Archaeologists in Saudi Arabia have unearthed a clay pot full of gold, silver and gemstone-encrusted jewelry that may have been buried by an Islamic pilgrim en route to Mecca more than a millennium ago.

The team nicknamed the hoard the "Dhariyah Treasure" after the archaeological site where it was discovered. Located in the Al-Qassim region, Dhariyah was a key station on the Hajj route for Islamic pilgrims between Basra, Iraq, and Mecca, Saudi Arabia. According to archaeologists with the Saudi Heritage Commission who have been excavating Dhariyah for six years, radiocarbon analysis of organic remains puts the main settlement in the period of 743 to 753.

During the recent excavation season, archaeologists discovered gypsum water basins and the walls of several residential buildings. Inside the structures, they found fragments of pottery and glass — but the buried ceramic jar containing over 100 pieces of jewelry was a surprise.

"One of the most important discoveries of this sixth season was the uncovering of the 'Dhariyah Treasure,' which consists of a collection of gold pieces, gemstones and oxidized copper fragments," a laboratory expert with the Saudi Heritage Commission said in a translated video.

The treasure hoard was likely buried during the early years of the Abbasid caliphate, which came to power in 750 and was destroyed by the Mongols in 1258. Named after one of Muhammad's uncles, the Abbasid caliphs helped usher in the Islamic Golden Age in which cultural and scientific activity flourished. Geographically, the Abbasid Empire stretched from North Africa to Iran but was concentrated primarily in the Arabian Peninsula and present-day Iraq, with its capital at Baghdad.

According to Islamic tradition, every adult who can afford it and is physically able to make it is supposed to make a pilgrimage — called the Hajj — to the holiest Islamic city, Mecca, at least once. During the Abbasid period, Dhariyah was an important stop on the pilgrimage route between Basra, a port city in southern Iraq near the Arabian Gulf, and Mecca on the west coast of Saudi Arabia.

Experts do not yet know why the jewelry decorated with floral patterns and geometric motifs was buried at Dhariyah or whether it belonged to a pilgrim. But it is clear that skilled metalworkers crafted the pieces, Gulf News reported, by shaping sheets of gold, embossing them, and inlaying semiprecious gems.

Additional archaeological excavation at Dhariyah is planned for the future.

Editor's note: This story was updated at 9:55 a.m. ET on June 1 to note that the discovery was made at the Dhariyah archaeological site in the Al-Qassim region rather than Diriyah located on the outskirts of Riyadh, as previously stated.

See how much you know about gemstones with our gold and gems quiz!

The first two weeks of the war between the U.S., Israel and Iran created immense present and future greenhouse gas emissions, draining the global carbon budget faster than 84 countries combined, a new analysis finds.

Between Feb. 28 and March 14, 2026, the warring parties released almost 5.6 million tons (5.1 million metric tons) of carbon dioxide (CO₂) and other greenhouse gases by firing carbon-intensive weapons, powering fighter jets and ships, and bombing infrastructure such as oil storage facilities and civilian buildings, researchers found.

For comparison, if these emissions continued at the same rate for one year, they would be roughly equivalent to the annual carbon emissions of the 84 lowest emitting countries in the world combined. And the emissions from the first two weeks of the conflict are higher than Iceland's annual carbon emissions, which in 2024 totaled 4.7 million tons (4.3 million metric tons) of CO₂ via all sources, the team said.

"Every missile strike is another downpayment on a hotter, more unstable planet, and none of it makes anyone safer," Patrick Bigger, a co-author of the analysis and a research director at the Climate and Community Institute, a climate and economy think tank, told The Guardian.

The analysis and an accompanying opinion article written by the researchers were published March 21 by the Climate and Community Institute.

The biggest source of CO₂ from the conflict in Iran during its first two weeks was the destruction of homes, schools and other buildings, as the rubble will need to be cleared and the infrastructure must be rebuilt after the war ends, according to the analysis. Bigger and his colleagues calculated that these indirect emissions amount to about 2.7 million tons (2.4 million metric tons) of CO₂, which is equivalent to the Maldives' yearly emissions. Based on data from Red Crescent Society of Iran, a humanitarian organization, the infrastructure that has been razed includes 16,191 residential buildings, 3,384 commercial units, 77 medical centers and 69 schools, the researchers noted in the study.

The second largest chunk of CO₂ emissions from the first 14 days of the war came from the U.S., Israel and Iran's bombarding of oil storage facilities, oil refineries and oil tankers across the Gulf region. The researchers found that 2.5 million to 5.9 million barrels of oil were blown up during their analysis period, unleashing 2.1 million tons (1.9 million metric tons) of CO₂ and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere — roughly equivalent to Malta's annual emissions.

Fuel used during combat and support operations in the first two weeks of the war was the third-biggest source of CO₂, totaling about 583,000 tons (529,000 metric tons) of the greenhouse gas, which is comparable to Greenland's yearly emissions. The U.S. and Israel struck more than 6,000 targets in Iran using fighter jets and bombers between Feb. 28 and March 14, according to the analysis. This is equivalent to about 2,500 flights lasting three hours each, which, together with the transport of troops and other support activities, likely consumed 150 million to 270 million liters (40 million to 71 million gallons) of fuel, the researchers estimated.

In the first two weeks of the war, the U.S. lost three F-15 fighter jets and one KC-135 refueling aircraft. In the same period, Iran is reported to have lost 28 planes, 21 ships and about 300 missile launchers. This equipment will likely be replaced through manufacturing, and this makes up the fourth-largest source of CO₂ in the analysis, totaling 190,000 tons (172,000 metric tons) of the greenhouse gas. That's about the same as Tonga's annual emissions.

Finally, the researchers estimated that the U.S. and Israel launched 9,000 missiles in the first 14 days of the war. Iran, meanwhile, is thought to have launched 1,000 missiles and about 2,000 drones in the same period. Similar to planes, ships and missile launchers, the warring parties will likely replenish this arsenal, which also includes interceptor missiles. According to the analysis, the embodied CO₂ emissions amount to roughly 61,000 tons (55,000 metric tons), which is equivalent to a small cement plant's yearly emissions.

The war is in its fourth week, meaning that far more CO₂ has now been emitted directly and indirectly as a result of the conflict than the analysis suggests.

"We expect emissions to increase rapidly as the conflict proceeds, mainly due to the speed [at] which oil facilities are being targeted at an alarming rate," Fred Otu-Larbi, a co-author of the analysis and a researcher at Lancaster University in the U.K. and the University of Energy and Natural Resources in Ghana, told The Guardian. "Just what are the costs, no one really knows, that is why studies like this are so vital."

If more countries join the war, they could significantly boost emissions, the researchers wrote in the analysis. But already, "burning up the annual emissions of Iceland in two weeks is something we really cannot afford," Otu-Larbi said.

The aftershocks of the war are expected to have an even bigger climate impact than the fighting itself, as countries seek to buffer against fuel and fertilizer shocks caused by Iran's blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. Specifically, there could be an increase in drilling for fossil fuels as countries seek to become as energy secure as possible, the researchers said.

"Historically, every U.S.-driven energy shock has been followed by a surge in new drilling, new LNG [liquified natural gas] terminals and new fossil-fuel infrastructure," Bigger said. "This war risks hard-wiring another generation of carbon dependence."

Israeli archaeologists have unearthed a 2,000-year-old sling bullet inscribed with a cruel message: an ancient admonition telling enemies "Learn your lesson."

The sling bullet was found in the remains of the ancient city of Hippos (also known as Sussita). The molten lead for the ammunition had been poured into a mold emblazoned with the Greek letters for "learn."

"Sling lead bullets of this type are well known in archaeological research from many sites dating to the Hellenistic period, particularly from the second century BCE … but this is the first in the world to bear the inscription 'Learn,'" Michael Eisenberg, an archaeologist at the University of Haifa, said in a statement.

He thinks the sling bullet, also called a sling stone, was used against attackers by the Greek-speaking defenders of Hippos, which was located about a mile east of the Sea of Galilee. Eisenberg and his colleagues reported the findings March 10 in the journal Palestine Exploration Quarterly.

"This represents local sarcastic humor on the part of the city's defenders, who wished to teach their enemies a lesson with a wink," he said.

Hippos was one of 10 ancient cities in a confederation known as the Decapolis. These cities were founded on the eastern edge of the Levant by the Macedonian successors of Alexander the Great and were later developed by the Romans as their eastern frontier against the Parthians, who lived in the ancient Near East and had descended from nomads in eastern Iran.

Ancient ammo

The sling bullet was found in 2025 during excavations of a necropolis in the ruins of Hippos, according to the statement. The archaeologists think a defender likely fired it from the city's walls, which overlooked a road there.

The lemon-shaped bullet is made of lead and is about 1.3 inches (3.2 centimeters) long. One side was destroyed in a powerful impact, and archaeologists estimate it originally weighed about 1.6 ounces (45 grams).

The statement noted that slings were cheap but extremely effective as artillery and that a skilled slinger could strike an enemy almost 1,000 feet (300 meters) away. In addition, sling bullets could be easily made from stone molds during a conflict.

Sling bullets were often inscribed with the names of gods, cities or military commanders, such as Julius Caesar, or with magical symbols, like tridents, lightning bolts or scorpions, which were said to imbue them with power, according to the study.

Hippos bullet

One side of the sling bullet from Hippos is inscribed with the Greek letters ΜΑΘΟΥ. The study authors have interpreted that inscription as a form of the Greek word "mathaíno," which means "learn," and they think the spelling indicates it was an imperative that meant something like "Learn your lesson."

Similar lead sling bullets with dark humor have been found in the region, with inscriptions that mean "catch" and "take a taste."

The latest find is one of 69 lead sling bullets discovered at Hippos during 26 years of excavations, the study noted. Some are decorated with scorpions and thunderbolts, but this is the first with an inscription.

These sling bullets may have been used in any of several battles during the Hellenistic period at Hippos.

"The first was before the city's establishment, during the Ptolemaic rule, when a fortress stood atop the hill," the team wrote. "It was conquered during the Battle of Paneion c.199 BCE by the Seleucids, who subsequently established the polis of Hippos in this location."

Today, trans people face politicization of their lives and vilification from politicians, media and parts of broader society.

But in some of history's earliest civilizations, gender-diverse people were recognized and understood in a wholly different way.

As early as 4,500 years ago in ancient Mesopotamia, for instance, gender-diverse people held important roles in society with professional titles. These included the cultic attendants of the major deity Ištar, called assinnu, and high-ranking royal courtiers called ša rēši.

What the ancient evidence tells us is that these people held positions of power because of their gender ambiguity, not despite it.

Where is Mesopotamia and who lived there?

Mesopotamia is a region primarily made up of modern Iraq, but also parts of Syria, Turkey and Iran. Part of the Fertile Crescent, Mesopotamia is a Greek word which literally means "land between two rivers", referring to the Euphrates and Tigris.

For thousands of years, several different major cultural groups lived there. Amongst these were the Sumerians, and the later Semitic groups called the Akkadians, Assyrians and Babylonians.

The Sumerians invented writing by creating wedges on clay tablets. The script, called cuneiform, was made to write the Sumerian language but would be used by the later civilizations to write their own dialects of Akkadian, the earliest Semitic language.

Who were the assinnu?

The assinnu were the religious servants of the major Mesopotamian goddess of love and war, Ištar.

The queen of heaven, Ištar was the precursor to Aphrodite and Venus.

Also known by the Sumerians as Inanna, she was a warrior god, and held the ultimate political power to legitimize kings.

She also oversaw love, sexuality and fertility. In the myth of her journey to the Netherworld, her death puts an end to all reproduction on Earth. For the Mesopotamians, Ištar was one of the greatest deities in the pantheon. The maintenance of her official cult ensured the survival of humanity.

As her attendants, the assinnu were responsible for pleasing and tending to her through religious ritual and the upkeep of her temple.

The title assinnu is an Akkadian word related to terms that mean "woman-like" and "man-woman", as well as "hero" and "priestess."

Their gender fluidity was bestowed on them by Ištar herself. In a Sumerian hymn, the goddess is described as having the power to

turn a man into a woman and a woman into a man

to change one into the other

to dress women in clothes for men

to dress men in clothes for women

to put spindles into the hands of men

and to give weapons to women.

The assinnu were viewed by some early scholars as a type of religious sex worker. This, however, is based on early assumptions about gender-diverse groups, and is not well supported by evidence.

The title is also often translated as "eunuch," though there is also no clear evidence they were castrated men. While the title is primarily masculine, there is evidence of female assinnu. In fact, various texts show they resisted the gender binary.

Their religious importance allowed them to possess magical and healing powers. An incantation states:

May your assinnu stand by and extract my illness. May he make the illness which seized me go out the window.

And a Neo-Assyrian omen tells us that sexual relations with an assinnu could bring personal benefits:

If a man approaches an assinnu [for sex]: restrictions will be loosened for him.

As the devotees of Ištar, they also had powerful political influence. A Neo-Babylonian almanac states:

[the king] should touch the head of an assinnu, he shall defeat his enemy his land will obey his command.

Having their gender transformed by Ištar herself, the assinnu could walk between the divine and the mortal as they maintained the wellbeing of both the gods and humanity.

Who were the ša rēši?

Usually described as eunuchs, the ša rēši were attendants to the king.

Court "eunuchs" have been recorded in many cultures throughout history. However, the term did not exist in Mesopotamia, and the ša rēši had their own distinct title.

The Akkadian term ša rēši literally means "one of the head", and refers to the king's closest courtiers. Their duties in the palace varied, and they could hold several high-ranking posts at the same time.

The evidence for their gender ambiguity is both textual and visual. There are various texts that describe them as infertile, such as an incantation which states:

Like a ša rēši who does not beget, may your semen dry up!

The ša rēši are always depicted beardless, and were contrasted with another type of courtier called ša ziqnī ("bearded one"), who had descendants. In Mesopotamian cultures, beards signified one's manhood, and so a beardless man would go directly against the norm. Yet, reliefs show the ša rēši wore the same dress as other royal men, and so were able to display authority alongside other elite males.

One of their main functions was supervising the women's quarters in the palace — a place of highly restricted access — where the only male permitted to enter was the king himself.

As they were so closely trusted by the king, they were not only able to hold martial roles as guards and charioteers, but also lead their own armies. After their victories, ša rēši were granted property and governorship over newly conquered territories, as evidenced by one such ša rēši who erected their own royal stone inscription.

Because of their gender fluidity, the ša rēši were able to transcend the boundaries of not just gendered space, but that between ruler and subject.

Gender ambiguity as a tool of power

While early historians understood these figures as "eunuchs" or "cultic sex workers", the evidence shows it was because they lived unbound by the gender binary that these groups were able to hold powerful roles in Mesopotamian society.

As we recognize the importance of transgender and gender-diverse people in our communities today, we can see this as a continuity of respect given to these early figures.

This edited article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

About 1,500 years ago, early Christian monks and adherents of the Persian religion Zoroastrianism lived together without conflict in northern Iraq, according to a new study.

This wasn't the only place where Zoroastrians mingled with people of other faiths; a 2,000-year-old sanctuary discovered in modern Georgia reveals a mixture of Zoroastrian beliefs and those of other religions, another study reports.

Taken together, the finds are more evidence that Zoroastrianism — the official religion of the royal dynasties that governed the Persian empires for more than 1,000 years — often coexisted peacefully with other religions.

In the Iraq finding, a team led by archaeologists Alexander Tamm, of the Friedrich-Alexander University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, and Dirk Wicke, of Goethe University Frankfurt, examined the ruins of a building complex at the Gird-î Kazhaw site in the Kurdistan region of the country, according to a statement from Goethe University Frankfurt.

They found buried stone pillars and other architectural evidence that the building complex had been a church at the center of a Christian monastery, which was originally discovered in 2015. The monastery was built in about A.D. 500 — "a huge surprise" because it was the first Christian structure ever found there, according to the statement.

The team also unearthed buried fragments of a large jug decorated with an early Christian cross. (Crosses were rarely used as Christian symbols until the Roman Empire legalized Christianity in the fourth century.)

And yet the newly investigated Christian monastery lies only a few yards from a Sasanian Persian fortification where Zoroastrianism was practiced. The two structures' proximity indicates that Christians and Zoroastrians were living peacefully side by side at this location, the statement said.

Rival empires

The archaeological team noted that in that era, Christianity was spreading beyond the borders of the Roman Empire, where it had been the official religion since the Edict of Thessalonica by Emperor Theodosius in 380.

The Romans — and, later, the Byzantines — were usually rivals of the Persians, and sometimes allies. The new religion of Christianity, however, was spreading even among the Persians. "The early dating for a church building into the fifth to sixth century AD is not unusual in the region," the statement said. "There are comparable structures in northern Syria and northern Mesopotamia."

"Grandiose" temple in Georgia

The finds in northern Iraq come amid new details of a roughly 2,000-year-old sanctuary within a "grandiose" temple complex at Dedoplis Gora in Georgia, less than 400 miles (600 kilometers) north of Gird-î Kazhaw in Iraq.

Dedoplis Gora was under the independent Kartli kingdom at that time. However, the region was heavily influenced by the Achaemenid Persian Empire, and there is extensive evidence that Zoroastrianism was practiced there.

According to a study in the January 2026 issue of the American Journal of Archaeology by David Gagoshidze, an archaeologist at the University of Georgia in Tbilisi, "the kings of Kartli worshiped Iranian (Zoroastrian) gods merged with local Georgian astral deities." The study looks at three sanctuary rooms in the Dedoplis Gora palace that had different religious traditions.

In one sanctuary, the rites of Zoroastrainism were practiced at an altar where "permanent residents of the palace of Dedoplis Gora offered daily sacrifices and prayed." In another room, it appears the "noble owners of the palace" worshipped the Greek cult of Apollo, "based on the statuettes found there," according to the study.

Finally, in a third room, in what seems to have been a "syncretic" ceremony (that is, a ceremony that combines more than one religious tradition), rituals were likely carried out for a local cult related to "fertility, agriculture and harvest."

History of Zoroastrianism

The studies indicate the official Persian religion of Zoroastrianism was generally tolerant of other beliefs, although there were times during the late Sasanian Persian Empire when followers of rival religions like Christianity or Manicheism (a now-extinct Persian religion centered on the prophet Mani) were persecuted.

