Old Akkadian love incantation on clay, about 2340 to 2200 BC, from Tell Ingharra at Kish in modern Iraq. Shown from six sides. Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. Catalogued as MAD 5, 8.

The tablet came out of Tell Ingharra, the eastern mound of the sprawling city of Kish in what is now central Iraq, excavated between 1923 and 1933 by a joint expedition of the Field Museum in Chicago and the University of Oxford. The finds were divided between the two institutions, which is how this one reached the Ashmolean. Its precise findspot is unknown, and that is not unusual for this dig. Even by the standards of the day, the expedition’s documentation of provenance was poor, a problem compounded when the principal excavators died within a few years of one another and the Second World War interrupted publication.

What can be established comes from the writing itself. The script is a fine Old Akkadian hand, which places the tablet somewhere in the Sargonic period, roughly 2340 to 2200 BC. Very few incantations survive from that period at all, which makes this one significant regardless of its subject.

The title the scholars gave it

Joan Goodnick Westenholz and Aage Westenholz published the definitive edition in the journal Orientalia in 1977. Their title was direct. They called the article “Help for Rejected Suitors.”

The text’s function follows from that. It is an incantation intended to overcome a young woman’s resistance to a man’s advances. Someone commissioned it, someone recited it, and the intended result was that a named individual’s feelings would be changed against her stated position. It is not a private lament or a poem about longing. It is an instrument, and its target is another person’s will.

This tends to get softened when the tablet circulates online, usually as a warm story about lovesickness before dating apps. The softening is understandable and it is worth resisting, because the accurate version is the more interesting one. A man in the third millennium BC encountered refusal, and the technology available to him for overriding refusal was ritual. He used it, or paid someone to use it on his behalf.

Written in the language of love poetry

The genuinely arresting feature of the text is its register. The composition works through the imagery of a fertile garden, one of the standard figures of Mesopotamian love literature. In Sumerian love poetry and in the Dumuzi and Inanna cycle, the beloved is repeatedly a garden or an orchard, a place of date palms and running water and growing things, while the lover is the one who enters or waters or tends. The same figure reappears more than a millennium later in the Song of Songs, where the woman is a garden enclosed and the man comes into his garden to gather spices.

The incantation borrows that vocabulary. It also dwells on the body with a directness that surprised its modern editors, attending closely to the mouth and to the eyes. One line describes the lips as oil and a harp. Scholars working on the history of intimacy have cited the text precisely because of this attention to the mouth as an object of desire.

The result is a document that sits awkwardly between categories. It is written like a love song and it functions like a binding spell, and Assyriologists have disagreed about which side of that line it belongs on since it was first published. That ambiguity is not a flaw in the text. It is a feature of how this kind of magic worked, using the language of desire in an attempt to manufacture desire.

The gods who enforce it

Mesopotamian love magic draws on a small and consistent set of powers.

Ishtar, Inanna in Sumerian, is the most prominent, goddess of love and war and fertility, associated with the planet Venus, worshipped from at least the Uruk period and eventually across the whole of Mesopotamia. She is also, in the mythology, a figure who responds badly to refusal. When Gilgamesh declines her proposal, she goes to her father and demands the Bull of Heaven be released to destroy him.

Alongside her stand Ishara, a goddess connected with love and with oaths, and Ea, god of wisdom, fresh water, and incantation, the deity you invoke when the magic needs to work. Related Akkadian love charms make the mechanism explicit, with formulas conjuring the target by Ishtar and Ishara, seizing the mouth, the eyes, the body.

The significant detail is that this is oath language. Ishara’s association with oaths matters, because a spell that binds a person by the authority of these gods is not making a request. It is applying the same category of force that made a contract enforceable, and directing it at someone’s private feelings.

A demand that never went away

The Kish tablet is early but far from isolated. Love incantations recur across Mesopotamian history. Claus Wilcke published a group from Isin several centuries later. Robert Biggs edited the corpus known as ŠÀ.ZI.GA, a genre concerned with male potency rather than female consent. Nathan Wasserman has published an Old Babylonian spell that binds love magic to the preparation of kohl, so that the black eye paint carries something with it when the woman looks.

Read as a sequence, these texts document a persistent market. Across two thousand years of literate civilization, someone was reliably willing to write a spell of this kind, and someone else was reliably willing to pay for it.

The demand did not stop at Mesopotamia’s borders either. The Greek magical papyri from Egypt contain numerous binding spells aimed at named women. Theocritus built an entire poem around a woman working love magic on the man who left her. European trial records from the medieval and early modern periods are full of the same material. The Kish tablet is the earliest surviving link in a chain that has never fully broken.

What the tablet does not contain

There is a reading of this object in which it is simply poignant. A young man, an unreturned attachment, a bit of superstition, a moment of recognition across four thousand years.

There is another reading in which the woman at the centre of the text holds a position, that position is refusal, and the object exists to defeat it. She commissioned nothing. She left no tablet. Her name is not recorded and will not be recovered. What survives is his account of the situation, fired into clay and preserved by accident for more than four millennia, while whatever she thought about it went into the ground with her.

Both readings are accurate, and the second is the one that makes the object worth examining carefully. It is small, finely written, and genuinely poetic, and its purpose is to override another person’s will. Mesopotamia left us its law codes and its king lists and its astronomical observations. It also left this, which records something those documents never will.

A note to readers. Ancient Content is written and researched independently, and paid subscribers are what keep it that way.

If these pieces are worth your time, consider subscribing. For a few dollars a month you get:

• A researched piece every day, checked against the primary sources

• Short documentaries, and the full video archive

• The complete written archive

• Notes on what the coverage gets wrong, and why.

Subscribe now

Sources: Westenholz, J.G., and Westenholz, Aa. (1977). “Help for Rejected Suitors, The Old Akkadian Love Incantation MAD V 8.” Orientalia, New Series 46/2, 198 to 219. Kogan, L.E., and Nurullin, R.M., “Old Akkadian Love Incantation MAD 5, 8, Introduction, Translation and Commentary,” Vestnik Drevnei Istorii. Wilcke, C. (1985). “Liebesbeschwörungen aus Isin.” Zeitschrift für Assyriologie 75/2, 188 to 209. Biggs, R.D. (1962). “The ŠÀ.ZI.GA Incantations, Sumerian and Akkadian Love Charms.” Cunningham, G. (1997). Deliver Me From Evil, Mesopotamian Incantations 2500 to 1500 BC. Moorey, P.R.S. (1978). Kish Excavations 1923 to 1933.

