Gold motifs from Tutankhamun’s tomb hint at Levantine influence

Posted on 21 Nov 2017 by Pakinam Amer

Photographer: Christian Eckmann{credit}RGZM, DAI Cairo and University of Tübingen{/credit}

Tutankhamun’s tomb is the gift that keeps on giving, it seems, as archaeologists continue to uncover new “treasures” after examining, for the first time, embossed gold applications on artifacts recovered from the famed tomb.

The objects, along with the tomb itself, were previously unearthed by English archaeologist Howard Carter in 1922 and, for decades, had been stowed away in the Egyptian Museum. Now, archaeologists from Tübingen University have painstakingly restored and analyzed the motifs adorning the tomb a century after the historical discovery. And according to their observations, the art on the motifs – images of battling animals and goats – is foreign to Egypt and betrays strong Middle Eastern, specifically levantine, aesthetic influence.

“Presumably these motifs, which were once developed in Mesopotamia, made their way to the Mediterranean region and Egypt via Syria,” says Peter Pfälzner, leader of the team of archaeologists and conservators. According to the lead archaeologist, the images from the Pharaoh’s tomb resemble those previously found on a tomb in the Syrian Royal city of Qatna, discovered during a dig in 2002.

“This again shows the great role that ancient Syria played in the dissemination of culture during the Bronze Age.”

The next step, says Pfälzner, lies in solving the riddle of how the foreign motifs came to be adopted in Egypt to begin with.

Cuneiform clay tablets discovered in Kurdistan

Posted on 08 Nov 2017 by Pakinam Amer

The tablets are valuable and could reveal insights into Bronze age Iraq.{credit}Peter Pfälzner, University of Tübingen{/credit}

University of Tübingen archaeologists unearthed 93 clay tablets adorned with cuneiform pictograms, an early Sumerian writing system, in the Kurdish region of northern Iraq. The archive dates back to 1250 BCE.

The tablets were dug out of Bassetki, an ancient Bronze-age site which was only discovered in 2013, and whose location lay along busy trade routes from Mesopotamia to Anatolia and Syria.

“Bassetki was of key significance on important trade routes,” Peter Pfälzner, lead archaeologist, says of the discovery. “Our finds provide evidence that this early urban center in northern Mesopotamia was settled almost continuously from approximately 3000 to 600 BCE.”

A big chunk of tablets had been deposited in a ceramic pot, probably used for storage, in a room inside a destroyed Assyrian building.

“The vessels may have been hidden this way shortly after the surrounding building was destroyed. Perhaps the information inside it was meant to be protected and preserved for posterity,” says Pfälzner.

A fragment of the clay tablet contains mentions of a temple to the ancient goddess Gula. However, the scientists believe it might be too early to rule whether they’re looking at legal, or religious text.

The researchers will begin translating the text in Germany, which they say will be challenging, time-consuming and intense since many of the tablets are either unbaked or badly worn.

Raising Horizons: women in science reframed

Posted on 15 Feb 2017 by Barbara Kiser

Posted on behalf of Elizabeth Gibney

Victorian fossil hunter Mary Anning, posed by earth sciences curator Lorna Steel.{credit}Leonora Saunders{/credit}

Women in geoscience today can be struck by the paucity of their predecessors in the scientific record. This month, an exhibition helps to redress the balance: portraits celebrating 200 years of pioneering work by women archaeologists, palaeontologists and geologists, on display at London’s Geological Society library.

Raising Horizons — created by photographer Leonora Saunders and science outreach group TrowelBlazers — celebrates 14 women scientists, from fossil-hunter Mary Anning (1799-1847) to underwater archaeologist Honor Frost (1917-2010). The twist is that the portraits are photographs in which present-day scientific counterparts enact these historical luminaries. Thus Lorna Steel, senior curator in earth sciences at London’s Natural History Museum, is dressed as Anning out collecting with her dog Tray, and maritime archaeologist Rachel Bynoe is shown as Frost emerging dripping after a ‘wreck dive’ in the Mediterranean.

Underwater archaeology pioneer Honor Frost, portrayed by scientific counterpart Rachel Bynoe.{credit}Leonora Saunders{/credit}

Saunders, known for her work on gender and equality, has shot these portrayals of glass-ceiling smashers and adventurous field scientists in rich hues and with deep-green backdrops. They evoke oil paintings — an honour accorded to few of these formidable professionals during their lifetimes.

