The Instructions of Shuruppak - 2600 BC

The Instructions of Shuruppak is a fragmentary tablet, written in Sumerian. The earliest copies of this text represent some of the oldest literature known - from about 2600 BCE. The inscription reads in part: Do not buy an ass which brays too much. Do not commit rape upon a man's daughter; the courtyard will learn of it. Do not answer back against your father.

Even at the dawn of the written word, people looked to a more ancient past for wisdom.

Shuruppak's instructions begin by recalling "those far remote days" and "those far remote years" as the source of the wisdom it imparts. Linguists estimate that the Proto-Indo-European language was spoken around 5,500 years ago. But they have dated another ancient language, Proto-Afroasiatic — the grandparent of languages like Ancient Egyptian, Hebrew, and Arabic — to 10,000 to 20,000 years old.

Pompeii

Girl Attaching a Peplum Statue

A small port on the Sarno River, Pompeii had thrived as a Roman colony for over two centuries. Its inhabitants knew nothing of Mount Vesuvius’s previous eruptions, which dated to the seventh century B.C.

On August 24, 79 A.D., Mount Vesuvius erupted, spewing a gigantic cloud of molten rock and pulverized pumice some thirty kilometres into the air. Tons of pumice, rocks and ashes rained down on Pompeii, piling up on the streets and collapsing roofs and walls. Although the eruption caught the inhabitants completely by surprise, most of them managed to escape. Only those who took shelter indoors were doomed. Paradoxically, the devastating eruption of Mount Vesuvius contributed to preserving much of Pompeii, which remained relatively undisturbed under metres of ashes for centuries.

Dog from the House of Orpheus

New discoveries from Pompeii give insight into the daily life of the Roman town before the cataclysmic eruption of Mount Vesuvius.

See ----->Treasures of Pompeii

Returned Stolen Treasure

Two Roman ballista balls from Gamla were returned. The 2,000-year-old stones were left in a bag at the courtyard of the Museum of Islamic and Near Eastern Cultures.

In 1993, a retired Red Army officer dropped off 101 drawings by masters like Goya, Manet, and Delacroix at the German embassy in Moscow. They had been looted from the Bremen museum in 1945 by Soviet soldiers.

The looting of the Baghdad Museum as Saddam Hussein’s government crumbled was devastating for antiquities lovers. In 2003, three men anonymously returned one of Iraq’s most precious treasures in the back of a car. The Sacred Vase of Warka, a massive limestone bowl, dates to around 3200 B.C.

They had been stolen 16 years earlier.

In 2001 a London dealer received an anonymous phone call that led him to his doorstep to six fragments of Roman frescoes taken from Pompeii.

In 2006, just a year after a 1,500-year-old stone box from the Mayan civilization was found in Guatemala, it mysteriously vanished. After a national investigation, it returned through an anonymous delivery at the country’s Ministry of Culture.

In 1950 a group of 11 small ancient clay figurines were found in a Utah canyon. They belonged to a long-vanished people called the Fremont Culture, who had lived in the region from 700 to 1300 A.D. For two decades, these pieces, which came to be known as the Pilling Collection, toured around Utah museums. In the early 1970s, one of the figures mysteriously failed to show up. In 2011, an anthropologist at Utah State University received a box with the missing piece.

In 2007 the J Paul Getty Museum returned disputed antiquities, including a prized statue of the goddess Aphrodite. Italian authorities believe the 7ft statue, bought by the Getty for $18m in 1988, was looted from an ancient Greek settlement in Sicily.

In April 2015 some 123 artefacts were seized by US customs as part of a five year investigation into international smuggling networks dubbed Operation Mummy's Curse. One item, a 2,300 year-old sarcophagus was found in a garage in Brooklyn.

Special ancients bring top dollar

Two Dekadrachms from the time of Dionysios I were auction stars.

One signed by Kimon and graded NGC Ch VF ★ Strike: 5/5 Surface: 5/5, and the other signed by Euainetos and graded NGC Ch EF★ Strike: 5/5 Surface: 4/5. The Kimon coin sold for $360k and the Euainetos for $198k, both well exceeding their estimates.

A phenomenal Elagablus Aureus graded NGC Ch MS★, Strike: 5/5 Surface: 4/5 brought $312k, and a Septimius Severus Aureus graded NGC Ch AU, Strike: 5/5 Surface: 3/5 made $192k.

Golden curse tablets found in ancient Serbian tomb

In 2016 archaeologists in Serbia discovered golden curse tablets in ancient Roman tombs. The tablets contain inscriptions with magical symbols calling upon both gods and demons to unleash ill-health, punishment, and death upon enemies, unrequited lovers, bad neighbors and relatives.

The curse tablets were found in Roman tombs at the Viminacium archaeological site, the capital of the former Roman province of Moesia Superior in Serbia. The territory was under Roman (and later Byzantine) rule for about 600 years, from the 1st century BC until the 6th century. Viminacium occupies a total of about 450 hectares (1,100 acres)

“..so long as someone, whether slave or free, whether man or woman, keeps silent or knows anything about it, they may be accursed in blood, and eyes and every limb and even have all intestines quite eaten away if they have stolen the ring or been privy (to the theft).” Other curses are even more personal ... “May your penis burn away when you make love.”

In Viminacium, Christians and pagans buried together suggests they were living together in relative harmony.

Aqrabuamelu - Scorpion men

Scorpion men are featured in several Akkadian myths, including the Enûma Elish and the Babylonian version of the Epic of Gilgamesh. They were also known as aqrabuamelu or girtablilu. The Scorpion Men are described to have the head, torso, and arms of a man and the body of a scorpion. Their "terror is awesome" and their "glance is death."

The mysterious fate of “The Apollo of Gaza”

An extremely rare bronze statue of the Greek god Apollo resurfaced in the Gaza Strip in 2014, only to be seized and vanish. A fisherman says he scooped the 500-kg statue from the sea bed, and carried it home on a donkey cart.

Police from the Islamist group Hamas, which rules the Palestinian territory, swiftly seized it. Archaeologists have not been able to get their hands on the Apollo since – to their great frustration. From what they can tell, it was cast sometime between the 5th and the 1st century BC. The discolored green-brown figure shows the youthful, athletic god standing upright on muscular legs; he has one arm outstretched, with the palm of his hand held up. He has compact, curly hair, and gazes out seriously at the world, one of his eyes apparently inlaid with a blue stone iris, the other just a vacant black slit.

The statue is unique and most experts say priceless. It's current whereabouts remains unknown.

The finder said he cut off one of the fingers to take to a metals expert, thinking it might have been made of gold. Unbeknownst to him, one of his brothers severed another finger for his own checks. This was then melted down by a jeweller. It is very rare to find a statue which is not in marble or in stone, but in metal. 5,000 years of history lie beneath the sands of the Gaza Strip, which was ruled at various times by ancient Egyptians, Philistines, Romans, Byzantines and crusaders. Alexander the Great besieged the city and the Roman emperor Hadrian visited.