There are lots of articles and essays about new archaeology finds that are of interest to modern Pagans, Heathens, and polytheists out there. More than our team can write about in-depth in any given week. Therefore, The Wild Hunt must unleash the hounds in order to round them all up. Here are our favorite picks this month.
LUXOR, Egypt – The Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities announced last week the discovery of the “Lost Golden City.” The discovery is being heralded as one of the most significant archaeological finds since the tomb of Tutankhamun.
Egyptologist Dr. Zahi Hawass who is in charge of the excavation, has dubbed the site as the “Ascension of Aton or Rise of Aten” depending on translation. The city dates back to over 3,000 years and the reign of Amenhotep III, ninth king of the 18th Dynasty, who ruled Egypt from 1391 till 1353 B.C.E.
The Ministry refers to the site as “the largest city ever found in Egypt,” and the statement issued on social media indicates that the level of preservation of the city is good, that it has nearly complete walls and rooms that contain the tools of daily life.
The site also contains human and animal remains. Excavators have found “two unusual burials of a cow or bull.” Another discovery held the “remarkable burial of a person found with arms outstretched to his side, and remains of a rope wrapped around his knees. The location and position of this skeleton are rather odd, and more investigations are in progress.”
The excavation area is sandwiched between Rameses III’s temple at Medinet Habu and Amenhotep III’s temple at Memnon. Hawass and his team began work in this area in September of 2020 in search of Tutankhamun’s Mortuary Temple. Much to their surprise, what they uncovered were formations of mud bricks in every direction.
“Many foreign missions searched for this city and never found it. We began our work searching for the mortuary temple of Tutankhamun because the temples of both Horemheb and Ay were found in this area,” Hawass said. “The city’s streets are flanked by houses, which some of their walls reach 3 meters high. We can reveal that the city extends to the west, all the way to the famous Deir el-Medina.”
Deir el-Medina is a village that was inhabited by workmen and artisans and dates to the 19th and 20th dynasties on the west bank of the Nile river across from modern-day Luxor.
In the seven months since the first discovery, the team has uncovered three separate areas including a food preparation and bakery site designed to accommodate a very larger number of people, a residential and administrative area that is still being excavated, and a production area that included not only the production of mud bricks bearing the cartouche of King Amenhotep III (Neb Maat Ra) and used to construct temples but also contained molds for creating amulets and decorative pieces that would’ve been used on tombs and temples.
To the north of the areas being excavated are a number of tombs that are similar in construction to those found in the Valley of the Kings and in the Valley of the Nobles–rock-cut tombs accessed through stairs carved into the rock. What those tombs might hold remains to yet be discovered and revealed.
TWH – The breadth and variety of new research and excavations in Egypt suggest that the pyramids were not built by slaves. Sites like Deir el-Medina, and the more recent discoveries like the ones in the “Lost Golden City” in Luxor, highlight the great number of skilled workers who were involved in the construction of sites like the Great Pyramid.
Egyptologist Dr. Zahi Hawass has stated in previous interviews that the burials found at the foot of the Great Pyramid suggest such an honorable placement of the worker’s tombs would not have been accorded to slaves. Hawass disputes the idea of there even being slaves during this period.
And yet, these false ideas about slave labor building the pyramids continue to circulate and plague anthropologists and Egyptologists. Despite the amount of research and findings that support Hawass’s and other researcher’s statements regarding the use of slaves, every few years a story crops up attempting to link a new find to these debunked ideas.
Last year during worldwide protests over racism, a statue of slaver Edward Colston in Bristol, England was pulled down and thrown into the Avon River and was followed by some calls for the destruction or removal of the pyramids at Giza due to an incorrect belief they were built with slave labor. The Egypt Independent notes that “Colston was responsible for the enslavement and transfer of more than 80,000 people from Africa to the New World in the 17th Century, while working with the Royal African Company, according to CNN.”
Dr. Mark Lehner who has done extensive excavation through the program Giza Plateau Mapping Project (GPMP) has helped to identify the worker areas around Giza that include workshops, storage buildings, bakeries, and barracks.
