Tag Archives: ancient history

‘Part of our history’: Ukraine hails return of Scythian gold treasures (The Guardian)

Posted on by
Reply

The Guardian:
‘Part of our history’: Ukraine hails return of Scythian gold treasures . “On Tuesday the collection, including a rare golden neck ornament and a solid gold helmet, was shown off in Kyiv. They are among 1,000 items lent in 2013 by four museums in Crimea for an exhibition in the Netherlands. The following year – with the artefacts still out of the country – Vladimir Putin annexed the Black Sea peninsula. Ukraine and the museums in Moscow-occupied territory both demanded the Scythian finds be sent back to them. After a lengthy battle the Dutch supreme court ruled in June that the items belonged to Ukraine. ”

Nature: AI reads text from ancient Herculaneum scroll for the first time

Posted on by
Reply

Nature: AI reads text from ancient Herculaneum scroll for the first time. “A 21-year-old computer-science student has won a global contest to read the first text inside a carbonized scroll from the ancient Roman city of Herculaneum, which had been unreadable since a volcanic eruption in AD 79 — the same one that buried nearby Pompeii. The breakthrough could open up hundreds of texts from the only intact library to survive from Greco-Roman antiquity.”

WIRED: Scientists Have an Audacious Plan to Map the Ancient World Before It Disappears

Posted on by
Reply

WIRED: Scientists Have an Audacious Plan to Map the Ancient World Before It Disappears. “Buried civilizations could soon become inaccessible forever. Archaeologists have to move fast, so they’re turning to the latest ground-scanning tech.”

Herculaneum scrolls: A 20-year journey to read the unreadable (University of Kentucky)

Posted on by

University of Kentucky: Herculaneum scrolls: A 20-year journey to read the unreadable. “Restoring an ancient library from the ashes of Mount Vesuvius is now closer to a reality. To highlight the progress, this is the first in a four-video series featuring Brent Seales, University of Kentucky Alumni Professor in the Department of Computer Science in the Stanley and Karen Pigman College of Engineering and his Digital Restoration Initiative team.”

University of Tübingen: Database with 2,400 prehistoric sites

Posted on by

University of Tübingen: Database with 2,400 prehistoric sites. “Scientists from the research center ROCEEH (“The Role of Culture in Early Expansions of Humans”) have compiled information on 2,400 prehistoric sites and 24,000 assemblages from more than 100 ancient cultures. The digital data collection is available for free to scientists and amateurs and was recently published in the journal PLoS ONE.”

Times of Israel: Groundbreaking AI project translates 5,000-year-old cuneiform at push of a button

Posted on by

Times of Israel: Groundbreaking AI project translates 5,000-year-old cuneiform at push of a button. “‘Google Translate’-like program for Akkadian cuneiform will enable tens of thousands of digitized but unread tablets to be translated to English. Accuracy is debatable.”

The Conversation: AI is helping us read ancient Mesopotamian literature

Posted on by

The Conversation: AI is helping us read ancient Mesopotamian literature. “The primary objective of the eBL project is to advance the understanding of Babylonian literature by reconstructing it to the fullest extent possible. Additionally, the project aims to provide a user-friendly platform containing extensive transliterations of cuneiform tablet fragments, along with a robust search tool, to address the abiding problem of the fragmented nature of Mesopotamian literature.”

Arkeonews: Staging of religion on rock paintings that are thousands of years old in southern Egypt desert

Posted on by

Arkeonews: Staging of religion on rock paintings that are thousands of years old in southern Egypt desert. “Egyptologists at the University of Bonn and the University of Aswan want to systematically record hundreds of petroglyphs and inscriptions dating from the Neolithic to the Arab period and document them in a database. The desert in southern Egypt is filled with hundreds of petroglyphs and inscriptions oldest dating from the fifth millennium B.C. and few have been studied.”

‘Spectacular’ new find: Roman military camps in desert found by Oxford archaeologists using Google Earth (University of Oxford)

Posted on by

University of Oxford: ‘Spectacular’ new find: Roman military camps in desert found by Oxford archaeologists using Google Earth. “Three new Roman fortified camps have been identified across northern Arabia by a remote sensing survey by the University of Oxford’s School of Archaeology. Their paper, published today [Thurs] in the journal Antiquity, reports the discovery may be evidence of a probable undocumented military campaign across south east Jordan into Saudi Arabia.”

Nottinghamshire City Council: New website heralded ‘An Aladdin’s cave for archaeologists, researchers and students’, launched in Notts

Posted on by

Nottinghamshire City Council: New website heralded ‘An Aladdin’s cave for archaeologists, researchers and students’, launched in Notts. ” The new website… provides access to an expansive database of heritage sites, earthworks, historic buildings, and archaeological finds that that make up the rich and varied historic environment of the county. Features from the 25,000 data entries range from single chance finds, such as Roman coins, to large sites such as WWII airfields.”

IFL Science: This Is The World’s Oldest Bar Joke, But Literally Nobody Knows Why It’s Funny

Posted on by

IFL Science: This Is The World’s Oldest Bar Joke, But Literally Nobody Knows Why It’s Funny. “Say, have you heard the one about the Abderite who saw a eunuch talking to a woman and asked whether she was his wife? Upon hearing that eunuchs couldn’t take wives, the Abderite replied: ‘so, is she your daughter?’ Didn’t tickle your funny bone? It probably sounded better in the original Latin – along with context clues like who, exactly, the Abderite people were and why they seem to have been the ancient Roman equivalent of the ‘dumb blonde’ archetype.”

Object, Idea, Desire: Exhibition of Freud’s antiquities collection co-curated by UCL academic (University College London)

Posted on by

University College London: Object, Idea, Desire: Exhibition of Freud’s antiquities collection co-curated by UCL academic. “In June 1938, an ageing cancer-stricken Sigmund Freud and his family were forced to leave Nazi-occupied Vienna and flee to London with a curious collection of ancient artifacts in tow. Freud’s study, preserved at his final home in Hampstead, contains a vast array of nearly 2,500 collected objects that originate from or are inspired by the ancient world.”

‘Treasures of Artsakh’: Virtual exhibition showcases Artsakh’s spiritual and material heritage (Panorama)

Posted on by

Panorama (Armenia): ‘Treasures of Artsakh’: Virtual exhibition showcases Artsakh’s spiritual and material heritage. “An online exhibition titled ‘Treasures of Artsakh’, jointly organized by [The Armenian Museum of America and The History Museum of Armenia], aims to showcase the spiritual and material heritage of Artsakh during the ancient, medieval, and modern periods, spanning millennia of Armenian history.”

Leiden University: Citizen scientists discover more than 1,000 new burial mounds

Posted on by

Leiden University: Citizen scientists discover more than 1,000 new burial mounds. “In total, over 6,500 people worked on the project and identified thousands of potential archaeological objects, such as burial mounds (c. 2,800-500 BC), Celtic fields (prehistoric field complexes dating from 1,100 to 200 BC), charcoal kilns (places where wood was burned to make charcoal) and cart tracks.”

Vanderbilt University: New technique unlocks ancient history of climate and wildfires recorded in California cave rocks

Posted on by

Vanderbilt University: New technique unlocks ancient history of climate and wildfires recorded in California cave rocks. “Jessica Oster, associate professor of Earth and environmental sciences, worked with scientists at Johannes-Gutenberg University of Mainz, Germany to develop and apply a new technique that allows researchers to reconstruct fire activity above caves based on chemicals trapped in stalagmites as they grow from water dripping from the soil and rocks above. With this new advancement, scientists can now measure unique chemicals in stalagmites to reveal fire activity from tens to hundreds of thousands of years ago.”