Thousands of years ago, across the Eastern Mediterranean, multiple Bronze Age civilizations took a distinct turn for the worse at around the same time.
The Old Kingdom of Egypt and the Akkadian Empire both collapsed, and there was a widespread societal crisis across the Ancient Near East and the Aegean, manifesting as declining populations, destruction, reduced trade, and significant cultural changes.
As usual, fingers have been pointed at climate change and shifting allegiances. But scientists have just found a new culprit in some old bones.
In remains excavated from an ancient burial site on Crete, in a cave called Hagios Charalambos, a team led by archaeogeneticist Gunnar Neumann of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany found genetic evidence of bacteria responsible for two of history's most significant diseases – typhoid fever and plague.
Therefore, the researchers said, widespread illnesses caused by these pathogens cannot be discounted as a contributing factor in the societal changes so widespread around 2200 to 2000 BCE.
"The occurrence of these two virulent pathogens at the end of the Early Minoan period in Crete," they wrote in their paper, "emphasizes the necessity to re-introduce infectious diseases as an additional factor possibly contributing to the transformation of early complex societies in the Aegean and beyond." READ MORE...
Inequality affected some ancient societies, but not all. Changes in farming – and the animals used in it – might have been a factor which caused it to spiral.
26 November 1922 marks what is arguably the most famous discovery in the history of archaeology. On that day, the British Egyptologist Howard Carter made a small hole through which he could insert a candle in the sealed doorway of Tutankhamun's burial chamber and thus lit the interior. As his eyes slowly adapted to the darkness, he was able to make out a chamber that had not been disturbed for over 3,000 years.
Tutankhamun was just an obscure pharaoh during his lifetime, and there is evidence that he was hastily buried – the second of the three nested coffins seems to have originally belonged to someone else. And yet the inner coffin, in which his mummy was discovered, is made of solid gold, weighing almost 250lbs (113kg). One can barely imagine how impressive the burials of such powerful leaders as Khufu, Thutmose III, or Rameses II must have been. Alas, they were all looted in antiquity.
But contrary to popular belief and cinematic glorification, most archaeologists would say that the search for spectacular treasures isn't their main research objective. They want to understand the daily life of past civilisations. Still, both extremes – the fabulous wealth of kings and the hardscrabble existence of common people – contribute to an understanding of what can be argued is one of the main goals of archaeology: to document and study the evolution of inequality in ancient societies. This also involves the question of how to recognise and quantify it. READ MORE...
When Pierre-François Bouchard’s men discovered the ancient stone slab that would change the world on July 19, 1799, they weren’t on an archaeological dig; they were doing a last-minute construction job. The French soldiers occupied a run-down fort in Rosetta, Egypt, and had just days to shore up their defenses for a battle with Ottoman Empire troops.
As the men tore down a wall that had been built using the detritus of nearby ancient Egyptian sites, they discovered a large stone fragment covered in three types of writing, including ancient Greek.
Intrigued, Bouchard wondered if the stone might say the same thing in three different languages. He shared his find with French scholars who had come to plumb Egypt for archaeological treasures.
They got more than they bargained for. The slab was the Rosetta Stone, and the letters and symbols carefully chiseled into its dark face would shed light on the glory of ancient Egyptian civilization. But first, scholars would have to crack its code. READ MORE