Zoroastrianism is named after the Persian prophet Zarathustra (Zoroaster in Greek), who is thought to have lived about 3,500 years ago, and it is centered on the worship of the "Wise Lord" Ahura Mazda, whose primary symbol is fire. (The phrase "Thus spake Zarathustra" is the title of a book by the 19th-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who wasn't Zoroastrian but used Zarathustra as a fictional mouthpiece for his ideas.)

Zoroastrianism sharply declined in Persia (now Iran) after the Islamic conquest of the Sasanian Empire in the seventh century, and now there are only about 120,000 practicing Zoroastrians worldwide.

Archaeologists in Jerusalem have unearthed a rare 1,300-year-old lead medallion decorated on both sides with the image of a seven-branched menorah — the ceremonial candlestick unique to the Second Temple.

Researchers think the medallion was worn on a necklace by a Jewish person in the late sixth or early seventh century, when the city and surrounding region were under the rule of the Christian Byzantine Empire — only decades before the city fell, first to the Sasanian Persians in 614 and then to mostly Arab Islamic invaders in about 638.

According to a statement from the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA), the medallion was discovered in part of the "City of David" archaeological site near the southwest corner of Jerusalem's Temple Mount, which is now the location of several Islamic holy sites in "al-Haram al-Sharif" (which means "the Noble Sanctuary" in Arabic).

"One day while I was digging inside an ancient structure, I suddenly saw something different, gray, among the stones," Ayayu Belete, an archaeological worker for the nonprofit City of David Foundation, said in the statement. "I picked up the object and saw that it was a pendant with a menorah on it."

The discovery is a surprise to archaeologists because Jews were restricted from entering the city at that time. Centuries earlier, the Jewish people's failed Bar Kochba (also spelled Kokhba) Revolt from 132 to 136 (the third major rebellion against Roman rule in Judaea) led the Roman emperor Hadrian to declare that Jerusalem would be rebuilt as "Aelia Capitolina" and that the surrounding province of Judaea would be called Syria-Palaestina. This ancient name was inspired by the long-dead Philistines, biblical enemies of the Israelites who had lived along the nearby Mediterranean coast.

Rare medallion

The newfound medallion was discovered inside a Late Byzantine-era building, which had been buried beneath a thick layer of rubble from construction work directed by the city's Umayyad rulers a few decades after the Islamic conquest, the statement said.

The medallion is disc-shaped, with a loop at the top. Both sides depict a seven-branched menorah, a type of menorah that was used only in Jerusalem's Second Temple, which was destroyed by the Romans in A.D. 70. (Nine-branched menorahs are used nowadays at Hanukkah.) The top of each candlestick branch on the medallion has a horizontal crossbar with flames rising above it. One side of the medallion is well preserved, but the other side is covered by a natural patina from weathering; analysis shows it was made almost entirely of lead.

Only one other millennia-old lead medallion bearing the menorah symbol has ever been found before, the statement said. "A pendant made of pure lead, decorated with a menorah, is an exceptionally rare find," IAA archaeologists Yuval Baruch, Filip Vukosavović, Esther Rakow-Mellet and Shulamit Terem wrote in the statement. "The double appearance of the menorah on each side of the disc indicates the deep significance of this symbol."

Hadrian's city

Jews were supposedly forbidden from entering the city in Byzantine times and had been since the Roman victory in the Bar Kochba revolt. But according to Günter Stemberger, an emeritus professor Jewish Studies at the University of Vienna, the prohibition was sometimes relaxed, and many Jews lived in nearby cities and territories.

However, it's unclear what significance these medallions held for their owners. "Were they private objects of Jews who came to the city for various reasons — perhaps merchants, or those on administrative missions, or individuals who came to the city as secret pilgrims, and under unofficial circumstances?" the archaeological team wrote in the statement.

The newfound medallion reveals that "during periods when imperial edicts were issued prohibiting Jews from residing in the city, they did not stop coming there," said Baruch, the IAA's Jerusalem District archaeologist.

The fact that the medallion was made from lead indicated it was worn as an amulet — and probably hidden — rather than as jewelry, according to Baruch. "Lead was considered a common and particularly popular material for making amulets at that time," he said.

In 2009, Israeli archaeologists uncovered a massive stone in an ancient synagogue near the Sea of Galilee — and it had an ancient menorah carved into it. Only a handful of depictions of menorahs exist from the Second Temple period, which ended in A.D. 70 when the Romans destroyed both the temple and Jerusalem, and the Magdala stone may be the earliest of them all.

During an archaeological excavation ahead of construction, archaeologists discovered the ruins of a synagogue at the site of Magdala (also called Migdal), an ancient city said to be the birthplace of Mary Magdalen. The synagogue was in use from about A.D. 50 through its abandonment and collapse around A.D. 80.

Within a small room thought to have held Torah scrolls, archaeologists found a unique rectangular block of limestone set on four stone feet, now known as the Magdala stone. Five sides of the stone were decorated with raised carvings of objects in a synagogue. One of these carvings — a seven-branch menorah — has been the focus of much discussion since the stone's discovery.

The Magdala stone measures about 23.6 by 19.7 by 15.7 inches (60 by 50 by 40 centimeters). The long sides of the stone are carved with a series of round arches separated by columns, while the top includes floral imagery. On one of the narrow ends, a menorah rests on a square box flanked by amphoras, or clay jugs. The menorah's seven branches reflect the menorah used in rituals in the Second Temple.

Archaeologist Mordechai Aviam wrote in a study that the Magdala stone may have served as the base for a Torah reading table and that the decorations depict the Holy of Holies shrine — where God's presence is said to dwell, according to Jewish tradition. This Holy of Holies shrine was in the Second Temple in Jerusalem. Following the sack of Jerusalem in A.D. 70, the Romans took the gold menorah from the Second Temple and paraded it through Rome, eventually memorializing their military triumph on the Arch of Titus.

The discovery of a carved representation of the Second Temple outside of Jerusalem suggests that a pilgrim saw the Holy of Holies shrine and its gold menorah before the Second Temple was sacked. This pilgrim likely commissioned a representation of them for the Magdala synagogue prior to the destruction, making the Magdala stone the oldest image of the Second Temple's seven-branch menorah ever found.

This year, Hanukkah began after sundown on Dec. 14. The Festival of Lights lasts for eight days. Nowadays, Jewish people typically use a nine-branch menorah, called a hanukkiah, that celebrates the rededication of the Second Temple in Jerusalem in the second century B.C., after the Maccabees revolted against the Seleucid rulers of Syria. The Seleucids had outlawed Jewish practices and brought pagan worship to the Second Temple.

After ousting the Seleucids, the Maccabees ritually purified and re-dedicated the Temple. Scholars of Judaism disagree about the significance of why Hanukkah lasts eight days. Some say the Maccabees found a flask of oil that unexpectedly burned for eight days, while others suggest that people were observing a delayed Sukkot, which celebrates the fall harvest.

For more stunning archaeological discoveries, check out our Astonishing Artifacts archives.

Long before the ancient Greeks imagined Zeus taking the form of a swan to mate with the princess Leda, the Natufian people in southwest Asia were depicting the same thing. Archaeologists recently discovered a 12,000-year-old sculpted piece of fired clay from a prehistoric settlement in Israel that they say represents an early belief system.

"When I took this small block of clay out of its box, I immediately recognized the human figure and then the bird lying on its back," Laurent Davin, an archaeologist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, told Live Science in an email.

The figurine depicts a woman and a bird — thought to be a goose — and is the earliest known depiction of a woman in southwestern Asia, Davin and colleagues wrote in a study published Monday (Nov. 17) in the journal PNAS.

During an investigation, Davin meticulously examined tens of thousands of small clay fragments that had been collected from several Natufian archaeological sites. The Natufians were a sedentary hunter-gatherer culture found in present-day Israel, the Palestinian territories, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria between 15,000 and 11,500 years ago.

One tiny bit of crafted clay from an archaeological site called Nahal Ein Gev II, located about 1.2 miles (2 kilometers) east of the Sea of Galilee in northern Israel, caught Davin's eye.

"I understood that I held in my hand an exceptional piece, both in terms of the subject depicted and the quality of the modeling created 12,000 years ago," Davin said. "The human depiction is the most complete and detailed representation of a human body that has been identified so far in the Natufian culture."

The "extremely rare" clay figurine may be the earliest representation in the world of human–animal interaction, the researchers detailed in the study.

The figurine was modeled from a single block of clay and found fragmented into three pieces, the researchers wrote in the study. It measures just 1.5 inches (3.7 centimeters) tall and was heated in a fireplace before being covered with a red mineral pigment.

At the top of the figurine is a bird resting on the back of a human, its wings spread out and backward to partially envelop the person. An incised triangular area on the lower part of the figurine likely represents a female pubis, and symmetrical oval imprints near the face suggest breasts. The bird is likely a goose, the researchers wrote, as animal bones discovered at the site suggest the Natufians used geese for both food and decoration.

One potential interpretation of the figurine is that it shows a hunter transporting a slain bird back to camp, according to the study. But because the woman is leaning forward and because the goose appears to be alive, the researchers favor a more mythological explanation: a male goose mating with the squatting female by mounting her.

"Imaginary mating between human and animal spirits is known in many myths of historical periods across the world," Davin said. "This emerging desire to represent female imagery might be related to the growing importance of women in managing the spiritual practices of these communities."

Davin also noticed a partial fingerprint on the figurine. Based on the fingerprint's ridge density in comparison with modern fingerprints made by people of known sex, this may indicate the piece was sculpted by a woman.

The figurine was discovered in an area of the site that had been used for burial, along with other unique deposits, including a child burial and a cache of human teeth, the researchers noted in the study.

Taken together, the features of the rare figurine suggest the Natufians were creating complex imagery and potentially expressing animistic beliefs prior to the "Neolithic revolution" in southwest Asia, when people permanently settled down, grew crops and domesticated animals.

The woman and a goose figurine therefore "bridges the world of mobile hunter-gatherers and that of the first settled communities, showing how imagination and symbolic thinking began to shape human culture," study co-author Leore Grosman, an archaeologist at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, said in a statement.

Archaeologists in Iraq have unearthed the remains of a 5,000-year-old building that may have been a temple from the Uruk period, when the first cities in the world were taking off.

The buried "monumental" structure was discovered in September at the Kani Shaie archaeological site in the northern Sulaymaniyah Governorate, in the foothills of the Zagros Mountains in northern Iraq, according to a statement.

"If the monumental nature of this building is confirmed — which we are now investigating in detail — the discovery could transform our understanding of Uruk's relationship with surrounding regions," the researchers said in the statement.

The structure dates from between about 3300 to 3100 B.C. during the Uruk period, which is named after Uruk in southern Mesopotamia.

Ancient Uruk was a city of up to 80,000 people, spread out over an area of up to 990 acres (400 hectares) with a grid-like pattern of streets and zones for different functions, such as administrative and residential neighborhoods, according the late German archaeologist Hans Nissen in his key work "The Early History of the Ancient Near East" (University of Chicago Press, 1988).

The excavation leaders said in the statement that the structure was found in the top part of a mound of earth at Kani Shaie, and that its architectural style indicated it had been an official building of some sort and possibly a "cultic space" or temple for worship.

Cylinder seal

The researchers also found fragments of a gold pendant, which may reflect a "social display" of wealth in the community; and "cylinder seals" from the Uruk period, which were associated with administration and political power, the statement said.

In addition, the team discovered ancient "wall cones" — decorative ornaments consisting of cones of baked clay or stone that were pressed point-first into fresh plaster on a wall. The flat parts of the cones were then painted, creating a mosaic effect across the wall that often featured geometric designs, such as triangles and zigzags. The wall cones are further evidence that the building was a "public or ceremonial structure," the statement said.

Kani Shaie was almost 300 miles (480 kilometers) north of Uruk, which would have been about 15 days' walk on foot. But the new finds suggest that it was not a peripheral place during the Uruk period, as archaeologists had previously assumed because of its distance. Instead, the settlement seems to have been part of an expansive cultural and political network that stretched across ancient Mesopotamia.

"Kani Shaie is regarded as the most important archaeological site east of the Tigris River for understanding the sequence of human occupation from the Early Bronze Age through to the 3rd millennium BC," the researchers said.

Ancient Uruk

Archaeologists have carried out excavations at the site since 2013 and found evidence of occupation since the Chalcolithic period (the "Copper-stone" Age) from about 6500 B.C. in this region until about 2500 B.C.

Uruk (modern Warka in southern Iraq) may have been the first city in the world and it strongly influenced the Sumerians and later Mesopotamian civilizations. The people of Uruk are credited with inventing cuneiform writing, which may have been the first writing system and was used throughout Mesopotamia for thousands of years. They are also credited with developing the first written numbers, which seem to have been used for tallies of farming produce.

Uruk also pioneered a form of the "ziggurat" style of building that would be used for temples by later Mesopotamian civilizations; and it may have been the first place where priests were distinguished with special vestments and religious iconography.

Mesopotamia quiz: Test your knowledge about the ancient civilizations of the Fertile Crescent

Archaeologists in Saudi Arabia have discovered 12,000-year-old life-sized animal etchings — "monumental rock art" that dates to over 2,000 years before humans were thought to be in the region, a new study finds.

These highly realistic depictions of camels and other creatures were likely culturally meaningful for these hunter-gatherers, and probably served as waymarkers to help people locate oases that popped up when the area became wetter starting from 16,000 to 13,000 years ago, the researchers wrote in the study, which was published Tuesday (Sept. 30) in the journal Nature Communications.

The rock art could have also marked ancient travel routes or even signified the territory of a group and its intergenerational memory, the researchers said. These findings ultimately show that "humans were able to survive in the desert very early on, much earlier than we thought and in much harsher conditions than we thought,"study co-author Maria Guagnin, an archaeologist at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology in Germany, told Live Science.

At the crossroad between Africa and Asia, Arabia was a key migration route for early humans, with research published April 9 in the journal Nature confirming the region underwent various "humid episodes" that enabled these dispersals. Yet there previously was no evidence of human occupation in northern Arabia between the end of the Last Glacial Maximum (around 25,000 to 20,000 years ago), the coldest period during the last ice age, and around 10,000 years ago. Researchers assumed the area had been abandoned because it was too arid to survive.

Now, following a tip from local amateur archaeologists about a giant piece of rock art, researchers have explored three previously unknown sites in the southern Nafud Desert in northern Saudi Arabia that upend that assumption.

When they arrived, one teammate wandered off to explore the area and discovered "the first big excitement," a rock formation with ancient art surrounding a pool of water, Guagnin said. And on the other side of the mountain were the remains of an ancient lake.

The team subsequently found 62 rock art panels with 176 engravings across the three sites, with some etched into huge cliff faces 128 feet (39 meters) up. The engravings were predominantly of life-sized animals, mainly camels.

Importantly, these depictions were commonly of male camels with distinctive bulges around their necks that they form during the mating season and thick winter fur. This suggests that the ancient water sources may have formed in winter, and may have also symbolized the resilience of these animals to the harsh environment, the authors speculated in their study.

Digging up the desert

The archaeologists excavated directly below four camel engravings to try to determine their age. They unearthed over 1,200 stones, 16 animal bone fragments and three hearths. The team dated these using luminescence dating, a technique that measures when sediments were last exposed to heat and sunlight, and radiocarbon dating, which measures the ratio of different versions of carbon.

These methods revealed that the rock art was between 12,800 and 11,400 years old.

At one excavation site, the camels' legs had been obscured by layers of sediment. When they dug down, the team were amazed to find the stone tool likely responsible for creating the masterpiece, which they dated to around 12,200 years ago. This provides "an indirect date for the engraving," the authors wrote in the study.

They also found arrow points, bladelets and stone beads; but "this isn't just a handful of arrowheads," Guagnin said. A community lived in the region and crafted tools and ornaments typical of the Natufian culture in the Levant, many miles away around the eastern Mediterranean. "They were in contact with the Levant somehow across hundreds of kilometers," she said, and learned about the latest tools and accessories.

Crucially, "some things are imported but then some things are unique," study co-author Michael Petraglia, an archaeologist at Griffith University in Australia, told Live Science. These people were also developing their own culture, with the rock art having symbolic meaning as well as being clear ways of marking routes to water sources, he said.

An analysis of the sediments in the dried up water sources revealed the region had become more humid starting around 16,000 to 13,000 years ago, forming seasonal lakes. This discovery represents the earliest evidence of increased humidity in northern Arabia after the Last Glacial Maximum.

"This is a very exciting study revealing a part of Saudi Arabian history that has so far not been readily visible," Hugh Thomas, an archaeologist specializing in Saudi Arabia at the University of Sydney who was not involved in the study, told Live Science in an email. He said that these results show that "the entire region was populated and that even at this time, it was an interconnected landscape."

Stone Age quiz: What do you know about the Paleolithic, Mesolithic and Neolithic?

This 5,000-year-old silver figurine depicts a bull kneeling in a human-like pose and holding a spouted vessel. It was made in southern Mesopotamia by someone from the Proto-Elamite culture, the oldest civilization in Iran, and was likely used in a ritual or ceremony.

The bull is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. It stands 6.4 inches (16.3 centimeters) tall and was made from 98.5% pure silver, according to a 1970 study by then-Met conservator Kate Lefferts. Inside the hollow figurine, Lefferts found five limestone pebbles, which were likely included by the artist to create a rattling sound. Fiber adhered to the statue was made from animal yarn.

In a 1970 study, Donald Hansen, then a fine arts professor at New York University, described the figurine as a remarkable blend of part-human and part-animal characteristics. The bovine head, complete with curved horns, rests atop human-like shoulders, and the creature is clothed in a decorated robe that covers its kneeling legs. The bull's outstretched arms are human-like but end in hooves that hold a vessel. The figurine does not have a flat base, Hansen noted, which means it could not have stood on its own on a hard surface.

Related: Haniwa Dancers: 1,500-year-old ghostly figurines thought to hold the souls of the dead

The figurine was made in Elam, an ancient region that corresponds to modern-day southwestern Iran. This area was the seat of the Proto-Elamite, an early Near East civilization in the Copper Age. The Proto-Elamites invented cylinder seals — cylinders that were engraved with figural scenes and were used for administrative purposes — many of which depict animals in human-like poses. The Kneeling Bull was likely made in this Proto-Elamite tradition of creating mythical-but-realistic-looking animal-human hybrids.

