Modern geologists and archaeologists have now examined three of the most famous. One turned out to be exactly as the ancient writers described it, and still lethal. One sits on real gas-bearing faults, though what that gas did remains in dispute. And one, it seems, was never an oracle at all.

Strabo threw sparrows into the gate at Hierapolis

Hierapolis in Phrygia, the ancient city above the white travertine terraces of Pamukkale in Denizli province, held a sanctuary called the Ploutonion, sacred to Pluto, lord of the dead.

The geographer Strabo visited around the turn of the era and left a precise account. A small opening, just big enough for a person, led down into the ground. It was filled with a vapour so thick the floor could barely be seen. Any animal that went in died. Bulls led inside collapsed and were dragged out dead, and Strabo threw in sparrows himself and watched them fall. The only ones who could enter unharmed were the Galli, the castrated priests of the mother goddess Cybele. Strabo wondered whether this was divine protection or some antidote. Pliny the Elder recorded the place as well.

For a long time this read like one of the stranger tales in ancient literature.

The cave was found again in 2013 by following a spring

Francesco D’Andria of the University of Salento, who spent decades excavating Hierapolis, found the Ploutonion in 2013 by tracing the course of the city’s thermal spring back to its source.

His team uncovered a temple, a small grotto opening beneath it, and a walled arena in front with stepped seating where spectators could watch the sacrifices. Inscriptions were dedicated to Pluto and Kore, the queen of the underworld. Statues of Cerberus, the three-headed hound who guards the gate of Hades, and of a serpent came out of the ground nearby. Christians destroyed the sanctuary in the sixth century AD, and earthquakes did the rest.

During the excavation, birds that flew too close to the opening dropped dead.

Carbon dioxide at up to 91 percent, and why the priests survived

In 2018 the volcano biologist Hardy Pfanz of the University of Duisburg-Essen published measurements made with Turkish geologists Galip Yüce of Hacettepe University, Ahmet Gülbay of Eskişehir Osmangazi University and Ali Gökgöz of Pamukkale University. Inside the grotto, carbon dioxide reached 91 percent. Gas escaping from its mouth into the arena ran between 4 and 53 percent depending on height above the ground, and at night it reached levels that would kill a person within a minute.

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Proposed dates for the first people in the Americas span more than 100,000 years. The oldest claim rests on Cerutti in California, published in 2017 as a 130,000-year-old site. The youngest widely accepted site is Swan Point in Alaska, at about 14,200 years. A new review from the University of Kansas tests each position against the genomes of ancient Native Americans.

The review, by Bethany Potter, Savannah Hay, Archana Singh and Jennifer Raff of the university's anthropology department, appears in Current Opinion in Genetics & Development volume 101. Potter and Hay contributed equally.

The Clovis First model gave way to older sites

For much of the 20th century, the leading model linked North America’s first inhabitants to the Clovis culture, about 13,500 years old. In this view, people from northeast Asia crossed Beringia and entered the continent through an ice-free corridor near the end of the Last Glacial Maximum. Older sites found later suggested people may have arrived before that corridor opened.

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Egyptian soldiers carrying incense trees back from Punt, from the temple of Hatshepsut at Deir el-Bahari, around 1470 BC. Credit: Σταύρος, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons

The lost continents of the last piece were invented in the nineteenth century, by a zoologist, a misread codex and a novelist’s imagination. Ancient writing is full of fabulous places too, lands of gods, eternal life and impossible wealth, and most of them have stayed on the page.

A few have not. Dilmun, Punt and Troy were each treated for a long time as places of legend, and each has since been found, or traced, on the map.

Dilmun was a paradise where no lion killed and no one fell ill

In the Sumerian myth of Enki and Ninhursag, Dilmun is a pure land at the beginning of things. The raven does not cry, the lion does not kill, the wolf does not take the lamb, and no one complains of a sick eye or an aching head. Enki, god of fresh water, makes sweet water rise from the ground to bring it to life.

In the Sumerian flood story the gods grant the survivor, Ziusudra, eternal life and settle him in the land of Dilmun, where the sun rises. For a Sumerian reader, Dilmun was where the world was new and where death could not reach.

It was also a place you could sail to. Around 2500 BC Ur-Nanshe, king of Lagash, recorded that ships of Dilmun brought him timber from foreign lands. Two centuries later Sargon of Akkad boasted that ships from Dilmun, Magan and Meluhha moored at the quay of his capital. Merchants’ archives from Ur list copper, pearls and goods bought through Dilmun’s traders.

Bahrain fits the myth down to its springs

In 1879 a British officer, Captain Edward Durand, found a basalt stone in a mosque on Bahrain carrying a cuneiform inscription that named Inzak, a god known from Mesopotamian texts as the lord of Dilmun. Henry Rawlinson, who had helped decipher cuneiform, identified Dilmun with Bahrain the following year.

The proof came with a Danish expedition that began work in 1953, led by P. V. Glob with Geoffrey Bibby, who told the story in Looking for Dilmun. They excavated the great tell at Qal’at al-Bahrain, a temple at Barbar, and hundreds of stamp seals in a distinctive local style.

Then there are the tombs. Between about 2200 and 1750 BC the island’s inhabitants built burial mounds on a scale found almost nowhere else. The 21 sites inscribed by UNESCO in 2019 hold some 11,774 of them, and the original total ran far higher. Among the largest are the royal mounds of A’ali, where inscribed stone vessels name a king, Yagli-El, servant of Inzak.

The geography even explains the theology. Bahrain is an island of fresh water in a salt sea, with springs that rise from the seabed offshore, and its Arabic name means two seas. A land where sweet water wells up from beneath the salt was a natural home for Enki’s paradise.

Punt was the Egyptian land of incense and gods

Punt appears in Egyptian records from the Old Kingdom onward. The Palermo Stone records an expedition under the pharaoh Sahure, around 2480 BC, that brought back tens of thousands of measures of myrrh. Egyptians sometimes called it Ta Netjer, the land of the god.

The most famous voyage belongs to Hatshepsut, around 1470 BC. Five ships sailed for Punt, and the reliefs in her temple at Deir el-Bahari show what they found. Houses raised on stilts among palm trees, incense trees dug up whole and carried in baskets to be replanted in Egypt, cattle, ebony, gold, panther skins and baboons. The ruler of Punt is named as Parahu, beside his wife Ati, carved with an unusually heavy body that has made her one of the most recognisable figures in Egyptian art.

For centuries the question was where any of this was. Proposals ranged from Arabia to Somalia to India.

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The paper, by Sue Kelly of the Czech Institute of Egyptology at Charles University and Crystal Miller of the University of Bucharest, appears in Prague Egyptological Studies volume 36. It concludes that Meretneith, also written Merneith, held the serekh reserved for rulers and began her political life as Djer’s co-regent.

Petrie first took her for a king

The story begins at Abydos. Flinders Petrie thought he had found a new king, Merneit, when he excavated tomb Y in the royal cemetery, even though the name on the royal stela lacked a serekh. Further inscriptions of the name with a feminine ending led scholars to identify Meretneith as a queen consort.

