While assessing the 100-year-old coffin of the Perth Mummy, Ta-Kr-Hb, for its Conservation in Action: Saving the Perth Mummy installation, the Perth Museum & Art Gallery discovered “painted figures on the internal and external bases of the trough.” The paintings appear to represent Egyptian goddess, Amentet or Imentet, also known as “She of the West” or “Lady of the West.” Researchers suspect “The West” might allude to a geographical location, but it is also “primarily a mythological, supernatural reference.”
Conservators Helena and Richard Jaeschke said:
Although both the mummy and the coffin have suffered badly during the centuries in the tomb, from grave-robbers searching for amulets to flash floods that washed mud and debris onto the painted coffin, they have survived remarkably well and need careful, patient conservation treatment to enable them to survive for many more years and allow everyone to see the beautiful paintwork on the coffin.
Photo: Russian Academy of Sciences Institute of Archaeology / Fair Use
Archaeologists have discovered the remains of four female skeletons in Russia that suggest Amazons were real-life warrior women instead of mythical characters. Members of the Russian Academy of Sciences Institute of Archaeology, while studying a burial mound in Russia’s Ostrogozhsky District, found the remains of several generations of females from the 4th century BCE, according to a news release: one from a girl 12 to 13 years old, and the others from three women with estimated ages of 20 to 25, 30 to 35, and 40 to 50.
The eldest woman was found wearing a well-preserved gold-plated headpiece thought to have belonged to the “richest royal barrows of Scythia.” Other objects and ornaments at the site included “iron arrowheads, an iron hook shaped in the form of a bird, horse harness elements, iron hooks for suspending the reins, iron knives, fragments of molded vessels, [and] numerous animal bones.”
“For a while, people have assumed that myths about the Amazons that the Greeks told were just fantasy,” said Adrienne Mayor, author of The Amazons: Lives and Legends of Warrior Women Across the Ancient World (she was not involved in the research). “Now we have proof that those women did exist and that the lives of those women warriors really did influence the Ancient Greek ideas and visions of what they said about the Amazons.”
American archeologists Jack L. Davis and Sharon R. Stocker from the University of Cincinnati uncovered two 3,500-year-old Greek royal tombs in the ancient city of Pylos. The tombs are between 28 and 39 feet in diameter and “built in a dome-shape structure known as a tholos.”
The discovery allowed researchers to better understand Mediterranean trade during the Late Bronze Age because of the items found inside the tombs, including “gold-lined floors, a golden seal ring, and a gold pendant with the image of the ancient Egyptian goddess Hathor.” According to NPR, the finding suggests Pylos traded with Egypt between 1650 and 1100 BCE.
In November 2019, archaeologists announced they’d found the largest collection of mammoth remains in history. About 800 bones belonging to the prehistoric mammals were discovered in Tultepec, Mexico, during an excavation for a planned garbage dump. Researchers also believe the site contains two “mammoth traps” – the first hard evidence of such devices on record.
According to Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History, the traps consist of “two human-built pits dug 15,000 years ago,” which ancient humans may have herded mammoths into. The pits each measure about 82 feet long and 5.6 feet deep.
Researchers concluded the pits were likely mammoth traps, as some of the bones bear the marks of being hunted. The site also yielded the remains of a horse and a camel, two species that went extinct in the Americas before the modern era.
Photo: Rüdiger Stehn / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 2.0
Archeologists discovered more than 20 ancient Egyptian coffins in the city of Luxor on the west bank of the Nile, in a necropolis called Al-Assasif. Egypt’s Ministry of Antiquities noted in a news release that the multilevel tomb is “one of the largest and most important discoveries” of the last few decades. Each of the colored wooden coffins appears to be fairly well-preserved. They were stacked to create two layers, still closed, and “in a distinct state of conservation” with the inscriptions intact.
The city of Luxor was once the ancient city of Thebes and its ruins were found on Luxor soil. During pharaonic times, kings and noblemen were buried in Al-Assasif. Though the historical period of the tomb is undisclosed, archaeologists have previously uncovered items from the 18th dynasty in Al-Assasif.
Photo: Edwin Henry Landseer / Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain
In 1845, Sir John Franklin led two ships, the HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, on a voyage meant to chart the Arctic. Franklin had participated in two earlier Arctic expeditions, earning the title Commanding Officer. Unfortunately for Franklin, this expedition would prove to be his last.
The ships became stuck in ice – not an unforeseen event for polar explorers, but in this case, unseasonably cold summers meant they were trapped there longer than expected. In 1848, the crew mysteriously decided to leave their ships (which were still full of food) and undertake a desolate 1,000-mile trek to a trading port on Hudson Bay.
Research suggests the explorers may have suffered from a variety of maladies, including tuberculosis, scurvy, hypothermia, and pneumonia, and these might have caused them to become deranged or confused, leading to poor judgment and the decision to walk away from their food stores.
Most shocking of all, cut marks found on several bones from the area suggest that the crew resorted to cannibalism for survival: “not only did the starving explorers cut flesh off the bones of their fallen comrades, they also cracked open the bones to suck out the marrow.”
