Ancient brick inscribed with Mesopotamian writing
Ancient brick inscribed with Mesopotamian writing Ancient bricks inscribed with the names of Mesopotamian kings have yielded important insights into a mysterious anomaly in Earth's magnetic field 3,000 years ago, according to a new study involving UCL researchers. The research, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) , describes how changes in the Earth's magnetic field imprinted on iron oxide grains within ancient clay bricks, and how scientists were able to reconstruct these changes from the names of the kings inscribed on the bricks. The team hopes that using this "archaeomagnetism," which looks for signatures of the Earth's magnetic field in archaeological items, will improve the history of Earth's magnetic field, and can help better date artefacts that they previously couldn't. Co-author Professor Mark Altaweel (UCL Institute of Archaeology) said: "We often depend on dating methods such as radiocarbon dates to get a sense of chronology in ancient Mesopotamia. However, some of the most common cultural remains, such as bricks and ceramics, cannot typically be easily dated because they don't contain organic material. This work now helps create an important dating baseline that allows others to benefit from absolute dating using archaeomagnetism." The Earth's magnetic field weakens and strengthens over time, changes which imprint a distinct signature on hot minerals that are sensitive to the magnetic field. The team analysed the latent magnetic signature in grains of iron oxide minerals embedded in 32 clay bricks originating from archaeological sites throughout Mesopotamia, which now overlaps with modern day Iraq.
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