Most are portrayed at work. Geologist Catherine Raisin (1855-1945), modelled by pioneering geoconservationist Cynthia Burek, scrutinises a geological map. Archaeologist Shahina Farid — who was field director at Turkey’s Neolithic site Çatalhöyük for 17 years — appears as renowned archaeologist of Neolithic culture Kathleen Kenyon (1906-1978), pausing for breath at the excavation of Great Zimbabwe in the 1930s.

Archaeologist Shahina Farid – former field director at Turkey’s Çatalhöyük site – as Kathleen Kenyon, who helped to excavate Great Zimbabwe.{credit}Leonora Saunders {/credit}

With Saunders, the four TrowelBlazers scientists — archaeologists Suzanne Pilaar Birch and Rebecca Wragg Sykes, bioarchaeologist Brenna Hassett and palaeobiologist Victoria Herridge — dug into archives for each portrayal. Period artefacts, such as the 1930s field camera Farid is holding, were used in some of the photos. The period class system is also on show. Geologist Charlotte Murchison (1788-1869), portrayed by earth scientist Natasha Stephen, wears a glamorous evening gown; Murchison’s contemporary, the working-class Anning, a simple dress and clogs.

“There are so many other people I could have chosen,” says Wragg Sykes, who selected subjects from almost 150 biographies accumulated by Trowelblazers. Although many of the women featured in the press, their names rarely made it into scientific publications, says Amara Thornton, the social historian of archaeology who portrays Margaret Murray (1863-1963), Britain’s first female archaeology lecturer.

Mary Leakey, the archaeologist who found the famous “Zinjanthropus” fossil, portrayed by specialist in Neanderthals Ella Al-Shamahi.{credit}Leonora Saunders{/credit}

A highlight is Dorothy Garrod (1892-1968), an archaeologist who led digs at the prehistoric Mount Carmel site in Palestine and discovered an important Neanderthal skull at Gibraltar in the 1920s. Archaeologist Nicky Milner captures Garrod in intense concentration, examining a stone tool.

The exhibition does a fine job of emphasising just how long women have made key advances in these arduous fields. Like the Bearded Lady Project — which also celebrates female earth scientists — Raising Horizons indicates that the Indiana Jones stereotype could be on the wane. And the success of the Academy Award-nominated film Hidden Figures – about African-American female mathematicians whose calculations were crucial to the space race – shows a public appetite for such stories.

Social historian of archaeology Amara Thornton as archaeologist Margaret Murray, shown in the process of unwrapping a mummy.{credit}Leonora Saunders{/credit}

The lives of many of Raising Horizons’ subjects are intertwined, as the women taught, mentored or worked alongside each other. A large part of Trowelblazers is about encouraging such networks today, says Wragg Sykes. Judging from the lively launch event – which, refreshingly, buzzed with children and babies, as well as women and men – they seem to be succeeding.

The scientists in these portraits are a diverse group representing generally white, wealthy historical predecessors. In terms of inspiring a new generation of trowel-wielding women, diversity in role models is essential, says Wragg Sykes. As the Trowelblazers put it, “If you can’t see it, you can’t be it”.

Geologist Catherine Raisin scrutinising a geological map, posed by geoconservationist Cynthia Burek.{credit}Leonora Saunders{/credit}

Saunders says the photos were designed with the learned society setting in mind. Mounted high around the rail of the library, the intent is literally to ‘raise horizons’, slipping these scientists’ legacies back into positions in history they should already hold. But these images are so absorbing that I’d also hope to see them in larger formats when the exhibition tours Britain, and at eye level. That way young women contemplating the life scientific can ‘meet’ these inspiring researchers face to face.

Elizabeth Gibney is a reporter on physics for Nature based in London. She tweets at @LizzieGibney. Raising Horizons will run at The Geological Society, London, until 28 February. It will then set off on a UK tour, to include the University Women’s Club, London, the Lyme Regis Fossil Festival and the Women of the World festival in Chester.

For Nature’s full coverage of science in culture, visit www.nature.com/news/booksandarts.

2016: Editor’s choice

Posted on 31 Dec 2016 by Pakinam Amer

Extracts from selected news and feature articles published this year.

Astrophysics

An international team of scientists, including from New York University Abu Dhabi (NYUAD), managed to directly observe structural components of one slowly rotating star, thanks to asteroseismology. This new technique, 10,000 times more precise than its predecessor, reveals a star’s flatter, rounder contours and different rotational speeds. It allows scientists to ‘see’ the nature of the stellar interior with very high precision.

