“The Romans left Britain” is one of those sentences that sounds clearer than the event it describes. Rome did leave, if by Rome we mean the western imperial state: its tax system, military command, regular coin supply and the administrative machinery that had governed much of Britain for centuries. By the early fifth century, towns and local elites were being forced to organise without the apparatus of the province. But the phrase becomes misleading when it quietly turns an administrative collapse into a population disappearance.

The people did not leave with the government.

Roman Britain had never been a sealed ethnic block. It contained communities rooted in Britain long before the conquest, families shaped by almost four centuries of imperial rule, soldiers and officials posted from other provinces, merchants, craftspeople, enslaved people, freed people and migrants from across Europe, North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean. The British Museum describes Romano-British society as the product of local Iron Age societies meeting Roman law, administration, engineering, religion, art and imported populations. When imperial authority fractured around AD 410, that mixture did not revert to an imagined pre-Roman purity. Nor did it vanish and wait for a new people to arrive.

What happened instead was harder to narrate and therefore more interesting: continuity, migration, political fragmentation and cultural reinvention happened at the same time.

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A Roman man lost a gold ring. Another man wore a ring bearing the name of the suspected thief. And then a curse asked a god to deny that thief his health.

Time forward to more than fifteen centuries later, and the story reached J. R. R. Tolkien.

That sequence sounds almost too perfect. It contains a stolen ring, an inscription, a curse, an ancient sanctuary, and the scholar who later created the most famous ring in modern literature. It is easy to understand why the object at The Vyne in Hampshire has been called a possible source for the One Ring.

The evidence proves that Tolkien studied the temple and its mysterious god, but it does not prove that this particular ring inspired his fiction. The real story though is more uncertain, and perhaps more interesting, than the legend that grew around it.

The Ring in the Field

Around 1785, a farmer ploughing near the abandoned Roman town of Silchester uncovered a large gold ring. It eventually entered the collection of the Chute family at The Vyne, where it remains today.

The ring is a bit unusual. It weighs about twelve grams and has a ten sided hoop attached to a square bezel. The bezel carries an engraved profile surrounded by the word VENVS. Around the hoop is a second Latin inscription: Seniciane vivas in Deo. It is normally understood as a wish that Senicianus should live in God.

Now, what is weird, is that Venus belongs to the older Roman religious world, while the phrase on the band is associated with early Christianity. The National Trust dates the ring to roughly AD 350 to 450, a period when both traditions existed beside one another in Britain.

But the name Senicianus would eventually pull the ring into a much darker story.

A Curse One Hundred Miles Away

At Lydney Park in Gloucestershire, archaeologists found a thin sheet of lead at a Roman sanctuary dedicated to the god Nodens. The writing records the anger of a man named Silvianus. His ring was gone, and he believed someone called Senicianus was responsible.

The message asks Nodens to deny health to anyone named Senicianus until the ring is returned to the temple. Silvianus promises the god half the value of the missing object.

But this was not a private diary entry. It appears to be an appeal to supernatural justice! In a world without modern police or insurance, a victim could hand a grievance to a god and ask for punishment. Convenient, isn’t it?

Once antiquarians noticed the same name on the Lydney tablet and the Silchester ring, an irresistible story formed. Senicianus had stolen the ring, worn it despite the curse, and lost it near Silchester. The object in Hampshire was therefore the very treasure named on the tablet in Gloucestershire.

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Tolkien Enters the Story

The connection to Tolkien is real, but narrower than the popular version suggests.

Archaeologist Mortimer Wheeler worked at Lydney Park and asked Tolkien, then an Oxford scholar of language, to investigate the name Nodens. Tolkien contributed a specialist note to the excavation report published in 1932. His task was linguistic, and he examined the name of the god and its possible roots.

This places Tolkien directly inside the scholarly history of the Lydney site. He knew about the sanctuary, the inscriptions, and the strange world surrounding Nodens. Later accounts also suggest that Wheeler discussed the possible ring connection with him.

The timing though encouraged speculation. Tolkien was developing the stories that became The Hobbit during the same general period. A cursed gold ring connected to a place called Dwarf Hill seems almost designed to invite comparison with Middle Earth, isn’t it?

Did It Inspire the One Ring?

No surviving letter, notebook, or statement from Tolkien identifies the Senicianus ring as his inspiration. The National Trust now warns that the object has previously been wrongly presented as the source of The Lord of the Rings.

There is also uncertainty at the beginning of the story. The National Trust considers a direct connection between the ring and the curse tablet unlikely. The two objects were found far apart, and Senicianus was not a unique name. The ring itself names Senicianus, not Silvianus, which creates another difficulty if it was the stolen object described at Lydney.

Tolkien unquestionably studied Nodens and the Lydney material. He may have encountered the dramatic story that antiquarians built around the gold ring. That story could have then joined the many myths, languages, objects, and legends that nourished his imagination. Yet the claim cannot be demonstrated, although it makes sense.

The Ring Controversy Still Alive

The object does not need Tolkien to be remarkable. It survives from a moment when Roman Britain was changing, old gods remained present, and Christian language was becoming more visible. Its inscriptions preserve that complicated world in a single piece of gold.

