Top 10 Great Archaeological Discoveries

Archeology is one of the most amazing sciences, because it allows us to learn many unknown (and sometimes previously unimaginable) details of human history thanks to the remains of material culture collected bit by bit.

An archaeologist is almost a detective and a forensic scientist rolled into one. From a couple of bones and a rusty metal fragment, he can determine what happened at this place hundreds, if not thousands of years ago.

Our rich history reveals itself reluctantly, gradually: sometimes only a significant discovery takes a lot of moral and physical strength and a huge amount of time. As a result, the results are more valuable and interesting.

Here are just 10 of the most important archaeological discoveries in the history of this science.

10 Clay Seal of Baruch

One of the most valuable recent finds from the field of so-called “biblical” archeology is the personal seal of Baruch ben-Neriah.

Baruch was not only a friend and assistant of the prophet Jeremiah (and, in modern terms, his secretary), but also the author of a biography of this wise man.

The seal was found in 1980 by the Israeli archaeologist Nachman Avigad. It has an inscription – “lbrkyhw bn nryhw hspr”, meaning “Baruch, son of Neriah, scribe”.

And by the way, then the Jews still wrote not with Hebrew signs, but with angular letters similar to Phoenician ones. Such seals (in the form of a small roller with a name carved on it and worn on a cord around the neck) served in the ancient world as a signature, which was put on a lump of wet clay that sealed a contract or other important document written on parchment.

9. Nag Hammadi Library

In 1945, the peasant Mohammed Ali Samman accidentally found a collection of 12 ancient codes written on papyrus near the city of Nag Hammadi (Egypt) (only 13 sheets remained of the 8th codex), which opened the veil of secrecy that shrouded the first centuries of Christianity.

Historians have found out that there are 52 texts in the codes, of which 37 were previously unknown, and the rest have already been found in the form of translations into other languages, quotations, references, etc.

The texts included a number of Gospels, part of Plato’s book “The State”, as well as documents that deviate significantly from modern Christian dogma and contradict the Bible.

According to historians, these papyri were made in the XNUMXth century BC. and specially hidden by the monks of a nearby Christian monastery after the Alexandrian Archbishop Athanasius I the Great ordered the destruction of all non-canonical texts. Now these codes are kept in the Cairo Museum.

8. Pilate’s Stone

We all heard the story of the crucifixion of Christ and we know who sentenced him to this painful execution. But until 1961 there was no evidence that Pontius Pilate (procurator of Judea) really existed as a living person, and was not invented by the authors of the New Testament.

And finally, during excavations in Caesarea, the Italian archaeologist Antonio Frava found a large flat slab behind the amphitheater building, on which he read the Latin inscription “Tiberium … Pontius Pilate, prefect of Judea … dedicated …”.

So, firstly, it became clear that Pilate was a real historical person, and secondly, that he was not a procurator, but a prefect (at that time, however, the duties and rights of people who held these two positions in the Roman provinces were nearly identical).

Pilate’s stone is now in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.

7. dinosaur fossils

Now no one will say for sure when people first found dinosaur bones, but the first documented case of the discovery of the remains of ancient dinosaurs occurred in 1677, when Oxford professor Robert Plott, who obtained a huge femur of an unknown animal, first decided that this was part of one of the elephants , brought to Britain by the Romans, and eventually came to the conclusion that these are the remains of a sinner who drowned in the Great Flood.

(By the way, until the XNUMXth century, people most often considered dinosaur bones to be the remains of biblical giants, but the Chinese, who turned out to be closest to the truth, called them dragon bones and even attributed healing properties to them).

Given that people in Europe until very recently were very religious, they could not even imagine that such strange giant creatures once existed on earth (hardly created by the Lord).

Well, already in 1824, the British geologist and paleontologist William Buckland first described and named the dinosaur species he discovered – megalosaurus (that is, “great lizard”). The very term “dinosaur” appeared only in 1842.

6. Pompeii

At the mention of the name “Pompeii”, someone will immediately remember the famous painting by Karl Bryullov “The Last Day of Pompeii”, someone – the recent film “Pompeii” with Kit Harington.

In any case, almost everyone heard about this city, destroyed by Vesuvius at the end of October 79 AD (but not everyone is aware that two more cities died along with Pompeii – Herculaneum and Stabiae).

They were discovered purely by chance: in 1689, workers digging a well stumbled upon the ruins of an ancient building, on the wall of which there was an inscription with the word “Pompeii”. But then they simply considered that this was one of the villas of Pompey the Great.

And only in 1748, excavations began at this place, and their leader was the military engineer R.J. Alcubierre thought he had found the Stabiae. He was only interested in things that had artistic value, he simply destroyed the rest (until archaeologists were outraged by this fact).

