The 11,000-year-old composite statue discovered at Karahantepe, one of the remarkable sculptural finds from the site. (AA Photo)

Archaeologists working at the Neolithic site of Karahantepe in southeastern Türkiye have uncovered a rare 70-centimeter-tall stone composite statue depicting a human figure seated on the back of a leopard. The approximately 11,000-year-old artifact, found in its original position inside a specially prepared structure, represents a previously unattested artistic style at the site and offers fresh insights into the symbolic world of Pre-Pottery Neolithic communities.

Turkish Culture and Tourism Minister Mehmet Nuri Ersoy announced the discovery on August 25, 2026. He described it as a unique composite figure combining human and animal forms in a single composition, unearthed during the 2026 excavation season under the government’s “Heritage for the Future” (Geleceğe Miras) project. The statue was located on a bench running along the wall of a roughly three-meter-diameter structure whose floor was paved with flat stones. According to reports, it rested exactly where it had been left millennia earlier and was found covered with flat stones.

Karahantepe (also known as Karahan Tepe), located near Şanlıurfa and about 30 kilometers from the UNESCO-listed Göbeklitepe, forms part of the broader Taş Tepeler (“Stone Hills”) project. Systematic excavations began there in 2019 under the direction of Prof. Necmi Karul of Istanbul University. The site belongs to the Pre-Pottery Neolithic period, roughly contemporaneous with Göbeklitepe, when communities in Upper Mesopotamia were transitioning from mobile hunter-gatherer lifeways toward more settled patterns of social organization, monumental architecture, and complex ritual practices.

An 11,000-year-old composite statue unearthed at Karahantepe, offering a rare glimpse into the symbolic art of the Neolithic period. (AA Photo)

Unlike Göbeklitepe, which is renowned primarily for its T-shaped pillars with animal reliefs, Karahantepe has yielded a notably higher number of three-dimensional human depictions and composite human-animal sculptures. Earlier finds include a well-known statue of a human carrying a leopard on its back, large realistic human figures such as the so-called “Ribbed Man” (a 2.3-meter seated figure with carefully incised ribs discovered in 2023), human heads carved from bedrock or pillars, and numerous animal representations including leopards, foxes, snakes, and vultures. The new statue’s composition—a human seated or riding atop a leopard—stands out as distinct from these earlier examples.

Leopards appear repeatedly in the iconography of the Taş Tepeler sites and are widely interpreted as symbols of power, danger, protection, or spiritual potency. The deliberate placement of the new composite figure on a bench within a carefully paved circular structure suggests it held ritual or ceremonial significance rather than serving a purely domestic purpose. Such carefully positioned sculptures, left in situ and later sealed or covered, are consistent with broader patterns observed at both Karahantepe and Göbeklitepe, where buildings and statues were often intentionally filled and abandoned.

Minister Ersoy emphasized the discovery’s potential to generate wide scientific interest, stating that it “opens the door to new questions about the earliest periods of human history.” He thanked the General Directorate of Cultural Heritage and Museums, the excavation team, scientists, and field workers involved in the project. The find continues a pattern of annual breakthroughs at Karahantepe that are reshaping understandings of early Neolithic social complexity, artistic capability, and human-animal relationships long before the appearance of writing, pottery, or urban centers.

Further study of the statue, its precise stratigraphic context, and associated architectural features is expected to refine interpretations of symbolism and social organization in one of the world’s earliest monumental landscapes. As excavations under the Taş Tepeler and Heritage for the Future initiatives continue, Karahantepe remains a key site for illuminating the deep roots of human creativity and communal life in the ancient Near East.

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

What is cut into the face

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

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

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

Why the inscription is the thing to watch

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

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

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

Seals, administration and trade

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

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

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

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

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

Source. National Museum of Tajikistan

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

What the new season found

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

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

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

Eleven forts between the Delta and Gaza

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

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

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

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

No dimensions have been published yet

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

Excavation is continuing.

Source: Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities وزارة السياحة والآثار

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

What Egyptian blue is and why making it was difficult

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

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

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

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

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

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

The scale in Iran is the surprise

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

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

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

What they are testing for now

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

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

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

The claim that would matter most

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

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

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

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

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

A family tomb cut into the bedrock

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

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

Two Roman tombs, one with a reception hall

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

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

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

Offering tables and terracotta figures

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

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

Bahariya keeps producing burials

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

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

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

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

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

The dolium probably came off a wine ship

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

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

The hull cannot be dated yet

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

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

Whether the two belong together is an open question

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

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

Elba sits on a route that has been used for millennia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As found in other ancient Egyptian digs along levant.

The tombs revealed brass swords and tools

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

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

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

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

Source: Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities of Egypt

Excavators at the Etruscan city of Kainua, near Marzabotto in Emilia-Romagna, have found a well in the sacred area dedicated to the goddess Uni. Two bronze female statuettes and a bronze plate lay at the bottom, still holding the bright colour of the metal. Two adult human skeletons came out of the fill above them.

The dig is run by the University of Bologna under Elisabetta Govi, professor in the Department of History and Cultures, and this was its thirty ninth season.

The donations

Govi declared that bronzes, from the end of the VI century and start of the V century BC, when the settlement of Kainua was established, were placed purposefully in the founding ritual of the well. So this means they belong to the foundation of the site. The antique, rare bronze plate and the two other figurines are very well preserved, although Govi described the usual corrosion of bronze due to soil.

Two adult human skeletons discovered in the fill are part of the concluding ritual of the life of the well not of its start: according to the studies carried out by the professor’s university team, ‘the combination of the bronzes and skeletons suggests a sequence of actions: opening of the well with a votive rite and their closing in ritual burial, associating this context with the exclusively sacred nature tied both to the foundation of the city and the cult of the water.’

The two humans were buried in different periods, and both were adults. The well is situated in the primary sacred sector of Kainua which has the temples where two main temples are present (one identified by writings in the past as devoted to the god Tinia (Zeus/Jupiter) and his goddess consort Uni (Hera/Juno); the other one, according to those studies, at the time, devoted to Vei (Demeter/Ceres)), they are both visible now. The study helps to give information about foundation rituals and the cults of Etruscan people.

