Category: Historic

3000-Year-Old Pharaoh Ramses II Statue Found In Cairo Slum, And It’s “One Of The Most Important Discoveries Ever”

The massive 26 ft (8 meters) statue was found in the groundwater of a Cairo slum by archaeologists from Egypt and Germany. It is likely to represent revered Pharaoh Ramses II, who controlled Egypt more than three thousand years ago, researchers say.

The find was made near the remnants of the temple of Ramses II, in the old city of Héliopolis in the eastern part of modern Cairo, one of the most significant ever by the Minister for Antiquities.

The minister of antiquities, Khaled al-Anani, told Reuters on the site for an unveiling of the statue, they called me to announce a big discovery of a colossus made from quartzite, most likely from Ramses II.

Ramses the Great was the most powerful and celebrated ruler of ancient Egypt.  Known by his successors as the ‘Great Ancestor’, he led several military expeditions and expanded the Egyptian Empire to stretch from Syria in the east to Nubia in the south.

He was the third pharaoh of the Nineteenth Dynasty of Egypt and ruled from 1279 to 1213 BCE.

‘We found the bust of the statue and the lower part of the head and now we removed the head and we found the crown and the right ear and a fragment of the right eye,’ Anani said.

Archaeologists, officials, local residents, and members of the news media looked on as a massive forklift pulled the statue’s head out of the water. The joint Egyptian-German expedition, which included the University of Leipzig, also found the upper part of a life-sized limestone statue of Pharaoh Seti II, Ramses II’s grandson, which is 80 centimeters long.

The sun temple in Heliopolis was founded by Ramses II, which increases the likelihood the statue is of him, archaeologists say. It was one of the largest temples in Egypt, almost double the size of Luxor’s Karnak, but was destroyed in Greco-Roman times.

Many of its obelisks were moved to Alexandria or to Europe and stones from the site were looted and used for building as Cairo developed. Experts will now attempt to extract the remaining pieces of both statues before restoring them.

If they are successful and the colossus is proven to depict Ramses II, it will be moved to the entrance of the Grand Egyptian Museum, set to open in 2018.

The discovery was made in the working-class area of Matariya, among unfinished buildings and mud roads.

Dietrich Raue, head of the expedition’s German team, told Reuters that ancient Egyptians believed Heliopolis was the place where the sun god lives, meaning it was off-limits for any royal residences.

‘The sun god created the world in Heliopolis, in Matariya. That’s what I always tell the people here when they say is there anything important. According to the pharaonic belief, the world was created in Matariya,’ Raue said.

‘That means everything had to be built here. Statues, temples, obelisks, everything. But … the king never lived in Matariya, because it was the sun god living here.’

The find could be a boon for Egypt’s tourism industry, which has suffered many setbacks since the uprising that toppled autocrat Hosni Mubarak in 2011 but remains a vital source of foreign currency.

The number of tourists visiting Egypt slumped to 9.8 million in 2011 from more than 14.7 million in 2010.

A bomb attack that brought down a Russian plane carrying 224 people from a Red Sea resort in October 2015 further hit arrivals, which dropped to 1.2 million in the first quarter of 2016 from 2.2 million a year earlier.

Scientists Reveal a Perfectly Preserved 18,000-year-old Puppy Discovered Frozen in Russia

An ancient dog finds in Russia in the Far East that he lived a glorious eighteen thousand years ago. It was found last year in a frozen mud near the city of Yakutsk in Siberia and has been given the affectionate name of “Dogor”.

More surprising is that it is unusually good with intact fur, skin, whiskers, and eyelashes. It might look just like a sleeping old dog to the casual viewer!

The Russian Wolfhound, also known as the Borzoi breed, is a special dog of tremendous speed, known for the rather remote appearance, associated with Russia.

A quick online search showed that in Russia other dogs mixed wolves with hundreds of massive beast dogs that have been domesticated by patient owners. The owners insist these dogs are half-wolf; whether they’ve been genetically proven to be so is another matter.

That is what scientists believe they have found buried deep in the ice in the Far East reaches of Siberia; an almost perfectly preserved specimen that even retains its fur.

