Ghosts of the Old World: Ancient Artifact Pictures to Make Your Hair Stand on End
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The chilling gold leaf death mask now known as the "Mask of Agamemnon" was unearthed from an ancient shaft tomb in Mycenae in the 1870s by an archaeologist named Heinrich Schliemann. Though the origin and ownership of the mask have been called into question -- for example, it is believed to be from the 16th century B.C., making it too old to belong to the true Greek king Agamemnon, if there was such a person -- it is an intriguing clue into how the ancient Mycenaeans felt about death and the afterlife. The outer shape of the skull is pressed nearly flat. The eyes appear at once both opened and closed. In short, it's worth a shiver or two. Read on to see more of the creepiest and most unexplainable traces left behind by the unfathomable people of the distant past.
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The ancient city of Catal Huyuk in modern-day Turkey is one of the best-preserved Neolithic settlements in the world, giving us a fascinating window into the strange world of Stone Age civilization. These mysterious "twin" figurines, fused along the sides of the bodies, were discovered among the many symbolic artifacts at the site, which include animal figurines and primitive representations of the human form. Archaeologists believe this particular artifact may be more than 8,000 years old. Ancient figurines like these are found all over the world, suggesting they played a religious, magical or totemistic role in pre-state societies.
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This odd, wide-eyed, cross-shaped figurine was unearthed from an ancient Vinca site in what is now the country of Serbia. It is housed in the Serbian National Museum in Belgrade. And we wonder why some people think alien life forms made contact with our distant forebears.
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Is this the face of a god, of a ghost, or of an ordinary man or woman? Whatever the case, archaeologists date these Vinca sculptures to sometime between 4500 and 3500 B.C. Next, you'll see an extremely complex ancient machine that seems to defy explanation.
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This is the rusted carcass of the once-magnificent Antikythera mechanism -- a compact astronomical calculator that is believed to be the oldest analog computer in human history. In the first century B.C., a ship sank off the coast of the island Antikythera, taking to the bottom of the Aegean Sea this unthinkable ancient computer. The wreck was discovered by sponge divers in 1901, and since the recovery of the ship's contents, archaeologists have been amazed by the otherworldly sophistication of this mechanism. No one knows for sure who put together the bronze gears of the Iron Age star-charting machine. That secret, like so many others, is lost to time.
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Throughout the Pacific southwest region of Costa Rica lie stone spheres that are centuries old. One of these mysterious pre-Columbian monuments rests on display outside the National Museum in Costa Rica. The smooth, sometimes immense globes -- many of which achieve a startling, near-perfect roundness -- have been the subject of modern myths and speculation. Next, you'll see a highly contested artifact of possibly ancient origins.
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This is the Shroud of Turin -- a long piece of faded linen, showing the outline of what appears to be a dead human body. Many Christians believe that the shroud is the actual burial dressing of the dead Jesus of Nazareth, and that the ghostly imprint is the true figure of Christ. If this were true, it would make the linen almost 2,000 years old. However, when provided with small pieces of the shroud for testing, several independent laboratories concluded that the linen bearing the unsettling image had been manufactured as recently as the 14th century A.D.
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There's certainly no shortage of low-budget horror movies about grotesque animal-human hybrids, but 20th-century geeks weren't the first to envision mixed-up monsters of this kind. Ancient Greeks, who knew nothing about DNA or gene splicing, dreamt up equally horrifying visions, such as the Minotaur -- a vicious half-man, half-bull who roamed the hidden Labyrinth of Crete. The image of the monster is pervasive in ancient Greek art and sculpture.
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This smug-looking bronze figurine and its gold foil mask were brought up from the site of Sanxingdui in the Sichuan Province of China. The figures were found among the contents of several sacrificial pits, which also contained elephant tusks, burned bones and jade carvings. Sanxingdui's artifacts are more than 3,000 years old, from the Chinese Bronze Age. You'll see another strange Chinese artifact in the next image.
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This ceremonial vessel from the Hunan Provincial Museum is certainly a fine work of antique art, but there's just something about it -- something that makes one slightly hesitant to pull up a chair and sit down for a game of checkers.
