What appears to be evidence of the oldest alphabetic writing in human history is etched onto finger-length, clay cylinders excavated from a tomb in Syria by a team of Johns Hopkins University researchers.

The writing, which is dated to around 2400 BCE, precedes other known alphabetic scripts by roughly 500 years, upending what archaeologists know about where alphabets came from, how they are shared across societies, and what that could mean for early urban civilizations.

"Alphabets revolutionized writing by making it accessible to people beyond royalty and the socially elite. Alphabetic writing changed the way people lived, how they thought, how they communicated," said Glenn Schwartz, a professor of archaeology at Johns Hopkins University who discovered the clay cylinders. "And this new discovery shows that people were experimenting with new communication technologies much earlier and in a different location than we had imagined before now."

Schwartz will share details of his discovery on Thursday, Nov. 21, at the American Society of Overseas Research's Annual Meeting.

A Near Eastern archaeologist, Schwartz studies how early urban areas developed throughout Syria and how smaller cities emerged in the region. With colleagues from the University of Amsterdam, he co-directed a 16-year-long archaeological dig at Tell Umm-el Marra, one of the first medium-sized urban centers that popped up in western Syria.

Embalming practices, once considered exotic rituals mainly linked to ancient Egypt or South American cultures, have now been confirmed in Europe at recent discoveries at Château des Milandes in Castelnaud-la-Chapelle, Dordogne, France.

These findings indicate that such techniques were employed among European aristocracy during the 16th and 17th centuries.

The remains of seven adults and five children from the noble Caumont family were all found embalmed in a crypt, along with a separately buried woman.

According to archaeologists from the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW), the discovery will provide significant insights into the first historical embalming methods in Europe.

Caroline Partiot from ÖAW, said "Our examinations of a complete individual and the almost 2,000 fragments show a careful and highly standardised technical treatment of the deceased, which is similar for adults and children. This shows a know-how that has been passed down for over two centuries."

New DNA evidence from the ruins of the ancient city of Pompeii reveal that many of the presumptuous narratives about the charred victims are entirely false, according to a new study.

Researchers, including some from Harvard University, focused on fourteen of the castings of bodies that were created in the late 1880s to preserve the remains of the victims of the historic volcanic eruption, according to the study published in the journal Current Biology.

Introduction

If you look at the current situation with a cool eye, you can only wonder how a country that set cultural, scientific and industrial standards until 90 years ago could completely lose its compass.

First it was destroyed by Hitler - the Germans allowed this to happen. Then Germany became a vassal - the Germans allowed that to happen. Finally, they managed to drive the former industrial jewel of the world to the wall with the most incompetent leadership you could dream of. A new government with Merz as Chancellor will do nothing to change this, as he has already been bought and paid for by the hegemon.

This article is therefore not about the political kindergarten in Berlin, which can hardly be put into words, but attempts to describe the fundamental problem of this great country and provide food for thought.

A burial chamber containing the remains of an ancient Egyptian priestess has been unearthed after nearly 4,000 years.

Named Idy, her remains were found in a coffin within another coffin in a tomb in the city of Asyut, Egypt, just about 200 miles south of Cairo.

The excavations took place between Aug. 18 and Sept. 17.

Idy was the daughter of Djefai-Hapi I, a wealthy regional Egyptian governor who lived around 1880 BC. The Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities said in a Facebook post that he was "one of the most important rulers of the territories in ancient Egypt."

"Djefai-Hapi I was deified in ancient times and his tomb was an integral part of the cultural memory of ancient Egypt for more than 2000 years," Professor Jochem Kahl, an archeologist at Freie Universität Berlin who led the discovery, said, according to the Daily Mail.

In December 2022, Canada imposed strict sanctions on Gilbert Bigio, frequently referred to as "Haiti's only billionaire" and the deeply impoverished country's "richest man." He, along with two other super-wealthy Haitian citizens, was accused by Ottowa of using his outsized influence and power in the country "to protect and enable the illegal activities of the armed criminal gangs" that have been tearing Port-au-Prince apart for years. Since then, Bigio has remained at liberty and unpunished - meanwhile, Haiti has slid ever further into catastrophe.

Markedly, no other Western country - notably the sanctions-happy U.S. - followed Canada's lead. While wave upon wave of UN-mandated peacekeepers from every corner of the world have been deployed to Haiti in recent years, they have been unable to quell - and often exacerbated - the violence that has left the country without a functioning state or civil society. Kenya, currently leading an international "anti-gang" initiative in Port-au-Prince, recently called for the effort to be transformed into a dedicated U.N. peacekeeping operation.

For his part, Latin American & Caribbean Studies Professor Danny Shaw has zero doubt that Bigio and others like him are fundamentally responsible for encouraging and facilitating Haiti's collapse.