It is unclear why someone decided to make the Kneeling Bull five millennia ago. But the limestone pebbles inside the statuette and the fabric adhering to it suggest it was used in a ritual or ceremony, according to Hansen. It may have even been a "foundation figurine." These items were intentionally buried during the construction of Proto-Elamite temples to symbolically mark sacred ground. If the Kneeling Bull was created as a foundation figurine, it was never meant to be seen again.

Archaeologists have uncovered a complete plaster cross dating to 1,400 years ago during an excavation in the United Arab Emirates. The Christian symbol finally proves that a series of houses discovered decades ago were part of a monastery.

"This is a very exciting time for us," Maria Gajewska, an archaeologist at the Department of Culture and Tourism — Abu Dhabi, said in a video. "We never had concrete proof [the houses] were inhabited by Christians."

Nine small courtyard houses were excavated in 1992 on Sir Bani Yas, an island 110 miles (170 kilometers) southwest of Abu Dhabi. Nearby, archaeologists found a church and monastery dating to the seventh and eighth centuries A.D. But it was unclear whether the houses were related to the monastic settlement.

This year, archaeologists returned to Sir Bani Yas for further excavation. In the courtyard of one house, they found a stucco plaque in the shape of a Christian cross measuring nearly 1 foot (30 centimeters) long.

With that cross, "we have now proved these houses were part of a Christian settlement," Gajewska said. Senior monks probably lived in the houses, secluding themselves and praying, before reconvening at the monastery with their brethren, she said.

Related: 1,800-year-old silver amulet could rewrite history of Christianity in the early Roman Empire

Sir Bani Yas was just one location of Christian worship in the region during this time period, according to a translated statement from the Abu Dhabi Media Office. Christianity spread around the Arabian Gulf between the fourth and sixth centuries before the rise of Islam starting in the seventh century. Muslims and Christians lived on Sir Bani Yas until the monastery was abandoned in the eighth century.

The new excavation "helps us better understand the nature of life and the relationships that connected the inhabitants of the island with the surrounding regions," Hager Hasan Almenhali, an archaeologist at the Department of Culture and Tourism — Abu Dhabi, said in the video.

Archaeologists plan to continue their work on the courtyard houses. The Sir Bani Yas church and monastery site is open to the public.

What do you know about Jesus Christ, the man? Test your knowledge of biblical archaeology

This small, bronze figurine is the best-known depiction of the Mesopotamian god Pazuzu, who was the inspiration for modern demons featured in "The Exorcist" and "The Simpsons" — but apparently not the basis for the collectible toy Labubu.

On display at the Louvre, the 6-inch-tall (15 centimeters) winged figurine stands on a base with his right arm raised. But on his back is a bone-chilling inscription that likely contributed to the demon's infamy: "I am Pazuzu, son of Hampa, the king of evil spirits of the air who violently emerges from the mountains raging; it is I."

In ancient Mesopotamian religion, Pazuzu was a world-wandering wind demon. Although the depictions of him differ, Pazuzu typically has a dog-like face with huge, bulging eyes; an open mouth with sharp teeth; the talons and wings of a bird; the horns of a goat; and a scaly body with serpent-headed genitalia and a scorpion tail.

Ancient texts suggest that Pazuzu was responsible for summoning destructive winds, for bringing about droughts and famine and for introducing disease.

A huge number of Pazuzu figurines made from a variety of materials have been found on archaeological sites over the years, but Pazuzu didn't enter the modern cultural zeitgeist until half a century ago.

Related: Sabu Disk: A mysterious 5,000-year-old Egyptian stone sculpture that looks like a hubcap

The Mesopotamian "demon of the southwest wind" inspired a character in William Peter Blatty's 1971 book "The Exorcist," where the spirit possesses a little girl. In 2017, a character named Pazuzu showed up on an episode of "The Simpsons," where the statue possesses the family. And more recently, some people have taken to the internet to speculate that the furry collectible toy Labubu, with its enormous eyes and tiny fangs, is based on Pazuzu.

But Pazuzu has gotten a bit of a bad rap. In spite of his destructive nature, he was also seen as a protector of the domestic realm. His job was to repel other demons from people's homes, and he looked after pregnant women and mothers.

A Viking hoard unearthed in England contains silver traded from the Islamic world, as well as plenty of silver looted in Europe, a new study reveals.

The 1,100-year-old Bedale hoard offers a glimpse into the substantial wealth that the Vikings had in England during the Viking Age, and includes a gold sword pommel, silver jewelry and 29 silver ingots. The hoard was first discovered in 2012, but archaeologists have only just discovered that some of its riches were acquired through long-distance trade networks that stretched deep into the Middle East.

Following their analysis, published Monday (Aug. 11) in the journal Archaeometry, the researchers concluded that most of the hoard's silver came from western Europe, likely from looted Anglo-Saxon and Carolingian coins. However, a good chunk came from Islamic silver coinage.

The researchers' findings reinforce the Vikings' connections to the Islamic world and highlight that they didn't just loot their way to wealth.

"Most of us tend to think of the Vikings primarily as raiders, who looted monasteries and other wealthy places in search of wealth," study lead author Jane Kershaw, an associate professor of Viking Age archaeology at Oxford University in the U.K., said in a statement. "What the analysis of the Bedale hoard shows is that that is only part of the picture."

Related: Hornelund Brooches: Viking age gold ornaments mysteriously buried in Denmark 1,000 years ago

The Vikings were a diverse and successful people who originated in Scandinavia. They are famous for their sea-borne raiders and explorers, who travelled to diverse lands across at least four continents, including North America, between the 8th and 11th centuries.

The Bedale hoard was discovered by metal detectorists Stuart Campbell and Steve Caswell near the town of Bedale in northern England, which the hoard was named after. In 2014, BBC News reported that the hoard was valued at a little over $70,000 (£51,636) in today's money.

For the new study, researchers used geochemical analysis to identify the original source of the silver used to make the hoard's ingots and jewelry. This analysis revealed that the silver was made from melted-down western European coinage and Islamic dirhams.

A third of the hoard's ingots matched silver minted in the Middle East, mainly from the Abbasid Caliphate, the third caliphate to succeed the Islamic prophet Muhammed that spanned a vast territory encompassing the Arabian Peninsula, much of North Africa, and modern-day Iran and Iraq.

The hoard’s silver would have reached the Vikings via eastern trade routes called the Austrvegr, according to the statement. To obtain the coveted dirhams, the Vikings exchanged fur, amber, swords and slaves, according to the accounts of Arab chroniclers. The Vikings would have then taken this Islamic silver with them when they settled in England.

"I love to think how Bedale – today a quintessentially English market town in north Yorkshire – was, in the Viking Age, at the heart of a much wider, Eurasian Viking economy," Kershaw said. "The Vikings weren't only extracting wealth from the local population, they were also bringing wealth with them when they raided and settled."

Viking quiz: How much do you know about these seaborne raiders, traders and explorers?

This gold helmet, painstakingly decorated to look like the wavy hairdo and ears of its wearer, was found in 1927 by British archaeologist Sir Leonard Woolley during excavations at Ur, an ancient city in Mesopotamia that is now part of Iraq.

The artifact was recovered from a tomb in the Royal Cemetery along with alabaster vases, gold daggers and golden bowls — one of which listed the name Meskalamdug, meaning "hero of the good land." But since the tomb was not as big or as richly furnished as other royal tombs, Woolley suggested the deceased was probably a prince rather than a king of Ur.

Two copies of the helmet were made within a few years of discovery, one going to the British Museum and one to the Penn Museum. The original helmet, which was hidden before the First Gulf War and protected from looting until it was recovered in late 2003, is at the Iraq Museum in Baghdad.

Related: Vounous Bowl: A 4,000-year-old basin holding 4 miniature cows and 18 people — that was buried for mysterious reasons in a Bronze Age tomb in Cyprus

According to the Penn Museum, the helmet is 8.9 inches (22.7 centimeters) tall and 8.3 inches (21 cm) wide. And according to James Ogden, an early 20th century goldsmith who created the two exact replicas in 1928, the original helmet was made from one sheet of 15-karat gold.

Ogden described the helmet in his personal notes as "life size" and "perhaps a ceremonial headdress." The small holes around the rim were likely used to secure a quilted cloth lining, and Ogden noted that he found traces of it inside.

The hand-beaten gold was modeled and engraved to represent hair that was tied back with a ribbon and pulled into a small bun in the back. The ears had holes so that the wearer could hear through the helmet, and additional holes below the ears were probably for the attachment of a chin-strap.

Meskalamdug's helmet is quite different from the ordinary copper helmets that private soldiers wore, Woolley wrote in a 1928 report on Meskalamdug's tomb. But it is similar to the hairstyles and helmets worn by the Mesopotamian rulers Eannatum and Sargon the Great, also known as Sargon of Akkad, in the 25th and 24th centuries B.C. Meskalamdug's helmet is one of the oldest ever found.

While there is evidence from the Royal Cemetery that a man named Meskalamdug was a Sumerian king, this particular Meskalamdug was not identified as a king by the artifacts in his grave. The helmet may therefore have belonged to the eponymous son or grandson of King Meskalamdug, part of Ur's First Dynasty, whose second wife was Queen Puabi.

The historical area called Mesopotamia, meaning "land between two rivers" in ancient Greek, refers broadly to the territory between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Mesopotamia encompassed what today are Iraq, eastern Syria, southeast Turkey, and parts of Iran and Kuwait. Beginning around 10,000 B.C., Mesopotamia became a hotbed of cultural developments, including agriculture, mathematics and the wheel. So it's no surprise that some of the world's earliest empires also arose here.

The Sumerian civilization began around 5500 B.C. in south-central Iraq, boasting important city-states such as Ur. The Akkadian Empire eclipsed Sumer around 2300 B.C., dramatically expanding the old borders — and drafting numerous salacious riddles. And then around 800 B.C., the middling city of Assur capitalized on free trade and became a significant power at the heart of the Assyrian Empire. All of these cultures left their mark on the region.

Is your knowledge of the ancient Near East as solid as a cuneiform tablet, or will this "cradle of civilization" test make you cry like a "Baby"lon? Start the quiz below to find out.

Remember to log in to put your name on the leaderboard; hints are available if you click the yellow button!

More science quizzes

—Ancient Maya quiz: What do you know about the civilization that built pyramids across Mesoamerica?

—Viking quiz: How much do you know about these seaborne raiders, traders and explorers?

—Pompeii quiz: How much do you know about the Roman town destroyed by Mount Vesuvius?

This carved relief from Nimrud, a major city of the ancient Assyrian Empire in present-day Iraq, regularly drifts around the internet as purported evidence for scuba diving nearly 3,000 years ago. But the wall panel actually depicts an army crossing a river, and soldiers are navigating the waves with the help of ancient flotation devices.

The gypsum panel is one of several excavated in the 1840s from the Northwest Palace, which was built on the Tigris River around 865 B.C. on the orders of King Ashurnasirpal II. Originally located around the interior walls of the throne room and royal apartments, the carved panels depict the king leading a military campaign, engaging in rituals and hunting animals.

This panel fragment, which is in the collection of The British Museum, shows several men and horses crossing a river. The horses are swimming, pulled on leads by cavalry soldiers. One soldier is free-swimming, one is rowing a small boat, and two are using goat-skin bags that the soldiers are inflating to stay afloat.

Related: Tarkhan Dress: World's oldest known outfit was worn to an ancient Egyptian funeral 5,000 years ago

A cuneiform inscription running across the top of the panel traces the king's lineage and describes his key accomplishments. The two-dimensionality of the perspective — in which the figures appear complete and not half-submerged — is typical in Assyrian art, according to The British Museum.

Animal skin or bladder floats appear several times in the Nimrud wall panels, and they were likely made from goats or pigs. The floats were used to help keep a soldier's weapons dry and to allow an army to sneak up on an enemy. Ashurnasirpal II was known for his military prowess as well as his brutality, and his innovative tactics — including the goat-skin floats — helped him expand his empire considerably in the ninth century B.C.

While it's interesting to ponder how much of the world the Assyrian army might have conquered if they'd had scuba gear, the humble goat skin still represents a key invention that helped them maintain power in Mesopotamia for centuries, until the empire fell around 600 B.C.

Around 1,200 years ago in what is now Iraq, enslaved people who were forced to build a vast canal system defied authority and rebelled, a new study indicates.

Between A.D. 869 to 883 a group known as the Zanj, many of whom were enslaved people taken from Africa, rebelled against the Abbasid Caliphate (ruled from 750 to 1258) and disrupted its control over the region, according to historical texts. The records also suggest that during the Middle Ages, the Zanj helped build a large system of canals spanning nearly 310 square miles (800 square kilometers) that was used to irrigate agriculture near the city of Basra.

These canals are no longer used, but their earthen remains, including 7,000 human-made ridges, are still visible across the landscape. While researchers have long known about the canal system, no one had ever dated the ridges to see if they were constructed during the ninth-century Zanj rebellion.

To investigate, the researchers collected and dated soil samples from within four of the ridges in an effort to learn more about who built them. Using optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) dating, a technique that estimates when soil was last exposed to sunlight, the team determined that the ridges were built sometime between the late ninth to mid-thirteenth centuries A.D., they reported in their study published June 2 in the journal Antiquity.

"The close dating between some of the ridges and the time of the rebellion makes it very likely that people who were involved in the rebellion were involved in the creation of some of these features," study first author Peter J. Brown, an archaeologist at the Radboud Institute for Culture and History in the Netherlands and Durham University in the U.K., told Live Science in an email.

The results also indicate that construction of the ridges continued long after the rebellion ended. "We have a more limited understanding of exactly what happened afterwards and whether large numbers of slaves continued to work across this field system or whether 'free' local peasant farmers took over," Brown said.

The fact that the work on the ridges came to an end during the mid-thirteenth century could be related to the Mongol invasion of the region, which resulted in the sack of Baghdad in 1258, the authors wrote in their paper.

Enslaved life

The ninth-century revolt was not the Zanj's first rebellion. They also revolted in 689 to 690 and 694 to 695, according to historical texts. However, both of these insurrections were quickly suppressed. In contrast, the third revolt ended up "sparking more than a decade of unrest until the Abbasid state regained control of the region," according to the study.

Life as an enslaved person digging canals was brutal, and medieval texts provide some clues as to what life was like for the Zanj.

Before the rebellion, the textual sources describe work camps distributed throughout the canal region, with groups of 50 to 500 enslaved people in each camp, Brown said.

"They seem to have been in a servile situation with 'agents' or 'masters' who were in charge of them, and the historical sources suggest they were treated poorly but we don't have details about the conditions in which they lived," Brown said.

The labor they had to perform was backbreaking.

"The workers who built this system would have had to dig out the canals and pile up earth into the large ridge features we can see on the ground today, " Brown said, noting that the slaves may have used animals such as donkeys to help with transporting sediment.

After the canals were built, they needed to be cleaned frequently "to keep them functional as water carries silt that would be deposited within the canal beds," Brown said. "Over time, [the silt] would lead to them becoming unusable if they were not routinely cleaned."

Adam Ali, an assistant professor of Arabic language at the University of Toronto who has a doctorate in Islamic history, said that the study is interesting but cautioned that the samples come from just four of the ridges and more work is needed to verify the study findings.

"I think that this study opens an avenue for further the discussion and examination of these ridges and what they can tell us," Ali, who was not involved in the research, told Live Science in an email.

The possibility that slaves from Africa kept being used on the canals after the rebellion is important, Kristina Richardson, a professor of Middle Eastern and South Asian languages and cultures and history at the University of Virginia, told Live Science in an email. "The findings are extraordinary and surprising, because they upend the historical consensus that Middle Easterners stopped using East Africans as agricultural slaves after the suppression of the Zanj Rebellion in 883."

Found a century ago in a mass grave in the desert of southern Iraq, this 4,500-year-old statuette may depict the daily ritual associated with destiny and the birth of the universe in ancient Mesopotamia.

Archaeologist Leonard Woolley discovered two nearly identical statuettes, which he named "Ram in the Thicket," in the Great Death Pit at the Royal Cemetery at Ur in 1928. This burial of one royal Sumerian individual around 2550 B.C. also involved the sacrifice of 68 women and five men.

Woolley discovered the statuettes broken and crushed. Now reconstructed, they measure 16.7 inches (42.5 centimeters) and 18 inches (45.7 cm) tall. The smaller one is on display at the Penn Museum in Philadelphia, while the larger one is housed at the British Museum in London.

Related: Oseberg tapestry: Viking Age artwork from a boat burial that may depict the Norse tree of life

According to the Penn Museum, the statuettes may represent markhor goats, a type of Central and South Asian mountain goat with fantastical spiral horns. But Woolley called them "rams" because they reminded him of the biblical story of Abraham sacrificing a ram instead of his son Isaac.

The heads and legs of the goat statuettes are wood, covered in gold leaf, as is the thicket or flowering bush. Their ears are copper, and their bellies are silver. Lapis lazuli, a semiprecious deep-blue stone, was used for their horns and fleece. Each goat stands on its hind legs on a rectangular base decorated with a mosaic of shells, lapis lazuli and red limestone in a diamond pattern.

Experts are unsure what function this pair of goat statuettes served, but they may have been used as offering stands to support small bowls that did not survive, according to a team of Penn Museum researchers who published an analysis of the objects in 2020.

These researchers view the thicket or bush as a representation of the Mesopotamian cosmic tree that connects heaven and Earth. Rosettes on the tree symbolize heaven, while the leaves signify Earth. The diamond pattern on the statues' bases may represent mountains — specifically those on the eastern horizon of Ur where the sun rises.

Daily sunrise was very important in ancient Mesopotamia. It was connected to the idea of destiny and associated with the birth of the universe. Rituals for the sun god Shamash often involved the sacrifice of sheep or goats and were made between sunset and sunrise. Because the "ram in the thicket" statuettes evoke sunrise — the time and place where heaven, Earth and the netherworld meet in Mesopotamian belief — they were likely seen as "suitable furnishings" for a royal tomb, the researchers wrote in their analysis.

The origins of domestic cats, and their travels with ancient humans, are as enigmatic as the animals themselves. But now, scientists have found new evidence supporting the idea that the unfathomable felines were likely first domesticated in ancient Egypt, where they were worshipped as part of a cult — or in another region of North Africa.

