A 2018 satellite image of northeastern Afghanistan, near the border with Tajikistan, showing the outline of Ai-Khanoum. Credit: Google Earth.

Today the settlement is known as Ai-Khanoum, or Oyxonim, but its original name has been lost to history. The city sits in Takhar Province in Afghanistan’s northeast, between the Amu Darya and Kokcha rivers, surrounded by fertile farmland.

Two zones, and Greek influence everywhere

Little survives of the ancient city today, but archaeologists have identified two distinct zones. A lower city, dominated by an extensive palace complex, held administrative buildings, an arsenal, a gymnasium, several temples, and a large, open-air theater. Above it stood a fortified upper city, an acropolis serving primarily defensive functions. From the architecture to the artwork to the very layout of the settlement, the imprint of ancient Greek culture is unmistakable throughout.

The city was inhabited for a relatively short span, from the late fourth century BC to the mid-second century BC. By 145 BC, it had been abandoned. Local nomadic groups, seizing on internal troubles within the ruling empire, sacked this remote outpost and drove its inhabitants into the surrounding hills.

Artifacts excavated at Ai-Khanoum, on display at the National Museum of Afghanistan in Kabul. Credit: Ninara via Flickr.

Whose city was it

Given its dating, some once suspected Ai-Khanoum was a creation of Alexander the Great, a product of his relentless campaigns across Asia. Most scholars now believe instead that the city was founded during the reign of Seleucus I, who ruled from 305 to 281 BC and established the Seleucid Empire, Alexander’s successor state stretching from southeastern Europe to the borders of India.

A popular story holds that the site was discovered in 1961, when Afghanistan’s last king, Mohammed Zahir Shah, noticed the outline of a city while out hunting in the region. In fact, evidence of an ancient settlement here was first identified back in 1925, by French archaeologist Jules Barthoux. It would take until 1963 for another French researcher, Daniel Schlumberger, to establish that the site’s character was distinctly ancient Greek.

The city was investigated through a series of excavations by the French Archaeological Delegation in Afghanistan, but progress stalled in 1979 following the Soviet invasion. Instability has continued ever since, through the Afghan Civil War of the 1990s and the American-led invasion that began in 2001, bringing excavation work to a standstill.

Today Ai-Khanoum has been thoroughly plundered by looters and left in a state of neglect, seemingly forgotten once again.

A crossroads that brought both riches and ruin

Ai-Khanoum reveals just how rich and unusual this ancient land’s history actually was. Sitting at the crossroads of Asia, the region’s mountain passes formed a vital route for the Silk Road, carrying the flow of goods and ideas between China, India, Persia, and the Mediterranean world for thousands of years.

That same strategic position brought the region no shortage of trouble. Across millennia, it became a place fought over and repeatedly passed between a remarkable succession of empires, the Achaemenid Persians, Alexander’s Macedonians, the Kushans, the Sasanians, the Arabs, the Mongols, and the Mughals, to which should be added the modern empires that have tried, and failed, to claim it for their own.

An ancient Greek city thousands of kilometers from the Aegean Sea might seem strange at first glance. But for Afghanistan, it is only one detail in a very long and remarkable history.

Sources. IFLScience (July 10, 2026); Bernard, P. (1982). "An Ancient Greek City in Central Asia." Scientific American, 246(1), 148 to 159; La Brújula Verde, "Ai-Khanoum, the Lost Greek City in Afghanistan"; Wikipedia, "Ai-Khanoum."

The Grave of an Ancient God Found Near Sikachi-Alyan in Russia’s Far East. Image credit: Khabarovsk Krai Today

The meaning of that mysterious rite is still to be deciphered, but the find is already being described as unique, the first time a petroglyph has ever been discovered underground.

The discovery was presented publicly at the conference “Russia and China, History and Prospects of Cooperation,” held in Blagoveshchensk and continued across the border at universities in the Chinese cities of Heihe and Mudanjiang. The gathering drew specialists well beyond archaeology, including physicians, physicists, chemists, and economists from leading institutes in Moscow, Saint Petersburg, and other cities, along with Chinese colleagues. A report titled “A Ritual Complex of the Early Iron Age in the Sacred Landscape of Sikachi-Alyan” drew keen interest from the scientific community of both countries, according to Evgeny Chernikov, head of the archaeology department of the Khabarovsk Regional Center for the Protection of Historical and Cultural Monuments.

The cluster of stones uncovered in the test pit near Sikachi-Alyan, part of a mound-like ritual structure raised in the early Iron Age. Photo Khabarovsk Regional Center for the Protection of Historical and Cultural Monuments.

