25 Most Incredible Archaeological Finds

An archaeologist will probably find something fascinating somewhere in the world today. The same thing happened yesterday, and it will happen again tomorrow. No matter how much of our history we've already found, there's always so much more waiting to be discovered. In early April 2022, archaeologists working in the ancient city of Nydos in Turkey came across four rare Umayyad inscriptions etched into marble and limestone blocks. The ruined city is approximately 2,600 years old, but the inscriptions are more recent. Based on the brief period of the city's history where the Umayyads were in control, they must have been etched onto the stones between the years 685 and 711. Nydos was originally founded by Greek settlers and became an important center of trade and politics. The medical school that was founded here trained many of the ancient world's most important physicians. Coming back to the inscriptions, their content concerns a series of Umayyad expeditions to Istanbul and lists the names of all the tribes scheduled to participate in the exhibitions, including the leaders of each tribe. These are the oldest Islamic relics in western Anatolia, dating back to the early years of the Islamic religion itself. Many of the names of the tribal leaders featured in the inscriptions are new to historians, so the team working at the site hopes to find more inscriptions that might tell them more about who these people were and what they achieved. Those of you who drink wine probably have opinions about where the best wine in the world comes from. Many of you are likely to prefer French or Italian wine, but there are those of you who'll swear by Spanish, South African, Australian, or even American wine. Very few of you are likely to suggest Chinese wine is the world's greatest, but perhaps you should. After all, the Chinese have been making wine for at least 3,000 years. Wine from the country's early Zhou Dynasty era was recently found inside eight bronze kettles inside a tomb in Yuncheng, which is in China's Shanxi province. The kettles were found in mid-2021, but it took a little while for scientists to identify the clear liquid in the bottom of them. Now they've completed their research and they can say with certainty that it's a type of fruit wine. This is the first time wine from pre-Qin era China has been discovered in the country. For comparison, the oldest Chinese wine found before this was 2,200 years old. This newer discovery comes from eight whole centuries earlier. Speaking of China, the history of China is long and complicated. The land has played host to many cultures and civilizations over many millennia, and we know much more about some than we do about others. We know almost nothing about the state of Shu. That's why discovering this fragment of a gold mask in March 2021 is so important. It provides us with a tangible link to people who left behind very few written records or artifacts. Archaeologists say that the mask is roughly 3,000 years old. It comes from Saxindui, arguably the most important archaeological site in the country. The mask is one of around 500 objects found during the same dig, all of which might be Shu in origin. Many of the objects are made from precious materials like ivory, gold, jade, and bronze. They're a sign of how rich and prosperous the Shu state was before it was attacked and then conquered by the neighboring state of Qin in the year 316 BCE. Experts think that the mask, which is 84% pure gold, was probably worn by a priest or religious leader during important ceremonies. We're going to stay in China to look at one more discovery before we move on. It's some striking ancient bronzeware which was unearthed in the country's Hunan province at the very end of 2021. The two bronze artifacts have been dated to the time of the Shang dynasty, so they could be anything up to 3,600 years old. The most significant of the two discoveries is the bronze wine vessel of a kind that's only rarely seen before. It was recovered from the village and features a bizarre depiction of an unknown animal with enormous bulging eyes etched onto its sides. The smaller artifact is a basic bronze pot which is undecorated. The wine vessel is a lot more exciting than the bronze pot for obvious reasons, but experts in the country are hopeful that both discoveries will enhance their limited understanding of the bronze culture that once existed in the Yangtze river basin. As we covered when we talked about the Shu people, there are enormous holes in our understanding of ancient Chinese history, and discoveries like these can help us fill those holes. Way back in April 2011, archaeologists were invited to dig up a site close to the German town of Syke in Lower Saxony before the installation of a new major pipeline in the area. When they did, they found four pounds of solid gold that had been buried in the ground since the Bronze Age. The gold came out of the ground accompanied by a collection of bronze pins, a golden spiral curl, and a gold cuff with engravings. The ground was so densely packed with artifacts that experts decided to cut a two-foot square block of earth out of the ground and unpack it in a laboratory. When they did, they found more than 100 individual items. The weight of the gold puts it among the largest prehistoric gold finds ever to be discovered in Central Europe. The style of the sun motifs carved into the gold