TWO rare gold coins from the reign of Emperor Valens have been unearthed in Egypt. Nevine El-Aref reports on the find. Archaeologists from the Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA) carrying out a routine archaeological survey at Sail Al-Tofaha area, west of Saint Catherine's Monastery in Sinai, have chanced upon two gold Byzantine coins bearing the head of Emperor Valens (364-378 AD). A number of grotto caves and fragments of clay and glass have already been found in the area.

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LONDON — A letter in which Albert Einstein dismissed the idea of God as the product of human weakness and the Bible as "pretty childish" has sold at auction for more than $400,000.

Bloomsbury Auctions said Friday that the handwritten letter sold to an overseas collector after frenetic bidding late Thursday in London.

The sale price of $404,000, including the buyer's premium, was more than 25 times the pre-sale estimate.

Bloomsbury did not identify the buyer, but managing director Rupert Powell said it was someone with "a passion for theoretical physics and all that that entails."

"This extraordinary letter seemed to strike a chord, and it gave a deep personal insight one of the greatest minds of the 20th century," Powell said.

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Inca surgeons in ancient Peru commonly and successfully removed small portions of patients' skulls to treat head injuries, according to a new study.

The surgical procedure—known as trepanation—was most often performed on adult men, likely to treat injuries suffered during combat, researchers say.

Around the ancient Inca capital of Cuzco, remains dating back to A.D. 1000 show that surgical techniques were standardized and perfected over time, according to the report.

Many of the oldest skulls showed no evidence of bone healing following the operation, suggesting that the procedure was probably fatal.

But by the 1400s, survival rates approached 90 percent, and infection levels were very low, researchers say.

Read the rest on National Geographic News.

One of the most important Dead Sea scrolls is going on display in Jerusalem this week—more than four decades after it was last seen by the public.

The 24-foot (7.3-meter) scroll with the text of the Bible's Book of Isaiah had been in a dark, temperature-controlled room at the Israel Museum since 1967. It went on display two years earlier, but curators replaced it with a facsimile after noticing new cracks in the calfskin parchment.

Great Find

The priceless manuscript, written by a Judean scribe around 120 B.C., was in a long glass case Tuesday, its neat rows of Hebrew letters distinct and legible. President Bush, visiting Israel this week for the anniversary celebration, will be one of the first to view it.

The Isaiah manuscript was the only complete biblical book discovered among the Dead Sea scrolls, one of the great archaeological finds of the 20th century.

The ancient documents, which include fragments of the books of the Old Testament and treatises on communal living and apocalyptic war, have shed important light on Judaism and the origins of Christianity.

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By Blaga Bangieva

Marble consecrated slab stone from the Rome epoch was discovered in archaeological excavations by the director of Archaeological Museum in Hisar town doctor Mitko Madjarov.

The precious found has sizes 50 to 50cm and presents the three Rome nymphs - patronesses of the mineral springs.

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An ancient church has emerged from a flooded valley for the first time in 50 years as Spain's worst drought in decades forced the city of Barcelona to begin shipping in drinking water.

For the majority of the past four decades, all that has been visible of the village of Sant Roma has been the belltower of its stone church, peeping above the water beside forested hills from a valley flooded in the 1960s to provide water for the Catalonia region.

This year, receding waters have exposed the 11th-century church completely, attracting crowds of tourists who stand gazing around it on the dusty bed of the reservoir.

A ship carrying 5million gallons (19,000 cubic meters) of water from nearby Tarragona docked in Barcelona's port this morning. A second vessel from Marseille, France, is scheduled to arrive in the coming days.

The bustling port city on Spain's Mediterranean coast is among the areas hardest hit by the worst springtime drought in the country since records began 60 years ago.

With reservoirs at dramatically low levels and no substantial rainfall in sight, authorities hope a new desalination plant - one of the biggest in Europe - will be operational in May of next year and resolve much of Catalonia's water woes.

The regional government of Catalonia said six ships a month will bring in a total of 438million gallons (1.66million cubic meters) of water in an unprecedented effort to avoid water restrictions before the start of the holiday season.

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AP Photo: In this undated image released by France's Culture Ministry Tuesday

PARIS (AP) - Divers trained in archaeology discovered a marble bust of an aging Caesar in the Rhone River that France's Culture Ministry said Tuesday could be the oldest known.The life-sized bust showing the Roman ruler with wrinkles and hollows in his face is tentatively dated to 46 B.C. Divers uncovered the Caesar bust and a collection of other finds in the Rhone near the town of Arles — founded by Caesar.

Among other items in the treasure trove of ancient objects is a 5.9 foot marble statue of Neptune, dated to the first decade of the third century after Christ.

Two smaller statues, both in bronze and measuring 27.5 inches each also were found, one of them, a satyr with his hands tied behind his back, "doubtless" originated in Hellenic Greece, the ministry said.

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AP: NEW ORLEANS — A steamship that sank off the Louisiana coast during an 1846 storm has produced a trove of rare gold coins, including some produced at two, mostly forgotten U.S. mints in the South, coin experts say.

Last year, four Louisiana residents salvaged hundreds of gold coins and thousands of silver coins from the wreckage of the SS New York in about 60 feet of water in the Gulf of Mexico, said David Bowers, co-chairman of Stack's Rare Coins in New York.

"Some of these are in uncirculated or mint condition," Bowers said, predicting the best could bring $50,000 to $100,000 each at auction.

