IMPORTANT BREAKTHROUGH IN BIBLICAL ARCHAEOLOGY

An expert working at the British Museum has confirmed the existence of an important Biblical figure after deciphering a cuneiform inscription on a small Babylonian clay tablet.
Austrian Assyriologist Dr Michael Jursa made the breakthrough discovery confirming the existence of a Babylonian official mentioned in the Old Testament and connected to the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar.
The clay document is dated to the 10th year of Nebuchadnezzar II (595 BC) and names the official, Nebo-Sarsekim. According to chapter 39 of the Book of Jeremiah, he was present at the siege of Jerusalem in 587 BC with Nebuchadnezzar himself.
In 601 BC King Nebuchadnezzar marched to the Egyptian frontier where the Babylonian and Egyptian armies clashed with both sides suffering heavy losses. Over the next few years the struggle between the Babylonians and Egyptians continued and in the course of these campaigns Jerusalem was captured (597 BC).
To find a cuneiform reference to someone connected with these remarkable times is rare but evidence from non-Biblical sources for the existence of any individual named in the Bible - other than kings - is incredibly rare.

Nebo-Sarsekim is described in the book of Jeremiah as ‘chief eunuch’ (as the title is now translated, rather than ‘chief officer’). Dr Jursa’s translation of the Babylonian tablet proves that his name was really pronounced as Nabu-sharrussu-ukin, and gives the same title, ‘chief eunuch’, in cuneiform script, thereby confirming the accuracy of the Biblical account.
“Reading Babylonian tablets is often laborious, but also very satisfying: there is so much new information yet to be discovered,” said Dr Jursa, who is Associate Professor at the University of Vienna.
“But finding something like this tablet, where we see a person mentioned in the Bible making an everyday payment to the temple in Babylon and quoting the exact date is quite extraordinary.”
Dr Jursa has been studying cuneiform at the British Museum since 1991. It is the oldest form of writing known to us and was commonly used in the Middle East between 3200 BC and the second century AD.
Today there are only a small number of scholars worldwide who can read cuneiform script, which was created by pressing a wedged-shaped instrument (usually a cut reed) into moist clay.

