Interesting Ancient Finds Sometimes archaeologists find something very interesting. That is just what happened near Masada in Israel. Only a couple of these objects have been found before. In their day they were rather mundane, but today finding one is incredible. I am not talking about anything precious; I am talking about a paycheck receipt for a Roman soldier. It seems they would receive a statement of their year’s pay with a list of deductions. This one listed the deductions for boots, a tunic and feed for his horse. It didn’t leave a lot for the soldier and it is thought they were able to get revenue in other ways. One way which was found was charging the citizens of Israel a rate higher than the legal tax rate and pocketing the difference. Plenty of mummies have been found over the years and not just in Egypt. One Egyptian mummy was a truly unusual find. It wasn’t the mummy of a pharaoh or anyone famous, yet this mummy had been treated in an incredible way. The mummy was entirely wrapped in gold. Gold can be made into an extremely thin sheet. The archaeologists found out the man’s name, it was Hekashepes and he lived around 2,300 B.C. His body was found inside a limestone sarcophagus and was in unusually good condition considering how long ago it was mummified. Scientists have been able to decipher letters which were found from Mary, Queen of Scots, when she was imprisoned by the Earl of Shrewsbury, before her beheading. The letters were coded and written mostly to Michel de Casteinau de Mauvissiere, who was the French ambassador to England. The letters date from 1578 to 1584 and were found filed in a French library. There were 50 letters. The code breakers were amazed at the ingenious code which was used. Sometimes objects are found in a strange way. The first European to visit an area of New Zealand in the 1830s noticed the natives cooking a sweet potato like tuber in a bronze pot. This was very curious, because the natives didn’t have bronze. He asked if he could examine the pot, and when he did he was surprised at what he had found. The object was not a pot, it was a bell and seemed to be off a ship. It had writing on it and the writing was in Tamil. This language is spoken today in southeast India, Sri Lanka and Singapore. The bell was damaged and some of is edge was missing. The Tamil language on the bell was of a much older type and hard to read. At first it was thought the bell contained the name of the ship’s owner, then later it was believed it was the ship’s name on the bell, but eventually it was found out it was the name of a Muslim saint that ships back hundreds of years ago would put on the bells for protection as they sailed the ocean. It was never found out what ship it came from, at least not yet. An unusual object was found in Romania. As most of us know, the Romans conquered Europe. The object was a metal mask which was worn during parades, and as a matter of fact, is known as a parade mask. It was found with a metal detector, but metal detecting in Romania is different than it is here. You have to apply to the Ministry of Culture if you want to use it at known archaeological sites. If you find something older than 100 years, you have 72 hours to turn it over to the authorities and if the object is classified as treasure, you are given 45% of the value, else you get 30% of the value. It is believed the mask was worn by a soldier. The mask is believed to be from the 2nd or 3rd century A.D. A new town is being built in Devon, in the United Kingdom. It is strange when you begin new construction and then find out you are building over something very ancient. In this case an ancient road, the remains of Bronze Age homes and Roman farms. It is thought the road connected ancient communities. The road has crushed slate for a surface and drainage points. It is believed the area thrived in the Bronze Age from 2,700 to 700 B.C. We are finding out what we believed about ancient man was all wrong and that hominins were sailing the oceans of the world half a million years ago. Proof was found they used fire a million years or more ago and they were walking on two feet over 7 million years ago or more. It always amazes me when a new species of dinosaurs is found. Scientists have found a new species of Pterosaur. It had hundreds of tiny hooked teeth in a long beak shaped mouth. The fossil was found in a German quarry. There are no teeth at the end of the mouth but the teeth extend on the sides and go back to the back of the mouth. When we tend to think of old workshops, we might think of the oldest being Babylonian or Ancient Greek, but archaeologists just made a discovery of the oldest workshop ever found. Take a guess at the age. No, it was not tens of thousands of years old or even hundreds of thousands, it was 1.2 million years old. The workshop manufactured obsidian tools. Archaeologists were shocked to find the workshop which contained 600 obsidian hand-axes. The workshop was found in the country of Ethiopia. Archaeologists are calling the people who made them unknown. Hominins are believed to be ancient relatives of modern humans. The find pushed the date for the manufacture of obsidian tools back another 500,000 years. A dig in Iraq has led to the discovery of an ancient city. It is said the land there was very fertile and many of the people were crafters. The site is known as Lagash. The archaeologists were very surprised at one of the things they found which was a tavern. Why they felt so surprised was the fact it was from 2,700 B.C. It was equipped with a type of clay refrigerator, called a zeer, along with an oven and food storage vessels, and some still had food in them. There were benches so you were able to sit and eat, and enjoy a drink. It just goes to show, people were not so different in ancient times from us. The big difference was there was no technology to ease their burdens, but they seemed to enjoy eating out once in a while and worked to produce different objects.
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