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Lions and bulls are motifs frequently seen in ancient Anatolia. As can be seen on the coins, the most fundamental motif appearing on the Lydian coins—which are considered the first minted coins—is the lion. Another motif seen on the coins of the Lydian Kingdom depicts the moment when that lion attacks a bull.

The motifs seen on these earliest coins, minted in the 6th century BCE, belong to the Kingdom of Lydia. Although there are various interpretations as to why they chose the lion for their coins, it is generally accepted that they were inspired by a species of lion found in ancient Anatolia. However, there is no clear, accepted explanation for why the lion is depicted attacking the bull. It is likely that this served as propaganda depicting a confrontation between the Kingdom of Lydia and another kingdom in Anatolia (Phrygians?).

What really caught my attention, however, is that this motif continued to be used in the Tarsus area during the Hellenistic period. We know that the satrap who ruled the region before Alexander the Great used this symbol and that Alexander continued this tradition. Indeed, the fact that the Asian Lion (Panthera leo persica), native to Anatolia, lived in the eastern and southeastern regions of Anatolia explains the lion depicted on these coins (and, of course, the lion seen on Babylonian coins as well).

It can be said that the Late Hittite city-states, which emerged in the southeastern region after the collapse of the Hittite Empire around 1200 BCE, clearly reflect Aramaic influence. But how is it that the Kingdom of Lydia, located to the west, used a type of lion found in the east, while its eastern rivals were symbolized by a bull?

It is unfortunate that the history of the period between 1200 BCE and 500 BCE is so obscure, forcing us to rely heavily on interpretation. Nevertheless, the fact that nearly the same figure was used in the same way for over 300 years is quite impressive.

An interesting inscription on a tombstone in Greek mentioning a Thracian king who took part in the Battle of Pharsalus in 48 BC when Julius Caesar with much fewer troops decisively beat Pompey, who then fled to Egypt where he met his end. Caesar was then the leading person in the Roman empire, although it was still technically a Republic. Interestingly, the person for whom this was set up might have fallen in battle 6 years later when Mark Antony and Octavian beat the army of Caesar's assassins Brutus and Cassius in Philippi. That town in ancient times was in Macedonia, on the border with Thrace, although there was a sizeable Thracian population then. Now it is in the modern Greek region of Eastern Macedonia and Thrace.

"Inscribed schist tombstone stele. The date of the inscription E and P= 105, that rests on the Macedonian chronology, places the stele chronologically to the year 43-42 BC. The inscription hails as a hero Drioziges, son of Rivoukenthes from Polge (unknown Thracian town probably in the plain of Chrysoupolis) who was killed in a battle at the side of king Riskoupores. All these names are Thracian. The referred king Riskoupores must be identical with the known prince of the Thracians Sappaii Raskoupores, who took part in the battle of Farsala in 48 BC and helped the democratics in the battle of Philippi in 42 BC. It is very likely that in this battle Drioziges was killed." Per the archaeological museum in Philippi, Macedonia, Greece where this is on display.

Underwater archaeologists working near Kekova Island in southern Türkiye have uncovered amphorae dating back roughly 4,400–4,700 years from an Early Bronze Age shipwreck.

Clay analysis suggests that some of the vessels may have been produced in the Jordan Valley, while similar examples have been found in Egypt, Troy and Crete — offering a glimpse of maritime connections across the eastern Mediterranean thousands of years ago.

One particularly unusual amphora has nine markings and two holes. Researchers think it may have been used as a churn for making cheese or butter, raising an intriguing possibility that sailors were producing food during long voyages.

The site has been described by Türkiye’s Culture and Tourism Ministry as the world’s oldest shipwreck, although further archaeological evidence will be important as excavation continues.

What interests me most is this: what can a wreck this early tell us about how extensive Mediterranean maritime trade already was in the Early Bronze Age?

Source: Anadolu Agency / Türkiye Ministry of Culture and Tourism (2026).

https://www.aa.com.tr/en/culture/4-700-year-old-amphorae-discovered-near-turkiyes-kekova-island

Egyptian archaeologists working in Behbeit El-Hagar, a village in Gharbia Governorate, have uncovered the remains of two giant royal statues, and experts believe both show King Ramesses II.