Source: http://www.24hourmuseum.org.uk/nwh_gfx_en/ART48827.html

Easter Island's ancient statues

The giant stone statues of Easter Island have perplexed generations of archaeologists, engineers and scholars. Ever since European explorers first set eyes on them three centuries ago these carvings have presented a problem. How could the island's primitive inhabitants have erected such massive edifices – each weighing many tons – without the help of wheels, cranes, machines, metal tools or draft animals? The very existence of these giant heads on a barren outcrop of land in the middle of the Pacific Ocean seemed to defy reason, if not the laws of physics.
The author Erich von Däniken suggested that the statues were the work of extraterrestrial beings who, after being stranded on Easter Island, decided to do a little stonework before eventually being rescued. It was hard to believe that the stones were the work of humans, especially ones who had to survive in the treeless landscape of Easter Island, which lies more than 2,000 miles from the nearest mainland.
Jacob Roggeveen, the Dutch seaman who gave the island its name when he spotted it on Easter Day in 1722, was amazed by the statues. "The stone images at first caused us to be struck with astonishment, because we could not comprehend how it was possible that these people, who are devoid of heavy thick timber for making any machines, as well as strong ropes, nevertheless had been able to erect such images, which were fully 30ft high and thick in proportion," Roggeveen wrote in his journal.
He was equally amazed as to how the Easter islanders could have come to colonise such a remote place in the middle of a vast ocean. Their canoes were leaky and frail, made of small planks and light inner timbers stitched together by fine, twisted threads. They were not the sort of heavy ocean-going craft that could survive a three-week journey over open sea. Much bigger timbers bound with heavy ropes were needed for that.
Yet there were no trees, no timber and no ropes to be seen. Easter Island seemed to be a place of "singular poverty and barrenness", Roggeveen wrote.
However, we now know that Easter Island was once a lush, sub-tropical paradise covered in thick forest filled with a rich assortment of wildlife. But the trees and forest animals were long gone by the time Roggeveen had arrived. The question is why?
This Saturday the giant statues, or "moai", could be voted one of the new seven wonders of the world in a global competition. At least 50 million people have taken part in the attempt to comprise a 21st-century list of man-made heritage sites. The seven winners from the 20 entries will be announced in Lisbon at the end of the week.
The moai stones lie at the heart of the many mysteries of Easter Island. But trying to explain the puzzle has caused a deep fissure within academia. Some archaeologists see Easter Island as an example of what can happen when the lust for material splendour – ever bigger stone carvings in this case – is satisfied at the expense of the environment.
Others, meanwhile, take a different view. They see Easter Island as another victim of European colonialism that killed off an ancient culture. The island, these scholars argue, suffered at the hands of introduced diseases, notably smallpox, and a slave trade that stole a huge proportion of its indigenous population.
At the heart of the debate is the issue of the island's deforestation. There is no dispute that the island was once covered in huge palm trees. There is also no dispute that something happened that caused the island to become completely denuded over a short period of time. But was it the islanders who triggered this environmental degradation, or some other event beyond their control such as climate change or the introduction of rats?
In his 2005 book Collapse, author Jared Diamond explains why it was the islanders' fault. Diamond says they started to build bigger and bigger ceremonial statues in an atmosphere of competitive rivalry between the island's many different clans. To move the statues from the island's quarry, Rano Raraku, in the south-east, the islanders needed to cut large logs for the construction of long "canoe ladders" to carry the massive carvings to the island's coast. They also needed heavy ropes made from the fibrous bark of the bigger palms.
The scale of the operation was vast. Crews of between 50 and 500 men dragged statues weighing between 10 and 90 tons. Some 887 statues were carved in total, nearly half of which still remain in Rano Raraku quarry, which appears to have been abandoned mid-production. For its transport alone, each statue would have required several trees to be cut down. Other timber was needed for housing, fuel and the construction of the large stone platforms, or "ahu", on which the moai were placed.
"The overall picture for Easter Island is the most extreme example of forest destruction in the Pacific, and among the most extreme in the world: the whole forest gone, and all of its tree species extinct," says Diamond.
As a result of the deforestation, food production fell dramatically as crops became exposed to the harsh winds and semi-arid conditions of the region. Consequently the population collapsed from perhaps as many as 15,000 at its peak to the few thousand that were eking out a living by the time Roggeveen arrived.
Smallpox and slavery killed off most of the people that remained, but the islanders were on the way to total collapse even without any contact with Europeans, says Diamond.
But not everyone is convinced. "It's a shame that some now want to blame the islanders for their own demise," says Professor Terry Hunt, an anthropologist at the University of Hawaii. "There is no evidence that a population collapse occurred before European contact," says Hunt, who is supported by Professor Carl Lipo of California State University in Long Beach. "Lacking much of the basic evidence, a set of beliefs has been established and perpetuated that rationalise the story," says Lipo.
Hunt and Lipo argue that Easter Island was first colonised by Polynesian seafarers much later than supposed. They say the first people to arrive on Easter Island came around AD1200, about 400 years later than other scientists have suggested from radio-carbon dating. This makes it implausible for the population to reach the 15,000 figure that would have caused the fast ecocide invoked by the environmental catastrophists.
Hunt and Lipo believe the deforestation occurred over a longer period as a result of climate change, aided probably by rats. The islanders did not go through a population collapse until after the arrival of Europeans, they say.
However, John Flenley of Massey University in New Zealand, who carried out much of the radio-carbon work on Easter Island, and Paul Bahn, a leading British archaeologist, say there is ample evidence for a much earlier arrival of Polynesian settlers. They dismiss the sceptics. "They view the island through rose-coloured spectacles, choosing to believe that the community was thriving up to 1722 and that it was the Europeans who destroyed them," say Flenley and Bahn in a scientific paper published in the May issue of the Rapa Nui Journal.
"It is undeniable that many calamities befell the island thanks to European visits... but the Europhobic model ignores the mass of archaeological, oral, botanical and sedimentological evidence which documents the prehistoric transformation of the island by humans from pristine subtropical rainforest to a virtually treeless landscape," they say.
Climate change may have contributed to deforestation but it could not be solely responsible. Neither could rats have killed off the living trees which can live for a century or more. The radio-carbon dating points convincingly to an initial colonisation before AD900, Flenley and Bahn argue. There was ample time for the rapid deforestation, environmental collapse and a population crash, they insist.
Why all this is important today is not of course lost in the age of globalisation, climate change and a rapidly growing world population of more than 6.5 billion people. As Jared Diamond says: "The parallels between Easter Island and the whole of the modern world are chillingly obvious."

The tale of the heads
* Easter Island lies 2,237 miles west of Chile – which annexed it in 1888 – and was formed by the three volcanoes as they emerged from the floor of the Pacific Ocean.
* It is one of the most remote inhabited islands and was first colonised by Polynesian seafarers sailing from islands to the west which were already inhabited.
* The stone carvings, or moai, probably represent ancestral deities linked with the 20 or so clans that comprised the island's population. The statues were usually placed on a stone platform, or ahu, sited on the coast. They faced inland, overseeing the segment of land controlled by each clan.
* A quarry called Rano Raraku is where most of the statues were carved from hardened volcanic ash before being transported to their final resting site. Many statues are still in the quarry today, including the biggest, weighing nearly 155 tons, which probably turned out to be too large to be removed.

