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Swedish archaeologists in cooperation with the antiquities department have excavated two burial tombs at the site of Dromolaxia-Vyzakia that they believe belonged to two rich families judging by the nature of the finds, they said on Friday.This large Late Bronze Age city, which flourished between 1630 and 1150 BC, is situated along the shores of the Larnaca Salt Lake near the mosque of Hala Sultan Tekke.Both tombs contained material from the outgoing 15th and the 14th centuries BC, which chronologically corresponds to the Late Cypriot IIA-B period, the Late Helladic IIIA1-2 and the famous Egyptian 18th Dynasty. One of the...

3,500 years ago, the island underwent a period of significant cultural transformations, namely the adoption of a new language and economic system, and major changes in burial customs and attire.Around the same time, many important sites across the island were destroyed and warriors’ graves appeared at the famed palace of Knossos, leading scholars to long believe that these seismic changes had been the result of a Mycenaean invasion...Rather than looking at things like burial, art, or dress, practices that tend to shift with fashion, archaeologists have begun to look more closely at more mundane, everyday practices as a better insight...

A new genetic analysis may have finally revealed the origin of the Etruscans — a mysterious people whose civilization thrived in Italy centuries before the founding of Rome. It turns out the enigmatic Etruscans were local to the area, with nearly identical genetics to their Latin-speaking neighbors. ***** both groups appear to be migrants from the Pontic-Caspian steppe — a long, thin swath of land stretching from the north Black Sea around Ukraine to the north Caspian Sea in Russia. After arriving in Italy during the Bronze age, the early speakers of Etruscan put down roots, assimilating speakers of other...

Archaeologists have discovered ashes from one of the biggest ever volcanic eruptions in recorded history. Excavations in Turkey’s ancient city of Smyrna, now located in Izmir, have revealed details from a Minoan eruption that took place some 3,600 years ago. Smyrna was established about 5,000 years ago by the Greek tribe of Aeolians and later inhabited by Ionians. It was mostly abandoned after it was captured by the Anatolian kingdom of Lydia in the 6th century B.C. Archaeologists say the ashes will tell them a lot about the history. “Now that we have identified those ashes with a more extensive...

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...

The team first studied the rules that the signs followed on the clay tablets and other accounting documents. Two problems had so far complicated the decipherment of Linear A fractions. First, all documents containing sums of fractional values with a registered total were damaged or difficult to interpret, and second, they contradicted uses of certain signs, which suggest the system changed over time. Thus, the starting premise had to rely on documents concentrated to a specific period (ca. 1600-1450 BCE), when the numerical system was in coherent use across Crete. To investigate the possible values of each fractional sign, the...

"The longest chronology in the world stretches back 12,000 years. But in the Mediterranean, the problem is that we don't have a full, continuous record going back to the time of Thera," Pearson said. "We have recorded the last 2,000 years very well, but then there's a gap. We have tree rings from earlier periods, but we don't know exactly which dates the rings correspond to. This is what's called a 'floating chronology.'" Filling this gap could help pin down the Thera eruption date and paint a climatic backdrop for the various civilizations that rose and fell during the Bronze...

Emily Catherine Egan, a doctoral student at the University of Cincinnati in Ohio, studied the floor of the Throne Room at the Palace of Nestor, one of the best-preserved palaces of Mycenaean Greece, a civilization from the late Bronze Age. She found that the floors of the palace, located in the present-day Greek town of Pylos, were made of plaster, and were often painted with grids of bright patterns or marine animals. The creative decorations show how ancient Mycenaean artists used floors — together with painted ceilings and walls — to impress palace visitors, Egan said. "Mycenaean palatial floor paintings...

KO-RE-TE, PO-RO-KO-RE-TE [koreter, prokoreter] -- Such officials are known at both Knossos and Pylos. The titles bear a suspiciously close resemblance to the Latin terms curator and procurator ("guardian" and "manager, imperial officer/governor" respectively). The Linear B evidence suggests that the koreter was a local official in charge of one of the sixteen major administrative units within the Pylian kingdom, and the prokoreter was evidently his deputy.

An old stone quarry on the Greek island of Crete which has a network of underground tunnels could be the original site of the ancient Labyrinth, the maze that housed the Minotaur of Greek legend, scholars believe. An Anglo-Greek team believes that the site, near the town of Gortyn, has just as much claim to be the place of the Labyrinth as the Minoan palace at Knossos 20 miles away, which has been synonymous with the Minotaur myth since its excavation a century ago. The 600,000 people a year who visit the ruins at Knossos are told the site was...

Bulgarian archaeologists have found an image of the legendary labyrinth of King Minos, the Bulgarian National Radio reported. The exclusive find was unearthed near the village of Golyam Derven last week. The team of Professor Daniela Agre, who are doing excavation works in the area, stumbled upon the unique artefact while researching a an ancient Thracian tomb's entrance stone. The labyrinth image, which is carved on the slate, is perfectly preserved. The legendary labyrinth was considered a just a myth from the Greek mythology until the exclusive finding. According to the legends, King Minos ordered the construction of the labyrinth...

