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It was a fabled kingdom known in ancient times as the Island of Gold, a civilisation with untold wealth that explorers tried in vain to find long after its unexplained disappearance from history around the 14th century. The site of Srivijaya may finally have been found – by local fishing crews carrying out night-time dives on the Musi River near Palembang on the Indonesian island of Sumatra. Their extraordinary catches are treasures ranging from a lifesize eighth-century Buddhist statue studded with precious gems – worth millions of pounds – to jewels worthy of kings....

An ancient clay tablet shows that the Babylonians used Pythagorean triples to measure accurate right angles for surveying land.Students may not believe that Pythagoras’ Theorem has real-world uses, but a 3,700-year-old tablet proves that their maths teachers are right. The artifact, named Si.427, shows how ancient land surveyors used geometry to draw boundaries accurately. Discovered in central Iraq in 1894, Si.427 sat in a museum in Istanbul for over a century. Now, mathematician Dr Daniel Mansfield from the University of New South Wales, Australia, has studied the clay tablet and uncovered its meaning. “Si.427 dates from the Old Babylonian (OB)...

Signs will be added to explain the ‘whiteness’ of sculpture plaster casts inside Cambridge University’s archaeology museum as part of a new anti-racist strategy. Plaster casts of Roman and Greek sculptures are said to give a ‘misleading impression’ of the whiteness and ‘absence of diversity’ of the ancient world. And the Classics Faculty at Cambridge University has revealed it will ‘turn the problem into an opportunity’, according to the Daily Telegraph.... ...academics will be encouraged to include ‘content warnings’ to lectures and reading materials.

My father gave me Werner Keller’s The Bible as History when I was a kid. I’ve been a sucker for Biblical histories since then. Keller’s been superseded, both by the deconstructionists who claim the Bible isn’t true and by modern archeology, which has added to and reinterpreted many archeological findings since Keller’s time. And last week, in Jerusalem, an archeologist discovered an earring that helps confirms one of the most pivotal stories in the Bible: The destruction of Solomon’s Temple and the Babylonian captivity.The Bible describes how the Kingdom of Judah, under Jehoiakim, refused to pay tribute to King Nebuchadnezzar...

Archaeologists in Morocco have announced the discovery of North Africa’s oldest Stone Age hand-axe manufacturing site, dating back 1.3 million years, an international team reported on Wednesday. The find pushes back by hundreds of thousands of years the start date in North Africa of the Acheulian stone tool industry associated with a key human ancestor, Homo erectus, researchers on the team told journalists in Rabat Before the find, the presence in Morocco of the Acheulian stone tool industry was thought to date back 700,000 years. New finds at the Thomas Quarry I site, first made famous in 1969 when a...

A team of researchers with the Westfalen-Lippe Landscape Association revealed during a presentation in the city of Schmallenberg that one of the largest hoards of Iron Age weapons in western Germany had been unearthed at a nearby dig site on a small mountain in Wilzenberg. In their press release, the researchers note that they found approximately 100 Celtic Iron Age artifacts—primarily through the use of a metal detector.

Scientists Find 500-Million-Year-Old Fossilized Brain The discovery of new evidence supports the previous speculation on 520 million-year-old human-old brain systems, provoking thoughts about the nature of brains, life, and intelligence in the cosmos. Soft, squishy, and delicate; brain and nervous system tissues maybe some of the worst candidates for preservation in the fossil record. In past years the best examples of the ancient brain and nerve structures have come from creatures trapped and preserved in amber that was a couple of hundred million years old. But a few years ago paleontologists claimed to have found evidence of brain structures in...

Humans understood astronomy 40000 years ago, European caves provide proof According to a scientific study, 40,000-year-old cave paintings indicate the use of complex astronomy. According to experts, the ancient paintings that were believed to be symbols of prehistoric animals are actually ancient star maps. Early cave art reveals that people in the last ice age had a detailed knowledge of the night sky. They were hardly different from us today in terms of intellect. Animal symbols represent star constellations in the night sky. A new scientific study revealed that humans had a sophisticated knowledge of stars and constellations more than...

Kailash Temple is the world’s largest monolithic masterpiece in Ellora, Maharashtra, India. The magnificent structure was carved by skilled craftsmen from a single piece of solid rock in a cave on a mountainside. It took more than two decades to construct the entire building. Table of Contents ABOUT THE TEMPLE ORIGIN ARCHITECTURE Kailash TempleThe Kailasa Temple in Ellora, India( image source ) ABOUT THE TEMPLE Generation after generation of people is always fascinated by the architecture of the Ancient world. Whether it’s the Pyramids of Egypt, the magnificent examples of Roman architecture, or the splendor of the Oriental Temples, these...