Researchers already knew that modern-day lap cats (Felis catus) derived from African wildcats (Felis lybica). But exactly when and where these wildcats first accepted human companionship is a matter of intense debate.

Now, two studies published on the preprint server bioRxiv in March 2025 — meaning they have not yet been peer-reviewed — offer tantalizing new insights into how the world's second-most-popular pet may have come to coexist with humanity and spread around the world.

One of the prevailing hypotheses is that cats were domesticated in the Levant, a region of the Middle East bordering the Mediterranean Sea, during the Neolithic period 12,000 to 5,000 years ago.

The region is part of the Fertile Crescent, where agriculture first emerged. The theory suggests that when humans switched from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to farming, rodents became a problem. Cats were attracted to the rodents and, given the felines were eating the pests, humans were happy to cohabit with them.

Related: Over 40% of pet cats play fetch — but scientists aren't quite sure why

This theory is based on the discovery of a cat buried at the foot of a human in Cyprus, which is off the coast of Turkey and Syria.

"The first evidence of human association with a cat comes from Cyprus about 10,000 years ago," Jonathan Losos, an evolutionary biologist at Washington University in St. Louis and author of "The Cat's Meow: How Cats Evolved from the Savanna to Your Sofa" (Viking, 2023), told Live Science. That suggested the cat-human association may have begun in the Fertile Crescent, said Losos, who was not involved with the new research.

But both of the new papers cast doubt on this idea, suggesting cat domestication actually took place much later, and that cat remains suggesting earlier interactions were actually wildcats.

In one of the news studies, the researchers conducted genetic analyses on early cat specimens, which revealed that cats found in Europe and Turkey from between 11,000 and 2,300 years ago were not the direct ancestors of today's domestic cats. They were instead European wildcats (Felis silvestris) that had naturally hybridized with African wildcats where the ranges of the species overlapped.

"We successfully reconstructed nuclear genomes of several Neolithic cats from Anatolia and Southeast Europe and proved that these cats are European wildcats," said Marco De Martino, a palaeogeneticist at the University of Rome Tor Vergata and lead author of the first study.

"They were likely exploited for food, pelts or ritual practices," he told Live Science. These weren't pets — they were meant for the stew pot or the collar of a luxurious cloak or as offerings to deities.

Instead, the researchers suggest that cat domestication occurred in Africa — either in Egypt or another northern area of the continent, such as modern-day Morocco or Tunisia.

Their analysis indicated that modern domestic cats are most genetically similar to African wildcats from Tunisia.

Ancient Egyptian cats

To piece together the domestic cat's introduction to the world, the authors then looked at non-genetic evidence of cats in societies in ancient times.

Egypt was the most prominent early civilization to encourage the presence of cats, with evidence indicating that they were well-established there by the first millennium B.C., according to the authors.

They were worshipped as part of the cult of Bastet, an Egyptian goddess associated with fertility, health, protection and domestic life. Cats are common in ancient Egyptian imagery, both as members of human households and in the form of Bastet herself — early depictions of the goddess style her as a lion, but she later resembled a domestic cat.

Based on evidence both from iconography and extensive mummification of cats as part of the worship of Bastet, the second paper concludes that Egypt was likely the main center of cat domestication. While the felines may have been drawn to agricultural production by rodents, one variation of the the hypothesis suggests that they were bred for the production of mummies used in devotional rituals. The large-scale breeding operations may have initiated the domestication process.

Cats likely then moved north from Egypt via trade routes. Specimens found in the U.K., date to the late Iron Age, suggesting there was one early wave of cats entering Europe during this period. Domesticated cats then moved into Europe with greater intensity during periods of Greek and Roman dominance.

However, the authors caution that genetic data from mummified cat remains in Egypt has not yet been reliably analyzed. "We believe that Egypt remains the best candidate as the birthplace of domestic cats given the extensive extant iconographic evidence, but we have no genetic data from Egypt to demonstrate that," noted De Martino, who was a co-author on the second paper as well.

Genetically, at least, origins in western North Africa may be on firmer ground.

"The lack of genomic data from ancient or modern cats in Egypt is the big question mark that needs to be answered — when that is added, it may swing genetic support back to the Out of Egypt hypothesis," Losos said.

Cat quiz: Can you get a purr-fect score?

Archaeologists who are excavating the ancient city of Nineveh in Iraq have discovered a rare stone carving depicting the last ruler of the Assyrian Empire flanked by important gods. The slab was made in the seventh century B.C. but was mysteriously broken and buried under the palace throne room several centuries later.

"We have no information on the reasons that led to the relief being buried," Aaron Schmitt, an archaeology professor at Heidelberg University in Germany who discovered the stone, told Live Science in an email. "This is quite enigmatic."

During archaeological excavation underneath the palace built by King Ashurbanipal in Nineveh, the capital of the Assyrian Empire, Schmitt and his team found the monumental relief carving, which had been broken up into several fragments.

In the center of the relief stands Ashurbanipal, the last king of the Assyrian Empire, who ruled from 669 to 631 B.C. He is flanked by the ancient Mesopotamian gods Ashur and Ishtar, and they are followed by a fish deity and a scorpion man. The inclusion of these gods was a surprise, the team noted.

"Among the many relief images of Assyrian palaces we know of, there are no depictions of major deities," Schmitt said in a statement.

Related: Evidence of Assyrians' conquest of Holy Land discovered in Jerusalem

The enormous stone slab measures 18 by 10 feet (5.5 by 3 meters) and is estimated to weigh about 13.2 tons (12 metric tons). Although the team has not analyzed the rock yet, Schmitt said it may be gypsum.

Archaeologists found the stone relief scene in a filled-in pit behind the main entrance to the palace's throne room. They believe the sculpture was buried there during the Hellenistic period, between the second and third centuries B.C.

But information on the Hellenistic settlement at Nineveh is lacking, Schmitt said. "We do not know if they were negatively disposed towards the Assyrian king and the Assyrian gods," he said. "I hope we will be able to get a clearer picture through our future excavations."

The stone relief will be studied further, and there are plans to place it in its original location and open it to the public.

The ancient Mesopotamians created a massive, sophisticated network of canals to water their crops more than 3,000 years ago, a new study has revealed.

Researchers found thousands of ancient irrigation canals up to 5.6 miles (9 kilometers) long carved into the landscape near Basra in Iraq, which at the time was the Eridu region of Mesopotamia. Mesopotamians occupied this region along the vast Euphrates river from the sixth millennium B.C. (8,000 to 7,000 years ago) to the early first millennium B.C. (3,000 to 2,000 years ago).

The canals provide researchers with rare insights into the ancient practices of Mesopotamians, according to a statement released by Durham University in the U.K., one of the universities involved in the research.

"This ground-breaking discovery not only enhances our understanding of ancient irrigation systems but also highlights the ingenuity and adaptability of early farmers," Durham University said in the statement.

The researchers published their findings Feb. 18 in the journal Antiquity.

Related: What's the world's oldest civilization?

Mesopotamia was a historical region that included parts of modern-day Iraq, Syria, Turkey, Iran and Kuwait. "Mesopotamia" is an ancient Greek word that can be translated to "the land between two rivers." Those rivers were the Tigris and the Euphrates, which flowed from eastern Turkey to the Persian Gulf.

Along the Euphrates river was Ancient Babylon, which sat at the heart of the Mesopotamian civilization around 2000 B.C. to 540 B.C., and the even more ancient city of Eridu, founded closer to the Persian Gulf around 5,400 B.C. The newly discovered canals were carved out of the sides of the Euphrates and supplied farms in the Eridu region. That was until the river shifted course, drying out the region and leaving the canal trenches behind, according to the study.

"A shift in the ancient course of the Euphrates River left this region dry and consequently unoccupied after the early first millennium BC until now," the study authors wrote. "This has allowed the archaeological landscape of this region to remain intact and thus we were able to identify and map a vast, intensive and well-developed network of irrigation canals that pre-date the early first millennium BC."

The researchers traced these canals using satellite imagery, geological maps, drone footage and other techniques. In total, they found more than 200 primary and secondary canals and more than 4,000 smaller canals connected to the main channels. They also identified more than 700 farms, which typically had small canals around their perimeters, according to the study.

The study authors noted that though the network is vast, the canals were probably not in use at the same time.

"This reconstructed network of irrigation canals represents the combined agricultural activities for all the periods of occupation in the region and it is unlikely that all of the canals were running simultaneously during the entire occupation period (i.e. from the sixth until the early first millennium BC)," the study authors wrote.

Researchers may have finally identified the site where Alexander the Great fought the Battle of the Granicus against the Persian Empire.

The site is about 6 miles (10 kilometers) north of the city of Biga in northwest Turkey. In 334 B.C. Alexander's forces defeated the Persians at the battlefield, which enabled them to establish a foothold in Persian territory and push deeper into the Middle East.

"The Battle of Granicus was not only one of the most significant turning points in Alexander's life, later earning him the epithet 'the Great,' but [was] also a pivotal moment in world history," team leader Reyhan Körpe, an archaeology professor at Canakkale Onsekiz Mart University, told Live Science in an email.

The discovery is not entirely new. Körpe noted that Heinrich Kiepert, an archaeologist who worked in the region in the 19th century, had suggested that the same area could be the location of the battlefield. But Körpe's team has now uncovered additional evidence supporting the suggestion.

Notably, the team identified the remains of the ancient city of Hermaion, which ancient records indicate was the location of Alexander's last encampment before the battle. The researchers then conducted geomorphological tests to reconstruct what the nearby landscape looked like when the battle was fought. They found that the path of the Granicus River had changed little since Alexander's time. They also found that some areas were marshy in Alexander's time and therefore don't match the description of the battlefield, enabling the team to rule out these locations.

Related: What if the Persians had defeated Alexander the Great?

Ancient records say that Alexander stationed Persian Greek mercenaries on a hill, and the team identified a promising hill site where local farmers had found graves with weapons that may date to Alexander's time. For example, in 2024, farmers uncovered the remains of human bones during plowing near the southern slope of the hill. The researchers examined the bones and found that they are from an adult male.

"The lack of typical grave markers or artifacts indicated these were not part of a formal cemetery," Körpe said. However, more tests need to be done to determine when this individual dates to and how they died.

Live Science contacted scholars not involved with the researchers to get their thoughts. Graham Wrightson, a history professor at South Dakota State University, said that the team's finds are interesting. "It is exciting that they believe it has been identified," Wrightson told Live Science in an email. "We'll have to wait more years now to see what artifacts come out of the annual digs."

Körpe said that the team plans to conduct geophysical surveys and excavations to get a better idea of what lies beneath the ground.

This 2018 astronaut photo shows off an unusually triangular "Christmas tree" lake in Iraq that appears to be dressed up for the holidays with a mix of both natural, artificial and illusory decorations.

Lake Dukan is a human-made reservoir that was fully formed in 1959 after the completion of the Dukan Dam — a huge hydroelectric dam near the city of Ranya in Iraq's Kurdistan region. The large tree-shaped triangle stretches up to 6 miles (10 kilometers) across from its "base" to its "top"; and a smaller gangly offshoot appears to hang off the tree's top like a wonky star, where the dam drains into the Little Zab River, according to NASA's Earth Observatory.

While the lake is not known locally for its festive shape, it is a sought-after landmark for astronauts on board the International Space Station during the holidays. "Looking down from space, features on Earth appear in many familiar shapes — and Lake Dukan just happens to look like a Christmas tree," NASA representatives wrote.

Festive decorations

In the astronaut photo (above), two additional festive decorations are on display. First, the tree is covered with tinsel-like green swirls that are the result of algae blooming across the lake's surface, triggered by warm weather and agricultural run-off. Second, around a dozen black dots are littered across the tree like ornaments.

However, unlike the blooming tinsel, the shadowy ornaments are not there. Instead, the spots are artifacts in the photo caused by a phenomenon called lens flare in the astronaut's camera, in which light gets scattered by slight imperfections in the camera's lens, according to Earth Observatory.

Related: See all the best images of Earth from space

The lake has turned into a popular tourist destination in recent decades thanks to its artificial beaches and excellent fishing. However, some experts worry that these activities threaten a diverse ecosystem that has emerged at the lake since it was created.

The reservoir is home to around 180 species of mainly birds and fish, as well as some rarer species including Eurasian otters (Lutra lutra) and striped hyenas (Hyaena hyaena), which are both threatened with extinction, according to BirdLife International (BLI). However, the lake has never been properly assessed and is under "very high" pressure from tourist activities, BLI representatives wrote.

Dukan Lake is also surrounded by several important archeological sites, including the paleolithic Hazar Merd Cave, or "cave of a thousand men," that dates back to around 50,000 years ago. The area also hosts several ancient citadels and a group of 4,000-year-old sculptures, known as the Ga'war Strait Sculptures, according to the Kurdistan Tourism Board. Most of these places are located in the nearby Zagros Mountains.

Name: Queen Puabi's lyre

What it is: A decorated wooden harp or lyre found in an elite grave

Where it is from: The Royal Cemetery at Ur, in what is now southern Iraq

When it was made: Circa 2600 to 2400 B.C.

Related: Sutton Hoo helmet: A gold- and jewel-encrusted relic with ties to Beowulf and a lost Anglo-Saxon king

What it tells us about the past:

This musical instrument was found in the 1920s by British archaeologist Sir Leonard Woolley during excavations at the Royal Cemetery at Ur, an ancient city in Mesopotamia that is now part of Iraq.

The artifact, called Queen Puabi's lyre, is one of four lyres that Woolley discovered in one large, elite tomb; the others have been dubbed the golden lyre, the bull-headed lyre and the silver lyre. At about 4,500 years old, these harps are the world's oldest stringed instruments ever discovered.

Queen Puabi's lyre was made of wood, most of which decayed over the millennia. During excavations, Woolley filled the depression left by the rotted wood with plaster to preserve as much of the instrument as possible. The lyre, which is now on display at the British Museum in London, is a reconstruction that consists of wooden panels, strings, 11 gold-headed pegs and the original decorations.

Along the panels, lapis lazuli (a blue semiprecious stone), shell and red limestone were set in bitumen — a sticky, black substance used as mortar. These designs included a lion-headed eagle, gazelles and leopards. A gold bull's head graced the front of the lyre, and its beard, hair and eyes were made of lapis lazuli.

As reconstructed, Queen Puabi's lyre is about 3.7 feet (1.1 meters) tall, 3.1 feet (1 m) across the top, and just 2.8 inches (7 centimeters) wide.

The attribution of the tomb to Queen Puabi comes from the discovery of a cylinder seal with her name on it. Her status as a queen is assumed based on the opulence of the tomb, which was filled with gold and silver objects. Puabi's remains were discovered on a platform surrounded by the remains of her presumed attendants. Little else is known about her life, though.

Woolley also discovered the skeleton of a woman lying against the lyre and reported that her hand bones were exactly where the strings would have been. Because there were several skeletons in the tomb, though, it is not clear if this person was Queen Puabi herself or one of her attendants who likely had been sacrificed upon her death.

All four of the instruments that Woolley found are box lyres with similar decorations. Based on the placement of the lyres in the tomb, the ancient Mesopotamians may have played these instruments at Queen Puabi's funeral.

In some ways, these ancient instruments were like modern guitars: Each string would have produced a different note when plucked or a chord when multiple strings were plucked together, and they could be tuned by tightening and loosening the strings attached to the top pegs.

These lyres from Ur show that the Mesopotamians had musical technology that was cutting edge at the time.

Archaeologists in northern Iraq have discovered the remains of a massive villa, royal gardens and other structures buried deep underground at what was once the ancient Assyrian capital of Khorsabad, a new magnetic survey reveals.

The international team of researchers used a magnetometer in unusually taxing conditions to detect the 2,700-year-old city's water gate, possible palace gardens and five large buildings — including a villa with 127 rooms that is twice the size of the White House. The previously undiscovered structures challenge the notion that Khorsabad was never developed beyond a palace complex in the eighth century B.C., according to an American Geophysical Union (AGU) statement.

"All of this was found with no excavation," Jörg Fassbinder, a geophysicist at Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich, first author of the research presented Dec. 9 at the AGU 2024 Annual Meeting, said in the AGU statement. The research has yet to be published in a peer-reviewed journal.

"The remote mapping work that Fassbinder and his team have done is extremely important. The magnetometer creates a more comprehensive reconstruction than traditional test trenches, and it does not cause any damage to the site," Sarah Melville, a historian who specializes in the Neo-Assyrian Empire who was not involved in the Khorsabad survey, told Live Science in an email.

Neo-Assyrian emperor Sargon II started building his giant new capital — originally called Dur-Sharrukin, meaning "Fortress of Sargon" — in 713 B.C. But Sargon died in 705 B.C., possibly before the capital's occupancy and completion. Sargon II's son and successor, Sennacherib, then moved the capital to the city of Nineveh, and Khorsabad was abandoned and forgotten for over two millennia.

Related: Ancient carvings of Assyrian war scenes revealed on stone gate in Iraq damaged by Islamic State group

Over 25 centuries later, French and American archaeological missions in the 1800s and 1900s, respectively, unearthed Khorsabad's palace, including iconic “Lamassu” statues of winged bulls with human heads that are now at the Louvre. Beyond the palace and the city's 1.1-by-1.1 mile (1.7-by-1.7 kilometers) walls, however, the layout of the ancient capital remained a mystery, and archaeologists assumed it had been left unfinished. In 2015, Khorsabad was looted by the Islamic State, and archaeologists were able to resume work at the site only when the militant Islamist group largely withdrew from the region in 2017.

Fassbinder's team conducted their remote sensing operation in 2022. Instead of mounting the magnetometer on a vehicle or drone, which might have attracted unwanted attention, Fassbinder and a fellow researcher hand-carried the 33-pound (15 kilogram) device back and forth over the buried capital. They worked for seven days, covering 2.79 million square feet (0.3 square kilometers) — which is still less than 10% of the site.

"Every day we discovered something new," Fassbinder said in the statement.

"Surprisingly, the vast amount of data available on Assyrian capitals comes almost exclusively from the study of official monumental architecture — essentially, the spaces and creations associated with the king," Daniele Morandi Bonacossi, an archaeologist from the University of Udine in Italy who specializes in the Ancient Near East and was not involved in the survey, told Live Science in an email. "Consequently, it is often impossible to gain insights into the lives of other inhabitants, or even to confirm the existence of additional residents in the Assyrian capitals."