The curse tablet is equally human. It records loss, suspicion, anger, and the hope that a divine power might succeed where ordinary justice had failed. Whether or not the two objects belonged to the same quarrel, each reveals how people tried to protect property and make sense of misfortune.

The Tolkien connection adds one final layer. It shows how an ancient artifact can acquire a second life through modern storytelling. A ring found in a field became connected to a curse found at a temple, then to a scholar studying an unfamiliar god, and finally to a literary legend known around the world.

It is possible that this ring helped inspire Tolkien. Whether we will know for sure or not, we do not know. What we can say though with confidence is that the story surrounding it has become powerful enough to resemble one of his own: an object passes through time, gathers meanings, and becomes far larger than the person who first wore it.

Top Image: The Ring of Senicianus, a late Roman gold signet ring found near Silchester. Its inscription asks that Senicianus live in God. Source: Photograph by Simon Q, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 2.0.

By Aris Manus

References

National Trust Collections. Ring of Senicianus, inventory 719789. https://www.nationaltrustcollections.org.uk/object/719789

Roman Inscriptions of Britain. RIB 306, Curse upon Senicianus. https://romaninscriptionsofbritain.org/inscriptions/306

BBC News. J. R. R. Tolkien ring goes on display at The Vyne exhibition. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-hampshire-22008746

The Guardian. The Hobbit ring that may have inspired Tolkien put on show. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/apr/02/hobbit-tolkien-ring-exhibition

Rome did not keep its most important prophecies for curious citizens. Instead, it locked them inside a temple and allowed them to be opened only when the state was afraid.

A plague that would not end or an enemy army destroying Roman legions or reports of blood falling from the sky. It is in such moments, when the Senate could order a small priestly college to consult the Sibylline Books, a secret collection that Romans believed contained divine guidance for the survival of their city.

The priests would then enter the archive, examine verses written in Greek, and return with instructions. The public might be told to honour unfamiliar gods, stage an extraordinary ritual, or bring a foreign cult to Rome. What the public did not know was the text itself. Rome revealed the remedy while guarding the words that supposedly required it.

That secrecy makes the collection one of the great lost archives of the ancient world. The books survived changes of government, military catastrophe, religious conflict, and one devastating fire. An emperor later burned more than two thousand rival prophecies while preserving a selected Sibylline collection beneath the statue of Apollo. And then the official books disappeared!

The mystery is what powerful officials read when the doors closed, how much those hidden words shaped public policy, and whether the final collection was destroyed by one of the most hated men in the dying western empire?

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A skull partly exposed by erosion beside the Darling River in north-western New South Wales carried a wound that looked startlingly like the work of a sharp blade. The burial was later dated to the mid thirteenth century, approximately six centuries before European settlement reached the region. That chronology turns one injured skull into a difficult forensic question.

‘Our old people back then did not have a blade like that.’ - Baakandji elder William Badger Bates

The remains were found after erosion or animal activity disturbed a shallow Aboriginal burial and left part of the skull visible. The man became known as Kaakutja, meaning ‘elder brother’. His injuries were documented during excavation and analysis recorded by ABC TV’s Catalyst. The published study concluded that traditional sharp-edged wooden weapons, including lil-lils and fighting boomerangs, could fit the dimensions of the trauma and could have caused the fatal wounds.

That conclusion does not identify a particular weapon, and the skeletal evidence alone cannot establish a foreign visitor or contact. This article revisits the question rather than treating the answer as settled. It examines the shape of the injuries, the limits of sharpened mulga wood in reported tests, and comparisons with sharp-blade trauma. Could a wooden weapon have produced this particular wound or does the evidence leave room for a different explanation?

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Someone engineered a wooden structure 476,000 years ago. Yes you read it correctly…

That sentence should not fit the history most of us were taught. The oldest widely accepted fossils of Homo sapiens are about 300,000 years old. Yet beside a river in Zambia, archaeologists uncovered two heavy logs that had been deliberately shaped and locked together through a broad cut notch. Whoever made them lived roughly 176,000 years before our species appears clearly in the fossil record.

And this was not a sharpened stick or a loose branch carried into place by water. One piece had been chopped, scraped, narrowed, and fitted over another. The builders were turning separate parts into a construction, making it the earliest known structural use of wood anywhere in the world.

No human bones were found beside it, the builders have no agreed name, and the object they created has partly vanished. It may have supported a platform, a walkway, a dwelling, or something archaeologists have not yet imagined? What survives is only the join, an intentional act preserved in mud for almost half a million years.

How can researchers be certain that it was built rather than formed by nature? How was wood dated beyond the reach of radiocarbon testing? And if human ancestors this ancient could plan and assemble a large structure, how much of their technological world disappeared simply because wood normally rots? The answers do more than add one remarkable object to prehistory. They expose how incomplete our picture of early human intelligence may be.

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In 1945, an earthen jar was opened near Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt. Inside were papyrus books that had survived for roughly sixteen centuries. They preserved more than fifty religious and philosophical works, many written by Christians whose ideas did not become the official faith of later churches. But you know that already, we have published many articles on the topic. However, what you don’t know, is that among them were three copies of a revelation that had almost vanished from history. A fourth copy had surfaced decades earlier in Cairo, but wars, accidents, and scholarly delays kept it from public view. The work is now called the Secret Book of John, the Secret Revelation of John, or the Apocryphon of John.