By Steve Connor

Independent

Source: http://news.independent.co.uk/sci_tech/article2734673.ece

Earliest-known evidence of peanut, cotton and squash farming found

Anthropologists working on the slopes of the Andes in northern Peru have discovered the earliest-known evidence of peanut, cotton and squash farming dating back 5,000 to 9,000 years. Their findings provide long-sought-after evidence that some of the early development of agriculture in the New World took place at farming settlements in the Andes.
The discovery was published in the June 29 issue of Science.
The research team made their discovery in the Ρanchoc Valley, which is approximately 500 meters above sea level on the lower western slopes of the Andes in northern Peru.
“We believe the development of agriculture by the Ρanchoc people served as a catalyst for cultural and social changes that eventually led to intensified agriculture, institutionalized political power and new towns in the Andean highlands and along the coast 4,000 to 5,500 years ago,” Tom D. Dillehay, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at Vanderbilt University and lead author on the publication, said. “Our new findings indicate that agriculture played a broader role in these sweeping developments than was previously understood.”

Dillehay and his colleagues found wild-type peanuts, squash and cotton as well as a quinoa-like grain, manioc and other tubers and fruits in the floors and hearths of buried preceramic sites, garden plots, irrigation canals, storage structures and on hoes. The researchers used a technique called accelerator mass spectrometry to determine the radiocarbon dates of the materials. Data gleaned from botanists, other archaeological findings and a review of the current plant community in the area suggest the specific strains of the discovered plant remains did not naturally grow in the immediate area.
“The plants we found in northern Peru did not typically grow in the wild in that area,” Dillehay said. “We believe they must have therefore been domesticated elsewhere first and then brought to this valley by traders or mobile horticulturists.
“The use of these domesticated plants goes along with broader cultural changes we believe existed at that time in this area, such as people staying in one place, developing irrigation and other water management techniques, creating public ceremonials, building mounds and obtaining and saving exotic artifacts.”

The researchers dated the squash from approximately 9,200 years ago, the peanut from 7,600 years ago and the cotton from 5,500 years ago.

Source: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2007-06/vu-eeo062507.php

Hatshepsut's Mummy

Egyptologists think they have identified with certainty the mummy of Hatshepsut, the most famous queen to rule ancient Egypt, found in a humble tomb in the Valley of the Kings, an archaeologist said on Monday.
Egypt's chief archaeologist, Zahi Hawass, will hold a news conference in Cairo on Wednesday. The Discovery Channel said he would announce what it called the most important find in the Valley of the Kings since the discovery of King Tutankhamun.

The archaeologist, who asked not to be named, said the candidate for identification as the mummy of Hatshepsut was one of two females found in 1903 in a small tomb believed to be that of Hatshepsut's wet-nurse, Sitre In.
Several Egyptologists have speculated over the years that one of the mummies was that of the queen, who ruled from between 1503 and 1482 BC -- at the height of ancient Egypt's power.
The archaeologist said Hawass would present new evidence for an identification but that not all Egyptologists are convinced he will be able to prove his case. "It's based on teeth and body parts ... It's an interesting piece of scientific deduction which might point to the truth," the archaeologist said.
Egyptologist Elizabeth Thomas speculated many years ago that one of the mummies was Hatshepsut's because the positioning of the right arm over the woman's chest suggested royalty.

Her mummy may have been hidden in the tomb for safekeeping after her death because her stepson and successor, Tuthmosis III, tried to obliterate her memory.
Donald Ryan, an Egyptologist who rediscovered the tomb in 1989, said on an Internet discussion board this month that there were many possibilities for the identities of the two female mummies found in the tomb, known as KV 60. "Zahi Hawass recently has taken some major steps to address these questions. Both of the KV 60 mummies are in Cairo now and are being examined in various clever ways that very well might shed light on these questions," he added.

In an undated article on his Web site, Hawass cast doubt on the theory that the KV-60 mummy with the folded right arm was that of Hatshepsut.
"I do not believe this mummy is Hatshepsut. She has a very large, fat body with huge pendulous breasts, and the position of her arm is not convincing evidence of royalty," he wrote.

He was more optimistic about the mummy found in the wet-nurse's coffin and traditionally identified as the nurse's. That mummy is stored away in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.
"The body of the mummy now in KV 60 with its huge breasts may be the wetnurse, the original occupant of the coffin ... The mummy on the third floor at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo could be the mummy of Hatshepsut," Hawass wrote.