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"My, what big eyes you have!" Though these metal masks may look frozen in surprise, mummies have already been through it all, from desiccation in baths of natron salts to the removal of nearly every crucial internal organ. These wide-eyed remains are found in the Valley of the Golden Mummies -- a deposit of preserved human corpses from the Greco-Roman period in ancient Egypt. In the next image, you'll see a mummy mask from the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.
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This vividly painted burial mask of copper plates and woven feathers was a product of the pre-Columbian Chimu culture of northern coastal Peru. Next: How can even the most beautiful art become a discomforting shadow of its former self?
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What makes some ancient artifacts so disturbing is not the original design, but the way that time and decay have acted upon things that were once new. Take, for example, this Egyptian sculpture from the 14th century B.C. It may have once been a rather plain and lovely vision of a human being, but look how the ages have left it: the chipped and jagged ear, the rough smudge of natural texture where the nose has been broken or crumbled away. Not to mention the creepy, recessed hollows where eyes should be. Some people believe this sculpture is supposed to represent the head of Nefertiti, the wife of the pharaoh Akhenaten. Whoever it is, it has now become something entirely different: an artifact.
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Are there ancient Egyptian aviators hiding somewhere in history? The so-called "Saqqara Bird" was unearthed from an ancient gravesite in Saqqara, Egypt, in the 1890s. Though the wooden figurine was more than two millennia old by the time it was re-discovered, some speculated that the bird was no mere child's toy or religious idol. The bird's wooden wings were, in fact, somewhat similar in shape and position to the wings of modern-day wooden gliders, which suggested that the ancient Egyptians who built the wooden figure may have understood some of the fundamentals of aerodynamic lift and thus could have been working toward technological flight. Unfortunately, the bird that remains seems to lack the crucial tail plane that could have stabilized it for gliding. There's no proof whether such a tail plane was once part of the figurine or not. Some experiments have attempted to show that such a glider could have, in fact, flown with only the existing wings, but there is no agreement among scholars that technological flight was known to the ancients. So for now, the Saqqara Bird remains grounded.
Image Credit: Dawoud Khalil Messiha
This is the Venus of Willendorf -- a famous ancient figurine if there ever was one. This carving, showing an exaggerated representation of the female form, is believed to be about 25,000 years old, dating back to a time firmly within the Paleolithic Era, when even the ancient empires we often think of as the beginning of history were unknown. The 4.5-inch (11.4-centimeter) woman of Willendorf was probably carved by the hunter-gatherers who lived on the Austrian banks of the Danube River in that long-ago eon. Her exaggerated features, faceless head and great age make her one of the strangest and most intriguing artifacts in human history.
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This is a surface from the famed Gundestrup cauldron. As iron soldiers arm themselves for battle in the upper and lower panels to the right, the panel on the left almost certainly depicts an image that is even more violent and chilling: a human sacrifice in progress. This cauldron was found in a bog in Denmark and dated to the Iron Age. However, the inhabitants of Iron Age Europe were not the only people in history to offer up human lives in their religious rites -- in fact, human sacrifice was a disturbingly common practice in the ancient world, which took place from one corner of the globe to the other.
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This pair of figurines -- a seated male and female, both looking somewhat dazed -- shows the style of some ancient art from the region of Veracruz in Central America. Next, you'll see an ancient Viking who may have been part of a human sacrifice ritual.
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This is the Tollund Man -- an ancient Scandinavian body, preserved since his death in the Iron Age by the natural mummification of a Jutland peat-bog. The man's body shows evidence of a violent death, most likely some form of strangulation by rope, and some have suggested that the conditions of his death are indicative of human sacrifice by pre-Roman Viking cultures. Why is this considered a possible religious sacrifice, and not just a murder or execution, as of a criminal? The man's body shows signs of having been treated respectfully after his death, with his eyes and mouth closed, and with his body laid gently in a restful pose before sinking into the bog.
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This stone altar, known as "Altar #5," is found among a group of ancient Olmec ruins in the Mexican state of Tabasco. The sculpture emerging from the hood of rock is believed to depict the human sacrifice of a child. Years of exposure to the raw effects of weather have left the details blurred and blunted, so the face of the ominously posed man is now nothing more than a rounded surface, with bumps and recesses representing what were once features. Click ahead to see another artifact possibly related to human sacrifice.