Its claim is more unsettling than the discovery itself. The text does not say that God failed to make a perfect world. It says that the being who made this world was never the highest God at all. He was an ignorant ruler who mistook borrowed power for absolute authority.

And do not confuse this with an argument of an outsider mocking Christianity. The book presents itself as a private teaching given by the risen Christ to John. It retells Genesis from inside an early Christian struggle over creation, suffering, authority, and the identity of the human soul.

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You wake up, or at least, you think you do. The room looks exactly as it should… But you cannot move. Your body is completely frozen, your chest feels as though something heavy is pressing down on it, and at the edge of your vision there is a presence, something emerging in the form of a shadow.

If this has happened to you, you are in very ancient company. Across thousands of years and every continent on Earth, human beings have woken in exactly this state and tried to make sense of it, and what they came up with tells us something very interesting about the human mind at the edge of sleep.

What Is Sleep Paralysis and Where Did the Word “Nightmare” Come From?

Sleep paralysis occurs at the boundary between sleeping and waking. During REM sleep, the mind temporarily disconnects the body’s muscles to prevent us from acting out our dreams. Occasionally, a person becomes conscious before that paralysis has ended, resulting in waking awareness trapped inside a body that cannot respond.

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Archaeologists working on a rural cemetery in Poland in 2012 discovered Grave 49 with no stake driven into its heart or a pile of bones, nor was there anything indicating that it was the grave of a vampire; instead, it contained an unsettling piece of evidence - a curved iron sickle placed across the neck of a female deceased.

The blade of the sickle was positioned in such a way, that if the deceased female were to attempt to rise, it would have severed her neck. This was not the result of an accident where a farmer had dropped his tool but instead, four additional graves from the same cemetery had had sickles laid across their neck or body. Two additional graves had stones placed over their necks and one contained a coin inside the mouth of the skeleton.

Although the people residing in Drawsko were living in the 1600’s and 1700’s, they did not use the modern term “vampire,” as is depicted in movies today, to identify these grave sites; rather, their burial practices clearly reveal their fear of the dead returning to harm them. It is unclear why the people of this village felt that way about the remains of their ancestors and why they chose a sickle to prevent this from occurring!

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The Great Altar of Pergamon is one of antiquity’s most remarkable surviving monuments. Erected on the acropolis of the ancient city of Pergamon, today Bergama, Türkiye, it was later excavated in 1878 and transported to Berlin, where its monumental reconstruction became one of the defining displays of the Pergamon museum. Yet for many readers of the Bible, Pergamon also carries the enigmatic description from Revelation:

In this wide-ranging Ancient Origins conversation, Ioannis Syrigos speaks with Jonathan Cahn, the #1 New York Times bestselling author behind The Harbinger, The Paradigm, The Return of the Gods, and The Dragon’s Prophecy. Cahn’s books have repeatedly appeared on The New York Times bestseller lists; an Evangelical Christian Publishers Association report stated that The Dragon’s Prophecy reached No. 1 on the list in 2024.

Cahn’s new book, The Altar of Pergamon: The Mystery of the Dark Angel and the Future of the World, presents its investigation through a story-driven mystery. In the interview, he follows the documented movement of the altar and its friezes, from Pergamon to Berlin, through post-war Soviet custody, and back to East Berlin, while advancing his own theological interpretation of the connections among the altar, German history, the Cold War, and biblical prophecy.

The result is not a conventional archaeology interview. It is a conversation at the intersection of ancient history, religion, symbolism, war, ideology, and historical memory. Whether you share Cahn’s conclusions or approach them with caution, the questions are difficult to ignore.

In Ancient Rome, those with the disease we know as epilepsy could be taken to the arena and be provided with a cure that would cause even today’s readers to stop and think twice before trying it. According to accounts given by Romans of that time, many of these individuals drank the warm blood of fallen gladiators. The Romans believed that when someone was killed violently, that act created a powerful force to eliminate physical illness or disease.

Pliny the Elder’s writings are among the most well-known of this practice; indeed, Pliny stated that gladiator blood was “like the draught of life.” However we know that Pliny did not recommend gladiator blood as a cure for epilepsy; instead he wrote about his disgust for this practice. The same passage in which Pliny discussed gladiator blood included comments on why this treatment is terrible, the need for treatment of epilepsy, and the impact that the gladiatorial blood had on people’s lives.

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A small clay object is placed to the lips, then air enters a narrow channel, collides inside a hidden chamber, and comes out as something far less musical than anyone would expect. Depending on how it is blown, an Aztec skull whistle can hiss, shriek, rasp, or produce a sound is similar to a human scream.

That sound has made the object famous as the “Aztec death whistle.” Videos of replicas are now everywhere, usually accompanied by a certainty that Aztec armies used hundreds of them to terrify their enemies before battle. Well, if this was the case, it would make it an unforgettable story, right?

If we dive into the real history, we will find that yes the whistles are genuine. Their strange sound is also genuine. Some were found in ritual contexts connected with death and sacrifice. A recent scientific study found that people often perceive their sound as alarming and scream like. Yet the original purpose of the instruments remains open to interpretation. They may have carried ritual, religious, and emotional force that a modern horror label cannot fully capture.

