Even at one of the world’s most popular ancient sites, the secrets are still waiting to be revealed. Archaeologists find tomb with grail underneath the treasury at Petra.
A set piece in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, the Treasury of Petra in Jordan is one of the new Seven Wonders of the World. Despite its fame, American and Jordanian researchers uncovered a hidden tomb containing 12 human skeletons and various objects in the grave in a archaeological dig.
Sometime around the 1st century BC, the rock-hewn city in the pink sandstone cliffs was constructed by the nomadic Arabian tribe known as the Nabataeans, about whom little is known. Throughout history, the floodwaters through the low porous sandstone and human remains that surrounded the city have intercepted Petra archaeologists form knowing about them.
The twelve skeletons uncovered are also in a fragile state, although at least they are not disarticulated, and the excavation team is hoping to obtain some form of DNA which will allow them to make inferences about their appearance, identity, age at death, their food and so on.
“This is a hugely rare discovery—in the two centuries that Petra has been investigated by archaeologists, nothing like this has been found before,” said Josh Gates, an archaeologist and dramatist who hosts Discovery Channel’s Expedition Unknown, which joined the excavation team.
“Even in front of one of the most famous buildings in the world … there are still huge discoveries to be made.”
Drastic spoilers: in The Last Crusade, an action archaeologist, played by Harrison Ford, solves puzzles of renaissance maps trying to reach the Holy Grail. Just in the end of the film, while walking through the dashboard of the treasury building in Petra, he discovers a considerable number of grails, and the Baroness asks him which of the grails is real, the one which Christ used during the Last Supper.
And in an apparently very fortunate turn of events, the excavation team located some of the grave goods including a ceramic cup which has a striking resemblance to the film’s grail which the excavation teams, some of whom apparently wore sun hats shaped like fedoras.
“It really was this awesome moment of history imitating art,” Gates told CNN.
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