Her tomb is one of the reasons the debate never closed. Tomb Y measured 16.5 by 14.0 metres and 2.7 metres deep, with eight narrow chambers around the burial chamber, and Petrie remarked that it was the most carefully built in the cemetery. The surviving limestone stela, now in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, gives her name with Neith’s crossed arrows and shield, the hoe and the mouth sign, but no serekh and no title.

Emery’s stoppers carried four serekhs

At Saqqara tomb S3503, the stoppers lay on a shelf and around the mouth of the tomb shaft. Each impression showed four serekhs in a line, three together and a fourth after a noticeable gap. Emery recognised the first and fourth as Djer’s and noted that the other two carried a different name and lacked the Horus falcon. Stone vessels inscribed with Meretneith’s name lay beside the sarcophagus and in the burial chamber.

Emery did not interpret the middle serekhs in his 1954 report. In 1961 he described them as Meretneith’s serekhs topped by Neith’s crossed arrows and suggested she might have been Djer’s successor. Several scholars accepted the reading. Peter Kaplony argued in 1963 that the published sealing was unconvincing, and his objection prompted the new study.

The evidence has since shrunk. The stopper and Emery’s original glass plate are both missing, leaving only the black-and-white print in the Egypt Exploration Society archive and Emery’s line drawing.

A scanned photograph stands in for the missing artefact

In September 2022, staff of the Egypt Exploration Society made high-resolution scans of the print on an Epson Perfection V700 flatbed scanner. The authors corrected the contrast in Adobe Lightroom and exported the result as a TIFF file.

They first tried DStretch, a decorrelation tool widely used on rock art. Because it works on colour differences, its usefulness on a black-and-white print was limited, so the team kept its results as a baseline for comparison. The main method used Photoshop. A high-contrast threshold mask separated the raised impression from the clay surface, the background was removed and the colours inverted, and the result was converted into a vector drawing. The authors liken the output to a charcoal rubbing and consider it far more accurate than a hand drawing.

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The enhanced serekhs show a doubled hoe sign

In the first serekh beside Djer’s, the name compartment shows the hoe sign, read mr, written twice. Its form closely matches other inscriptions of Meretneith’s name, though it sits at a slight angle. The emblem above this serekh matches the Neith traces Emery recorded, and the authors reject Silke Roth’s earlier suggestion that it was part of a falcon.

The third serekh is less clear. It again appears to have a doubled hoe, but the figure on top does not look like the Neith symbol. Roth had said in 1997 that the legs and belly of the royal falcon could be made out on Emery’s photograph, and the new illustration appears to confirm her. The authors call the idea of a first known female Horus serekh tempting but remain cautious.

The authors argue spelling varied for every early ruler

The main objection to Emery’s reading was that the doubled hoe differs from how Meretneith’s name is written elsewhere. Kelly and Miller survey her inscriptions and find no standard form. Some add a mouth sign, some a feminine ending, and her name runs vertically or horizontally in either direction. The one constant across all her inscriptions is the hoe sign, the sign doubled in the serekhs.

Kings’ names were just as unstable in this period. Jochem Kahl identified 15 different writings of Narmer’s name. Djer’s flax-bundle sign varies even within a single seal, and Anedjib’s heart sign appears with four blood vessels in one serekh and seven in the next. On this basis, the authors conclude that little argument remains against attributing the serekh to Meretneith and read the Neith emblem as the female counterpart of the Horus falcon.

The authors read the seal as a co-regency with Djer

No other known seal impression places two rulers’ serekhs side by side. The authors compare it with two ivory labels that Günter Dreyer read in 2021 as naming Narmer and Aha together, and with a contested year label from Qaa’s tomb showing the serekhs of Semerkhet and Qaa. They conclude, in their own words, that the first stage of Meretneith’s career was as a co-regent, following earlier proposals by Peter Schulze and Jean-Pierre Pätznick.

Her family ties remain uncertain. Scholars generally consider her Djer’s daughter, the successor of Djet and possibly his wife.

Seals from Den’s tomb at Abydos name her king’s mother

A later stage appears on necropolis seal impressions from the tomb of her son Den at Abydos. In both main reconstructions, by Werner Kaiser and by Günter Dreyer, the seal lists early rulers and ends with Meretneith bearing the title mwt nswt, king’s mother. She is the only person named without the funerary god Khentiamentiu before her. Kaiser explained this by her status as queen regent. Vivienne Callender and Pätznick instead suggest she was the living author of the seal, acting while Den was a minor.

Her memory lasted. A necropolis seal from the reign of Semerkhet, found by the German Archaeological Institute, still lists her. Qaa’s seal leaves her out.

Inscriptions link her name to the treasury

Several stone vessel fragments pair Meretneith’s name with royal institutions. Three from her tomb point to authority over the treasury, including a British Museum fragment, a bowl in Chicago’s Oriental Institute Museum and a piece recovered by Christiana Köhler’s team, which has been re-excavating her tomb since 2020. The authors read these as evidence of her active power, while noting that they give her no title.

Köhler’s team found hundreds of large wine jars in the tomb, some still sealed with their original stoppers. The University of Vienna described the complex as including the tombs of 41 courtiers and servants. Kelly and Miller, citing Petrie, count 49 subsidiary graves and chambers.

Other Egyptologists dispute the serekh reading

The serekh interpretation remains contested. Eva-Maria Engel of Humboldt University in Berlin, who was not involved, examined the enhanced images and told Smithsonian she does not think Meretneith appears among the names, while agreeing she was powerful. Kelly and Miller’s paper had listed Engel’s 2021 study among the works that accept the reading.

Other evidence also cuts both ways. Some scholars take the missing serekh on her stela as proof that she was a regent, not a ruler. Kelly and Miller answer that Djet and Den had both reigned since her time with Djer, which may explain the change. A funerary enclosure in Abydos’s North Cemetery, 66.5 by 25.5 metres, is attributed to her by David O’Connor and Laurel Bestock, while Kaiser and Toby Wilkinson assign it to Den.

Kelly and Miller propose a career in stages

The paper’s broader hypothesis divides her career by evidence type. The serekh marks a co-regency with Djer, the Abydos seals a later role as regent king’s mother for Den, and the treasury inscriptions her direct authority over officials. Citing radiocarbon modelling by Michael Dee and colleagues, the authors estimate she held power for at least 30 years. They suggest she could step on and off the platform of rulership as circumstances required. The final report from Köhler’s excavation at tomb Y has yet to be published.

Sources:

1. Kelly, S. and Miller, C. (2026). “New technology illuminating ancient evidence. Re-evaluating Meretneith’s serekhs and political position.” Prague Egyptological Studies 36, 28 to 49. Licence CC BY-NC-ND 2.0. http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11956/212321

2. Emery, W. B. (1954). Excavations at Sakkara. Great Tombs of the First Dynasty II. London, Egypt Exploration Society.

3. Emery, W. B. (1961). Archaic Egypt. Baltimore, Penguin Books.

4. Petrie, W. M. F. (1900, 1901). The Royal Tombs of the First Dynasty I and II. London, Egypt Exploration Fund.

5. Kaplony, P. (1963). Die Inschriften der ägyptischen Frühzeit. Wiesbaden, Harrassowitz.

6. Roth, S. (1997). “Königin, Regentin oder weiblicher König?” In Gundlach, R. and Raedler, C. (eds), Selbstverständnis und Realität. Wiesbaden, Harrassowitz, 99 to 123.