They stumbled over a stone

The story began in the autumn of 2025, during the routine work of defining the boundaries of archaeological heritage sites. As often happens in science, the breakthrough came entirely by accident. The archaeologists literally tripped over a boulder protruding from the ground. Looking closer, they saw parallel cut marks on its surface, an unmistakable sign of human modification, since no animal is capable of making such traces.

Where it all began. The stone in the forest, the carved boulder on the shore, and the site that connects them, near Sikachi-Alyan on the Amur. Credit: Khabarovsk Regional Center for the Protection of Historical and Cultural Monuments.

The strange boulder proved to be only the first piece of the puzzle. The team opened a test pit and, within a small area, uncovered a whole heap of stones piled together. The stones had probably been carried up from the riverbank, where the famous basalt boulders of Sikachi-Alyan lie, including one on which previously unknown images were identified not long ago. As the excavation continued, it became clear that the heap had once been part of a surface structure resembling a burial mound. At its base lay a dark, humus-stained patch, the trace of a hearth. And at the bottom of the hearth pit, among a cluster of small stones, the archaeologists found a fragment of an anthropomorphic image pecked into stone.

A Neolithic face in an Iron Age fire

Here the history takes its strange turn. The fragment belongs to a mask-face, or lichina, of the type famous at Sikachi-Alyan, and dates to the Neolithic, making it at least 4,500 to 5,000 years old. The hearth, however, turned out to be far younger. Radiocarbon analysis of charcoal from its fill showed that the fire went out about two thousand years ago, in the early Iron Age. The carved image, in other words, ended up in the fire at least two millennia after it was made.

The sequence the archaeologists reconstruct is remarkable. The image was moved from the riverbank into the forest, painted with red pigment, burned in a fire, and a mound of boulders was heaped up nearby. As Chernikov stressed, there is no practical reason to burn a stone. What the evidence points to is symbolic action.

The ritual complex at Malyshevo Settlement-1 under excavation. Field photographs of the trench beside an annotated 3D plan showing the collapsed stone structure, the raised stonework with its hearth pit, the fragment of a carved figurative image in yellow, and scattered sherds of hand-molded pottery across the 2.5-meter excavation. Image Khabarovsk Regional Center for the Protection of Historical and Cultural Monuments.

A rite wrapped in mystery

The deeper context makes the scene even more evocative. The Neolithic on the Lower Amur came to an unexpected end around three and a half thousand years ago, in the first half of the second millennium BC, for reasons still unknown, with climate change among the suspected causes. The river country stood largely empty for a long stretch, until new people settled the territory centuries later at the dawn of the early Iron Age. The burned mask thus belonged to one cultural tradition, and the fire to a completely different one.

Chernikov suggests the fragment was deliberately taken, or perhaps stumbled upon, by these later inhabitants, and that the burning may have been a way of resolving some problem connected with the image. It could, for instance, have been a source of anxiety, a powerful relic of vanished people that demanded ritual treatment. He is careful to note that a full reconstruction of the rite is impossible, since the data are too scarce. What is clear is that the complex served no utilitarian purpose and took shape through ceremonial, ritual actions.

Not everyone is convinced. Among the experts at the conference, opinions on the interpretation split. Some congratulated the team on a discovery, while skeptics proposed a plainer scenario, in which people two thousand years ago simply picked up the stone from the bank along with others, never recognized the face carved on it, and put it to ordinary practical use.

An open ending

One question may remain open forever. Will the rest of the mask ever be found? The team has already looked. In the spring of 2026, during monitoring of the ice drift at the especially valuable heritage site “Sikachi-Alyan. Petroglyphs,” they re-examined the shoreline near the spot where the complex was found, and came up empty.

Chernikov is not discouraged. More than 400 images are already recorded near the villages of Sikachi-Alyan and Malyshevo, and new ones are constantly coming to light. The boulder bearing the rest of the face may simply be buried in sand, and a major flood could one day wash it clean and leave it on the surface. Perhaaps other archaeologists will find it many years from now, he reflects, or perhaps it will be his own team, simply on the next visit. Time will tell.

Source: Khabarovsk Krai Today (todaykhv.ru), interview with Evgeny Chernikov, Khabarovsk Regional Center for the Protection of Historical and Cultural Monuments.

Archaeologists decipher 4,000-year-old Linear Elamite script from ancient Iran

Desset, an archaeologist specializing in Iran from the Neolithic through the Bronze Age, worked alongside colleagues Kambiz Tabibzadeh, Matthieu Kervran, Gian Pietro Basello, and Gianni Marchesi. Their proposed decipherment, first announced in 2020 and detailed in a peer-reviewed study published in 2022, has drawn wide attention for cracking a script that had resisted scholars for over a century.