By Jonathan Wright

Source: http://www.abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=3313952&page=1

Travel - Jewel of the Jungle

Just before sunrise on a cloudy April morning in northern Cambodia, I joined hundreds of tourists crossing the wide moat to the outer wall of Angkor Wat, often said to be the largest religious structure in the world. Inside the rectangular courtyard, which covers more ground than 200 football fields, I waited near a small lake in front of the temple. Within minutes the sun appeared behind its five iconic towers, each shaped as a closed lotus bud, representing the five peaks of Mount Meru, home of the gods and the mythical Hindu center of the universe.

The temple's precise, symmetrical beauty was unmistakable. The other tourists all faced the sun, watching in stillness and whispering in foreign tongues, as hundreds more arrived behind them. Angkor Wat at sunrise is a wondrous spectacle, one that I would return to several times during my stay in Cambodia.

I had come to the temples of Angkor prepared, having read about their archaeology and history and learned of their immense size and intricate detail. The mystery of why an early Khmer civilization—which built the temples during a period of more than five hundred years—chose to abandon them in the mid-15th century intrigued me. So too did the tales of travelers who "discovered" Angkor in the centuries that followed, some of whom thought they had stumbled across a lost city founded by Alexander the Great or the Roman Empire—until finally, in the 1860s, the French explorer Henri Mouhot reintroduced the temples to the world with his ink drawings and the postmortem publication of his journal, Travels in Siam, Cambodia, and Laos.

But on that first morning I realized that such knowledge was unnecessary to appreciate this remarkable achievement of architecture and human ambition. "There are few places in the world where one feels proud to be a member of the human race, and one of these is certainly Angkor," wrote the late Italian author Tiziano Terzani. "There is no need to know that for the builders every detail had a particular meaning. One does not need to be a Buddhist or a Hindu to understand. You need only let yourself go..."

****

Although Angkor Wat is the largest and best known of these temples, it is but one of hundreds built by the kingdom of Angkor. Huge stone monuments scattered across hundreds of square miles of forest in northern Cambodia, the temples are the remains of a vast complex of deserted cities—which included manmade lakes, canals and bridges—that were astonishing in their size and artistic merit.

But piecing together information about the ancient Khmers who built them has not been easy for archaeologists and historians. The only written records that still exist are the inscriptions on the temple walls and the diary of a Chinese diplomat who visited Angkor in 1296. All administrative buildings and the homes of kings and commoners alike were made of wood; none have survived, leaving only the religious creations of brick and stone.

Direct ancestors of modern-day Cambodians, the Khmers are thought to have descended from the Funan peoples of the Mekong delta. Funan was a decentralized state of rival kings that thrived as a trading link connecting China and the West for the first few centuries A.D. In the late sixth century, Funan was superseded by the state of Chenla, based farther north into Cambodia's interior. Chenla lasted for about 250 years until the start of the Angkor period.

Meanwhile, Hindu and Buddhist influences, which originated in centuries-old contact with Indian traders, infiltrated the region. (Neither ever fully displaced the local animist religion, but rather assimilated into it.) Elite Khmer rulers commissioned the building of temples and gave themselves Sanskrit names to demonstrate their wealth and power. Their subjects made donations to the temples to curry favor—both with the gods and with the local ruler. Temples, as such, were not only religious but also commercial centers. In the time of Angkor many temples operated as small cities, and some of them as very large cities.

Around A.D. 800 a powerful regional king named Jayavarman II consolidated the rival chiefdoms in Cambodia and founded the kingdom of Angkor. It was Jayavarman II who instituted the cult of the Devaraja (literally "god-king" or "king of the gods"), symbolically linking Khmer royalty to the divine realm.

For the next six centuries, Angkor's heartland was the area between the northern banks of the Tonle Sap lake and the Kulen hills to the north. Here the temples are most concentrated, though Angkorian constructions exist all throughout Southeast Asia.

Life in Angkor was busy, ritualistic, unstable. Wars against neighboring armies from modern-day Thailand and Champa (modern-day central Vietnam) were constant. A vaguely defined process for royal succession left the throne frequently exposed to ambitious usurpers. For the common rice-grower and peasant, the feverish pace of temple-building required labor, money in the form of taxes and the prospect of being drafted into war by the king.

Three hundred years after the beginnings of the kingdom, King Suryavarman II ordered the construction of Angkor Wat as a shrine to the god Vishnu. Fittingly for the king who erected this most sublime of the Angkor temples, Suryavarman II ruled at the height of Angkor's dominion over Southeast Asia. During his reign from 1113 to 1150, Angkor's control extended beyond Cambodia to parts of modern-day Thailand, Myanmar, Laos and Vietnam.

