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1,700-year-old Roman sarcophagus is unearthed in Budapest
- rolph 1y ago"Excavators also removed a layer of mud roughly 4 centimeters (1.5 inches) thick from inside the coffin that Fényes hopes could contain more treasures." i strongly suspect this is not "mud" but the dried precipitate of liquified soft tissue, [coffin liquor] and condensation.
- mptest 1y ago'Coffin liquor' may be the most disgusting pair of words I've ever read, and I've been on the internet a while. Wow.
- anonzzzies 1y agoI was getting the exact same thing. I will be using the term in conversation now though.
- Towaway69 1y agoSounds like a cocktail to me. Somewhat like a black russian but browner in colour.
- ronjakoi 1y agoCool band name, too.
- anonzzzies 1y agoHaha I told my good friend (we played together in a black metal band 100 years ago) that we might want to try again with this name.
- Semaphor 1y agoThere's a grindcore album by that name. Which I'll now have to check out ;) https://napalmted.bandcamp.com/album/coffin-liquor https://napalmted.bandcamp.com/album/coffin-liquor
- speed_spread 1y agoVampires playing black metal during the roaring 20s must have been wild
- herodoturtle 1y ago> Cool band name, too. Coffin Liquor. It's to die for.
- masfuerte 1y agoBrown is right. "Mummy brown" is a pigment made from ground up mummy.
- xtiansimon 1y agoSimilar to “dumpster piss”. hehe.
- IAmBroom 1y agoI'm imagining vampires obsessing over terroir...
- dv_dt 1y agoTry these three words: Victorians eating mummies
- sippeangelo 1y agoLove this bit of lore. It goes super well with The Thought Emporiums video about recreating an Egyptian mummy just to eat it: https://youtu.be/fbhV0TP3jco https://youtu.be/fbhV0TP3jco
- wunderlust 1y ago"dried precipitate of liquified soft tissue...and condensation". Yeah - mud.
- potato3732842 1y agoOnce all the bacteria have done their thing what's left? At this point thousands of years later it probably is solidly within the mud spectrum and closer to the sand end then say lakebottom or swamp mud.
- Mistletoe 1y agoI wish someone would do the math, it feels like a human body wouldn’t leave that much remains after degrading. I remember learning in the cemetery tour at New Orleans that those above ground tombs are family tombs and that they contain generations of people. The top shelf is where the body goes and it stays for one year and degrades before it is opened again and scraped into the bottom layer where multiple generations dwell forever together. https://historyinstone.blogspot.com/2019/07/above-ground-burials-and-oven-crypts.html https://historyinstone.blogspot.com/2019/07/above-ground-bur...
- nixass 1y ago> In the early days of New Orleans, the pieces of the casket were removed and burned, while the remains were pushed to the back of the tomb, falling into an underground chamber called a caveau (This is where the phrase, "I wouldn't touch him with a ten-foot pole comes from... the pole being the device used to push remains to the back of the tomb). TIL
- lostlogin 1y agoI’ve always heard the phase a little different, “I wouldn’t touch that with a ten foot barge pole.” And when I search that the story matches yours.
- rolph 1y agosarcophagus looks to be 2 feet by 7 feet based on scale of objects in the image. is 1.75 cubic feet of solid material reasonable? the image displays distinct relief cracks of a drying wet slurry, the dark staining inside the coffin suggests high fluid mark was maybe 4inches, it may have knocked an urn over, before recedeing, and evaporating. while not up on the finer points of such burial practice, it doesnt seem unreasonable that a consideral amount of flowers and other plant materials may be involved, there should be considerable pollen present, potassium and sodium salts of the decedent, adipocere, and perhaps diatoms dependent on the nature of the soil, and source of water percolating into the sarcophagus. i believe considering it to be just mud, would be to overlook, a volume of pertinant discovery.
- nkrisc 1y agoSounds like dirt to me.
- odyssey7 1y agoI was reading the article looking for mentions of some analysis that this might allow. Perhaps all that archaeology does with this material is to sift it for objects.
- IAmBroom 1y agoStep 1: Find it. Step 2: Archive it. (Dig and catalogue) Step 3: Analyze it. We often learn new things from fossils that have been shelved for decades, but not yet researched, so I assume analysis is still in the pipeline.
- mlhpdx 1y agoWhere did the mud inside come from if it was still sealed?
- rolph 1y agolimestone is porous and will allow water to eventually seep through. a condensation cycle will occur, and drip percolate the soft tissue and adipocere into a slurry [coffin liquor] that will settle to the bottom of the sarcophagus.
- xenospn 1y agoI honestly cannot believe that I have been listening to Death Metal my entire life, and no one has ever used the term “coffin liquor” in a song.
- Isamu 1y agoI think “coffin liquor” would be a great name for an absinthe.
- ajxs 1y agoFor what it's worth, Morpheus Descends had a song called 'Submerged in Adipocere', which is a similar kind of thing.
- user432678 1y agoJust wanted to say hello to my fellow metalheads. And thanks for the song recommendation!
- jojobas 1y agoThat's more Necrophagist kinda territory.
- hopelite 1y ago[flagged]
- cindyllm 1y ago[dead]
- potato3732842 1y agoThe treatment archeological finds get today is downright religious compared "that's a damn good stone, we'll use that stone for a lintel, chuck the skeleton in the river" that would've happened prior to the modern era.
- masklinn 1y agoOr worse, for centuries mummies were ground into powder for “medicine” or pigments, during the Egyptology craze hundred of mummies were unwrapped and destroyed for the idle curiosity and entertainment of aristocrats, and tens of thousands of cat mummies are attested being used as fertiliser.