Longer excavation

The University of Bologna started excavation at the Kainua archaeological park in 1988. But thanks to the 140,000 Euros grant from the general director of museums of the Minister for Culture, and the help of DiVA fund, since 2025 this extra amount is provided yearly to the universityResearchers. This support comes from a 2023 agreement with the National Etruscan Museum of Marzabotto and the University of Bologna, which gave the researchers two additional weeks on their site to survey. It was only then that the well has been found.

Future discoveries

MNEMA exhibition has now reopened with new museographical layout, studied by its director Denise Tamborrino, on the basis that ‘the museum is primarily a working laboratory not a collection closed on its achievements ‘; now people can retrace every step of the researches in a modern exhibition. Here the new finds from Kainua will be placed when they become part of the museum. Excavation is managed by the Museums of Bologna; the Regional Directorate for Emilia Romagna (under Luigi Gallo) and MNEMA (under Denise Tamborrino) both part of it and the University of Bologna.

Sources: Università di Bologna, Unibo Magazine, 4 August 2026. Excavation directed by Elisabetta Govi, Department of History and Cultures, with the Gruppo Ravennate Archeologico.

Excavations in Turkey's Aspendos, located in the province of Antalya, have yielded an incredible 2.20-meter-tall marble group statue. Revealed on August 6, 2026, by Turkey's Minister of Culture and Tourism, Mehmet Nuri Ersoy, the statue depicts the ancient Greek god of healing, Asclepius, with the child god Telesphoros at his feet. This remarkable find is believed to date to the last quarter of the 2nd century AD and is part of a larger Heritage for the Future project run by the ministry.

The location of the discovery

The group has been unearthed from a collapse on the north wing of the Monumental Gate, on the west façade of the East Square on Theatre Street, which itself forms part of the public/ceremonial sector of the Roman city of Aspendos thus, indicating it was publicly exposed.

The figures

Asclepius is portrayed standing with a frontal orientation. He is a mature, bearded man with a mane of thick, long hair. He stands with his weight shifted to his left leg, his right leg slightly bent and extended forward and to the side. Much of his upper body is bare, with a himation draped over his left shoulder and then gathered around his waist and legs in heavy folds.

Telesphoros

His name means ‘bringer of completion’ and his specialism was convalescence, the recovery phase from a crisis. Asclepius is the healer; Telesphoros is the convalescent. Arguments suggest that he was Celtic god brought into Anatolia in the third century BC and incorporated into the Asclepius cult perhaps at Pergamon, where he even had a dedicated temple, the Telesphorion, within the Asclepius precinct, and was known by other names such as Euamerion at Titane and Acesis at Epidaurus.

Telesphoros is usually represented in a wide cape reaching to his feet known as a cucullus and has been connected with the Genius Cucullatus recorded in two epigraphical examples from Noricum.

His worship gained momentum in the second century AD under Hadrian and has been distributed mainly along the river Danube and in Anatolia, and he was identified in an Athenian inscription of the same century as a child of Asclepius.

Sources: Anadolu Agency, 6 August 2026, reporting the announcement of Minister of Culture and Tourism Mehmet Nuri Ersoy and the statement of the General Directorate of Cultural Heritage and Museums. Background on Telesphoros from Pausanias, Description of Greece 2.11, and from Wroth, "Telesphoros," Journal of Hellenic Studies 3 (1882).

The position is commanding. From the ridge the view runs across the plain of Macomer, over the plateaus of Abbasanta and Paulilatino, out to the highlands of the Nuorese and as far as the Gulf of Oristano.

The find was announced on July 30, 2026, and presented at the town library by mayor Patrizia Luciana Tomassetti alongside Elena Anna Boldetti and Monica Stocchino, the superintendents for Cagliari and for Sassari and Nuoro, with archaeologists Luca Doro and Gianluigi Marras.

Cleared rather than excavated

The tomb was not dug out of the ground. The two Sardinian Soprintendenze were already working at the site on the excavation and restoration of its nuraghe when survey work identified the structure, and clearing operations were agreed with the landowners. Removing the vegetation and accumulated material brought the monument back into view.

What emerged is in exceptional condition. Built in blocks of trachyte, the tomb preserves its burial chamber and the monumental exedra, the curved forecourt set before the entrance where the community would have gathered.

One feature has drawn particular attention. Inside the chamber, near the entrances, the space is divided across two levels. This is rarely documented in tombs of this type and will be the subject of further study.

A form that appears around 1800 BC

Giants’ tombs are among the most distinctive expressions of Nuragic funerary architecture, and they are found throughout Sardinia, where roughly seven hundred have been recorded. They emerged around 1800 BC and were used for collective burial.

Their function extended beyond the practical. These monuments carried symbolic and identitary weight, expressing the relationship between a community, its ancestors, and its control of the surrounding territory. The forecourt in front of the entrance is the architectural signature of that role, a space designed for ceremony rather than interment.

Two giants’ tombs were already known in the municipality of Bortigali, at Tiriani-Perda ‘e S’Altare and at Sereddis. Carrarzu Iddia makes a third.

The rest of the site

The tomb belongs to a larger complex that the current campaign has been steadily uncovering. Work at Carrarzu Iddia has also brought to light two protonuraghi, an earlier form of the Nuragic tower, along with a village and a well cistern of probable sacred function.

Fieldwork began in May as part of a four million euro project covering several municipalities of the Marghine region, aimed at making one of the area’s most significant Nuragic sites accessible again. The excavation has concentrated on the Middle Bronze Age, roughly 1800 to 1400 BC. Alongside the architecture, the team has recovered bronze bracelets and fragments of ceramic vessels, with material still coming out of the ground during the days before the announcement.

Boldetti described the site as a fortunate one, begun with more routine interventions in mind and turned into an extraordinary discovery. Stocchino called the Marghine a region that continues to produce surprises, and this find a genuine revelation.

Sources: Soprintendenza Archeologia, Belle Arti e Paesaggio per la Città Metropolitana di Cagliari e le Province di Oristano e Sud Sardegna, and Soprintendenza ABAP per le Province di Sassari e Nuoro, announcement of July 30, 2026, as reported by ANSA, L’Unione Sarda, La Nuova Sardegna, and Casteddu Online.

The complex includes circular pools, and it remained in use across the transition from Ptolemaic to Roman rule.