The breakthrough drew on a set of previously inaccessible inscriptions on silver beakers held mainly in the Mahboubian Collection in London. The vessels are thought to originate from the Kam-Firuz area near the ancient city of Anshan in southwestern Iran. The additional texts gave researchers enough material to identify recurring royal names, which served as the key to unlocking the script’s phonetic values.

Linear Elamite consists of geometric signs and was used during the Bronze Age, roughly between 2300 and 1900 BC, by the Elamite civilization that flourished in what is now southwestern Iran. Desset and his colleagues have argued it may be the oldest known purely phonetic writing system, a claim that remains debated among specialists, with some scholars maintaining the script is partly logographic.

The script was first uncovered in the early 1900s during French excavations at the ancient city of Susa, but it remained unreadable for more than a hundred years because so few inscriptions survived. Earlier scholars such as Ferdinand Bork, Carl Frank, Walther Hinz, and Piero Meriggi identified the values of a handful of signs but could not complete a decipherment, largely because the available corpus was too small.

Regularised Linear Elamite characters as interpreted by Desset et al. in 2022. Credit: François Desset

Desset has said his engagement with the script deepened after 2006, when he took part in excavations in southern Iran. The turning point came when he identified a repeated sequence of symbols matching the ending of the name of the Elamite ruler Shilhaha, who reigned around 1950 BC. Recognizing that pattern allowed the team to assign sound values to several signs and gradually read the rest.

The achievement has invited comparison with Jean-François Champollion, who deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphs in the early nineteenth century by recognizing royal names such as Ptolemy and Cleopatra. Desset has described Shilhaha as playing the role in his own work that those names played for Champollion.

Following the breakthrough, researchers have been able to read dozens of Linear Elamite inscriptions, from a known corpus of only around 40 to 50 texts. Desset has said he next intends to turn to the even older and largely undeciphered Proto-Elamite script, one of the earliest writing systems in the world, of which more than 1,600 inscriptions survive.

The Elamite civilization emerged during the early urbanization of the ancient Near East in the fourth millennium BC. Centered first at Anshan and later at Susa, Elam covered much of present-day Khuzestan and Ilam provinces in Iran and extended into parts of southern Iraq. Its language is considered unrelated to any known language family and remained in official use during the Achaemenid Persian Empire.

Desset has expressed hope that the work will support the preservation of Iran’s cultural heritage and contribute positively to Iranian culture and identity.

A painted wooden Aztec mask of Mictlantecuhtli, the god of the underworld. Credit: The Walters Art Museum.

Known today as the Mask of Mictlantecuhtli, the artifact is held by The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore. It dates to around AD 1450–1521, the final period of Mexica power before the Spanish conquest. The mask is made of wood, ground, and paint, and measures 17.2 by 14 by 7.2 centimeters.

Although it is called a mask, the object was probably designed as a sculptural or devotional element rather than as something worn over a human face. Its lack of eye openings suggests that it was likely attached to a wooden figure, statue, post, or ritual image representing the god.

A wooden face of death

The mask shows Mictlantecuhtli with a skeletal face, one of his most recognizable features in Aztec religious art. The sunken eyes, black pupils, triangular nose, and exposed teeth create the impression of a skull rather than a living face.

The teeth are marked with vertical black lines, while the cheeks preserve traces of small reddish circles. These red marks are thought to represent decay, a visual feature associated with the death god in other Mexica images, including representations in painted manuscripts such as the Codex Borgia.

Both ears appear to have been pierced. This detail matters because Mictlantecuhtli was often shown wearing ear ornaments connected with bones or human remains. The mask therefore does more than show a skull. It presents a specific divine identity, using details that would have been recognizable within Mexica religious imagery.

The object is especially valuable because surviving Aztec wooden masks are rare. Organic materials such as wood often decay over time, and many ritual objects were destroyed, repurposed, or lost after the conquest. This mask’s survival makes it an important piece of Mexica devotional material culture.

Mictlantecuhtli and the underworld

Mictlantecuhtli was one of the major death deities of the Aztec pantheon. His name is usually translated as “Lord of Mictlan.” Together with his wife, Mictecacihuatl, he ruled the underworld realm associated with the dead.

In Mexica belief, the fate of the dead depended on the manner of death. Different categories of death could lead to different afterlife destinations. Mictlan was the underworld realm ruled by Mictlantecuhtli, often described as a place reached through a difficult journey across several levels or regions.