It came out of the ground in 1899 and then sat in a drawer

Workers on the University of Pennsylvania’s excavation at Nippur, in what is now southern Iraq, turned it up in 1899. It measures about 21 by 18 centimetres and is a few centimetres thick. Hermann Volrath Hilprecht published a photograph in 1903, and the tablet has been in the Hilprecht Collection at Friedrich Schiller University in Jena ever since, catalogued as HS 197.

The surface was carefully prepared and the lines cut with a steady hand. Numerical measurements run along the walls in the sexagesimal system used throughout Mesopotamia, and place names appear in both Sumerian and Akkadian.

The cartographer left most of the city out

What the tablet records is the skeleton of Nippur in the second half of the second millennium BC. The city walls run in angular segments, pierced by seven gates, each with its name written beside it. Canals and moats frame the settlement. Inside the walls are the temple precinct of Ekur, dedicated to Enlil, the Ekiur associated with his consort Ninlil, a garden, and an enclosure whose function is not clear. The Euphrates appears to one side.

The residential quarters, which is to say most of the city, are largely absent. Attention goes to the defensive circuit, the watercourses and the sacred core, which tells you something about who the document was made for. Oelsner and Stein, who produced the standard edition in 2011, suggest the moat system was included for strategic rather than religious or administrative reasons.

Measurements along successive stretches of wall are given in the nindan, a unit of roughly six metres. Set against modern survey of the site, those figures resolve to a consistent scale of approximately one to nine thousand two hundred.

For seventy years it was read the wrong way round

When the map was properly published in 1905 it was taken to show only the eastern part of the city, and it was printed turned ninety degrees with the Ekur at the bottom. That orientation was chosen because it seemed to match the excavated remains as they were then understood. It did not match them well. Structures on the tablet sat awkwardly against what the trenches had produced, and the map picked up a reputation for being schematic or simply wrong.

Samuel Kramer argued in 1956 that it showed the entire city, and published it again in 1970 with Inez Bernhardt under a title calling it the oldest city map in the world. The question closed in the following decade. McGuire Gibson of the University of Chicago noticed on an aerial photograph that a ridge at the site appeared to coincide with a corner of the city wall as drawn on the tablet. His thirteenth season, in 1975, opened Area WC in the southernmost corner of the city and found fortifications where the clay said they would be. Miguel Civil, the expedition’s epigrapher, went back over the wall measurements and showed they only worked if the map covered the whole city and was oriented as Gibson proposed.

Nobody is certain how they did it

Mesopotamians were accomplished surveyors, and administrative tablets recording field boundaries and house plots survive in large numbers, drawn up for taxation and the management of land and water. The Nippur plan covers a far larger and more complicated area than any of them.

Augusta McMahon, professor of Mesopotamian archaeology at the University of Chicago and director of the school’s Nippur excavations, suggests knotted ropes, measuring rods, and possibly a rudimentary trigonometry for calculating angles. Whatever the method, it would have meant laborious incremental measurement over many days, then patient transfer onto clay.

It may be a plan rather than a record

Nippur had declined badly in the centuries before the tablet was made, and much of it stood abandoned. Then the Kassites took power in Babylonia and set about restoring the old religious center.

Johannes Hackl, professor of Assyriology at Jena, points to a Mesopotamian conception of kingship in which rulers held a duty to build. On that reading the tablet is not a picture of Nippur as it stood but a working document for its reconstruction, which would make it the earliest known urban blueprint as well as the oldest known city map. It is a proposal rather than a demonstration. Nothing on the tablet says what it was for.

Nothing else quite like it has survived

HS 197 remains unique. Smaller fragments of Mesopotamian city plans exist, but none combines topographic accuracy, detailed measurement and urban scale in the same way.

The tablet is still legible after three and a half thousand years. It records the walls and watercourses of a city, and beyond that a decision by particular people to measure the place their gods lived in, and set it down.

Subscribe now

A note to readers. Ancient Content is written and researched independently, and paid subscribers are what keep it that way.

If these pieces are worth your time, consider subscribing. For a few dollars a month you get

• A researched piece every day, checked against the primary sources

• Short documentaries, and the full video archive

• The complete written archive

• Notes on what the coverage gets wrong, and why

Sources: National Geographic, December 2025 issue, "The Oldest Known Map of This Mesopotamian City Is Startlingly Precise." Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures, University of Chicago, Nippur, Sacred City of Enlil, including McGuire Gibson on the Kassite map and Miguel Civil's reading of the wall measurements. Penn Museum, Expedition Magazine, Ancient Cartography. Hilprecht Collection, Friedrich Schiller University Jena.

What they also found was gold. Buckles at her ankles, a headdress covered in plaques, and a face on her forehead that looks like a Greek gorgoneion.

The grave is Burial 11 at the Karakabak-10 cemetery. The study is by A.E. Astafyev of the Mangystau State Historical and Cultural Reserve and E.S. Bogdanov of the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography at the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, published in Archaeology, Ethnology and Anthropology of Eurasia.

The shoes were made for the grave

At her ankles were two shoe straps, each with a buckle of carved wood covered in gold foil and small gold-covered tips at the other end.

The study is clear that these were never walked in. They show no wear, and the excavators take them as objects made specifically for the burial. Whatever they were for, it was not footwear.

A separate gold buckle in the shape of a bird of prey with spread wings also came from the grave. Its style belongs to what archaeologists call the Shipovo horizon, after a site in the Volga region of Russia. Gold shoe fittings of this kind are unusual for the area around the Caspian and Aral seas.

A Greek face on a steppe headdress

The headdress carried dozens of small gold plaques, two carved wooden masks covered in gold at her temples, and a larger gold-covered face worn on the forehead.

That forehead piece resembles a gorgoneion, the head of Medusa used as a protective motif in Hellenistic Greek art and carried east through the Black Sea colonies and the Bosporan kingdom. Comparable masks have turned up in the Volga region and near the Black Sea. The wooden temple masks have no known parallel anywhere.