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Although the North Sea looks permanent if you look at it on a map, it really seems as if it has always held Britain apart from continental Europe. Yet not long ago in geological terms, much of that water covered a living landscape with rivers, wetlands that fed birds and fish, red deer, wild boar, bear, and people who moved across a land that later generations would never know existed.

This lost landscape is what archaeologists call it Doggerland. A strange name, I know, it sounds like a fantasy kingdom (with dogs?), but the evidence is real. Ancient river systems were traced below the seabed, layers of peat, bones and tools hauled up by fishing boats, pollen and environmental DNA preserved in sediment cores, and seismic maps that reveal contours now hidden under water.

Doggerland however, did not magically vanish in a single day. The sea advanced for thousands of years, as the climate warmed after the last ice age. But around 8,150 years ago, a colossal submarine landslide off Norway sent a tsunami through the North Sea. Did that wave destroy the final communities living there? Or did it strike a landscape already breaking apart, leaving people to adapt and return until the rising sea won anyway?

The answer to this question changes Doggerland from a simple story of a sunken land into something different and more human. That is a homeland that may have been lost slowly, violently, or both.

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Editorial Note - Speculative Hypothesis
This article presents the author’s personal reverse-engineering hypothesis concerning ancient stoneworking, mythology, iconography, and possible energetic technologies. Its interpretations and proposed connections are speculative and do not represent established archaeological, historical, or scientific consensus. References to ancient texts, objects, sites, researchers, and technical mechanisms are discussed within the framework of the author’s thesis and should not be understood as independently verified proof of the conclusions advanced here. Readers are encouraged to consult primary sources and peer-reviewed scholarship when evaluating these claims.

An invisible thread unites Puma Punku, Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Aztec chronicles in the manipulation of natural stone. Microscopic, petrographic, and reverse-engineering analyses could reveal a lost science based on energetic control and the molecular breakdown of matter.

The Testimony of Sources and Similarities Among Civilizations

Post-diluvian, post-Younger Dryas traditions converge on the construction of great architectural complexes through the intervention of external wisdom figures and the use of physical objects endowed with energetic powers:

Mesopotamia: The Apkallu sent by Enki and the use of the MEs to found structures immune to the decay of time.

Ancient Egypt: The Zep Tepi with the “Seven Sages” led by Ptah, who rendered matter plastic through the “Word”.

India: The Asuras led by Maya Asura, builders of the Tripura cities and users of Astra weapons capable of melting stone.

Andean Traditions: The Viracochas, who used techniques to soften stone under their touch, making it moldable like clay. Mesoamerica: Huitzilopochtli and the Xiuhcoatl, a turquoise “fire serpent” capable of piercing, melting, and pulverizing rock.

In this context fits the Shamir of the Hebrew tradition (Talmud, Sotah 48b), a small object the size of a barleycorn endowed with immense power. Not being a mechanical tool, it was placed on the rock and “engraved diamond and granite” following lines traced by ink, leaving the edges perfectly smooth without producing any debris or percussion noise.

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A sixteenth century print shows spheres, crosses, cylinders and a black spear above Nuremberg. It has become an icon of ancient UFO lore, but its own words tell a more complicated story.

Before the familiar language of flying saucers, there was a sunrise over Nuremberg. On the morning of 14 April 1561, a local letter painter named Hans Glaser published a printed account of an extraordinary sight said to have been seen in and around the city. In his image, the sky is crowded with red and dark spheres, crosses, long blue cylinders, arcs, and one immense black spear. Beneath them, a line of smoke rises from the ground beyond the city wall.

Glaser wrote that many men and women had watched the spectacle at daybreak. The objects seemed to rush at one another for more than an hour, then fall to earth “as if they all burned,” fading in a great cloud of smoke. It is easy to understand why the print later became one of the most frequently shared images in the history of UFO culture.

The Morning the Sky Went to War

According to Glaser, the event occurred between 4:00 and 5:00 a.m. A red semicircular arc and two blood-red arcs were close to the sun, he wrote in his narrative. In the tale, Glaser writes of red crosses, balls of many colours arranged in rows and squares, rods/tubular objects that were long, and a very dark object, which he describes as “like a black spear.” The shaft of this dark object faced east, and its tip faced west. Glaser further explains that there were spheres moving from the sun toward the rods, fighting “furiously,” until they fell in wafts of smoke.

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Thousands of years before hospitals, anesthesia, or antibiotics, skilled practitioners made openings in living skulls. The healed bone they left behind tells a startling story of survival.

At first, the skull from Jericho looks impossible. Its crown bears four openings, each made when its owner was alive. But the bone around them does not have the raw, broken look of a fatal blow or a fresh incision. It has begun to remodel. The person survived long enough for the body to answer a wound to the head with new growth.

That one skull is not an isolated marvel. Across the ancient world, archaeologists have recovered crania with deliberate openings made by scraping, cutting, or careful grooving. The procedure is called trepanation, or trephination. It is among the oldest forms of surgery known from human remains, and it was sometimes astonishingly successful.

This is not a story about primitive people somehow possessing a lost version of modern neurosurgery. It is stranger than that. It is about observation, hard won technique, community care, and the physical evidence of people who lived through an operation that still makes modern readers flinch.