cuff has helped experts to date the find to the Middle Bronze Age of 3,400 years ago. From a scientific point of view, the biggest surprise is that the gold was drawn rather than hammered. Historians didn't think our ancestors were capable of using such a technique during the Bronze Age, but they were wrong. The oldest Torah scroll in the world was found in the archives of Bologna University in Italy in 2013, but could have been discovered much earlier if the university's archivists had been paying attention. The scroll has been in the university's collection since 1889, but its age had been badly underestimated. The academics that examined the scroll in the 19th century declared that it was probably 200 years old at the most, but carbon dating tests have proved it to be about 860 years old. That makes it easily the oldest complete Torah known to exist anywhere in the world and makes the document, which is written on sheepskin, incredibly valuable. The academics of the 19th century didn't have access to carbon dating technology but should have still noticed that the Torah was ancient because of the Oriental Babylonian script it's written in. So the error is inexplicable. A further giveaway is the fact that this version of the Torah contains several passages of text and other features that were forbidden in versions created in later dates by order of the rules laid down by the 12th century scholar Maimonides. The subway lines beneath the Brazilian city of Rio de Janeiro are currently being expanded. That process means digging into earth that hasn't been disturbed for centuries and it's resulted in some surprising discoveries. One of them is a tiny ivory toothbrush that's thought to have belonged to Emperor Pedro II. Another is a type of minty toothpaste believed to have been formulated for a Portuguese queen. More than 200,000 discoveries have been made thus far, almost all of which come from the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. Curiously, a substantial number of the artifacts have royal or aristocratic connections. There's even an ornate water bottle with the words to the royal family engraved on the side. Archaeologists were initially puzzled by the raft of royal discoveries because this part of the city used to be a slaughterhouse. That's the last place you'd expect to find objects like this. They now think they have an explanation. There's a former imperial palace not far from the site of the digging and it seems that the palace's occupants used this part of the city as a landfill without telling anybody. The subway workers have been digging through royal trash. We're going back to 2013 for our next discovery, but it's worth the trip. That was the year that the New Zealand Antarctic Heritage Trust found a set of negatives of photographs taken during Ernest Shackleton's failed Antarctic expedition of 1914 to 1917. They were discovered inside an expedition hut left behind from Robert Falcon Scott's failed attempt to reach the South Pole in 1912. These cellulose nitrate negatives had fused into a clump and were kept inside a box belonging to Scott's photographer Herbert Ponting. Separating the negatives was a long and complicated process but scientists were eventually able to recover 22 pictures of landmarks around Antarctica's McMurdo Sound. There are also a few photos of life aboard Shackleton's ship the Aurora. One of the few people who can be identified in the images is Alexander Stevens, the mission's chief scientist and geologist. The photos were almost certainly taken by Arnold Patrick Spencer Smith who was Shackleton's photographer. Sadly he didn't survive being stranded in Cape Evans for almost a year after the failure of the mission and was buried on the Ross ice shelf. There's no pretty way to describe our next discovery. It's a 200-year-old douche and it was found under New York City's hall in February 2014. The experts found in it what they believe to be the discarded leftovers of an enormous party that was thrown at the time City Hall was built. The douche is a feminine hygiene device but by modern standards it wouldn't be considered very hygienic. For a start it's made out of bone. The vaginal syringe was surrounded by empty bottles of alcohol, smoking pipes, shards of pottery and animal bones including fish, cows, sheep and turtles. They're likely leftovers from a grand feast as turtles were considered a delicacy at the time. Devices like the douche probably weren't uncommon at the time but there's barely any mention of them in the medical textbooks of the era or anywhere else because discussing feminine hygiene was considered a social taboo in the prudish 19th century. However the douche was designed to be reusable. It isn't broken so why anyone would throw away one that was perfectly fine when they were presumably difficult to get a hold of is something of a mystery. Woburn Abbey in Bedfordshire, England is one of the country's grandest mansions. It's fit for royalty which is just as well because the people who live there are distantly related to the Queen. They're the Duke and Duchess of Bedford and in 2014 they made a surprising discovery about their stately home. After peeling back the wallpaper ahead of planned renovations they found an extremely rare Chinese wall covering. Experts think that it's likely to be among the first of its kind ever to be exported to Europe and would have been placed during the 1750s. It might have been