An ancient tablet engraved with 13 verses of the Odyssey has been unearthed in southern Greece in what is possibly the earliest-recorded trace of the epic poem, the culture ministry said Tuesday. The clay slab is believed to date back to the third century, during the Roman era. “If this date is confirmed, the tablet could be the oldest written record of Homer’s work ever discovered” in Greece, a ministry statement said. The extract, taken from book 14, describes the return of Ulysses to his home island of Ithaca. The tablet was discovered after three years of surface excavations by the Greek Archaeological Services in cooperation with the German Institute of Archaeology. It was found close to the remains of the Temple of Zeus at the cradle of the Olympic Games in western Peloponnese. First composed orally around the 8th century BC, the epic –

The world-renowned general Julius Caesar may have been rather less heroic than we imagine, in terms of victories as well as physique. Caesar was largely bald and had a deformed skull, resulting from difficulties during his birth. As for military campaigns, he suffered his greatest defeat in the Low Countries, possibly near the Dutch city of Maastricht, according to new research suggesting that he fought a substantial proportion of the Gallic Wars in the northern part of Gaul. These findings emerged from the research conducted by the archaeologist and author Tom Buijtendorp on Caesar’s activities in the Low Countries, in response to the mounting pile of clues for his presence here. Buijtendorp’s research was recently published in the book Caesar in de Lage Landen (Caesar in the Low Countries). His findings about Caesar’s countenance in combination with one of the oldest portraits of Caesar from the collection of the Dutch national museum of antiquities (the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden in L

Scientists presented Ingentia prima, the first giant dinosaur that inhabited the Planet more than 200 million years ago. It exceeds three times the size of the largest Triassic dinosaurs known to date. The discovery was made at the Balde de Leyes deposit, southeast of the province of San Juan. Dinosaurs were not always giants. The evolutionary history took millions of years for some species to double the weight of a current elephant and reach between eight and ten meters in length, but that time was much less than was believed: hence the great importance of the finding of Ingentia prima, which would have had a body mass of up to ten tons. Dr. Cecilia Apaldetti, researcher at the Institute and Museum of Natural Sciences of the University of San Juan (IMCN) and CONICET, told the Agencia CTyS-UNLaM that “this new species shows a strategy of growth unknown until now and indicates that the origin of gigantism came much earlier than previously thought”. “Before this discovery, gigantism was