Sometimes you stumble upon remarkable pieces of long-forgotten history when you live in an area that was home to ancient civilizations. According to Smithsonianmag, that is what happened to one Greek farmer living in Crete, not far from the town of Ierapetra. The farmer was parking his truck on his property under some olive trees when the ground underneath him began to give way. He saw that a four-foot-wide hole had opened up in the ground after the farmer moved his vehicle to a safer location. He realised this was no ordinary hole when he peered inside. The farmer informed...

Nazi Operated Enigma Machine Retrieved In Baltic Sea Recovery of the century’s long lost-quintessential mechanical encryption machine: The Enigma code machine was made in the cold Baltic Sea in Europe nearly three centuries after its drastic beneficial purpose had been served during the second world war. Having been said that during the ending period of World War II, the machine was abandoned deep into the sea by German to keep it out of reach of the allies. WHAT IS AN ENIGMA CODE? The Enigma code machine. ( image source ) Enigma machines also used a form of substitution encryption. Substitution...

Melting glacier sheds light upon hidden Viking era artifacts in Norway dated back to 300 AD The tremendous melting of the glaciers resulted in some recent archaeological discoveries revealing several well preserved historical objects, and one of these remarkable finds is the discoveries of artifacts from the Viking era on the hills that were once used for transportation purposes dated back to 300 A.D. as per the study. More glacial melt, although a disturbing factor of a much larger global warming effect, has provided ample shreds of evidence and remains of the age-old objects for today’s generation advantageously. Artifacts from...

Archaeologists researching on an underwater diving project, stumbled over an ancient underwater temple claimed as Heracleion’s ‘Egyptian Atlantis’ and probably have found a destroyed ancient Greek temple and treasure-laden vessels which might have sunken into the sea due to floods and tsunami 1,200 years back.

A digital model has revealed a complex planetarium on the ancient device's face. “Unless it's from outer space, we have to find a way in which the Greeks could have made it,” researchers say.

The Arzhan-2 burial of the Scythian ‘King’ and the ‘Queen’, found in 1997 and studied between 2001-2003 by Russian-German expedition is one the most extraordinary discoveries ever made by archeologists. Now for the first time the features of the powerful couple buried in their gold-encrusted, awe-inspiring clothing can be seen in life-like sculptures thanks to work of Moscow Miklukho-Maklai Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology, and Novosibirsk Institute of Archeology and Ethnography. Two teams of anthropologists spent months meticulously building 3d models of the skulls, using laser scanning and photogrammetry to then re-create the faces of the people that ruled vast...

Archaeologists have unearthed new sections of an Aztec tower of human skulls dating back to the 1400s beneath the center of Mexico City. The team has uncovered the facade and eastern side of the tower, as well as 119 human skulls of men, women and children, adding to hundreds previously found, the National Institute of Anthropology and History (Inah) announced on Friday. The tower, approximately five meters (16.4ft) in diameter, was first discovered in 2017, and the latest discoveries were made in ...

The remains of a 1,200-year-old pagan temple to the Old Norse gods such as Thor and Odin have been discovered in Norway — a rare relic of the Viking religion built a few centuries before Christianity became dominant there. Archaeologists say the large wooden building — about 45 feet (14 meters) long, 26 feet (8 m) wide, and up to 40 feet (12 m) high — is thought to date from the end of the eighth century and was used for worship and sacrifices to gods during the midsummer and midwinter solstices. Old Norse culture was famous and feared by...

Radar is a useful tool with familiar uses such as detecting aircraft and observing weather. It also has some less known applications, such as a technology known as ground-penetrating radar (GPR). Despite the difficulty of sending and receiving radio waves through solid objects, with the right equipment it’s possible to build a radar that works underground as well. GPR is used often for detecting underground utilities, but also has applications in other fields such as archaeology and geology. For those people in these fields, a less expensive GPR was the priority of a group presenting at a 2017 National Institute...

Tools excavated from a cave in central Mexico are strong evidence that humans were living in North America at least 30,000 years ago, some 15,000 years earlier than previously thought, scientists said Wednesday.​ Artefacts, including 1,900 stone tools, showed human occupation of the high-altitude Chiquihuite Cave over a roughly 20,000 year period, they reported in two studies, published in Nature. "Our results provide new evidence for the antiquity of humans in the Americas," Ciprian Ardelean, an archeologist at the Universidad Autonoma de Zacatecas and lead author of one of the studies, told AFP. "There are only a few artefacts and...

It's not clear why ancient people dug up these chambers, but evidence suggests they used them in everyday life. Co-director of the excavation Barak Monnickendam-Givon standing in the subterranean chambers. (Image: © Yaniv Berman-Israwl Antiquities Authority) Archaeologists recently uncovered three ancient subterranean chambers carved in the bedrock beneath the Western Wall plaza in Jerusalem. The 2,000-year-old chambers, consisting of an open courtyard and two rooms, were carved on top of one another and connected by hewn staircases. Inside the chambers, archaeologists discovered clay cooking vessels, cores of oil lamps, a stone mug and a piece of a qalal, or a...