From a statue that sang at sunrise to a shocking new revelation of a mummy thanks to new technology,
here are 10 of the most mysterious archaeological discoveries ever!
10: The Singing Statues The Colossi or Colossus of Memnon are two
of the most mysterious statues in all of Egypt.
Also known as the singing statues, they are two huge statues found on the bank of the
River Nile near Luxor in the Theban Necropolis.
Each statue measures about 60 feet tall, built during the 14th century BC.
They were built during the reign of Pharaoh Amenhotep III, who ruled Egypt 3400 years
ago.
They originally depicted the pharaoh sitting on a throne with his hands on his knees and
his gaze facing the river.
Thousands of years ago, they were guarding Amenhotep’s memorial temple.
The temple has mostly been destroyed by now, though some of its ruins are still there.
The mystery behind the Colossi of Memnon is that they used to sing.
As crazy as it sounds, the statues once made strange musical sounds at dawn, shocking early
Greek and Roman tourists.
These same tourists didn’t know what the statues really represented and thought that
instead of being built for a pharaoh, they were representations of Memnon, a hero from
the Trojan War.
Memnon was the King of Ethiopia and fought against the Greeks on the side of the Trojans,
but he was slain by Achilles.
Legend goes that Memnon was the son of Eros, the goddess of dawn.
After Memnon’s death, his mother shed tears each dawn in mourning for her lost son.
The Greeks and Romans thought it was Eros herself here in this place, weeping.
But if it wasn’t the goddess, then what were these sounds?
In 27 BC there was an earthquake that caused the top of one of the colossal statues to
collapse and the rest of it to crack.
From then on the statue began to sing, or make a whistling or moaning sound when the
sun rose.
The rising temperatures at dawn caused dew to evaporate inside the cracks of the statues,
creating a sound that could be heard floating across the desert.
9: The Antikythera Bronze Arm The Antikythera Shipwreck has been named the
most intriguing shipwreck in the world.
It is most famous for the Antikythera mechanism, a contraption filled with gears and what appear
to be machine pieces, believed to be the world’s first computer.
Even though the wreck was first discovered in 1900, more recent expeditions to explore
the wreck have revealed even more incredible and mysterious treasures!
In 2014 archaeologists started a new project to explore the site using modern technology.
So far they have found hundreds of objects!
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute Working with the Greek Ephorate of Underwater Antiquities
have found a strange bronze arm and nobody's sure what it was a part of.
It was probably part of a bronze statue, but the rest of the statue has yet to be uncovered.
The team has uncovered many sculptures and revealed the location of at least 9 more hiding
under rocks on the seafloor.
They also found a bronze gear that could be part of the Antikythera mechanism.
A marine archaeologist described the wreck as a tractor-trailer truck wrecked on the
way to Christie’s auction house for fine art—it’s just amazing.”
Even more bizarre is that the team also discovered a skeleton belonging to someone who went down
with the ship over 2000 years ago, something that almost never happens with shipwrecks
because the bones are usually picked apart by underwater creatures.
From the Antikythera Mechanism to the bronze arm – plus the mysterious skeleton, the
mystery of this shipwreck just keeps getting more and more confusing.
How did the ship sink?
Why did it have so many treasures?
There's lots more still to uncover!
8: Ancient Fingerprints Archaeologists excavating a complex of ancient
buildings at the Ness of Brodgar archaeological site in Scotland have found a mysterious fingerprint
leftover on a clay vessel made over 5000 years ago.
Archaeologists have been investigating the Neolithic site since 2006 and this is the
first time they ever discovered a real human fingerprint!
It was first noticed by a ceramic specialist named Roy Towers as he inspected a massive
collection of late Neolithic grooved pottery recovered from the area.
He had to use something known as reflectance transformation imaging to confirm that the
print was indeed from a human finger.
With additional investigation, archaeologists are hoping the fingerprint can reveal the
age and gender of the potter who left it behind.
According to Nick Card, the excavation director for the site, people often forget about the
ancient people who crafted the artifacts at rare archaeological locations like this.
But Nick says the discovery of the fingerprint is really bringing the ancient people back
into focus.
It's giving the archaeologist a more personal connection to the Neolithic people of ancient
Scotland who left all these amazing relics behind.