A short video produced for PBS and the show “It’s okay to be Smart” outlines how the pyramids were built without the aid of slaves or even space travelers.
SOZOPOL, Bulgaria – A slab that depicts ancient Greek warriors and dates to circa 500 B.C.E. has been discovered in the excavations of two temples that were dedicated to the Greek god Apollo on what was originally St. Cyricus Island and sits on the shore of the Black Sea.
This most recent find fits with several other pieces which were discovered during excavations in 2018 and 2019 and are all part of a much larger depiction of marching warriors.
Apollo of the Belvedere. [Photo Credit: Livioandronico2013. CC BY-SA 4.0]
St. Cyricus Island, also known by the names of St. Cyril Island, St. Quiricus and St. Julietta Island, has a wealth of archaeological structures that date to the 6th century B.C.E. and the establishment of the ancient Greek colony of Apollonia Pontica on the Western Black Sea coast.
In 2011, and then again in 2016, plans were made public to rebuild and install the Colossus of Apollonia Pontica, a 13-meter bronze statue of Apollo which is believed to have once stood in the harbor before being seized and removed to Rome in 72 B.C.E. by Roman general, Marcus Lucullus.
Last fall, the Bulgarian government and the French Ambassador to Bulgaria announced a plan to turn St. Cyricus Island in Sozopol into a museum of archaeology with aid from France, the OAE, and the Louvre Museum in Paris.
LA LIBERTAD, Virú Province, Peru – A mural that archaeologists believe depicts a stylized and zoomorphic image of a spider was discovered on the south wall of a 3,200-year-old ceremonial temple or “huaca” belonging to the pre-Columbian indigenous Cupisnique culture.
The painting was discovered when local farmers seeking to expand their lands destroyed more than half of the temple which is in the middle of avocado and sugar cane fields. The Decentralized Directorate of Culture of La Libertad has been contacted and efforts are underway to protect the site.
Archaeologist Régulo Franco Jordán from the Wisse Foundation, working with archaeologist Feren Castillo concluded after completing fieldwork that the huaca was used for rituals.
Jordán explained in an interview with La República the positioning and symbolism of the painting, “Precisely, the spider located in the temple, which I have baptized as Tomabalito, just faces the river that crosses the valley of Virú. This animal is linked to water and is extremely important in the Hispanic culture, which lived and had a ceremonial calendar. It is probable that this special ceremony of the sacred and ritual water took place between January and March when the rainwater in the upper area fell.”
MELBOURNE, Australia – New findings published in the Public Library of Science journal, PLOS One, on the UNESCO World Heritage site in Laos named “Plain of Jars” has determined the funerary stone jars were likely originally placed in the position between 1240 to 660 B.C.E.
The megalithic jar sites in northern Laos referred to as the “Plain of Jars” are made up of carved stone jars that measure anywhere from one to three meters in height, and can be found across the landscape, appearing singularly or in groups that can number up to several hundred.
[Plain of Jars – archaeological site, Photo Credit: Jakub Hałun: CC BY-SA 4.0]
Despite the name “Plain of Jars” the majority of the megalithic jar sites are found on mountain ridges, saddles, or hill slopes that surround the central plain and upland valleys in Xieng Khouang Province, where the largest number of sites are mostly located.
The team led by Dr. Louise Shewan from the University of Melbourne, Associate Professor Dougald O’Reilly from the Australian National University (ANU) and Dr. Thonglith Luangkoth from the Lao Department of Heritage collected and analyzed sediment from two of the more than 120 sites.
Using a technique called Optically Stimulated Luminescence (OSL) the team was able to determine when the sediment grains were last exposed to sunlight.
Detrital zircon U-Pb dating, which has been used by geologists for several decades, and recently used to establish the provenance of ceramic and stone sources in archaeological contexts including Stonehenge, was used by Associate Professor Richard Armstrong at ANU to measure the age of some jar samples and possibly determine provenance by comparing the jar samples to those from local sandstone outcroppings and probable quarry sites.
Armstrong found that the zircon age distributions revealed very similar provenance to a sandstone outcrop and was the likely source of the stone used for the creation of jars at the site that was studied and samples were taken from.
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