A block of pink granite carved with hieroglyphs came out of the ground close by. The Egyptian mission of the Supreme Council of Antiquities made the find during rescue excavations in the village.

The discovery began when a local man, busy working on a plot of land he owns in front of his house, struck a stone block covered in carvings. He told the local antiquities inspectorate right away, and inspectors rushed to the site, where a first check showed the block was ancient.

The Behbeit El-Hagar inspectorate then completed the legal paperwork, while the Supreme Council of Antiquities formed a committee and a team of specialists to begin rescue excavations, which brought both statues and the granite block to light.

The first statue is known from an enormous head about 1.60 meters tall, which shows the king wearing the double crown, a symbol of the union of Upper and Lower Egypt.

Archaeologists also found the upper section of the statue’s back pillar, and an inscription on the pillar gives the king’s Horus name, “Hor Ka Nakht Meri Maat.” Judging by the size of the head, the team estimates the whole statue, base included, once stood about 8.5 meters high, which gives a sense of how grand the monument was.

The second statue survives in much better shape, though the legs and base are gone. The main body measures roughly 2.40 meters long and shows the king in the royal nemes headcloth, with part of the top broken away. The head was found as well, and the face is still clear and well preserved, closely matching the face of the first statue.

Experts think this figure also represents Ramesses II, but they have not confirmed the identification.

Im taking part in an oxford debate next week and the topic is whether the peloponesian war was unavoidable or not. I watched quite a lot of videos on yt, but still want to know more, and perhaps do a little arguing. The opposite team will be covering the side of "it WAS unavoidable" so if anyone shares this view id love to talk to you. Thanks

A few years ago, excavations at Stainton West near Carlisle turned up two carved oak "tridents" in a waterlogged river channel, dated to the early 4th millennium BC. Similar objects are known from Ehenside Tarn in Cumbria and from County Armagh. Each is carved from a single oak plank, with three tines and a pair of shaped projections, or "ears", where the tines meet the body. Nobody is sure what they were for.

My theory is that they're turf cutters and lifters.

Why turf: Neolithic Britain used enormous amounts of it. Long barrows, henge banks, houses and Silbury Hill all contain cut turf, sometimes tens of thousands of sods in a single monument. Yet no turf-cutting tool has been identified from the period. Something had to do that job.

Why this shape:

• It's one piece of oak. A hafted flint, bone or antler blade adds a joint that breaks. A turf specialist tried an ox-scapula mattock, and it was slow and snapped.
• The tines slip past roots and push them aside, where a solid blade would jam.
• It's used low and nearly flat, thrust in to start the cut, then swivelled and levered. The ears act as a pivot to flip the turf onto a plank.
• The best turf grows on flat, stone-free, damp ground such as river floodplains, which is where several of these have been found.

The wear: the complete Stainton example looks to me like a tool at the end of its life. The gaps between the tines have worn from a rounded shape into a V, which traps roots rather than shedding them. Reshaping it further would snap the tines off, and one of the pair did have broken tines. A longer example exists, which I read as a fresher tool earlier in its life.

The test: I carved a one-piece wooden replica on a long handle and tried it on a meadow and a lawn. It lifted sods cleanly. The catch is that I copied the worn Stainton example, so my tines were too short and blunt. It worked anyway, and a fresh, sharp one should work better.

Has anyone seen any other suggested ancient turf lifters?

Video Here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfWlXHCuHmU

Sources: F. Brown (2013), IfA Finds Group newsletter, on the Stainton West finds; R. Loveday (2006), "Turf – an Invisible Component", Scottish Archaeological Journal 28(2).

