More than 2,000 years after Alexander the Great founded the city, archaeologists are discovering its fabled remains, from the likely site of Cleopatra’s palace to pieces of an astonishing lighthouse that was one of the Seven Wonders of the World

There’s no sign of the grand marbled metropolis founded by Alexander the Great on the busy streets of this congested Egyptian city of five million, where honking cars spouting exhaust whiz by shabby concrete buildings. But climb down a rickety ladder a few blocks from Alexandria’s harbor, and the legendary city suddenly swims into view. (more…)

An archaeological expert has claimed that two innocuous-looking stones at the side of a road in Berwick St James could hold clues to the secrets of Stonehenge.

Dennis Price, who is a renowned expert on the site and used to work with Wessex Archaeology, believes the two large stones standing at the side of a lane next to the B3083 could be parts of Stonehenge’s mysterious altar stone. (more…)

Greece - Excavation work at a site in a northern Athens suburb, where sections of an ancient Greek theater were discovered on Thursday, should prove whether the structure is the fabled ancient theater of Acharnae, archaeologists said yesterday.

Modern Menidi, where the remains of the 4th century BC theater were found by construction workers, is believed to have been built upon the ancient village of Acharnae, the largest of a string of settlements outside Athens, according to chief excavator Maria Platonos-Yiota. (more…)

Cairo, Egypt - Archeologists have uncovered three wooden pharaonic sarcophagi, dating back to the 20th century B.C., the chief of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities said on Saturday.

“The three sarcophagi were found in a very well preserved condition inside three burial shafts,'’ Zahi Hawass, the council chief, told The Associated Press. (more…)

Phrases inscribed on the walls of an Egyptian pyramid are revealed to be Semitic spells designed to ward off snakes.

Ancient spells inscribed on the walls of an ancient pyramid near Cairo have finally been deciphered more than a century after they were discovered. (more…)

British museums have become used to requests that foreign treasures be repatriated. Greece has persistently requested the return of the Parthenon marbles, while some administrators have agreed to return the remains of Australian Aborigines. Now the pressure is coming from closer to home.

British pagan groups are increasingly asking for human remains and grave goods from pre-Christian burials to be returned to them as well. The presence of what they see as their ancestors in dusty drawers or under harsh display lights is an affront to their religion. To them, the bones are living beings, whose existence is bound up with their religious descendants and the sacred land. (more…)

Archaeologists working near Stonehenge have discovered what appears to be an ancient religious complex containing a treasure trove of artifacts that may finally illuminate the lives and religious practices of the people who built the mysterious monument 4,600 years ago.

The circle of massive stone blocks on England’s Salisbury Plain southwest of London is one of the best known archeological sites in the world, but researchers know surprisingly little about the people who built it and lived in the region. (more…)

Archaeologists say they have found a huge ancient settlement used by the people who built Stonehenge.

Excavations at Durrington Walls, near the legendary Salisbury Plain monument, uncovered remains of ancient houses.

People seem to have occupied the site seasonally, using it for ritual feasting and funeral ceremonies.

In ancient times, this settlement housed hundreds of people, making it the largest Neolithic village ever found in Britain.

The dwellings date back to 2,600-2,500 BC, the same period that Stonehenge was built.

“In what were houses, we have excavated the outlines on the floors of box beds and wooden dressers or cupboards,” said archaeologist Mike Parker Pearson of Sheffield University.

The researchers have excavated eight dwellings in total that belonged to this settlement. But they have identified many other probable dwellings using geophysical surveying equipment.

The archaeologists think there could have been at least one hundred houses.

Each one would have measured about 5m (16ft) square: “fairly pokey”, according to Professor Parker Pearson.

The dwellings were made of wood, with a clay floor and central hearth. The archaeologists found 4,600-year-old rubbish covering the floors of the houses.

“It is the richest - by that I mean the filthiest - site of this period known in Britain,” Professor Parker Pearson told BBC News.

“We’ve never seen such quantities of pottery and animal bone and flint.”

The Sheffield University researcher thinks the settlement was probably not lived in all year round. Instead, he believes, Stonehenge and Durrington formed a religious complex used for funerary rituals.

Professor Parker Pearson believes it drew Neolithic people from all over the region, who came for massive feasts in the midwinter, where prodigious quantities of food were consumed. The bones were then tossed on the floors of the houses.

“The rubbish isn’t your average domestic debris. There’s a lack of craft-working equipment for cleaning animal hides and no evidence for crop-processing,” he said.

