Egyptian Museum 2nd Floor Walking Tour - Tutankhamun Exhibit!

From about 2000 BC until 1600 BC, the Amorites ruled a large part of Mesopotamia. They were the rulers of what is now Syria and Palestine, likely originating from Arabia many centuries before. The details are a little blurry going so far back, but it's believed the Amorites started as a tribe of nomads who brought down the Ur dynasty around 2004 BC. And then, they built their own kingdom. In the Bible, the Amorites are mentioned as the people of Canaan. The Bible also describes them as giants, people of immense stature like cedar trees. And in Deuteronomy, the last book of the Torah, the Amorite king Og is said to be the last of the legendary giants. But the scary part about the Amorites is that they supposedly sacrificed their children to their false gods. Both sons and daughters were slaughtered in the name of false idols. Evidence of this was discovered in 1902 by archaeologist Stuart McAllister at the site of Gezer. He uncovered an ancient altar used by the people of Canaan to worship their gods. And here, he discovered what appeared to be evidence of child sacrifice, in the form of infant skeletons. This seems to confirm what the Bible says about the Amorites. They did worship strange gods, and they very well may have sacrificed their own children to appease their thirst for blood. 9. Japan's Calamity Stones All along Japan's coastline are some terrifying ancient stones. These stones are 300 years old and suggest a great catastrophe had once taken place in the coastal settlements of the Land of the Rising Sun. One of these stones can be found at the edge of Anayoshi, a small Japanese village to the north. Beyond the traditional houses and other buildings is a 10-foot stone tablet standing in the jungle, carved with a grave and unsettling warning. It says, remember the calamity of the great tsunamis. It then urges people not to build any homes below the point of the stone, or else they could be swept away in the next storm. These kinds of artifacts have been found all along the coast. Some are as recent as 1896, while others go back much further. Some have been destroyed by earthquakes. Some are being reclaimed by nature. But all of them are terrifying. They act as a warning across every generation not to build too close to the shoreline. But not everyone has listened. According to Itoko Kitahara, a history expert on natural disasters from the Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto, not everyone heeded the warnings. Many coastal communities ignored the advice and spread to lower ground beneath the tsunami stones. In 2011, many faced the consequences of ignorance when 29,000 people died following a deadly earthquake. These stones are all along the shore to keep people safe. But not everyone wants to take the advice of an ancient rock. 8. Egyptian Mummies Something utterly horrifying happened in Egypt 4,000 years ago. Dozens of men were slaughtered and thrown in a tomb by some desert cliffs near Luxor. It was a mass burial of people who suffered gruesome wounds, something extremely out of place in ancient Egypt. The Egyptians weren't keen on mass burials and preferred to give everyone their own private place to rest. Yet somewhere around 2150 BC in Egypt's Old Kingdom, dozens of men were thrown into a death pit and left to mummify together. It's called the Tomb of the Warriors, located in Deir el-Bahari. It was originally discovered in 1923 and then sealed to keep the disturbing mystery sleeping. It was only recently that archaeologist Salima Ikram with the American University in Cairo opened the tomb once again. She investigated the bodies and has come to a rough conclusion on what happened all those years ago. Salima believes the mass grave contains the victims of civil unrest. Approximately 4,200 years ago, a bloody battle was sparked between regional governors during a particularly dark time in Egyptian history. One of the conflicts of this battle ended the lives of 60 men. There was so much blood and gore, and so much death, that the men were dumped into a pit rather than properly buried. And there, alone in the dark, they all turned into natural mummies. And now to lighten the mood a little bit, it's shoutout time! I want to say a big thank you to Rose Nelson and David Clark for supporting this channel. Be sure to subscribe if you haven't already for more videos about incredible history! 7. The Blood of Louis XVI In Paris in 1793, King Louis XVI of France lost his head. It happened in full view of all the people who had shown up to watch the spectacle. In typical 18th-century fashion, those on the scene when King Louis was beheaded rushed to his body and dipped their handkerchiefs in the king's blood. Many years later, one of these morbid souvenirs was discovered by an Italian family. This family had been in possession of a hollow gourd for over a century. The gourd was inscribed with a rather peculiar phrase. On January 21, Maximilian Bardelot dipped his handkerchief in the blood of Louis XVI after his decapitation. The gourd was also decorated in scenes from the French Revolution. Inside it was one of the blood-soaked handkerchiefs from that fateful day. In 2009, the family sent the handkerchief with Carlos La Lueza Fox, an expert in paleogenomics who specializes in ancient DNA. This was a huge order because finding blood from a dead French king is not the easiest thing to do. Of course, there is the mummified heart of Louis XVI's son, but that wasn't about to be swabbed for DNA. Carlos had to use the mummified head from Henry IV, who died in 1610. His head was stolen from his grave during the revolution and then found in the early 1900s at an auction. It was a ghoulish ordeal, and in the end the blood was not verified as belonging to the king. Researchers believe it was the product of a swindler in the 18th century who sold a random bloody handkerchief. 6. The Zombies of Yorkshire In 2017, archaeologists announced a shocking discovery. They found knife marks on approximately 137 human bones excavated from the tiny Yorkshire village of Warrampercy in England. The bones were originally found in the 1960s, but only recently were the knife marks identified. At first, researchers weren't sure what they were dealing with. It almost looked like a case of medieval cannibalism, but instead, it looks as though the knife marks had something to do with a fear of zombies. The skeletons date from between the 11th and 14th centuries. This was right before the rise of vampire paranoia in much of Europe. What researchers believe is that the villagers mutilated the bodies of the dead so that they wouldn't rise from their graves. The corpses were dismembered, their bones were mixed up, and the pieces were reburied. This was so that after death, they couldn't put themselves back together again and terrorize the living. 