5 Real Ancient Artifacts Too Ridiculous for Indiana Jones

5 One Frustrated Kid’s Homework

Archaeology spans the entire past of humanity, including both the prehistoric period, for which archaeology is our only tool, and periods within the historical record, where archaeology finds what fell between the cracks. 

For example, consider the Russian town of Novgorod (no relation to Novigrad from The Witcher — both simply mean “new town”). Though historical records mention the place from as far back as the ninth century, we don’t have newspapers tracking the day-to-day life for peasants during the early years of the Grand Duchy of Moscow. So, a series of manuscripts we discovered in Novgorod, written on birch bark, would seem to be able to tell us a lot.

However, the ones we found turned out to have been written by a seven-year-old. His name was Onfim.

It the below piece, we see that Onfim was writing out the alphabet. We conclude this was his homework. But he quickly got tired with that and turned to drawing someone on a horse slaying an enemy. Archaeologists believe that the knight was Onfim himself, and that the enemy was his teacher.

Some of these may be difficult to make out. The one below looks like just a mess of scratches. Fortunately, redoing the sketch as line art makes it more clear. More fortunately still, Onfim added text explaining it. “I am a wild beast,” he wrote, indicating that that’s a wild beast, and the beast is Onfim. He also wrote, “Greetings from Onfim to Danilo,” which is how we figured out the his name. 

The below sketch is of Onfim’s parents. Another one has text on it that says, “This is my Dad. He is a warrior. When I grow up, I want to be a warrior just like him.” This idea — that sons loved their fathers — shakes up everything we ever thought we knew about humanity. 

4 The Meat-Shaped Stone

The next time you’re in Taipei, set some time aside to visit the National Palace Museum. You might get a chance to see the fabulous treasure known as the Meat-Shaped Stone. 

The Meat-Shaped Stone is — get this — a piece of stone that is shaped like meat. The specific type of stone is jasper, and the specific type of meat is pork, as this looks like one particular Hangzhou way of red braising pork belly. 

The stone dates to the Qing Dynasty, but we don’t know exactly when it was made or by whom. The museum insists that the piece reveals the dual Chinese veneration of art and food (which is, of course, a characteristic unique to China and not just two things that literally every culture likes). It’s a highlight of the museum, naturally, and also occasionally goes on international tours, attracting fans everywhere. 

The museum also has an exhibit called the Jadeite Cabbage:

This one is far newer and has little historical importance at all, says the museum. This leaves curators utterly baffled as to why people enjoy seeing it as much as they do the Meat-Shaped Stone. 

3 The Mysterious Sex Coupons

In a couple different Ancient Roman sites, we’ve discovered metal tokens, which have been named “spintriae.” On one side of the coin, usually, is a Roman numeral. On the other is an engraving of two people having sex. 

These tokens don’t all have the same engraving of two people having sex, in the way that every penny will have the same famous head on it. Each of these offers a different relief on its face, showing people having sex in a different position. 

If these were merely engravings of people having sex, we could call it erotic art and leave it at that. But the nature of these items — two-sided metal discs, with a number on one end — seems to mean they’re coins. They served some utilitarian function, and now we have to speculate about what. 

One explanation you’ll see is that these were tokens used as currency in a brothel. You weren’t allowed to bring the emperor’s image into the brothel, says the story, so Romans used these coins instead. A lot of people seem to like the sound of this explanation, but archaeologists have to pipe up and point out, “We have nothing backing up that theory. Someone just made it up.” Further elaborations, claiming that each token purchased the exact sex act pictured on the token, are also popular but don’t sound likely. 

Another theory says these were game tokens. One of these tokens bears a message reading, “QVID LVDIT ARRAM DET QVOD SATIS SIT.” Online translators tell us that means, “Whatever you say, that is enough,” but scholars assure us that we’d be better off translating that as, “Whoever wants to play, let them give sufficient deposit to respond.” This seems to fit fine with the brothel theory, but it also fits fine with the idea that these were merely pieces in a sex-themed board game. This part isn’t our joke, by the way — this is a legitimate theory. 

The most interesting observation about these is that some of the exact images can be found on the walls of a different site: the baths at Pompeii. This could be a total coincidence, but apparently these bath walls also have numerals next to the images, suggesting a connection to the tokens. 

To figure out the truth, we must now collect all the tokens and take them to Pompeii, so we can insert them into slots there and see what opens up. This would be a great scene in the Indiana Jones porn parody, whose title is so obvious that we aren’t even going to mention it here. 

2 A 5,000-Year-Old Toy Car

Let’s describe for you an ancient site that should definitely be the setting for that archaeological thriller you’re currently writing. It’s called Sumatar Harabesi and is in Turkey, close to Syria. We’ve found carvings there invoking “the Lord of the gods” — a god of the Moon named “Sin.” Sin’s symbol is a horned pillar, and one of these sits in front of a cave there. 

Biblical tradition says this place is where Moses lived when he was driven out of Egypt, and the tombs in Sumatar Harabesi go back even further than that. A hundred of these tombs circle a central mound. In one of these tombs, we found an artifact dating back five millennia. 

It was a little toy car. 

Archaeologists found the toy chariot and four toy wheels. The axles must have been made from some material that rotted long ago, but we can figure out how the wheels must have connected with the rest. The toy car had no motor, which is hardly surprising, as motors wouldn’t be invented for many thousands of years. You just had to imagine a horse pulling it. Or maybe you could tie it to a pair of mice. 

Archaeologists conclude that this wasn’t some art piece or a scientific model but was a toy, designed for children. They found it in this tomb because it was a tomb for a child. The presence of a child’s tomb tells us nothing new — we always knew that most children back then died. But now, we know that kids had cool cars to play with. 

1 Dissatisfied Tourist Reviews

There are parts of Ancient Egypt even older than Sumatar Harabesi. The Tomb of Ramesses VI is comparatively new, in that it’s only around 3,200 years old. 

That still means that when Romans visited the tomb in the fourth century, it was just as much older than them as the Romans were older than us. 

As a result, when archaeologists discovered the tomb late in the 19th century, they weren’t the first people to see it since the original Egyptians. Many Ancient Romans and Greeks had come to the place — as tourists. And they had left messages on the walls, describing what they thought of the attraction. 

“I, Ammonios, singularis of Italy, saw and admire it,” reads one bit of graffiti. Much of the graffiti are just people’s names, and when people did leave additional messages, many of them wrote the same thing: “I admired it.” 

Not everyone was so positive in their reviews, though. “I visited and I did not like anything except the sarcophagus,” carved one dissatisfied traveler into the wall. 

But when people’s criticism lacked merit, you could count on more charitable visitors chipping in to defend the place. “I cannot read this writing,” complained one Roman.

“Why do you care that you cannot read the hieroglyphs,” commented someone else below. “I do not understand your concern.” You might think the complainer was the cretin here, but really, both of them are jerks. Such is the nature of all conversations that consist of public comments.

Also, they were jerks for vandalizing an ancient structure. But it was vandalism only at the time. Today, it’s valued history. 

A thousand years from now, no one will value your online comments, because they will all have vanished thanks to the apocalypse that wipes away all electronic data. So, be sure to leave something behind in a more permanent form. Write on a bathroom wall, “Blumpkin Joe is watching you poop.” Archaeologists will find it one day, will decode it and will decide that their whole profession is a waste of time. 

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