RARE ANCIENT TABLET BEING SOUGHT FROM XTIAN MUSEUM AS HOBBY LOBBY

US prosecutors are seeking to confiscate a rare ancient tablet from a Christian museum co-founded by the president of retailer Hobby Lobby. The 3,500-year-old artifact, from what is now Iraq, bears text from the Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the world's oldest works of literature. Prosecutors allege that an auction house deliberately withheld information about its origins. Hobby Lobby said it was co-operating with government investigations.

It bought the tablet from the auction house in a private sale in 2014 for $1.67m (£1.36m) for display at the Museum of the Bible in Washington. The office of the US attorney for the Eastern District of New York says the tablet was illegally imported into the US.
Prosecutors did not name the auction house in their public statement, but on Tuesday Lobby House filed a lawsuit against Christie's in relation to the tablet.

Known as the Gilgamesh Dream Tablet, the artifact features sections of a Sumerian poem - parts of the epic mirror stories from the Old Testament, such as the Garden of Eden. According to a civil suit filed by US prosecutors on Monday, the tablet was originally purchased by an antiques dealer in 2003 in London. In 2007, the dealer sold it to another buyer for $50,000 and allegedly included a fake document claiming it had been obtained at an auction in the US in 1981.

Three years later, when the museum's curator asked for clarity about the tablet's origins, the auction house allegedly withheld information about its origins, including the fake letter which it knew "would not withstand scrutiny", the prosecutors said.

The tablet was seized from the museum in September last year; Monday's legal move was a formal attempt to take possession. Iraq's ministry of antiquities told US broadcaster NPR that it was working to find out if the tablet was one of thousands of items stolen from its museum in 1991. At least nine of the country's 13 regional museums were looted that year when Saddam Hussein's regime lost control of certain areas of the country, soon after his invasion of Kuwait.

The civil suit comes after Hobby Lobby was fined $3m and forced to hand over thousands of smuggled ancient artifacts from Iraq which it had bought for the Bible museum.

In March, the museum's board chairman, Steve Green, also disclosed that it had discovered another 5,000 papyrus fragments and 6,500 clay objects in its collection with insufficient provenance. He said the artifacts would be returned to Egypt and Iraq.

PICASSO PAINTING WON IN PARIS

An Italian woman has won a painting by Pablo Picasso, worth about €1m (£900,000; $1.1m), in a raffle after being given the ticket as a gift. The winning ticket was pulled out during a live draw at Christie's auction house in Paris.

The event, which was fundraising for Care charity, had been postponed twice - first to sell more tickets, and then because of coronavirus restrictions.

The prize painting, Nature Morte, is a still life from 1921. It is a relatively small artwork - measuring 9in by 18in (23cm by 46cm) - which shows a glass of absinthe and a newspaper on a table.

IRON AGE TOMB OF WOMAN ADORNED WITH JEWELRY

The tomb of a woman dating back about 2700 years has been uncovered by archaeologists in France.

The woman, who is believed to have lived at the start of the Iron Age in the eighth century BC, was found adorned with jewelry which had been preserved over millennia.

"Inside the coffin, the deceased, a middle-aged woman, was laid on her back, arms beside her body, dressed and adorned with her jewelry," the archaeologists wrote in a statement about the discovery.

The tomb is 2.85 metres long and 1.1 metres wide and featured pottery placed next to the woman's head. (Inrap)
"An entire pottery vase was placed near and to the right of her head." The body of the woman was found wearing a bracelet on each wrist and a belt around her hips – something not seen in other burials at the site.

The adornments are blue and blue-green in color and made of glass beads and decorated with light-colored threads, alternating with a series of copper alloy beads

HUGE ANCIENT ITEMS SEIZED IN SPAIN

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Two huge international police and customs operations targeting the trade in stolen artworks and archaeological artifacts have led to the arrest of 101 people and the recovery of more than 19,000 items, including a pre-Columbian gold mask, a carved Roman lion and thousands of ancient coins.

The joint initiatives – which involved officers from Interpol, Europol, the World Customs Organization and many national police forces – focused on the criminal networks that steal from museums, plunder archaeological sites and take advantage of the chaos in war-afflicted countries to loot their cultural treasures.

Details of the two concurrent investigations carried out last autumn are emerging only now for operational reasons. Police officers in Spain recovered several rare pre-Columbian objects at Madrid’s Barajas airport, including a unique Tumaco gold mask, gold figurines and pieces of ancient jewellery. All had been illegally acquired by looting in Colombia. Three traffickers were arrested in Spain, while Colombian police carried out a series of searches in Bogotá, resulting in the confiscation of a further 242 pre-Columbian objects – the largest such seizure in the country’s history.

