Archaeology Odyssey, 2002

Any choice of the “10 Most Endangered Sites” is, at most, a kind of informed arbitrariness. Although all of the sites on our list are archaeologically important and in imminent danger, some have more value than others and some face greater threats. Our ranking takes both factors into account, as well as the collective […]

German scholars are locked in furious argument over a 3,000-year-old settlement. Was the mound at Hisarlik, in northwestern Anatolia, the site of a huge, prosperous, commercial city during the Late Bronze Age—even the site of Homer’s Troy? Or was it just a tiny backwater, perhaps a 017nobleman’s country estate? All Germany seems fascinated by […]

Why spend your summer vacation on your hands and knees or crawling up ladders and down into trenches when you could be lounging by the pool, sipping piña coladas? Well, many archaeology enthusiasts imagine unearthing a tarnished coin last touched by an ancient Athenian as he bought bread in the marketplace, or uncovering a […]

We couldn’t get to the fifth-century B.C. tomb at Pyla, said to be one of the finest of the period, because minefields were being cleared that day and the road was closed. Pyla, on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus, lies near the border between the Republic of Cyprus in the south and the Turkish […]

Intact tombs from ancient Egypt are extremely rare, so high are the rewards of grave-robbing. Even the most famous tomb of all—that of King Tutankhamun (1336–1327 B.C.), opened by the British archaeologist Howard Carter in 1922—was robbed in antiquity. The last intact tomb was excavated in 1941 by Egyptian archaeologist Zaky Y. Saad. […]

11 High above the sprawling modern city of Amman, Jordan, sits Jebel al-Qal’a—the site of the ancient, and often sacred, Citadel of Bronze Age, Iron Age, Greco-Roman, Byzantine and early Islamic civilizations.

Moses Wilhelm Shapira is best known for the so-called Shapira Strips, narrow fragments of supposedly ancient parchment on which were inscribed a somewhat different version of the Ten Commandments from Deuteronomy than is known from the Bible. Said to have been found in the cliffs east of the Dead Sea, they were written in […]

All Germany is transfixed by the debate over the significance of Hisarlik/Troy (see “The New Trojan Wars”). Seeking safe passage through the maze of accusations, arguments and counter-arguments, we turned to one of the world’s most eminent archaeologists, Wolf-Dietrich Niemeier—who also serves on Archaeology Odyssey’s Editorial Advisory Board. Formerly a professor of archaeology […]

Rabbath Ammon it was called in ancient times, a place-name we might translate as the Ammonite Heights. During the Iron Age, it was the capital of the kingdom of Ammon, rival of the biblical Israelites. The remains of the ancient Ammonite acropolis are perched atop a rocky outcrop overlooking the bustling capital of modern […]

On a cold and rainy morning in January 1997, I received a phone call from Orthodoxos Liasides, the foreman of a maintenance crew working on the monumental tombs of Tamassos, 15 miles southwest of Nicosia. The men were insulating the tombs from the destructive effects of dampness in the soil, and they were digging […]

Pausanias, regent of Sparta, was one of Greece’s greatest heroes. He led the Greek forces in the decisive defeat of the massive Persian invasion at Plataea in 479 B.C. It was this splendid victory that ushered in what has become known as the Classical Age of Greek culture. Had it not been for Pausanias […]

They look like flattened igloos—mysterious ancient round burial tombs, called nawamis, in southern Sinai. To Canadian archaeologist Charles Currelly, who studied them in 1904 as part of British archaeologist Flinders Petrie’s expedition to Sinai, these 6-foot-high sandstone structures resembled beehives scattered across the desert floor. 020 Their name, nawamis, means mosquito. According to […]

During the Late Bronze Age (1550–1200 B.C.E.), much of the eastern Mediterranean and Near East was carved up among a group of civilizations: Egyptians in the south, Babylonians and Assyrians in Mesopotamia, the Mittani in northern Syria, Hittites in Anatolia, and Mycenaeans in Greece and Crete. Many of these states had active diplomatic relations […]

Archaeologists are good at recovering things left behind by the past, such as buildings, incense altars, tools and relief carvings. What they are not so good at recovering are the ideas, feelings and emotions—the innerness—of sentient ancient beings. It’s one thing to examine a temple’s holy of holies; it’s another thing to understand […]

It’s a problem acknowledged by all. There is no room to store them—the piles of antiquities recovered in both legal and illegal excavations in Italy. There is simply too much. “We ought to dump the excess,” said Angelo Bottini, superintendent of antiquities for the region of Tuscany, at a recent conference on the […]

Just who were the Hittites?

Mount Vesuvius sleeps quietly today, overlooking the brilliant blue waters of the Bay of Naples. Yet over the millennia its eruptions have again and again destroyed (and sometimes preserved) towns lying near its slopes—including the prosperous ancient cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum.

In Jerusalem around 30 C.E., an itinerant Jewish rabbi named Jesus lifted a cup of wine, passed it to his disciples and said: This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many. Truly I tell you, I will never again drink the fruit of the vine until that day […]

In the reign of Ptolemy II Philadelphus (283–246 B.C.), Rabbath Ammon was renamed Philadelphia. Despite the name change, the city’s inhabitants remained largely Semitic and probably were never extensively Hellenized. When Arab Muslims conquered the region of present-day Jordan in 634, they called the city by the name local peoples used: Amman, the modern […]

In this interview with Archaeology Odyssey editor Hershel Shanks, John Malcolm Russell of the Massachusetts College of Art—an expert on the looting of Iraq and author of The Final Sack of Nineveh: The Discovery, Documentation and Destruction of King Sennacherib’s Throne Room at Nineveh, Iraq (Yale, 1998)—describes the damage suffered at the Assyrian King […]

Iphigenia and Isaac, an unlikely pair. Yet both were almost sacrificed—one to a Greek goddess and the other to the universal Israelite God. Both Iphigenia and Isaac were innocent of any wrongdoing. In the end, both were saved when the deity relented and an animal 052sacrifice was substituted for the human sacrifice. Of course, […]

A strange, grim, menacing creature lurks on one of the ancient Greek vases in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. The scene painted on this vase—a Corinthian black-figure krater dating to between 560 and 540 B.C.—is known to art historians as the oldest illustration of the ancient legend of the Monster of […]