The other great king of Angkor was Jayavarman VII, who in 1181 assumed the throne after driving out an occupying army from Champa initiated an intensive building program of temples, roads and hospitals that, according to some estimates, led to twice as many monuments as Angkor already had.

Jayavarman VII's greatest project was the temple city of Angkor Thom, enclosed by a square wall more than seven miles long and about 26 feet high. In its precise center is the Bayon, a mysterious, oddly shaped temple with 54 towers. Carved into each of the towers' four sides is a serene, enigmatic face, possibly a composite of a bodhisattva and Jayavarman VII himself. After his death in 1219 the kingdom began a slow decline.

The Khmers moved south to Phnom Penh sometime after 1431, the last year that Thai armies invaded Angkor and made off with much of its treasure and women. Scholars and archaeologists still ponder why they left. Some say the Khmers sought a more secure capital from which to defend against the Thais. Others believe the Khmers wished to engage in further trade with China, which could be more easily conducted from Phnom Penh, an intersection of four rivers, including the Mekong. No single reason is certain.

Although Angkor was mostly abandoned, it was never completely forgotten. Some ascetic monks stayed behind, and for a brief time in the 16th century the Khmer kings returned the capital to Angkor, only to leave once again. Missionaries and pilgrims occasionally came upon the neglected temples, which through the centuries were swallowed by the jungle.

After Mouhot's "rediscovery" and the French colonization of Cambodia in the 1860s, extensive restoration work on the temples was begun by the École Française d'Extrême-Orient (the French School of the Far East). Today more work continues to be done by Unesco and organizations from Cambodia and many other countries. Over the years, the restoration process has faced many difficulties. Statues, artwork and even sections of the temples themselves have been vandalized or stolen. The murderous Khmer Rouge government under Pol Pot halted the restoration work completely when it occupied the temples as a military stronghold in the late 1970s.

Perhaps the most serious threat to the temples in recent years is one brought on by their own appeal: tourism. After a half-century of political instability, war and famine, Cambodia became safe for tourism about a decade ago. Angkor is the engine now driving this thriving industry, which last year brought 1.7 million visitors to the country, according to the Cambodian Tourism Ministry. Other estimates put the number even higher, and it is projected to continue growing.

This attraction presents a dilemma. The government remains plagued by corruption, and the average Cambodian income is the equivalent of one American dollar per day. The tourism generated by Angkor is therefore a vital source of income. But it also poses a serious threat to the structural integrity of the temples. In addition to the erosion caused by constant contact with tourists, the expansion of new hotels and resorts in the nearby town of Siem Reap is reportedly sucking dry the groundwater beneath the temples, weakening their foundations and threatening to sink some of them into the earth.

****

During my visit I walked Angkor's dark corridors, climbed its precipitous steps and studied up close the finely carved bas-reliefs, where pictorial legends of Hindu and Buddhist mythology and the exaggerated exploits of Khmer kings are engraved on their walls. Usually around noon, when most tourists seemed to escape the sweltering heat to have lunch, I had no trouble finding an empty, contemplative space once inhabited by the gods.

As I took in the vast temples, I had to remind myself that the daily life of the early Khmers was violent and exacting. In their careful adherence to routines and rituals, could they have imagined how their efforts would one day be so revered? How different their experience must have been from the feelings of wonderment and awe now inspired by their temples, or by watching a sunrise at Angkor Wat.

By Cardiff de Alejo Garcia
Source: http://www.smithsonianmagazine.com/issues/2007/july/angkor.php