The fingerprint itself won’t yield any huge revelations about our ancient ancestors – but
it’s still a pretty fascinating discovery, and it makes you wonder why more fingerprints
haven’t been found at other ancient places around the world.
Especially in things made by hand!
7: Ancient Assyrian Artifacts More mysterious artifacts were discovered
recently in Iraq.
Very rare Assyrian carvings dating back 2700 years to the rule of King Sargon II have been
found, showing further proof of just how powerful the Assyrian Empire was during the 8th century
BC.
Back then, King Sargon ruled a huge part of the Middle East and was greatly feared by
all other kingdoms in the area.
A team of Italian and Iraqi archaeologists uncovered the stone reliefs adorning an ancient
canal system dug into the rock.
The carvings were beautifully crafted.
In fact, the carvings were so brilliant that archaeologists were stunned because things
like this are usually found only in royal temples and palaces.
According to Daniele Morandi Bonacossi, an archaeologist working on the project, Assyrian
rock reliefs are very rare monuments.
No such panels have been discovered since 1845 and it's believed that most of them are
hidden underneath the soil and will probably never be seen by human eyes.
But the presence of such striking stone artwork on the remains of what was once nothing more
than a canal goes to show that the old Assyrian Empire was likely a shimmering jewel of the
Middle East with highly detailed artworks all throughout the kingdom, not only in places
of high value like temples and palaces.
Unfortunately, nobody really knows what these stone carvings mean.
This area of Iraq has been closed to researchers pretty much since the 70s, meaning that efforts
to decode the society of the ancient Assyrians have been seriously stunted.
What we do know is that the stone carvings appear to show King Sargon II and a procession
of mystery Assyrian gods, with one of them riding a dragon.
6: The Stones of Baalbek The largest monolith on Earth will probably
surprise you.
It's not in Egypt.
It's not in England.
It's nowhere in the Americas.
The largest worked monolith on Earth is known as ‘the Stone of the South’, and it's
located in Lebanon, at the site of the Baalbek Temple.
The stone at Baalbek weighs an outstanding 1242 tons.
It was likely intended to be part of the temple foundation, located just over 3000 feet away.
But the huge stone of Baalbek proved too much for the workers to handle.
They did somehow manage to move some stones that weighed up to around 800 tons into the
temple and raise them over 20 feet into the air.
This outstanding feat of engineering has been forgotten, but the builders were able to place
these ginormous blocks with machine-like precision.
This one specifically just couldn't be done.
But wait, because there are other stones that have just been discovered that were also meant
to be a part of the massive temple.
A team of archaeologists have found another stone buried in the dirt a few feet away from
the Stone of the South that could be even bigger.
So far, it's over 60 feet long and they haven't even finished digging yet.
According to those working on the project, this new block of stone is adding to the mystery
of this ancient site.
But let’s look at the actual temple these stones were intended to be used with.
The Temple of Baalbek is a site shrouded in mystery.
All we know is that the Romans called it Heliopolis and that the area around the temple has been
occupied since the Bronze Age.
Some say it could be the Phoenicians who built it, others say it was the biblical Canaanites.
Others say it was crafted by giants because of how immense the blocks are that make up
the temple's foundations.
The truth is that we don’t know who built it or how they put together building blocks
over 1200 tons in weight thousands of years ago!
5: Children’s Handprints Over 100 mysterious handprints have been found
on the walls of a cave in Mexico.
The handprints were put there by children over 1200 years ago.
Scientists now believe the handprints may be part of a mysterious and unknown ritual
practiced by the ancient Maya in which children were ushered into adulthood.
At least 137 handprints have been found in black and red paint.
The cavern in which they were discovered is located at the tip of the Yucatan Peninsula.
What's really interesting is that according to archaeologist Sergio Grosjean, black represents
death.
But this doesn't mean the children were to be killed.
Instead, the black paint probably represented death from a ritual perspective.
As for the red paint, it probably referred either to war or life.
The combination of both suggests some kind of connection between life and death and the
coming of age.
At the time these handprints were left in the cave, the Maya were going through their
classical zenith period.
In other words, they were at their peak in everything from art to agriculture.
Strangely, this is the only evidence found anywhere in the ancient kingdom of this handprint
coming-of-age ritual showing us that there is still much we don’t know about them.