5. The Great Pit of Death Sir Charles Leonard Woolley excavated the ancient Mesopotamian city of Ur from between 1922 and 1934. Among his discoveries were many tomb chambers without names on them. Any tomb that he could not identify was named a death pit. The most grotesque of these death pits was officially titled PG-1237, but it was dubbed by Woolley as the Great Death Pit. It got its nickname due to the sheer number of bodies that were inside the tomb. It wasn't a messy pit of death like you might imagine, but rather neatly organized. The bodies were placed in rows and dressed in rich garments. The dead people within the pit of death may have been unwilling sacrifices. People slaughtered to join their master or mistress in the afterlife. The thing about the death pits is that each one was found adjacent to a tomb of someone very important. Most of their names have been lost to history, but Woolley theorized they were nobles, important people in government, high priests, and relations to royalty. Some may even have been royalty. When one of these important people died, they had a large number of their servants killed and then buried next to them in a separate tomb. That way they could serve their masters, even in the afterlife. The big difference with the Great Death Pit is that there were a lot of remains. Whoever died and had these people slaughtered to join them must have been very important. There were 74 people inside. Only 6 men and the rest were women. This suggests it was a man who was responsible. A man hoping to enter the afterlife with 68 female servants. Or perhaps concubines. 4. The Wicker Man The wicker man was supposedly used by the old druids of Europe over 2,000 years ago. According to what Julius Caesar wrote in his commentary of the Gallic War, the Gauls also participated in the terrifying ritual of the wicker man. Julius Caesar wrote it, and modern historians have confirmed it. The Gauls were extremely superstitious and had many ritual ceremonies. They supposedly hired the druids to perform mass sacrifices to entertain their immortal gods. This was before Christianity, in the days when Rome itself was still a hub for pagan activities. But even the Romans didn't go so far as using the wicker man. The wicker man was a gigantic effigy of a man made of wicker. Picture a massive scarecrow almost 30 feet tall but hollow. It was spacious, with enough room to cram human beings into its arms, legs, and torso. Dozens of people could supposedly be thrown into the wicker trap, then sealed inside. It would then be burned, and all the people stuck inside the wicker man's body would roast alive. It was horrendous and brutal, and it may have really happened. Julius Caesar, as unreliable as his own account may be, could have been right. Modern archaeologists have found evidence of human sacrifice in Iron Age Europe. Men have been found sacrificed in bogs throughout the countryside, such as in Denmark. The only thing is that nobody's ever found evidence of a wicker man. We see it mentioned all throughout history, but the physical remains have never been found. Then again, it would be almost impossible to find such evidence considering everything would have been burned thousands of years ago. 3. Stone Age Victims Archaeologists poking through a Neolithic settlement in Western Slovakia recently discovered a horrifying mass grave. There were about three dozen bodies inside, but what makes this grave so disturbing was that none of the remains had their heads. They appear to be the victims of some kind of cultic ceremony, something that has been baffling researchers. The discovery was made at a site in Vrabli, believed to be one of the largest Stone Age settlements in Central Europe ever excavated. It's a massive site of over 50 hectares. People lived here between 5250 and 4950 BC, and while lots of interesting things have been found, the discovery of the headless corpses has definitely been the strangest. Other than the bodies, researchers have found over 300 longhouses, a fortification that was built around the settlement before it was abandoned, and a defensive ditch to protect themselves against enemies. It appears that the people here were stable and peaceful up until near the end, when they suddenly needed protection against other tribes. It was excavations in 2022 that revealed the mass grave. 35 individuals who were the victims of cult sacrifice were buried here. They weren't buried very nicely either, with the skeletons found haphazardly as if they had been dumped into the pit without care. There were men, women, and children, but nobody has found where their heads went. The heads were definitely taken from the bodies, but scientists are clueless as to what the Stone Age people did with them afterward. For that matter, no one knows what the point of such a barbaric ritual may have been. The disturbing prehistoric roots of the cold sore virus have been traced thanks to ancient DNA. As of right now, about 3.7 billion people across the world suffer from the herpes virus, which causes sores to grow on a person's lip. For the first time in history, the ancient genome of that very virus has been sequenced by a team of scientists from the University of Cambridge. One of the samples used in their research came from a young adult male dug out of a medieval graveyard. The individual died in the late 14th century. He suffered a grotesque dental abscess and experienced cold sores. By looking through the ancient DNA, researchers learned that the modern HSV1 strain began about 5,000 years ago. That was around the same time that Bronze Age migrations into Europe from the vast grasslands of Eurasia began. Nobody knows exactly what happened, but the people coming from the grasslands mixing with the Europeans, along with a population boom, caused kissing sores to spread like wildfire. 1. Death of the Donkey In southern Israel, archaeologists discovered the bones of a donkey. It wasn't the most terrifying discovery, but it's still a little creepy to see the bones of a donkey from 3,500 years ago. The skeleton still had a copper bit in its mouth and saddlebags slung over its back. Researchers believe the animal was well-liked in its community, and it was likely sacrificed as part of a mysterious ritual in the Bronze Age. Donkeys were extremely valuable animals in ancient Israel. It was thanks to the donkey that caravans were able to create trading networks as far back as the 18th century BC. Small, insulated kingdoms were able to trade their wares a great distance because of donkeys. The pack animals were like the U-Hauls of the Bronze Age. This particular donkey did not participate in any trading. Researchers from Israel's University of Haifa say it didn't do a day of hard labor in its life. There was no evidence that the donkey was driven or ridden for any long period of time. It was only about 4 years old, and had likely been somebody's pet or a local resident of the temple where it was found. Researchers believe the donkey was brought up with great respect, then humanely killed as part of a sacrifice to appease the gods.