As yet, experts have not determined whether the animal is dog or wolf, but that riddle, they say, is half the fun of the quest. One thing is for sure, it looks like a puppy and perhaps is an evolutionary cross between wolf and dog.

A piece of the puppy’s bone was immediately shipped off to Stockholm’s Centre for Paleogenetics to determine just what scientists were looking at.

They have determined the animal is 18,000 years old and is preserved perfectly, thanks to the ice in which it was buried.

“We have now generated a nearly complete genome sequence from it and normally when you have two-fold coverage genome, which is what we have, you should be able to relatively easily say whether it’s a dog or a wolf, but we still can’t say, and that makes it even more interesting,” said Love Dalen, professor of evolutionary genetics at the centre.

Whatever the animal’s true ancestry turns out to be, the remains now have a name that applies in either case: Dogor, which is Yakutian for a friend.

Dogor remains are now kept at a private facility, the Northern World Museum. Museum director Nikolai Androsov said, at Dogor’s unveiling to the media, “this puppy has all its limbs…even whiskers.

The nose is visible. There are teeth. We can determine due to some data that it is male” he said at the presentation of Dogor at Yakutsk’s famed Mammoth Museum, which specializes in ancient remains and specimens.

How the prehistoric puppy perished is so far unknown, although scientists do know he was just eight weeks old. Researchers will no doubt continue testing to learn all they can about the fascinating creature.

Russia’s the Far East has provided many incredible finds and animal remains for scientists who study ancient animals in recent years.

Buried deep within Siberia’s permafrost, remains of woolly mammoths, canines and other prehistoric animals are being discovered whenever the ice melts. Mammoth tusk hunters are oftentimes the ones who discover them.

Who knows? One day Dogor the prehistoric puppy may become part of a Russian children’s story, or the basis of a movie. He has already joined other furry, famous canines in getting worldwide attention.

Buried in the sand for a millennium: Africas roman ghost city

While the whole city often does not vanish, the Roman colony of Thamugadi was established in the North African province of Mumidia by Emperor Traian about 100 A.D., the city, also known as Timgad or Tamugas.

Home to Veterans of the Third Augustan Legion, Thamugadi flourished for hundreds of years, becoming prosperous and thus an attractive target for raiders. After a Vandal invasion in 430, repeated attacks weakened the city, which never fully recovered and was abandoned during the 700s.

The desert sands swept in and buried Thamugadi. One thousand years would pass before the city received a visit from a team of explorers led by a maverick Scotsman in the 1700s.

Originally founded by Emperor Trajan in 100 AD and built as a retirement colony for soldiers living nearby, within a few generations of its birth, the outpost had expanded to over 10,000 residents of both Roman, African, as well as Berber descent.

Most of them would likely never even have seen Rome before, but Timgad invested heavily in high culture and Roman identity, despite being thousands of kilometers from the Italian city itself.

The extension of Roman citizenship to non-Romans was a carefully planned strategy of the Empire – it knew it worked better by bringing people in than by keeping them out.

In return for their loyalty, local elites were given a stake in the great and powerful Empire, benefitted from its protection and legal system, not to mention, its modern urban amenities such as Roman bath houses, theatres and a fancy public library…

Timgad, also known as Thamugadi in old Berber, is home to a very rare example of a surviving public library from the Roman world.

Built-in the 2nd century, the library would have housed manuscripts relating to religion, military history, and good governance.

These would have been rolled up and stored in wooden scroll cases, placed in shelves separated by ornate columns. The shelves can still be seen standing in the midst of the town ruins, today a UNESCO World Heritage Site and a monument to culture.

The remains of as many as 14 baths have survived and a mosaic portraying Roman flip-flops was found at the entrance of a house in Timgad dating back to the 1st or 2nd century, with the inscription “BENE LAVA” which translates to ‘wash well’.

This mosaic, along with a collection of more than 200 others found in Timgad, is held inside a museum at the entrance of the site.

Other surviving landmarks include a 12 m high triumphal arch made of sandstone, a 3,500-seat theater is in good condition and a basilica where a large, hexagonal, 3-step immersion baptismal font richly decorated with mosaics was uncovered in the 1930s.