7. Dreyer, G. (1987). “Ein Siegel der frühzeitlichen Königsnekropole von Abydos.” MDAIK 43, 33 to 43.

8. Kaiser, W. (1987). “Zum Siegel mit frühen Königsnamen von Umm el-Qaab.” MDAIK 43, 115 to 119.

9. Köhler, E. C. et al. (2023). “A Preliminary Report of New Archaeological Fieldwork at the Tomb of Queen Meret-Neith of the 1st Dynasty at Abydos, Umm el-Qaab.” Ägypten und Levante 33, 75 to 144.

10. Dee, M. et al. (2013). “An absolute chronology for early Egypt using radiocarbon dating and Bayesian statistical modelling.” Proceedings of the Royal Society A 469 (2159). DOI 10.1098/rspa.2013.0395

11. University of Vienna (9 October 2023). “5,000-year-old wine for Egyptian queen.” Press release. https://medienportal.univie.ac.at/en/media/recent-press-releases/detailansicht-en/artikel/5000-year-old-wine-for-egyptian-queen

12. Smithsonian Magazine (1 October 2026). Coverage of Kelly and Miller, with comment from Eva-Maria Engel. Via Arkeofili, “Kraliçe Merneith Mısır’ı Tek Başına Yönetmiş Olabilir,” 2 October 2026. https://arkeofili.com/kralice-merneith-misiri-tek-basina-yonetmis-olabilir/

An Old Babylonian student exercise tablet with the name of the god Urash copied in repeated lines. Credit: Cuneiform tablet: student exercise tablet. Babylonian, Old Babylonian period. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 86.11.251.

The study, by Shana Zaia of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, was published online in the journal Iraq on 24 September 2026.

Schools met in teachers’ homes

Zaia’s starting point is that Babylonia had no separate subject called religion. Religious content ran through many genres and entered the curriculum according to how difficult each text was, so even schools located in temple complexes were not primarily religious institutions.

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An apkallu with cone and bucket, from the palace of Ashurnasirpal II at Nimrud, ca. 883 to 859 BC. Apkallu-figure with Armlets, Assyrian, ca. 883–859 B.C.E. Gypsum stone, pigment. Brooklyn Museum, Purchased with funds given by Hagop Kevorkian and the Kevorkian Foundation, 55.145. Photo: Brooklyn Museum, CC BY.

Layard uncovered the reliefs at Nimrud in 1845

The story starts on the Tigris. Austen Henry Layard began excavating at Nimrud in November 1845, believing he had found Nineveh. The site was actually Kalhu, capital of the Assyrian king Ashurnasirpal II, who ruled from 883 to 859 BC. Layard’s two-volume Nineveh and Its Remains appeared in 1848 and 1849 and became an immediate bestseller.

Ashurnasirpal’s North-West Palace is the earliest surviving Assyrian royal residence, and its gateway figures and reliefs caused a sensation in the West when they were found. Ashurnasirpal was the first Assyrian king to decorate his palace extensively with carved stone, a practice his successors followed.

The winged figures are apkallu, protective sages

Museums that hold these reliefs identify the figures consistently. The Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge describes its winged man as an apkallu, meaning “sage”, one of several benevolent semi-divine beings believed to counsel and protect the Assyrian king. Images of apkallu were placed near the entrances to rooms in the palace to ward off evil spirits.

An eagle-headed apkallu with cone and bucket, from Ashurnasirpal II's palace at Nimrud, ca. 883 to 859 BC. Apkallu-figure, Assyrian, ca. 883–859 B.C.E. Gypsum stone, pigment. Brooklyn Museum, Purchased with funds given by Hagop Kevorkian and the Kevorkian Foundation, 55.149. Photo Credit: Brooklyn Museum

The Fitzwilliam’s figure holds a banduddu, a pail, and a mullilu, a sprinkler, from which he dispenses water for purification. He wears a horned crown, a sign of divine status. Apkallu appear in several forms. Some are winged men, some have eagle heads, and some wear a fish cloak.

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For perhaps thousands of years, local Cappadocians retreated underground when enemies approached. Their subterranean city was rediscovered by accident. Credit: Yasir999, CC BY-SA 4.0

A basement wall opened the site in 1963

The modern history of Derinkuyu begins with a house renovation. A resident’s work on his home in 1963 exposed a dark passage, the first of more than 600 entrances that open into the underground city from houses in the town. Türkiye’s Ministry of Culture gives the complex an approximate depth of 85 metres, with stables, cellars, dining halls, churches and a place for boiling molasses. It opened to visitors in 1965, and only about ten percent of it can be visited today.

Water was built into the design. A 55-meter ventilation shaft connected to the surface also served as a water well.

Published depths and level counts vary between sources

Popular accounts often describe Derinkuyu as 18 storeys deep and able to hold 20,000 people. Official and survey figures are more modest. Measured by its 52 ventilation shafts and wells, the depth ranges from 40 to 85 metres, and the eighth floor consists of a single small chamber with a ventilation shaft.

The most detailed independent mapping comes from Roberto Bixio of the Centro Studi Sotterranei in Genoa and Ali Yamaç of the OBRUK Cave Research Group in Istanbul. They describe a network beneath the modern town on at least five overlapping levels reaching about 45 meters, divided into radial sectors that are mostly inaccessible today under the masonry houses. The two best documented sectors alone contain more than 2.5 kilometres of passages, and the total is certainly much greater.

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Lemuria, Kumari Kandam and Mu usually travel together. Books and videos treat them as three names for the same drowned homeland, a vast land in the Indian or Pacific Ocean whose survivors carried civilization to the rest of the world.

Each of the three has a traceable origin, and they turn out to be very different things. One began as a scientific hypothesis about lemurs. One is a genuine strand of ancient Tamil literature. One came from a misreading of a Maya book. They merged in the twentieth century, and underneath all three lies a drowned world that is real.

Lemuria began as a zoologist’s answer to a puzzle about lemurs

In 1864 the British zoologist Philip Sclater published a short paper called The Mammals of Madagascar. He was troubled by a pattern in the fossil record. Lemur-like primates appeared in Madagascar and in India, and he could find no trace of them in the lands between.

His solution was a land bridge, a continent in the Indian Ocean connecting the two, since sunk. He named it Lemuria, after the animals it was meant to explain.

For a scientist of the 1860s this was a reasonable idea. Continental drift had not been proposed, and land bridges were the standard way to explain why related species turned up on separate landmasses.

An 1876 map illustrating the supposed location of Lemuria and the hypothetical dispersal routes of the "12 varieties of men" from their alleged Lemurian origin across the globe. Credit: Public Domain

Occultists turned it into a homeland of lost races

The idea did not stay with zoology for long. In 1868 the German biologist Ernst Haeckel suggested Lemuria might be the cradle of humanity, a lost paradise where the first humans had evolved and from which they spread.

In 1888 Helena Blavatsky, founder of Theosophy, made it far stranger. In The Secret Doctrine, Lemuria became the home of the Third Root Race, giant beings who lived long before Atlantis. Her follower William Scott-Elliot published The Lost Lemuria in 1904, complete with maps.

By the early twentieth century a hypothesis about primate fossils had become a spiritual history of humanity.