The Evidence Is Written in Bone

Bones can be a great witness, but very slowly. The result of an operation on a deceased individual may leave sharp edges and little evidence of healing at the location of the entrance wound. In contrast, persons who lived beyond this critical period may leave a very different record of their injury; their entrance wounds will have smooth and rounded edges, and new bone may in fact form at the edges. This is what allows archaeologists to conclude that some patients survived surgery.

Most researchers openly acknowledge this limitation. The smoothness of the edges of the opening does not indicate precisely how long the individual lived after surgery; therefore, it cannot be considered a reliable measure of time. The process of healing bones is a complex one, and it is debatable whether the changes in bone structure used as indicators of trephination in antiquity will provide the archaeologist with consistently reliable evidence for the survival of the individual. However, the strength of the evidence does not diminish the need for caution.

Regardless of this confusion, a number of skulls pose a significant challenge to interpretation. The skull from Jericho, for example, has four openings with evidence of healing, and the specimen from New Ireland in Papua New Guinea shows evidence of eight separate trepanations, with many of these openings having healed by the time of death. The examples demonstrate that trepanation was not limited to one desperate attempt but rather a procedure that was repeated in certain cultures.

A Surgery Older Than States

There is significant archaeological evidence for healed trepanation going back deep into prehistory. In a comprehensive survey of medical and archaeological literature, several healed trepanation specimens have been documented between approximately 10,000 to 5,000 BC, and many additional specimens have also been found in Europe, the Middle East, Asia, Africa, Oceania, and North America following that time period. Trepanation appears to have been practised in societies with vast geographical distances and divergent belief systems.

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However, the fact that trepanation was practised across a wide aperture of cultural contexts does not necessarily imply that every society used the technique to treat the same medical conditions. The creation of a hole in a patient’s skull may have been an urgent method of addressing an acute injury, an attempt to alleviate pain or pressure, a form of ceremonial treatment, or may have been something that cannot be known based upon present evidence. Archaeology is capable of demonstrating evidence of surgical intervention; however, archaeology cannot tell us what conversations took place around the patient before, during or after the procedure, nor can archaeological evidence tell us what the healer told the family about the expected outcome.

The consistent reconstruction of this surgical procedure suggests that the individual performing the surgery likely returned to a conceptual vision of precisely removing a cranial area while attempting to prevent damage to underlying tissues. This was not simply an act of serendipity. To perform this procedure properly, an individual required a learned technique; an assortment of instruments; knowledge of how to use these tools; a reliable source of funding for instruments and surgical procedures; and a supportive social network to assist the patient post-surgery.

Why Did They Do It?

The most convincing medical motive is head trauma. With the frequent use of sling stones or clubs as weapons in the mountains of ancient Peru, many people would have suffered from skull injuries. Of eleven burial places located in the Cuzco area, it was shown that one of the primary reasons trepanation was performed was to treat cranial trauma. It appears that the surgeons did not perform this operation without due consideration, since they often avoided the most dangerous parts of the cranium for trepanation, as they did not operate on regions close to large blood vessels or membrane coverings of the brain.

Several other theories also exist regarding the reason for performing trepanations; however, many of these theories are unsubstantiated. Historical documents, along with more recent legends and customs, have suggested that some of the reasons for doing a trepanation were due to headaches, convulsions, altered states of behaviour or spiritual beliefs regarding spirits within the head. However, these theories may only be applicable in certain locations and at certain time periods. They should not be viewed as a global resolution. The methods of the actual surgical procedure could have had a variety of social, medical, and ritualistic significance.

The Peruvian Learning Curve

Ancient Peru provides the clearest evidence that trepanation could improve through experience. In one Cuzco region study, researchers identified 66 individuals with 109 skull openings. Circular cutting and scraping were the main methods. The study estimated an overall survival rate of 83 percent and reported little ensuing infection in the sampled remains.

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The results also showed change over time. The authors concluded that success rose as techniques improved through repeated practice. Later analyses of larger Peruvian collections have estimated long term survival rates from around 40 percent in some earlier periods to as high as 91 percent in the period from AD 1000 to 1400. These are not universal ancient survival rates but estimates from specific Peruvian samples, inferred from patterns of bone healing. But they are remarkable all the same.

The comparison is sobering. The American College of Surgeons notes that these estimated outcomes in some Andean samples rival or exceed the mortality recorded for cranial operations during the American Civil War. The difference does not mean ancient practitioners had modern medicine. It suggests that repeated experience, careful technique, and an understanding of which areas to avoid could save lives even in a world without sterile operating theaters.

How the Surgeon Acted and Thought

Although there is no known ancient surgical textbook that provides a detailed explanation for every surgical decision made by the Cuzco surgeons, the evidence from the remains indicates that the surgeons employed practical reasoning to guide their surgical choices. For example, surgeons in Cuzco chose ways and places of performing burials that maximized the likelihood that they would not have to cut through very thin areas of bone in order to access the soft tissues below. The method of using circular grooves and/or scrapes to cut through the skull in a gradual manner rather than attempting to gouge through the bone using a blunt object (e.g., an awl) also would have improved survival rates for patients with cranial wounds.