Happy to answer questions. Tear it apart

The Tomb of Murong Zhi of the Tuyuhun Kingdom, dating back to the reign of Wu Zetian of the Tang Dynasty, is situated on a mountaintop north of Chashan Village, Qilian Town, Tianzhu County, Wuwei City, Gansu Province. During the Wu Zhou period, this locality was known as Shenniao County of Liang Prefecture. Murong Zhi was a royal prince of the Tuyuhun. The Tuyuhun royal house had long submitted to the Tang Dynasty. Murong Zhi himself was enfeoffed by the Tang court as "Prince Xi" and appointed General of the Left Jade Guard. His mother was Princess Honghua, a daughter of Emperor Taizong Li Shimin of the Tang Dynasty. Murong Zhi died of illness in the second year of Tianshou (691 AD) at the age of 42. "In the ninth month of the same year, on the fifth day, his remains were reinterred at the Great Khan’s Mausoleum."

sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/06/180608200055.htm

Image: Anterior aspect of an Incan skull, showing trephinning. Public Domain Mark. Source: Wellcome Collection.

3,610 players dated 15 things older than 1000 bc. 54% of their 4,301 guesses landed after 500 bc. the typical one came out about 1,500 years too late.

(how it works: you see the name and a small picture, then drop a pin on a timeline from 3000 bc to today. no starting pin, nothing to compare it with.)

who guessed: players from 73 countries. where the country is known, a third of the guesses came from the us and one in eight from the uk; i don't ask for age or gender. bronze age guesses after 500 bc: us 61%, uk 58%, germany 66%.

data: guesses from a daily dating game i made on 18 sep to 13 oct 2026.

(since i don't want to violate rule 8, here is only the raw data) raw anonymised data (csv): https://roughly.is/blog/data/roughly-when-bronze-age-2026-10.csv

I have more visuals (2) and will Post them in the comments since im only allowed one sadly :(

Archaeologists in Saxony-Anhalt found a second stone building next to the palace of a lost royal residence. The site is the Ottonian palatinate of Helfta, on a hill called Kleine Klaus near Lutherstadt Eisleben.

Digs there ran from 2020 to 2023 and started up again on August 31, 2026. They’ll wrap up on October 24, 2026.

The state heritage office, led in the field by Prof. Dr. Felix Biermann, manages the work. About 20 volunteers help on site. The town of Eisleben is building tourist facilities around the site, and the state funds that effort. The earlier digs already turned up the big pieces.

Before 969, Emperor Otto the Great founded the Radegund church here. A stone palace from the same period served as the royal hall and residence. Teams also found strong walls around the main fort and its outer yards, plus pit houses, lime kilns and grain-drying ovens. Graves from the Carolingian period came out of the ground too.

The new building sits beside the palace. Finds date it firmly to the 10th century, which makes it one of the earliest secular stone buildings in Helfta and in all of Saxony-Anhalt. It measures about 9 by 5 meters and has a cellar. Its entry stairs survive in good shape.

Nobody knows yet what it was for. Researchers see two options: a guest house for noble companions of the king, or the seat of a count who ran the place while the ruler was away.

A stone-lined terrace also came to light on the east side of the palace. It faces the courtyard between palace and church. It likely worked as a platform for open-air gatherings.

Church, palace and the new building formed a stone group you could see from far away. In the 10th century, that showed what the king could build and what power he held.

Life looked very different in the southeast outer yard. Crews uncovered more pit houses there, mostly rectangular and three to five meters on a side. They had walls of woven branches and clay, roofs of wood or reed, and a hearth lined with stones.

Ordinary people lived and worked in them. Clay loom weights, casting crucibles and a lime kiln show what they made: textiles, lime for plaster and mortar, and objects of copper alloys. Walls and ditches split this world from the royal one, and the finds show a gap in living standards too.

Figures Commonly Used in the Ancient World 1: The Serpent

In antiquity, the serpent was one of the figures frequently used by the Greeks, the Romans, and the local cultures situated between them. It is particularly noteworthy because it frequently appears in mythological narratives. A serpent motif can be seen on each of the coins below. The vast majority of them are associated with the cult of Heracles.

It is often recounted that Heracles, while still a child, strangled with his bare hands two snakes that had come to kill him; there are also the famous Kistophoros coins featuring a quiver motif adorned with an aplustre, and it is believed that the quiver—as is also known from Alexander the Great’s coins—depicts Heracles.

Asclepius, who is identified by the serpent coiled around his staff, is one of the most famous (and yes, the symbol of the two intertwined serpents used as the emblem of modern medicine is incorrect).