In 1763, it finally became clear that the found city was not Stabiae, but Pompeii, and in 1870, the archaeologist Giuseppe Fiorelli guessed to fill with plaster the voids left in the place of the dead and covered with a layer of ash of people and domestic animals, thus obtaining their exact death casts.

To date, Pompeii has been excavated by about 75-80%.

5. Dead Sea Scrolls

And one more find from the field of “biblical” archeology, which is of great importance for scientists studying the origins and dogmas of world religions (in this case, Judaism and early Christianity).

972 documents, written mainly on parchment (and partly on papyrus), were accidentally discovered by an ordinary shepherd in the Qumran caves in the Dead Sea region. A significant part of them was sealed for safety in ceramic vessels.

For the first time these valuable scrolls were found in 1947, but they are still periodically discovered. The time of their creation is approximately from 250 BC. before 68 AD

The documents differ in content: about a third of them are biblical texts, while others are apocrypha (non-canonical descriptions of sacred history), texts by unknown religious authors, collections of Jewish laws and rules of life and behavior in the community, etc.

In 2011, the Israel Museum digitized most of these texts (with the support of Google) and posted them on the Internet.

4. Tutankhamun’s Tomb

The name “Tutankhamun” is also very well known. Discovered in 1922 in the Valley of the Kings in the Luxor region, the 4-chamber tomb of a very young pharaoh, which was robbed twice in ancient times, but retained a lot of valuable items, became one of the greatest finds not only in the field of Egyptology, but also in the entire world archeology .

It contained a lot of jewelry, household items, and, of course, ritual things that accompanied the pharaoh to the “better world”.

But the main treasure was the sarcophagus of Tutankhamen, in which his mummy was perfectly preserved. The archaeologist and Egyptologist Howard Carter and George Carnarvon, a British lord and collector who collected antiquities, found this tomb.

By the way, due to disputes about where the found values ​​should be stored – in Egypt itself or in Britain (the homeland of the discoverers), relations between these two countries almost deteriorated, and Carter was almost expelled from Egypt forever.

3. Cave of Altamira

There are a considerable number of caves in the Spanish province of Cantabria, and therefore, when in 1868 the hunter Modest Cubillas Peras discovered another one near the town of Santillana del Mar (its entrance was almost covered by a landslide), no one attached much importance to this.

But in 1879, local amateur archaeologist Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola decided to study it. His 9-year-old daughter Maria was with him and, according to one version, it was she who drew her father’s attention to the beautiful polychrome paintings on the ceiling of the cave, exclaiming “Daddy, bulls!”

It turned out that the bison, horses, wild boars, etc. depicted on the walls and vaults of the Altamira cave are from 15 to 37 thousand years old, and they belong to the Upper Paleolithic era. “Bulls” were painted with charcoal, ocher and other natural colors.

For a long time, other Spanish archaeologists tried to prove that Sautuola was a fraud. No one could believe that ancient people were able to depict animals so skillfully.

Altamira has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1985.

2. rosetta stone

In 1799, near the town of Rosetta in Egypt (now Rashid), a stone stele was found, the surface of which was covered with a text in three languages.

It was discovered by the captain of the French troops (remember the Egyptian campaign of Napoleon I) Pierre-Francois Bouchard, who led the construction of Fort Saint-Julien in the Nile Delta.

Being an educated person, Bouchard appreciated the importance of the find and sent it to Cairo, to the Institute of Egypt (opened by order of Napoleon just a year ago). There, the stele was studied by archaeologists and linguists, who found out that the inscription, made in the ancient Egyptian language (and made in hieroglyphs), below – in a much later Demotic script, and even below – in ancient Greek, is dedicated to Ptolemy V Epiphanes and created by Egyptian priests in 196 BC AD

Since the meaning of all three fragments was identical, it was the Rosetta Stone that became the starting point for deciphering the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs (using their elementary comparison with the ancient Greek text).

And despite the fact that just the part of the stele with hieroglyphs was damaged the most, the scientists managed to succeed. The Rosetta Stone is now in the British Museum.

1. olduvai gorge

Olduvai Gorge (a 40-kilometer crevice stretching along the Serengeti plains in Tanzania, 20 km from the Ngorongoro Crater) is the very place where in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The famous archaeologists Louis and Mary Leakey discovered the bones of the predecessor of modern man – “handy man” (homo habilis), as well as the remains of an earlier species of great ape (Australopithecine) and a much later Pithecanthropus.

The age of the most ancient remains exceeded 4 million years. That is why Olduvai is considered to be almost the “cradle of mankind.” By the way, in 1976, here in Olduvai, Mary Leakey and Peter Jones discovered the famous footprints proving that our ancestors walked straight already 3,8 million years ago.

Many of these finds are now housed in the Olduvai Goj Museum of Anthropology and Human Evolution, which was opened in 1970 on the grounds of Mary Leakey’s own Ngorongoro Conservation Area.