Most ancient Hebrew biblical inscription deciphered

Professor Gershon Galil of the department of biblical studies at the University of Haifa has deciphered an inscription dating from the 10th century BCE (the period of King David’s reign), and has shown that this is a Hebrew inscription.

Ancient maps – A pocket guide to prehistoric Spain

A nice find, and a nice story: “hunter-gatherers may have had had their own maps. A team of archaeologists have matched etchings made 14,000 years ago on a polished chunk of sandstone in northern Spain to the landscape in which it was found. They claim to have the earliest known map of a region in western Europe – a prehistoric hunting map.

Grim Writing – the Indus Script and Computer Science

Found some interesting stuff on Smithsonian.com and sized it down a little for you guys:

The Indus civilization, which flourished throughout much of the third millennium B.C., was the most extensive civilization of its time. At its height, it encompassed an area of more than half a million square miles centered on what is today the India-Pakistan border. Remnants of the Indus have been found as far north as the Himalayas and as far south as Mumbai. It was the earliest known urban culture of the subcontinent and it boasted two large cities, one at Harappa and one at Mohenjo-daro. Yet despite its size and longevity, and despite nearly a century of archaeological investigations, much about the Indus remains shrouded in mystery. (…) Over the decades, archaeologists have turned up a great many artifacts, including stamp sealings, amulets and small tablets. Many of these artifacts bear what appear to be specimens of writing—engraved figures resembling, among other things, winged horseshoes, spoked wheels, and upright fish. What exactly those symbols might mean, though, remains one of the most famous unsolved riddles in the scholarship of ancient civilizations.

Grim Archaeology – Peruvian Girl Mummies

An interesting article was posted by National Geographic today. It sheds a (tiny) bit of light on the worldview of the Andean people. A tale of mountain spirits and girl mummies: “Many of the 33 mummies uncovered near Chiclayo, Peru, were those of girls—a rarity, experts say. Their throats slit, the girls were probably killed in a bid for agricultural fertility. “Majority of them were sacrificed using a very sharp bladed instrument, probably a copper or bronze tumi knife. And for the majority there are several combinations, a complex set of variations on cutting of the throat.” While mass sacrifice was common in Andean pre-Hispanic cultures, it is rare to find such a large number of sacrificed people together in one place. Another element that made this discovery so unusual was that most of the mummies were females.

Papyrology – Virtually unrolling the Herculaneum scrolls

Exciting news in papyrology! Scientists have acquired a preliminary CT-scan of a complete unopened papyrus scroll from Herculaneum, and are poised to begin acquiring scans at the best resolution and with the best possible contrast, revealing the internal layers and giving hope to the goal of eventually “virtually unrolling” the layers to read the text (!). Next week the team hopes to show a high-resolution slice of the internal structure of a complete Herculaneum scroll.