Bamiyan Buddhas once glowed with colour

Ten years ago the world watched in horror as the Taliban blew up the two gigantic Buddha statues that had looked out over the Bamiyan Valley since the 6th century. Located on the Silk Road the huge works of art formed the centrepiece of one of the world’s largest Buddhist monastic complexes. Thousands of monks tended countless shrines in the niches and caves that pierced a kilometre-long cliff face.

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Διάλεξη για την Ελληνική Αρχαιολογική Αποστολή στην Ιορδανία

Ανασκάπτοντας τη φιλόξενη χώρα της Ιορδανίας

Αθανάσιος Παπαδόπουλος, Ομότιμος Καθηγητής Προϊστορικής Αρχαιολογίας του Πανεπιστημίου Ιωαννίνων

28 Φεβρουαρίου 2011, 19:00

Αμφιθέατρο Εθνικού Αρχαιολογικού Μουσείου, Τοσίτσα 1, 106 82 Αθήνα

Iraq: Ancient cities sprung from marshes

For more than a century, archaeologists have believed that ancient Mesopotamian cities – places like Uruk and Ur – were born along the banks of the great rivers of the Middle East and depended mainly on irrigation of surrounding deserts for their survival.

Dr. Jennifer Pournelle, a research assistant professor in the School of the Environment at the University of South Carolina, has a different theory. She believes that the great cities of southern Iraq grew and thrived in vast lowland marshes fed by those rivers, not along the banks of rivers themselves.
Last fall, Pournelle led the first American research team of archaeologists to visit Iraq in more than 25 years. And what she and her colleagues found has caused the start of a shift in thinking about how ancient urban landscapes evolved.

“Clearly, the earliest cities were not strung out along rivers like pearls on a strand. Rather, they were spread across the river delta within and along the margins of marshlands,” said Pournelle, who combines excavation records and archaeological site maps with aerial and satellite imagery, in order to reconstruct ancient environments.

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How Jericho's 11,000-year-old tower came into being

Discovered by archaeologists in 1952, a 28-foot-high stone tower discovered on the edge of the town of Jericho has puzzled scientists ever since. Now, eleven centuries after it was built, Tel Aviv University archaeologists at the ancient site Tel Jericho are revealing new facts about the world's first skyscraper.

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Αίγυπτος: «Πώς έζησα την εξέγερση που συγκλόνισε τον κόσμο»

Αντώνης Λιάκος στο tvxs.gr.
Κάιρο-Αθήνα, 11/12 Φεβρ. 2011
 
Φύγαμε την Τρίτη το μεσημέρι για το Κάιρο, αν και όλοι, με όσους είχαμε συζητήσει προηγουμένως, είχαν προσπαθήσει να μας αποθαρρύνουν, επισημαίνοντας τους κινδύνους. Καταλαβαίναμε όμως ότι εκείνο που συνέβαινε τις τελευταίες δυο βδομάδες ήταν κάτι πολύ σημαντικό και θέλαμε να έχουμε την εμπειρία του. Στο δρόμο από το αεροδρόμιο στο κέντρο, υπήρχαν τανκς, αλλά πουθενά αστυνομία· μόνο στρατός. Η αστυνομία είχε εξαφανιστεί μετά την πρώτη μέρα. Η χώρα είχε παραλύσει. Σχολεία και υπηρεσίες, ακόμη και οι ακίνητες στο χρόνο πυραμίδες, όλα κλειστά. Τα μαγαζιά, όσα ήταν ανοιχτά, άνοιγαν έως το μεσημέρι. Πάντως υπήρχε κόσμος και αυτοκίνητα στους δρόμους. Δύσκολα καταλάβαινες, καθώς έτρεχε το λεωφορείο, ότι η χώρα ήταν έξω από την κανονική της καθημερινή ζωή. 

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Nippur Ιράκ: βρέθηκε πήλινο ειδώλιο

..."the artifact that has been found by the citizen is a ceramic statue of a woman without a head or legs with a  length of 16 cm and a width 12 cm, it has been handed over to the Antiquities Department in Diwaniyah."