a gift to mark the rebuilding of the Abbey which was completed during that decade. The room containing the wall covering was once the bedchamber of the fourth Duke of Bedford but he passed away in 1771 and his successor must have taken a disliking to it because he had it papered over. Considering that it's been covered in multiple layers of paper for 200 years it's in remarkably good condition. The wall covering is too delicate to be removed from its current location but it was briefly shown off to the public as part of an exhibition called Peeling Back the Years. Our next artifact is interesting not because of what it is but because of what it's not. It's a beautifully decorated gourd that according to legend contains a handkerchief soaked in the blood of King Louis XVI after he was executed during the French Revolution in 1793. In 2014 scientists opened the gourd and found that it did indeed contain a handkerchief soaked in blood but they've sequenced the genome of the blood sample and now say that it can't possibly have come from the ill-fated king. It's now thought that both the gourd and the handkerchief were created by a talented fraudster of the 18th century who was trying to find a way to cash in on the revolution happening around them. People were executed almost every day during the revolution but it would have been much easier to get near the scaffold and collect blood from the people on the guillotine when there was someone on it less famous than a deposed king. The inscription on the bottom of the gourd says on January 21st Maximilian Bordelieu dipped his handkerchief in the blood of Louis XVI after his decapitation but we now know that was a lie. The sunken Egyptian city of Thonis-Heracleion has been giving up archaeological treasures ever since it was rediscovered. It was once the kingdom's largest Mediterranean port but became less important after Alexander the Great founded Alexandria in 331 BCE and then eventually slipped below the waves after an earthquake. The most recent treasure trove of artifacts brought to the surface includes fine Greek ceramics and wicker baskets that are still sealed and full of fruit despite spending almost all of the past 2400 years underwater. The items were recovered from a large Greek funerary area known as a tumulus. It's around 200 feet long and 30 feet wide and resembles an island cut off from the rest of the city. Layer upon layer of burnt material has been observed on the tumulus suggesting that fire played a major role in the burial ceremonies that happened here. Experts think that it must have been sealed off deliberately as there are no artifacts within it from less than 2300 years ago despite the fact that life continued in the city for several more centuries before the sinking. The Bible tells us that a colossal earthquake struck Jerusalem 2800 years ago. The incident is detailed in both the book of Amos and the book of Zechariah. Finding archaeological evidence of a natural disaster that happened such a long time ago isn't easy. But in August 2021, experts in the city announced they'd found some. The Israeli Antiquities Authority excavated a layer of ancient ruins in the neighborhood of Silwan and found evidence of damage to pottery and buildings that appears to be consistent with a large earthquake. Other explanations for the damage have been considered but there's no ash to support the idea of a fire and no water damage to suggest a flood. Extremely destructive earthquakes in Jerusalem are rare but they can happen. The last one of any magnitude happened in 1927. Further digs in archaeological layers of the same age have been carried out in Megiddo, 80 miles north of Jerusalem and similar telltale signs of an earthquake have been detected there too. If they're from the same quake it must have been enormous so it's no wonder that ancient writers saw fit to record it. You can't always say much about the discovery of an ancient coin but this coin is special. It's a punch marked silver coin and it was found at the well-established archaeological site of Kaladi, Tamil Nadu, India in the summer of 2021. One side of the oddly shaped coin is stamped with symbols including the sun and moon and the other side features a semi-circle and a symbol similar to the letter Ta from the Tamil alphabet. Nobody knows who made the coin but some academics in the country have taken it as evidence of an unknown race living on the banks of the river Vagai over 2,500 years ago. If this hypothetical civilization used coins as currency rather than as medallions or jewellery it implies they had a well-developed culture and may have even traded with cultures from the north of India. To add to the mystery two layers of terracotta pipelines have been found in the same place. While other ancient terracotta pipelines have been found in Tamil Nadu before, none of the past discoveries share the same design. Were they made by the same people who made this coin? If so, why have we found no other relics of their culture before now? A menhir is a large standing stone. They're among the most common monuments left behind by our ancient ancestors and they're especially common sites in Europe. Archaeologists recently discovered a previously unknown set of menhirs in the commune of St. Leonard, Switzerland and immediately realized that there's something different about this collection. Most menhirs are either solitary monuments or are arranged in circles. The