You can imagine the excitement of Scottish explorer James Bruce when he reached the city ruins in 1765, the first European to visit the site in centuries. Still largely buried then, he called it “a small town, but full of elegant buildings.” Clearing away the sand with his bare hands, Bruce and his fellow travellers uncovered several sculptures of Emperor Antoninus Pius, Hadrian’s successor.

Unable to take photographs in 1765, and without the means to take the sculptures with them, they reburied them in the sand and continued on Bruce’s original quest to find the source of the Blue Nile.

Upon his return to Great Britain, his claims of what he’d found were met with skepticism. Offended by the suspicion with which his story was received, James Bruce retired soon after and there would be no further investigation of the lost city for another hundred years.

Step forward Sir Robert Playfair, British consul-general in Algeria, who, inspired by James Bruce’s travel journal which detailed his findings in Timgad, went in search of the site. In his book, Travels in the Footsteps of Bruce in Algeria and Tunis, Playfair describes in detail what he found in the desolate and austere surroundings of the treeless desert plain.

“The whole of this district is of the deepest interest to the student of pre-historic archaeology … we left Timegad not without considerable regret that we could not afford to spend a longer time there. We would fain have made some excavations as there is no more promising a field for antiquarian research.”

Just a few years later, French colonists took control of the site in 1881, and began a large-scale excavation, which continued until Algeria gained independence from France in 1959.

“These hills are covered with countless numbers of the most interesting megalithic remains,” wrote Playfair in 1877.

1,600-Year-Old Elongated Skull with Stone-Encrusted Teeth Found in Mexico Ruins

The 1600-year-old skeleton of an upper-class woman whose skull was purposely deformed and teeth encrusted with mineral stones was found by archeologists near ancient Teotihuacan ruins of Mexico.

When she died, between the ages of 35 and 40, the woman was buried with 19 jars that served as offerings, the National Anthropology and History Institute said.

The institute said in a statement that her cranium had been elongated by being compressed in a “very extreme” manner, a technique commonly used in the southern part of Mesoamerica, not the central region where she was found.

Her teeth contained two round pyrite stones, which were encrusted in her top front teeth.

This was a practice that was used among the nobility in Maya regions in southern Mexico and Central America.

The Maya are credited with being the masters of cosmetic dentistry as they were known to decorate teeth by embedding them with precious stones or by carving notches and grooves into them.

Tiny holes were chipped out of teeth and ornamental stones—including jade—were attached with an adhesive made out of natural resins, such as plant sap, which was mixed with other chemicals and crushed bones.

The dentists likely had a sophisticated knowledge of tooth anatomy because they knew how to drill into teeth without hitting the pulp inside.

Last year, archaeologists discovered liquid mercury in a subterranean tunnel beneath the Temple of the Feathered Serpent in Teotihuacan, which may represent an underworld river that leads the way to a Royal tomb or tombs.

The remains of the kings of Teotihuacan, some of the most powerful rulers of the pre-Hispanic world, have never been found.

Such a discovery would be monumental as it would unravel many of the mysteries surrounding this ancient civilization.

The enigmatic pre-Hispanic city of Teotihuacan, some 50 kilometers (30 miles) north of Mexico City, thrived between the first and eighth centuries, after which its civilization vanished.

Its two majestic Sun and Moon pyramids are major tourist attractions.

In mint condition! Millions of pounds-worth of pristine 5th-century gold coins are found buried in a pot under an Italian theatre.

It was an amphora, not a pot, but archaeologists found a literal jackpot in a dig in northern Italy last week. No word on if there was a rainbow. Hundreds of gold coins dating from Rome’s late Imperial era, the 4th or 5th century, were found at a dig in Como, Italy, according to the Italian Ministry of Culture.

The ministry shared photos of the shiny coins, which were spilling out of an amphora — a Roman jar with two handles — buried in the dirt.

Inside was an estimated 300 gold coins from the late Roman Imperial era, which took place in the 5th century, just before the empire’s untimely demise. Despite their age, the coins are in miraculous condition, with all the images and engravings easily visible.

“We do not yet know in detail the historical and cultural significance of the find,” said Alberto Bonisoli, the culture minister of Italy’s Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities (Ministero per I Beni e le Attività Culturali) in a press release.