Tamil literature already remembered a land taken by the sea

Here the story changes character, because this part rests on genuine ancient texts.

The Silappatikaram, one of the great Tamil epics, composed in the early centuries AD, mentions in passing that the cruel sea swallowed the Pahruli river and the many-peaked Kumari mountains in the south. The Manimekalai, its companion epic, tells how the port city of Puhar was swallowed by the sea after its king neglected the festival of Indra.

Then there are the Sangams, the legendary academies of Tamil poetry. A commentary on the Iraiyanar Akapporul, written down around the eighth century, says the first Sangam met in a southern Madurai for 4,440 years with 549 members including gods, and the second at Kapatapuram for 3,700 years. Both cities, it says, were lost to the sea. The third Sangam met at the present Madurai, where the surviving classics were composed. A later medieval commentator, Adiyarkkunallar, described the lost land as divided into 49 territories between the Pahruli and Kumari.

"Lemuria" in Tamil nationalist mysticist literature as Kumari Kandam, connecting Madagascar, South India, and Australia, covering most of the Indian Ocean. Credit: CC BY-SA 3.0

The name Kumari Kandam itself comes from the fifteenth-century Kandapuranam, where it refers to a portion of the world rather than a sunken continent. The historian Sumathi Ramaswamy, in The Lost Land of Lemuria, traced how Tamil writers in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries fused these older traditions with Sclater’s Lemuria, producing a Tamil homeland stretching toward Madagascar and Australia, the cradle of Tamil language and culture.

The fusion was modern. The memory of a southern coast taken by the sea is old.

Mu came from a misreading of a Maya book

In 1864, the same year Sclater named Lemuria, the French priest and antiquarian Charles Étienne Brasseur de Bourbourg set out to translate a Maya codex, then called the Troano Codex and now part of the Madrid Codex.

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Those few lines grew into one of the largest bodies of literature attached to any biblical figure, and over the past century scholars have traced where much of it came from. The trail leads to Babylon, to a king who ruled the city of the sun god before the flood.

A whole library grew out of four verses

By the third century BC a substantial collection of writings had formed around Enoch, now known as 1 Enoch. In its opening section, the Book of the Watchers, two hundred angels descend on Mount Hermon, take human wives, and teach metalworking, weapons, cosmetics, sorcery and the reading of the stars. Their offspring are giants, the earth fills with violence, and the flood follows. Enoch stands in the middle as the man the fallen angels ask to plead for them.

Another early section, the Astronomical Book, lays out the movements of the sun, moon and stars and argues for a calendar of 364 days. The Book of Jubilees, from the second century BC, calls Enoch the first human to learn writing.

The collection survived complete only in Ge’ez, the classical language of Ethiopia, where it remains part of the Ethiopian Orthodox canon. Europe learned of it when the Scottish traveler James Bruce brought manuscripts home in 1773. It was never entirely forgotten elsewhere, since the New Testament letter of Jude quotes it directly. In 1976 the scholar Józef Milik published Aramaic fragments of Enoch from Qumran Cave 4, and they confirmed the oldest sections go back at least to the third century BC.

In Jewish mysticism he becomes Metatron

Later tradition went further still. In the work known as 3 Enoch, Enoch is carried up to heaven, his body turned to fire, and he becomes Metatron, the highest of the angels, even called the lesser YHWH.

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It is tempting to look for that upheaval in the oldest writing we have. Sumerian king lists, Egyptian temple texts, Plato, Tamil epics and Norse myth all speak of floods, lost lands and a world that ended once before. Some of those threads lead back toward the Ice Age. Others turn out to be far younger than they look, and a few were invented in the nineteenth century.

The Sumerian King List counts its early kings in units of 3,600

The best copy is the Weld-Blundell Prism in the Ashmolean Museum, a clay prism about twenty centimetres tall inscribed on four sides around 1800 BC. Herbert Weld Blundell bought it on the antiquities market in 1922, and it is said to come from Larsa.

It opens with kingship descending from heaven to Eridu and lists eight kings in five cities before the flood. Alulim reigns 28,800 years, Alalngar 36,000, En-men-lu-ana 43,200, down to Ubara-Tutu at 18,600. Then comes a single line saying the flood swept over, and kingship descends again, this time at Kish.

The numbers repay attention. 28,800 is eight units of 3,600, the sar, the great round number of Sumerian base-sixty arithmetic. 36,000 is ten sars and 43,200 is twelve. These are schematic counts, the way a scribe expresses immense age, and after the flood the reigns shorten step by step through Etana at 1,500 years into ordinary human spans.

The Babylonian priest Berossus, writing in Greek around 280 BC, gives ten kings before the flood and a total of 432,000 years, which is 120 sars. Genesis also has ten generations from Adam to Noah, with Adam at 930 years and Methuselah at 969. The parallel is real and much studied, and what it shows is a shared Mesopotamian literary pattern, a vast age before the flood and a shortening after it.

Egypt’s king lists begin with gods, and the totals are calendrical

The Turin King List, a papyrus from the reign of Ramesses II now in the Museo Egizio, is the one Egyptian list that runs back past Menes. It broke badly when it was shipped to Italy in the early nineteenth century and has been reassembled since. Its opening lists gods, then spirits and the Followers of Horus, then human kings.

A later tradition attributed to Manetho, the Egyptian priest who wrote in Greek in the third century BC, gives a grand total of 36,525 years. That is 25 times 1,461, the length of the Sothic cycle over which the Egyptian civil calendar drifted back into line with Sirius. Like the Sumerian sars, it is a number built from astronomy.

The Edfu Building Texts describe an island of the egg, a serpent enemy, and divine builders called the Shebtiw who carried the art of temple building to Egypt. They are genuine and remarkable. They are also carved on a temple built between 237 and 57 BC, and the Egyptologist Eve Reymond published them in 1969 as a Ptolemaic theology of how temples came to be. They preserve older ideas at more than nine thousand years’ distance from the end of the Ice Age.

The sea did rise, and some people remember it

This is the strongest part of the case, and it deserves more attention than it gets.

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The excavated tomb at Bir el-Shaghala in the Dakhla Oasis, with its stone entrance at the centre and the mudbrick pillars of a later shrine in front. Credit: Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities

A stone doorway in Egyptian style

Fourteen steps lead down to the entrance, which is built of sandstone and cut in sunk relief with hieroglyphic texts, spells and funerary recitations for protection.

Mohamed Abdel Badie, head of the Egyptian Antiquities Sector, calls the doorway unique at Bir el-Shaghala. An Egyptian cavetto cornice crowns it, decorated with the winged sun disc and two cobras, and below that runs an architectural element shaped as a bundle of reeds.

The lintel carries a funerary scene the cemetery has not produced before, showing the seventh hour of the Amduat, the book of the underworld that follows the sun god through the night. Inscriptions run down both sides of the doorway with texts and scenes relating to the couple. The entrance was found closed by a stone slab bearing an Osirian figure surrounded by spells.

Beyond it lies a transverse hall of mudbrick with a vaulted roof, part of which has collapsed on the western side. Two mudbrick burial chambers open to the right, plastered over, and the pyramid rises above them.