Three results from a first season

Hisham El-Leithy, secretary general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, identified three findings of particular significance.

The first is documentary. This is the first systematic recording of a complete thermal complex at Tell Nasser, a site that had not previously been investigated in any organised way.

The second concerns the site’s chronology. The excavation confirmed occupation predating the Ptolemaic period, which places the baths within an existing settlement rather than on newly founded ground.

The third concerns duration. The complex continued in use into the Roman period, with architectural modifications made during that time, evidence that its function and its usefulness both persisted through a change of rulers.

Sherif Fathy, Minister of Tourism and Antiquities, described the results as a substantial contribution to understanding settlement patterns, architectural development, and public service infrastructure in the eastern delta during the Ptolemaic and Roman periods.

The round plan and what it signifies

The circular pools identify the building type. Baths of this form, known as tholos baths after their round plan, entered Egypt under the Ptolemies and became one of the most visible Greek contributions to Egyptian civic architecture. Bathers used individual hip baths arranged around the interior wall of a domed rotunda, an arrangement documented at Greek sites across the Mediterranean and adopted widely in Egypt from the fourth century BC onward.

Examples continue to surface. A late Ptolemaic tholos bath was found in Alexandria’s Moharam Bek district in May 2026, alongside a Roman villa with mosaic floors.

The Council describes the Tell Nasser complex as a complete model of hydraulic engineering for the eastern delta, and notes parallels with other Hellenistic baths documented in Egypt, among them one recently excavated at Tell al-Hir in northern Sinai.

A private unit among the public rooms

One feature distinguishes Tell Nasser from those comparisons. Alongside the public bathing facilities, the complex contains a private bathing unit.

That combination indicates the building served more than one category of user, which is a detail worth watching as excavation continues, since it bears on who had access to the facility and on what terms.

Sources: Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities and Supreme Council of Antiquities, July 2026. Comparative material on tholos baths from reported excavations at Moharam Bek, Alexandria, May 2026, and Tell al-Hir, northern Sinai.

The carvings on the tombstones are what make the find interesting. On their sides and backs, Greek and Egyptian deities appear together, in combinations that could only have been produced in one place and time.

The finds come from the current excavation season at one of the eastern delta’s most productive sites, where systematic work resumed in 2007.

Twenty limestone stelae

Mohamed Abdel-Badie, head of the Egyptian Antiquities Sector, described the tombstones as about twenty pieces, all carved in limestone and unique in their workmanship. Their fronts carry human figures rendered in a refined style. Their lateral sides and reverses are engraved with religious symbols and deities, among them the griffin, Agathodaimon, and Isis-Thermouthis.

For Abdel-Badie, that iconographic repertoire reflects a cultural crossroads between Egyptian religious tradition and Greco-Roman influence, and also indicates the high social standing of those buried beneath the stones.

Two serpents from two traditions

The specific combination repays a closer look, because it is not decorative eclecticism. It is theological.

Agathodaimon is the beneficent serpent of Greek tradition, associated with good fortune and, in Egypt, with the god Serapis. Isis-Thermouthis is a fusion in its own right, joining Isis with Renenutet, the Egyptian harvest deity represented as a cobra, whose Greek name was Thermouthis. The Hellenistic world eventually assimilated her to Agathodaimon precisely because both took serpent form. The griffin, a hybrid creature of Mesopotamian origin later absorbed into Greek art, completes the set.

These pairings are documented elsewhere in Greco-Roman Egypt on objects held in major collections, where Agathodaimon and Thermouthis appear as matched agrarian and fertility deities flanking Serapis and Isis. What the Tell el-Deir stelae show is that repertoire applied to the funerary monuments of a delta community, a combination that could only have emerged after centuries of contact between Egyptian and Greek populations had reshaped burial ritual in the region.

Incense, lamps, and barrel-shaped coffins

Alongside the stelae, the mission recovered a wide and varied collection of ceramic incense burners and decorated oil lamps in many different forms, together with anthropoid sarcophagi of barrel-shaped ceramic and a number of funerary amulets.

Barrel-shaped pottery coffins of this kind are characteristic of later delta burial practice, and their presence alongside the syncretic stelae reinforces the picture of a cemetery in active use well into the Greco-Roman period.

A funerary centre, not just a cemetery

Hisham El-Leithy, secretary general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, said the discovery opens new avenues for understanding how the delta’s necropolises developed, and confirms that Tell el-Deir was not simply a burial ground but a complete funerary centre with its own defined social, cultural, and religious identity.

He added that the find strengthens the site’s standing as one of the most significant in the eastern delta, with the potential to revise the settlement map and the record of ancient cemeteries across the region, and to add to what is known about the history of Damietta governorate in antiquity. El-Leithy noted that the Council is providing full support to the mission this season, following instructions from Minister of Tourism and Antiquities Sherif Fathy to facilitate the work of expeditions across Egyptian sites.

A site with a long record

Tell el-Deir has been yielding material for years, and the accumulated sequence is part of what makes this season’s finds legible. The necropolis spans Egypt’s Late Period through the end of the Roman era.

Earlier seasons produced burials of the Twenty-sixth Dynasty, the Saite period, the last native ruling family before the Persian conquest of 525 BC, including bodies covered with thin gold foils shaped as Isis, Bastet, and Horus, alongside scarabs and miniature pottery canopic jars. A 2024 campaign uncovered mudbrick chambers still holding their grave goods after some 2,500 years, among them a pottery vessel containing 38 bronze coins of the Ptolemaic period. In 2019 the mission found Byzantine gold coins depicting the emperors Phocas and Heraclius, along with limestone coffins carved with human faces.

Sources: Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities and Supreme Council of Antiquities, July 30, 2026, via Xinhua. Background on Tell el-Deir from prior excavation seasons reported 2019 to 2024. Comparative material on Agathodaimon and Isis-Thermouthis in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Preliminary assessment places the painting in the second half of the seventh century BC or the beginning of the sixth, the final decades of the Kingdom of Urartu. That dating is part of what makes it interesting, since it captures Urartian painting not at the height of the kingdom’s power but near its end.