“But that area is proving to be a real treasure for our archaeology. A discovery that fills me with pride”.

The urn and its stash of gold were taken to a government restoration laboratory in Milan, where they will be thoroughly examined. This might take a while, however, as the coins were found tightly packed into little stacks so that they can only be removed one at a time with careful precision.

So far, historians have successfully separated 27 coins, all of which are from the 5th century. This makes this treasure particularly intriguing, as, during this time, there was very little currency flow in the Roman economic system.

The coins feature engravings that suggest they were minted during the reigns of five different emperors: Honorius, Valentinian III, Leon I, Antonio, and Libio Severo.

The Italian media has predicted that the coins, none of which reach beyond 474 AD, could be worth millions of euros. And that doesn’t even take into account everything that was found in the urn, or the urn itself.

Keeping the coins company was a bar of gold, and at the bottom of the urn, archaeologists predict even more precious objects might be found.

According to The History Blog, “no such hoard has even been unearthed in northern Italy before”.

The archaeological site may seem like an odd place to stash such valuable items, but whoever placed them there likely “buried it in such a way that in case of danger they could go and retrieve it.” That’s according to Maria Grazia Facchinetti, an expert in rare coins. Beyond the location, the way that the coins were hidden has given historians like Facchinetti a few hints about the owner’s identity.

“They were stacked in rolls similar to those seen in the bank today,” she says.

“All of this makes us think that the owner is not a private subject, rather it could be a public bank or deposit”.

Facchinetti’s theory is bolstered by the fact that the theatre is just a few steps away from the city’s forum – a place where merchants, banks, and temples often did business.

Although the ancient Roman neighborhood was also known for its wealth, so a miserly and paranoid private owner is not out of the question. Layer analysis will now be used to determine if the coins were all deposited in the same era or if they were placed in the urn over a period of time.

The Cressoni Theatre, where the coins were found, is not far from the ancient city of Novum Comum, home to many other important Roman artifacts. The historic theatre was opened in 1807 but was converted into a cinema that closed in 1997.

Today, the plan is to demolish the old building and replace it with luxury residences. The recent discovery, however, has stalled all future work at the site until further excavations can be made.

The oldest submerged city: A 5000 old sunken perfectly designed city in southern Greece

There is a little village called Pavlopetri, in the Peloponnesus region of southern Greece, where a nearby ancient city dating back 5,000 years resides.

This is however not a typical archeological site, the city is located about 4 meters underwater and is believed to be the oldest known submerged city in the world.

The community is incredibly well built with roads, two floors with parks, temples, a cemetery, and a complex water management system including channels and water pipes.

In the center of the city, was a square or plaza measuring about 40×20 meters and most of the buildings have been found with up to 12 rooms inside. The design of this city surpasses the design of many cities today.

The city is so old that it existed in the period that the famed ancient Greek epic poem ‘Iliad’ was set in.

Research in 2009 revealed that the site extends for about 9 acres and evidence shows that it had been inhabited prior to 2800 BC.

Scientists estimate that the city was sunk in around 1000 BC due to earthquakes that shifted the land.

However, despite this and even after 5,000 years, the arrangement of the city is still clearly visible and at least 15 buildings have been found.

The city’s arrangement is so clear that the head of the archaeological team, John Henderson of the University of Nottingham, and his team, have been able to create what they believe is an extremely accurate 3D reconstruction of the city, which can be viewed in the videos below.

Historians believe that the ancient city had been a center for commerce for the Minoan Civilization and the Mycenaean civilization.

Scattered all over the place there are large storage containers made from clay, statues, everyday tools, and other artifacts.

The name of the city is currently unknown as well as its exact role in the ancient world.

The featured image shows the original foundations of the city behind underneath the reconstructed pillars and walls of one of the buildings.

A California Couple Found $10 Million In Gold Coins In Their Backyard

After all, a California couple who have discovered a $10 million cache of hidden gold coins may not be so lucky The coins may have been stolen from the U.S. Mint in 1900 and thus be the property of the government, according to a published report.