The carved sandstone entrance at Bir el-Shaghala, with the winged sun disc on the cornice and the seventh hour of the Amduat on the lintel. Credit: Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities

Nineteen lines of Greek verse for a judge

Sami Dardiri, head of the Central Administration for Middle Egypt Antiquities, describes the second find, fixed to the southern wall of the pyramid.

It is a rectangular stone slab finishing in a gable, with a sun disc carved in raised relief at its centre. The text is written in red ink in ancient Greek, a funerary elegy of nineteen lines composed for a man named Psichtes. Preliminary study suggests he held the position of a judge.

The elegy dates to the late third and early fourth centuries AD. Dardiri presents it as evidence of a literary and cultural life running in the oases under Roman rule, in a language and a form imported from elsewhere, on a monument built in Egyptian style.

The stepped approach to the tomb at Bir el-Shaghala, leading down to the stone entrance. Credit: Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities

What else came out of it

Mohamed Ibrahim, director general of New Valley antiquities, reports a sandstone offering table set above a purification basin of the same material, a range of pottery vessels, and a bronze coin carrying a relief portrait of the emperor Constantine.

The tomb also appears to have been reused later. A mudbrick chapel was built above the main entrance, with a funerary shrine in front of it supported by four square mudbrick pillars.

A sandstone offering table set above its purification basin, from a newly uncovered Roman-period pyramid tomb at Bir el-Shaghala, Dakhla Oasis, Egypt. Credit: Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities

The cemetery served the capital of the oasis

Bir el-Shaghala is one of the burial grounds of Mut, the oasis capital, known in antiquity as Mothis. The modern name comes from a well on the site. Excavation by the Supreme Council of Antiquities began in 2002 and has uncovered tombs of varied plan and architectural style across successive seasons.

The pattern running through them is mixture. Egyptian forms sit alongside Ptolemaic and Roman elements. Some tombs have an open courtyard, which in others becomes a staircase flanked by altars, probably for rites performed in the open air. Several carry an upper storey with a funerary shrine beneath a pyramid.

Inside, an antechamber leads to burial rooms, some holding stone and pottery coffins, with vaulted ceilings built of sandstone or of mudbrick made from local clay. Walls and ceilings carry scenes and texts drawn from the Egyptian books of the underworld, set beside Greek and Roman elements.

Hisham El-Leithy, secretary general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, locates the value of the find there, in what the architecture and the texts say about funerary practice and religious life in Dakhla under Rome.

Sherif Fathy, Minister of Tourism and Antiquities, described the oases as holding evidence of the succession of civilisations across Egyptian history.

Source: Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities, announcement of September 2026.

The single burial in trench L09-65, beside Special Building A at Göbeklitepe. The white lines in panel C reconstruct the position of the body, flexed on its left side facing east. Credit: Gresky and Clare, PLOS ONE 2026, CC BY. Photographs J. Gresky, orthophoto B. Waszk, German Archaeological Institute.

Nine hundred and twenty-eight bone fragments with no context

Since excavation began in 1995, human bone has been coming out of Göbeklitepe in pieces. The assemblage now runs to 928 fragments, mostly unrelated to one another, from males and females of every age.

They turn up in the fill of the monumental buildings and in the soil between the structures, scattered across three thousand square meters of the main excavation area and through every stratigraphic layer to a depth of several meters. Most were found singly. None could be assigned reliably to individuals.

Cranial fragments outnumber postcranial ones, 408 against 283.

Two explanations, one of them attractive

The first is that somebody put them there. Secondary and tertiary burial practices are well documented across Neolithic eastern Anatolia, and Göbeklitepe already has evidence of deliberate treatment of the dead. Gresky’s 2017 work identified deep incisions running along the midline of crania, now recognised on five individuals, which she and colleagues described as a previously unknown form of skull cult.

The iconography points the same way. Pillar 43 in Special Building D carries a headless human figure. Stone heads have been found detached from statues. Sculptures from Nevalı Çori and Karahantepe show animals and birds gripping human heads. Corvids, which scavenge, appear in the animal bone at Göbeklitepe at four times the frequency recorded at other sites of the period, which has been read as a possible trace of excarnation in the open.

The neighbours reinforce it. At Sefertepe a skull was set into the floor plaster of a niche, and a small cell now called the skull chamber held at least twenty-one skulls placed on their bases with nearly all facing southeast. Çayönü Tepesi has its Skull Building, with around seventy skulls in its later phases. At Karahantepe some seventy fragments show cutting, incising, scraping and burning. At Sayburç, crania and long bones from at least nineteen individuals were found on and in front of a stone bench in a dwelling, some burnt.

The second explanation is duller. Burials placed under house floors higher up the mound slid downhill and ended up in the fill.

The site and the two burials, with the collective grave in panels C and D and the scattered bone fragments from the building fill in panels E and F. Credit: Gresky and Clare, PLOS ONE 2026, CC BY. Photographs E. Küçük, C. Lelek-Tvetmarken and J. Gresky, German Archaeological Institute, Göbeklitepe Research Project.

What the two burials look like

The first came to light in 2017 during construction of a drainage channel for the shelter that now covers the main excavation area. A kidney-shaped pit had been cut through the plaster floor of a rectangular building, and it held at least three people and possibly four.

Almost nothing remained in place. The crania had been gathered in the southeastern corner, the postcranial bones piled toward the centre, some long bones laid along the western wall. Only the lower part of one left arm survived in anatomical position, resting on an older plaster floor beneath.

The three are a woman of at least thirty-five, a man of twenty to thirty, and a girl of eleven to fourteen. Gresky and Clare read the arrangement as sequential use. Complete bodies went in, were pushed aside to make room for the next, and were tidied once more before the grave was closed. The presence of hand and foot bones shows whole bodies rather than prepared remains, and no cut marks appear anywhere.

The second burial was found in 2012, sealed again for want of time, and excavated in 2022. It lay against the eastern wall of a small space immediately west of Special Building A. A young woman had been placed flexed on her left side, facing east, on a layer of fist-sized stones with no cut pit around her.

The fragmentation happened in the ground

This is the part that settles the argument, and it turns on unglamorous evidence.

Both burials show the same alterations found across the scattered assemblage. Heavy postmortem fragmentation, with the ends of the long bones broken off and missing. Calcareous deposits covering most surfaces, which in this soil penetrate the bone and crack it apart, and which affect large bones worst. Rodent gnawing. Serrated fracture edges from soil pressure.

Because the second burial is a clear primary inhumation that was never moved, those changes must have occurred inside the grave. The breakage is not somebody smashing bones.

That similarity supports the erosion reading. Buildings higher on the mound held subfloor burials, slope slides carried the deposits down into the hollows where the special buildings sit, and the bones arrived mixed and broken. An uneven scatter across three thousand square metres is what that process produces.

The distribution argues against deliberate placement on its own terms. Anyone depositing selected bones would concentrate them somewhere, and skull fragments at Göbeklitepe are mixed with postcranial bone from both sexes and every age group.

The temple reading keeps receding

Göbeklitepe spent two decades being described as a ritual centre without significant permanent occupation, largely following Klaus Schmidt. That interpretation has been under revision for years as evidence for dwellings and domestic activity accumulated throughout the sequence.