“The animal bones are being thrown away half-eaten. It’s what we call a feasting assemblage. This is where they went to party - you could say it was the first free festival.”

Pigging out

The Durrington settlement has its own henge, this one made of wood. This ancient circle was discovered in 1967 - long before any houses were excavated.

Both henges line up with events in the astronomical calendar - but not the same ones.

Stonehenge is aligned with the midwinter solstice sunset, while the Durrington timber circle is aligned with the midwinter solstice sunrise. They are complementary, says Mike Parker Pearson.

This fits nicely with the idea of a feast held in midwinter, which is supported by analysis of pig teeth found at the site.

“One of the things we can tell from the pig teeth we’ve looked at is that most of them have been slaughtered at nine months. And we think they are farrowing in Spring,” Professor Parker Pearson.

“It’s likely there’s a midwinter cull and that ties in with our midwinter solstice alignments at Durrington and Stonehenge.”

In a separate area, further up the valley, Julian Thomas of Manchester University discovered two other Neolithic houses, each surrounded by a timber fence and ditches.

Sacred monument

But unlike the houses further down the valley, these were free of rubbish: “At first we thought they had been washed out,” Professor Thomas said.

But the researchers now think these dwellings were deliberately kept clean and may have been home to community leaders, wise women, chiefs or priests.

Alternatively, they could have been sacred sites, where people went to carry out rituals.

Professor Parker Pearson believes Durrington’s purpose was to celebrate life and deposit the dead in the river for transport to the afterlife, while Stonehenge was a memorial and even final resting place for some of the dead.

After feasting, he said, the people travelled down the avenue to deposit their dead in the River Avon flowing towards Stonehenge. They then moved along Stonehenge’s main “avenue” to the monument, where they would cremate and bury a select few of their dead.

Stonehenge was therefore a place for these people, who worshipped their ancestors, to commune with the spirits of those who died.

Stonehenge was the largest cemetery in Britain at the time, containing about 250 ashes from cremations.

Source: BBC News

A magic spell to keep snakes away from the tombs of Egyptian kings, adopted from the Canaanites almost 5,000 years ago, could be the oldest Semitic text yet discovered, experts said Tuesday.

The phrases, interspersed throughout religious texts in Egyptian characters in the underground chambers of a pyramid south of Cairo, stumped Egyptian experts for about a century, until the Semitic connection was found.

In 2002 one of the Egyptologists e-mailed the undeciphered part of the inscription to Richard Steiner, a professor of Semitic languages at Yeshiva University in New York. Steiner discovered that the phrases are the transcription of a language used by Canaanites at some point in the period from 25th to the 30th centuries B.C.

“This is the oldest connected text that we have in any Semitic language,” Steiner said in a telephone interview while visiting Israel to present his findings in a lecture sponsored by the Academy of the Hebrew Language. The previous oldest Semitic text dates from the 24th century B.C., Steiner said.

Another expert said it was still unclear whether the Egyptian text is actually the oldest.

“This is highly significant because maybe, according to the researcher, it dates to the third millennium B.C., so it’s the most ancient pre-Canaanite text that we ever met and maybe … it is the most ancient Semitic text ever discovered,” said Moshe Florentine, an expert on ancient Hebrew and a member of the language academy.

Steiner has not submitted his findings to a scientific journal but plans to do so, he said. More study of the fragments will be necessary to determine how these passages fit into the evolution of Semitic languages, Florentine said.

The Egyptians’ use of the magic spell demonstrates the close relations they had at the time with the Canaanites. While Egyptians considered their culture and religion superior to that of their neighbors to the north, they were willing to do anything to protect the mummies of their kings from the poisonous snakes.

Believing that some snakes spoke the Semitic language of the Canaanites, Egyptians included the magic spells in inscriptions on two sides of the sarcophagus in an effort to ward them off.

“Come, come to my house,” reads one section in the Semitic language that is supposed to be the snake’s mother speaking, trying to lure him out of the tomb. In another passage, the snake is addressed as if he is a lover with “Turn aside, O my beloved.”

The Egyptian and Semitic sections are each an integral part of the magic spell and neither can stand alone, Steiner said. For this reason, the Egyptian experts could not fully understand parts of the religious texts until Steiner got involved.

The Semitic language of these texts that have now been deciphered was a very archaic form of the languages later known as Phoenician and Hebrew, Steiner said.

The text includes words that have the same meaning as in Hebrew, like “yad” for hand, “ari” for lion, and “beit” for house, he said.

Source: PhysOrg.com