Archeology is one of the most amazing sciences, because it allows us to recognize many unknown (and sometimes even previously unrepresentable) details of human history thanks to the remnants of material culture collected bit by bit.
An archaeologist is almost like a detective and a forensic scientist in one person. From a pair of bones and a rusty metal fragment, he can determine what happened on this site hundreds, or even thousands of years ago.
Our rich history reveals itself reluctantly, gradually: sometimes a significant discovery alone takes a lot of moral and physical strength and a huge amount of time. Thus, in the end, the results are more valuable and interesting.
Here are just 10 of the most important archaeological discoveries in the history of this science.
10. Clay seal of Baruch
One of the most valuable finds of modern times from the field of the so-called "biblical" archeology is the personal seal of Baruch ben-Neriya.
Baruch was not only a friend and assistant to the prophet Jeremiah (and also, in modern terms, his secretary), but also the author of the biography of this wise man.
The seal was found in 1980 by the Israeli archaeologist Nahman Avigad. There is an inscription on it - "lbrkyhw bn nryhw hspr", meaning "Baruch, son of Neria, the scribe."
And by the way, then the Jews still wrote not in Hebrew characters, but in angular letters similar to Phoenician ones. Such seals (in the form of a small roller with a name carved on it and worn on a cord around the neck) performed the role of a signature in the ancient world, which was placed on a lump of raw clay, holding a contract or other important document written on parchment.
9. Nag Hammadi Library
In 1945, the peasant Mohammed Ali Samman accidentally found a collection of 12 ancient codes written in papyrus near the city of Nag Hammadi (Egypt) (only 8 sheets from the 13th codex), which opened the veil of secrecy enveloping the first centuries of Christianity.
Historians have found that there are a total of 52 texts in the codes, 37 of which were previously unknown, and the rest have already appeared in the form of translations into other languages, quotes, references, etc.
The texts included a number of Gospels, part of Plato’s book “The State”, as well as documents significantly deviating from modern Christian dogmas and contrary to the Bible.
According to historians, these papyri were made in the IV century. and specially hidden by the monks of a nearby Christian monastery after the Alexandrian Archbishop Athanasius I the Great ordered the destruction of all non-canonical texts. Now these codes are stored in the Cairo Museum.
8. Pilate Stone
We all heard the story of the crucifixion of Christ and we know who sentenced him to this painful execution. But until 1961 there was no evidence that Pontius Pilate (the procurator of Judea) really existed as a living person, and was not invented by the authors of the New Testament.
And finally, during excavations in Caesarea, the Italian archaeologist Antonio Frova found a large flat slab behind the amphitheater building, on which he read the Latin inscription “Tiberium ... Pontius Pilate, Prefect of Judea ... dedicated ...”.
So, firstly, it became clear that Pilate was a real historical person, and secondly, that he was not a prosecutor, but a prefect (at that time, however, the duties and rights of the people who held these two posts in the Roman provinces were almost identical).
Now the Pilate stone is in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.
7. Dinosaur Fossils
Now no one will say for sure when people found dinosaur bones for the first time, but the first documented case of discovering the remains of ancient dinosaurs occurred in 1677, when Oxford professor Robert Plott, who got a huge femur of an unknown animal, first decided that it was part of one of the elephants brought to Britain by the Romans, and eventually came to the conclusion that these are the remains of a sinner who drowned in the Great Flood.
(By the way, until the 19th century, people most often considered dinosaur bones as the remains of biblical giants, but the Chinese, who were closest to the truth, called them dragon bones and even attributed healing properties to them).
Given that people in Europe until recently were very religious, they could not have imagined that such strange giant beings once existed on earth (hardly created by the Lord).
Well, already in 1824, the British geologist and paleontologist William Buckland first described and named the type of dinosaur he discovered - the megalosaurus (that is, the "great lizard"). The term “dinosaur” itself appeared only in 1842.
6. Pompeii
At the mention of the name "Pompeii", someone will immediately remember the famous picture of Karl Bryullov "The Last Day of Pompeii", someone - the recent film "Pompeii" with Keith Harington.
In any case, almost everyone heard about this city, destroyed by Vesuvius at the end of October 79 AD, but not everyone is aware that two more cities, Herculaneum and Stabia, died along with Pompeii.
They were discovered by accident: in 1689, workers digging a well stumbled upon the ruins of an ancient building, on the wall of which there was an inscription with the word "Pompeii". But then they simply considered it to be one of the villas of Pompey the Great.
And only in 1748, excavations at this site were begun, and their leader was a military engineer R.J. Alcubierre, believed that he had found Stabia. He was only interested in things that had artistic value, he simply destroyed the rest (until archaeologists were indignant at this fact).
In 1763, it finally became clear that the city found was not Stabia, but Pompeii, and in 1870 the archaeologist Giuseppe Fiorelli guessed to fill in the plaster of the voids left in the place of the people and animals that were killed and covered with ashes, thus obtaining their exact posthumous casts.