She may not have been from here

The other graves at Karakabak-10 show what the researchers call Pontic fashion, a style associated with communities near the Black Sea. Burial 11 shows very little of it.

That absence, together with the unmatched temple masks, leads the authors to suggest she may not have been local. The gold itself probably was. They think it was made at a nearby settlement called Karakabak, on the strength of similarities with objects found earlier at Altynkazgan.

Source: Astafyev, A.E., and Bogdanov, E.S. (2026), in Archaeology, Ethnology and Anthropology of Eurasia.

The study is by Sue O’Connor of the Australian National University, with Shimona Kealy, Hendri Kaharudin, Ceri Shipton and colleagues, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Why nobody could put a date on this art

The motif is familiar across eastern Indonesia and the western Pacific. Prominent rocks carry red concentric circles with rays, in a style resembling common representations of the sun, and the tradition is associated with Austronesian-speaking populations.

The trouble has always been chronology. The rocks these images are painted on are far older than the paint, and there is nothing datable in the pigment, so the tradition has been hard to place in time.

A painted slab buried in organic sediment is different. The sediment can be dated, which is how this piece has acquired an age when the rock panels have not.

The claim that the art came before the pottery

Here is what makes the date interesting. If it reflects when the slab arrived on Wetar rather than a later deliberate burial, then the painting tradition reached the island before pottery did.

That is a substantial claim. Pottery is one of the key technologies associated with Austronesian expansion, and it had reached Taiwan from China long before this. O’Connor’s reading is that spreading their art mattered to these voyagers more than carrying even a technology of that importance.

She raises a possible sequence. The explorers, whom she calls argonauts, may have visited islands first with their art, scouting rather than settling, and returned later with pottery once people had established themselves. Whether or not they were carrying pots, the ideas were being taken up where they found suitable islands.

The motifs are painted where they can be seen from the sea

The Austronesian language family covers more than half the world. Linguistics, genetics and archaeology together trace its origins to Taiwan, from where speakers moved into the Philippines, Indonesia, and then across the Pacific and Indian oceans, reaching Rapa Nui in one direction and Madagascar in the other.

The usual explanation for that expansion is an advance in boat technology. None of the early boats survives, so nobody knows what the advance was. Some anthropologists have argued instead that ideas drove it.

The paper sits on that side. Its authors point to the importance of founders in Austronesian culture and the respect accorded to them, which may have pushed people into long and dangerous voyages. The sun motifs are typically painted high on cliffs where they can be seen from a distance, which makes them function as an announcement that representatives of this culture had arrived.

Shipton’s point is that people travelling to new islands were not only carrying technologies and objects. They were carrying ideas, identities and ways of understanding the world.

O’Connor draws a modern comparison, noting how readily people can now be influenced on something like vaccination, and observing that cults and influencers have always had a large effect.

What happened when the ideas arrived

When Europeans reached these islands thousands of years later they brought their own ideology, usually alongside violent conquest. O’Connor says there appears to be little evidence of conflict following the Austronesian expansion, though this cannot be known with certainty. Instead people joined the culture, adopting Austronesian languages, art, technologies and burial practices.

Portable does not mean it was carried anywhere

That the slab is portable does not establish that it was carried to Wetar. O’Connor notes the limestone could be local or could have come from another island. Whether the argonauts carried objects like this on their voyages is not known.

One slab is also a thin basis for an ideology that took root across a very large number of islands. O’Connor considers the team lucky, since they excavated an area of only two meters by one.

The choice of where to dig was not random. The find came beneath an overhang with what she calls a magnificent view of the coast, which suggests a good ocean view has been valuable property for a very long time. The walls of the shelter were themselves covered in Austronesian Painting Tradition art, which O’Connor thinks may have served as a marker visible from the sea.

Source. O’Connor, S., Kealy, S., Kaharudin, H.A.F., Nutman, E., et al. (2026). “4000-Year-Old Painted Plaque From Southeast Indonesia Reveals Austronesian Painting Tradition Preceded Neolithic Pottery.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 123(34).

Read more

It survives in good condition. The object is beige, made of fired clay, and comes in two parts, a handle pierced with a hole, apparently for a cord, and a round working face for stamping. It stands about five centimetres high and the engraved face is roughly six centimetres across.

What is cut into the face

Everything on it is mirrored, which is what you would expect from a working seal, since the impression has to come out the right way round in clay or wax.

The archaeologists have made out a Bactrian inscription, geometric ornament, the bust of a ruler in a toothed crown, mountain goats, symbols of Kushan royal authority, and further signs that may relate to local rulers.

The inscription has not been fully read, and the museum has not settled on an interpretation of the seal as a whole. Its archaeology and numismatics department is still working on the object, so the owner, the precise date and the function are all open questions.

Why the inscription is the thing to watch

Bactrian is an Iranian language written in a modified Greek alphabet, and under the Kushans it became an important language of administration. That makes inscriptions on official objects particularly useful for reconstructing the institutions and titles of the period.

If the text can be read, it may give a name, a title or an institutional affiliation, and with it some sense of whether the seal belonged to a royal official, a local ruler, or someone else within the Kushan system.

The combination of royal symbolism with signs apparently tied to local authority is the other point of interest. It suggests the seal may document something more complicated than imperial power alone, namely the relationship between Kushan rulers and the regional nobility in what is now southern Tajikistan.

Seals, administration and trade

The Kushan Empire began in Bactria and became one of the leading political powers of Central and South Asia in the early centuries AD, eventually holding territory across parts of modern Central Asia, Afghanistan, Pakistan and northern India.

That position placed it inside the trade networks connecting China and Central Asia with India, Iran and, indirectly, the Roman world, and those connections underwrote a period of economic growth and urban expansion under Kushan rule.

The routes now grouped under the name Silk Road were never a single highway controlled by one state. They were a network of caravan tracks, market towns and regional trading chains along which goods passed from one group of merchants to the next, silk, glass, precious stones, metals, textiles, ivory and much else.

In ancient administrative systems, seals authenticated documents, identified officials or owners, sealed vessels and marked goods. If this one can be tied to a particular institution or ruler, it would say something about how authority connected to the movement and accounting of goods. There is no direct evidence yet that this seal was used in trade.

