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JERUSALEM — Goliath the Greek? Human remains from an ancient cemetery in southern Israel have yielded precious bits of DNA that a new study says help prove the European origin of the Philistines — the enigmatic nemeses of the biblical Israelites. The Philistines mostly resided in five cities along the southern coast of what is today Israel and the Gaza Strip during the early Iron Age, around 3,000 years ago. In the Bible, David fought the Philistine giant Goliath in a duel, and Samson slew a thousand of their warriors with the jawbone of an ass. Many archaeologists have proposed...

A team of marine archaeologists has uncovered a 3,600-year-old shipwreck in the Mediterranean, just off the coast of Antalya, Turkey. The ship, believed to have been a merchant vessel sailing from Cyprus, may be the oldest ever discovered, according to Haaretz... Based on its position and the large cargo of copper ingots found inside and around the wreck, it is likely to have been a trading ship, ferrying goods from Cyprus to the Aegean region. Although the ship is in very poor condition, and the hull has been almost completely destroyed, the bulk of the ship, together with its precious...

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...

An intact tomb from the early Mycenaean era (1650-1400 BC) has been unearthed by archaeologists in the region of Nemea, southern Greece. According to the Culture Ministry, the tomb is among the largest ever found in the region and is set apart by the short yet wide path leading to its entrance along with other features that place it in the early phase of the Mycenaean civilization. It was found in a Mycenaean cemetery in Aidonia. The Mycenaean civilization, with its palatial states, urban organization, sophisticated art and writing system, flourished in Greece in the 17th-12th centuries BC.

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...

The reasons for the end of the Mycenaean culture have been hotly debated among scholars. At present, there is no satisfactory explanation for the collapse of the Mycenaean palace systems. The two most common theories are population movement and internal conflict. The first attributes the destruction of Mycenaean sites to invaders. The hypothesis of a Dorian invasion, known as such in Ancient Greek tradition, that led to the end of Mycenaean Greece, is supported by sporadic archaeological evidence such as new types of burials, in particular cist graves, and the use of a new dialect of Greek, the Doric one....

Nicholas Blackwell and his father went to a hardware store about three years ago seeking parts for a mystery device from the past. They carefully selected wood and other materials to assemble a stonecutting pendulum that, if Blackwell is right, resembles contraptions once used to build majestic Bronze Age palaces. With no ancient drawings or blueprints of the tool for guidance, the two men relied on their combined knowledge of archaeology and construction. Blackwell, an archaeologist at Indiana University Bloomington, had the necessary Bronze Age background. His father, George, brought construction cred to the project... No one alive today has...

For many years, the prevailing theory on how the Mycenaean civilisation collapsed was that devastating earthquakes led to the destruction of its palaces in the Peloponnese, southern Greece around 1,200 BC. Nevertheless, new evidence suggests that some type of internal uprising or an external invasion might have brought about the downfall of the Mycenaean civilisation. From 2012, a team led by German archaeologist Joseph Maran of Heidelberg University and geophysicist Klaus-G. Hinzen has been conducting research in Tiryns and Midea. The findings of their research were published in the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America. "Although some of the...

According to a recent international study, the volcano of the island Santorini, Greece, erupted in the 16th century BC and not earlier. The survey characterized a number of research studies that took place in the past and have indicated that Santorini's volcano may have erupted a century earlier, as unreliable because the method based on tree-ring measurements that they used, could not provide them with accurate results. An international team of researchers led by Paolo Cherubini from the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research (WSL) has demonstrated in the scientific journal Antiquity, that this method cannot provide...

The results of the survey are particularly encouraging, as they brought to light new facts about the Middle Helladic and Early Mycenaean background of the settlements developed on the northern margin of the lake. In addition, the finding, with stratigraphic data, that the fortified settlements in the hills of Agios Ioannis and Aghia Marina have a phase of fortification, rehousing and abandonment chronologically analogous to the acropolis of Gla, ie around the middle of the 13th century BC, a milestone of the problems of the socio-political hierarchical relations of the Mycenaean northeastern coppaid field, as well as of the Orchomenos-Glas...

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...