- lazide 1y agoOr literally used as firewood to power steam engines
- protocolture 1y ago>It feels like a kind of end of civilization or even humanity type of thing, where at some point all of the earth will have been excavated and all human evidence will have been removed and catalogued and archived in some warehouse, totally sanitizing sterilizing the planet of human activity. My understanding is that most countries prevent areas from being wholesale dug up, but only permit smaller, limited digs for this reason. So a representative sample of a site can be reexamined at a future date with future technology to reassess understanding. Some sites have had many many digs in this fashion, and still havent dug the entire site. In fact its a criticism of some semi famous sites, usually from charlatans, that the entire site hasnt been dug therefore we are leaving evidence of their popular wackjob ideas in the ground >because there is very little of anything physical that remains. I dont know thats true. Lots of what we do is kept and recorded. And our activity surely leaves traces. Plastics especially. >My understanding is that outside of specific medium, none of the data we generate or consume will last, let alone survive something like a nuclear war or even a massive solar flair. I dont believe this is true either. We arent backing our society up to a single old spinning disk. We have documents that immediately predate data storage. We have old documents stored in multiple places. We have lost certain specific artefacts of our own history but it seems doomerish to assume thats what happens universally.
- Aloisius 1y agoThere's something about how this article was written that reads like grave robbing, especially the bit about them hoping to discover "more treasures."
- carefulfungi 1y agoYes. “Unlooted and unopened”… until today.
- 4ndrewl 1y agoIt sells newspapers unfortunately. For the longest time newspapers (and by extension much of the general public) equat archaeology with treasure hunting. I don't know the circumstances of this dig, but it may have been a rescue dig ahead of eg massive concrete foundations going in. In many countries this is what drives (and funds) fieldwork.
- animal531 1y agoThere's a bit done by a comedian where they ask what the differences are between grave robbers and archaeologists, but basically it boils down to a question of time.
- vintermann 1y agoIf historical grave robbers left detailed descriptions of what they'd found and where they moved it to, I wouldn't mind much.
- jacquesm 1y agoThose descriptions themselves would be a major archaeological find if they were preserved at all. But chances are that those detailed descriptions would be lost even if the original artifacts would have still been preserved had they not been looted.
- IAmBroom 1y agoA key fossil, journal entry, or bit of clothing that would help explain "X" is going to stay mute if sold on the black market and kept on someone's shelf. Maybe we'll get lucky and learn about it someday from the heirs - but probably not.
- nubg 1y agoGoddamn the website is atrocious to use on a phone, let me pinch to zoom in on the photos! Good post though.
- tedggh 1y agoWe are much closer in time to Marco Polo than Marco Polo was to this girl.
- codeflo 1y agoObviously?
- sandworm101 1y ago>> Untouched by looters and sealed for centuries, Until today. Open a grave one day and you are a grave robber. Open it on some other day and you are a scientist. I think the people who sealed the grave wouldn't see much of a difference.
- Joker_vD 1y agoAnd open a grave a third day, and you're just an ordinary grave digger, reusing the cemetery land.
- IAmBroom 1y agoIs that Yorick?
- dav_Oz 1y agoWhat would the people who sealed the grave do when they accidentally unearthed a sophisticated burial site from the middle bronze age? Leave it alone? Maybe. I'm not sure, humans are curious. Well the effort and care put into the grave made us - 2000 years later in cyberspace - in a sense remember the person. Who was this young woman? They even gave us hints/rewards. Made us curious. So maybe they prepared her for an afterlife ... of continued memory and presence among the living, which they with their technological limitations succeeded in, we are talking about her, now.
- gverrilla 1y agoWhat an aggressive website: at the same time, there's 2 different popups, a display ad and a video ad playing without being activated. Doesn't AP make enough money selling news to news organizations? Disgusting.
- Joker_vD 1y agoWhat a strange way to date it. "The Roman sarcophagus from the III century CE is unearthed in Budapest". Okay? The Roman Empire did span that far in that time period, and IIRC that time period is already quite well represented archaeologically speaking.
- GeoAtreides 1y ago>III century CE IV century CE
- cozyman 1y agoAD*
- pelasaco 1y agoThe famous last words: "Let's open this Sarcophagus and see what we find inside..."
- albert_e 1y ago> “The peculiarity of the finding is that it was a hermetically sealed sarcophagus. It was not disturbed previously, so it was intact,” said Gabriella Fényes, the excavation’s lead archaeologist. If this is the case -- dont scientists have interest in analyzing the air contents inside this sealed box before it is fully opened -- maybe by inserting a narrow tube? Might that not teach us something that may help us preserve future archaeological finds better? Maybe we are irreversibly destroying some of the evidence inside it by casually opening them? (I am sure they are not intentionally careless or destroying it -- but just wondering if future scince might make the current scientific process look clunky and ill-advised)
- ceejayoz 1y agoIt's made of limestone, which is quite porous. Should be plenty of air exchange over the last 1700 years. (And they may have done so before opening. It probably wouldn't be mentioned in an article like this.)
- jasonvorhe 1y agoThen it wasn't hermetically sealed, as the author claims.
- IAmBroom 1y agoIf nothing else, a time capsule of bacteria present...
- stronglikedan 1y agoWhere does it say that they didn't?
- rolph 1y agothere is an urn inside, that seems unbroken, there may be a sample in there.
- Andrew-Tate 1y ago[dead]
- 0x70dd 1y agoA Roman sarcophagus was found on a beach in Bulgaria last year [1]. It was used as a bar and had holes drilled for LED lighting. [1] https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2024/08/12/beach-bar-sarcophagus-turns-out-to-be-genuine-roman-artefact https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2024/08/12/beach-bar-sarc...
- jamonserrano 1y agoVideo (in Hungarian) about the excavation and the opening of the sarcophagus. They remove the lid at 8:30. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LknkrGnCTG8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LknkrGnCTG8