Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities announced that a 3,400-year-old wall that once protected the Sphinx from desert winds has been uncovered on the Giza plateau.

Here’s a summary of five papers published in the current issue of the Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists. The topics include the use of cabbages to pay interest on loans and Roman spelling mistakes.  

Yersinia Pestis, the bacterium that causes plague, originated in China 2,600 years ago, according to a new study by an international team of medical geneticists. “What’s exciting is that we are able to reconstruct the historical routes of bacterial disease over centuries,” said Mark Achtman of University College Cork.  

You can explore the 14,000-year-old art inside a French cave with this GigaPan from National Geographic.

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Tuesday, November 2, 2010. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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