He noted that the new research "seeks to address this significant gap in our understanding," by, among other things, investigating urban structures in addition to the palace complex.

Ultimately, the results of the new survey suggest that Khorsabad was a thriving capital developed far beyond what was previously hypothesized. It remains to be seen whether archaeologists will now bring the remotely detected structures to light.

Archaeologists in Kuwait have discovered a 7,000-year-old clay figurine that looks eerily similar to a modern-day depiction of an alien.

But while this figurine may look more supernatural than human, its style was common in ancient Mesopotamia, although it's the first of its kind ever to be found in Kuwait or the Arabian Gulf.

The small, finely crafted head, with slanted eyes, a flat nose and an elongated skull, was found during excavations this year at Bahra 1, a prehistoric site in northern Kuwait where a joint Kuwaiti-Polish team has been excavating since 2009. Bahra 1 was one of the Arabian Peninsula's oldest settlements, with occupation lasting from around 5500 to 4900 B.C.

During this time, Bahra 1 was settled by the Ubaid, a culture that originated in Mesopotamia and is known for its distinctive pottery, including its alien-like figurines. The Ubaid intertwined with Neolithic, or New Stone Age societies in the Arabian Gulf in the sixth millennium B.C. and turned the area into a sort of ancient melting pot, said Agnieszka Szymczak, an expedition leader at Bahra 1 in charge of the small finds at the site, like the newly discovered figurine.

The collision of these peoples and their cultures resulted in a "prehistoric crossroads of cultural exchange," Szymczak, an archaeologist at the University of Warsaw's Polish Centre of Mediterranean Archaeology, told Live Science in an email. Part of this exchange included art, like the recently unearthed figurine.

Related: Lumpy flint figurines may be some of the earliest depictions of real people

"[The] discovery of the figurine was a total surprise for the whole team, as it was the first such find not just among the over 1.5k [1,500] small finds excavated from the Bahra 1 site but also from the Arabian Gulf region," Szymczak said. Moreover, it's made of Mesopotamian clay, not like the "Coarse Red Ware" ceramics local to the Arabian Gulf, meaning the Ubaids were actively importing their homegrown traditions into the region.

Ubaid figurines are sometimes called "lizard-headed," "bird-like," or "ophidian" meaning "snake-like," according to University of Chicago publications. The newfound figurine is likely "imbued with symbolic meaning," Szymczak said, even though the figurine was discovered in a "mundane activity area," not in a special or symbolic place — like the graves they've been found in throughout Mesopotamia.

Aurelie Daems, a Near Eastern archaeologist at Ghent University in Belgium who has written book chapters on Ubaid ophidian figurines but was not involved in the current study, praised the find at Bahra 1 as having the "potential to clarify research questions related to ritual and social practices" of the Ubaid, as well as the relationships between the prehistoric Gulf region and Mesopotamia.

Various theories have attempted to explain the unusual facial features of these figurines. One idea suggests the sculptures show artificial cranial deformation, otherwise known as "head-shaping," a practice followed in Ubaid society, and evidenced in skeletal remains excavated in Mesopotamia. Achieved by wrapping bandages around an infant's malleable skull, head-shaping could have been utilized by the Ubaids as a symbol of identity, such as class, culture or belonging to a special group within their settlement. The Ubaid may have picked up this practice in what is now Iran in the eighth and seventh millennia B.C., and head-shaping hit its peak in Ubaid society during the fifth millennium B.C.

Excavations at the site are ongoing, as are studies on the clay figurine head found this year.

Dozens of clay bowls may be evidence of one of the earliest government institutions in the world, a new study finds. The bowls, which were unearthed at an early archaeological site in Iraq, are thought to have held savory meals given in exchange for labor in ancient Mesopotamia.

But the site was eventually abandoned, which might indicate that local people had rejected centralized authority, although the researchers are uncertain whether this was the case. After this early government fell, it took another 1,500 years for any centralized governing authority to return to the region, the authors wrote in the study.

The researchers made this discovery at Shakhi Kora, an archaeological site southwest of Kalar in the Kurdish region of northern Iraq, which holds the remains of a settlement that's thought to date to the fifth millennium B.C.

"Our excavations at Shakhi Kora provide a unique, new regional window into the development, and ultimately the rejection, of some of the earliest experiments with centralised, and perhaps state-like, organisations," University of Glasgow archaeologist Claudia Glatz said in a statement. Glatz has led excavations at the site since 2019 and is the lead author of the new study, which was published Wednesday (Dec. 4) in the journal Antiquity.

Related: Babylonian tablet preserves student's 4,000-year-old geometry mistake

Uruk expansion

The excavations by Glatz and her colleagues have revealed structures at Shakhi Kora that span several centuries, while pottery shards and other cultural items indicate a progression from the initial local traditions of the farming people who lived there, to the later domination of traditions from the early city of Uruk in southern Mesopotamia, more than 220 miles (355 kilometers) to the south. (According to archaeologists, the "Uruk period" is the earliest phase of the Sumerian civilization, between 4000 and 3100 B.C.)

Similar progressions have been seen at other sites in ancient Mesopotamia, and some archaeologists have suggested these are signs of an "Uruk expansion," in which the innovations of Uruk — including urbanization, interregional trade and early writing — were introduced to more distant regions by people who traveled there.

In particular, the excavations at Shakhi Kora have unearthed large numbers of distinctive pottery bowls, called beveled-rim bowls. The team thinks these bowls were used to supply food in return for labor — an early form of centralized authority, perhaps of the kind that led to the development of ancient Mesopotamian city-states. Analysis of the residues inside some of the bowls indicate many were used to serve meat, possibly as broths or stews, which suggests that herds of sheep and goats were kept near the ancient settlement for this purpose.

The researchers think this shows people traveled to Shakhi Kora to perform labor on behalf of "institutional households" there; and the excavations showed at least one of the household buildings featured pillars and drainage systems that were evidence of southern Mesopotamian influence.

But the excavations also show the site was abandoned in the late fourth millennium B.C. without any signs of violence or environmental pressures.The researchers think this indicates that local people had rejected the idea of a centralized system of authority and returned to their family farms.

"This reaffirms that top-down, hierarchical forms of government were not inevitable in the development of early complex societies," Glatz said. "Local communities found ways to resist and reject tendencies towards centralized power."

Early society

Susan Pollock, an archaeologist at the Free University of Berlin and an expert in the evolution of early states in Mesopotamia who was not involved in the new study, said "hundreds" of people likely gathered at Shakhi Kora to perform labor at any one time.

Other excavations indicate there were many small settlements in the region at this time, which suggests people there had not moved to live in centralized locations and that the expected trend toward urbanism was "not working out," she said. But further research was needed to establish whether that signified a deliberate rejection of centralized authority or if there was another reason for the larger settlement's decline, Pollock told Live Science.

Glenn Schwartz, an archaeologist at Johns Hopkins University who was not involved in the study, said the limited size of the excavations at Shakhi Kora made it difficult to be certain whether they had revealed traces of an organized hierarchy.

The distinctive beveled-rim bowls found at Shakhi Kora have also been found at other archaeological sites from ancient Mesopotamia. "They were sort of the 'Styrofoam cup' of the Uruk period," he told Live Science.

Archaeologists had long debated what food the bowls may have contained, and the revelation that many had held meat or meat stew was an "exciting" result, Schwartz said.

Declassified spy images of Iraq have helped archaeologists find a historic Islamic battlefield.

Upon analyzing the images, which were taken in 1973 by a U.S. satellite system named KH-9 (Hexagon), the team found remnants of a 1,400-year-old settlement. This helped them match the site to the lost location of the Battle of al-Qadisiyyah, the researchers reported in a study published Nov. 12 in the journal Antiquity.

The Battle of al-Qadisiyyah took place in A.D. 636 or 637 between the Arab Muslim army and the Sasanian Empire, which ruled the area that is now Iran between A.D. 224 and 651. According to Encyclopedia Britannica, the battle was a consequential victory for the Muslim army and the beginning of the eventual Muslim conquest of Persia.

But William Deadman, an archaeologist at Durham University in the U.K. and the lead author of the study, and colleagues had not originally set out to find the lost battle site. Using the 1973 satellite imagery, they were examining the Hajj pilgrimage route of Darb Zubaydah as part of its consideration as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. According to UNESCO, Darb Zubaydah connected the city of Kufa, Iraq, to Mecca, Saudi Arabia, and was the most important Hajj route between A.D. 750 and 850, during the Abbasid Caliphate, a golden age of Muslim civilization.

Related: Cold War satellite images reveal nearly 400 Roman forts in the Middle East

As the researchers looked over the newly declassified images, they realized they might have the chance to find the lost battlefield of al-Qadisiyyah, according to a Durham University statement. Records of the battle had given clues to its location. For example, they mentioned there was a 6-mile-long (10 kilometers) wall that connected al-Qadisiyyah to a neighboring town and that the town was "south of a body of water, between [a] moat and a bridged stream," the paper noted. Using these clues, Deadman located a modern-day agricultural field that matched the description.

An on-the-ground survey confirmed the find. Researchers identified the 6-mile-long wall and the moat north of the town mentioned in historical texts.

"This discovery provides a geographical location and context for a battle that is one of the founding stories of the expansion of Islam into modern day Iraq, Iran and beyond," Deadman said in the statement.

The world's oldest known system of writing was influenced by symbols used for trade — engravings found on cylinders used in the exchange of farming produce and textiles, a new study suggests.

The finding reinforces an idea proposed in earlier research: that cuneiform script — which was developed in early Mesopotamia around 3100 B.C. and is thought to be the earliest writing system — originated in part from accounting methods for tracking the production, storage and transport of such items.

According to the researchers, several symbols engraved on stone "cylinder seals" were developed into signs used in "proto-cuneiform," an early version of the cuneiform script used in southern Mesopotamia, now southern Iraq. The researchers reported their findings in a study published Tuesday (Nov. 5) in the journal Antiquity.

Such cylinder seals were used for millennia throughout Mesopotamia, where they were rolled across clay tablets to print their motifs on them — often to verify a transaction or, later, a letter.

Some of the seals examined in the new study date to about 4400 B.C. — more than 1,000 years before the development of writing. "We focused on seal imagery that originated before the invention of writing, while continuing to develop into the proto-literate period," study co-authors Kathryn Kelley and Mattia Cartolano, both researchers in the Department of Classical Philology and Italian Studies at the University of Bologna, said in a statement.

Related: 'A king will die': 4,000-year-old lunar eclipse omen tablets finally deciphered

The team's work identified seal motifs related to the transport of jars and cloth between different Mesopotamian cities, probably involving temple institutions. The researchers suggest these motifs became proto-cuneiform signs in early writings about the trade of farming produce and textiles.

The discovery, which still has skeptics, shows the continuity between the "preliterate" seals and early writing, according to the authors.

"It proves that the motifs known from cylinder seals are directly related to the development of writing in southern Iraq and shows how meaning was transferred from preliterate motifs into script," they wrote in the statement.

Oldest writing

Cuneiform writing used a stylus to make wedge-shaped impressions in unbaked clay. These impressions created signs representing sounds to make a record of spoken language. The clay could be dried or baked, preserving the signs.

Cuneiform was developed by the Sumerian civilization that lived in early cities in southern Mesopotamia from about 5500 to 2300 B.C., when it was succeeded by the Akkadian Empire, based in the city of Akkad.

The Akkadians adopted the Sumerian system of writing but applied it to their own language — and Akkadian written in cuneiform became the common written language of Mesopotamia for more than 2,000 years, throughout the subsequent Babylonian and Assyrian periods.

The new study highlights several motifs seen on preliterate cylinder seals. The authors suggest these motifs were developed into signs in the proto-cuneiform script seen on 5,000-year-old clay tablets from the southern Mesopotamian city of Uruk. These include symbols depicting a building, poles made from reeds, and fringed cloths in a vessel.

The authors hope their work will help scholars decode more proto-cuneiform symbols, as well as provide insight into the meaning of some seal motifs.

"The conceptual leap from pre-writing symbolism to writing is a significant development in human cognitive technologies," study co-author Silvia Ferrara, a professor in the Department of Classical Philology and Italian Studies at the University of Bologna, said in the statement. "The invention of writing marks the transition between prehistory and history, and the findings of this study bridge this divide by illustrating how some late prehistoric images were incorporated into one of the earliest invented writing systems."

Unclear origins

Anthropologist Gordon Whittaker, an expert on the origins of cuneiform at the University of Göttingen in Germany who was not involved in the study, called it "interesting and thought-provoking." But he cautioned that it may be premature to suggest the motifs on cylinder seals were "stimuli for the invention of writing."

"In the few instances in which the same item appears to be depicted in both a seal and a proto-cuneiform sign, there is no obvious causal relationship that would link the one with the other," he told Live Science in an email.

"Furthermore, several of the shapes — such as a narrow oblong without internal detail — are simply too general or vague to be helpful to the authors' argument," he said.

University of Pennsylvania archaeologist Holly Pittman, who was not involved in the research, told Live Science in an email that the new study verified her suggestion from roughly 30 years ago, that the imagery on seals was a fundamental influence on proto-cuneiform writing.

Pittman said the idea was dismissed at the time, but she was pleased to see that the authors of the new study had reached the same conclusion.

The Al Naslaa Rock Formation is a landmark in the Saudi Arabian desert formed of two big blocks of sandstone separated by a mysterious, pencil-thin gap. The gap is almost perfectly straight and smooth, dividing what was once a massive rock into symmetrical twins.

The Al Naslaa formation is roughly 20 feet (6 meters) tall and 30 feet (9 m) wide. Scientists don't know how the strange gap between the two blocks formed, but it appears to be of natural origin, according to Geology Science, a website that covers news and trends in geology. Researchers have proposed several theories to explain the rock's middle parting, one of which suggests that the gap opened as a result of plate tectonics.

Related: Remains of hundreds of 7,000-year-old 'standing stone circles' discovered in Saudi Arabia

Al Naslaa is located in a remote and arid region of northwestern Saudi Arabia that occasionally experiences tectonic shifts, according to Geology Science. Researchers think a sudden movement of Earth's crust may have shifted and fractured Al Naslaa. The blocks are made of sandstone, meaning the stone is layered and therefore relatively fragile. But something must then have polished the fracture, as a fissure resulting from plates moving beneath the rock would be unlikely to turn out so smooth.

Researchers suggest that for thousands of years after the rock split, wind and water went to work on the two halves. The newly formed gap may have created a channel for winds carrying sand and other abrasive particles that gradually eroded both sides of the rock until they were perfectly smooth, according to Geology Science.

Another theory is that the gap formed due to a joint, which is when a rock breaks apart naturally but without being directly displaced. Joints can result from regional tectonics — including processes that compress Earth's crust to form mountain chains — or from the rock cooling, according to the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETHZ). Joints often break rocks along straight lines, but as with the previous theory, erosion may have helped smooth the fissure out.

A third theory is that Al Naslaa split in half as a result of water freezing and expanding small cracks in the rock. These small cracks may have eventually joined together and opened the straight gap we see today. In this case, Al Naslaa would have become two separate rocks as a cool period came to an end thousands or millions of years ago, melting the water in the gap.

If Al Naslaa wasn't puzzling enough already, its two blocks each sit on a little pedestal, making it look like the formation is levitating. These pedestals are natural and surprisingly common in desert landscapes. Known as "mushroom rocks," blocks like this usually result from winds that blow faster close to the ground than higher up.

The Al Naslaa blocks also hold petroglyphs, which are symbols and pictures carved into the rock. Researchers have documented engravings of Arabian horses, ibexes and humans that are thousands of years old at Al Naslaa, but exactly when they were made remains a mystery.

Discover more incredible places, where we highlight the fantastic history and science behind some of the most dramatic landscapes on Earth.

Scholars have finally deciphered 4,000-year-old cuneiform tablets found more than 100 years ago in what is now Iraq. The tablets describe how some lunar eclipses are omens of death, destruction and pestilence.

The four clay tablets "represent the oldest examples of compendia of lunar-eclipse omens yet discovered" Andrew George, an emeritus professor of Babylonian at the University of London, and Junko Taniguchi, an independent researcher, wrote in a paper published recently in the Journal of Cuneiform Studies. (Lunar eclipses occur when the moon falls into Earth's shadow.)

The authors of the tablets used the time of night, movement of shadows and the date and duration of eclipses to predict omens.

For example, one omen says that if "an eclipse becomes obscured from its center all at once [and] clear all at once: a king will die, destruction of Elam." Elam was an area in Mesopotamia centered in what is now Iran. Another omen says that if "an eclipse begins in the south and then clears: downfall of Subartu and Akkad,"which were both regions of Mesopotamia at the time. Yet another omen reads: "An eclipse in the evening watch: it signifies pestilence."

Related: Violence in the ancient Middle East spiked with the formation of states and empires, battered skulls reveal

It's possible that ancient astrologers used past experiences to help determine what omens the eclipses portended.

"The origins of some of the omens may have lain in actual experience — observation of portent followed by catastrophe," George told Live Science in an email. However most omens were likely determined through a theoretical system that linked eclipse characteristics to various omens, he noted.

The cuneiform tablets probably come from Sippar, a city that flourished in what is now Iraq, George told Live Science. At the time the tablets were written, the Babylonian Empire flourished in parts of the region. The tablets became part of the British Museum's collection between 1892 and 1914 but had not been fully translated and published until now.

Trying to predict the future

In Babylonia and other parts of Mesopotamia, there was a strong belief that celestial events could predict the future.

People believed that "events in the sky were coded signs placed there by the gods as warnings about the future prospects of those on earth," George and Taniguchi wrote in the article. "Those who advised the king kept watch on the night sky and would match their observations with the academic corpus of celestial-omen texts."

Kings in ancient Mesopotamia didn't rely on those eclipse omens alone to predict what was coming.

"If the prediction associated with a given omen was threatening, for example, 'a king will die,' then an oracular enquiry by extispicy [inspecting the entrails of animals] was conducted to determine whether the king was in real danger," George and Taniguchi wrote.

If the animal entrails suggested that there was danger, people believed they could perform certain rituals that could annul the bad omen, thereby countering the forces of evil that lay behind it, George and Taniguchi wrote.So even if the omens were bad, people still believed that the forecasted future could be avoided.

