This Week in the Ancient Near East

A Roman mummy from the fabulously named site of Oxyrhynchus in Egypt has tested positive for the Iliad. But why put a snippet of Homer’s tale on a mummy, especially a fairly dull list of ships and places? Maybe it was to audition for a Christopher Nolan movie?

Iron Age Hazor sat in the middle of a complicated geo-political situation: Aram-Damascus to the north, the Phoenicians to the northwest, and Israel to the south. This made no difference to cows, who were taken to graze all over regardless of what the map said. Of course, they couldn’t read maps. Except maybe cow 5754. Suspicious.

With a host of bovine reminiscences from your hosts!

The Assyrian king Sennacherib’s throne room depicted gruesome scenes of warfare and visitors got the message that he was not to be defied. But now it seems that at the end of all the scenes of siege, torture and exile, there’s Judean king Hezekiah, standing alone. So what’s the real message? You don’t want to be the star of an Assyrian relief.

New photographic techniques have shown that that walls in Pompeii were covered with graffiti, including pictures of gladiator fights, lewd poetry, and inscriptions in non-local languages like Safaitic. So sort of like New York City subways in the 1970s. Who says the past doesn’t repeat itself?

A new study suggests that Iron Age Judean grandparents lived on the ground floor. Sure, it’s not like they were going up and down the ladder to the roof. But did they get their own suites and hey hey stop that, that’s a cooking pot!

The discovery of an elephant bone in third century BCE Spain has us asking questions. Was the circus in town or was it a war elephant, like one of those Hannibal used to climb the Alps? But where did it come from and how did Carthaginians learn to drive them? After all, the trunk is in the front.

New research suggests that the painted designs on prehistoric Halafian pottery represent mathematical reasoning. If you count all the leaves and bushes, this tracks. What kind of crazy people count the leaves and bushes? Archaeologists, that’s who.

Did Mamluks mill sugar in the Beth Shean Valley of Israel using water powered mills? Do elites own industries creating tasty and addictive foodstuffs and foist the products on the unsuspecting? Talk about a sugar rush!