Later summaries of Aztec religion describe Mictlan as a multi-stage underworld, sometimes described as having nine levels. The journey of the dead could take years and involved trials before the soul reached its final resting place. In this context, Mictlantecuhtli was both a ruler of death and a guardian of the boundary between the living and the ancestral dead.

Mictlantecuhtli was usually portrayed with a skull-like head or skeletal body. Full-body images often show him with raised arms, a posture associated with his role as a fearsome underworld lord. Some descriptions also connect him with gruesome attributes, including necklaces of human eyes or ornaments made from bones.

Masks and ritual transformation

Masks played an important role in Mesoamerican religious life. They could be worn in ceremonies, used in reenactments of myths, or attached to sacred images. By changing the face, the wearer or object could become a divine being, ancestor, mythic figure, or supernatural force.

The Walters Art Museum explains that in Mesoamerican ritual thought, the face was deeply connected with identity. To cover or replace the face was to cross an ordinary human boundary. In ritual performance, a person could temporarily assume the presence of a god or mythic being.

Skeletal masks were especially important because death occupied a central place in Mexica religion. Death was one of the twenty day signs in the calendar, and it formed part of a wider cosmic cycle of destruction, renewal, and rebirth.

The Mictlantecuhtli mask belongs to this religious world. Its form suggests it was made for ritual display or attachment to a sacred figure. Rather than functioning as a simple costume piece, it likely formed part of a larger image of the god.

Death and regeneration

To modern viewers, the mask may first appear as a grim image of death. In Mexica thought, death also carried a connection with renewal. The underworld was frightening, but it was also a place where the materials of new life could be found.

One important myth illustrates this idea. In the story, Ehecatl, the wind aspect of Quetzalcoatl, descends into Mictlan to retrieve the bones of earlier humans. These bones are needed to create the present human race.

Mictlantecuhtli first agrees to surrender the bones, then changes his mind and tries to prevent their removal. In one version of the myth, the underworld lord gives Quetzalcoatl a shell without holes and sets him a task involving a shell trumpet. Quetzalcoatl succeeds through cleverness and eventually escapes with the bones.

The recovered bones are then ground and placed in a sacred vessel. The gods shed their blood into the bone powder, and from this act the current generation of humans is created.

This myth shows why Mictlantecuhtli was more than a simple god of death. He was connected to the deep structure of existence: the dead, the ancestors, the underworld, and the raw material from which new human life could emerge.

A rare devotional object

The Mask of Mictlantecuhtli is important because it preserves several layers of Mexica religious meaning in a single object. Its skeletal form identifies the death god. Its painted details evoke decay and the body after death. Its pierced ears connect it to known iconography of Mictlantecuhtli. Its probable attachment to a statue or figure places it within ritual display rather than ordinary use.

The mask also shows the artistic skill of Mexica woodworkers. With simple but precise carving, the maker created a face that is both human and skeletal, physical and divine. The black pupils, red cheek marks, and lined teeth would have made the object visually powerful in a ceremonial setting.

Because masks of this type have survived only in small numbers, the object offers rare evidence for how wooden ritual images may have looked in the Aztec world. Stone sculptures, codices, and colonial descriptions preserve many details of Mexica religion, but wood, paint, and other organic materials give a different view of ritual practice.

The mask today

The mask entered The Walters Art Museum as a gift from John Bourne in 2009. Its recorded provenance includes Throckmorton Fine Arts in New York and John G. Bourne’s collection in the 1990s. The museum identifies it as an Aztec, or Mexica, work from Mexico, dating to the Late Postclassic period.

Today, the mask is studied as both an artwork and a religious object. It belongs to a world in which gods could be made present through image, performance, costume, and ritual. For the Mexica, death was a divine force woven into the cosmic order.

The face of Mictlantecuhtli therefore represents fear, power, ancestry, and renewal at the same time. More than 500 years after it was carved, the mask still carries the visual force of a deity who ruled the underworld and guarded one of the most important boundaries in Aztec belief: the passage between death and life.

Sources:

1. Live Science’s report by Kristina Killgrove gives the object’s basic details: name, material, Aztec origin, date range of AD 1450–1521, description of the painted features, and the interpretation that the mask was likely attached to a figure because it lacks eye holes.

2. The Walters Art Museum’s object record identifies the piece as “Mask of Mictlantecuhtli, Lord of the Underworld,” an Aztec/Mexica Late Postclassic object made of wood, ground, and paint, and gives its measurements, provenance, and interpretive description.

3. Britannica summarizes Mictlantecuhtli as the Aztec god of the dead, usually shown with a skull face, ruling Mictlan with Mictecacihuatl and associated with the underworld journey of the dead.