Swiss set was found standing in a line. Even with carbon-14 testing and analysis it's not easy to accurately date stone monuments. This formation could have been from the Neolithic period but it could just as easily be from the Bronze Age. The Neolithic era is considered to be the better candidate because St. Leonard is already known to have been teeming with life during that era. There's a Neolithic rock carving nearby at Crete de Barmes and another set of suspected Neolithic era menhirs three miles away in Sion. Discoveries like this would usually be left where they are but that's not an option in this case because of a scheduled construction project in the area. Instead, the stones will be removed and studied ahead of finding them a new permanent home. The Swedish castle of Sorby was lost for such a long time that archaeologists had begun to think it was a myth. As of August 2021, the castle's existence is no longer a myth. What's left of it was found in a dry lake by Swedish archaeologist Jan Henrik Fahlgren whose painstaking research uncovered a passing reference to its location in a dissertation from 1704. The essay led him to a dry lake in Skedmas, not far from Kavino Bagland. It's not the most auspicious location for a castle associated with so much folklore and myth but that's where it is. Skedmas has a dark history as one of the most significant sacrificial sites in Sweden, a practice that began as long as 2400 years ago and lasted until the 12th century. More than a ton of human remains have been discovered at the site along with gold and vast caches of ancient weapons. So little of the castle remains that not even the walls are there anymore. It's thought that the stone might have been taken and used to build a nearby Lutheran church. It's invisible to the naked eye but ground penetrating radar has allowed archaeologists their first look at the castle in more than three centuries. Deep in the Peruvian desert at the site of Casma Sashín Oasis is a monumental complex called Chanquilo. It stands on a hilltop and it's thought of as one of the most ancient and significant forts in all of Peru. It's noted for its clearly identifiable residential and social gathering areas and archaeologists believe it was an important focal point where people came from far and wide to take part in ceremonies 2300 years ago. More recently they've reassessed the 13 towers that still stand at the site. Their research has brought them to a surprising conclusion. They now think that the towers are the oldest solar observatory in the Americas. Two other structures at either end of the towers have been identified as observation platforms allowing Chanquilo's residents to track the movement of the sun through the sky at different times of the year as it aligned with the tower tops. The Inca are known for their ability as astronomers but whoever lived at Chanquilo might have been measuring and charting the movements of celestial bodies hundreds of years earlier. Perhaps they taught the Incas all they knew. As we're on the topic of amazing ancient South American discoveries let's check out the Chinchorro mummies. Most people think of ancient Egypt when they think of mummies. And that's a fair connection to make. The Egyptians mastered the art of mummification but they weren't the first to attempt it. That honour appears to belong to the culture that mummified these human remains some 7000 years ago. In July 2021 the mummies were added to UNESCO's World Heritage List. From what we know about the Chinchorros we can say that they lived in a coastal region of the Atacama Desert between Chile and Peru and survived mostly by fishing. The culture first appears 9000 years ago but didn't start mummifying its dead until 2000 years later. That's still 2000 years before the practice began in Egypt. There's some evidence of mummies being transported from place to place by groups of Chinchorros and placed in positions of honour during rituals. From this historians have surmised that they practiced a form of ancestor worship. That would explain why they seem to have mummified all of their dead whereas the Egyptians reserved the grisly honour for members of high society. For generations the people who lived close to the Aravalli mountains in Haryana, northwest India have known about the cave paintings inside them. Archaeologists only got around to investigating the paintings in early 2021 and immediately wished they'd done it years ago. They now think that the artwork inside these caves is the oldest in the country. Incredibly the paintings appear to be 20,000 years old. That might not even be the most remarkable of the discoveries the archaeologists have made so far. They've also uncovered evidence that early humans lived inside the caves and made stone tools there 100,000 years ago. The very oldest of the paintings are little more than straight lines, seemingly belonging to a time when humans were yet to figure out how to make complex patterns. The evolution of painting can be traced on the walls of the caves as the lines eventually give way to basic geometric shapes and then depictions of humans and animals. Osher was the drawing material of choice in the early years but the later paintings are rendered in an as yet unidentified white substance. Some locals have told the press that there's also mysterious ancient writings in some of the caves but archaeologists haven't seen any sign of that yet. The