Of course, we can also see some symbols that go beyond general mythological stories. Local beliefs, in particular, seem to play a significant role in this regard. Take, for example, the Uraeus serpent motif, which you can see on the fourth coin below. The serpent on this coin, minted in Alexandria, is the symbol that adorned the heads of ancient Egyptian pharaohs and represented the goddess Wadjet.

My personal favorite, however, is the one shown on the third coin. This coin, which is also an Egyptian minting, strikes me as a symbol of Egypt’s multiculturalism. The Serpent, associated with the pharaohs and Egypt, is intertwined with Poseidon’s trident, and the motif that appears to be holding this staff is Serapis, a Hellenistic Egyptian-Hellenic deity; the horns seen on Serapis are also a symbol of the horns of Ammon (Zeus-Ammon). If you asked me, “What is Egypt?” I think I’d show you this coin.

A Roman terracotta child's toy: It looks like a horse (the wheels are for mobility) and a rider. It dates to the 2nd-3rd centuries AD and was found in Bulgaria, however the display case showed numerous toys and collectively listed the towns so its not clear to the visitor if this was from Sofia/Serdica (Roman province of Thrace), Oescus (Roman province of Moesia) or Borovan (Roman province of Moesia although the Roman town there was built upon ruins of those from ethnically Thracian tribes). Thracian tribes were reknown for their horseback riding abilities and there are plenty of depictions of Thracian horsemen from Hellenistic & Roman times. This is in the National Archaeological Museum in Sofia, Bulgaria.

Finds suggest account in medieval folklore of a camp near Frenni Fawr hill was rooted in reality.

Magnus Maximus, the Roman emperor who ruled Britain in the fourth century, led his troops against the Picts and Scots, but a theory that he also established a military camp near Frenni Fawr hill in Wales has so far been based on folklore.

Now fourth-century coins, among other finds at a newly identified Roman fort in Pembrokeshire, suggest the medieval tale was rooted in reality, to the excitement of archaeologists.

The fort was discovered by Dr Mark Merrony, a leading Roman specialist at the University of Oxford. He heads an excavation that is bringing to life a story about Magnus Maximus, as told in the Mabinogion, a collection of medieval epic tales of myth, magic and miracles.

Merrony expressed excitement that this landscape held the only Roman military site close to where the Mabinogion places the emperor.

“If Magnus Maximus was there, there must have been an army there,” he said.

Wood, faience, gold, ivory, ebony

18th Dynasty (1550-1295 BCE)

Unearthed from Tomb KV46 in the Valley of the Kings

Egyptian Museum in Cairo

“Funerary stele of a Greek hoplite. From Lysi
Ca. 400 B.C. Limestone. Greek alphabetic inscription.

Although the stele is only partly preserved, it is a funerary monument of exquisite art with a rare representation of a warrior, portrayed with the weaponry of a hoplite, that is a helmet, a spear, a shield and a sword. The inscription mentions the name and the home town of the hoplite, Kardia in Thrace. It may be possible that this may be the funerary stele of a Greek soldier who fought on Cyprus during the Persian wars. The inscription is dated to the 3rd century and is later than the relief itself.
Dionysio(s) Kardiano(s)” Per the Cyprus Archaeological Museum in Nicosia, Republic of Cyprus.

Underwater archaeologists excavating the submerged island of Antirhodos in Alexandria’s ancient harbor have discovered a bronze signet ring engraved with an image believed to depict the Lighthouse of Alexandria — one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.

The lighthouse itself disappeared centuries ago, so surviving ancient representations can offer clues to how people in antiquity pictured this famous monument.

What I find especially interesting is the question of accuracy: were images like this intended to represent the real lighthouse closely, or had it already become a simplified symbol of Alexandria?

Source: European Institute for Underwater Archaeology (IEASM) / Franck Goddio.

Photo: Christoph Gerigk © Franck Goddio/Hilti Foundation

https://www.franckgoddio.org/cn/service/newsletter/detail/new-find-in-the-eastern-port-of-alexandria/

Before 6th century Length 36.8 cm, width 9.05 cm Tomb No 14, Gyerim-ro, Gyeongju Gyeongju National Museum