Ancient Etruscans were immigrants from Anatolia

Geneticists find the final piece in the puzzle

Nice, France: The long-running controversy about the origins of the Etruscan people appears to be very close to being settled once and for all, a geneticist will tell the annual conference of the European Society of Human Genetics today. Professor Alberto Piazza, from the University of Turin, Italy, will say that there is overwhelming evidence that the Etruscans, whose brilliant civilisation flourished 3000 years ago in what is now Tuscany, were settlers from old Anatolia (now in southern Turkey).
Etruscan culture was very advanced and quite different from other known Italian cultures that flourished at the same time, and highly influential in the development of Roman civilisation. Its origins have been debated by archaeologists, historians and linguists since time immemorial. Three main theories have emerged: that the Etruscans came from Anatolia, Southern Turkey, as propounded by the Greek historian Herotodus; that they were indigenous to the region and developed from the Iron Age Villanovan society, as suggested by another Greek historian, Dionysius of Halicarnassus; or that they originated from Northern Europe.
Now modern genetic techniques have given scientists the tools to answer this puzzle. Professor Piazza and his colleagues set out to study genetic samples from three present-day Italian populations living in Murlo, Volterra, and Casentino in Tuscany, central Italy. “We already knew that people living in this area were genetically different from those in the surrounding regions”, he says. “Murlo and Volterra are among the most archaeologically important Etruscan sites in a region of Tuscany also known for having Etruscan-derived place names and local dialects. The Casentino valley sample was taken from an area bordering the area where Etruscan influence has been preserved.”
The scientists compared DNA samples taken from healthy males living in Tuscany, Northern Italy, the Southern Balkans, the island of Lemnos in Greece, and the Italian islands of Sicily and Sardinia. The Tuscan samples were taken from individuals who had lived in the area for at least three generations, and were selected on the basis of their surnames, which were required to have a geographical distribution not extending beyond the linguistic area of sampling. The samples were compared with data from modern Turkish, South Italian, European and Middle-Eastern populations.
“We found that the DNA samples from individuals from Murlo and Volterra were more closely related those from near Eastern people than those of the other Italian samples”, says Professor Piazza. “In Murlo particularly, one genetic variant is shared only by people from Turkey, and, of the samples we obtained, the Tuscan ones also show the closest affinity with those from Lemnos.”
Scientists had previously shown this same relationship for mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) in order to analyse female lineages. And in a further study, analysis of mtDNA of ancient breeds of cattle still living in the former Etruria found that they too were related to breeds currently living in the near East.
The history of the Etruscans extends before the Iron Age to the end of the Roman Republic or from c. 1200 BC to c. 100BC Many archaeological sites of the major Etruscan cities were continuously occupied since the Iron Age, and the people who lived in the Etruria region did not appear suddenly, nor did they suddenly start to speak Etruscan. Rather they learned to write from their Greek neighbours and thus revealed their language. Archaeologists and linguists are in agreement that the Etruscans had been developing their culture and language in situ before the first historical record of their existence.
“But the question that remained to be answered was – how long was this process between pre-history and history"” says Professor Piazza. In 1885 a stele carrying an inscription in a pre-Greek language was found on the island of Lemnos, and dated to about the 6th century BC. Philologists agree that this has many similarities with the Etruscan language both in its form and structure and its vocabulary. But genetic links between the two regions have been difficult to find until now.
Herodotus’ theory, much criticised by subsequent historians, states that the Etruscans emigrated from the ancient region of Lydia, on what is now the southern coast of Turkey, because of a long-running famine. Half the population was sent by the king to look for a better life elsewhere, says his account, and sailed from Smyrna (now Izmir) until they reached Umbria in Italy.
“We think that our research provides convincing proof that Herodotus was right”, says Professor Piazza, “and that the Etruscans did indeed arrive from ancient Lydia. However, to be 100% certain we intend to sample other villages in Tuscany, and also to test whether there is a genetic continuity between the ancient Etruscans and modern-day Tuscans. This will have to be done by extracting DNA from fossils; this has been tried before but the technique for doing so has proved to be very difficult.”
“Interestingly, this study of historical origins will give us some pointers for carrying out case-control studies of disease today,” says Professor Piazza. “In order to obtain a reliable result, we had to select the control population much more carefully that would normally be done, and we believe that this kind of careful selection would also help in studies of complex genetic diseases.”

Source: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2007-06/esoh-aew061307.php

Achilli et al. The American Journal of Human Genetics Volume 80, p.759 (2007)

Lascaux on the Nile

The discovery of huge rocks decorated with Palaeolithic illustrations at the village of Qurta on the northern edge of Kom Ombo has caused excitement among the scientific community. The art was found by a team of Belgian archaeologists and restorers and features groups of cattle similar to those drawn on the walls of the French Lascaux caves. They are drawn and painted in a naturalistic style which is quite different from those shown in cattle representations of the well-known classical, pre-dynastic iconography of the fourth millennium BC. Illustrations of hippopotami, fish, birds and human figures can also be seen on the surface of some of the rocks.

The first examination of the patination and weathering suggests that these bovid representations are extremely old, most probably predating the fish-trap representations and associated rock scenes previously found at several locations in the Al-Hosh area. They are also similar to cattle representations discovered in 1962-63 by a Canadian archaeological mission as part of an attempt to reserve land for habitation and cultivation by Nubians who had been displaced from their homes by the construction of the Aswan High Dam. The Belgian mission relocated the rock in 2004 to the area near the modern village of Qurta. This newly-discovered site is still in pristine condition since they have not been visited by archaeologists since the Canadian team in 1963.

"This is a very important discovery and sheds more light on human life and history during the Palaeolithic era, a lesser recognised period in Egypt," Culture Minister Farouk Hosni said. He described it as an important revelation on Egypt's Stone Age heritage.