Marine science

In an unprecedented study on non-model organisms in captivity, scientists from Saudi Arabia, Australia and Norway were able to create large sequence datasets on how reef fish and their offspring react to the phenomenon of decreasing pH levels, called ocean acidification, brought on by climate change. Acidification happens due the uptake of atmospheric carbon dioxide. “The amount of sequencing data we generated is unparalleled for a non-model organism,” says Timothy Ravasi, the senior author of the paper. Scientists discovered that the offspring of some reef fish can tolerate acidification by adjusting their circadian rhythm to night time function throughout the day.

Ecology and evolution

An international consortium of researchers analysed the coding portions of genes, or “exomes”, belonging to 1,794 nationals of Greater Middle Eastern (GME) countries, a region spanning from Morocco in the west to Pakistan in the east. “As expected for a region so rich in history and at the crossroads of many civilizations, the Middle East ‘variome’ [the set of genetic variations in a given population] suggests mixing with other populations, although the percentage varies greatly depending on which subpopulation you look at,” says geneticist Fowzan Alkuraya from Saudi Arabia’s King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Center. Northwest African genes were found in people across northern Africa, most likely representing the Berber genetic background. Arabian Peninsular genes were observed in nearly all GME peoples studied, possibly the result of the Arab conquests of the seventh century. Similarly, Persian expansion in the fifth century into the Turkish peninsula, the Syrian Desert region and parts of northeast Africa probably accounts for the Persian and Pakistan genetic signal present in the peoples of those regions. The peoples of the Syrian Desert and Turkish peninsular regions show the highest levels of mixing with European populations.

Geology

Shallow, dense magma reservoirs may be responsible for the most hazardous type of volcano on Earth, according to a new study. Ivan Koulakov and colleagues, including scientists from Saudi Arabia, present a fresh seismic model, based on studying magma paths beneath the Toba volcano in Indonesia, which last erupted some 74,000 years ago. The model explains why the magma system under Toba causes large, devastating eruptions, and how such large volumes of magma are generated.

Archaeology

“We always say it can’t get any worse, and then it does — and that’s the hardest part,” says Allison Cuneo, project manager for the American Schools of Oriental Research’s Cultural Heritage Initiative (CHI), which documents the loss of Syrian heritage. CHI reported 851 incidents of damage to cultural heritage between September 2015 and August 2016, mostly concentrated in areas of northern Syria controlled by forces opposed to President Bashar al-Assad. With such extensive damage, there “is so much data on destruction to report, it’s like holding the ocean back with a broom,” says Michael Danti, the academic director of CHI.

Environment

A world atlas of artificial night sky brightness, published earlier this year in Science Advances, captured the extent to which we are smothered in light. It reveals Kuwait, Qatar, United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia as the most light-polluted places to live on the planet, topped only by Singapore. More than half of people living in Israel and Libya live through extremely bright nights, and the widest connected twilight zone in the world is along the Nile Delta in Egypt. No more can people in Kuwait and Qatar see the glowing band of the Milky Way from their homes. For more than 97 per cent of people in the United Arab Emirates, Israel, and Egypt, this is also true. “The night sky is the beginning of our civilization. It leads to all religions, philosophy, science, literature and the arts. The cultural significance of a sky full of stars is huge. The new generations have lost this source of inspiration,” says Fabio Falchi, of the Italian Light Pollution Science and Technology Institute’s Fabio Falchi, who led the study.

Astronomy

The Qatar Exoplanet Survey (QES) has discovered three new “exoplanets” outside our solar system. The planets, named Qatar-3b, Qatar-4b and Qatar-5b, are hot Jupiters: they are similar in size to Jupiter (11 times the size of Earth) and orbit very closely to their respective suns. They are located some 1400 to 1800 light years away from Earth and can be seen in the same part of the sky as the Andromeda Constellation, best observed in autumn in the northern hemisphere.

Empowering ancient Egyptian queens

Posted on 29 Nov 2016 by Pakinam Amer

{credit}The National Museum of Antiquities{/credit}

If you find yourself near Leiden, home to Leiden University, the oldest university in the Netherlands, make sure to visit the Queens of the Nile exhibition at the National Museum of Antiquities, which promises to finally afford the wives of the pharoahs the attention they deserve. The exhibit of royal portraits, godly statues, lavish jewellery and accessories is curated by Leiden University students and PhD candidates, in addition to egyptologist Olaf Kaper.