The museum says the object is undergoing archaeological, numismatic and epigraphic study, and that results will be published when that work is finished.

Source. National Museum of Tajikistan

A trawler brought them up from a hundred metres down

An industrial trawler brought them up from about a hundred metres down, roughly 25 kilometres off Taiwan’s southern coast, along with a large quantity of animal bone. The material was acquired by researchers in 2010 from a collection donated by the Taiwanese artist Li-Ren Hou to the National Museum of Natural Science, and some of the bones were recognised as hominin at that point.

During glacial periods when sea levels dropped, the channel was dry land connecting Taiwan to the Asian mainland.

The context is worth being plain about. These fossils came out of indiscriminate trawling, so they arrived jumbled together with no stratigraphy and no record of where on the seafloor any individual bone was picked up. Kaifu’s own paper says as much, that there is no record of when or where in the Penghu Channel each of the leg bones was collected. Nothing establishes that the two individuals were contemporaries, or that either is contemporary with Penghu 1, the mandible identified as Denisovan in Science last year.

One method says 45,000 years, another says 160,000

Radiocarbon on purified collagen from the tibia gives a calibrated age of 45,575 to 44,522 years before present. That is the figure in all the coverage.

Uranium-series dating on the same bone, published by Rainer Grün and Chris Stringer in 2023, indicated an age in excess of 160,000 years. The femur could not be dated by that method at all.

John Hawks, who works on Denisovan material at the University of Wisconsin, calls this a divergence by a factor of four and not a minor difference. His reading is that a radiocarbon age from purified collagen is fairly convincing evidence the uranium modelling was wrong, which has consequences well beyond Penghu, since a great many East Asian fossils are dated by uranium uptake and few can be checked against radiocarbon. The Harbin skull is among them.

The size claim has a sampling problem

The paper’s central argument is that Denisovans in this region were larger than earlier Homo erectus and larger than Late Pleistocene Homo sapiens in eastern Asia, and that this runs against Bergmann’s rule, which predicts body size declining as you move toward the equator. The authors also suggest the large Denisovan brain may follow partly from large body size.

Hawks is sceptical, and his objection is about how these bones came to be in a collection at all. Trawling nets catch larger and thicker elements more readily, and thicker bones survive the process with their morphology intact. A collector sorting through dredged material will pick out the well-preserved pieces, and thin or juvenile bones are less likely to be recognized as anything.

There is also a wider pattern. Hawks has written previously on the sample bias in known Denisovan remains, which are mostly male. Both Penghu individuals are identified as male.

His conclusion is that the sample sizes for groups other than Neanderthals are small enough that he would not make much of these measurements beyond saying the bones are human.

The isotopes put them at the trophic level of carnivores

A companion preprint led by Minoru Yoneda, posted the same day, ran stable isotopes on the same bones. Nitrogen values put the Penghu 3 individual at a trophic level comparable to carnivores, close to what is seen in Neanderthals. The carbon indicates a landscape dominated by C4 plants, which fits a southern coastal setting and differs from the C3 environments of the Neanderthals and of Tianyuan, the early modern human from northern China.

Hawks notes that isotopic composition is not vulnerable to the biases that affect the body-size argument, which may make this the more useful result of the two papers.

East Asia has almost nothing from these millennia

The Denisovan record has a gap. Neanderthals are abundant in the window between 70,000 and 45,000 years ago, so abundant that the term classic Neanderthals exists for them. East Asia has almost nothing from those millennia that can be attributed to Denisovans or to any other archaic human.

If the radiocarbon date holds, Penghu 3 sits directly in that gap and becomes some of the latest direct evidence for Denisovan survival anywhere. Hawks describes this as the major value of the new material, and adds that if collagen survives this well in the tibia, DNA may too, which would tell us considerably more about late Denisovans than anything currently available.

Thanks for reading. Support Independent Ancient Content. Your support helps me create more archaeology posts, articles, and mini history videos:

Sources: Kaifu, Y., Chang, C.-H., Tarusawa, Y., Sawafuji, R., Yonemoto, S., Shimamura, S., Takai, M., Kono, R.T., Sun, C.-H., Tsai, C.-H., Yoneda, M., and Tsutaya, T. (2026). "Denisovan Leg Bones From Taiwan Reveal Large Body Size." bioRxiv, doi.org/10.64898/2026.08.07.743438. Yoneda, M., et al. (2026). "Habitat and Feeding Ecology of a Denisovan From Late Pleistocene Taiwan." bioRxiv, doi.org/10.64898/2026.08.07.743455. Hawks, J., "Legs of the Last Denisovans," 8 August 2026. Grün, R., and Stringer, C. (2023). Quaternary Science Reviews 322, 108379. Tsutaya, T., et al. (2025). "A Male Denisovan Mandible From Pleistocene Taiwan." Science 388(6743), 176 to 180.

It is the same site that produced the large New Kingdom fortress announced last autumn, covering some 8,000 square metres with eleven towers and a southern wall over a hundred metres long. Pottery from foundation deposits there carried the name of Thutmose I.

What the new season found

The mission has located a second fortified enclosure to the east of the first, separated from it by a gap, and has begun exposing its walls and towers. Both structures belong to the same defensive line, which the ministry describes as evidence of successive phases of fortification at the site rather than a single building programme.

The temple is mudbrick and stands within the fortified area. Its plan is being cleared and its relationship to the fortresses established.

The granite block carries the cartouches of Ramesses II. That places royal activity at Tell el-Kharouba in the Nineteenth Dynasty, several centuries after the Thutmoside material from the earlier fortress, and gives the site a documented span rather than a single moment.

Eleven forts between the Delta and Gaza

The Way of Horus, wawt Hr in Egyptian, was the land route between Egypt and the Levant, and the only practical one across northern Sinai. It carried armies and trade in both directions, and the New Kingdom pharaohs fortified it heavily.

Seti I recorded the road on the walls of Karnak, showing his march from Tjaru toward Gaza past a sequence of forts and wells. Around eleven such installations are thought to have lined it. Tjaru itself has been identified with Tell Hebua, and other excavated stations include Tell el-Borg, where a temple of Ramesses II was found in the excavations of 1999 to 2001.