Archaeologists in Saudi Arabia have excavated eight ancient "standing stone circles" that they say were used as homes. 

About 345 of these structures were identified through aerial surveys across the Harrat 'Uwayrid, a lava field near the city of AlUla in northwestern Saudi Arabia, the team reported July 2 in the journal Levant. The circles range from 13 to 26 feet (4 to 8 meters) in diameter and have at least one standing stone at the center. 

The circles date back around 7,000 years and have the remains of stone walls and at least one doorway. They would have had roofs made of either stone or organic materials, the team wrote. 

During their excavations, the archaeologists discovered the remains of many stone tools made of basalt. Five of the standing circles alone yielded nearly 500 pounds (225 kilograms) of stone tools or debris, the team wrote. The archaeologists also found the remains of bones from sheep, goats and cows. 

Also among the finds were a variety of seashells, all of which came from the Red Sea, which is located about 75 miles (120 kilometers) to the west. The presence of the seashells "suggests developing networks of trade and exchange, concurrent with mobility," the team wrote. 

Related: Vast 4,500-year-old network of 'funerary avenues' discovered in Saudi Arabia

The artifacts found in the circles, combined with the circles' similarity to ancient homes excavated in Jordan, suggest that many, if not all, of the standing stone circles are also domestic structures, the team noted. 

While modern-day people may sometimes associate stone circles like those at Stonehenge with a ritual purpose, it's important to note that many early domestic structures were circular. 

"Globally, early domestic architecture was always round, and rectangular houses only appear in the later Neolithic," Jane McMahon, an honorary research fellow at the University of Western Australia and lead author of the paper, told Live Science in an email. 

Different landscape

Around 7,000 years ago, the environment in northern Saudi Arabia was much wetter than it is today, but farming had not yet come into use. "There's no evidence of farming domesticated species of plants like wheat and barley, but gathering wild plants likely took place, and perhaps manipulating the landscape to increase the likelihood and yield of wild species," McMahon said. 

When these standing stone circles were in use, another form of stone structure, known today as a mustatil (Arabic for "rectangle"), was being built as well. Excavations at the mustatils suggest they had a ritual purpose that may have included the sacrifice of cattle. The contemporaneous use of the mustatils and standing stone circles indicates that it is "likely that these two megalithic structure types are aspects of a single cultural entity," the team wrote. 

Gary Rollefson, a professor emeritus of anthropology at Whitman College and San Diego State University who was not involved in the research but has conducted extensive archaeological work in the region, said he thinks the people who built the standing stone circles and mustatils are descended from people who lived in Jordan and Syria about 500 years earlier. 

He told Live Science that the architecture of the standing stone circles is similar to that of structures found in Jordan dating to about 500 years earlier, and the people who built the structures in Jordan also herded sheep, goats and cattle. The migration may have been spurred by an increase in population brought about by new hunting technologies, such as the "kite," a series of stone walls used to force wild animals into a kill zone. These hunting advances dramatically increased the supply of food, which, in turn, led to an increase in the human population in the Jordan/Syria area. 

"They were building up a large population in eastern Jordan and [parts of] Syria," Rollefson said, and they needed to find new hunting grounds, which would have led them to gradually go south, into what is now Saudi Arabia. 

A Paleo-Arabic inscription on a boulder near an abandoned mosque in Saudi Arabia may have been carved by Ḥanẓalah bin Abī ʿĀmir, a companion of the Islamic prophet Muhammad, a new study finds.

Although many inscriptions from the early days of Islam are known, their authorship remains unconfirmed, except for one in Saudi Arabia's al-Bahah region that can be securely attributed to Muhammad's companion, who later became the governor of Mecca. The inscription, which researchers analyzed in a new study published in the April issue of the Journal of Near Eastern Studies, is only the second confirmed inscription whose attribution connects to Muhammad. Unlike the former text, this one was carved in the early seventh century before Islam came to dominate Arabia, making it an important witness to the pre-Islamic Hijaz (the region where Mecca is located) and the religious background of the Quran's audience.

However, not everyone is fully convinced about the authors' identities. 

The finding sheds light on the early days of Islam, the researchers said.

"Contrary to the popularly held belief that Islam was born in the full light of history, we don't know much about the rise of Islam from contemporary sources," Ahmad Al-Jallad, a professor of Arabic studies at The Ohio State University and the study's co-author, told Live Science. "That period of time is shrouded in mystery. These inscriptions provide a verifiable foundation for the writing of an evidence-based history of this period."

Yusef Bilin, a Turkish calligrapher visiting an ancient mosque in the city of Taif that's believed to have been built by Alī b. Abī Ṭālib, the fourth Caliph of Islam, noticed two inscriptions on a prominent boulder approximately 330 feet (100 meters) away. In 2021, he brought it to the attention of the study's authors. The inscriptions were written in Paleo-Arabic script, which describes the late pre-Islamic phase of the Arabic alphabet. The authors of the top and bottom inscriptions identified themselves as Ḥanẓalah, son of ʿAbd-ʿAmr-w and Abd al-ʿUzzē, son of Sufyān. 

Related: '4,000-year-old wall found around oasis in Saudi Arabia likely defended against raids from nomads'

The text translates to "In your name, our Lord, I am Ḥanẓalah [son of] ʿAbd-ʿAmr-w, I urge (you) to be pious towards God" and "In your name, our Lord, I am ʿAbd al-ʿUzzē son of Sufyān, I urge (you) to be pious towards God." 

The authors studied the traditional Muslim biographies of Muhammad and genealogical records of Arabs and found that the combination of these names was exceedingly rare. One person with the name Ḥanẓalah, whose father was ʿAbd-ʿAmr, fit the bill. This person belonged to the Aws tribe — based in Yathrib (now known as Medina) — and features prominently as a companion of Muhammad in early Islamic literature. 

The use of Paleo-Arabic easily puts these inscriptions in the late sixth or early seventh century and closely matches the timeline of Hanzalah, the companion, who died in the battle of Uhud in A.D. 625. The name of the second person, ʿAbd al-ʿUzzē, refers to the Arabian pagan goddess al-Uzza, further supporting the idea that the inscriptions were made by individuals who were not Muhammad's followers — or at least not yet. 

These observations led the researchers to conclude that Ḥanẓalah is most likely the same one associated with Muhammad and that he etched these words while traveling through Taif, possibly with someone named ʿAbd al-ʿUzzē, before he accepted Islam.

"It's basically inconceivable that this inscription was made after Muhammad began his ministry, because the people in Taif were extremely hostile to him, and it's unlikely that one of his followers went there and left this inscription," study co-author Hythem Sidky, executive director of the International Quranic Studies Association in Washington, D.C., told Live Science. 

Al-Jallad added that the patina of the inscription and the weathering patterns indicate that it had been there a long time, ruling out the possibility of a modern forgery. 

"The article is a very impressive piece of scholarship," James Montgomery, a professor of Arabic and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Cambridge who was not involved in the study, told Live Science in an email. "It is careful, meticulous and circumspect in its use of evidence, with every claim being properly substantiated by reference to all relevant and available evidence."

Although Montgomery thinks the identification is most likely accurate, he remained agnostic about the claim that the Ḥanẓalah mentioned in the inscription is the same one of Islamic tradition. "I would like to reserve judgment until we have two more inscriptions that also satisfy the stringent dating criteria the authors employ," he said. 

Military camps used by the Assyrian king Sennacherib, whose exploits of laying siege to Lachish and Jerusalem are detailed in the Hebrew Bible, have finally been identified, a scholar says.

At the time of the sieges, which both occurred around 701 B.C., the Assyrians controlled a rapidly growing empire that stretched from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean Sea. 

The sieges at Lachish and Jerusalem are mentioned frequently in the Hebrew Bible and supposedly ended at Jerusalem when "the angel of the Lord went out and put to death a hundred and eighty-five thousand in the Assyrian camp" (2 Kings 19:35). But ancient Assyrian inscriptions tell a different story, claiming that Hezekiah, the king of Judah, paid a large amount of tribute to get the Assyrians to leave. 

Lachish siege

At the British Museum in London, there is a relief depicting the siege of Lachish, and it shows the Assyrian camp. Stephen Compton, an independent scholar who specializes in Near Eastern Archaeology, compared this relief to photos from the early to mid-20th century which show Lachish. He identified a site north of Lachish with an oval shaped structure with walls that he thinks may have been the Assyrians' camp. 

Compton noted that Assyrian camps tended to be oval. The Arabic name of the proposed camp site is "Khirbet al Mudawwara," and during the Middle Ages, the word "Mudawwara" could mean a place where a sultan placed a military camp. This suggests that people who lived at the site in later times knew that the ancient Assyrians had used it as a camp, Compton noted in an article published in the June issue of the journal Near Eastern Archaeology. 

Related: Key events in the Bible, such as the settlement and destruction of Jerusalem, confirmed using radiocarbon dating

Additionally, an archaeological survey conducted in the early 20th century found the remains of pottery shards whose styles  date to around the time that Sennacherib laid siege to Lachish, Compton noted. He told Live Science he has sent a copy of his paper to archaeologists who are working at the Lachish site and he hopes that future excavations will shed light on whether the Assyrian camp is located there. 

Jerusalem camp

In the case of the Jerusalem camp, Compton used old aerial photographs and 19th-century archaeological excavation records to survey the landscape. He noted that in 1881 to 1882, the Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF) found walls at a site called Jebel el Mudawwara, located north of the Temple Mount. The Palestine Exploration Fund is a non-profit organization that facilitates research in the region. 

The 19th-century archaeologists thought it was a Roman camp, but the excavation records indicate that the camp is oval. "Roman [military camps] were rectangular, whereas the photos indicate that this was roughly oval, consistent with an Assyrian camp," Compton wrote. Additionally, the name "Mudawwara" — a name associated with military camps — is used by 19th-century sources to describe the site. 

If this is the place where Sennacherib set up camp to lay siege to Jerusalem, it could also be Nob, a site that once held the Tabernacle, a portable sanctuary constructed by Moses, Compton said. The Hebrew Bible claims that the Tabernacle was set up at Nob and that Nob was where Sennacherib halted to attack Jerusalem. 

The site's 20th-century history may make it more difficult to conduct new excavations there. In the 1930s, the British built an ammunition storage facility at the site, and it became known as "Ammunition Hill." In 1948, the Jordanian army positioned soldiers on the site and built a series of trenches and fortifications. And in 1967, there was a bloody battle between the Israelis and Jordanian troops that resulted in Israeli troops taking the hill. Today, a museum and memorial site are located there. 

Scholars react

Scholars who were not involved with the research had mixed opinions of the findings. Some noted that the idea that the Khirbet al Mudawwara site at Lachish is an Assyrian camp is plausible. "The case of Lachish is the most interesting," Israel Finkelstein, a professor emeritus of archaeology at Tel Aviv University, told Live Science in an email. The "next thing to do is to check the suspected site in the field," Finkelstein said. 

Eckart Frahm, a professor of Assyriology at Yale University, said that it's possible that Khirbet al Mudawwara was an Assyrian siege camp. 

Others are doubtful, however. David Ussishkin, a professor emeritus of archaeology at Tel Aviv University who has conducted extensive work at Lachish, told Live Science he thinks the siege camp was to the southwest of Lachish. 

Meanwhile, the idea of Jebel el Mudawwara as the siege camp for Jerusalem got a negative response. Frahm said Assyrian inscriptions suggest that while Sennacherib blockaded Jerusalem, he didn't try to take it by storming it or through the use of siege engines. Assyrian inscriptions say Sennacherib built "fortified structures" to blockade Jerusalem rather than to construct a single camp, Frahm said. 

Frahm also disagreed with the meaning of the Arabic word "mudawwara," saying it doesn't necessarily refer to a place where a sultan would place their tent. "The basic meaning of Arabic 'mudawwara,' if I am not very much mistaken, is 'round place' — and in my view, the many different al-Mudawwaras discussed by the author all simply indicate the roundness of the structure the term describes," Frahm said. 

The sources noted that further investigations will be needed. Mordechai Cogan, professor emeritus of biblical history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, told Live Science that the landscape where the sites are located may make them ideal for Assyrian military encampments but also said that new archaeological excavations are necessary. 

Editor's note: This article was updated at 10:43 a.m. EDT on June 20 to correct Mordechai Cogan's title to professor emeritus of biblical history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Name: Gilgamesh flood tablet

What it is: Also known as the 11th tablet of the Epic of Gilgamesh, this fragment of a baked clay tablet contains cuneiform inscriptions describing an epic flood that swept through Babylon. It is considered one of the oldest pieces of literature in the world. 

Where it was found: Nineveh (also known as Kouyunjik), an ancient Assyrian city in Upper Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq).

When it was made: The Epic of Gilgamesh may date to as early as the third millennium B.C., but this particular tablet dates to the seventh century B.C.

What it tells us about the past: The epic tale that was carved into the ancient tablet is eerily similar to the biblical story of Noah's ark found in the Book of Genesis. The tablet describes how the gods sent a flood down to destroy Earth. However one god, Ea, alerts Utu-napishtim, the ruler of an ancient kingdom, of the plan and instructs him to build a boat to save himself and his family along with "birds and beasts of all kinds," according to the British Museum, which counts the artifact as part of its permanent collection.

Just like in the Book of Genesis, the voyagers release birds to see if the waters had receded enough for land to emerge. Later, Utu-napishtim tells Gilgamesh of his experience, according to the text.

Related: Shigir Idol: World's oldest wood sculpture has mysterious carved faces and once stood 17 feet tall

Archaeologists discovered the roughly 6-by-5-inches (15 by 13 centimeters) tablet in the late 1800s but were unsure of what the inscription said. After handing over the artifact to the museum, a researcher named George Smith deciphered the text and allegedly said, "I am the first man to read that after more than two thousand years of oblivion," according to Smithsonian.

While this tablet was the first evidence of the Noah story coming from another culture, archaeologists have since discovered much older cuneiform tablets with similar flood stories that suggest the story had been circulating long before the Hebrew bible was written. In other words, the Epic of Gilgamesh may have been the source of the Noah's ark story.

You can read an English translation of the 11th tablet of the Epic of Gilgamesh online.

Turkey's "fairy chimneys" are natural yet surreal-looking spires up to 130 feet (40 meters) tall that were carved out of soft volcanic rock by the elements over millions of years. Thousands of these spindly chimneys are peppered across the Love Valley in Göreme National Park, forming a rocky wonderland that human civilizations have taken refuge in for nearly 4,000 years.

Volcanic activity that began roughly 14 million years ago laid the foundation for the jagged landscape we see today. A series of eruptions showered what is now Central Anatolia with ash, which solidified into thick layers of tuff — a type of light, porous rock. Subsequent explosions then coated the tuff with lava that hardened into a tough, basalt crust. The chimneys, technically called "hoodoos," formed over the eons as wind and water went to work on the rocks, wearing down the tuff and leaving behind only pillars. The basalt eroded more slowly, which is why many of the chimneys are capped with mushroom-like basalt tops to this day.

Related: Cave of Crystals: The deadly cavern in Mexico dubbed 'the Sistine Chapel of crystals' 

Nature did the heavy lifting, but humans also helped to shape the fairy chimneys. The landscape is honeycombed with caves and tunnels dating as far back as the Hittites, who inhabited the area between 1800 and 1200 B.C., according to National Geographic. Central Anatolia later straddled the boundaries of rival empires — including the Greek, Persian, Byzantine and Roman empires — and frequent turmoil drove the region's residents to dig out hiding places among and beneath the spires. Christians fleeing persecution in ancient Rome even carved churches and monasteries out of the soft stone, expanding cave and tunnel networks into sprawling underground cities.

The density of living quarters hidden among the fairy chimneys is so vast it is "one of the world's most striking and largest cave-dwelling complexes," according to UNESCO. The agency inscribed Göreme National Park and the rock sites at Cappadocia on its list of World Heritage Sites in 1985.

The fairy chimneys have also been dubbed "the world's most unusual high-rise neighborhood" by National Geographic.

Discover more incredible places, where we highlight the fantastic history and science behind some of the most dramatic landscapes on Earth.

A Neanderthal skull that was crushed to bits 75,000 years ago has been pieced back together and used to recreate the face of a wise-looking archaic woman with dark, flowing hair. 

Archaeologists painstakingly pieced together the skull of the individual, who researchers have named Shanidar Z, from hundreds of flattened bone fragments discovered inside Shanidar Cave in Iraqi Kurdistan in 2018. Her skull is believed to have been crushed shortly after her death, possibly by rockfall, and then compacted by tens of thousands of years of sediment. 

And now, with the help of surface scans and 3D-printing techniques, archaeologists have brought her synthetic face to life — muscle, skin and all. They detailed their efforts in a new documentary titled "Secrets of the Neanderthals," which launched on Netflix May 2. 

"The skulls of Neanderthals and humans look very different," Emma Pomeroy, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Cambridge who's featured in the documentary, said in a statement. 

Related: Weathered face of 'old man' Neanderthal comes to life in amazing new facial reconstruction

"Neanderthal skulls have huge brow ridges and lack chins, with a projecting midface that results in more prominent noses," she said. "But the recreated face suggests those differences were not so stark in life."

Neanderthals were the closest relatives of modern humans. They lived in Eurasia from around 400,000 years ago until they died out approximately 40,000 years ago. However, during that time, possibly as far back as 250,000 years ago, Neanderthals interbred with Homo sapiens who'd ventured out of Africa and into Eurasia. The genetic legacy of these interbreeding events still lives on today. 

"It's perhaps easier to see how interbreeding occurred between our species, to the extent that almost everyone alive today still has Neanderthal DNA," Pomeroy said. 

Shanidar Cave was originally made famous by archaeological discoveries back in the 1950s, which uncovered several Neanderthals who looked like they'd been buried there in succession. These findings suggested that this cave was a burial spot used by these archaic humans. 

So far, the remains of at least 10 Neanderthals have been excavated from the cave. However, archaeologists think Shanidar Z is potentially the best preserved of them all. Her remains — which include part of a skeleton nearly to her waist — were carefully exposed under 24.6 feet (7.5 meters) of soil and rock and removed for analysis in dozens of small, foil-wrapped blocks. 