A fortress older than the city around it

Erebuni was founded in 782 BC by the Urartian king Argishti I, a fact established by a cuneiform inscription found at the site, and modern Yerevan traces both its name and its origin to that fortress. The citadel was built largely of mudbrick and ringed by heavy walls, in places three rows deep. At its heart stood the temple of Khaldi, the chief god of the Urartian pantheon, whose walls carried extensive painted decoration.

Excavation there has produced palaces, temples, cuneiform inscriptions, ceramics, and metalwork, and the site has long been recognized as one of the richest sources of information on Urartian civilization anywhere. The French and Armenian teams have been working on and around the hill since 2008, and this is not the first painted material they have recovered. In June 2010, a joint expedition found remains of an Urartian wall painting along with three storage jars of a type familiar from the Van region, the Urartian heartland.

Why painted plaster so rarely survives

Erebuni was already known for its murals, both religious and secular in subject, and reconstructed chambers at the site have been repainted following the designs and colors of the authentic surviving fragments. That work gives visitors a sense of what figural and decorative painting looked like in the Armenian Highlands during the eighth and seventh centuries BC, a tradition that then breaks off for more than a thousand years before Christian fresco painting begins in Armenian churches.

The difficulty is that painted plaster is among the most fragile material archaeology deals with. Pigment fades, plaster crumbles, and the surfaces that do survive are often recovered in poor condition or with their color badly degraded. A fragment that retains its layers of color intact is genuinely uncommon, which is why the announcement stresses preservation rather than subject matter.

Recent scholarship has shown how much such fragments can yield when they are well enough preserved to analyze. A study of another Erebuni painting fragment, discovered attached beneath a second panel during conservation work, allowed researchers to reconstruct the decorative scheme it had originally belonged to. Chemical analysis of its pigments also produced a first, the identification of Egyptian blue in the territory of present-day Armenia, evidence that Urartian painters had access to a manufactured pigment produced and traded across the ancient Near East.

That same study noted a problem worth keeping in mind. Soviet-era restoration work at Erebuni heavily altered the original archaeological context of some painted material, which makes newly excavated fragments recovered under modern conditions especially valuable, since their findspots and stratigraphy can be documented properly from the start.

What comes next

Specialists expect the new fragment to yield information on Urartian painting techniques, the materials used to make the pigments, and the visual culture of the kingdom’s final phase. Beyond the object itself, the French Embassy framed the discovery as evidence of the continuing productivity of the scientific partnership between the two countries, whose joint excavations have been running at the site for close to two decades.

The find also sits within a broader pattern of recent Urartian discoveries across the region. At Garibin Tepe in the Tuşba district of Van, in Turkey, excavators have uncovered exceptionally well-preserved Urartian wall paintings in shades of blue and burgundy without known parallel, part of a site that has also produced Urartian buildings and lion sculptures. Taken together, these finds are steadily filling in a picture of a painted, colored Urartu that the surviving stone architecture alone could never convey.

Sources: Public Radio of Armenia; French Embassy in Armenia; Archaeology Magazine; Erebuni Historical and Archaeological Reserve-Museum; Dan, R., et al., "A New Painting Fragment from Erebuni and an Overview of Urartian Wall Paintings."

Finding infant remains in a sewer or latrine usually means one thing to archaeologists, and it is not a happy conclusion. Such contexts are conventionally read as evidence of abandonment, disposal, or the selective discarding of unwanted newborns. The new study of this grave argues the opposite, and the evidence is difficult to dispute.

The research, by Caroline Partiot and Lilli Zabrana of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and its Austrian Archaeological Institute, was published in the journal Childhood in the Past.

Layers of a very old place

The setting is a stack of centuries. The famous Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, first built around 550 BC and counted among the Seven Wonders of the ancient world, stood at the center of a sacred precinct. Within that precinct, in the first half of the first century AD, the Romans built an odeion, a roofed hall for musical and poetic performances. Sometime in the second or third century, a latrine was added to the structure, a public facility with capacity for roughly thirty users at once, served by a drainage channel.

Centuries later, long after the odeion had fallen out of use and the channel had gone dry, someone chose that abandoned space for a burial. Working inside one of the odeion’s substructure chambers, they built a small cist grave of brick and stone within the old channel and laid two infants in it. Radiocarbon dating places the burial in the eighth or ninth century AD, the Middle Byzantine period. Archaeologists uncovered it during excavations in 2010, though the full analysis has only now been published.

Two who arrived too early

Judging primarily by the size of the bones, Partiot and Zabrana estimate that both infants were born prematurely, at roughly thirty-three to thirty-four weeks of gestation, about seven and a half months, against a full term of thirty-nine to forty weeks.

The case for twins rests on two observations, that the two died at almost exactly the same developmental age, and that they were buried in direct physical contact with each other. Partiot is careful about the limits of that inference, noting that only future DNA analysis could confirm whether they were genuinely twins rather than two infants who happened to die close together.

Neither skeleton showed signs of trauma or disease. One, however, carried something unusual, a cervical rib, an extra rib growing from a vertebra at the base of the neck. The trait is hereditary and occurs in roughly one percent of people, where it usually causes no problems at all. In infants, though, Partiot’s earlier research has linked cervical ribs to anomalies in the Hox genes, the family of genes that governs how body segments develop in the embryo, and those anomalies are associated with stillbirth, premature birth, and sudden infant death. As the researchers note, no case of twins with cervical ribs had previously been documented in any archaeological context.

Why there, of all places

The obvious question is why a family would bury their children in a disused latrine rather than in one of the city’s cemeteries. The researchers suggest an explanation rooted in the religious situation of the time. Born prematurely and dying almost immediately, the infants would not have been baptized, which in Byzantine Christian practice complicated their eligibility for burial in consecrated ground.

What the grave represents, in the researchers’ reading, is a practical compromise, a way of reconciling Christian burial norms with a family’s need to lay their children somewhere meaningful. Zabrana has described the setting as unexpected and exceptional, noting that previously known graves at Ephesus were placed in a dedicated cemetery outside the boundaries of the old temple precinct. This one was inside it.

No trace of the twins’ mother has been found nearby or in the Ephesus cemetery. Partiot points out that she may have died at the same time or may not have, and that the question is difficult to resolve, since both infant and maternal mortality ran very high in this period.