The story of the discovery began two months ago when a Belgian archaeological mission from the Royal Museum of Art and History, financed by Yale University, resumed its intensive archaeological survey on the Nubian-sandstone cliffs at Qurta. While carrying out their routine survey, excavators stumbled upon three rock art sites spreading over a distance of about two kilometres on the eastern side of Qurta. Entitled Qurta I, II and III, each site contains several prehistoric rocks bearing a rich collection of Palaeolithic illustrations featuring a large number of bovids, hippopotami, birds and human figures.

Although they are very well painted, the large amount of rock art and the extremely difficult recording conditions have meant the restorers have had to install scaffolding at several locations in an attempt to maintain them for documentation. So far 20 of the 30 panel illustrations have been photographed and archaeologically documented, while the remaining 10 will be subjected to documentation during the mission's next archaeological season in 2008.

Limited excavation was carried out at Qurta I but, regretfully, it did not reveal any more information about the people who created the art, and when they did so.

Bovids are the most common animals depicted in the illustrations, with at least 111 representations in different positions. Of other animals there are seven examples of birds, three hippopotami, three gazelles and two fish. There are also 10 highly stylised human figures shown with pronounced buttocks, but with no other distinct bodily features.

All the rock art images are very darkly coloured and seem to be covered by a substantially developed varnish. Most of the images also have traces of intensive weathering through Aeolian abrasion and water run-off.

"In this respect, the rock art at Qurta is highly homogeneous," said Belgian archaeologist Dirk Huyge, the team leader. Although there were numerous superimpositions of images, the art seemed to have been produced in a single phase.

"None of the painted animals shows any evidence of domestication, and there is little doubt that the bovid should be identified as bos primigenius or aurochs (wild cattle)," Huyge said. "Although these bovids are rather short-horned, there is archaeozoological evidence to support this suggestion." He said that, moreover, the Late Pleistocene faunal representations on the Kom Ombo plain highlighted that the Egyptian species of bos primigenius had relatively smaller horns than the European, but was otherwise of about the same body size.

Huyge pointed out that animals drown on rocks were individual images rather than collective except for a very few, such as the art featuring two bovids standing opposite one another and a fresco of three flying birds.

Early studies on the rock art illustrations revealed that, unlike those of the pre-dynastic period, especially those of the fourth millennium BC, they do not have imaginary ground lines. On the contrary they were drawn in all possible directions. Quite often the heads are represented either upwards or downwards as if they were in movement.

In his archaeological report, a copy of which Al-Ahram Weekly has received, Huyge described the characteristic of the newly-discovered illustrations. He writes that, from a technical point of view, prehistoric men used a special artistic technique of art to engrave and paint their rock images. They hammered and incised the solid surface to transform it into a fine animal, a bird or a scene from the nature around them. In some cases the figures are executed almost in bas-relief, such as the one showing a large bovid found in Qurta II and a fresco of birds which combined three images. "It is really a superb example among the rock art ever found," Huyge commented.

The dimensions of the Qurta images are exceptional. Often the prehistoric bovid stood taller than 0.8 metres, and the largest example ever found measured over 1.8 metres. In this respect the Qurta rock art is quite different in that the size of each animal figure varies by 0.4 to 0.5 metres.

The prehistoric artist or artists at Qurta made use of natural fissures, cracks, curves, arches and brows of the rocks, and integrated them into the art images. A perfect example of this is a rock panel found at Qurta II, where a natural vertical crack was used to render the back part of a bovid. Huyge points out that bovid drawings were deliberately left incomplete. Some had missing legs, tail or horns, while others had numerous scratches over their heads and necks,

Some of Qurta's bovid images are combined with highly schematised human figures similar to those known from the Magdalenian cultural phase of Palaeolithic Europe.

"This must evidently have had a kind of symbolical meaning," Huyge suggests.

"The Qurta rock art is quite unlike any rock art known elsewhere in Egypt," Zahi Hawass, secretary-general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA), says. He adds that it is substantially different from the ubiquitous "classical" pre-dynastic rock art of the fourth millennium BC, known from hundreds of sites throughout the Nile Valley and the adjacent Eastern and Western deserts. The only true parallel thus far known is the rock art previously discovered in 2004 at Abu Tanqura Bahari at Al-Hosh, about 10 kilometres to the north and on the opposite bank of the river.