Burials under house floors are ordinary practice across the Pre-Pottery Neolithic in Anatolia and the Levant, and finding them here is another mark in the domestic column. Gresky and Clare say as much directly.

What stays open

The paper does not claim erosion accounts for everything, and the authors are careful about it.

The incised crania remain unexplained by slope movement, and they cannot yet be assigned to the earlier or later phase of the site. The corvid numbers are still unusual. The practices at Sefertepe, Karahantepe, Sayburç and Çayönü are real and nearby.

What has changed is the default. The scattered bone no longer needs a ritual explanation, because a geological one now fits the evidence. Anything else at Göbeklitepe has to be argued for on its own.

Source: Gresky, J., and Clare, L. (2026). "First Burials Give Insights Into Mortuary Rites at Göbeklitepe, Early Neolithic Türkiye." PLOS ONE 21(9), e0358979. Open access under CC BY. Excavation directed by Necmi Karul, with the General Directorate of Cultural Assets and Museums and the Şanlıurfa Museum.

Professor Cenker Atila of Sivas Cumhuriyet University leads the team, which began work on 28 June. Preliminary findings are expected within a few months and a full report in 2027.

What the formation is and where it sits

Durupınar lies in the Tendurek Mountains above the Uzengili valley, at about 1,980 meters, roughly 29 kilometres south of Mount Ararat. It measures around 160 meters from end to end and 48 meters at its widest, with one end pointed and the other rounded, and raised flanks that crest above the surrounding slope.

A Turkish army captain named İlhan Durupınar noticed it in aerial photographs taken in 1959, and the site carries his name. From 1977 the American amateur explorer Ron Wyatt promoted it as the Ark, claiming petrified ribs, iron fittings and stone anchors.

The dimensions are the reason the identification began. Genesis gives the Ark as 300 cubits long, and whether the formation matches depends on which cubit value is used, since ancient cubits range from roughly 45 to 52 centimeters.

The scans and what they are said to show

Noah’s Ark Scans, a California group led by Andrew Jones, has worked at the site since 2019 with partners including Ağrı İbrahim Çeçen University, Istanbul Technical University and Andrews University. They ran ground-penetrating radar in 2019, electrical resistivity tomography in 2021, and soil dating in 2022.

In August they released results from a three-dimensional radar system built by Khosrow Bakhtar, which produced volumetric images rather than the profile slices earlier equipment gave. The team reports angular structures reaching six meters down, a central corridor running about 71 meters, tunnel-like features roughly four meters below the surface and two meters high, and right angles at seven meters. Jones describes the pattern as possible support beams and walls arranged across three levels.

Soil samples taken in September 2024 and analyzed that December showed elevated organic matter and potassium, and carbon levels around 40 percent higher inside the formation than outside it. The team reads that as a possible chemical trace of decayed wood.

The geological explanation has been on the record for thirty years

The published case against the identification is specific rather than dismissive, and it comes from Lorence G. Collins, an emeritus professor of geology at California State University, Northridge.

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The study appears in npj Heritage Science.

Codex Arundel MS 263, folio 36-recto. Credit: British Library Board

A page otherwise given over to flowing water

The drawing is on folio 36 recto of the Codex Arundel, a bound collection of Leonardo’s loose sheets held at the British Library as Arundel MS 263. The volume covers hydraulics, geometry and a scatter of other subjects.

Carlo Vecce, one of the leading specialists on Leonardo, dates the sketch to the artist’s second stay in Florence. Those were years in which Leonardo was thinking hard about water, including the scheme to divert the Arno, and the rest of the page is taken up with notes on fluvial dynamics. The beetle is the only thing on it that has nothing to do with rivers.

A female Meloe, probably from the Florentine lowlands

Leonardo drew it carefully enough for two specialists to name it five centuries later.

Oil beetles of both sexes have no flight wings, short wing cases and a swollen abdomen, and the form of the antennae marks this one as a female. Two Meloe species live in the part of Tuscany where Leonardo was working. One is confined to the Alps and the Apennines. The other, Meloe proscarabaeus, also ranges through the lowlands around Florence, and Bologna and Zilli take it as the likelier match.

The name oil beetle comes from the insect’s defense. When disturbed it bleeds an oily yellow fluid from its leg joints, and that fluid carries cantharidin, the compound that raises blisters on skin.

Detail of the Meloe beetle depicted in Codex Arundel, MS 263, folio 36r. Credit: British Library Board

Why draw a wingless insect at all

Leonardo’s notebooks are full of insects, and nearly all of them fly. Dragonflies, bees, wasps and butterflies feed into his long study of wing mechanics and his designs for flying machines.

He did draw a few that stay on the ground. There is a crab, some worker ants, and what researchers now take to be Morimus asper, a flightless longhorn beetle common in Tuscany. The Meloe joins that short list.

Bologna and Zilli set out three possible reasons for it. He may have noticed the beetle in the grass during fieldwork and drawn it from plain curiosity. He may have wanted a flightless insect to set against the flying ones he was studying, the same instinct behind the longhorn beetle. Or he may have known exactly what the beetle was for. The first two can sit together.

Two thousand years of cantharidin

The third possibility is the one the paper explores most fully.

Cantharidin comes from two related beetle families, and cultures in China, Peru, South Africa and the Mediterranean all put it to use independently for at least two thousand years. It served as an aphrodisiac, an anti-inflammatory and a treatment for warts and tumours, and in larger doses as a poison.

In Greek and Roman medicine its use as a male stimulant is recorded by Hippocrates, Aristotle, Dioscorides, Pliny the Elder and Galen. It stayed in Italian folk medicine through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance and on into the nineteenth century. The species most tied to the practice is Lytta vesicatoria, still called Spanish fly, though Meloe was used too.

What cantharidin actually does is inflame the urinary tract, and the effect people mistook for arousal came from that irritation. It is dangerous in small quantities and has killed a good many of the people who took it.

Leonardo had the book, and the interest

Vecce notes that Leonardo owned a copy of the Hortus Sanitatis, an early printed encyclopedia of natural history published in Mainz in 1491 by Jacob Meydenbach. Its section on animals describes blister beetles as both irritants and aphrodisiacs.

The subject also fits Leonardo’s wider notes. He wrote and drew in detail about the anatomy of the penis and the part blood flow plays in erection, in the Windsor collection at folio 2 verso, and elsewhere he set down an aphrodisiac recipe, in the Codex Atlanticus at folio 482 recto.

The authors leave the question open

Bologna and Zilli choose not to settle on one explanation. A single isolated drawing on an unrelated page carries too little context to decide it, and Meloe is an unusual insect for anyone to sketch.

Their point is a wider one. Following the most plausible leads from one small beetle opens other overlooked corners of the notebooks, and adds to the picture of a mind that found almost everything worth recording.

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Sources: Bologna, M.A., and Zilli, A. (2026). “On Leonardo’s Choice to Depict a Wingless Blister Beetle Producing a Sexual Stimulant.” npj Heritage Science 14, 407. doi.org/10.1038/s40494-026-02896-8

The altar of Temple 4 at Kition and its two ship graffiti, traced in black on a photogrammetric model. Credit: Model and drawing by T. V. Manolova, from Braun et al., International Journal of Nautical Archaeology, 2026. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.