Care, not disposal

The strongest argument against reading this as a discarding of unwanted infants is the grave itself. Whoever buried these children did not simply place them in the channel. They constructed a protective stone cist around them, and it worked, preserving both skeletons intact for more than a thousand years. Zabrana takes that construction as clear evidence of a respectful burial rather than the disposal of human remains.

The researchers describe what the grave shows as a family’s intention to care for two dead infants and to acknowledge the brief place they held in their community. It is a small conclusion drawn from a small grave, but it carries a broader implication for the discipline, that archaeologists should be slower to assume the worst when infant remains turn up in sanitary contexts. Sometimes an abandoned drain was simply the most sheltered structure available, and the care is visible in how the burial was made.

Further work by the team will look at how the people of early medieval Ephesus reused abandoned sacred spaces, both for everyday needs and for spiritual ones, of which this quiet grave beneath a ruined concert hall is a particularly moving example.

Sources: Live Science (July 24, 2026). Partiot, C., and Zabrana, L. (2026). "Peace in Unexpected Places, The Middle Byzantine Burial of Two Perinates, Possibly Twins, in a Latrine Canal of the Odeion in the Artemision of Ephesos." Childhood in the Past, 1 to 21. doi.org/10.1080/17585716.2026.2682804

Tomb With 560 Funerary Figurines Found in Egypt’s Nile Delta. Image credit: Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities وزارة السياحة والآثار

The announcement came on July 22, 2026, following excavations by an Egyptian archaeological mission working under the Supreme Council of Antiquities.

Minister of Tourism and Antiquities Sherif Fathy said the discovery offers new insight into the religious and economic life of the period, underlining the Delta’s role as a crossroads of exchange in the centuries when Egyptian tradition mingled with Greek and Roman influence.

A vaulted tomb and bodies laid like Osiris

The funerary unit itself consists of a main hall opening onto several chambers with vaulted entrances, a layout characteristic of the Delta’s later cemeteries, where mudbrick vaulting substituted for the rock-cut architecture of Egypt’s southern necropolises. Within the chambers, the mission documented human remains placed in Osirian positions, the distinctive arrangement with arms crossed over the chest that deliberately mirrors the pose of Osiris, god of the dead, expressing the deceased’s hoped-for identification with the deity in the afterlife.

Alongside the burials, excavators recovered a range of funerary objects, headlined by a genuinely substantial find, two separate groups of small funerary figurines known as ushabti, numbering 560 pieces in total.

Tomb With 560 Funerary Figurines Found in Egypt’s Nile Delta. Image credit: Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities وزارة السياحة والآثار

An army of servants for the beyond

Ushabti figurines rank among the most characteristic objects of Egyptian burial practice. Placed in tombs among the grave goods, they were intended to act as servants for the deceased, answering on their owner’s behalf should the dead be called upon to perform manual labor in the world beyond, plowing fields, filling channels, carrying sand. Many carry a hoe over the shoulder and a basket on the back, and their inscriptions frequently include the spell from the sixth chapter of the Book of the Dead that commands them to rise and work when their master’s name is called. A well-furnished burial could include hundreds, in the ideal case one for every day of the year along with overseer figures to manage them, which makes a cache of 560 figurines across two groups a burial assemblage of real ambition.

Eye of Horus amulets recovered from the newly discovered funerary unit at Tell Quesna in the Nile Delta. Photo Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities.

A necropolis that keeps giving

The new funerary unit adds to a site with a well-established record. The Quesna cemetery, located in the Kfour el-Raml area of Menoufia Governorate, ranks among the most important archaeological grounds in the Delta, serving as a burial ground across many centuries for the region connected to the ancient city of Athribis, modern Benha, capital of the tenth province of Lower Egypt. Earlier excavation seasons at Quesna produced some of the Delta’s most striking finds, including mummies buried with tongues of gold foil placed in their mouths, gold chips shaped as scarabs and lotus flowers, funerary amulets, human-form stone coffins, and a massive black granite coffin belonging to one of Athribis’s most important priests.

Those golden tongues connect Quesna to a wider funerary tradition documented across Late and Greco-Roman Egypt, from Taposiris Magna near Alexandria to Oxyrhynchus and, most recently, the coastal cemetery of Marina el-Alamein, a practice meant to allow the dead to speak before Osiris in the judgment of the afterlife. The newly announced funerary unit, with its Osirian burials and its small army of ushabti servants, fits squarely within that same devotional world, another chapter in the long afterlife of a necropolis that has been serving the Delta’s dead, and now its archaeologists, for well over two thousand years.

Source: Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities وزارة السياحة والآثار

The newly discovered statue at the archaeological site. Credit: François Cherdo, Inrap.

The excavation, carried out by France’s National Institute for Preventive Archaeological Research, known as Inrap, covered 3.5 hectares at a place called Le Désert, in the commune of Mettray, ahead of development work by Tours Métropole. The work was led by Inrap archaeologist François Cherdo, under the scientific oversight of the regional archaeology service of the Centre-Val de Loire. Inrap announced the results on July 20, 2026, describing the site as among the best furnished with remarkable objects anywhere in this geographic sector.

A farmstead of the late Gallic world

The land at Le Désert had drawn people long before the Gauls. Excavators recovered numerous stone tools from reworked deposits attributable mainly to the Middle Paleolithic, including a handaxe, along with sparser traces of Neolithic, Late Bronze Age, and First Iron Age activity, the latter dating to the Middle Hallstatt period, roughly 625 to 540 BC.

The main occupation, however, belongs to the Second Iron Age, specifically the phase archaeologists call La Tène D1, spanning 150 to 80 BC, the final generations of independent Gaul before Caesar’s conquest. Almost the entire settlement could be studied, a rarity in itself. It takes the form of a rectangular residential enclosure covering 1.2 hectares, bounded by three straight ditches, with a wide internal partition ditch, equipped with a central crossing point, dividing the interior into two functional zones. Sterile bands along the inner edges of the ditches suggest earthen banks once stood there, since leveled by centuries of plowing. Stratigraphic analysis of the ditch fills points to two successive phases of occupation.

The eastern courtyard held a building founded on four posts, along with a crossing structure marked by two unusually large postholes. The western courtyard grouped four buildings, two of which show at least one episode of remodeling after their original construction. Outside the enclosure, a secondary network of field ditches managed water across the sector and organized spaces given over to craft and agropastoral activities.