Spain’s Guardia Civil police force said nine people were arrested in the country during the crackdown, and a Roman lion carved in limestone was recovered, as well as a frieze and three Roman columns. Argentinian federal police seized 2,500 ancient coins, Latvian state police a further 1,375 coins, and Afghan customs officials at Kabul confiscated 971 cultural objects bound for Istanbul. Other items recovered during the operations included fossils, paintings, ceramics and historical weapons.

Europol said law enforcement agencies across the world needed to combat what it termed a “global phenomenon” that went well beyond the trade in looted artefacts, and that was closely related to other kinds of widespread criminal activity.

“Organised crime has many faces,” said its executive director, Catherine de Bolle. “The trafficking of cultural goods is one of them: it is not a glamorous business run by flamboyant gentlemen forgers, but by international criminal networks. You cannot look at it separately from combating trafficking in drugs and weapons: we know that the same groups are engaged, because it generates big money.”

BIG AUCTION OF 250 ARTIFACTS WILL BE SOLD IN ENGLAND

A haul of Anglo-Saxon treasure dating back 1,500 years which was found buried on farmland six decades ago is expected to fetch £30,000 at auction. The ancient items - which shed light on life in medieval England - were hailed as one of the most significant archaeological discoveries of the 20th century when they were uncovered between 1962 and 1979.

An Anglo-Saxon amber beaded necklace with semi-precious stones was among items found More and more items, dating back to 425-600 AD, were gradually unearthed from 72, mainly female, graves including rare brooches, pots, knives and spearheads. Silver pendants, using characters from the early Teutonic alphabet, were also discovered at the site during excavations led by Mr Taylor almost 60 years ago.

It also includes tweezers, scissors, jewellery, amber and pottery beads and a girdle-hanger, which resembled keys and symbolised women controlling the home. Mr Taylor, of Cleethorpes, died in 2017 at the age of 88 and left his collection to his wife Muriel, who now wants the collection to end up in a museum.

ANCIENT TORTOISE STATUE FOUND IN CAMBODIA'S ANGKOR COMPLEX

Archaeologists have found a large ancient tortoise statue during an excavation at Srah Srang temple standing on an island in the middle of Srah Srang reservoir in the complex of the famed Angkor Archaeological Park in Cambodia, a spokesman said on Thursday.

Long Kosal, communications director and spokesman for the Apsara National Authority, which manages the park, said the tortoise statue was unearthed on Wednesday by a group of the Apsara National Authority archaeologists during the excavation.

“The large tortoise statue was made of sandstone,” he told Xinhua, adding that it is unclear yet how big or heavy the tortoise is.

CENTRAL CHINA 5,000 YEAR LONG CIVILIZATION IN YELLOW RIVER BASIN

-- Chinese archaeologists announced significant achievements at the Shuanghuaishu site in central China's Henan Province, providing key proof of the origin of the over 5,000-year-long Chinese civilization. -- With an area of 1.17 million square meters, the Shuanghuaishu site, dating back to around 5,300 years, is located on the south bank of the Yellow River in the township of Heluo, Gongyi City, and was proposed to be named "Heluo kingdom."

-- A large number of relics of the Yangshao Culture dating back 5,000 to 7,000 years have been discovered at the site.

With an area of 1.17 million square meters, the Shuanghuaishu site is located on the south bank of the Yellow River in the township of Heluo, Gongyi City. The ancient city relic dating back to around 5,300 years ago was proposed by Chinese archaeologists to be named "Heluo kingdom" after its location in the center of the Heluo area, where the Yellow River (known as He in ancient China) and the Luohe River meet.

"The Shuanghuaishu site is the highest-standard cluster with the nature of a capital city discovered so far in the Yellow River basin in the middle and late stage of Yangshao Culture, the early stage of the formation of Chinese civilization," said Li Boqian, a professor at Peking University, at a press conference on major archaeological discoveries at Shuanghuaishu site held Thursday in Zhengzhou, the provincial capital.

MASSIVE STRUCTURE FOUND FROM ROMAN IRON AGE

Archaeologists have unearthed a massive structure in Lolland that is believed to have been used to ward off an attacking army back in the Roman Iron Age. So far, 770 metres of the structure has been detected, but Museum Lolland-Falster estimates it could stretch to twice that.

“This is a really big structure. It’s taken a lot of work to build,” Bjørnar Måge, an archaeologist and curator from Museum Lolland-Falster, told TV2 News. “We believe the structure was built around a kilometre from the coast between two impenetrable wetland areas – in a bid to stop attacking foe from entering Lolland.”



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BRONZE AGE BURIAL 4,200 YEARS AGO FOUND UNDER UK SKATE PARK

Even more confounding was the discovery of another burial near the chieftain's remains, that of an older man buried in a seated position, according to Foundations Archaeology, a British-based archaeological consultancy. The older man was buried with one head and hoof offering and nothing else, said Andy Hood, an archaeologist with Foundations Archaeology, who helped excavate the site.

