12 Most Incredible Ancient Artifacts Finds

artifacts are a historian's best friend they're the building blocks that allow us to put together a picture of what life might have been like for our ancient ancestors almost anything can qualify as an artifact so long as it's been shaped by human hands and has at least some cultural significance but average artifacts don't make the cut for this video we bring you only the best and we've got some fascinating examples to show you [Music] the game of football is played and loved all over the world but the sport started in england the history of football in england dates back to a much earlier time than the formation of the world's first football association in 1863. in fact we have direct evidence that people were playing the game as early as 1540 thanks to this football it was found behind the paneling of the queen's chamber in sterling castle scotland during renovation work in 2010 it may actually be even older than we think it is 1540 was the year that the queen's chamber was decorated but the ball could already have been there at that time mary queen of scots was known to enjoy watching football matches and often wrote about them in her diaries this particular ball was probably used in impromptu games within the castle's courtyards archaeologists believe that it was placed behind the paneled wall as a good luck charm to ward off witchcraft which is about as strange to use for a football as you'll ever find unsurprisingly it's the oldest known football in the world in may 2016 a pensioner in somerset england finally got around asking professional valuers to take a look at a gold crown he'd kept in a cardboard box under his bed for decades the crown had been in his family for generations but nobody seemed to know where to come from when valuers from dukes of dorchester arrived to assess it they could scarcely believe their eyes this is a greek myrtle wreath and it's something like 2300 years old symbolically it's a representation of the crowns that were given out in ancient greece as prizes in athletic or sporting contests those crowns used real leaves though this golden crown is obviously far more valuable the artifacts owner who wishes to remain anonymous says that one of his ancestors traveled extensively through greece and egypt so it was probably picked up on his travels he's yet to cash in on his surprise heirloom but when he does he can expect to make six figures from it a similar head piece went to auction in 2012 and fetched a price equivalent to 300 000. for a long time it was thought that every scrap and fragment of the dead sea scrolls that would ever be found had already been recovered then in march 2021 the impossible happened a few dozen precious fragments of a dead sea scroll were found in a desert cave in the judean desert they're the first of their kind to be found in more than 60 years the delicate artifacts bear greek translations of the book of nahum and zechariah archaeologists think they were probably hidden in the cave deliberately during the first century possibly at the time of the barakakba uprising against roman occupation the cave they were found in is colorfully named the cave of horror which comes from the fact that a whole 40 skeletons were found there during the 1950s a scroll was found there at the same time but these fragments were somehow missed this exciting new finding is part of a new exploration that will penetrate deeper into the caves of the judean desert than ever before raising the possibility of more fragments being found in the near future in 1999 a small archaeological dig was carried out on farmland in the swedish island of gotland mostly for the benefit of a television documentary about archaeology a few coins were found during the dig and the tv crew went home happy with what they'd seen a couple of archaeologists remained at the site because they were convinced there was more to discover and they were right they eventually unearthed the spellings hoard the largest collection of viking silver ever found in total jonas strom and kenneth johnson found 14 295 viking artifacts most of which were coins but there were also hundreds of bronze armlets and arm rings a surprising number of the coins are islamic dirhams minted hundreds of years ago and seemingly buried on purpose beneath an outhouse that stood on the land during the 9th century one item commanded more attention than all the others and that's the so-called moses coin minted in the khazar kingdom during the 800s the inscription on the coin is dedicated to moses rather than muhammad that appears to confirm an ancient legend that the rulers of khazar converted to judaism the whole collection is now displayed at the gotland museum [Music] when humans first came up with the concept of counting they did so with their fingers or by making marks on pieces of stone or wood eventually someone came up with a better idea that idea was the counting board and the salamis tablet is the oldest surviving example of such a device it was made approximately 2300 years ago tablets like this were made from stone or wood and counting was done using beads of pebbles if such luxuries weren't available you could do it using sand or dust because of that some people refer to such artifacts as a sandboard abacus the name salamus tablet comes from the fact that it was found on the greek island of salamis in 1846 these days you'll find it in greece's national archaeological museum in athens aside from being the oldest example of its type it's also one of the grandest indeed were it not made of marble it probably wouldn't have survived for this long the calculations performed on the tablet were surprisingly complicated with each pebble representing a number between 1 and 4 and a system of lines etched into the surface representing powers of ten our modern system seems much easier but we're sure this was child's play at that time archaeologists are prepared to dig and search almost anywhere in the hope of finding an interesting artifact but sometimes nature gives them a helping hand it took a heavy rainstorm close to the site of ancient olympia in greece to reveal our next discovery but it didn't take long for archaeologists to find it after that it's a bronze figurine of a bull sculpted more than 3 000 years ago some of the muddy ground at an existing dig site had given way during the storm and its horns were poking out of the ground when experts returned to the area the following morning the fact that the figurine is so close to the temple of zeus probably isn't a coincidence as the mightiest of all the gods zeus was more likely to receive votive offerings than any other greek deity thousands of offerings were left at the site of the temple between 3 100 and 2 700 years ago but very few of them are as ornate as this whoever left it behind must have been asking zeus for a very large favor we wonder whether they got their wish [Music] legend has it that the ancient roman emperor caligula had a whole fleet of ships that he used exclusively for hosting large-scale orgins whether that's true or not he certainly had a love of parties and grand social occasions and he definitely had