The ancient 'Sweet Track'

No doubt there are many who make claims for other ancient structures, but I was surprised to find out recently that a scheduled monument in Somerset, southern England, might be the most ancient engineered road in the world.  It is called 'The Sweet Track'.  It seems that it was built over an even more ancient structure called 'The Post Track' (which must therefore have been more ancient, but let's not be too pedantic).

Of course it is only the most ancient until an earlier one is found, but it is still interesting to hear that an artefact in England can make this kind of claim.  I would have expected that there were more ancient structures in Mesopotamia or that region.

The Sweet Track is named after its discoverer, Ray Sweet who found it while digging peat in 1970.  It was built across the marshy Somerset Levels to make it easier to travel between settlements.  It has also been dated with surprising precision to one of two years, namely 3807 or 3806 BCE (presumably therefore by dendrochronology, although that is not clear).  200 tonnes of timber went into its 2000m length and it was probably prefabricated.

Dead Centre of the Ancient World

Bahrain has recently been in the news, with a surprising controversy about whether the Grand Prix should be run there.  The small island nation was probably always run by a despotic non-democratic government and to be honest I see the whole motor racing saga as an unfortunate but barely relevant flash in the pan.

However, you might not realise that, in a sense, Bahrain was the 'dead centre' of the ancient world.  3000 years ago it was a very fashionable place to be buried, and death was a thriving local industry.  As a result, Bahrain contains the largest and most ancient necropolis in the world, with the most famous area being the A'Ali tombs.

A'Ali tombs, Bahrain - the largest and most ancient necropolis.

It is not easy to find many pictures of this 'wonder of the ancient world' and apparently the locals barely notice that they are surrounded by tumuli that were built around 3000 BCE.

In all, it is estimated that there are 170,000 burial mounds.  The architecture of these ancient 'monuments' is not impressive, but the scale of the task is amazing.

Small note: Apologies for recycling one of my father's school-boy jokes in the title of this post!

Finding the Ugaritic texts in the Louvre

Last July I wrote a series of articles about the gods of the Old Testament including a post about The Ugaritic Texts.  Yes - I said 'gods' rather than God.  It seems very clear that there was 'pantheon' of gods at the time and God (a.k.a Yahweh) was just one of them as you can read at that link.

Finding myself in Paris on a Saturday afternoon with no other commitments for a few hours, I took the opportunity yesterday to go to Musée du Louvre to look for the actual Ugaritic Text tablets and to see them for myself.  Just having seen pictures of the tablets without seeing their context, I didn't have a good feel for the size of them or indeed the number of finds.

Musée du Louvre, in February 2012

Finding them was a little tricky.  Even asking one of the guides (and finding for the only time in 3 days that my French is not good enough) did not help.  Sitting in the Mesopotamia rooms of the Louvre, at first I thought he was just one of those arrogant Parisiens that you hear about but don't often meet.  After a while I realised that he was only arrogant because he was also ignorant of the archaeological treasures surrounding him.

C'est la vie!  I found them a bit later all by myself, in room B of the ground floor area of the 'Sully' section of the Louvre.  I gained access to that area through the 'Richelieu' wing.  No doubt there might be easier ways to get there but I happened across some other interesting and famous artifacts on the way there. More about the amazing Code of Hamurabi in a few days time.

For today, here are a couple of photos of room B.  Tomorrow I will post photos of some of the tablets themselves.  First an overview of the room looking towards the North-East.

Musée du Louvre, Sully, ground floor room B

This is the cabinet containing the Ugaritic texts

Where in Musée du Louvre are the Ugaritic texts?  In this cabinet.

and this is a bit more detail of the cabinet itself

The cabinet containing the Ugaritic Texts in Musée du Louvre

More detail coming tomorrow, but just to finish this post on an incongruously surprising, lighter note, I thought you might smile at a sticker that I saw on a motor bike in Paris.  At the least, it is an interesting example of 'Franglais'.

J'adore rien - I'm parisien!