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Archaeologists demand the British Museum return Rosetta Stone to Egypt

More than 2,500 archaeologists have signed a petition for the British Museum to return the Rosetta Stone to Egypt. This effort, which was launched last month, has urged the Egyptian Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly to officially request the object’s return, along with 16 other artefacts that were illegally and unethically removed from the country. Earlier this year, renowned Egyptian archaeologist Zahi Hawass called for the return of the Rosetta Stone, and announced his plans to form the petition. “Previously it was the government alone asking for Egyptian artefacts,” Monica Hanna, an archaeologist who co-founded the current restitution campaign, told CBS News. “But today this is the people demanding their own culture back.” The Rosetta Stone, a 2,200-year-old granodiorite stele inscribed with hieroglyphs, Ancient Egyptian Demotic script, and Ancient Greek, was discovered in 1799 during a Napoleonic campaign in Egypt, in which Napoleon’s troops apparently stumbled upon the stone while building a fort near the town of Rashid, or Rosetta. It was then acquired by the British Museum in 1802 from France under a treaty signed during the Napoleonic Wars. “The confiscation of the Rosetta stone, among other artefacts, is an act of encroachment on Egyptian cultural property and identity, and is a direct result of cultural colonial violence against Egyptian cultural heritage,” states the petition. “The presence of these artefacts in the British Museum to this day supports past colonial endeavours of cultural violence.” “History cannot be changed,” the document continues, “but it can be corrected, and although the political, military, and governmental rule of the British Empire withdrew from Egypt years ago, cultural colonisation is not yet over.” The British Museum, however, maintains that there has never been a formal request by the Egyptian government for the stone’s return. Image credits: Getty Images

Art

Archaeologists turn to robots to save Pompeii

The city of Pompeii has experienced not one, but two deathly experiences - first from a volcanic eruption, then from neglect - and technology is now being used to keep it safe going into the future. Decades of neglect, mismanagement and scant maintenance of the popular ruins resulted in the 2010 collapse of a hall where gladiators once trained, nearly costing Pompeii its UNESCO World Heritage status. Despite this, Pompeii is facing a brighter future. The ruins were saved from further degradation due to the Great Pompeii Project, which saw about 105 million euros in European Union funds directed to the site, as long as it was spent promptly and effectively by 2016. Now, the Archaeological Park of Pompeii’s new director is looking to innovative technology to help restore areas of the ruins and reduce the impacts of a new threat: climate change. Archaeologist Gabriel Zuchtriegel, who was appointed director-general of the site in mid-2021, told the Associated Press that technology is essential “in this kind of battle against time”. “Some conditions are already changing and we can already measure this,” Zuchtriegel <a href="https://www.nzherald.co.nz/travel/pompeii-rebirth-of-italys-dead-city-that-nearly-died-again/XOOKT34VC3A6ZFG5BJLDC62FJI/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">said</a>. <img src="https://oversixtydev.blob.core.windows.net/media/2022/02/pompeii1.jpg" alt="" width="1280" height="720" /> Archaeologists and scientists are joining forces to preserve and reconstruct artefacts found in Pompeii. Image: Pompeii Archeological Park (Instagram) So instead of relying on human eyes to detect signs of climate-caused deterioration on mosaic floors and frescoed walls across the site’s 10,000 excavated rooms, experts will rely on artificial intelligence (AI) and drones. The technology will provide experts with data and images in real-time, and will alert them to “take a closer look and eventually intervene before things happen”, Zuchtriegel said. Not only that, but AI and robots have been used to reassemble frescoes and artefacts that have crumbled into miniscule fragments that are difficult to reconstruct using human hands. “The amphorae, the frescoes, the mosaics are often brought to light fragmented, only partially intact or with many missing parts,” Zuchtriegel <a href="http://pompeiisites.org/comunicati/al-via-il-progetto-repair-la-robotica-e-la-digitalizzazione-al-servizio-dellarcheologia/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">said</a>. “When the number of fragments is very large, with thousands of pieces, manual reconstruction and recognition of the connections between the fragments is almost always impossible or in any case very laborious and slow. “This means that various finds lie for a long time in archaeological deposits, without being able to be reconstructed and restored, let alone returned to the attention of the public.” <img src="https://oversixtydev.blob.core.windows.net/media/2022/02/pompeii2.jpg" alt="" width="1280" height="720" /> The robot uses mechanical arms and hands to position pieces in the right place. Image: Pompeii Archeological Park (Instagram) The “RePAIR” project, an acronym for Reconstructing the past: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics meet Cultural Heritage, has seen scientists from the Italian Institute of Technology create a robot to fix this problem. It involves robots scanning the fragments and recognising them through a 3D digitisation system before placing them in the right position using mechanical arms and hands equipped with sensors. <img src="https://oversixtydev.blob.core.windows.net/media/2022/02/pompeii3.jpg" alt="" width="1280" height="720" /> The project will focus on frescoes in the House of the Painters at Work, which were shattered during WWII. Image: Pompeii Archeological Park (Instagram) One goal is to reconstruct the frescoed ceiling of the House of the Painters at Work, with was shattered by Allied bombing during World War II. The fresco in the Schola Armaturarum - the gladiators’ barracks - will also be the target of robotic repairs, after the weight of excavated sections of the city, rainfall accumulation and poor drainage resulted in the structure collapsing. Image: Pompeii Archeological Park (Instagram)