“Too little attention has been paid to the wives of the pharoahs, both in science and in the museum world. I wanted to tell their history and show different aspects of life at court,” says Kaper.

According to Leiden University, the exhibition covers a period of 500 years and pays tribute to five queens of the era known as the “new empire”. Those queens were famed for their political prowess and divinity.

Among the showcase are two particularly valuable pieces, “the decorated granite cover of the sarcophagus of Queen Nefertari and a five-metre papyrus,” explains Kaper. “This enormous document is a legal text that describes the conspiracy against and the murder of Pharoah Ramses III by a group of ladies from the harem and a number of officials. It proves that women at that time were by no means happy to accept a subordinate role.”

This is the first major exhibit of its kind on the Egyptian queens in the Netherlands. It continues until 17 April 2017.

Solar barques: Ritual vessels into the afterworld or real, functioning boats?

Posted on 19 Oct 2016 by Pakinam Amer

Khufu solar boat museum, King Cheops ship in the museum at the base of the Great Pyramid, Giza, Cairo, Egypt.{credit}Jack Sullivan / Alamy Stock Photo{/credit}

The exact functions of the Khufu “solar vessels” unearthed south of the Pyramids of Giza, have come into question again after a new revelation by archaeologists showed that ancient Egyptians used metal in their boats.

The most famous of the vessels, and the largest, is the Khufu vessel, preserved in the Giza solar boat museum. The typically human-propelled vessels were discovered in several boat pits around the pyramids.

Now, a fresh dig near the Great Pyramid of Giza unearthed circular and U-shaped metal hooks in a piece of wood–eight metres in length, 40 centimetres wide–that belonged to the frame of a boat discovered during the same year as Khufu’s vessel.

In all the boats discovered from this era, “we have not found the use of metals in their frames like in this boat,” Mohamed Mostafa Abdel-Megeed, an antiquities ministry official and expert in boat-making in ancient Egypt, tells AFP.

In ancient Egypt, funerary boats were used to ferry the dead, most commonly in funeral processions of kings. The wooden boats were believed to be “magically charged” after having been used. And it’s the reason why ancient Egypt would dispose of them after use, since they were “dangerous to the living,” explains Pearce Paul Creasman, associate professor of Dendrochronology and Egyptian Archaeology and director of the Egyptian Expedition at the University of Arizona.

In the Old and Middle Kingdoms, funerary boats were buried near royal chambers at the pyramid complexes. Now, as far as many archaeologists believe, “solar boats were a concept, not necessarily a construction,” says the scientist, “to be used by the god Ra in his travels across the sky, perpetuating neheh, the cyclical nature of the world.” In iconography, solar barques feature a specific set of accouterments associated with them, setting them apart from other types of boats.

Creasman chats to Nature Middle East about the possible nature of the boats, in light of of the new discovery, the first of its kind.

NME: How significant is this discovery?

PPC: The discovery of metal used in association with the ships of ancient Egypt is significant as it fills a logical hole in our understanding. The Egyptians had metal and were capable seafarers, why wouldn’t they use the metals to improve the durability or function of their boats? Until the recent discoveries, including the Khufu II vessel as well as ship remains from the Red Sea harbor of Wadi Gawasis (dating to the Middle Kingdom), we lacked archaeological evidence to demonstrate such a link. While the finds from the Khufu II work have not yet been scientifically published, from the press photos it appears that the metal was used precisely where we might expect: at stress points, such as oarlocks. The totality of the importance of these finds will have to wait for the scientific publications and analyses, but this is a great start.

NME: Was not this seen before in ancient Egyptian boats?

PPC: In only one instance prior to the Khufu II finds has metal been found in association with the structure and function of ancient Egyptian boats, that is, the disarticulated boat parts from Wadi Gawasis. The Khufu II finds are, by far, the oldest and appear to be used in the locomotive aspects of the boat. While we have seen metal in association with sails and their ropes, we have not previously seen it in the human-propelled aspects of boats.

NME: Why is this an important piece of information for archaeologists?

PPC: In the more than 3,000 years of intensive maritime history for the pharaonic Egyptians, there must have been tens-of-thousands of boats created to traverse the waters. Yet, today we have comparatively little archaeological remains to understand the the ships that facilitated this maritime life: whole or part of only some 30 boats. So, any new clue in unraveling the mysteries of the world’s first great maritime society is extremely valuable.

