This little statuette, excavated in 1910 from the tomb of nomarch Senbi II at Meir, in Egypt, has become the beloved unofficial mascot of the Met. It was made during the 12th dynasty, between 1961 BCE and 1878 BCE. Just 11.2 cm tall, and 20 cm long, little William is painted blue faience and decorated with images of lotus flowers, buds, and leaves to symbolize regeneration.
He wasn’t just a cute figurine though. To the ancient Egyptians, hippos were powerful and dangerous man-killers. Perhaps that is why he was found with just one leg, to mitigate the damage he could do in the afterlife; the rest of the legs you see are modern add-ons.
“A collection of 3,200 year old tablets discovered concealed inside jugs have revealed the location of an ancient lost royal Mesopotamian city in the Kurdistan region of Iraq.”
“Archaeologists from the University of Tübingen in Germany uncovered the tablets in 2017, after finding them hidden inside a collection of ceramic jugs in Bassetki in the Kurdistan region of Iraq.”
honey is the only food product that never spoils. there are pots of honey that are over five thousand years old and still completely edible
i also want to point out we know it tastes the same even after thousands of years b/c archaeologists who discovered two thousand year old honey tasted it. presumably right after they looked at each other and went “what the hell here goes nothing”
I’m pretty sure they also identify human remains by taste. Archaeologists are straight up freaks.
No, no no… you identify bone from rock or other substances by touching it to your tongue. If it sticks, it’s bone. The taste itself has nothing to do with it. And most archaeologists won’t lick human bones if they know they’re human.
…and I realize that doesn’t actually do much to prove archaeologists aren’t freaks.
mai nam is jane and wen i dig i fynde some roks both smol and big i put my tung upon the stone for science yes i lik the bone
I’m sitting with a bunch of archaeologists and we just laughed so hard we CRIED we’re getting tshirts with this on them
Imagine how pissed you have to be to engrave a rock
Ok but there was this guy called Ea-nasir who was a total crook and would actually cheat people out of good copper and sell them shit instead. The amount of correspondences complaining to and about this guy are HILARIOUS.
Are you telling me we know about a specific guy who lived 5000 years ago, by name, because he was a huge asshole
More like 4000 years ago but yes. Ea-nasir and his dodgy business deals.
And we haven’t even touched on the true hilarity of the situation yet. Consider two additional facts:
He wasn’t just into copper trading. There are letters complaining about Ea-nasir’s business practices with respect to everything from kitchenwares to real estate speculation to second-hand clothing. The guy was everywhere.
The majority of the surviving correspondences regarding Ea-nasir were recovered from one particular room in a building that is believed to have been Ea-nasir’s own house.
Like, these are clay tablets. They’re bulky, fragile, and difficult to store. They typically weren’t kept long-term unless they contained financial records or other vital information (which is why we have huge reams of financial data about ancient Babylon in spite of how little we know about the actual culture: most of the surviving tablets are commercial inventories, bills of sale, etc.).
But this guy, this Ea-nasir, he kept all of his angry letters – hundreds of them – and meticulously filed and preserved them in a dedicated room in his house. What kind of guy does that?
Your players are faced with an ancient Sumerian curse! However, since the early ancient Sumerian language was only used for recording tax debts, it turns out to actually be an ancient Sumerian bill.
and therefore they need to get hold of some ancient Sumerian coinage and bring it to the ruins of the ancient Sumerian tax office, because the Sumerians had a pleasingly direct way of preventing tax evasion, namely horrifying curses.
well I don’t have any coin but I have these copper ingots, lovely copper ingots, from a very reputable merchant, never heard a word said against him, very thorough with his paperwork, anyway they’re guaranteed pure copper and proper weight, so can I pay my tax with those?
I just want everyone to take a step back for a second and really think about how we’re using the most powerful knowledge tool in history to make jokes about a specific dude who lived almost 4000 years ago.
“The Black Sea waves have washed up what appear to be pieces of ancient, Roman-era buildings on Turkey’s coast after a storm. The artifacts resemble column fragments and elements from what could be temples.”
“The remnants lined the shores of the Amasra district, which is in the northern part of Asian Turkey, Hurriyet Daily News reported this week. Locals spotted a handful of the curious items floating along a stony beach near the regional harbor and called in officials from the state-run Amasra Museum.”
setepenre-set 