Today, Pompeii has been excavated by about 75-80%.
5. Dead Sea Scrolls
And one more find from the field of "biblical" archeology, which is of great importance for scientists studying the origins and dogmas of world religions (in this case, Judaism and early Christianity).
972 documents written mainly on parchment (and partially on papyrus) were accidentally discovered by an ordinary shepherd in the Qumran caves in the Dead Sea region. A significant part of them was sealed for preservation in ceramic vessels.
For the first time, these valuable scrolls were found in 1947, but they are periodically discovered to this day. The time of their creation is from about 250 BC. until 68 A.D.
The documents differ in content: about a third of them are biblical texts, while others are apocrypha (non-canonical descriptions of the sacred history), texts of unknown religious authors, collections of Jewish laws and rules of life and behavior in the community, etc.
In 2011, the Israel Museum digitized most of these texts (supported by Google) and posted them on the Internet.
4. Tomb of Tutankhamun
The name "Tutankhamun" is also very well known. The 4-chamber tomb of a very young pharaoh, discovered in 1922 in the Valley of the Kings in the Luxor region, which had been robbed twice in ancient times, but retained a lot of valuable objects, has become one of the greatest finds not only in Egyptology, but throughout world archeology .
It turned out to be a lot of jewelry, household items, as well as, of course, ritual things that accompanied the pharaoh to the “better world”.
But the main treasure was the sarcophagus of Tutankhamun, in which his mummy was perfectly preserved. Archaeologist and Egyptologist Howard Carter and George Carnarvon, the British lord and collector who collected antiquities, found this tomb.
By the way, due to disputes about where the found values should be stored - in Egypt itself or in Britain (in the homeland of the discoverers), the relations of these two countries almost deteriorated, and Carter was nearly expelled from Egypt forever.
3. Altamira Cave
In the Spanish province of Cantabria, a considerable number of caves are located, and therefore, when in 1868 the hunter Modest Cubillas Peras discovered another one in the area of the town of Santillana del Mar (its entrance was almost bombarded with a landslide), no one attached special importance to this.
But in 1879, the local amateur archaeologist Marcelino Sans de Sautuola decided to study it. 9-year-old daughter Maria was with him, and, according to one version, it was she who drew the attention of her father to the beautiful polychrome paintings on the ceiling of the cave, exclaiming “Dad, bulls!”
It turned out that the bison, horses, wild boars, etc., depicted on the walls and arches of the Altamira cave are from 15 to 37 thousand years old, and they date back to the Upper Paleolithic. “Bulls” were painted with charcoal, ocher and other natural colors.
For a long time, other Spanish archaeologists tried to prove that Sautuola is a con man. No one could believe that ancient people were capable of so skillfully depicting animals.
Since 1985, Altamira has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
2. Rosetta Stone
In 1799, near the town of Rosetta in Egypt (now Rashid), a stone stele was found, the surface of which was covered by text in three languages.
It was discovered by the captain of the French troops (recall the Egyptian campaign of Napoleon I) Pierre-Francois Bouchard, who supervised the construction of Fort Saint-Julien in the Nile Delta.
Being an educated person, Bouchard appreciated the importance of the find and sent it to Cairo, the Institute of Egypt (opened by order of Napoleon only a year ago). There the archaeologists and linguists studied the stele, who found out that the inscription made in the ancient Egyptian language (and made with hieroglyphs) is lower - with a much later demotic script, and even lower - in ancient Greek, dedicated to Ptolemy V Epiphanes and created by Egyptian priests in 196 BC AD
Since the meaning of all three fragments was identical, it was the Rosetta stone that became the starting point for deciphering the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs (using an elementary comparison of them with the ancient Greek text).
And despite the fact that just part of the stele with the hieroglyphs was damaged the most, the scientists managed to succeed. Now Rosetta stone is kept in the British Museum.
1. Oldduvai Gorge
The Olduvai Gorge (a 40-km cleft extending along the Serengeti plains in Tanzania, 20 km from the Ngorongoro crater) is the place where in the late 1950s and early 1960s. the famous archaeological couple Luis and Mary Leakey discovered the bones of the modern man’s predecessor, the “skilled man” (homo habilis), as well as the remains of an earlier humanoid monkey (Australopithecus) and a much later Pithecanthropus.
The age of the most ancient remains exceeded 4 million years. That is why Olduvai is considered to be almost the "cradle of mankind." By the way, in 1976 here, in Olduvai, Mary Leakey and Peter Jones discovered footprints that became famous, proving that our ancestors walked straight 3.8 million years ago.
Many of those finds are now kept in the Museum of Anthropology and Human Evolution “Oldduv Goj”, which was opened in 1970 in the territory of the Ngorongoro Nature Reserve of Mary Lika herself.