Check Nature Middle East’s sister magazine For Science for the full coverage in Arabic.

Genomes of stone-age woman carry farming tales

Posted on 10 Aug 2016 by Pakinam Amer

Zagros Mountains harbor a site with evidence for an ancient economy. {credit}JTB MEDIA CREATION, Inc. / Alamy Stock Photo{/credit}

The sequencing of the first genome of an early stone-age woman from Ganj Dareh, in the Iranian Zagros Mountains, can give us a glimpse into the world’s first farming efforts and the evolution of an activity that has profoundly affected human societies.

The international team of scientists, including a researcher from King Abdullah University for Science and Technology (KAUST), Saudi Arabia, has been studying an archaeological site in Zagros – a site with early evidence for an economy of a population of pastoralists, primarily based on goat herding, some 10,000 years ago.

This population has evidently occupied the area for two to three centuries.

Their findings suggest that Western Iran was inhabited by a population genetically similar to hunter-gatherers from the Caucasus, but distinct from the new stone-age Anatolian people who later brought food production into Europe.

The inhabitants of Ganj Dareh made little direct genetic contribution to modern European populations, suggesting those of the Central Zagros were somewhat isolated from other populations of the Fertile Crescent.

Archaeobotanical evidence remains limited, according to the study published in Scientific Reports yesterday, but the evidence present gives us an idea into what crops were common: for instance two-row barley with no evidence for wheat or rye.

This probably means that the overall economy was at a much earlier stage in the development of cereal agriculture than that found in the Levant, Anatolia and Northern Mesopotamian basin.

Sights and sounds of seabed cities

Posted on 26 May 2016 by Barbara Kiser

Posted on behalf of Kerri Smith

Stele of Thonis-Heracleion found in Abu Qir Bay, Egypt.{credit}©Franck Goddio / Hilti Foundation. Photo: Christoph Gerigk {/credit}

In his tome Histories, written around 440 BC, the Greek chronicler Herodotus relates the juicy tale of Helen of Troy escaping with her lover Paris (also known as Alexandrus) to a city on the Egyptian coast.

“Now there was (and still is) on the coast a temple of Heracles…” Herodotus wrote of the spot. The city is referenced in a handful of subsequent texts as Heracleion, after the temple. But modern historians and archaeologists searched in vain for traces of Heracleion. It seemed to have vanished.

Enter French archaeologist Franck Goddio, who looked where others had not: under the sea. In the early 1990s he began an intricate survey of the seabed a few kilometres off the north coast of Egypt, in the bay of Abu Qir. In 2000, he and his team found the remains of a city, and reasoned it must be Heracleion. When they found a large inscribed stone referring to a town called Thonis, they realised this must be a city with both Egyptian and Greek names, and christened it Thonis-Heracleion. (Learn more in this Nature Podcast and video.)

Raising the stele of Thonis-Heracleion from the seabed.{credit}©Franck Goddio / Hilti Foundation. Photo: Christoph Gerigk{/credit}

A new exhibition at the British Museum, Sunken Cities, brings some of the most impressive artefacts from Thonis-Heracleion and nearby Canopus to London, de-salinated, de-barnacled and standing tall (see Andrew Robinson’s review here), revealing the cities as melting pots of Greek and Egyptian culture.

Kerri Smith is Nature’s podcast editor. She tweets at @minikerri. Hear from Goddio in this interview for the Nature Podcast, and see more in this video about Sunken Cities at the British Museum, Great Russell Street, London WC1B 3DG. The exhibition runs through 27 November.

For Nature’s full coverage of science in culture, visit www.nature.com/news/booksandarts.

Beyond the Antikythera mechanism

Posted on 29 Sep 2015 by Barbara Kiser

Posted on behalf of Jo Marchant

'The Wrestler', a marble sculpture from the Antikythera shipwreck showing wear on the side not buried in sand.

One of the first-century BC marble sculptures from the Antikythera shipwreck, showing wear on the side not buried in sand.{credit}Copyright: Jo Marchant{/credit}

The sea has great destructive power, but it can also preserve. A new exhibition of 2,000-year-old artefacts retrieved in 1900 from a shipwreck near the Greek island of Antikythera includes some breathtakingly pristine treasures — such as a bowl made of delicate coils of turquoise, yellow and purple glass, and a miniature golden figure of Eros hanging from an earring set with garnets, an emerald and 20 tiny pearls.