A search of the Haithi Trust Digital Library provided by Northern California’s fishery guide Jack trout, who is also a historian and collector of rare coins, brought up the news of theft on the website of the San Francisco Chronicle.

The anonymous California couple spotted the edge of an old can on a path they had hiked many times before several months ago. Poking at the can was the first step in uncovering a buried treasure of rare coins estimated to be worth $10 million.

“It was like finding a hot potato,” the couple told coin expert Don Kagin from Kagin’s, Inc. The couple hired the president of Kagin’s, Inc. and Holabird-Kagin Americana, a western Americana dealer and auctioneer, to represent them.

The coins are mostly uncirculated and in mint condition, and they add up in face value to $27,000. “Those two facts are a match of the gold heist in 1900 from the San Francisco Mint,” the newspaper reported.

Jack Trout told the paper that an 1866 Liberty $20 gold piece without the words “In God We Trust” was part of the buried stash, and the coin may fetch over $1 million at auction because it’s so rare.

“This was someone’s private coin, created by the mint manager or someone with access to the inner workings of the Old Granite Lady (San Francisco Mint),” Trout told the newspaper. “It was likely created in revenge for the assassination of Lincoln the previous year (April 14, 1865). I don’t believe that coin ever left The Mint until the robbery. For it to show up as part of the treasure find links it directly to that inside job at the turn of the century at the San Francisco Mint.”

Mint spokesman Adam Stump issued this statement when contacted by ABC News: “We do not have any information linking the Saddle Ridge Hoard coins to any thefts at any United States Mint facility. Surviving agency records from the San Francisco Mint have been retired to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), under Record Group 104.  When news of the stash first broke, coin dealer Kagin spoke about the rarity of such a find.

“Since 1981, people have been coming to us with one or two coins they find worth a few thousand dollars, but this is the first time we get someone with a whole cache of buried coins… It is a million to one chance, even harder than winning the lottery,” Kagin told ABCNews.com.

The couple is trying to remain anonymous after finding the five cans of coins last spring on their Tiburon property in northern California and conducted an interview with Kagin.

“I never would have thought we would have found something like this. However, in a weird way I feel like I have been preparing my whole life for it,” the couple said.

“I saw an old can sticking out of the ground on a trail that we had walked almost every day for many, many years. I was looking down in the right spot and saw the side of the can. I bent over to scrape some moss off and noticed that it had both ends on it,” they said.

It was the first of five cans to be unearthed, each packed with gold coins.

“Nearly all of the 1,427 coins, dating from 1847 to 1894, are in uncirculated, mint condition,” said Kagin told ABCNews.com.

He said that the couple plan to sell most of the coins, but before they do, they are “loaning some to the American Numismatic Association for its National Money Show, which opens Thursday in Atlanta.”

“Some of the rarest coins could fetch as much as $1 million apiece,” said Kagin. He also said that they wish to sell 90 percent of the collection through Amazon.com and on the company’s website.

“We’d like to help other people with some of this money. There are people in our community who are hungry and don’t have enough to eat. We’ll also donate to the arts and other overlooked causes. In a way, it has been good to have time between finding the coins and being able to sell them in order to prepare and adjust. It’s given us an opportunity to think about how to give back,” said the couple.

Kagin and his colleague David McCarthy, senior numismatist, and researcher at Kagin’s, met with the couple last April, two months after the hoard was found.

When McCarthy and Kagin told the couple that their bonanza will be in the annals of numismatic stories for quite some time, the couple said, “It would have been quite a pity not to share the magnitude of our find. We want to keep the story of these coins intact for posterity.”

World’s Oldest Toy Car – Could This 5,000-Year-Old Discovery Be The Earliest Evidence Of The Wheel?

Many gearheads grew up playing with toy cars. Loyalties to Hot Wheels or Matchbox were as divisive as those between Ford and Chevy are today.

But kids have been fascinated by wheels since long before these companies—or even the car itself—existed.

An archeological dig in Turkey has revealed that our fascination with toy wheels goes back at least 5,000 years, reports the International Business Times.

A toy chariot dating back 5,000 years – which archaeologists believe may be the world’s oldest ‘toy car’ – has been discovered in Turkey.