4: Archaeological Bunnies A family of bunny rabbits accidentally became
archaeologists when they made a major discovery on a small Welsh island.
The rabbits excavated an ancient shard of pottery and mysterious Stone Age tools while
trying to burrow a new home.
The wardens of the island, Richard Brown and Giselle Eagle, noticed the fresh rabbit hole
and decided to take a look.
That was when they saw the ancient artifacts sticking out of the dirt.
An archaeologist from the National Museum in Wales was quick to confirm the tools as
being from the Stone Age.
As for the pottery shard, it was made significantly later.
The shard is just shy of 4000 years old, and was part of a burial urn from the Bronze Age.
The tools were made by hunter-gatherers about 5000 years before that!
How both of the relics ended up being excavated by a rabbit on a tiny Welsh island is baffling.
What we know so far is that for thousands of years, people have been returning to the
area and leaving behind pieces of their history.
But why would they return to this tiny island over and over again?
The answer is that they were probably preparing seal skins to build boats.
Either that, or they were using the island as a massive graveyard.
We won’t know the truth until someone starts digging up bones.
3: Incan Walls The Incan wall complex at Sacsayhuaman is
one of the most controversial archaeological discoveries anywhere in Peru.
The complex was built by preindustrial Incans and is considered a great marvel of engineering.
Some of the biggest blocks ever used in Incan construction were used at this location, with
blocks fitting together so tightly that the Incans never needed to use mortar and even
today, the blocks are so firm against one another that you can't even slip a piece of
paper between them.
This has caused some to speculate that the Incans used alien technology in developing
this ancient city.
The truth is that the Inca probably just had highly advanced engineering skills.
They knew how to carve rock with exact dimensions to play a prehistoric game of Tetris.
But unfortunately, the Spanish cannibalized Sacsayhuaman during their takeover of Cusco,
not literally but you know.
They destroyed the people, the towers, the battlements, and most of the walls.
This has really hindered archeologists in their fight to decode the ancient Inca and
understand more about their impossibly complex and advanced building techniques.
We still don't know how they did it.
2: A Pregnant Mummy In 2021, a pregnant Egyptian mummy was discovered
for the very first time in a shocking revelation of archaeology.
At first, archaeologists simply thought they had the mummy of an ancient priest.
It wasn't until they scanned the mummy that they found evidence of tiny foot bones inside
the mummy’s abdomen.
Further scans confirmed that the foot belonged to a fetus still inside the womb of its mummified
mother.
According to Science Alert, this is the first time that anyone has ever found a pregnant
woman who had been mummified deliberately.
The mystery here is simple yet evasive.
Who was the pregnant mummy and why did they wrap her in bandages and stuff her into a
sarcophagus with her fetus still inside her belly?
Nobody knows why the fetus wasn't first removed from the abdomen.
But what's really cool is just how far we've come with our archaeological technology.
The mummy and its sarcophagus were given to the University of Warsaw back in 1826.
It wasn't until literally now that researchers finally found the fetus inside the mummy.
The woman was also mummified with extreme care, a set of expensive amulets, and all
the telltale signs of a wealthy person.
Hopefully with more investigation, archaeologists can find out who this obviously important
woman was when she died just over 2000 years ago.
1: The Carnac Stones The Carnac stones have puzzled archaeologists
for hundreds of years.
The megalithic stones can be found outside the small village of Carnac in France.
The stones show alignments and other ancient geometrics similar to other prehistoric megaliths
across the world.
But what's strange is that the stones here have boggled researchers to no end.
There about 3000 of them at Carnac, erected by the pre-Celtic civilization sometime between
3300 BC and 4500 BC.
First of all, how and why were the stones moved?
It's true that Carnac is the largest megalithic site in the world.
But researchers don't understand how the Neolithic people of Europe moved the stones over 30
miles to the middle of a barren field.
On top of this, researchers don't understand what purpose the stones served.
They could have been used by druids in rituals, they may have been built in direct alignment
with the stars, or they may have acted as markings for the borders of the builders’
kingdom.
Basically, nobody knows for sure.
But the Carnac stones are still some of the most well-preserved ancient stones on the
planet.
They’re also around the same age as Stonehenge, yet far more complex and confusing.
Thanks for watching!
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