Technology

Archaeologists baffled by ‘mystical’ find in Scottish cave

Though mummies are mostly associated with ancient Egypt, archeologists have found evidence suggesting mummification also took place on Scottish shores. The team of researchers explored the Coversea Caves, just north of Inverness, with their exploits captured by the Smithsonian Channel’s documentary, <a rel="noopener" href="https://youtu.be/jV9dIhAn0Zg" target="_blank">Mystic Britain: Mummies</a>. The caves are among Scotland’s most impenetrable caverns, but evidence suggests that Bronze Age Britons made the “hazardous journey time and time again carrying the bodies of their dead”. “For prehistoric people to make the effort and to make the journey would have been really arduous to do,” said Dr Lindsey Buster, a researcher at the University of Edinburgh. “When archaeologists first started excavating here, the floor was strewn with human bones.” <img style="width: 500px; height:281.25px;" src="https://oversixtydev.blob.core.windows.net/media/7844377/mummies1.jpg" alt="" data-udi="umb://media/cd4d07e5cece43f98dac6f01c7867e14" /> Image: Smithsonian Channel / YouTube Unlike bones previously found in Britain, these bones still had fragments of soft tissue on them. “It’s not something we expect when we’re excavating a site that’s 3000 years old,” Dr Buster added. “That’s a really significant find.” It is possible that these bones once belonged to a fully-fleshed corpse that had been preserved in the unique conditions in the cave. <img style="width: 500px; height:281.25px;" src="https://oversixtydev.blob.core.windows.net/media/7844378/mummies2.jpg" alt="" data-udi="umb://media/9b3a3dadecad4377b3c1c426a3dbaa70" /> Traces of ligaments can still be seen on the remains. Image: Smithsonian Channel / YouTube. The team also found evidence of fires being lit in the cave “at the same time presumably as bodies are being laid out”. “The smoke could actually probably have helped to preserve bodies and body parts,” Dr Buster said. Dr Buster suspects Bronze Age people came to the caves to purposefully mummify their friends and relatives. “I think once bodies began to be brought into the cave and were behaving in ways that they didn’t normally do on above-ground sites, those characteristics were probably well-noted and became a factory of people coming back again and again over centuries to deposit their dead.” Image: Smithsonian Channel / YouTube

International Travel

Amazing find in tapas bar stuns archaeologists

With the coronavirus halting businesses around the world, the owners of the <a href="http://www.cerveceriagiralda.com/">Cervercería Giralda</a> tapas bar in Seville, Spain decided to use the time for much-needed renovations. But, as the renovations of the 89-year-old eatery started, workers made an astonishing find. Beneath the plaster that covered the ceiling they found a skylight in the form of an eight-pointed star belonging to a 12th century Islamic hammam. “As soon as we saw one of the skylights, we knew what it was; it just couldn’t have been anything but a bath,” said archaeologist Álvaro Jiméz. “We just had to follow the pattern of the skylights.” The former bathhouse was also found with elaborate red ochre paintings of geometric motifs on the walls, representing the night sky, which dates back to when the city was ruled by the Almohad caliphate, a Berber Empire that once controlled much of North Africa and the Iberian Peninsula. “Decoratively speaking, these baths have the largest amount of preserved decoration of any of the known baths on the Iberian peninsula,” the archaeologist said. “Absolutely everything here is decorated, and, luckily, it’s survived. The background is white lime mortar engraved with geometric lines, circles and squares. On top of that you have red ochre paintings of eight-pointed stars and eight-petalled multifoil rosettes. Those two designs alternate and entwine and adapt to the different geometric shapes of the skylight holes.” Historians believe this bathhouse, as well as several others found around the city’s central mosque known as the Royal Alcázar palace, was used by devotees to cleanse themselves before going to the mosque to pray. They also believe the bathhouses were likely used as meeting places for people to socialise, talk business, or relax. The tapas bar has since reopened and the bathhouse can still be seen. Images: Cervercería Giralda / Instagram

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Archaeologists demand the British Museum return Rosetta Stone to Egypt

Archaeologists turn to robots to save Pompeii

Archaeologists baffled by ‘mystical’ find in Scottish cave

Amazing find in tapas bar stuns archaeologists