That last point is worth holding alongside the new block. Ramesside temple building on this road is attested elsewhere, so a temple and a royal inscription at Tell el-Kharouba fit a known pattern rather than standing alone.

The road is also the one the Book of Exodus calls the way of the land of the Philistines, described as the shorter route that the Israelites did not take. Coverage of the site last year leaned heavily on that connection. It is worth saying plainly that the identification of the road is secure and everything built on it is not.

No dimensions have been published yet

The ministry has not published dimensions for the second fortress, and the relationship between the two enclosures, whether they were in use simultaneously or one replaced the other, is not yet established. The temple has not been dated independently of the Ramesses block.

Excavation is continuing.

Source: Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities وزارة السياحة والآثار

A study in the Journal of Archaeological Science by Wu Mingming, Hu Ping, Zhai Kai, Wang Quanyu and colleagues offers an answer. The pigment was bound to the rock with blood, and at one of the sites they sampled, that blood was between 97 and 99 percent human.

What the analysis found in the paint

The team had to drill for their samples, which was the first indication of how firmly the paint was attached. What the analysis showed was that the paintings had been laid down in two stages. The artists began with a ground layer, made by burning animal bone, bird droppings, limestone and shell together to produce calcium phosphate and quicklime, then slaking that with water and blood into a mortar. They spread it on the cliff, let it start to set, and painted over it with red pigment made from local clay rich in iron oxide.

The blood was doing chemistry. Its proteins biomineralised the calcium carbonate in the mortar, and biomineralised calcium carbonate is, in effect, limestone. The ground layer became the same material as the cliff it was sitting on, with the pigment particles sealed inside it. Not paint adhering to rock, but paint that had become rock.

The human proportion in the mortar varied. One sample was 61 percent human and 39 percent cattle, with the remainder at the first site made up of one to three percent from various herbivores. When the researchers looked more closely at the human blood, they found prolactin-induced protein and lactotransferrin. Both are close to absent in most people and both rise steeply in women late in pregnancy and in women who are breastfeeding.

That is where the paper moves from chemistry to argument. The Huashan images include copulation scenes, pregnant women and phallic figures, and the Luoyue who painted them are generally described as a matrilineal fishing and hunting society. The authors put those things together and suggest the blood was collected during childbirth and added to the paintings as a fertility rite. The proteins are a laboratory result. What the blood was doing on the cliff is a reading of the pictures.

The cliffs along the Zuojiang

The site itself is enormous. UNESCO inscribed it in 2016 as thirty-eight locations spread over about 105 kilometres of the Zuojiang and its tributary the Mingjiang, holding more than five thousand images in some three hundred groups. The largest panel, at Ningming, runs 221 metres along a cliff 140 metres high, with the paintings sitting between 30 and 90 metres above the water. That height has kept them safe from people as effectively as the blood has kept them safe from rain.

Among the figures are bronze drums, knives, swords, bells and boats, and a great many humans in a squatting posture, the largest such concentration known anywhere. Scholars have read the squatting as ritual, or as an imitation of frogs, which carry fertility associations in the rice-growing cultures of the region. Nobody is certain. Almost nothing survives of the Luoyue apart from this, and UNESCO describes the landscape as the only remaining witness to their tradition.

Thanks for reading. Support Independent Ancient Content. Your support helps me create more archaeology posts, articles, and mini history videos:

Sources: Wu, M., Hu, P., Zhai, K., Weng, X., Wang, Y., Chen, H., and Wang, Q., et al. (2026). "Blood-Induced Biomineralized Calcium Carbonate Used for Binding in the Huashan Rock Art of Guangxi, Southern China." Journal of Archaeological Science 193, 106650. Reported by IFLScience, 14 August 2026. Site details from UNESCO World Heritage listing 1508.

Penn Today spoke to Vanessa Workman, an archaeometallurgist in the School of Arts and Sciences who also works at the museum’s Center for the Analysis of Archaeological Materials, and Alexis North, a museum conservator, about the material and what they are doing with it.

What Egyptian blue is and why making it was difficult

The pigment gets its colour from crystals, and its chemistry is identical to a naturally occurring mineral called cuprorivaite. Workman points out that cuprorivaite is very rare indeed in the earth’s geology, so where you find it, it is almost always synthetic.

Making it means combining a copper-bearing material, silica in the form of quartz sand, an alkali such as plant ash or natron, and calcium carbonate such as limestone, then grinding the lot to a fine powder and firing it in a closed vessel at a controlled temperature.

Workman describes it as the earliest known synthetic pigment, and draws a distinction that matters. People had been throwing yellow ochre into fires to turn it red for hundreds of thousands of years. This is different. This is the first case of craftspeople using pyrotechnology to fundamentally alter the composition of a mixture in order to produce a colour.

The same process yields a green, known as Egyptian green, chemically very similar but with a slightly different crystal structure. North’s point is that the craftspeople had worked out how to adjust the recipe for the shade they wanted.

Nothing comparable appears again for a very long time. Han blue, made by a broadly similar process, comes more than two thousand years later, and Maya blue, made by bonding a clay to indigo, more than a thousand years after that.

Blue is uncommon in the mineral world, and producing it took more work than the other colours in use. As Workman puts it, this was a deliberate piece of thinking, an instance of we want this, how do we make it.

The scale in Iran is the surprise

Egyptian blue was used in Egypt as a paint from about five thousand years ago, and later as a material for small objects like beads and vessels. Most of the blue paint in Egyptian art is Egyptian blue.

What turns up at Hasanlu and Dinkha Tepe is something else. A student project first drew the team’s attention to the quantity of it, and Workman says they realised how much material there was and how unusual that was. In Egypt and the wider Near East people were painting objects with the pigment and making small beads and scarabs. Here there are large furniture legs, vessels, decorative wall tiles, bracelets and anklets.

North notes that identifying the pigment is straightforward, because it luminesces in a way that infrared photography picks up. Photographing anything suspected of carrying traces of it has become standard practice in the museum’s conservation work, and it is easy and non-destructive.

What they are testing for now

With the objects catalogued, the team has moved on to the pigment itself. They are testing for chemical differences, using microscopy to work out production techniques, and looking at what the destruction of Hasanlu did to the material.

