Posts Tagged: ‘archaeology’

Yesterday, the Supreme Council of Antiquities in Egypt released a statement saying that they will begin excavating three recently discovered sites that could feature the tombs of Cleopatra and Mark Anthony, reports the AP. Radar helped archaeologists discover these sites just last month while they were surveying the temple of Taposiris, which dates back to the third century B.C. and is located near Alexandria. Apparently, they found a few shafts in the temple that could be the burial sites of the infamous Cleopatra and Mark Antony.

This excitement comes on the heels of some other recent discoveries related to Cleopatra. Just last year, the same teams unearthed the head of an alabaster statue of Cleopatra in addition to 22 coins featuring her face. This head and these coins aren’t the first of their kind that have been discovered, but have recently dredged up the question about whether Cleopatra was the beauty many assumed her to be.

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This was a big week for aficionados of vampirism and medieval corpse defilement, as archaeologists in Venice discovered the bones of a suspected vampire in a 16th century mass grave for plague victims. No, fangs weren’t the giveaway — it was actually the huge brick shoved into its mouth.

The archaeologists suspect that the brick was inserted as a kind of exorcism for the corpse. Medieval Europe wasn’t exactly a hotbed of medical science, and human decomposition was poorly understood. Superstition ran rampant. What might a denizen of such a demon-haunted world think upon discovering that a corpse had bloated, chewed through its grave shroud and dribbled bloody purge fluid down its chin?

Exactly. You plug the corpse with a brick and move on. At the time, a little local panic was enough to see an entire graveyard exhumed in the hunt for bloodsuckers.

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