An initial inspection of the ceramics found in the tomb allowed it to be dated to the late Minoan period, or 1400 to 1200 BC Archaeologists in Crete have discovered an intact Minoan-era tomb containing a well-preserved adult skeleton along with funerary vessels. An initial inspection of the ceramics found in the tomb allowed it to be dated to the late Minoan period, or 1400 to 1200 BC, a statement from the Ministry of Culture noted. The tomb was discovered during an emergency excavation in an olive grove outside the village of Kentri, in the eastern prefecture of Ierapetra, the...

Sometime between 1400 and 1200 B.C., two Minoan men were laid to rest in an underground enclosure carved out of the soft limestone native to southeast Crete. Both were entombed within larnakes—intricately embossed clay coffins popular in Bronze Age Minoan society—and surrounded by colorful funerary vases that hinted at their owners’ high status. Eventually, the burial site was sealed with stone masonry and forgotten, leaving the deceased undisturbed for roughly 3,400 years.

It is hard to explain why such a thing occurred. As well as why in Minoan culture there is no representation of or reference to a lord. "In Minoan culture we have no representation of a lord, neither has any name come down to us except for that of Minos and perhaps Radamanthes, about whom we do not have much information. Moreover, Homeric Idomeneas was a Mycenaean king of Crete", noted Mrs Tsipopoulou having already stressed the mystery of Minoan culture which continuously thickens, despite new finds and fresh interpretations. Here is an interesting piece of information from the archaeologist...

Elizabeth Armstrong Moore September 27, 2016 In 1950, a collection of 29 tablets was discovered in the ruins of Ugarit, an ancient city in the northern region of present-day Syria, but only one had survived the intervening centuries well enough to be deciphered. Known as H6, the 3,500-year-old clay tablet revealed a simple hymn specifying the use of nine lyre strings and the intervals between them, much like an "ancient guitar tab," reports ClassicFM, which has recently picked up the story. The resulting melody, it says, isn't just the oldest discovered in the world, but "utterly enchanting." Musician and composer...

An ancient fortress which is 3,000 - 3,200 years old and was built with the so called Cyclopean masonry has been found by archaeologists in Bulgaria's Rhodope Mountains, near the town of Zlatograd and the border with Greece, and is taken as evidence that Ancient Thrace was part of the Mycenaean Civilization. The previously undetected fortress is roughly dated to 1,200 BC, i.e. to the time of Ancient Troy and the Trojan War. It is located near Zlatograd, Bulgaria's southernmost town, near the southern slopes of the Rhodope Mountains, in an area that is only about 20 kilometers away from...

...by resolving discrepancies between archeological and radiocarbon methods of dating the eruption, according to new University of Arizona-led research... "It's about tying together a timeline of ancient Egypt, Greece, Turkey and the rest of the Mediterranean at this critical point in the ancient world -- that's what dating Thera can do," said lead author Charlotte Pearson, an assistant professor of dendrochronology at the UA Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research... Archeologists have estimated the eruption as occurring sometime between 1570 and 1500 BC by using human artifacts such as written records from Egypt and pottery retrieved from digs. Other researchers estimated the...

DNA is shedding light on the people who built Greece's earliest civilizations. Researchers analysed genetic data from skeletons dating to the Bronze Age, a period marked by the emergence of writing, complex urban planning and magnificent art and architecture. These ancient Aegean people were mostly descended from farmers who had settled the region thousands of years earlier. But they showed signs of genetic - and possibly cultural - contact with people to the north and to the east. Dr Iosif Lazaridis, from Harvard Medical School in Massachusetts, and colleagues focussed on burials from the Minoan civilization, which flourished on the...

For a quarter century, Greek excavation director Nicholas Stampolidis and his dedicated team have been unearthing the untold stories of the people buried some 2,800 years ago in the necropolis of Orthi Petra at Eleutherna on Crete. Until now, the site has perhaps been best known for the tomb its excavators dubbed "A1K1," an assemblage of 141 cremated individuals, all but two of whom were aristocratic men who likely fell in battle in foreign lands. Excavated between 1992 and 1996, this elaborate rock-cut tomb was brimming with fantastic burial goods that date from the ninth to the seventh century B.C.,...

Cretan excavation sheds light on Dark Ages of Greek historyFinds from ancient Eleutherna at Cycladic Museum A marble statue of Aphrodite, from a second- to first-century-BC bathhouse in Eleutherna. By Nicholas Paphitis - Kathimerini English Edition On a narrow spur under the shadow of Mount Ida in central Crete, archaeologists for the past 20 years have been excavating a town that flourished from the Dark Ages of Greece’s early history until Medieval times. The Eleutherna project, a systematic dig carried out by a three-pronged team of top archaeologists from the University of Crete, is in itself unusual in a country...