Survival after the opening of the skull would have depended not only on the surgeon’s ability to create the opening but also on what was done following the creation of the opening. A patient with a cranial wound would have had to have access to food, water, shelter, and protection from additional injury as well as the availability of persons who were willing to assist with the patient’s survival despite the patient’s pain and weakness. In summary, repaired skulls are not just evidence of a surgical profession, but also evidence of the level of care provided.

Not a Lost Supermedicine

Trepanation, was a hazardous practice. It produced various results as evidenced by historical records due to varying levels of recovery from surgery. Some skulls have been discovered either with evidence of incomplete operations or without having healed. Researchers typically do not know when an individual was exposed to a trepanation opening, either on their deathbed, after having died, or in instances when the procedure did not have a successful outcome. The physical evidence found in archeological sites of survivors is much more visual than that of individuals who died without having healed even partially; therefore, all heuristics must be carefully assessed rather than viewed as miraculous occurrences.

The act of performing trepanation does not diminish its significance but actually increases the human characteristics associated with it. Through careful and constant observation of wounds and injuries, ancient medical practitioners were able to establish juxtapositions of trial and error through generational advancements. Success in achieving satisfactory treatment was not demonstrative of the mystical nature of the practice but rather a reflection that the development of skill through careful observation can exist long before the advent of a formalized scientific methodology.

The Jericho skull has waited more than four thousand years to make that point. Its four openings do not tell us the patient’s name, the reason for the operation, or whether the healer understood the brain. They tell us something simpler and more astonishing: someone opened this person’s skull, and this person lived long enough for the bone to begin its slow reply.

Top Image: A Bronze Age skull excavated at Jericho, dated to about 2200 to 2000 BC. Four openings show evidence that healing had begun. Source: Wellcome Collection and Science Museum, London. Creative Commons Attribution 4.0.

By Aris Manus

References

Andrushko, Valerie A., and John W. Verano. “Prehistoric Trepanation in the Cuzco Region of Peru: A View into an Ancient Andean Practice.” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 137, no. 1, 2008, pages 4 to 13. PubMed record: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18386793/

Partiot, Caroline, et al. “Cranial Trepanation and Healing Process in Modern Patients: Bioarchaeological and Anthropological Implications.” Journal of Anatomy 237, no. 6, 2020, pages 1049 to 1061. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7704229/

Kushner, David S., John W. Verano, and A. R. Titelbaum. “Trepanation Procedures and Outcomes: Comparison of Prehistoric Peru with Other Ancient, Medieval, and American Civil War Cranial Surgery.” World Neurosurgery 114, 2018, pages 245 to 251. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wneu.2018.03.133

Chavez Rivera, Angel D., and Tiffany R. Sanchez. “Trepanation Reveals the Success of the Incas.” American College of Surgeons, 2022. https://www.facs.org/for-medical-professionals/news-publications/news-and-articles/bulletin/2022/november-december-2022-volume-107-issue-11/from-the-archives/

Wellcome Collection. Bronze Age skull from Jericho, Palestine, 2200 to 2000 BC. https://wellcomecollection.org/works/va96ydta

Wellcome Collection. A human skull showing signs of trepanning, New Ireland, Papua New Guinea. https://wellcomecollection.org/works/najhwrtz

Metropolitan Museum of Art. Ceremonial Knife, tumi, Lambayeque or Sican, Peru. https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/316427

Tags

Ancient Medicine, Trepanation, Archaeology, Ancient Peru, Medical History, Human Survival, Ancient Mysteries

Twas thus She spoke, ”that blush of shame proclaims thee Briton, once a noble name; First of the mighty, foremost of the free, Now honoured less by all, and least by me…lo! Here, despite of wear and wasting fire, I saw successive Tyrannies expire; ‘Scaped from the ravage of the Turk and Goth, thy country sends a spoiler worse than both. Survey this vacant, violated fane; recount the relics torn and yet remain…some retribution still might Pallas (Athena) claim, when Venus half avenged Minerva’s (Roman Athena) shame.”

an excerpt from Lord Byron’s “The Curse of Minerva”

The world’s most famous cultural-property dispute began not in a courtroom, but high on the Acropolis, with scaffolding, chisels, and an ambiguous permit. More than two centuries after Lord Elgin’s agents removed and, in some cases, damaged, sculptures from the Parthenon, the “Elgin Marbles” remain at the centre of a dispute between Greece and Britain.

At stake is more than stone. The Parthenon has long stood as a beacon of democracy, philosophical inquiry, and art; its contested fragments force an enduring question: who has the right to possess the heritage of another people? This article examines the authority Elgin claimed, why Britain retained the marbles despite outrage from the outset, and whether Elgin’s own disgrace and misfortune helped inspire Lord Byron’s vision of Athena’s curse.

The Parthenon: Athena, Power, and Panhellenic Pride

Prior to discussing the marbles’ seizure, it is essential to examine the largest of the structures and the circumstances surrounding its construction and eventual decline. Built between 447- 432 BCE during Athens’ so-called “golden age,” under the reign of Pericles (495–429 BCE), the Parthenon is a Doric temple that dominates the Acropolis hill in Athens and is dedicated to Athena Parthenos (Athena the Virgin).

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Ramesses II had everything that should have made him the face of ancient Egypt: a 66-year reign, colossal monuments, famous battle scenes, and a legacy so imposing that later pharaohs adopted his name. Tutankhamun, by contrast, ruled for only about a decade and died young. Yet it is the boy king’s gold mask—not the giant statues of Ramses the Great—that has become one of the most recognisable images on Earth. Why?