Drone view of the Gallic settlement. Credit: Brice Beauchesne.

A face worn almost to nothing

The site’s most evocative find came from the southern enclosure ditch. There, at the stratigraphic level marking the transition between the settlement’s two occupation phases, excavators recovered a limestone statue standing 49 centimeters tall and weighing more than 18 kilograms. The stone itself is full of imperfections, and the carving is heavily worn, yet a human face still comes through, eyes, a nose, a mouth, and the beginning of a head of hair.

What makes the statue significant is less its artistry than its fate. The deliberate discarding of an aesthetic object of this kind within a domestic context, Inrap notes, carries strong symbolic weight, and the researchers read it as a probable cultic gesture. That reading gains force from what accompanied it. Ninety meters away, in the same ditch and in a synchronous stratigraphic level, excavators found fragments of a human braincase, interpreted as a memorial piece discarded as part of the same episode, whatever ritual logic connected a worn stone face and pieces of a human skull thrown into the boundary ditch of a working farm.

The sword preserved in its sheath. Credit: François Cherdo, Inrap.

A sword killed before burial

The second remarkable object came from the internal partition ditch, close to the crossing point that controlled movement within the residential enclosure. It is an iron sword, still accompanied by its scabbard, and it did not go into the ground intact. The weapon had been deliberately mutilated to render it completely unusable, a ritual act well documented in the Celtic world, where weapons were often ceremonially “killed” before deposition. The act, followed by the sword’s disposal, took place at the very end of the enclosure’s occupation, and the researchers suggest it may have symbolized the formal abandonment of the residence itself, a farewell performed in iron.

The horse butchers of Mettray

Alongside these singular objects, the everyday material tells the story of a largely self-sufficient community. Evidence of ironworking, grain milling, textile production, cooking, and the processing of animal resources runs through both phases of occupation, with perceptible reorganizations between them.

One activity stands out sharply from that ordinary picture. The study of the animal remains revealed butchery focused specifically on horses, reaching notably high proportions during the settlement’s first phase of occupation. In most of Gaul, horses were valuable animals associated with riding, traction, and status far more than with the table, which makes the scale of horse processing at Mettray genuinely atypical. Inrap’s summary is measured on the point, noting that while the site’s form and most of its activities match what is classically recognized for settlements of this period, the specificity of its horse husbandry during the first phase sets it apart, without the evidence yet allowing a firm explanation of whether the practice reflects dietary custom, ritual consumption, a specialized economic role, or some combination of the three.

Taken together, the fully excavated enclosure, the statue, the killed sword, the skull fragments, and the unusual horse butchery make Le Désert a substantial addition to what is known about rural life on the plateau north of Tours in the last century of Gallic independence, an ordinary farm, in most respects, that marked its own turning points in decidedly extraordinary ways.

Source. Institut national de recherches archéologiques préventives, Inrap (July 20, 2026). Excavation led by François Cherdo, with Tours Métropole and the Service régional de l’archéologie, Drac Centre-Val de Loire.

The entrance to one of the newly discovered tombs. Credit: Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities.

The find has yielded hieroglyphic inscriptions and material remains that illuminate previously poorly documented corners of the ancient Memphite necropolis, offering fresh insight into the social and administrative world of Egypt’s high officials during the eighteenth dynasty.

Minister of Tourism and Antiquities Sherif Fathy made the official announcement, stressing that the discovery is further proof that Saqqara, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, continues to hold archaeological treasures that have yet to be fully explored, and pointed to the site’s ongoing succession of major finds as evidence of its exceptional cultural significance.

Relief decoration carved into the wall of one of the newly discovered tombs. Credit: Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities.

Part of an active, ongoing project

Mohamed Abdel Badei, head of the Egyptian Antiquities Sector at the Supreme Council of Antiquities, explained that this excavation belongs to a dedicated research project focused specifically on the Bubasteion necropolis, one of the richest sectors of the entire Saqqara funerary complex in terms of material evidence recovered. Abdel Badei noted that excavation remains active in the tombs’ burial shafts and in other unexplored areas of the site, work he expects will yield further information about the tombs’ owners and about the history of the cemetery itself in future excavation seasons.

Archaeologists at work inside one of the newly discovered tombs. Credit: Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities.

A prince and mayor with military ties

Amr El-Tayeb, director general of Saqqara antiquities, provided the specific details distinguishing each of the three tombs. The first belonged to a man named Mentuhotep, whose titles included hereditary prince, mayor, and royal attendant, a combination reflecting a career that fused senior administrative rank with military service. The tomb’s northern walls carry scenes of offering bearers and hunting, along with a depiction of Mentuhotep seated beside his mother, Iah-hetep. The tomb’s burial shaft remains unexcavated, with that work scheduled to resume during the coming archaeological season.

The merchant of the House of Ptah

The second tomb belonged to a man named Samut, who held the title of great, or chief, merchant of the House of Ptah, a position tying him to the powerful cult of Memphis’s patron deity. Inscriptions within the tomb preserve the names of his wife, Tui, his mother, Atbeu, and their four children, offering researchers a rare, intimate glimpse into family life and social structure during the New Kingdom, well beyond the bare facts of Samut’s official career.

An overseer, and a clue from northern Syria

The third tomb, though considerably more poorly preserved than the other two, belonged to a man named Nehesy. Surviving inscriptions identify him by the title overseer of the house, along with the name of his wife, Neferuptah, who herself held the title lady of the house.

The most striking element recovered from this tomb is a fragment of a column bearing a hieroglyphic inscription referring to the return of one of the state’s military commanders from the region of Nahrin, in northern Syria. The passage carries real significance on two fronts. It offers direct chronological evidence anchoring the tomb firmly within the New Kingdom, and it provides tangible testimony to the military expeditions and diplomatic missions Egypt maintained with the lands of the Near East during this period, a line of evidence specialists regard as essential to understanding the wider foreign reach of the pharaonic state well beyond Egypt’s own borders.