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This is the Tizoc Stone -- another altar believed to have long ago been used for human sacrifices. Part of the evidence for this interpretation is starkly utilitarian: a carved gutter, extending from the center of the altar to the edge at a downward slope, which archaeologists believe could have been meant for draining blood.
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Trepanning is the process of drilling a hole into a living person's skull. Sometimes this is necessary for practical, medical reasons, but human beings had been drilling their skulls long before the advent of real medical science. Mesolithic and Neolithic human remains show that even Stone Age healers and priests practiced trepanning -- whether for religious purposes, or in some attempt to relieve pain or mental affliction, we don't know. What we do know, however, is that some of the ancient skulls that contain these burr holes show signs of smooth, healed-over bone at the edges, meaning some patients survived the operation -- even when it was conducted with Stone Age technology, which probably amounted to little more than a sharp rock tied to a stick.
Image Credit: Peter Treveris
This 17th-century copper engraving depicts a European barber-surgeon practicing primitive phlebotomy, also known as "bloodletting," which was designed to cure a wide range of medical problems. While bloodletting procedures involving blade kits, leeches and glass bells for collecting blood were practiced until frighteningly recent times, bloodletting also stretches long into the past. Some recovered artifacts even depict bloodletting in ancient Egypt and Greece!
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What makes this 17th-century-B.C. stele of the Babylonian king Hammurabi's laws so frightening? Most of us are comforted by the presence of rules and restrictions to keep the peace and ensure justice, but on the other hand, sometimes the imposed order is more terrifying than chaos. The Code of Hammurabi is full of unsettling insights into the violence and confusion of the ancient world -- some of the laws, for example, spell out the punishments for casting various spells and curses on one's neighbor. The punishments for almost all crimes are potentially capital. Here's one of Hammurabi's laws, translated by L. W. King: "If fire break out in a house, and someone who comes to put it out cast his eye upon the property of the owner of the house, and take the property of the master of the house, he shall be thrown into that self-same fire." One wonders, in the case of this law, how the thief's guilt is supposed to be judged while the house fire is still burning …
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This Thracian-style helmet was recovered from the dwelling of a Roman gladiator in the buried ancient city of Pompeii. Many Thracian helmets from the ancient world appear equally monstrous -- can you imagine a man armed with a sword or pike, with a head that looked like this, charging toward you across an open plain?
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Though war and violent death have always been and probably will always be a horror like no other, it's sometimes more terrifying to imagine the clashes of ages past, before guns, before bombs, and certainly before modern medicine. The weapons of ancient ages, such as this iron sword from an Etruscan tomb in Italy, give off an aura of palpable brutality that can make even the toughest warrior wince.
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The faces of the Chinese Qin emperor's famous Terracotta Warriors would strike fear in the hearts of not just any opposing mineral army, but modern discoverers as well. Each fighter in the Terracotta Army is individually designed, with his own physical features and expression, yet none of them look particularly inclined to show mercy or understanding. These guys mean business. Check out the next image to see the variation between the different figures.
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The frightening Terracotta Army was assembled for battle in the third century B.C. Next, you'll see a pair of disquieting and surreal stone creatures from ancient Assyria.
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These winged and bearded bulls, now housed in the Louvre in Paris, once guarded the entryway to the fortress of the Assyrian king Sargon II. Presumably, they did a pretty good job. Cloven hooves, elephantine bulk and beards like battering rams make for a truly frightening mythical creature.
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This artifact is known as the Narmer Palette. Believed to be more than 5,000 years old, the ancient engraving depicts the first unification of Egypt into a single kingdom under a single ruler: Narmer, the first pharaoh of both Upper and Lower Egypt. On one side, the victorious Narmer is shown dominating his former enemies and ascending to power. He stands gigantic, posed over a captive, with a club in hand, ready to strike. On the other side, lion-like creatures with long, snaking necks face one another tensely.
Image Credit: Jeff Dahl
This Etruscan cinerary urn shows a grisly battle scene, with warriors dealing blows near the top, and fallen fighters trampled underfoot. Cinerary vessels like these were designed to hold the ashes of cremated bodies.
Image Credit: © Burstein Collection/CORBIS
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