The answer is not that Tutankhamun was the greater ruler. It is that his story survived in a form no other New Kingdom pharaoh could match. When Howard Carter and an Egyptian excavation team uncovered his tomb in November 1922, they found the only New Kingdom royal burial discovered substantially intact: a compressed, dazzling world of thousands of objects, from chariots and shrines to jewellery and the now-iconic mask. That extraordinary survival, amplified by the media age, gave the modern world an intimate encounter with ancient Egypt and turned a relatively minor king into a global symbol.

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In 1947, a research ship named Atlantis crossed the Mid-Atlantic Ridge carrying a new instrument capable of drawing the ocean floor as it sailed. What it recorded was not a featureless abyss but a vast mountain system, terraced flanks resembling drowned shorelines, and sediment that appeared to have formed in the open air. Subsequent cores reportedly recovered rounded sand from miles below the surface and hundreds of miles from land. The orthodox explanation is complex, rooted in mantle plumes, plate boundaries, volcanism, and long-term subsidence. But Joe O’Donoghue asks a simpler - and far more unsettling - question: if this enormous plateau was once above water, could the Azores be the last visible summits of a lost Atlantic landmass?

About This Series

This is the fourth and final instalment of Joe O’Donoghue’s geological investigation of the Atlantis tradition. Part 1 considered whether Plato’s description corresponds to the Azores; Part 2 examined the drowned landscapes and coarse flood deposits of Greece and the Aegean; and Part 3 focused on the Acropolis and the geological record of the Athens Basin. This final article moves from land to the ocean floor, examining the Azores Plateau and the Mid-Atlantic Ridge through the evidence reported by twentieth-century oceanographic surveys.

The Azores Plateau: An Oceanographic Enigma

Oceanography, as a discipline, commenced in the mid-nineteenth century with seafloor surveys in advance of telegraph cable laying. The information obtained surprised many scientists, who had, up till then, considered the ocean floor to be a vast featureless plain, while the depths were considered to be pitch-dark and lifeless. As far as the Atlantic goes, the features of most interest at first were the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and the surrounding continental slopes, and many surveys and exploration programs were conducted.

However, and as to be expected, the sounding and sampling equipment was generally primitive at first, but great improvement had been made during and after World War Two. One of the first post-war cruises was carried out in 1947 by Maurice Ewing of Columbia University in collaboration with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute of Massachusetts, aboard a ship named the “Atlantis,” of all things, and this cruise and another the following year explored the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and the area around the Azores.

The Azores Plateau is a triangular-shaped section of supposed oceanic crust submerged to a depth of about 2,000 m, and upon which the volcanic islands that constitute the archipelago are built up. A number of islets and many submarine volcanoes are also present. The crust attains a thickness of between 20 and 30 kilometers, being thickest toward the east (Zanon et al., 2023). As mentioned above, the Azores Platform straddles the Mid-Atlantic Ridge with the islands of Corvo and Flores to the west, and the remainder to the east.

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Twice as old as Stonehenge, Göbekli Tepe was built by hunter-gatherers who did not yet have the wheel to assist them in their development. However, 30 years after its discovery, the debate over the site has intensified, with archaeologists having a wide range of views about what kind of ritual activity took place at the site.

The early phases of human civilization were once believed to have followed a specific progression, beginning with nomadic hunter-gatherers, who then developed agriculture and established permanent settlements, followed by the establishment of large population centres, and finally the complex social hierarchies that allowed for the development of religious beliefs and monument construction.

The investigation of Göbekli Tepe was initiated in 1994 by German archaeologist Klaus Schmidt, who uncovered a large, sophisticated, ceremonial structure dating back approximately 12,000 years. Today, some of the theories and interpretations regarding this structure and what it represents for human history are being evaluated by a new generation of archaeologists who disagree with Schmidt’s ideas.

For an in-depth investigation of this ongoing debate and the unanswered questions regarding Göbekli Tepe, consider subscribing to Ancient Origins to learn about all of the competing theories.

The Cathedral on a Hill

Göbekli Tepe is an incredibly large archaeological site composed of several circular structures, each made up of enormous stone pillars shaped like T’s (T-shaped). The tallest of these pillars are 5.4m (18 feet tall) and can weigh as much as 22,680kg (50 tons). All of these pillars were made using only flint tools and stone hammers and transported over long distances (hundreds of yards) up the hill, where they were erected with such precision that they all have perfectly aligned geometric shapes.

The bas-relief carvings on the pillars are quite stunning. Instead of the traditional Neolithic representations of fertility and game animals that we see in most other archaeological sites, Göbekli Tepe’s pillars are primarily covered with representations of scary, aggressive-type animals: scorpions, spiders, snakes, wild boars, and vultures (to name a few). Schmidt believed that the T-shape of the pillars represents an abstract form of human beings and were gathering areas for a regional cult of death worshippers (a “death cult”). “The first thing is the temple; the second (and last) thing is the city,” as Schmidt famously said. He further posits that the monumental construction effort involved in building Göbekli Tepe forced groups of hunter-gatherers to discover agriculture to provide food for the enormous number of workers involved in constructing the site. In Schmidt’s view, the onset of religion is what catalyzed the emergence of organized civilization.