A necropolis with a long pedigree

The Bubasteion necropolis, named for its association with the goddess Bastet, already ranks among Saqqara’s most significant New Kingdom burial sectors, having previously yielded the tomb of Aperel, vizier under Amenhotep III and Akhenaten, discovered in 1987, along with the tombs of Maya, wet nurse to Tutankhamun, and Hatiay, a scribe connected to the Aton temple at Memphis. Memphis’s standing as a major military center from the reigns of Thutmose III and Amenhotep III onward drew many senior officials and generals to be buried at Saqqara, a pattern that continued through the Ramesside period, and one these three newly identified tombs now extend further still.

Sources. Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities (July 19 to 20, 2026)

The underwater archaeological site of Gran Carro in Lake Bolsena. Credit: Soprintendenza Archeologia, Belle Arti e Paesaggio per l’Etruria Meridionale

Beneath the waters of Lake Bolsena, in Italy’s Viterbo province, archaeologists have recovered something the submerged Iron Age settlement of Gran Carro had never given up before, an actual fragment of woven fabric. It is the first piece of textile ever documented at the site since systematic underwater exploration began there in the 1960s.

The find came during a week-long excavation campaign led by the Underwater Archaeology Service of the Superintendency of Archaeology, Fine Arts, and Landscape for the metropolitan area of Rome, the province of Viterbo, and Southern Etruria, working with the companies Anfora SRL Archeologia Mare Ambiente and CSR Restauro Beni Culturali. The campaign forms part of a broader three-year public works program dedicated to safeguarding the site.

A diver from Italy's Underwater Archaeology Service at work on the lakebed of Lake Bolsena, at the submerged site of Gran Carro. Photo Soprintendenza Archeologia Belle Arti Paesaggio Etruria Meridionale.

A loom reconstructed from wood, weights, and floor marks

Much of the season’s work centered on piecing together how textiles were actually produced at Gran Carro. By carefully mapping the arrangement of surviving wooden remains and loom weights, together with support marks pressed into the settlement’s ancient clay floor, researchers were able to reconstruct the general form of a vertical, warp-weighted loom with considerably more precision than before. The loom’s presence at the site had already been suspected from earlier finds, wooden spindles still fitted with their whorls, and what researchers believe were weaving combs, both recovered during earlier phases of the project.

It was in an area right next to this reconstructed loom, however, that the campaign’s most significant discovery emerged, among the charred remains of one of the settlement’s burned habitation structures. There, underwater archaeologists recovered the fragment of fabric, an object that had eluded more than sixty years of prior research at the site.

Textile recovered from the Gran Carro archaeological site. Credit: Soprintendenza Archeologia, Belle Arti e Paesaggio per l’Etruria Meridionale

Wood and other finds preserved by the lakebed

The textile discovery adds fresh significance to a broader body of material recovered in earlier campaigns. The anaerobic conditions of the lakebed have preserved an unusually rich array of wooden objects at Gran Carro, including axe handles and door lock mechanisms, organic materials that would have decayed entirely at almost any dry archaeological site but survive here in genuinely exceptional condition.

An official diagram from the Soprintendenza showing the reconstructed Iron Age loom at Gran Carro, alongside the terracotta weights, spindle whorls, and combs used in its operation. Credit Soprintendenza Archeologia Belle Arti Paesaggio Etruria Meridionale.

A settlement with a long and violent history

Gran Carro’s own story stretches back to the Middle Bronze Age, around the fifteenth century BC, though the settlement reached its fullest development during the Early Iron Age, in the late tenth and early ninth centuries BC, generally associated with the early Villanovan culture that would eventually give rise to the Etruscans. Excavation has shown the settlement’s structures were repeatedly burned, collapsed, and rebuilt over time, a pattern of destruction and renewal that has left behind unusually rich stratified deposits for archaeologists to study. The site eventually came to lie underwater as changes in the lake’s water level submerged what had originally been dry land, sealing its remains beneath the lake for roughly three thousand years.

The current excavation project extends well beyond recovering individual artifacts. Plans include the creation of an accessible underwater visitor route and a full three-dimensional virtual reconstruction of the settlement, with the goal of eventually opening the site to the public, an ambition organizers hope to realize as early as 2026. It stands as one of the most ambitious efforts currently underway in Italy for both preventive underwater archaeology and the public presentation of submerged cultural heritage, gradually bringing a landscape frozen since prehistory back into view, one careful meter at a time.

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Source. Soprintendenza Archeologia, Belle Arti e Paesaggio per l’area metropolitana di Roma, la provincia di Viterbo e l’Etruria meridionale.

Mosaic uncovered at Agrigento. Credit: Parco Archeologico e Paesaggistico della Valle dei Templi

The research is a joint effort between the Ravenna campus of the University of Bologna and the Archaeological and Landscape Park of the Valley of the Temples, part of a collaboration the two institutions have maintained since 2016. This season’s work concentrated on the quarter’s fourth insula, uncovering a building whose successive construction phases are documented through layers of calcarenite flooring, cocciopesto, a durable waterproofed surface made from crushed pottery and lime, and finally a polychrome mosaic laid down in the Late Antique period.

A mosaic cleaned, and a basin that raised more questions

Restoration specialists at the park, working under the supervision of restorer Marilanda Rizzo Pinna, have already begun cleaning and consolidating the mosaic itself. Its decorative patterns fit comfortably within the aesthetic conventions typical of the Late Antique period, though specialists are continuing a more detailed technical and compositional analysis to pin down its specifics.

Archaeologists cleaning the newly discovered mosaic at the excavation site. Credit: Parco Archeologico e Paesaggistico della Valle dei Templi

As striking as the mosaic is, it was not what most captured researchers’ attention. That distinction belongs to a sealed quadrangular basin found within one of the building’s rooms. Inside, excavators recovered a genuinely varied set of materials, coins, the bone remains of small animals, and several amphora stoppers, one of which carries an engraved Christian monogram.

Christian monogram engraved on an amphora stopper. Credit: Parco Archeologico e Paesaggistico della Valle dei Templi

A building’s clues point toward faith

Giuseppe Lepore, professor of classical archaeology at the University of Bologna’s Ravenna campus, explained why this particular building has drawn such interest. Several clues, he said, seem to connect this space to the Christian religion, which began organizing itself within the cities of the Roman world, and in Sicily specifically, between the third and fourth centuries AD. He singled out the sealed basin as a find of real significance, noting that the small animal bones recovered from it were most likely the remains of ritual meals, found alongside the coins and amphora stoppers, including the one bearing the Christian monogram.