Archaeologists couldn't find her pelvic bones, so they determined her sex by studying a protein in her teeth enamel. These analyses also shed light on her age, as revealed by progressive, age-related signs of wear and tear. The team thinks Shanidar Z may have been in her mid-40s and around 5 feet (1.5 m) tall. 

Archaeologists in Saudi Arabia have discovered that humans were living in a lava tube at least 7,000 years ago and possibly earlier, a new study finds.

The lava tube, called Umm Jirsan, is located in a volcanic field called Harrat Khaybar, approximately 78 miles (125 kilometers) north of Medina, researchers said in a statement.

"Umm Jirsan is currently the longest reported lava tube in Arabia in terms of the horizontal length of passages, at 1481 metres [4,859 feet]," the scientists wrote in the paper published Wednesday (April 17) in the journal PLOS One.

Although ancient humans are known to have lived on the Arabian Peninsula during prehistoric times, organic remains are scant due to poor preservation in the arid region. So the researchers looked for areas that would have preserved artifacts because they were sheltered from the sun, wind and wild temperature changes over the past millennia. Umm Jirsan met these criteria, so the team decided to look there.

Their hunch turned out to be good. They found artifacts such as fragments of cloth and worked wood; rock art of domesticated animals; and the skeletal remains of nine human bones. These finds suggest that people occupied the lava tuba for at least the past 7,000 years and possibly as far back as 10,000 years, according to radiocarbon dating and optically stimulated luminescence dating, which examines when the last time certain minerals were exposed to heat or sunlight. Some of the dates are relatively recent and the tube appears to have been used into modern times, Stewart said.

The humans who used the lava tube left a few clues about their lives. These include bones of domesticated sheep and goats, as well as rock art depicting these animals, suggesting that these creatures were key to the humans' survival. A chemical analysis of the human remains showed an increase in certain plants, like cereals and fruits, over time — possibly because of a rise in oasis agriculture in the Bronze Age, the team said in the statement.

The analysis suggested that humans weren't living in the lava tube for long periods at a time, however. "The lava tube does not appear to have served as a permanent habitation location, but rather as a site that likely lay on herding routes and that allowed access to shade and water for passing herders and their animals," the authors wrote in the study. "Prior to this, as well as during pastoral periods, the lava tube was likely also linked with hunting activities, which probably remained a cornerstone of local economies into the Bronze Age."

Lava tubes form when lava creates underground passages that can transport large quantities of molten rock; when the lava supply ends or if the lava is diverted elsewhere, the empty tube is left behind, according to the National Park Service. And while they may sound inhospitable, they can be a good source of shelter. For instance, scientists at JAXA, Japan's space agency, have suggested that future humans could live in lava tubes on the moon.

Study co-author Mathew Stewart, a research fellow at the Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution at Griffith University in Australia, said lava tubes like this one continue to be used by modern-day people in the region "whether it be for corralling animals, accessing water resources, or simply for leisure," Stewart told Live Science in an email.

Related: 4,000-year-old wall found around oasis in Saudi Arabia likely defended 'against raids from nomads'

It's difficult to say when Umm Jirsan was last filled with lava, Stewart said, although volcanic activity has occurred intermittently in the region. "There have been some 1500 volcanic eruptions in Arabia over the past 1500 years, and many more in antiquity," Stewart said.

Scholars not involved with the research spoke positively of the team's work. It is "wonderful work by this team that has made a strong reputation for excellent fieldwork and interpretation," Gary Rollefson, a professor emeritus of anthropology at Whitman College and San Diego State University, told Live Science in an email. "Although the excavation produced relatively little in the way of artifacts and faunal remains, the material nevertheless reveals strong connections of material recovered in other parts of northern Saudi Arabia," Rollefson said, noting that there are similarities with material excavated in parts of Jordan.

Anthony Sinclair, a professor of archaeological theory and method at the University of Liverpool in the U.K., said in an email that in addition to providing shelter, the lava tube also would have been a "defendable position — in terms of allowing the pastoralists to safeguard their flocks at night against local predators. There would have been wolves, hyena and quite possibly lion and leopard across Arabia." Today, some of these animals are endangered or no longer present in Arabia.

A giant wall dating back around 4,000 years has been discovered surrounding an oasis in Saudi Arabia.

The wall was originally 9 miles (14.5 kilometers) long and surrounded the Khaybar Oasis, located near the city of Al-'Ula. It was about 16 feet (5 m) high and 5.6 to 7.9 feet (1.7 to 2.4 m) thick, the team said in a statement.

The wall originally had 180 bastions, points projecting out of the fortification.  Radiocarbon dating of charcoal remains found during excavations indicate that the wall dates to between 2250 and 1950 B.C., the team wrote in a paper published Jan. 10 in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports. Pottery remains on the wall also suggest that it dates to around that time. The wall may have been used for a few centuries before being abandoned.

Today, only about 3.7 miles (5.9 km) of the 9-mile wall and 74 of the 180 bastions remain, the team said in the statement.

Related: 7,000-year-old cult site in Saudi Arabia was filled with human remains and animal bones

Why were they built?

The wall may have been constructed for several reasons. One likely purpose was military defense "against raids from nomads," Guillaume Charloux, an archaeologist with the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) and lead author of the paper, told Live Science in an email.

In their paper, the scientists noted that the people who built the wall may have used it to demarcate their territory and to protect against flash floods. The team noted that other examples of fortified oases have been found on the Arabian Peninsula and may be a sign that populations were becoming more sedentary.

It would have taken 5.8 million cubic feet (164,000 cubic meters) of stone and brick and about 250 people working for four years to build the wall, Charloux said.

Work in the Khaybar Oasis is ongoing, and Charloux said we can expect to hear of results discussing a sizable settlement that existed in the Khaybar Oasis. There "is another important publication to come," he said.

Before the excavations were conducted, the site was analyzed using satellite surveys. The work on the fortifications was carried out between 2020 and 2023 by researchers with the Khaybar Longue Durée Archaeological Project.

Name: Arabian sand boa (Eryx jayakari)

Where it lives: Sandy deserts of the Arabian Peninsula and southwestern Iran

What it eats: Short-fingered geckos (Stenodactylus), Baluch rock geckos (Bunopus tuberculatus) and worm lizards.

Why it's awesome: These derpy-looking snakes have eyes that seem like they've been glued onto the top of their heads, earning them a celebrity moment on social media.

"The only reason that the Arabian sand boa (Eryx jayakari) has survived this long is that its prey can't stop laughing in time to escape," one Reddit user wrote in a post.

 "Ah yes, the Arabian sand boa, the most dumb looking snake," another user said.

Arabian sand boas are nocturnal; they spend the day buried deep in the sand and move toward the surface at dusk to hunt. And while their googly eyes are sometimes ridiculed, they are essential to these snakes' hunting strategy. 

Having eyes on top of their heads enables Arabian sand boas to peek out as they lie in wait for prey to pass nearby, with the rest of  their golden-brown bodies buried in the sand.

Related: Earless monitor lizards: The 'Holy Grail' of reptiles that looks like a mini dragon

Arabian sand boas grow up to 15 inches (38 centimeters) long and can tolerate a wide range of temperatures. They are one of two boa species that lay eggs instead of giving birth to live young — the other egg-laying species being the Saharan sand boa (Eryx muelleri), which is found throughout Africa.

Female Arabian sand boas lay their eggs in small clutches. They have to help their young break out from the eggs when they are ready to hatch, after roughly nine weeks, because the hatchlings lack an egg-tooth — a sharp projection on the snout, which the young of other snake species use to crack open their eggshells.

Arabian sand boas are common throughout their wide range and are not thought to be threatened by human activities, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List of Threatened Species.

Declassified images from Cold War spy satellites have revealed hundreds of previously undiscovered Roman forts in Iraq and Syria — and their existence suggests the eastern border of the ancient empire wasn't as violent as initially thought, a new study finds.

Researchers already knew about a series of forts — spanning roughly 116,000 square miles (300,000 square kilometers) from the Tigris River in modern-day Iraq to the plains of the Euphrates River in Syria — that were once thought to belong to a north-south border wall that separated the Romans from the rival empire of Persia. 

But the distribution, from east to west, of the newfound forts along with those previously known ones, hints that they were built to facilitate peaceful trade and travel. The new study, published Thursday (Oct. 26) in the journal Antiquity, refutes a 1934 hypothesis by the French archaeologist and Jesuit priest Antoine Poidebard that the eastern fortifications were built to repel invaders.

Related: Ruins of ancient Roman emperor Nero's theater unearthed in 'exceptional' discovery in Rome

"Since the 1930s, historians and archaeologists have debated the strategic or political purpose of this system of fortifications," lead study author Jesse Casana, a professor of anthropology at Dartmouth College, said in a statement. "But few scholars have questioned Poidebard's basic observation that there was a line of forts defining the eastern Roman frontier."

Stretching across the deserts of Iraq and Syria, Poidebard discovered 116 of the second and third century A.D. forts after taking aerial photographs in the 1920s and 1930s. Looking at their placement from his biplane, which he learned to fly during World War I, Poidebard hypothesized that the square-shaped strongholds created a north-south defensive line that drove back raids from Parthians and later the Sassanid Persians. 

Until now, Poidecard's hypothesis was widely accepted by historians. But after analyzing high-resolution images of the region taken by spy satellites in the 1960s and 1970s, the researchers discovered 396 previously unknown forts or fort-like buildings that were sprinkled widely from east to west.

This suggests the border was more fluid than first thought, with the outposts existing not along the border but through it — protecting trade caravans as they ferried people and goods between Rome and the neighboring Parthian (later Sassanid Persian) Empire. The archaeologists say this raises an important question about the border: "Was it a wall or a road?"

The researchers say their study highlights the importance of declassified images in archaeological research — especially as many of the forts revealed in the photos have now been destroyed by agricultural expansion and urbanization. They expect more discoveries to accompany the declassification of other aerial images, such as those taken by U2 spy planes.

"Careful analysis of these powerful data holds enormous potential for future discoveries in the Near East and beyond," Casana said.

A deep dive into nearly 12,000 years of violence in the Middle East reveals that bloodshed skyrocketed as proto-states, or state-level society, began to emerge about 6,500 years ago and spiked again as drought and superpowers took hold about 3,200 years ago, according to an analysis of battered human skulls and bones.

The skulls and bones — from over 3,500 people injured in conflicts in the Middle East during pre-Classical times (12000 B.C. to 400 B.C.) — came from the geographical region that includes Turkey, the Levant (the land around the eastern Mediterranean), Mesopotamia and Iran. These human remains were studied by an international research team interested in testing hypotheses about the rise and fall of violence in premodern times, according to a study published Oct. 9 in the journal Nature Human Behaviour.

The team investigated cranial trauma and weapon-related wounds in the skeletons of people who lived in the Middle East during one of four time periods: the Neolithic (12000 to 4500 B.C.), the Copper Age (4500 to 3,300 B.C.), the Bronze Age (3300 to 1200 B.C.) and the Iron Age (1200 to 400 B.C.). The ancient Middle East is an ideal place to look for clues to understanding violence in humans because this geographic area was crucial to several major innovations in human culture, from the domestication of plants and animals to the creation of the first cities beginning around 11,000 years ago.

The researchers' goal was to test assumptions about the level of violence in these time periods. For example, a low population density in the Neolithic period likely meant low levels of violence, while the emergence of states and empires in later periods may have increased interpersonal violence, particularly as people began to live close to one another in early cities.

Related: Iron Age warrior woman was buried with a sword and a mirror

Through their analysis of traumatic injuries identified on ancient skulls, the team found that the incidence of violence increased dramatically in the Copper Age, when large-scale organized conflict arose with the first proto-states, and then again in the Iron Age, due to major upheavals that included a 300-year drought and the rise of military superpowers such as the Assyrian Empire.

But a substantial decline in violence occurred in the Bronze Age between 3000 and 1500 B.C., the researchers found, in spite of numerous climate- and urbanism-related challenges. They concluded that it is likely "the violence decline took place at a time when early states achieved substantial capacities to reduce conflicts in their societies."

Reduced violence in the Bronze Age likely resulted from social innovations that transformed individuals into citizens.

"It seems quite clear that legal systems evolved rapidly through the Bronze Age, and even free citizens enjoyed some degree of protection from the law," study co-author Giacomo Benati, an economic historian at the University of Barcelona, told Live Science in an email. "This indicates that people had increasingly peaceful means to solve disputes."

Peace was short-lived, though, as the Iron Age saw unprecedented levels of inequality, diminishing resources, and a surge in warfare related to the rise of empires, such as that of the Hittites, who ruled over what is now part of Turkey. The discovery of upper-skull trauma in the Copper and Iron ages may suggest that "a blow to the head was possibly the most common way to kill in the pre-modern period," Benati said.

Debra Martin, a bioarchaeologist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas who was not involved in the study but has expertise in ancient violence, said the study is interesting and based on solid data.

"I applaud that the authors chose to not interpret the data to fit into one causal explanation," she told Live Science in an email. "Violence and conflict are often driven not only by external factors but also by ideology, beliefs and symbolism. In other words, it's complicated what drives violence."

The research team plans to carry out a follow-up study to address additional aspects of interpersonal violence trends over time, such as whether males or females were more likely to be affected.

"Skeletal data are uniquely well-suited for understanding changes in human welfare," Benati said, "and we will certainly try to observe gender differences as well — the gender dimension is certainly a crucial one."

The head of a marble statue of Alexander the Great unearthed in Turkey shows the enduring popularity of the ancient ruler hundreds of years after his death, experts say.

The object was found amid the ruins of the upper levels of a Roman-era theater at Konuralp, north of Düzce and near Turkey's northwest coast, and is thought to date to the second century. Alexander the Great died in 323 B.C, so the statue may have been made more than 400 years after his death.

The remains of other marble statues, including heads of the Greek god Apollo and the mythical monster Medusa, have also been found in the ruins of the theater, the Düzce Municipality wrote in a statement in Turkish.

Alexander was a popular figure in the ancient world long after his untimely death at age 32 at Babylon beside the Euphrates river, historian Paul Cartledge, a professor at the University of Cambridge and the author of "Alexander the Great: the Hunt for a New Past" (Overlook Press, 2004), told Live Science.

One reason for Alexander's enduring popularity was that his successors promoted him as an ideal ruler whom they hoped to emulate. "The contenders for his throne, and therefore his empire, used his name and said 'he was terrific,'" said Cartledge, who wasn't involved in the new discovery.

It also became common for later rulers to make coins containing Alexander's image as a way to legitimize their reigns, he said.

Macedonian king

After analyzing the marble head, historical experts determined it was a portrayal of Alexander, according to the statement.

"[He] is depicted with deep and upward-looking eyes … and a slightly open mouth that barely reveals its teeth," Düzce Municipality officials said in the statement, which also noted the distinctive hairstyle on the statue. "The two tufts of hair in the middle of the forehead, which are separated to the back and sides, are like a lion's mane," they said in the translated statement. "This depiction is a hairstyle unique to Alexander the Great."

Alexander was one of the most famous rulers of the ancient world. Born in 356 B.C., he became the king of Macedonia, a territory north of Greece, in 336. His father, Philip II of Macedon, had already succeeded in uniting Greece under his rule.

Although not born in Greece, Alexander was enamored of Greek culture and spread it as he began a campaign of military conquests to the south and east, which culminated in his defeat of the powerful Persian Empire in a series of battles between 334 B.C. and 331 B.C.

Mighty empire

At its height, Alexander's empire stretched from Greece and Egypt to Bactria, roughly in what's now Afghanistan, to the Punjab in what's now Pakistan. But his army refused to go any farther, and Alexander returned to Babylon, where he died a few years later — probably from an illness, but possibly from drinking too much or because he was poisoned, Cartledge said.

When the Romans conquered much of the ancient world — including the kingdom of Bithynia, in the region where the new statue was found — they, too, regarded Alexander the Great as an ideal ruler.

Indeed, Alexander's habit of shaving his face — as opposed to sporting beards, like most past rulers did — influenced Roman emperors and led Romans to shave, because it was thought to be the correct thing for rulers to do, Cartledge said. Alexander seemed to have taken up the habit because he wanted to be seen like the Greek god Apollo, who was portrayed without a beard.

For the same reason, many statues of Alexander portrayed his eyes looking upward, toward the gods, Cartledge said, and upward-looking eyes are one feature of the statue discovered at Konuralp.

Editor's note: An earlier version of this story said Alexander was "technically not a Greek." But although he was born in Macedonia, he was descended from Greeks on his father's side. 

Archaeologists have documented a cluster of carvings depicting camels on a rock outcropping near the southern edge of Saudi Arabia's Nafud desert.

The monumental artwork portrays a dozen life-size wild camels, a now-extinct species that once roamed this swath of the Arabian Peninsula desert thousands of years ago but has never received a scientific name, according to a study published in the December issue of the journal Archaeological Research in Asia.

While the site, named Sahout, had been recognized by other archaeologists for some time, this is the first time someone noticed the camel carvings on the outcropping.

"We learned about the site from another paper — but the panel was difficult to find because its location wasn't precise, and this isn't an easy landscape [to navigate]," study lead author Maria Guagnin, a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology in Germany, told Live Science. 

Finding the outcropping in the sand dunes wasn't the only challenge. Because the carvings have newer etchings overlapping the camels, there's an added layer of mystery surrounding which culture created the artwork and when.

Related: Stone tools and camel tooth suggest people were in the Pacific Northwest more than 18,000 years ago

"The outcroppings contain a dense cluster of rock art from many different periods," Guagnin said. "You can see that the carvings were done in various phases and are stylistically different."

It also doesn't help that most of the carvings were made inside crevices, making them difficult to access and radiocarbon date. 

However, radiocarbon dating of two trenches and two hearths nearby indicate that the Sahout site was repeatedly occupied between the Pleistocene (2.6 million to 11,700 years ago) and the Middle Holocene (7,000 to 5,000 years ago), according to the study.

The naturalistic style of the carvings depicting the animals' fur and sex also offer clues about when they were created.

"What's most striking about the beautifully carved camels is that most of them are male," Guagnin said. "Some of the carvings contain camels showing their dulla, an organ that hangs out of a male camel's mouth [that is used to attract females]."

Based on this symbolism alone, the researchers hypothesized that the art could've been made during mating season. This is also known as rut and occurs between November and March, according to Veterinary World.

"The feral camels also hadn't [molted their fur] yet and still had their winter hair," Guagnin said.