That destruction is worth explaining. Around 800 BC the settlement was attacked and burned, its inhabitants killed where they fell, and the site left with an extensive burned layer holding hundreds of skeletons. It is where the Hasanlu Gold Bowl came from, and where the two skeletons known as the Hasanlu Lovers were found. The fire is why so much survives, and it is also something the team now has to account for when reading the pigment’s condition.

They are also looking at isotopic signatures in the raw materials, which could narrow down where those came from and where the objects were made.

The claim that would matter most

If the pigment was made in northwestern Iran, Workman says, it would be the earliest known instance of Egyptian blue being produced outside Egypt.

That is the finding to watch, and it is conditional. How these craftspeople obtained the materials, and where they learned the technique, are both still open.

Workman’s broader argument is that chemical and isotopic analysis gives you tools for studying human mobility and connection, and the history and routes of a technology. People in the past, she says, keep turning out to have moved across much larger distances than anyone assumed.

Thanks for reading. Support Independent Ancient Content. Your support helps me create more archaeology posts, articles, and mini history videos:

Sources: Penn Today, University of Pennsylvania, 11 August 2026, interviews with Vanessa Workman and Alexis North, via Arkeofili. Background on Hasanlu from the Penn Museum’s Hasanlu Project archive and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

It was excavated during the University of Pennsylvania’s Babylonian Expedition, which ran from 1888 to 1900, and it is on display in the museum’s Middle East Galleries.

Nobody agrees on when it was written

Penn dates the tablet to Early Dynastic IIIB, 2500 to 2340 BC.

Other dates circulate. The commonest is 2100 BC with an attribution to the Ur III period, and 2400, 2200 and 2600 all appear in print. The museum’s own catalogue shows where this comes from. The original register entry calls the tablet pre-Sargonic and describes it as a ritual text. A later hand crossed out ritual, wrote in medical text, and added Old Akkadian and Ur III as alternative periods.

Ground to powder, dissolved in beer, applied

Fifteen of them, and none says what it is for. No illness is named anywhere on the tablet.

The ingredients come from plants, animals and minerals. Thyme, mustard, plum, pear, fig, willow, fir and pine appear on the botanical side, along with beer and wine. Turtle shell and water snake are among the animal materials. Salt and saltpetre are among the mineral ones.

The method is consistent. Ingredients are ground to powder, dissolved in beer or wine, and applied. One prescription washes a wound with alkali and oil, which is the chemistry of soap, and is often cited as among the earliest instances of it on record.

There is no magic. No incantations, no gods invoked, no ghosts or demons held responsible for illness. Later Mesopotamian medical texts routinely carry all of this alongside the prescriptions.

Most of what circulates about it comes from gift shops

A quantity of embellishment attaches to this tablet, most of it repeated by sellers of reproductions and by content sites working from them.

The usual version says Penn scholars translated it in 2005 and found cannabis, opium and aloe vera in it, and that it records the first known use of aspirin. Samuel Noah Kramer and the chemist Martin Levey published a translation in the 1950s. The aspirin claim comes from willow bark, which contains salicin, though the tablet does not say what the willow was for and salicin is not aspirin. Identifications of cannabis and opium in Sumerian plant vocabulary are disputed, and a good many of the plant names in these texts have never been identified at all.

Thanks for reading. Support Independent Ancient Content. Your support helps me create more archaeology posts, articles, and mini history videos:

Sources: Penn Museum, object CBS 14221, including the CBS register entry. CDLI P269190. Kramer, S.N., History Begins at Sumer. Levey, M., on Sumerian pharmacology. Penn Museum Bulletin VIII, no. 1 (January 1940), “Nippur Old Drugstore.”

The decision was not a guess. Surface scans and geomagnetic measurements indicate that this part of the mound also holds large public buildings, rectangular-plan structures and huts. That builds on the geophysical campaign run under the Heritage for the Future and Taş Tepeler project, in which teams from Istanbul University, the German Archaeological Institute and Freie Universität Berlin combined geomagnetic mapping, ground-penetrating radar and lidar to detect not only the familiar circular enclosures but rectangular traces that may be early dwellings.

That distinction matters. Göbekli Tepe is famous for its circular enclosures of T-shaped pillars, but the picture emerging now is of a site with houses as well as monuments. Excavations under the project have already exposed rectangular-plan buildings belonging to Göbekli Tepe's second phase, dated to the 8th millennium BC.

Work is running on several fronts at once. Excavation continues in the GT1 and GT2 areas under their two protective roofs, while conservation and consolidation are underway in Structures A, C and D. The final surface fragments of the pillars in Structure C have been returned to place, the walls of Structure D have been reinforced along with the ground fixings of its two central pillars, and steel cabling is being added to protect the pillars against seismic movement. Renewed visitor paths, laid out around the new excavation zones, will open shortly.

Source: T.C. Kültür ve Turizm Bakanlığı (Republic of Türkiye, Ministry of Culture and Tourism)

The work is directed by Sabri Farag, director general of Bahariya Oasis Antiquities, and forms part of the current excavation season. Minister of Tourism and Antiquities Sherif Fathy said the finds add to what is known about the history of the oasis.

A family tomb cut into the bedrock

The first is a collective burial cut into sandstone bedrock, apparently intended for a family of five. Mohamed Abdel Badie, head of the Egyptian Antiquities Sector at the Supreme Council of Antiquities, describes a square shaft about three metres deep with two burial chambers at the bottom.

In the western chamber was a limestone coffin containing a mummy wrapped in linen, set into a hollow cut in the floor. That detail matters more than it appears, since the same arrangement is documented in other Late Period tombs at Sheikh Soby, which is how the tomb is dated.

Two Roman tombs, one with a reception hall

The second tomb is undecorated and reached by a flight of stairs. It is thought to be Roman.

The third is another collective burial, also probably Roman, and its layout is the more interesting of the two. A rectangular shaft leads down into a small hall with no roof, from which two chambers open. The excavators suggest the hall served as a temporary space for receiving the mummy during the funeral, before the body was moved into one of the chambers.