Maria Serena Rizzo, an archaeological official with the Agrigento park, placed the find within a broader pattern researchers have been tracing over recent years. That ongoing work, she said, is gradually revealing what amounts to a genuine Christian city taking shape within Agrigento, complete with its own cult buildings, necropolises, and dedicated ritual spaces.

A quarter with a very long memory

The continuity of occupation documented in this fourth block, spanning distinct construction phases from the Republican era through the imperial period and into Late Antiquity, gives researchers an unusually complete record for studying how domestic and public spaces in a Sicilian city actually changed over time. Some reports on the find also note a possible connection between this building and a nearby cult site established within the remains of an older bath complex, a link researchers say would further reinforce the picture of an active Christian community taking shape in this part of the city.

Excavation work has proceeded under conservation protocols combining precise archaeological documentation with immediate preventive measures, carried out under the supervision of the park’s own restoration specialists, ensuring that fragile evidence like the mosaic and the sealed basin’s contents survives intact for the more detailed study still to come.

Sources: ANSA (July 17, 2026); Teleacras; AgrigentoNotizie; Parco Archeologico e Paesaggistico della Valle dei Templi.

Artifacts unearthed from an archaeological site in Xi’an’s Xincheng District. Credit: Shaanxi Provincial Institute of Archaeology.

A tomb of pottery figurines from the Sixteen Kingdoms period

The earliest of the newly detailed finds comes from Xi’an’s Xincheng district, where archaeologists carried out excavations between May and June 2023 as part of an urban redevelopment project. In the site’s northeastern section, they uncovered a tomb dating to the Sixteen Kingdoms period, spanning 304 to 439 AD.

Although the tomb had been disturbed at some point in the past, archaeologists still recovered 60 individual pieces or sets of burial objects, most of them pottery figurines. The assemblage falls into three broad categories, human figures, figures connected to travel and transportation, and depictions of domesticated animals, a combination the institute says matches elements commonly found in Sixteen Kingdoms-era tombs across the wider Guanzhong region.

Artifacts unearthed from Han dynasty tombs. Credit: Shaanxi Provincial Institute of Archaeology.

Several of the horse figurines stood out for their preservation, retaining details of saddles, harnesses, and painted decoration intact, material researchers say offers valuable insight into horse equipment and ornamentation during the period. The tomb also held a substantial collection of female seated musicians, travel figures, and ceremonial guard figures, alongside animal and kitchen-related pieces, giving archaeologists a fuller picture of how figurine groups were composed and arranged in burials of this era.

Tang Dynasty tombs with Taoist imagery

A second discovery came from Xi’an’s Chang’an district, where excavations carried out between May and June 2022 at a construction site uncovered 11 ancient tombs. Two of them, designated M1 and M2, proved particularly well preserved, each containing epitaphs bearing clear dates, adding useful new evidence to the study of middle and late Tang Dynasty burials in the Xi’an area.

The epitaph recovered from tomb M2 turned out to be especially informative, offering fresh insight into marital relationships, family structure, and burial customs among couples during the Tang Dynasty’s middle and later periods. Researchers believe the tomb’s owner held a genuine familiarity with Taoist practice, based on several unusual figurines found within, including figures with tall hairstyles and large ears, alongside depictions of deer with curled horns, imagery the institute connects to Taoist belief and mythology, offering new material for studying religious symbolism in ancient China.

Liubo boards from a Han Dynasty tomb

The most eye-catching find came from a separate excavation at Shaanxi Normal University’s Chang’an campus, carried out in 2022 ahead of the construction of new student dormitories. Archaeologists cleared 25 tombs and two ash pits at the site, with 10 Han Dynasty tombs surviving in good enough condition for detailed study, yielding 130 sets of burial objects in total, including pottery, bronze, and iron artifacts.

One of two Liubo game boards carved into square bricks and discovered in Han dynasty tombs. Credit: Shaanxi Provincial Institute of Archaeology.

Among these, two tombs, labeled M4 and M17, contained genuine highlights, boards for the ancient Chinese game of Liubo, carved directly onto plain or patterned bricks. Liubo, whose name literally means six sticks, was an enormously popular two-player board game during the Western Han Dynasty, played by both royalty and commoners alike, and is widely regarded as an ancestor of Xiangqi, or Chinese chess. Its board typically featured a distinctive symmetrical pattern, with a central area known as the water, and gameplay involved moving pieces according to throws of sticks or, later, dice. The game carried real cosmological weight in Han thought as well, with some scholars connecting its board pattern to contemporary diagrams of heaven and earth, and complete sets, including one remarkable, fully intact example recovered from the Mawangdui tombs in 1972, have turned up in aristocratic burials as apparent equipment for playing on into the afterlife. Despite that rich archaeological record, Liubo’s precise rules fell out of use and were effectively lost sometime after the Tang Dynasty, making each new board a small but genuine contribution to reconstructing how the game was actually played.

Beyond the chessboards themselves, the Shaanxi Normal University excavation offers researchers fresh material for tracing how burial objects, their types, quantities, and combinations, changed across the transition from the late Western Han into the late Eastern Han period.

A Northern Zhou official laid to rest with his wife

The fourth and final discovery came from a site east of Jinli village in the Xixian New Area, excavated between February and April 2021. According to an epitaph recovered at the site, the tomb belonged to a man named Yuwen Wei, who held several official positions during his life and died in the year 579, placing his burial firmly within the short-lived Northern Zhou Dynasty.

The tomb contained 115 sets of burial objects spanning pottery, porcelain, metal artifacts, and jewelry. Human remains recovered from the rear chamber confirmed the tomb functioned as a joint burial for Yuwen Wei and his wife, with female remains found on the eastern side of the coffin area and a relatively complete male skeleton on the western side, a layout matching the details recorded in the epitaph itself.

Among the tomb’s most notable objects was a white porcelain water container, notable for its distinctive shape, fine clay body, and delicate craftsmanship, a find the institute says offers valuable new evidence for tracing the development of white porcelain during the subsequent Sui Dynasty.

Source. Global Times (July 15, 2026), citing the Shaanxi Provincial Institute of Archaeology.