The Astronomical Alignment Debate

Schmidt’s “religion first” theory quickly gained acceptance as the prevailing theory regarding the significance of Göbekli Tepe, but just as quickly many competing theories were put forth, including the proposal that Göbekli Tepe was used for astronomical observations.

There are several researchers that have proposed the theory that the central pillars of the enclosures were aligned so that the movement of certain stars, especially Sirius and the constellation Orion, could be tracked. The animal engravings found within the enclosures are interpreted as an early attempt at establishing a zodiacal system, and they theorize it was used to help track the seasons (through the movement of stars) or to record an event; possibly the impact of a large comet that occurred at the end of the last ice age.

Mainstream archaeologists have disagreed strongly with the astronomical theory. They have pointed out that the enclosures were originally constructed underground (with roofs), so it would have been impossible to observe the night sky directly. Additionally, the night sky would have had a drastically different arrangement 12,000 years ago, due to the precession of the equinoxes; therefore, there have been inconsistencies in attempts to align the central pillars of Göbekli Tepe with ancient star maps.

The Skull Cult and the Houses of the Living

After Klaus Schmidt’s passing in 2014, the new research team began testing Klaus Schmidt’s premise that Göbekli Tepe was only a “ritual site” completely distinct from the surrounding environment in which it was located. Recent excavations nearby have unearthed structures consistent with the existence of domestic dwellings, cisterns for collecting rainwater, and tools used in the food preparation process. All of which has led the research team to develop a new hypothesis around Göbekli Tepe being an active location of people living and working daily rather than just a “cathedral in the sky”. It is proposed that the monumental pillars located within the monumental enclosures may serve as central architectural pieces for multi-use communal houses versus serving solely as open-air temples.

In addition, while there remains evidence of activity associated with “dark” rituals, as seen in a 2017 publication by anthropologists, there also remains the potential for ritualistic skulls being displayed at the site. The study reported finding many human remains that were intentionally cut and had carved grooves in the skull, many had been drilled through the centre of the cranium to allow the individual to be suspended by cords. This is the earliest known archaeological record for the existence of a skull cult as part of a wider set of ritualistic behaviours within the region (and possibly beyond).

The 95 Percent Mystery

Göbekli Tepe’s continuing debate is indicative of the fact that extremely little is currently known about this site and what it holds; so far only a small portion of its extensive area (less than 5%) has been excavated. Ground-penetrating radar and geomagnetic survey results suggest that the four known monuments represent only a small part of the buried area - there are approximately 15 additional monumental enclosures with hundreds of large pillars lying below ground.

The long-awaited results of ongoing excavation work will not be available until many more decades (even centuries) from now. Up until then, the oldest religious site in the world represents a mirror to the opinions humans have regarding their own natures, whether it served as an observatory free of violence, as a site devoted to the worship of ancestors or whether it was simply the unintended outcome of an enormous attempt at architectural construction, thereby giving rise to agriculture.

Whether or not it was constructed based on intentional designs does not change the fact that the people who built Göbekli Tepe (hunter-gatherers) were able to accomplish what had, until recently, been believed to be impossible: they looked at their unrestrained, chaotic environment and created something that would endure throughout time.

Top Image: Aerial view of the Göbekli Tepe excavation site in southeastern Turkey, showing the massive circular enclosures built nearly 12,000 years ago. Source: UNESCO World Heritage Centre

By Aris Manus

References

Curry, Andrew (2008). Gobekli Tepe: The World’s First Temple? Smithsonian Magazine. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/gobekli-tepe-the-worlds-first-temple-83613665/

Nalewicki, Jennifer (2025). Göbekli Tepe: The Mysterious Site Older Than Stonehenge. History.com. https://www.history.com/articles/gobekli-tepe

Gresky, J., et al. (2017). Modified human crania from Göbekli Tepe provide evidence for a new form of Neolithic skull cult. Science Advances. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.1700564

Haklay, Gil (2020). Geometry and Architectural Planning at Göbekli Tepe, Turkey. Cambridge Archaeological Journal.

In the fall of 1898, Olof Öhman, a Swedish immigrant farmer, was clearing off land on his farm near Kensington, Minnesota. While trying to pull out a deformed poplar tree, he made an important discovery that would begin one of the most heated and enduring debates within archaeology throughout North America.

The roots of the tree were entwined with a huge 202 lb. slab of greywacke stone, with strange angular carvings on the front and one side of the stone. When Öhman and his ten year old son uncovered the stone by brushing away the dirt, they noticed that the carvings looked like an “Indian almanac” to Öhman, but scholars have now determined that the markings are Scandinavian runes. Once translated, the text tells a startling tale about how a group of thirty Norse explorers traveled far inland into North America in the year 1362 and left behind ten men “red with blood” after they were murdered.

If genuine, the Kensington Runestone would drastically change the chronology of European exploration in the Americas, placing Vikings in the Heartland of North America one hundred thirty years before Columbus sailed. The academia collectively response was to challenge the authenticity of the stone which has sparked an ongoing debate more than one hundred years later; see the entire investigation regarding the Kensington Runestones’ authenticity and the experts who do not support its authenticity by upgrading your subscription.

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