More research is needed to figure out the significance of this site. "There's no known water source, so there might have been something else that brought people here," Guagnin said. "Perhaps it was a good stopping point on their way to another location. It must've been an important location, but right now, we're not sure why."

Sahout isn't the only site in Saudi Arabia where camel carvings have been found. In 2018, archaeologists discovered a 2,000-year-old "parade" of life-size camels in the province of Al-Jouf in the northwestern Saudi desert.

Archaeologists excavating an ancient stone monument in Saudi Arabia have unearthed thousands of animal bones, as well as human remains belonging to at least nine individuals.

The discoveries suggest that people gathered at stone structures to perform rituals and activities in Saudi Arabia about 7,000 years ago. These rituals appear to have included depositing animal horns and skulls.

More than 1,000 prehistoric rectangular stone structures called mustatils ("rectangles" in Arabic) have been documented in Saudi Arabia, yet exactly when and why they were built have remained a mystery. In 2018, the Royal Commission for AlUla, a region in northwest Saudi Arabia, launched a project to document and study mustatils and other archaeological remains in the region.

The recently excavated mustatil measures 131 by 39 feet (40 by 12 meters); the stone walls are up to 6.6 feet (2 m) thick, but the original height of the walls, which have since eroded, is unclear.

At the center of a courtyard within the mustatil, there is a structure that may have functioned as a shrine, with two hearths where ceremonies may have taken place, the archaeologists wrote in a paper published in August in a supplement to the journal Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies.

Related: 7,000-year-old cult site in Saudi Arabia was filled with human remains and animal bones

Within the mustatil, archaeologists also found more than 3,000 fragments of animal remains that together weigh about 55 pounds (25 kilograms). These animal remains include hundreds of horns and heads of animals, including cattle and caprines such as goats. Other prehistoric sites in the Middle East also contain a multitude of cattle heads and horns, including a site in Yemen where a ring of cattle skulls was displayed, lead study author Wael Abu-Azizeh, a junior professor of archaeology at Lumière University Lyon 2, told Live Science. The animal bones were deposited between 5300 B.C. and 5000 B.C., the archaeologists wrote.

The human bones found in the mustatil come from at least nine people: two infants, five adults, an adolescent or young adult, and a child, the team wrote in the paper. The human remains date to a few centuries after the animal bones were placed in the mustatil. "It's a collective burial," and it's unclear if the people buried there are related to the builders of the mustatil, Abu-Azizeh said.

Olivia Munoz, an archeo-anthropologist at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) who wasn't involved with the study, praised the research and hopes that more details about the human remains will be published. "It would be interesting to know the distribution by bone type to help understand whether individuals were deposited whole or whether parts of the already decomposed skeleton could be brought into [the mustatil]," Munoz told Live Science in an email.

Religious meaning

It's unclear why the mustatil was created and why it holds so many animal bones. In a 2021 paper published in the journal Antiquity, researchers suggested that mustatils may have been part of a "cattle cult" in the region. However, Abu-Azizeh said he disagrees with this idea, noting that the team's excavations found that cattle bones accounted for only a small proportion of the animal remains from the site, with caprines making up the most.

The mustatil's "wide open-air courtyard" design indicates that crowds congregated there. The presence of many animal horns and head remains hints that rituals may have taken place there. Moreover, the two hearths in the possible shrine and the finding that some of the animal bones were burnt suggest that the ritual may have involved the burning of animal bones.

One important aspect of the site is that it is well preserved, said Anne Porter, an assistant professor emerita of Near Eastern archaeology at the University of Toronto who wasn't involved in the work. "All too often open-air structures such as this, wherever they are found, are badly disturbed," Porter told Live Science in an email.

At the time the mustatil was built, the environment in the region would have been substantially wetter than it is today, Gary Rollefson, a professor emeritus of anthropology at Whitman College in Washington, told Live Science in an email. He agreed the mustatil likely had spiritual importance for the people who used it, noting that the animal horns and heads may have been "votive offerings." Nomadic groups that were dispersed much of the year may have gathered at the mustatil at a point in time, perhaps near or just after the end of the rainy season, Rollefson said.

The mustatils will be a part of the AlUla World Archaeology Summit, which will take place Sept. 13-15.

Stars and lines engraved in rocks on the Arabian Peninsula may represent nearby hunting traps, making these carvings the first scale-plan diagrams in human history, according to a new study that reveals humans' sophisticated understanding of space around 8,000 years ago.

Archaeologists first noticed these structures, known as desert kites, about 100 years ago, when aerial photography began taking off with airplanes. Kites are large areas of land bordered by low stone walls, sometimes with pits scattered on the inside near the edges. Found primarily in the Middle East and Central Asia, kites are thought to have functioned like pens or traps for animals. Hunters would herd animals, like gazelle, into the kite through a long, narrow passage, where the game would be unable to escape the walls or the pits, making them easier to kill. 

Because of their massive size — averaging close to the square footage of two football fields — kites cannot be seen in their entirety from the ground. But the advent of publicly available, high-resolution satellite images, such as those from Google Earth, has jump-started the study of desert kites in the past decade.

The recent discovery of architectural-like designs engraved in rocks in Jordan and Saudi Arabia has revealed how Neolithic humans may have planned these "mega-traps," according to a new study, published Wednesday (May 17) in the journal PLOS One.

Related: 7,000-year-old cult site in Saudi Arabia was filled with human remains and animal bones

The study authors made mathematical calculations to compare the rock-cut kite diagrams with the shape and dimensions of known kites. Their first example was an engraved limestone monolith from the archaeological site of Jibal al-Khashabiyeh in Jordan. The nearly 3-foot-tall (80 centimeters) stone provided a good canvas for prehistoric people, who carved long, kite-looking lines that drove animals into a star-shaped enclosure, which has eight cup-shaped depressions that represent the pit traps. The stone has different carving techniques, but it's unknown if they represent the work of one person or several people, study first author Rémy Crassard, an archaeologist at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS),  told Live Science in an email. 

The second example, from Wadi az-Zilliyat in Saudi Arabia, shows two kites carved into an enormous sandstone boulder that's over 12 feet tall and nearly 8 feet across (about 4 by 2 meters). Although made in a different style than the Jordan one, the Saudi Arabia kite diagram also depicts driving lines, a star-shaped enclosure and six cup marks at the ends of the points. 

Kites are notoriously difficult to date because they are arrangements of rocks and pits, meaning they don't usually have organic material that's testable with radiocarbon dating. But based on comparisons with neighboring kites associated with sediments and organic remains, the team estimates that these two sites date to about 8,000 years ago, around the end of the Neolithic period in Arabia.

Crassard and colleagues with the Globalkites Project then quantitatively compared the rock-cut diagrams with dozens of plans of known kites through geographical graph modeling. Mathematical comparisons of the engravings with documented kites revealed similarity scores — the diagram from Jordan was found to be most similar to a kite located 1.4 miles (2.3 kilometers) away, while the diagram from Saudi Arabia was most similar to a kite 10 miles (16.3 km) away and very close in appearance to another one 0.87 mile (1.4 km) away. 

"The engravings are surprisingly realistic and accurate, and are moreover to scale, as observed by the geometric graph-based assessment of shape similarity," the authors wrote in the study. "These examples of kite representations are thus the oldest known architectural plans to scale in human history."

The team theorized that a group of people preparing for a hunting activity might have studied and discussed the plan of an already-built kite, which might have included coordinating the number and position of the hunters and anticipating the animals' actions ahead of the event. It's also possible that a diagram like this was used to construct the kite in the first place. In either case, the fact that humans were creating a link between physical space as seen from above and graphical representation is an important development in abstract thought and symbolic representation, the researchers suggested in their study.

Jens Notroff, a Neolithic archaeologist at the German Archaeological Institute who was not involved in this research, told Live Science in an email that "the discovery of this specific type of schematic rock art already is an absolutely fascinating addition to our now growing understanding of these Neolithic desert kites and their obviously complex layout within the landscape." Notroff also said "the most stunning insight for me personally is the degree of abstraction — they represent a view none of those participating in construction and use of these desert kites could easily reproduce from their own visual experience."

Crassard and colleagues are continuing their work on desert kites through the Globalkites Project. Although "these engravings are the oldest known evidence of at-scale plans," Crassard said, it is possible that people created similar diagrams in less-permanent material, such as by drawing them in dirt. 

Three ancient Roman camps in the Jordanian desert, possibly built during a secret military mission in the second century A.D., have been discovered by an archaeologist using satellite images from Google Earth.

Only a handful of Roman camps have been found in the Middle East — unlike in Roman territories in Europe, where hundreds are known — and experts say the discovery is an important archaeological advance.

Just the outlines of the camps are visible via Google Earth; no buildings or high walls remain. The camps are so far out in the desert that no scientist has visited them on foot, although tire tracks show several vehicles have been in the area, according to a study published April 27 in the journal Antiquity.

Study lead author Michael Fradley, a landscape archaeologist at the University of Oxford, told Live Science that a wall of one camp had at some point been recorded on a Jordanian heritage register. "But there'd been no interpretation of it as a Roman camp," he said.

Related: 25 strangest sights on Google Earth

Eye in the sky

Fradley works with a project called Endangered Archaeology in the Middle East and North Africa (EAMENA) to analyze satellite photographs, and Google Earth is among its sources.

"There are problems with some areas that don't have good imagery, but it's still the go-to tool for lots of geographical researchers" mainly because the open-source imagery it uses is free to access, he said.

Fradley was using Google Earth last year to examine photographs of the desert near Jordan's southern border with Saudi Arabia when he spotted the classic "playing card" shape of a Roman camp. Less than 24 hours later, he'd spotted two more, leading in a line from an oasis at Bayir roughly southeast into the desert. 

Further investigations with Google Earth and from aerial photographs suggest that the outlines are the distinctive remains of temporary Roman military camps, built by soldiers following a standard defensive plan — in these cases, by piling up rocks. 

The camps are farther apart than a person could easily walk in a day — about 23 to 27 miles (37 to 44 kilometers) — and Fradley estimates they were occupied by hundreds of mounted troops, maybe on camels.

Secret mission

There's no record of a Roman incursion into this region, and in the second century, it was controlled by the kingdom of the Nabataeans, a Bedouin people and ostensibly Roman allies who followed the empire's directives. 

The line of camps seems to be heading for the Nabataean city of Dumat al-Jandal, which is now in Saudi Arabia. But the usual approach to the city would have been through a dry valley farther north called Wadi Sirhan; Fradley speculated that the camps were part of a secret Roman mission to attack from an unexpected quarter.

Roman records indicate that after its king died in A.D. 106, the Nabataean kingdom passed peacefully into direct Roman rule, during the reign of Emperor Trajan. But the new discoveries suggest the transition to Roman rule may have been more violent than previously thought, Fradley said.

It's not known what happened to the soldiers who made this journey into the desert. They may have turned back before reaching Dumat al-Jandal, or they may have continued on to other camps farther east, of which no signs remain, he said.

David Kennedy, a professor emeritus of classics and ancient history at the University of Western Australia who wasn't involved in the study, noted that only a few Roman military camps have been found in the Middle East, and so the discovery is important evidence for the study of the Roman army in Arabia.

Dating such camps could be difficult, but their outlines seemed to point to the first two centuries A.D., he said. 

Beyond that, archaeologists would have to travel to the sites and search for any artifacts they could use to date them, although that's unlikely: "[It's] not a hopeful undertaking, but necessary," he said.

Archaeologists in Saudi Arabia have discovered ancient human remains buried near hundreds of scattered animal bones inside a 7,000-year-old desert monument, a ritual site used by a prehistoric cult.

The remains, those of an adult male approximately in his 30s, were found inside a mustatil, a structure that takes its name from the Arabic word for rectangle. The ruin is one of more than 1,600 mustatils discovered in Saudi Arabia since the 1970s. Mostly submerged beneath sand, the structures were built when the Arabian Desert was a lush grassland where elephants roamed and hippos bathed in lakes. 

The mustatils' builders were members of an unknown cult. As a change to the climate slowly transformed the land to desert, cult members likely gathered to protect it by sacrificing their cattle to unknown gods, researchers say. Now, a new mustatil excavation, detailed in a study published March 15 in the journal PLOS One, has revealed more details about the mystifying structures and their worshippers lost to time. 

"Almost nothing has been written on the mustatils and beliefs that surrounded them," study lead author Melissa Kennedy, an archaeologist at the University of Western Australia, told Live Science. "Only 10 mustatil have been excavated, and this study is one of the first to be published. So we still don't know a lot about this tradition yet."

Mustatils vary in their appearance, but they are typically long rectangles formed from low rock walls around 4 feet (1.2 meters) high. Excavations have revealed complex structures inside some of the ruins, including interior walls and pillars that give way to central chambers possibly reserved for feasting and ritual sacrifices, Kennedy said. 

Related: Vast 4,500-year-old network of 'funerary avenues' discovered in Saudi Arabia

Worshippers entered the mustatils from one end and walked anywhere from 66 to 1,970 feet (20 to 600 m) or more to the other, arriving at a rubble platform called the head. A chamber inside the head housed a beytl — a sacred stone, sometimes originating from a meteorite — that cult members used to commune with their gods. 

The mustatil excavated by the researchers, located 34 miles (55 kilometers) east of the ancient city of AlUla, is 460 feet (140 m) long and constructed from local sandstone. Its beytl is a large upright stone, around which the researchers found 260 fragments of animal skulls and horns. The bone pieces are mainly from domesticated cattle, though the researchers said some fragments belonged to domesticated goats, gazelle and small ruminants.

"They would most probably have brought animals with them, potentially slaughtered them on-site, offered the horns and upper parts of the skull to a deity, while potentially feasting on the rest of the remains," Kennedy said. "We can't be certain if the slaughter occurred on-site or somewhere else, as we haven't found the rest of the animal remains. However, we think that it most probably occurred on-site, as the horns, particularly the keratin — which degrades very quickly — were in such good condition. It suggests that there was probably only a short period of time before the removal of the horns and their offering in the mustatil."

Immediately to the north of the mustatil's head, the researchers found a cist, a type of burial chamber built throughout the Neolithic and Bronze ages across Europe and the Middle East. Analysis of the interred bones belonging to the man revealed that he was in his 30s or early 40s when he died and that he probably had osteoarthritis, a degenerative joint disease that is the most common form of arthritis. Radiocarbon dating of the human and animal bones showed that the man was buried 400 years after the animals had been slaughtered — a sign that the mustatils were sites of repeated pilgrimages.

"We are finding more and more evidence for humans being interred in mustatils," Kennedy said. "However, these burials are always later; they do not date to the same time period as the animal offerings. We hypothesize that the mustatil sites retained their importance even after their use ceased and that later generations would bury their dead at these places as a way of asserting ownership over these structures, essentially claiming a link with the past."

The purpose of the mustatils' ceremonies remains an enigma. As the desert-spanning structures were built during the Holocene Humid Period — a phase that lasted between 7000 B.C. and 6000 B.C. for Arabia, making it and North Africa much wetter but still prone to droughts and slow desertification — the researchers think there could be some connection between the rituals practiced inside these structures and a communal desire to bless the drying land with rain.

They are now testing this hypothesis by geographically mapping the close placement of mustatils to prehistoric pastoral lands, rivers and lakes. The investigation, which is ongoing, could reveal the connections between ancient religious practices and the region's primeval climate crisis.

Archaeologists in Iraq have unearthed the remains of a 4,500-year-old Sumerian temple dedicated to Ningirsu, the Mesopotamian god of springtime thunder, the British Museum has reported. 

The long-lost temple was built out of mud brick and was the spectacular centerpiece of the ancient city of Girsu, now an archaeological site known as Tello.

"At the heart of the city of Girsu, we have discovered — and are still currently excavating — one of the most important sacred spaces of all ancient Mesopotamia: a temple dedicated to the chief god of Girsu," Sebastien Rey, a curator of ancient Mesopotamia and lead archaeologist at the British Museum in London, said in a presentation of the findings.

Girsu was a bustling cultural center at the heart of Mesopotamia — a broad area between the rivers Euphrates and Tigris including Iraq, eastern Syria, southeastern Turkey, part of western Iran and Kuwait, and home to some of the first civilizations. The Sumerians were possibly the oldest civilization in the world and the first to establish religion and a code of law.

French archaeologist Ernest de Sarzec first discovered the remains of Girsu in 1877 and removed all the artifacts he could find, including a 4,000-year-old statue of the Sumerian king Gudea, who ruled the city at the end of the third millennium B.C. As a result, many people thought that there was nothing left to excavate. Multiple periods of conflict have also prevented scientists from accessing the site in the Dhi Qar province of southern Iraq. Rey and his team, however, could not shake the idea that Girsu had more secrets to reveal.

Related: Ancient Egyptian temple to the sun cult uncovered near Cairo 

"After the Second World War and years of conflict that followed later in Iraq, the site of Girsu fell into semi-oblivion," Rey said. "It is not fanciful to say today that Girsu is probably one of the most important heritage sites in the world that very few people know about."

Now, more than a century after archaeologists last explored the remarkable site, Rey's team has unearthed the vast temple. Archaeologists used remote sensing techniques to reveal features of the site buried under sand and other deposits. They also created digital elevation models to understand how the landscape has changed since the excavations of the 19th century. 

"After five seasons of excavations at the temple site, we were able to uncover a large area of this ancient sanctuary, including the inner sanctum, a ceremonial square, an interior wall which featured a gate, and we were also able to identify and excavate part of the inclosure wall of the religious complex, including a monumental gate," Rey said.

The temple, referred to in ancient inscriptions as Enninu or the "White Thunderbird," housed the sacred statue of the hero thunder god Ningirsu, one of the most important gods of the Sumerian pantheon. The Sumerians believed that Ningirsu held power over spring thunder, rainstorms and floods, as well as commanding the plow and plowing of the land, according to the British Museum. 

Remarkably, the newly unearthed walls surrounding the sacred site perfectly match a map carved into the statue of king Gudea found during the early excavations. 

"Enninu, the White Thunderbird, is the oldest temple for which we have detailed inscriptions — an archaic plan carved into the statue of the king," Rey said. "We were able to test our theory by opening a series of excavation soundings and identifying, for example, the foundations of a temple gate exactly where we predicted the temple gate would be, according to the 4,000-year-old plan."