Italian and Pakistani archaeologists have discovered large layers of an Indo-Greek city with weapons, coins and pottery forms, in Barikot, Pakistan, according to a Dawnreport.

Barikot was called Bazira in ancient times, a city captured by Alexander the Great during his advance to India.

Dr. Luca Maria Olivieri, head of the Italian Archaeological Mission in Pakistan, told Dawn that during their recent excavation in April-June they unearthed some very important discoveries in Barikot, in the Swat river valley. Excavations at Barikot are funded by the Pakistan-Italian Debt Swap Program.

"Very little is known in the archaeology of the sub-continent about the material culture of the Indo-Greek. However, this time we discovered at Barikot ample layers associated not only to the Indo-Greek city (when the settlement was encompassed by the Defensive Wall, 2nd century BC), but also to the pre-Greek city, the Mauryan settlement (3rd century BC)," Olivieri told Dawn.

The archaeologist also said that during the excavations it was discovered that all pre-Greek layers were destroyed along the Defensive Wall at the time of its construction, to make space for the fortification, revealing conspicuous traces of the Iron Age village (7th century BC).

This video goes into great depth about the origin of the racist, anti-poor philosophy of Eugenics. From the in-breeding Darwin-Galton-Huxley family to the American Eugenics Society, this is a critical missing piece of history. Thousands were involuntarily sterilized in the United States before World War 2 and the roots of eugenics lead to familiar places.

In recent years, both the Western as well as the liberal Russian press have had a lot to say about Russian "barbarianism," as if to contrast it with European "civilization." But a closer inspection - through the prism of the heroic pages of Russian history - of the two groups' moral ideals and actual lives presents us with quite a different picture.

For example, in pagan times, ancient Russians never worshipped a god of war, although their contemporaries in Europe were transfixed by their own martial deity, constructing an entire epic narrative around the concepts of war and conquest.

After defeating the "infidels" (the Golden Horde), Russians never sought to forcibly convert them to Christianity. In the epic poem "Ilya Muromets and the Pagan Idol," the Russian hero liberates Constantinople from that mythological monstrosity, but refuses to become the voevoda (or ruler) of the city and returns home. Ancient Russian literature does not include tales of personal enrichment through conquest or plunder, although this is a common theme in the Western canon.

This week, the Ministry of Antiquities will start the second phase of a study aimed at uncovering the mystery behind an unidentified sarcophagus found in 1906 inside tomb KV55 at the Valley of the Kings on Luxor's west bank.

The study is being operated with a grant of $28,500 from the American Research Centre in Egypt (ARCE) Endowment Fund.

This tomb was thought to hold the body of the monotheistic king Akhenaten, though no definitive evidence has been presented to back up this speculation.

Elham Salah, head of the ministry's Museums Department, told Ahram Online that the study is being carried out on a collection of 500 gold sheets found in a box in storage at the Egyptian Museum in Tahrir along with the remains of a skull and a handwritten note in French. The note, she says, is dated to when KV55 was first found and states that the 500 accompanying sheets were discovered with a sarcophagus, though it does not mention which sarcophagus.

According to Elham, the first phase of the study, which started last year, indicated that the gold sheets may belong to the sarcophagus found in KV55.

Islam Ezat, from the scientific office of the ministry, said that the study is being carried out by skilled Egyptian archaeologists and restorers from Egyptian Museums and it may lead to uncovering the identity of the owner of the sarcophagus and the tomb.

Archeologists have unearthed a set of Roman lead sling bullets which were used against the barbarian foes in Scotland. The bullets were found to make a piercing whistle noise when hurled through the air, a sound thought to have been used to strike terror in their enemies 1,800 years ago.

According to an article published recently by LiveScience, the bullets were discovered at Burnswark Hill in southwestern Scotland. The find was made during the excavation of a field where a massive attack of the Roman army took a place in the 2nd century AD.

The excavation work was led by John Reid of the Trimontium Trust, a Scottish historical society which is directing the first major archaeological investigation of Burnswark Hill site in 50 years. The bullets weigh about 1 ounce (30 grams) and had been drilled with a 0.2-inch (5 millimeters) hole. The researchers believe that it was designed to give the soaring bullets a sharp buzzing or whistling noise in flight, making them what they called a real ''terror weapon''.

John Reid said to LiveScience:

You don't just have these silent but deadly bullets flying over; you've got a sound effect coming off them that would keep the defenders' heads down. Every army likes an edge over its opponents, so this was an ingenious edge on the permutation of sling bullets.

About 20 percent of the lead sling bullets discovered at Burnswark Hill had been drilled with the holes. They were also smaller than the typical bullets, so the researchers pinpointed that the soldiers may have used several of them with one throw. The size of the bullets gave the ability to fire them in groups of three or four, so the soldiers could receive a scattergun effect. The researchers believe that they were for ''close-quarter skirmishing''.

The grave of a woman with a bizarre, long-headed skull has been unearthed in Korea.

The woman was part of the ancient Silla culture, which ruled much of the Korean peninsula for nearly a millennium.

Unlike some of the deformed, pointy skulls that have been found throughout the world in other ancient graves, however, it is unlikely that this woman had her head deliberately flattened, the researchers said.