In 2024 Graham Braun of the University of Cincinnati and Caroline Barnes of the University of British Columbia pointed a terrestrial laser scanner at the same wall. They were recording ashlar masonry, the dressed stone blocks, for a wider study of Late Bronze Age building on Cyprus. The ships came out of the data unannounced.

Barnes says they had not expected to find them at all. The study, written with Tzveta Manolova, who had been recording the site’s graffiti separately by photogrammetry, is published in the International Journal of Nautical Archaeology.

One temple block at Kition in five laser scan renderings, with two newly identified ships marked in the tracing above. Credit: Scans and drawing by G. C. Braun, from Braun et al., International Journal of Nautical Archaeology, 2026. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.

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The fort belongs to the chain of garrisons Ramesses II maintained along the western frontier, watching for Libyan raids and later for the Sea Peoples. Earlier seasons at the site produced a ceremonial cow burial and a bronze sword carrying the pharaoh’s cartouche. This is the first campaign to uncover the living quarters street by street.

The settlement was planned

Hisham el-Leithy, secretary general of the Council, describes a large mudbrick complex with a main street about four meters wide running east to west, crossed by a second street that leads to the fort’s limestone southern gate.

The team reads that grid as deliberate planning rather than a settlement that accumulated around a garrison. Rooms within the complex held grain silos and cylindrical ceramic ovens. Mohamed Abdel-Badei, head of the antiquities sector, says some rooms north of the main street served as wheat stores, and large jars recovered from them still contained charred grain.

Nearby stand three stone wells inscribed with the titles of Ramesses II, found in previous seasons.

View of the archaeological excavations. Image credit: Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities

The horse was buried with care

The animal is a young male, and preliminary study suggests a medium-sized, fast breed of the kind used for military training or for drawing chariots.

What marks it as an honorary burial rather than a disposal is the intact posture, the position of the head and the evident attention paid to the arrangement. A few metres away the team recovered cylindrical pieces of alabaster and limestone, probably decorative fittings from a chariot harness.

Two stelae and a Libyan captive

Khaled Abdel-Ghani Farhat, director of Beheira antiquities and supervisor of the dig, reports a limestone stela fragment carrying a hieratic inscription naming Merneptah, son and successor of Ramesses II, who reigned from 1213 to 1203 BC. The text compares his strength to Set and invokes Ptah. Farhat describes it as without precedent in the region.

A second limestone stela, in hieroglyphs, carries the birth name, coronation name and Horus name of Ramesses II. A third fragment shows a bound prisoner identified as a Meshwesh Libyan.

That detail carries an irony the garrison could not have seen coming. Less than three centuries after Ramesses II died, a Meshwesh chief named Sheshonq I took the Egyptian throne and founded the Twenty-second Dynasty.

What the soldiers kept

Scarabs from the site name Ramesses II and Seti I, along with Amun, Sekhmet, Ptah and Set. Amulets take the form of a fish, a lotus, a cobra, a baboon and the nefer sign.

The rest is domestic. Storage and cooking pottery, vessels for perfume and oil, loom weights, fragments of mills and mortars, balance weights and personal ornaments. Among them is a pilgrim’s flask associated with the cult of Abydos, the Osiris sanctuary far to the south, carried by somebody stationed at the other end of the country.

What has not been established

Neither the ministry nor the team has said which phase of the fort’s occupation the residential district and the horse burial belong to, or whether they connect to the cow burial and the sword from earlier seasons. Work on the fortress plan and its place in the New Kingdom’s western defensive network continues.

Source. Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities, September 2026.

It measures about 6.6 by 7.7 centimeters and carries lines from Book 12 of the Odyssey.

The passage is the cattle of the sun

Circe had warned Odysseus to keep away from Thrinakia, the island of Helios. He and his crew landed there anyway, after surviving Scylla and Charybdis, and he agreed to it on the condition that no one touch the cattle.

A month of storms followed and the food ran out. Eurylochus and the men killed and ate the sacred herd. Helios demanded redress, and Zeus destroyed the ship, drowning everyone aboard except Odysseus.

De Kreij’s own assessment is that the Odyssey contains a good many dull stretches, and that this is not one of them.

It came from a pocket-sized book

The parchment belonged to a codex made in Egypt in the third or fourth century AD, probably in the Fayum oasis, small enough to carry. Around thirty comparable fragments are known.

De Kreij suggests it survived because it sat in the middle of the book, protected by the pages on either side. How it ended up inside a collection of Egyptian texts is not known. Utrecht bought the material in the middle of the twentieth century, among early Christian manuscripts.

He found it in 2024. The full study appears shortly as a book, Hieratic, Demotic, Greek, and Coptic Texts in the Utrecht University Collection.

The reverse of the parchment fragment, about 6.6 by 7.7 centimeters, mounted between glass with a scale bar at right. The catalogue label reads Utrecht Papyri Gr. Ms. 66.39. Credit: Utrecht University

The second Homeric find this year

In the spring, archaeologists in Egypt recovered papyrus fragments of the Iliad from inside a Roman-period mummy.

Both epics were composed in the late eighth or early seventh century BC, the Iliad on the ten-year war at Troy and the Odyssey on the ten years Odysseus spent getting home to Ithaca.

Sources. Utrecht University. Live Science, 16 September 2026.

Mieza is the site where Aristotle is said to have taught the young Alexander. This year’s work, led by Angeliki Kottaridi, focused on the eastern side of the complex, where the palaestra meets the Didaskaleion, the house of teaching. There the team found the classrooms, rows of stone benches still facing where a teacher would have stood.

Next to them stood a three-room building of more than 160 square metres, built around a central vestibule flanked by two andrones, the men-only dining halls of the Greek world. Both keep their mosaic floors, and the raised platforms show each hall held ten couches, so at least twenty guests reclining at once. The students studying alongside Alexander were learning to host and attend symposia with the same ceremony practised at court.

The comparison with Aigai carries real weight. It suggests Mieza was not an ordinary school but a building raised to palace standard, quite possibly by the same craftsmen who worked for the Macedonian kings.

Archaeologists carefully cleaning the mosaic in the northern portico. Credit: Hellenic Ministry of Culture

What earlier seasons found

Systematic excavation began in 2024. By 2025 it had produced four bronze writing styluses linked to the wax-tablet exercises of Aristotle’s students, and fragments of Panathenaic amphorae, the containers for the sacred olive oil awarded at Athens. The largest feature remains the xystos, a two-storey covered colonnade nearly 200 meters long where students ran laps under cover.

The Aristotle link is a hypothesis

Worth stating plainly. The connection to Aristotle’s actual lessons rests on later literary sources, chiefly Plutarch, who places the tutoring at a nearby Sanctuary of the Nymphs rather than inside the gymnasium. Identifying this building as the classroom is supported by the dating, the scale, the quality and the proximity to Pella, but it is not documented certainty.

What is certain is the ending. The Romans dismantled the gymnasium after the second Battle of Pydna in 148 BC, which ended Macedonia as an independent kingdom. The demolition debris and a later fire buried the plaster and floors, which is why they survive nearly intact twenty-one centuries on.

Source. Hellenic Ministry of Culture, September 2026.