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Newly Online at the Oriental Institute: Tell Hamoukar, Volume 1. Urbanism and Cultural Landscapes in Northeastern Syria: The Tell Hamoukar Survey, 1999-2001

Tell Hamoukar is one of the largest Bronze Age sites in northern Mesopotamia. The present volume presents the results of three seasons of field survey and remote-sensing analysis at the site and its region. These studies were undertaken to address questions of urban origins, land use, and demographic trends through time. Site descriptions and settlement histories are presented for Hamoukar and fifty-nine other sites in its immediate hinterland over the last 8,000 years. The project paid close attention to the "off-site" landscape between sites and considered aspects of agricultural practices, land tenure, and patterns of movement. For each phase of occupation, the patterns of settlement and land use are contextualized within larger patterns of Mesopotamian history, with particular attention to the proto-urban fifth millennium B.C., the Uruk Expansion of the fourth millennium BC, the height of urbanism in the late third millennium, the impact of the Assyrian empire in the early first millennium BC, and the Abbasid landscape of the late first millennium AD.

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Visible Language: Inventions of Writing in the Ancient Middle East

A new exhibition at the Oriental Institute Museum at the University of Chicago will show visitors how scribes in the ancient Middle East invented writing, thus transforming prehistoric cultures into civilizations.

Among the items on display will be the earliest cuneiform tablets from Mesopotamia (today's Iraq), dating to about 3200 BC, which are on loan from the Vorderasiatisches Museum in Berlin. They have never before been exhibited in the United States. The pictographic signs, a precursor to writing, are part of a writing system that developed into cuneiform, a wedge-shaped script that was incised on clay tablets. Examples of that form of writing will also be exhibited.

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How Neolithic farmers and hunter gatherers fought for space

A new research details a physical model, which can potentially explain how the spreading of Neolithic farmers was slowed down by the population density of hunter gatherers. Agricultural or Neolithic economics replaced the Mesolithic social model of hunter-gathering in the Near East about 10,000 years ago.

One of the most important socioeconomic changes in human history, this socioeconomic shift, known as the Neolithic transition, spread gradually across Europe until it slowed down when more northern latitudes were reached.

Over 500 ancient artefacts unearthed in Bazgir Tappeh in northeastern Iran

LONDON, (CAIS) -- Over 500 ancient metal artefacts have recently been discovered during an archaeological excavation on the Bazgir Tappeh in Gorgan Province in northeastern Iran.

The artefacts, all of which are made of copper, comprise weapons, farming tools, drug tubes and pans, which date back to about 1800 years ago, Gorgan Cultural Heritage, Tourism and Handicrafts Department director Fereidun Fali told the Persian service of IRNA reported on Saturday.

The artefacts are comparable to relics previously discovered in archaeological excavations on Gorgan’s Turang Tappeh and the Tappeh Hesar of Damghan in northern Semnan Province, and several ancient sites in Turkmenistan and Tajikistan, he added.

“Ruins of a large Parthian castle built of 37x37 centimetre mud bricks, which are similar to ruins previously discovered at the Turang Tappeh and the Narges Tappeh, have also been unearthed in the upper stratum of the site,” Fa’ali said.

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Major archaeological Discovery In Israel

Byzantine church and a large Mosaic were uncovered in an Israel 
Antiquities Authority Salvage Excavation at Hirbet Madras, in the Judean coastal plain.

In recent months an archaeological excavation was conducted at Hirbet Madras
in the wake of an antiquities theft during which robbers attempted to breach 
and plunder an ancient underground complex.

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What’s inside? Sealed jar discovered at Qumran – site of Dead Sea Scrolls

An intact, sealed, jar has been discovered at Qumran, the site where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found in nearby caves.

A multinational team of scientists have been analyzing the jar and their findings are set to be published in the journal Archaeometry. If you have a subscription (or access to a library with one) you can already see the article on the publication’s website.

“The finding of an intact and sealed storage jar is an extremely rare event,” the researchers write. The discovery “provides a unique possibility to analyse its last contents.”

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Göbekli Tepe: Making us rethink our ancestors

German archaeologist Professor Klaus Schmidt first came to Turkey in 1978 for research but it wasn’t until 1994 that he realized the importance of Göbekli Tepe, an early Neolithic site in the southeast of Turkey. He tells us about site’s discovery, its importance, what has been uncovered to date and also has a message for those who traffic in antiquities.

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