The southern chamber held fragments of a pottery coffin and the eastern one a damaged limestone coffin. Four smaller entrances open off different sides of the shaft, and work at the eastern entrance found a side burial with a cylindrical pottery coffin broken into pieces. Its lid carries a raised human face with the features clearly modelled.

Offering tables and terracotta figures

Qutb Fawzy, head of the Central Administration of Cairo and Giza Antiquities, reports pottery vessels, small bottles and dishes, together with offering tables of limestone and sandstone.

There were also terracotta votive figurines. Some are maternal figures. Others are stylised animals.

Bahariya keeps producing burials

Sheikh Soby holds a cemetery used by the rulers and priests of Bahariya during the Late Period, with the tombs cut into the archaeological mound that gives the site its name. The Temple of Bawiti stands in the same area, built in the twenty-sixth Dynasty for Amasis II.

Bahariya has been producing burials on a large scale since 1996, when the Valley of the Golden Mummies was found nearby, a Greco-Roman cemetery estimated to contain thousands of burials, of which only a fraction has been excavated. Sheikh Soby belongs to the same landscape of oasis burial without being part of that cemetery.

Farag says the mission will continue in future seasons, with the aim of finding further tombs and building a picture of how successive generations in the oasis lived and buried their dead.

Sources: Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities, announcement of 12 August 2026, with statements from Sherif Fathy, Mohamed Abdel Badie, Qutb Fawzy and Sabri Farag.

Read more

The study is by Sonia Alconini of the University of Virginia and Walter Sánchez-Canedo of the Universidad Mayor de San Simón, published in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal. The deposit dates to somewhere between AD 1300 and 1536.

The context is a grain store, not a temple

The building is a qollqa, the circular stone structure used across the Andes for storing crops. That placement matters, because the bells were not alone in it.

They were deposited alongside a small stone carving of an ear of maize, a polished stone, a land snail shell and a stone axe. Taken together, this reads as a deliberate offering rather than a stored object or something mislaid, and the maize carving points at what the offering concerned.

The clappers were chosen to sound different

The variation is the striking part. Six bells of similar form, each fitted with a clapper of a different material, gives a set of distinct tones rather than a uniform chime.

That is a design decision. Copper, shell and stone ring differently against the same body, and whoever assembled this bundle wanted a range of sounds rather than one sound repeated. It suggests the bells were meant to be heard together, and that the differences between them carried meaning.

The comparison Alconini and Sánchez-Canedo draw is with living practice

Dancers in the modern Jalqa and Tarabuco communities of the Sucre region wear bells and spurs, and the metallic sound they make is associated with welcoming a good harvest.

The authors propose that the Yoroma bells worked in a comparable way. Bells, a carved maize cob and a grain store belong to the same set of concerns, and the ethnographic parallel gives a plausible reading of what the sound was for.

The distance between the two is roughly five hundred years, which is a long time for a practice to persist, and the analogy is an argument rather than a demonstration. But the Jalqa and Tarabuco are the descendants of this region’s population, not an unrelated comparison drawn from elsewhere.

Oroncota was a frontier

The valley sits on the eastern slopes of the Andes, along the Pilcomayo River at about two thousand metres. The Yampara had been the principal population there for well over a thousand years when the Inka took the area under Topa Inca Yupanqui, sometime between 1471 and 1493, and turned it into a defensive outpost on the empire’s eastern edge.

Beyond that edge were the Chiriguano, Guaraní-speaking groups who attacked the region heavily during the last years of Inka rule and eventually took control of it.

So this is a provincial site in a contested zone rather than a centre of imperial power, which is Alconini’s long-standing research interest. She has published extensively on how the Inka governed their southeastern frontier, and on what happened to Yampara identity and material culture before and after the conquest.

What the bells say about exchange

Copper bells of this kind circulated over long distances in the ancient Andes, and the paper’s title places them within networks of exchange as much as ritual.

An object that carries both a sound and a source has two things to tell you. Where the metal came from indicates who the community was connected to. What it was used for indicates what those connections were understood to mean locally. At Yoroma the answer to the second question appears to involve the harvest, buried in the building where the harvest was kept.

Sources: Alconini, S., and Sánchez-Canedo, W. (2026). "Sacred Sounds, Exchange, and Copper Bells in the Ancient Southeastern Andes, The Yamparas and Inka Empire." Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 1 to 18. doi.org/10.1017/S095977432610064X.

Read more

The work began in May 2026 and covers the waters between Piombino and the islands of the Tuscan Archipelago, carried out with the Carabinieri cultural heritage protection unit in Florence and the Carabinieri diving unit in Genoa. It is a survey programme rather than an excavation, intended to check the condition of known submerged sites, confirm the positions of objects already catalogued, update the mapping and follow up new reports from the public.

The dolium probably came off a wine ship

Dolia were used in antiquity for storing and moving foodstuffs, above all wine, oil and grain. What makes this one interesting is the type of vessel it is likely to have come from.

Between roughly the first century BC and the first century AD, a particular kind of merchant ship worked the main Tyrrhenian routes carrying wine in bulk. Rather than loading amphorae, these ships had enormous dolia fixed into the hold, effectively tanks, which allowed far greater volumes to be shipped at once. They are known in Italian scholarship as navi a dolia. The characteristics of this vessel and the context it was found in point that way, according to the Soprintendenza.

The hull cannot be dated yet

The second find is about five metres by two. Divers have identified planking, wooden structural elements and a large number of bronze nails, which is enough to establish that it is a boat and not much more than that.

The mucilage covering it, a gelatinous organic film that forms in the water column and settles on the seabed, is the main obstacle. The Soprintendenza is explicit that the state of preservation does not currently permit a firm date, and gives a range from late antiquity through to the medieval period. Other reporting places the chronological bracket wider still, from the Roman era to the Middle Ages.

Whether the two belong together is an open question

They were found in the same area, and it would be convenient if the dolium had come from this hull. There is no evidence for that yet. The dolium points to the Roman period, the hull sits somewhere in a range of a thousand years or more, and nobody has established a relationship between them.

A second campaign is planned for autumn 2026 to cut exploratory trenches, which should narrow the date of the wreck and clarify whether the finds are connected.

Elba sits on a route that has been used for millennia

The island lies just over ten kilometres off the Tuscan coast at the nearest point, with Corsica close by to the west, which places it on maritime routes running between the Italian peninsula and the western Mediterranean. Ships called there, loaded and unloaded, or passed on toward the mainland ports.