deserts of Kazakhstan are vast and featureless and offer very little incentive for travelling across them. Because of that, there could be countless ancient monuments in the desert waiting to be found. Here's one that turned up in summer 2021. This bizarre looking statue stands alone in the desert some 155 miles away from Turkestan, which is the nearest city. Archaeologists say it was carved during the early Turkish period some 1300 years ago. Rather than being found by experts, the monument was discovered by a member of the public as he walked along above the Sirdarya River. The crown-like object on the statue's head was first interpreted as a crown, leading to initial suspicions that this is a depiction of a long forgotten king. But experts now agree that this is actually a female figure. The crown is part of a headscarf and she's wearing earrings. That doesn't necessarily mean that she wasn't a queen but it might also be the wife of a great ruler or perhaps even a representation of Ume, the Turkic goddess of fertility. We've already discussed meneers earlier on in this video and we noted that they could be found almost everywhere in the world. However, they didn't always serve the same purpose. In some cases, meneers were used to denote places of ritual and ceremony. In others, they were used as burial markers. Archaeologists think that these 4,000-year-old meneers, which were recently discovered in Yadadri Bangir, India, fit into the latter category. The practice of erecting standing stones at burial sites goes back at least 4,000 years in the region and this pair are among the oldest ever discovered. Unfortunately, the associated burials haven't yet been found and so might have been destroyed centuries ago. One of the meneers is still intact and standing whereas its companion was broken in half and left in a field near the village of Venkatapuram. Most Indian meneers come with inscriptions and glyphs on their surfaces. So the lack of any such markings on these stones is part of what persuades archaeologists of their age. The authorities have decided to move the 15-foot tall monuments for safekeeping but haven't yet chosen a new site for them. The oceans are littered with shipwrecks and we'll probably never discover all of them. We're getting better at finding them than ever before though and we've seen some remarkable ones come to light in recent times. Here's one from the Sicilian coastline that was identified in July 2021. It's a Roman-era shipwreck and marine archaeologists say it's 2,200 years old. Amazingly, its entire cargo of wine amphorae is still aboard the vessel. Based on the number of vessels present, this must have been an incredibly expensive loss for whoever had ordered all the wine. The ancient vessel is close to the Isola del Femmine and sits at a depth of just over 300 feet. It's in too fragile a condition to be raised to the surface but it might be possible to retrieve at least some of its cargo. The Sicilian wine trade is thought to have been the most profitable of all the professions available to the entrepreneurs of the Roman Republic but such is the quantity of the wine that was lost here that it may have bankrupted the merchant who paid for it unless they had some kind of ancient Roman form of insurance. Cablespien is one of many ancient sites that tourists should go out of their way to see if they ever visit Cambodia. The riverbed here is covered in Hindu carvings and those carvings can be found both above and beneath the water. The origins of these carvings are shrouded in mystery. It's likely, but not proven, that the first of them were created in the 11th century. They range in design from simple to sophisticated with cobbles as the most basic hand-carved shapes here and the most ornate being representations of Hindu deities created as reliefs on the rocks. The presence of the gods has earned Cablespien the nickname Valley of 1000 Lingas. Many of the carved circular shapes were probably also representations of Shiva at one point but time and running water have turned them into smooth lumps. This is such an elaborate site that it looks almost as if it might have been created as a setting for the latest Indiana Jones movie but it's all real. It's a spectacular place to see but a hard one to understand. When you were a child, you might have played with toy cars. If you did, that's something you had in common with children in the Bronze Age. The car didn't exist back then, of course, so instead they played with tiny model chariots like this one. This remarkable intricately detailed toy is thought to be about 5000 years old. It was discovered in Sagmitar, Turkey in 2017. Archaeologists found it inside a child's tomb where they also found a rattle with birds carved into its surface. It's likely that toys like this were only available to the children of high-ranking people and were probably made to order as opposed to being on the shelves of a local shop. The age of the toy is important because it takes us closer to the time when most historians believe the wheel was invented in Mesopotamia 5,500 years ago. We're told that wheels back then were solid discs of wood and it's only around 4,000 years ago that lighter hollow wheels started to appear. If this toy is 5,000 years old, it suggests that carriages and lightweight wheels existed long before we thought they did. It seems we can no longer even say when the wheel was invented with any certainty.