The ancient ship is famous for having contained a geared astronomical device from the first century BC, dubbed the Antikythera mechanism. What’s less well known, however, is that the rest of its cargo is hugely important too: a dizzying collection of items from statues to ships’ nails that provide a unique insight into first-century-BC seafaring and trade.

The exhibition, called “The Sunken Treasure: The Antikythera Shipwreck”, includes hundreds of items on loan from Athens’ National Archaeological Museum – the first time they have been permitted to leave Greece – and runs at the Basel Museum of Ancient Art and Ludwig Collection in Switzerland until 27 March 2016.

The journey down

Curator Esaù Dozio and Paris-based exhibition designers Studio Adeline Rispal clearly want to take visitors on a journey. To enter the exhibition, we descend into a black-walled room with elegantly placed bronze and marble statues set against the ocean displayed on a 16-metre-wide screen. According to the notes, we’re in a Roman seaside villa. Around 70 BC, when the Antikythera ship sailed, wealthy Romans loved to decorate their homes with Greek artworks, and commissioned thousands of ships to deliver them from territories in the eastern Mediterranean.

Photo of the Exosuit, a US$1-million wearable submarine used at Antikythera in 2014, with marble finds from the wreck.{credit}Copyright: Jo Marchant{/credit}

Then we take a voyage, filing past a model of a Roman cargo vessel, and ship components retrieved from the Antikythera wreck itself, including a bilge pipe, hull planking, bronze nails and rigging rings. Next come cooking pots and oil lamps used on board, and what may have been the belongings of an aristocratic passenger – gold jewellery, and silver coins from Pergamum and Ephesus on the Asia Minor coast. Found near female skeletal remains, these items have sparked stories of a royal bride travelling to Rome with her dowry.

We descend a ramp to the sound of whistling wind and emerge on the seabed, another black room with marble statues from the shipwreck artistically arranged on piles of white-painted pebbles. The effect is beautiful yet ghostly. The torso of a horse – one of four that may have formed a chariot group – lies stranded on the stones. Crouching nearby is a naked boy. His head and half of his body (presumably protected over the millennia by being buried in sand) are exquisitely preserved, while his other arm and leg are rough, pitted stumps eaten away by the sea.

These marbles date from the first century BC, made of stone from the Aegean island of Paros. Meanwhile bronze statues, held in glass cases against the walls, are thought to date from the second and third centuries BC, already antiques when loaded onto the ship. These are mostly in pieces, including the arm of a boxer with a bandage-wrapped hand, and a philosopher’s head with piercing glass eyes and tousled hair. The missing parts are presumably still buried below the seabed.

Patterned ‘mosaic’ bowl.{credit}Copyright: Jo Marchant{/credit}

Other items provide a snapshot of thriving Mediterranean trade: there’s glassware from Alexandria; fragments of a wood-and-bronze couch, probably from the island of Delos; and wine jars from Kos and Rhodes. A small room dedicated to the Antikythera mechanism doesn’t contain the surviving fragments (these are too fragile to leave Athens) but does feature several models – of the mechanism itself and other ancient geared devices, including the “sphere of Archimedes” described by the Roman writer Cicero.

Technological shifts

The exhibition also nods to the changing technology used to explore the wreck. On the “seabed”, we see a canvas diving suit like the one used by sponge divers to salvage the 55-metre-deep site in 1900; a model of the boat used by marine researcher Jacques Cousteau when he investigated the wreck in 1976; and a giant photograph of the Exosuit, a US$1-million wearable submarine deployed at Antikythera in 2014.

That latest project, directed by Brendan Foley of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Massachusetts with archaeologists from the Greek Ephorate of Underwater Antiquities, aims to discover whether any of the ship’s cargo remains buried on the seabed. In September 2015, divers retrieved items including a blue game pawn, sections of a bone flute and pieces of mosaic glass. They hope future excavations might yield more statues, or even another mechanism, to add to the items on display.

But the Antikythera collection is opening up in another way too. As well as excavating the wreck site, Foley says he is determined to carry out as many scientific tests as possible, not just on new discoveries but on the existing artefacts. For example, lead isotope analysis on the ship’s hull sheeting should show where it was built, while DNA analysis on the contents of ceramic jugs and jars may reveal the contents of the foodstuffs, medicines and perfumes they held.