Of particular interest to coin experts — numismatists — are gold pieces known as quarter eagles and half eagles, which carried face values of $2.50 and $5, respectively, in the days before the United States printed paper currency.

Those coins were struck at mints in New Orleans; Charlotte, N.C.; and Dahlonega, Ga. The Charlotte and Dahlonega mints operated from 1838, when the first significant U.S. gold deposits were found in those areas, until the start of the Civil War in 1861, said Douglas Mudd, curator of the American Numismatic Association's Money Museum in Denver. Neither mint ever reopened.

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By BEN CLERKIN

It was the size of a dustbin lid and had a range of just half a mile.

The world's first mobile phone could hardly be more different to today's devices, which are small enough to slip inside a pocket and can call almost anywhere in the world.

But its inventor, Nathan Stubblefield, is finally being recognised as the father of mobile phone technology exactly 100 years after he patented his design for a "wireless telephone".

The melon farmer came up with his invention in 1902 after devoting every spare hour and penny he had to establishing a telephone service in his rural home-town of Murray, Kentucky.

He constructed a 120ft mast in his orchard, which transmitted speech from one telephone to another using magnetic fields.

However, the total amount of wire required for the coils in the phones was far longer than what would be required to simply connect them - but the invention allowed mobility.

Read the rest on the DailyMail.

By Roger Highfield, Science Editor

Archaeologists excavating an enigmatic burial mound in Sussex believe that grave robbers beat them to the prize of finding the remains of a Bronze Age chief.

Racing against time to date a burial mound on the cliffs at Peacehaven Heights in East Sussex before it collapses into the sea, they have found evidence of human occupation of the site spanning back to 8,000 years BC.

But the prize was to find the remains of the warrior chief who was placed there in the Bronze Age, when the burial mound was built some 2000-3000 years ago, around the same time as the famous stones were erected at Stonehenge.

Many such mounds were built in the Bronze Age, often in high places, to mark the burial of a local chief.

With him would have been placed grave goods such as beads, bone pins, pottery, even gold artefacts.

However, the team found pottery and a clay pipe dating from the 1700-1800s, which suggests that robbers had excavated the mound then, said Susan Birks, who has led the effort by the Brighton & Hove Archaeological Society and the Mid Sussex Field Archaeological Team.

Read the rest on the Telegraph.

BERLIN — It is only a breathless Hollywood script: treasure-hunter Indiana Jones races with German archaeologists to track down the fabled Ark of the Covenant, the chest that held the stone tablets on which the Ten Commandments were etched.

Now German researchers claim to have found the remains of the palace of the Queen of Sheba — and an altar that may have held the Ark.

The discovery, announced by the University of Hamburg last week, has stirred skeptical rumblings from the archaeological community.

The location of the Ark, indeed its existence, has been a source of controversy for centuries.

Regarded as the most precious treasure of ancient Judaism, it is at the heart of a debate about whether archaeology should chronicle the rise and fall of civilizations or explore the boundaries between myth and ancient history.

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The Ann Arbor News

Hidden underneath layers of sediment in a cave in northern Spain was an unassuming but breakthrough scientific find: the jawbone of the oldest-known human ancestor in Europe.

The fossil, dated at approximately 1.2 million years old, shatters scientists' previous theories about human migration to Europe, said University of Michigan researcher Josep Pares, who was a member of the team that found the jawbone last summer.

"We totally confirmed that human occupation in Europe was much earlier than previously thought. ... I think that the present theories need to be reconsidered, honestly,'' said Pares, who left May 2 to return to the Spanish work site for three months.

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By ThinkSpain

The wreck of a 13th or 14th century ship has come to light on a construction site in Barcelona's Barceloneta district - beside the Balaurd del Migdia and behind Francia train station - that used to be under water.

The remains were discovered at around seven metres below sea level on the site of a new residential apartment block being built by the Sacyr Vallehermoso company on a plot previously owned by Renfe.

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Builders clearing land for a housing project in Colombia have uncovered an ancient burial site containing nearly a thousand tombs linked to two little-known civilizations.

The site covers some 12 acres (5 hectares) in the impoverished Usme district in southeast Bogotá and includes one set of remains that some researchers believe could be a victim of human sacrifice.

"Her mouth is open as if in terror, and her hands seem contracted as if she had tried grabbing hold of something," Groot said.

Another tomb contains the remains of a man with a curved tibia, or shinbone, possible evidence that the man was a shaman, she added.

Spanish observers in the 1500s wrote of indigenous shamans spending long periods in caves with no exposure to sunlight. A lack of sunlight would produce a shortage of vitamin D, causing curving of the bones, explained Groot's colleague, Virgilio Becerra.

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MADRID, Spain — Spain formally laid claim Thursday to a shipwreck that yielded a US$500 million treasure, saying it has proof the vessel was Spanish.

Officials demanded the return of the booty recovered last year by a U.S. deep-sea exploration firm, saying the 19th-century shipwreck at the heart of the dispute is the Nuestra Senora de las Mercedes — a Spanish warship sunk by the British navy southwest of Portugal in 1804 with more than 200 people on board.

Tampa, Fla.-based Odyssey Marine Exploration had announced in May 2007 that it had discovered the wreck in the Atlantic — and its cargo of 500,000 silver coins and other artifacts worth an estimated US$500 million.

At the time, Odyssey said it did not know which ship it was, and flew the treasures back to Tampa without Spain's knowledge, from an airport on the British colony of Gibraltar on Spain's southwestern tip.

The Spanish government filed evidence in a Tampa federal court to support its claim.

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