In an area where rescue excavations were conducted last year, archaeologists discovered a basalt stone statue from the Urartian period that weighed approximately one tonne during the archaeological excavations in Van's Tuşba district.

In 2023, archaeologists found the first monumental statue of its kind in the region during rescue excavations at Garibin Tepe. This fascinating discovery, which is roughly 2 meters long and 1 meter wide, was discovered in a historical site only 3 kilometers from Ayanis Castle and 30 kilometers (18.6 miles) from the city center.

This year, the excavation was concentrated on the southern portion of the hill and was headed by Van Museum under the scientific direction of Professor Mehmet Işıklı from the Department of Archaeology at Atatürk University.

Professor Işıklı stated: "This is a monumental three-dimensional statue that we have never encountered before. We are very excited, and after preliminary studies, we hope to gain more detailed information."

The statue, believed to have a broken neck, is noted for its impressive size and craftsmanship. After detailed examinations by a team from Ankara, the mystery of the basalt statue is expected to be solved.

Professor Işıklı stated that the Urartian civilization is one of the least understood areas because it has very few known sculptural works.

A Bronze Age settlement hidden on the Arabian Peninsula reveals secrets about the slow growth of urbanization in the region.
A small 4,400-year-old town in the Khaybar Oasis of Saudi Arabia hints that Bronze Age people in this region were slow to urbanize, unlike their contemporaries in Egypt and Mesopotamia, a new study finds.

Archaeologists discovered the site near the city of Al-'Ula in the Hejaz region of western Saudi Arabia and called it "al-Natah." The settlement covered about 3.7 acres (1.5 hectares), "including a central district and nearby residential district surrounded by protective ramparts," the researchers said in a statement. But the town, which was occupied starting around 2400 B.C., was small, with a population of only around 500 people, the team noted in a study, published Wednesday (Oct. 30) in the journal PLOS One.

The residential area had a large amount of pottery and grinding stones, as well as the remains of at least 50 dwellings that may have been made of earthen materials. The central area had two buildings that may have been used as administrative areas, the team wrote in the paper. In the western part of the central area, a necropolis was found. It has large and high circular tombs that archaeologists call "stepped tower tombs."

No examples of writing have been found so far at the site, study lead author Guillaume Charloux, an archaeologist at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), told Live Science in an email. Researchers have unearthed only a few traces of cereals, but based on finds at other sites it's likely that al-Natah's people grew crops near the site, Charloux said.

The town and its nearby areas were surrounded by a 9-mile-long (14.5 kilometers) wall, which would have provided defense from raids carried out by nomads, the team wrote in an earlier paper published in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports.

The town was abandoned sometime between 1500 and 1300 B.C., but researchers aren't sure why this happened. "It's a pertinent question that I can't really answer at the moment," Charloux said, noting that "we have very few clues about the last phase of occupation."

The geopolitics of rare earths and precious metals require constant observation in order to understand some global events in greater detail.

Why lithium attracts so much attention

There are moments in History that are characterized by a strong economic component, so predominant that we are said to be facing a revolution, passing through the ever dramatically present moment of war. Since the end of the 19th century that the world has been witnessing wars over oil; now, however, we have been a few years into those over rare earths, among which lithium, a mineral indispensable for smartphones and especially electric cars, plays a privileged role.

Foreign Office documents, examined by a British historian and journalist, show that the UK organized from top to bottom the overthrow of President Evo Morales in order to seize Bolivia's lithium reserves. Nothing new under the sun: the U.S.-Great Britain axis has been dirty business for centuries already, and this is hardly the first planned subversion or export of democracy by bombs and coups.

A recent British Museum video reveals that the "oldest map of the world in the world" on a clay tablet from Babylon was deciphered to reveal a surprisingly familiar story.

The oldest globe ever found is the Imago Mundi, a Babylonian map of the world. This map is a Babylonian clay tablet with a schematic world map and two inscriptions written in the Akkadian language. The probably seventh century BC is when this map was created. It shows a small part of the world as the ancient Babylonians knew it, and it was found in the southern Iraqi city of Abu Habba (Sippar).

The ancient artifact was acquired by the British Museum in 1882 but remained a mystery for centuries until curators found a missing part and transcribed its cuneiform.

The cuneiform tablet from the 6th century BC shows an aerial view map of Mesopotamia — the land "between the rivers" in modern-day Iraq — and what the Babylonians believed lay beyond the known world at the time.

After centuries of deciphering, the ancient tablet provides insight into the Babylonians' beliefs about the known world at the time.

The tablet has several paragraphs of the cuneiform on its backside and above the map diagram describing the creation of the Earth and what its writer believed existed beyond it.

Researchers confirm the circle around Mesopotamia suggests that Babylonians believed the area was the center of the world. There also shows the river Euphrates cutting through ancient Mesopotamia.