"One of the mysteries is, what was the relationship between those two men?" Hood told Live Science. The two likely had some type of social bond, but it's unclear why they were buried so close to each other, he said.

Archaeologists found the burials in 2017, ahead of the construction of a skate park in Lechlade-on-Thames, a town in the southwestern county of Gloucestershire, England. Radiocarbon dating revealed that the two men lived in about 2200 B.C.

The chieftain's burial held the skulls and hooves from four different cattle, Hood said. Head and hoof burial offerings were practiced in Europe during the Bronze Age, but were less common in Britain. "In fact, all previous examples here [in the U.K.] have been single cattle burials, so the Lechlade burial is unique in this regard," because it had four, Hood said.

The age and style of the burials, as well as artifacts found near the chieftain, suggest that these men were part of the Beaker culture, named for its beaker-like ceramic pots. According to recent DNA studies, the people in this culture arrived from mainland Europe around 2400 B.C. They were an impressive lot who might have been the first to use copper and bronze in Britain, "so we think that their arrival is a fairly important moment in prehistory," Hood said.

SATIRE OF COURSE AT STANFORD

Satire by Dagny Carlsson on May 4, 2020

It is little known that the University’s stated objective, “to qualify students for personal success, and direct usefulness in life” formerly included the phrase “through both mental and physical education.” This emphasis on physical education was slowly forgotten, as Stanford failed to require physical education classes. But this year, the University will honor the Stanfords’ original wishes by adding a new course offering.

Beginning in winter 2021, the course CLASSICS 8L: “How to be a Gladiator” will be open for enrollment. However, the enrollment process for the class will be slightly different: It is expected that students will be required to sign waivers acknowledging that Stanford is not liable for any injuries sustained during the course. “In addition to custom weapons, the instructors will require the students to wear their own armor designs. Therefore, if a student is injured, the scar will help them to remember to improve their armor quality in the future,” Brubaker-Cole added.

“It would be a fantastic location,” noted classics professor David Parker. “In case of injury, students are slightly closer to Vaden, and the slope would ensure that students would be forced to fight. This is important, as instead of a final, we are planning a class-wide brawl. Hopefully, we will be allowed to open the event to the entire University so as to convey a more realistic colosseum experience. Perhaps this can be a Cardinal Nights event.”

“If the course is successful, the classics department plans to partner with the physics department to plan CLASSICS 9L: ‘Chariot Racing.’ I anticipate the logistics for that course would be easier, as we have plenty of good bike paths to use around campus.”

Unfortunately, CLASSICS 8L is expected to replace the course Social Dance 1, which will no longer be offered.
Editor’s Note: This article is purely satirical and fictitious. All attributions in this article are not genuine and this story should be read in the context of pure entertainment only.

ANCIENT SITES IN GREECE WILL REOPEN MAY 18 AND OTHERS JUNE 15

Culture Minister Lina Medoni said visitor limits would be imposed at most of the reopened sites, including open-air cinemas, which will start operating on June 1 and will keep about half the available seats empty.

Seating changes, she said, will also be introduced at the ancient theaters of Epidaurus, in southern Greece, and Herodes Atticus in Athens where open-air concerts and performances are held each summer.“In each case, special measures will be taken to protect staff and the public,” Medoni said.

She did however clarify that the smooth running of cultural events and activities this summer depends almost entirely on the latest epidemiological data and as such all are open to changes.

Visitors in archeological sites should keep a 1.5 meters distance to the next person - 2 meters at museums. In museums, restrictions will apply to how many can enter within an hour, while priority will be given to electronic ticket holders.

With its vital tourism industry heavily affected by the pandemic, Greece is expected to sink back into deep recession in 2020 and is hoping to salvage some of the holiday season with an expected tourism boost.

NEANDERTHALS USED BONES FROM SPECIFIC ANIMALS TO MAKE TOOLS

vidence continues to mount that the Neandertals, who lived in Europe and Asia until about 40,000 years ago, were more sophisticated people than once thought. A new study from UC Davis shows that Neandertals chose to use bones from specific animals to make a tool for specific purpose: working hides into leather.

The results show that the bones used to make lissoirs mostly came from animals in the cattle family, such as bison or aurochs (a wild relative of modern cattle that is now extinct). But other animal bones from the same deposit show that reindeer were much more common and frequently hunted for food. So the Neandertals were choosing to use only ribs from certain types of animals to make these tools.

“I think this shows that Neandertals really knew what they were doing,” Martisius said. “They were deliberately picking up these larger ribs when they happened to come across these animals while hunting and they may have even kept these rib tools for a long time, like we would with a favorite wrench or screwdriver.” Bovine ribs are bigger and more rigid than deer ribs, making them better suited for the hard work of rubbing skins without wearing out or breaking.

“Neandertals knew that for a specific task, they needed a very particular tool. They found what worked best and sought it out when it was available,” Martisius said.