an impressive fleet of party ships this piece of mosaic flooring came from one of those ships and it has quite a story behind it the decorative piece which is 2 000 years old was dredged from lake nemi just outside rome during the 19th century after laying there forgotten for centuries inside a shipwreck from there it went to italy's roman ship museum but was stolen from the museum shortly after world war ii the stolen relic somehow ended up in the hands of an aristocratic italian family who lived on the edge of the lake but was sold to a couple who own a desirable park avenue apartment in new york city in the 1960s by then the story of its history was no longer attached to the object so the couple used it as a coffee table when their apartment was photographed for the architectural digest in 2017 the italian police somehow caught sight of it and asked their colleagues in the usa to retrieve their long-lost museum piece it's now finally back in the ship museum [Music] archaeologists in australia know that they found something significant at the site of murrahuang in march 2021 but they're still not entirely sure what it is the artifact made from bone might have been a projectile point on the other hand it might have been a tool of some kind used for piercing soft materials they're a little more certain about its age which is something like 4 500 years at the moment the piercing tool theory is more popular with experts than the projectile theory they think it was used as a pen to fasten cloaks made from possum fur the bone itself came from either a kangaroo or a wallaby couple that with the possibility that it was attached to a possum fur cloak and it's just about the most australian artifact you could imagine while plenty of attention has been foisted upon ancient stone and wood artifacts in australia far less attention has historically been given to bone artifacts if the archaeologist involved in this study can crack the secret of what this artifact actually was it would be a big step in the right direction [Music] a whole clutch of ancient artifacts was found in raleigh north carolina right at the start of 2021 archaeologists were summoned to the city ahead of plans to build a new highway it didn't take them long to take advantage of the opportunity of the several potentially interesting sites the team identified the very first one they started digging at turned out to be a camp used by a tribe of hunter-gatherers 1500 years ago whoever camped here left broken pieces of pottery behind at the site along with a few tools they'd either discarded or forgot to carry with them when they left when they dug further though they hit the jackpot the astonish team found a set of stone points accompanied by polished stone with a series of holes drilled into it for unknown reasons the stone points have been estimated as being between eight and ten 000 years old but the polish stone which is a best guess might have been a piece of jewelry is closer to 10 000 years old all of the stone comes from the uwari mountains which is itself a puzzle because the mountains are over 100 miles from this site the team is still hard at work at the site so there may be more to come learning how to make bread was a fundamental breakthrough when it comes to human beings having the ability to feed themselves it's a very ancient practice but it might surprise you to find out just how old it is in july 2018 archaeologists came across a stone fireplace in the black desert of jordan within that fireplace was a tiny charred piece of flatbread when it was tested it turned out to be an incredible 14 400 years old that comfortably makes it the oldest piece of bread in the world its age puts it four thousand years ahead of the development of agriculture in fact a current working theory is that the long-winded process of gathering wild cereals to make bread like this might have been what inspired early humans to start cultivating grain in an organized fashion in the first place while it's impossible to be sure this flatbread was probably made by a tribe called the nataphians who lived at the very beginning of the human transition from nomadic to sedentary living they used quite a strange recipe to make their bread including tubers from aquatic plants it probably tasted gritty salty and not particularly appetizing a collection of weapons was found close to the city of adam in oman in early 2016. the weapons are 3 000 years old and made from bronze which would automatically make them interesting but there's something even more fascinating about this horde rather than being full sized and battle ready this is actually a collection of miniature replicas the mini weapons are far too small to have been of any use on a battlefield which begs the question of why they were made as a best guess archaeologists think that they might have been offerings made to a war god before heading into battle carrying their full-sized equivalents there's still questions about that conclusion though including the matter of whether bronze would really have been used to make replica weapons the proper versions of the weapons were made from wood and leather so why use a precious metal for non-functional copies every kind of weapon from the era is represented from bows and arrows to daggers and battle axes fragments of ceramic incense burners have also been found at the same site which supports the idea of a ritual burial but we'll have to make peace with the idea that we'll probably never know the truth when you think of 18th century queen marie antoinette you probably think of the famous quote let them eat cake you'd be wrong to think that though because she never actually said it however she did wear this very pretty silk shoe which was auctioned in versailles in november 2020 and fetched 12 000 silk might seem like a somewhat impractical material to make a shoe out of but in this case it's been reinforced with goat skin marie antoinette was well known for her extremely elaborate outfits and her love of fine fashion and this shoe is entirely in keeping with the kind of things she'd wear around her palaces during her reign like a mother sending her child to school she had her name sewn into the heel her reasons for doing so are unknown surely the shoe wouldn't have been mistaken for someone else's and only a fool would have tried to steal from her it's thought that marie emily leshivan marie antoinette's chambermaid fled from france with the shoe after the french revolution after that it stayed in her family for the next two centuries before they eventually decided to cash in on it [Music] subscribe to the channel and turn on notifications and you will be the first to know when a new video comes out thank you for watching and 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Channel: Inforado

Views: 81,008

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Keywords: 12 Most Incredible Ancient Artifacts Finds, ancient artifacts, ancient finds, archaeological finds, archaeological artifacts, incredible finds, artifact found, 12 most, top 12, most amazing

Id: Y1h9Q56hwT0

Length: 15min 28sec (928 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 13 2021