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The red line marks Dogger Bank, which is most likely a moraine formed in the Pleistocene . Image credit: Public Domain

A study published in PNAS in March 2026 makes a different argument. Doggerland was not a corridor people passed through. It was a place with forests on it, thousands of years earlier than anyone expected, and it may have been one of the reasons northern Europe was habitable at all during the coldest part of the last Ice Age.

The work was led by Robin Allaby at the University of Warwick with Vincent Gaffney at Bradford and colleagues at St Andrews, Glasgow and the Smithsonian, as part of Europe’s Lost Frontiers, the largest directed archaeological project ever mounted on the drowned landscapes of the North Sea.

What is actually down there

Doggerland occupied what is now the southern North Sea, connecting eastern Britain to the Netherlands, northern Germany, Denmark and northern France. It was exposed repeatedly through the Pleistocene whenever sea levels dropped, and the name is generally used for its last phase, from the Late Pleistocene into the Early Holocene.

The sea took it back between roughly 10,000 and 7,000 years ago, breaking it first into low islands and then covering it entirely. The drowned surface is called the Dogger Littoral.

It was named after Dogger Bank, which was named after the doggers, the Dutch fishing boats that worked there. Those boats are also how anyone first knew something was underneath. Trawlers kept hauling up mammoth bone, antler and, in 1931, a barbed harpoon point out of a lump of peat.

Doggerland drowning in four stages, from a continuous landmass at 10,000 years ago to open sea by 7,000. The Southern River, the system the study sampled, is marked in red. Credit: Allaby et al., PNAS 2026, CC BY. Figure adapted from Walker et al., 2020.

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Ötzi's digital twin, with the photogrammetric skin above and the CT-derived skeleton below. Credit: South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology and Arc-Team

Ötzi is kept at minus 6.5 degrees and 99 percent humidity, in a cold cell at the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology in Bolzano. Those numbers reproduce the glacier he came out of, and they are what stop his tissues drying out, losing mass or growing anything.

They also make him very difficult to photograph, because the conditions leave him under a protective layer of ice with wet skin beneath it, and both reflect light in a way that defeats the software used to build 3D models. Solving that problem is most of what the new paper in Heritage is about.

The work was done by Arc-Team, a small archaeological company in Cles, led by Luca Bezzi with Alessandro Bezzi, Rupert Gietl and Cicero Moraes, working with the museum, the radiology department at Bolzano hospital and a forensic pathologist from Munich. The artefacts were surveyed in 2022, the mummy in 2023 and 2024, and the paper was published on 26 August.

One of the three archaeologists photographing Ötzi in the sterile laboratory chamber. The shoot ran for nearly six hours. Credit: South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology and Arc-Team

Why ice is hard to photograph

Structure from Motion works by finding the same point in many overlapping photographs and calculating where it must be in space. It assumes surfaces scatter light evenly in all directions, which most things do.

Ice and wet skin do not. They reflect specularly, throwing back bright highlights that move as the camera moves. The software sees a feature that appears to be in a different place in every frame, and the reconstruction falls apart.

The team had solved this before, on a project photographing Hellenistic gold in Taranto, by working in a blacked-out room with a single polarised light source. That was not available here, because the laboratory chamber could not be darkened and its lighting could not be filtered.

So they built the light instead. A ring LED with a custom polarising filter cut from high-efficiency sheet, matched by a second polariser on the camera lens. The ring overwhelmed the ambient lighting, the crossed filters removed the glare, and what reached the sensor was diffuse reflection only.

The scan happened in a gap in the conservation schedule

Getting to him took some arranging.

The survey was slotted into a window during a microbiological inspection, when the mummy had been partially defrosted so meltwater could be sampled. That thinned the ice layer, which happened to be ideal for scanning, and the work had to finish before the routine misting with sterile water that counteracts his ongoing weight loss.

Access ran through a decontamination room into a Class 10,000 cleanroom with ultraviolet germicidal irradiation. Equipment and personnel were sterilised. Three archaeologists rotated through a shoot lasting nearly six hours, working two at a time, while the chamber was brought back down to minus 6.5 degrees.

None of them touched him. All handling was done by Oliver Peschel, a forensic pathologist from Munich, and Martina Tauber, a pathologist at Bolzano.

They took 1,294 usable photographs, 640 of the front and 654 of the back.

Digital models of the Iceman's clothing and equipment, from the bearskin cap at top left to a shoe at bottom right. Credit: South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology and Arc-Team

He was not in the same position for both halves

This is the part that surprised them, and it only became apparent afterwards.

Between the front survey and the back survey, his posture had changed. The right hand had moved about five centimetres and the left about one. Minimal handling, especially during the partial defrosting, is enough to shift a body that has been frozen for five thousand years.

That broke the processing pipeline, which assumes a rigid subject. The fix was to stop treating him as one object. They cut the model into four segments, the torso with head and left arm, the left forearm and hand, the upper right arm and the lower right arm, processed each separately and reassembled them.

The same problem then appeared at a larger scale. The CT scan they wanted to merge with the surface model had been taken at Bolzano hospital in 2021, and by 2023 his limbs were no longer where the scan said they were. So they took the skeleton apart digitally, disarticulating the knees, the shoulders and the joint between the skull and the first vertebra, producing five blocks that could be realigned against the new surface.

The bearskin cap needed a different technology entirely

Most of the equipment scanned adequately, the quiver, the axe, the belt and pouch, the loincloth, the shoes, the leggings, the coat and the bow.

The bearskin cap did not. Dense overlapping fur is the sort of thing photogrammetry either turns to noise or smooths into a blank surface, and neither was acceptable.

They ran the same photographs through a Neural Radiance Field instead. Rather than building a surface from points, a NeRF trains a network to answer what colour and density exist at any coordinate seen from any angle, which handles fur because it never has to decide where the surface is.

The result is two records of the same object doing different jobs. The photogrammetric model is measurable and simplified. The NeRF model is not measurable but captures what the cap actually looks like.

The reason for all of this is monitoring

The output is a web application, built on an open-source framework called 3DHOP, that lets a researcher anywhere slice the model along three axes or fade the skin away to reveal the skeleton underneath. It is the first time CT data and a photogrammetric twin have been fused this way.

But the paper is clear that the display is secondary. The plan is to repeat the survey roughly every seven years and compare the results, looking for micro-dehydration, small losses of volume from water still sublimating inside the chamber, surface damage from handling, or early signs of biological change. Quantifying that is how you find out whether the preservation regime is working before anything visible goes wrong.

There is also something CT cannot do. Tomography records density, not colour, so Ötzi’s 61 tattoos are invisible in it. They show up only in photographs.

Luca Bezzi’s framing is that the value lies in integration rather than resolution, that this is the first time the outer surface and the internal anatomy have sat in a single model. The museum’s director, Elisabeth Vallazza, puts it as documenting condition with unprecedented accuracy while keeping the object out of harm’s way.

The paper’s own phrase for it is an ethical proxy. Every future examination that happens on the model is one that does not happen on the body.

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Sources: Bezzi, L., Bezzi, A., Gietl, R., Moraes, C., Vallazza, E., Guareschi, E.E., Tauber, M., Peschel, O., Pernter, P., and Putzer, A. (2026). “Preserving the Past, The 3D Documentation of Ötzi, the Iceman Mummy, and Its Archaeological Context.” Heritage 9(9), 339.