#berenike

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Archaeologists Find Roman Centurions' Letters in Ancient Animal Cemetery in Egypt

Discovered among the graves of hundreds of cats, dogs and monkeys, the correspondence was likely written by centurions in the first century.

An ancient pet cemetery in Egypt is becoming a gold mine for rare Roman history. Alongside its carefully constructed graves of more than 200 beloved cats, dogs and monkeys, archaeologists have now found letters handwritten 1,900 years ago by Roman centurions stationed nearby.

Though Rome controlled Egypt for centuries—from the year 30 to the mid-600s—few Roman sites still exist in the region, lead researcher Marta Osypińska, an archaeologist at Poland’s University of Wrocław’s Institute of Archaeology, tells Science in Poland’s Ewelina Krajczyńska. The burial ground, which dates back to the first and second centuries, is located in Berenike, a Red Sea port in southern Egypt built by Roman Emperor Tiberius.

Osypińska’s team first discovered the cemetery in 2011, and they’ve been slowly excavating it since then. Among the burials of cats, dogs and exotic monkeys, researchers have found ceramics, Roman coins and now, several letters written on papyrus by military officers who commanded units of Roman legions.

According to a statement by the University of Wrocław, these “priceless sources of knowledge about the ancient inhabitants of Berenike” are from the era of Emperor Nero, a cruel Roman ruler of the mid-first century. During his reign, Berenike was a hub of cross-continental trade, through which goods from India, Arabia and East Africa flowed, Osypińska says in the statement. The port was home to regional merchants, Roman higher-ups in charge of trading and—as historians have long suspected but never before proven—a unit of the Roman military.

The newly-found correspondence contains several names of presumed Roman centurions: Haosus, Lucinius and Petronius. In one letter, Petronius asks Lucinius, who is stationed in Berenike, about the prices of some exclusive goods, Osypińska tells Science in Poland. Petronius writes that he’s sending money via “dromedarius,” a unit of Roman soldiers traveling on camels, and tells Lucinius to provide the soldiers with veal and tentpoles.

Researchers believe ancient Romans likely kept the papyri in a nearby office which was later destroyed, accidentally distributing its contents over the pet cemetery, as McClatchy’s Aspen Pflughoeft writes. Excavators found the papyrus in rolled fragments, which they showed to Rodney Asta, an expert of ancient inscriptions, who pieced together a page approximately one and a half feet long and a foot wide, Osypińska tells Science in Poland. Among the animal graves, researchers have found countless ostracons—pieces of pottery etched with writing—but the papyri are the first paper texts to be found on-site.

The letters are the latest evidence of advanced Roman trade to be found in the cemetery, per the statement: The skeletons of several buried monkeys, recently identified as macaques native to India, show that Romans imported non-utilitarian animals across oceans. These primates, along with long-haired cats and miniature dogs, were “elite pets,” and many were buried with toys, ceramics or other animal companions.

As Osypińska notes in the statement, it may seem difficult to reconcile the image of commanders of an ancient foreign legion with such animals, which were “treated as family members.”

“However, our findings unequivocally show that the military elite surrounded themselves with elite pets and led an exclusive lifestyle,” she adds.

By Sonja Anderson.

Painted World enemies

“Falcon shrine with cryptic message unearthed in Egypt baffles archaeologists: An ancient falcon shine in Berenike, an old port city in Egypt, has flummoxed archaeologists who aren't sure what to make of its headless falcons, unknown gods and cryptic message that reads, "It is improper to boil a head in here."

good lord imagine leading an article with that and then later literally having a paragraph that cites the team's fucking hypothesis from their own fucking paper.

the article: researchers baffled; nay, FLUMMOXED!! the researchers, according to the same article:

"We hypothesize that the sacrificial animals were boiled before being presented to the god, perhaps to facilitate plucking their feathers, and that their heads were removed, according to the prescription on the stele," the team wrote in their paper. 

like. my man. bro. owen jarus livescience contributor. are you mcfucking kidding me here.

so yeah, this is a stupid article even just because of that ~mysterious mysterieeees~ bait in the first paragraph. you have to know how to read between the lines to get an inkling of what's even happening here and many people just won't. it's vile, tbh, just write an upfront fucking article or shut the fuck up. but anyway. let's get to the actual science. which owen jarus livescience contributor should be aware of considering he cited the actual fucking paper (meaning he presumably read it) and still came up with this trash bullshit excuse of a bait article.

The find under discussion (term used very loosely) here is from 2019, and here's a link to the paper the team wrote on this, available to read for free. That's honestly the best source you can get; every time you come across an article like this and they give excerpts said to come from "the paper the team wrote"? Google a few keywords including "paper" or "abstract" to see if you can locate the original and just read that. Sometimes they'll link the actual paper and/or study (this one did, which is again interesting because that's probably the only scientific thing owen jarus livescience contributor did here), but usually you'll have to do your own digging.

This era of Egypt is not my specialty so I won't go into it too deeply myself, though I'm relatively confident talking about it because a) I read the paper and b) one of my own professors was involved and I remember a few preliminary online discussions on this.

Basically what is going on here is that we're looking at a late Roman Egypt cultic centre (with some, as Salima Ikram pointed out, really exciting in-situ finds) focussed on three gods, most notably a falcon god. The article states "two of the gods are enigmatic and unknown" (the third is Harpocrates, or Horus the Younger), but then describes them as "falcon-headed" and "a goddess with a headdress of cow's horns and a solar disk". While acknowledging the fact that the names are missing and we can't be sure about this since the specific attributes of either deity can apply to a few options, based on the peripherals we are most likely looking at Khonsu, Isis/Hathor/Isis-Hathor and Horus the Younger.

The interesting, not mysterious, thing about this find are the falcon remains. They're quite unique based on what we know of falconry/breeding and votive mummification of falcons from earlier periods, and so this is a matter of ongoing research. The stela itself is also interesting because the attested text is of a type (a prohibition) that hasn't been seen so far at Berenike.

I can absolutely recommend reading the full paper, it gives a really interesting discussion on the stela and its potential meaning, which presumably just registered as white noise in the brain of owen jarus livescience contributor because it wasn't sufficiently alike the plot of an indiana jones movie enough. The entire vibe of the paper is really just "scientists forming hypotheses based on available evidence" rather than "flummoxed archaeologists flailing squeamishly at decapitated falcons". The only flummoxed thing around these parts is the singular brain cell of owen jarus livescience contributor and his journalism degree. He deliberately left out information that is absolutely in the paper he himself linked with his own two hands to craft a more ~mysteriously baffling~ narrative that's far more likely to get clicks than the "hey check out these cool decapitated falcons we found in Berenike, quite unique actually!" an actual expert would've made of it.

sam replays ac origins (21/?) ↳ killing berenike, the crocodile