The little chair on wheels, made from earthenware, was found during an excavation of the ancient city of Sogmatar, in the south-east of the country.

Sogmatar is believed to have been the home of Moses when he had run away from the Pharaoh.

Digs in the city have uncovered a number of tombs, including the child’s grave the mini-chariot was found, which have provided a fascinating insight into how ancient civilizations lived.

In total, 45 tombs have been opened, including three that have remained untouched since the Roman era.

A 4,000-year-old baby’s rattle dug up in the city of Kultepe in the central Anatolian province of Kayseri in 2014 was at that time hailed as the world’s oldest toy.

Sogmatar Excavation Head and Sanliurfa Museum Manager Celal Uludag said that Sogmatar was one of the most important excavations in the area.

He added: ‘The excavation in this area continues with the permission of the ministry. In the necropolis part, in a tomb room, we found a toy carriage which belongs to the Bronze Age and believed to have been made for the children of kings or the leaders.

‘This finding is very important for us as shows the aesthetic and cultural understanding of the period.

‘The item will be exhibited in the biggest museum complex of Turkey, the Sanliurfa Archaeology Museum. We believe that we are going to find even more important things in the excavation.’

A 14,000-year-old puppy, whose perfectly preserved body was found in Russia, munched on a woolly rhino for its last meal

Russian scientists in 2011 found a perfectly preserved Frozen Aged puppy in Siberia. Recently, while examining the 14,000-year-old wolf-dog’s stomach contents, researchers were stunned to find evidence of what could be one of the last woolly rhinos on Earth still in its prehistoric bowels.

“It’s completely unheard of,” professor of evolutionary genetics Love Dalen said. “I’m not aware of any frozen Ice Age carnivore where they have found pieces of tissue inside.”

Scientists originally found the furry canine at a dig site in Tumat, Siberia, and shortly afterward found a piece of yellow-haired tissue inside its stomach.

Experts initially believed that the tissue belonged to a cave lion, but after sharing the evidence with a resourceful team in Sweden, learned otherwise.

“We have a reference database and mitochondrial DNA from all mammals, so we checked the sequence data against that and the results that came back — it was an almost perfect match for woolly rhinoceros,” Dalen explained.

Dalen works at the Centre for Paleogenetics, which is a joint venture between Stockholm University and the Swedish Museum of Natural History, so his team had access to both highly-detailed DNA databases and radiocarbon dating.

After Dalen and his colleagues were able to assess with the overwhelming likelihood that this half-digested tissue belonged to a woolly rhinoceros, they then radiocarbon dated it at around 14,400 years old.

“This puppy, we know already, has been dated to roughly 14,000 years ago,” said Dalen. “We also know that the woolly rhinoceros goes extinct 14,000 years ago. So, potentially, this puppy has eaten one of the last remaining woolly rhinos.”

Modern research has shown that the woolly mammoth’s extinction was partly due to severe climate change. As for how this lucky puppy got its paws on such a specimen, which is the same size as a modern-day white rhino that weighs nearly 8,000 pounds and stands six feet tall, remains largely unclear.

Indeed, Edana Lord, a Ph.D. student who co-authored a research paper studying the woolly rhino’s road to extinction, asserted that due to the rhino’s size it is impossible that the puppy killed the animal itself.

Additionally, experts were surprised to see that the rhino was left mostly undigested in the puppy’s stomach, leading Dalen to conclude that “this puppy must have died very shortly after eating the rhino.”

“We don’t know if it was a wolf, but if it was a wolf cub, maybe it came across a baby rhino that was dead,” Dalen hypothesized. “Or the (adult) wolf ate the baby rhino. Maybe as they were eating it, the mother rhino had her revenge.”

This wolf-pup is just one of a few amazing prehistoric canines specimens to be found in the last decade. In 2016, a miner in the Yukon region of Canada found a mummified 50,000-year-old wolf pup alongside a prehistoric caribou.

Then, in 2019, researchers found an 18,000-year-old wolf-dog hybrid perfectly preserved in the Siberian permafrost. They have since named that specimen “Dogor.”

Ultimately, researchers hope that this latest find can shed some more light on the last days of the woolly rhino — which are still being debated millennia later.