Ancient culture

The ancient Silla Kingdom reigned over part of the Korean Peninsula from 57 B.C. to A.D. 935, making it one of the longest-ruling royal dynasties. Many of Korea's modern-day cultural practices stem from this historic culture.

Yet despite its long reign and wide-ranging influence on culture, the number of Silla burials with intact skeletons remained few and far between, said study co-author Dong Hoon Shin, a bioanthropologist at Seoul National University College of Medicine in the Republic of Korea.

"The skeletons are not preserved well in the soil of Korea," Shin told Live Science in an email.

However, in 2013, researchers had a lucky break while excavating a grave near Gyeongju, the historic capital of the Silla Kingdom. Inside a traditional burial coffin, called a mokgwakmyo, lay the nearly perfectly intact bones of a woman who died in her late 30s.

Nearly 100 mysterious manuscripts thought to be 1,000 years old and written by a Jewish family that lived along the ancient Silk Road have been discovered in an Afghan cave.

Scholars and historians are excited about this new cache of documents, which was purchased by Israeli antiquities dealer Lenny Wolfe six months ago.

He came across them as part of an ongoing search for the "Afghan Genizah," a reference to the Cairo Genizah collection of 300,000 Jewish manuscript fragments discovered in a synagogue storeroom in Egypt.

Written in a plethora of languages, including Aramaic, Hebrew, Persian, Judeo-Arabic, and Judeo Persian, these new documents are attributed to an 11th Century family headed by Abu Ben Daniel from the northern Afghan city of Bamyan, according to Haaretz.

They would have been quite familiar with the area's two biggest attractions back then and up until 15 years ago - giant Buddha statues built in the 6th Century and blown up by the Taliban six months before the September 11, 2001 attacks.

Wolfe first purchased 29 of the documents in 2013, which he returned to Israel where they have been studied in the National Library.

The treasures of Tutankhamun have been remembered as the greatest discovery in Egypt. However, in 1995, the Valley of the Kings revealed another magnificent secret - the tomb of at least 52 sons of Ramesses II.

The tomb named KV5 is located only 70 meters (230 ft) from the tomb of Tutankhamun. Its existence had been known about for over a century but its location remained elusive. The first person who tried to find it was James Burton, who excavated the area in the early 1830s. Howard Carter also made an attempt. The location of the tomb was finally identified during an expedition in 1985 -1986 led by Kent Weeks of the American University in Cairo and the Theban Mapping Project, which used sonar and ground-penetrating radar.

In the action-adventure video game series Rise of the Tomb Raider, Lara Croft finds the remnants of a once powerful civilization and searches for the location of an artifact known as the Divine Source, believed to be buried in the lost city of Kitezh. While the story line of the game is a work of fiction, historical texts suggest that Kitezh, known as 'The Invisible City', was a real place that is thought to now lie submerged within Lake Svetloyar in Russia.

Accounts of the ancient city of Kitezh are believed to trace back to the earliest days of Rus', however, the first written reference appeared in the Kitezh Chronicle, written by the Old Believers in the 1780s. (In Russian Orthodox church history, the Old Believers separated from the official Russian Orthodox Church after 1666 as a protest against church reforms.)

According to this Chronicle, the city of Lesser Kitezh was founded by Prince Georgy, Grand Prince of Vladimir in the early 13th century, on the banks of the Volga River in the Voskresensky District of the Nizhny Novgorod Oblast in central Russia. He then discovered a beautiful site further upstream, on the shores of Lake Svetloyar where he decided to build the city of Greater Kitezh. It was established as a monastic city and considered holy by all who inhabited it.

Theories on the fringe of science sometimes slowly work their way into the core as the evidence accumulates.

"A classic example is the continental drift [theory]," said cultural geographer Stephen C. Jett, professor emeritus at the University of California - Davis. "In 1955, if you believed in continental drift, you were laughed at. In 1965, if you didn't believe in continental drift, you were laughed at."

He was a geography student while this dramatic change in opinion occurred, and he took the example to heart. Encouraged by a professor of his at Johns Hopkins University, Jett started a decades-long investigation into another controversial theory.

Diffusionism

Mainstream anthropology and archaeology holds that Norse expeditions around 1000 A.D. were the only ones to make it to the New World before Christopher Columbus landed in the 15th century. But on the fringes are multiple theories about other successful pre-Columbian expeditions. These theories are placed under the umbrella of "diffusionism."

"At the outset, I supposed that accumulating the evidence and ... putting it out there would change the point of view, at least gradually," Jett said. "But there hasn't seemed to have been a lot of that. There's a good deal of inertia, a good deal of resistance to the whole concept."

According to Jett, one of the reasons it has been difficult for the concept of early transoceanic voyages to penetrate mainstream history is that it requires a multidisciplinary perspective.

"If you confine yourself to one field, you won't see it," he said.

Jett has a multidisciplinary perspective. "Geography is a very broad discipline," he explained. For example, physical geography gives insight into climate, oceans, landforms, and other elements relevant to long-distance travel. Cultural geography, Jett's specialty, has helped him see many similarities between ancient Old and New World cultures.