeans came to this area.

“It looks like a little kid’s bead you could buy anywhere, but it’s not,” said Chris Garst,


This seems cut off but we are unable to find the whole story.

Fortuitous stumble du jour Student Stumbles On Historic Structure

A University of North Florida student walking around the Timucuan Preserve this week stumbled on a discovery that may be of major historical significance.

After some digging, it appeared that the rock the woman tripped over was actually a piece of a shed. According to park rangers, the structure may be part of the first French settlement in the area.

"This is the thing most archeologists try and look for, to find sites like this we can analyze and figure out what was going on historically," said cultural resource specialist John Whitehurst.

Archeologists and UNF anthropology students at Ft. Caroline have excavated part of what they believe to be a 4-foot-by- 6-foot storage shed or cellar. The structure may have been attached to a house dating back some 200 years.

"To be able to find a structure like this is pretty exciting," said assistant professor Robert Thunen.


Mummy alert 2,000-year-old corpse found in China

A coffin with a corpse wrapped in top quality silk clothes and around 2,000 years old has been unearthed by archaeologists from a cluster of ancient tombs in China.

The tombs, located in a village on the Ordos plateau in Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, must have been built in the Western or Eastern Han dynasties (206 BC-220 AD), said Yin Chunlei, an official with Ordos City Museum.

"The corpse was found in one of those tombs. It lay in a strongly-built coffin and was dressed in many layers of top quality silk clothes," Xinhua quoted Yin as having said.

"We didn't attempt to peel them off for fear of causing damage."

According to Yin, the fine clothes suggested the tomb owner must have been a rich man -- most probably an aristocrat.


New stuff begins here:

News courtesy of The EEF

Dubai Dubai doo? Dubai's Pharaonic flair By Zahi Hawass

People often ask me whether the Pharaohs reached America and Mexico, and I respond that we have no evidence of this. So when I visited Dubai and found buildings and homes that were clearly influenced by the Pharaonic civilisation I was more than surprised to find signs of the Pharaohs in that city.

In 1988 Sheikh Manea invited me to Dubai and told me that he had decided to build a Sheraton Hotel in the shape of a pyramid. During the three days I stayed there we discussed the project, which never materialised. I must say that I could not see why he wished to build a hotel in a pyramid shape there.


Kom AL Deka stone causes controversy

The recent uncovering of semi- circular stone steps at the eastern side of the archaeological site of Kom AI Deka in Alexandria has caused controversy among arcaeologists.

The find that dates back to the Ptolemaic age poses a question as to the function of these halls.

At first archaeologists had reason to believe that these steps constitute lecture halls of the old Alexandria University.


Upshot: The recently found halls in Alexandria may have been "music listening
halls" instead of university lecture rooms.

Online papers

Thomas Hecksher, Sune T. B. Nielsen, Alexis Pigeon, "A CHRG Model of the
Ancient Egyptian Grammar", Student project report, Computer Science Dept.,
Roskilde University, Denmark
"This report describes and discusses the experiment of writing a grammar of
ancient Egyptian, with focus on the the modelling aspect and the formalism
used. ... the goal was to create an extendible and general model of ancient
Egyptian grammar. It should be able to verify whether a list of 'signs'
(i.e. representations of hieroglyphic signs in the style: A1, B15, B20) can
be recognised as a correct sentence according to the model of the ancient
Egyptian grammar formulated in the program." - 63 pp., pdf-file: 350 KB
URL: http://www.dat.ruc.dk/~henning/chrg/PapersOnCHRG/Hieroplyphs.pdf

"Newsletter", Polish Centre of Mediterranean Archaeology in Cairo,
Warsaw University

-- March 2002

URL: http://www.bolanda.org/main/Newsmar.asp

-- October 2002

URL: http://www.bolanda.org/main/Newsletter.asp

-- no.11, November 2003 - 8 pp., pdf-file: 350 KB

URL: http://www.bolanda.org/main/newsletter%2011.pdf

Courtesy Michael Tilgner.