Excavator Nicholas Stampolidis said his team discovered more than 3,000 pieces of gold foil in the 7th-century B.C. twin grave near the ancient town of Eleutherna... The tiny gold ornaments, from 1 to 4 centimetres (0.4 to 1.5 inches) long, had been sewn onto a lavish robe or shroud that initially wrapped the body of a woman and has almost completely rotted away but for a few off-white threads... The woman, who presumably had a high social or religious status, was buried with a second skeleton in a large jar sealed with a stone slab weighing more than half a...

Over 100 years of excavations on Crete have exposed elegant Minoan frescoes that once adorned the walls of the island’s Bronze Age palaces. This distinctively colorful Aegean art style flourished in the Middle Bronze Age (1750-1550 B.C.). The nearby inhabitants of Akrotiri, a city on the Cycladic island of Thera (modern Santorini), painted numerous artworks in the style of the Minoan frescoes before the island was decimated by a volcanic eruption in the late 17th or 16th century B.C. Until recently, there was no archaeological evidence of Minoan frescoes beyond the islands of the Aegean. Art exhibiting Aegean characteristics has...

By studying and excavating ancient burial grounds, we can learn about how final respects were paid when people died during ancient times. The artifacts located alongside these remains also provide insight into what items people valued and what they believed about the afterlife. A 2013 discovery of an ancient burial ground near Bethlehem is providing new information about one civilization that lived approximately 4000 years ago. In 2013, efforts began to build an industrial park near Bethlehem, leading to a discovery that may prove to offer fresh insights about the ancient world. The area where the industrial park was to...

A 4,000-year-old cemetery made up of more than 100 tombs has been found near Bethlehem in the West Bank. Now known as Khalet al-Jam'a, the cemetery probably served an undiscovered settlement for more than 1,500 years. Many of its tombs have been destroyed by modern construction or looting, but at least 30 tombs have survived. Many of them are shaft tombs with one or more rock-cut chambers. According to Lorenzo Nigro of Sapienza University of Rome, the settlement was situated near trade routes, and artifacts from the tombs indicate that it had been a wealthy place. "Typical pieces of the...

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. -- Along an isolated, rocky stretch of Greek shoreline, a Florida State University researcher and his students are unlocking the secrets of a partially submerged, “lost” harbor town believed to have been built by the ancient Mycenaeans nearly 3,500 years ago. “This is really a remarkable find,” said Professor Daniel J. Pullen, chairman of FSU’s Department of Classics. “It is rare indeed to locate an entire town built during the Late Bronze Age that shows this level of preservation.” Pullen and a colleague, Assistant Professor of Classical Studies Thomas F. Tartaron of the University of Pennsylvania, led students...

A chunk of worked limestone unearthed at a dig came from to the lost throne of Agamemnon, the ancient Greek hero revered by Homer in The Iliad, his epic story of the Trojan War, according to an archaeologist. Christofilis Maggidis, who leads excavations in Mycenae, in the north-eastern Peloponnese, said that the 110lb (50kg) slab was found two years ago in a streambed metres from a palace that collapsed during an earthquake in about 1200 BC. “This is one of the most emblematic and significant finds from the Mycenaean era,” Mr Maggidis said after an elaborate, year-long study of the...

Devastating 'World War ZERO' destroyed ancient Mediterranean civilisations and plunged Europe into a dark age 11:41, 13 MAY 2016 UPDATED 11:44, 13 MAY 2016 BY JASPER HAMILL Controversial theory finally identifies mysterious 'Sea Peoples' blamed for cataclysmic series of events which changed the course of history It was a disaster which destroyed the ancient world's greatest civilisations and plunged Europe into a dark age that lasted centuries. Now one archaeologist think he's worked out who's to blame for sparking an event he calls "World War Zero", but which most academics refer to as the The Late Bronze Age Collapse ....

The Trojan War was a grander event than even Homer would have us believe. The famous conflict may have been one of the final acts in what one archaeologist has controversially dubbed "World War Zero" -- an event he claims brought the eastern Mediterranean Bronze Age world crashing down 3200 years ago. And the catalyst for the war? A mysterious and arguably powerful civilisation almost entirely overlooked by archaeologists: the Luwians. By the second millennium BC, civilisation had taken hold throughout the eastern Mediterranean. The Egyptian New Kingdom coexisted with the Hittites of central Anatolia and the Mycenaeans of mainland...