Bronze statuette discovered by researcher Jacques Cousteau in the 1970s. Its base may have rotated when a key was inserted.{credit}Copyright: Jo Marchant{/credit}

Other possibilities include fracture analysis on the bronze statue pieces to investigate how and when they broke, and X-ray imaging. A prime candidate for X-ray analysis is a bronze statuette discovered by Cousteau’s team in 1976. It stands on a circular base with what looks like a broken-off key on the front. According to the exhibition notes, a mechanical device inside the base rotated the statue when this key was turned. Yet this idea has never been investigated or confirmed. The statue dates from the second century BC, so if X-ray imaging does reveal an internal mechanism, this statuette would trump the Antikythera mechanism as the world’s oldest known geared device.

The Basel exhibition is truly stunning, but for me, the most exciting thing about this collection is the paradigm shift now being driven by Foley and his team. Since 1900, these objects have been beautiful but static, seen merely as artworks to be admired and conserved. The introduction of a scientific approach promises to transform them into a dynamic, rich source of new information about this fascinating period of ancient history.

Jo Marchant is author of a book about the Antikythera mechanism called Decoding the Heavens: Solving the Mystery of the World’s Computer. Her next book, Cure: A Journey into the Science of Mind over Body, will be published by Canongate in February 2016.

For Nature Video’s film Building the Sphere of Archimedes, see here. For Nature’s full coverage of science in culture, visit www.nature.com/news/booksandarts.

Ancient bird may be signature of a breeding system for raptors

Posted on 10 Sep 2015 by Pakinam Amer

It’s not gluttony, it’s force-feeding that killed the bird{credit}Iziko Museums, Carina Beyer{/credit}

A bird of prey’s last meal may offer us some insight into how Ancient Egyptians handled their feathered offerings to the gods – also, hinting at the possibility that Egyptians may have bred them in large numbers.

The mummified kestrel in question, a raptor, was kept in captivity and is believed to have been forcefully fed as a votive, according to new research published in the Journal of Archaeological Science. The bird was previously kept in the Iziko Museums of South Africa in Cape Town’s Social History collection.

Macroscopic study and 3D digital imaging have allowed the research to lift the veil on the “unusual” circumstances surrounding this particular bird’s death: SACHM 2575 was not deliberately killed, as far as appearances go, but it clearly died due to overeating.

SACHM 2575’s last supper

When it died, the scans reveal, the kestrel was full of at least one or two digested mice and a partially digested sparrow, in addition to a mouse whose tail got stuck in the kestrel’s gullet – the meal that finally killed it.

It’s unusual for this type of raptor to devour its food in this manner; generally, it tears its food to pieces, and if the bird catches too much food for a single meal, it stores the rest for later consumption. It regurgitates whatever it fails to digest – like teeth for instance.

The kestrel’s gizzard, however, contained a mass of bones and numerous, unattached teeth of mice – the whole affair strongly suggesting it was force-fed. The kestrel was probably a male, and for it to be chosen for mummification – essentially compromised – could mean that the females were saved for breeding purposes.

It’s not a first that mummified birds of prey were found in Ancient Egypt, in fact numerous numbers of votive mummies have been discovered in catacombs throughout Egypt.

Researchers often wondered about the sheer numbers of captured raptor birds that ended up being mummified and how the Ancient Egyptians did it. “Did they catch or trap them and kill them, raid nests or find them dead?” says Salima Ikram, Professor of Egyptology at The American University in Cairo and lead author of the study. “We now think it was because of active breeding.”

She adds: “The idea of birds of prey being bred to the extent of being kept and force-fed is new.”

Faces of Gods

Study suggests falconry may have been practiced {credit}Stellenbosch University{/credit}

At this point, the research is still largely speculative, Ikram explains to Nature Middle East. “We’re going to see if we can CT other raptors, to see if this has cropped up in other places as well.”

Killing an animal, like this, was not seen as a form of cruelty at the time. Animals were avatars of the gods, seen as closer to the deities than humans and speaking their language. “You’re giving a sacrifice for gods. When the animal dies, it becomes one with God. It’s united with God for eternity.”

In addition to clarifying how Egyptians might have been able to mummify so many raptors, the research has implications about wild animal husbandry and the possibility of falconry being practiced in ancient Egypt, says Ikram.

“We know raptors were religiously important but it’s interesting to think about the role they may have had in falconry. It’s also interesting that Egyptians were exerting so much thought and control over nature and that their aptitude with wild animals is considerable.”

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