The seabed reflects that. The best known wreck is the one found at Procchio in 1967, a Roman merchantman that went down off the northern coast, and material has been recorded at Sant’Andrea, Chiessi, Capo Enfola and around Portoferraio. Deeper water between Elba and Pianosa has produced Roman cargoes at over six hundred metres, investigated by Ca’ Foscari University with remotely operated vehicles.

Navigation here had a specific hazard. The mountain gave shelter to ships close inshore, and that shelter disappeared the moment they left the island anchorages for the channel toward the mainland or turned back into open water.

Valerio Tesi, the superintendent, described the sea of the Tuscan Archipelago as an exceptional deposit of archaeological material, and credited the results to the working relationship between his office and the Carabinieri units involved.

Sources: Soprintendenza Archeologia, Belle Arti e Paesaggio per le province di Pisa e Livorno, reported in Toscana Media News, Livorno Today and Stile Arte, August 2026. Background on deep-water wrecks between Elba and Pianosa from Ca' Foscari University of Venice, 2024 campaign.

Read more

Only two of these were actually excavated. One was recovered by Ofer Bar-Yosef from Nahal Hemar in 1983, a cave above the Dead Sea that also contained basketry, beads, and what is generally considered the oldest known glue. The second came from Horvat Duma, near Hebron.

Both are now in the Israel Museum. One is still designated as the Moshe Dayan specimen because it was donated by him.

The other 13 have a very different story. None were found in archaeological excavations, and most were once part of the private collection of New York collectors Judy and Michael Steinhardt.

The study

For almost a decade, archaeologist and curator of prehistory Debby Hershman at Jerusalem’s Israel Museum has been studying these groups and was the organizer in 2014 of a show that grouped together twelve for the exhibition Face to Face-one of the first times that any of them had all been together in the one space. The stone type and any patination and use were studied by Yuval Goren at Tel Aviv University, who was able to show that all fifteen are from the one area, within approximately 50 kilometers of each other. Given that there is no information about Where the find was made, for one group of artifacts that would be as strong as this project can probably ever yield because it suggests a geographical unity without the input of an excavator’s field information.

3D models were generated by the computer archaeology unit of Jerusalem’s Hebrew University showing that most masks could be comfortably worn on the face of a man.

Portraits of the dead

Hershman’s interpretation is that the masks are portraits of particular individuals. The faces differ from one another, some reading as old and some as young, which she takes as individual likeness rather than a generic type. Many of them, in her words, look like dead people.

On that basis she proposes an ancestor cult, with the masks worn during ceremonies by shamans or tribal chiefs, and notes that masks used in West African ancestor cults today weigh as much or more.

What cannot be checked

There’s no written source to tell us anything about them. Writing only reaches the region several thousand years after these masks were carved.

And for 13 of the 15 masks, there’s very little archaeological context to work with. We don’t know whether they were found in an occupation layer, buried with the dead, or deliberately placed somewhere as a cache. For the masks that came onto the market, we don’t even know where they were originally found.

Their dates are largely based on how closely they resemble the two masks that were actually excavated.

Hershman has also been quite open about the fact that she doesn’t know whether future examples might be found in special buildings or other specific contexts.

The Steinhardt case

In December 2021, Michael Steinhardt handed over 180 looted antiquities, valued at around $70 million, to the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office. He also agreed to an unprecedented lifetime ban on acquiring antiquities.

The investigation, which began in 2017, examined thousands of objects Steinhardt had bought and sold since 1987. Investigators traced many of them through a network of antiquities traffickers operating across 11 countries, including Israel.

Steinhardt was never arrested. He maintained that he had not known the objects he purchased were stolen.

Sources: Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Face to Face, The Oldest Masks in the World, 11 March to 13 September 2014, curated by Debby Hershman. Reporting by the Times of Israel, Live Science, National Geographic and the Biblical Archaeology Society, March to June 2014. Manhattan District Attorney's Office, statement of 6 December 2021, as reported by the Art Newspaper, CNBC and Forbes.

The most crucial graves for the eastern Delta area pertain to the central period from four millennia ago. The Ministry reports they date to the Fifthteenth Dynasty, Seventeenth Dynasty and the dawn of the New Kingdom, which is within the period of the occupation by Hyksos of Lower Egypt where Avaris was their capital. The site is located north east of a short distance.

Hisham Hussein-head of Administration of lower Egypt antiquities stated that the type of domes for the dead tombs at Avaris is also existent here, that a stone construction style adopted by Canaan and not the native Egyptians for tombs but even by Canaan. Another indicative factor made by Mr. Hussein is the existence of the graves located inside a village occupied by residents. The pottery discovered bears markings indicating existence of an occupation and settlement by people from levant.

As found in other ancient Egyptian digs along levant.

The tombs revealed brass swords and tools

As for the village houses it was made of mudbrick and until the start of the New Kingdom it remained functioning, and excavations found grain silos, stoves and places where fires were ignited; the remains of walls, in an Arabic wavy pattern unique to the eastern Nile Delta and covering both human beings tombs and villages also discovered fish, bird and animal remains along with ceramics and stone instruments.

Earlier than the previous graves which are found beneath there, were those that dates back to the Early and Late Egypt in Lower Predynastic at periods referred to to in archaeology as “Buto1” & Buto2” located in the middle of the4th century B.C and built by a round shape excavation in the soil of sand . People’s body was buried inside it with bodies put in different ways, where no things were found except only a small Pottery set of pots or dishes, and stone or flint Tools, as well as animal, plant and other types of species from marine origin, which is evidence for a population that inhabited there and occupied the place more than a thousand years ago before the emergence of Avaris as a city.

The furthest point in terms of history from earliest to latest are Greek and Roman tombs which contained simple holes wherein people were placed inside pottery jars as kids for example which did not belong to a particular era and some Amphora, re-utilized as receptacles for the deceased, which is one discovery.

Hisham El-Leithy, Secretary General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, called Kafr al-Hattaba one of the few sites in the eastern Delta with a continuous record running from prehistory through to the Greek and Roman periods.

Source: Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities of Egypt