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Archaeologists working in northeastern Romania have identified a prehistoric structure so large and unusually placed that it is forcing researchers to rethink how early farming communities in Europe organized themselves. The building was found at Stăuceni-‘Holm’ in Botoșani County, a Cucuteni-Trypillia settlement connected to one of the most remarkable Neolithic cultural zones of southeastern Europe.

The discovery comes from a study published in PLOS ONE by Doris Mischka, Carsten Mischka, Adela Kovács, Constantin Aparaschivei, and Elena Marinova. Their research combined geophysical survey, field collection, and excavation work carried out between 2021 and 2024. According to the survey results, the settlement contained roughly 45 buildings and was enclosed by several ditch and palisade systems.

What makes the find stand out is not simply its age, but its scale. The structure covers about 350 square meters, making it far larger than the ordinary houses at the site. Most nearby buildings measured around 70 to 120 square meters, with a median size of about 91 square meters. The building also occupied a highly visible position near the probable entrance area, a placement that strongly supports its interpretation as a true “mega-structure.”

In Cucuteni-Trypillia archaeology, mega-structures are not just oversized houses. Researchers generally define them as rectangular buildings larger than normal dwellings, often placed in open or highly visible parts of a settlement. Some may have had different architectural features or special social functions. Earlier studies had already documented many such structures across sites in Ukraine and Moldova, but only a small number had been excavated in detail.

The Stăuceni-‘Holm building is important because it brings physical excavation evidence to a debate often dominated by magnetometry. Geomagnetic surveys can show hidden plans beneath the soil, but they do not always reveal what those anomalies truly represent. At this site, some interior features suggested by the survey could not be confirmed archaeologically, showing that magnetic readings need excavation before strong conclusions are made.

Excavation revealed a carefully planned construction process. The builders first created a rectangular foundation ditch, then placed posts into pits at regular intervals of about 70 to 90 centimeters. Some of the posts appear to have been stabilized with reused fragments of burnt clay from older buildings. Inside the structure, large central postholes may have supported a roof or helped divide the building’s interior space.

One of the most striking construction details was the floor. The builders placed halved tree trunks flat on the ground, then covered them with a smoothed clay layer. The researchers cannot yet say whether this clay surface was intentionally fired or whether it burned later when the structure was destroyed by fire. Either way, the preserved floor makes this mega-structure especially valuable for understanding Neolithic architecture.

Dating the structure has added another layer of intrigue. Radiocarbon samples taken from archaeobotanical remains between the wooden floor elements placed the building in the 40th or 39th century BC. This creates a tension with traditional pottery-based dating for the Cucuteni A3 phase, which has often been placed earlier. The researchers argue that the samples came from secure contexts and short-lived plant material, making them difficult to dismiss.

A small ceramic vessel found deep in a posthole also connects the construction event to the pottery tradition at the site. The vessel was recovered more than a meter below ground level in the foundation trench, suggesting it may have been deliberately placed during construction. Such deposits can be important clues, because they tie architecture, ritual behavior, and chronology together in a single archaeological context.

The finds inside the structure were surprisingly limited. Archaeologists recovered pottery fragments, a vessel with a bull-head protome, pieces of ladles, a clay cone, and 87 flint artifacts. Plant remains included cereals, weeds, gathered fruits, and traces of henbane, a plant known for medicinal and psychoactive properties. These finds suggest activity inside the building, but they do not point clearly to one single function.

That uncertainty is exactly what makes the discovery significant. The building does not look like a simple storage facility. The evidence also does not strongly support large-scale communal feasting or a clearly defined cultic function. For now, the researchers leave several possibilities open: it may have been a large house for an important household, a meeting place, a decision-making space, or a building connected to emerging social hierarchy.

This matters because Cucuteni-Trypillia communities have often been described as relatively egalitarian. Their settlements could be large and well organized, yet archaeologists have struggled to identify obvious palaces, ruling elites, administrative buildings, or written records. A structure like the one at Stăuceni-‘Holm complicates that picture. It suggests that even without kings, scripts, or monumental stone architecture, some communities may have developed special buildings for coordination, authority, ritual, or collective identity.

The discovery does not prove that prehistoric Romania had centralized rulers. But it does show that early European farming societies were more architecturally and socially complex than older models allowed. A 6,000-year-old wooden and clay building may not look monumental in the same way as pyramids or temples, but in its own cultural world, it may have been just as powerful a statement.

At Stăuceni-‘Holm, the question is no longer whether people could build large, planned structures this early. The evidence says they could. The deeper question is why they built them, and what kind of society needed such a space.