In 1962 and 1963, the Canadian Prehistoric Expedition started an intensive excavation project in the area around Kom Ombo to rescue as many as possible of the prehistoric remains in the area. Several Late Palaeolithic settlements were found in the vicinity of the recently discovered rock art sites, the most important of which is GS-III, situated at a distance of only 150 to 200 metres from the Qurta I rock art site. At this Palaeolithic site, sandstone fragments were found on which were incised several deep parallel linear grooves. "Such discovery proved that the Late Palaeolithic inhabitants of the Kom Ombo plain practised the technique of incising sandstone to implement their drawings," Hawass concludes.

Mohamed El-Beyali, head of Aswan antiquities, says the GS-III site and similar sites found by the Canadian Prehistoric Expedition and other missions on the Kom Ombo plain in the early 1960s were attributed to the Ballanan-Silsilian culture. Other occurrences of this culture are known from Wadi Halfa in Sudanese Nubia and from the vicinity of Esna (E71-K20) and Nage' Hammadi (Arab Al-Sahaba). The Ballanan-Silsilian culture is dated to about 16,000 to 15,000 years ago. This corresponds climatologically to the end of a hyper-arid period, preceding a return of the rains and the "Wild Nile" stage of about 14,000-13,000 years ago.

The fauna of these Ballanan-Silsilian and other Late Palaeolithic sites on the Kom Ombo plain suggest a culture of hunters and fishermen with a mixed subsistence economy oriented to both stream and desert for food resources. "It is essentially characterised by elements such as aurochs ( bosprimigenius ), hartebeest ( alcelaphus buselaphus ), some species of gazelle (especially gazella dorcas ), hippopotamus ( hippopotamus amphibius ), wading and diving birds including numerous goose and duck species as well as some fish species, especially clarias or catfish," Huyge said. He continued that with the exception of hartebeest, this faunal inventory perfectly matched the animal repertory of the Qurta rock art sites. Both in the Late Palaeolithic faunal assemblages and in the rock art large "Ethiopian" faunal elements, such as elephants, giraffes and rhinoceros, are conspicuously absent.

Huyge claimed that although the Canadian Prehistoric Expedition had hinted on several occasions of the high antiquity of the rock art at Qurta, it had failed to assess the true importance of its finds. In an article in Scientific American in 1976, P E L Smith, director of the Canadian mission, wrote: "interesting scenes of wild animals, including cattle and hippopotamus, are engraved on the cliffs near our Gabal Silsila sites, but no one can prove they were the work of a late Palaeolithic group." And still later, in 1985, he assumed: "... that the Gabal Silsila art... is of Holocene age like most or all of the art known to date in northern Africa.". "In our opinion," Huyge continued in his report, "because of the various particularities outlined above, the rock art of Qurta reflects a true Palaeolithic mentality, quite closely comparable to what governs European Palaeolithic art.

"We propose an attribution of this Qurta rock art to the Late Pleistocene Ballanan-Silsilian culture or a Late Palaeolithic culture of similar nature and age," Huyge wrote. He added that "in this respect, it can hardly be coincidental that the comparable site of Abu Tanqura Bahari 11 at Al-Hosh is also situated at close distance [only at about 500m] from a Late Palaeolithic site that, mainly on the basis of its stratigraphical position immediately below the 'Wild Nile' silts, must be of roughly similar age as the Ballanan-Silsilian industry of the Kom Ombo plain. "These remains, therefore, suggest that the rock art of Qurta can be about 15,000 years old," Huyge claimed. He pointed out that the exact age of the rock art was unfortunately not yet available, "but we propose to sample the rock art in the near future for AMS 14C dating of organics in the varnish rind and/or U-series dating."

Huyge sees that the rock art of Qurta and also that of Al-Hosh are "extremely important" as they constitute the oldest graphic activity thus far recorded in Egypt. They also provide clear evidence that Africa in general and Egypt in particular possess prehistoric art that is both chronologically and aesthetically closely comparable to the great Palaeolithic art traditions known for a long time from Europe.

"The rock art of Qurta, which is truly a 'Lascaux on the Nile' should therefore be preserved at any price. Qurta is definitely Egypt's most important rock art site," Huyge concluded.

The rock supporting this art, the Nubian sandstone, is extremely fragile and still being intensively quarried in the area. The rock art panels are often very large and show numerous cracks and fissures. Huyge believes that since it would almost be impossible to remove the rock art from its original location without seriously damaging it, and since, of course, the rock art is an integral part of the Upper Egyptian desert landscape that should be studied and understood in situ, the only way properly to safeguard this priceless heritage of Egypt is to provide adequate surveillance, with several permanent guards on site. It could eventually be envisaged that the area of the rock art could be secured by building high protective walls around it. "Taking this rock art away from its original location, however, and putting it in a museum would definitely be a substantial impoverishment of Egypt's cultural heritage."

Source: http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2007/849/he1.htm