1,700-year-old Roman sarcophagus is unearthed in Budapest | Hacker News Reader

1,700-year-old Roman sarcophagus is unearthed in Budapest

apnews.com

150 pointsgmays76 comments

"Excavators also removed a layer of mud roughly 4 centimeters (1.5 inches) thick from inside the coffin that Fényes hopes could contain more treasures."

i strongly suspect this is not "mud" but the dried precipitate of liquified soft tissue, [coffin liquor] and condensation.

'Coffin liquor' may be the most disgusting pair of words I've ever read, and I've been on the internet a while. Wow.

I was getting the exact same thing. I will be using the term in conversation now though.

Sounds like a cocktail to me. Somewhat like a black russian but browner in colour.

Cool band name, too.

Haha I told my good friend (we played together in a black metal band 100 years ago) that we might want to try again with this name.

There's a grindcore album by that name. Which I'll now have to check out ;)

https://napalmted.bandcamp.com/album/coffin-liquor

Vampires playing black metal during the roaring 20s must have been wild

> Cool band name, too.

Coffin Liquor. It's to die for.

Brown is right. "Mummy brown" is a pigment made from ground up mummy.

Similar to “dumpster piss”. hehe.

I'm imagining vampires obsessing over terroir...

Try these three words: Victorians eating mummies

Love this bit of lore. It goes super well with The Thought Emporiums video about recreating an Egyptian mummy just to eat it: https://youtu.be/fbhV0TP3jco

"dried precipitate of liquified soft tissue...and condensation". Yeah - mud.

Once all the bacteria have done their thing what's left? At this point thousands of years later it probably is solidly within the mud spectrum and closer to the sand end then say lakebottom or swamp mud.

I wish someone would do the math, it feels like a human body wouldn’t leave that much remains after degrading. I remember learning in the cemetery tour at New Orleans that those above ground tombs are family tombs and that they contain generations of people. The top shelf is where the body goes and it stays for one year and degrades before it is opened again and scraped into the bottom layer where multiple generations dwell forever together.

https://historyinstone.blogspot.com/2019/07/above-ground-bur...

> In the early days of New Orleans, the pieces of the casket were removed and burned, while the remains were pushed to the back of the tomb, falling into an underground chamber called a caveau (This is where the phrase, "I wouldn't touch him with a ten-foot pole comes from... the pole being the device used to push remains to the back of the tomb).

TIL

I’ve always heard the phase a little different, “I wouldn’t touch that with a ten foot barge pole.” And when I search that the story matches yours.

sarcophagus looks to be 2 feet by 7 feet based on scale of objects in the image.

is 1.75 cubic feet of solid material reasonable?

the image displays distinct relief cracks of a drying wet slurry, the dark staining inside the coffin suggests high fluid mark was maybe 4inches, it may have knocked an urn over, before recedeing, and evaporating.

while not up on the finer points of such burial practice, it doesnt seem unreasonable that a consideral amount of flowers and other plant materials may be involved, there should be considerable pollen present, potassium and sodium salts of the decedent, adipocere, and perhaps diatoms dependent on the nature of the soil, and source of water percolating into the sarcophagus.

i believe considering it to be just mud, would be to overlook, a volume of pertinant discovery.

Sounds like dirt to me.

I was reading the article looking for mentions of some analysis that this might allow. Perhaps all that archaeology does with this material is to sift it for objects.

Step 1: Find it.

Step 2: Archive it. (Dig and catalogue)

Step 3: Analyze it.

We often learn new things from fossils that have been shelved for decades, but not yet researched, so I assume analysis is still in the pipeline.

> “The peculiarity of the finding is that it was a hermetically sealed sarcophagus. It was not disturbed previously, so it was intact,” said Gabriella Fényes, the excavation’s lead archaeologist.

If this is the case -- dont scientists have interest in analyzing the air contents inside this sealed box before it is fully opened -- maybe by inserting a narrow tube? Might that not teach us something that may help us preserve future archaeological finds better? Maybe we are irreversibly destroying some of the evidence inside it by casually opening them? (I am sure they are not intentionally careless or destroying it -- but just wondering if future scince might make the current scientific process look clunky and ill-advised)

It's made of limestone, which is quite porous. Should be plenty of air exchange over the last 1700 years.

(And they may have done so before opening. It probably wouldn't be mentioned in an article like this.)

Then it wasn't hermetically sealed, as the author claims.

If nothing else, a time capsule of bacteria present...

Where does it say that they didn't?

there is an urn inside, that seems unbroken, there may be a sample in there.

There's something about how this article was written that reads like grave robbing, especially the bit about them hoping to discover "more treasures."

Yes. “Unlooted and unopened”… until today.

It sells newspapers unfortunately. For the longest time newspapers (and by extension much of the general public) equat archaeology with treasure hunting.

I don't know the circumstances of this dig, but it may have been a rescue dig ahead of eg massive concrete foundations going in. In many countries this is what drives (and funds) fieldwork.

There's a bit done by a comedian where they ask what the differences are between grave robbers and archaeologists, but basically it boils down to a question of time.

If historical grave robbers left detailed descriptions of what they'd found and where they moved it to, I wouldn't mind much.

Those descriptions themselves would be a major archaeological find if they were preserved at all. But chances are that those detailed descriptions would be lost even if the original artifacts would have still been preserved had they not been looted.

A key fossil, journal entry, or bit of clothing that would help explain "X" is going to stay mute if sold on the black market and kept on someone's shelf. Maybe we'll get lucky and learn about it someday from the heirs - but probably not.

While the article does not mention it, chances are that the sarcophagus was found during doing the soilwork for modern construction. In which case the construction company is obliged to report that to the ministry in charge and then the excavation can be done with proper care. If there was not a law for that we wouldn't talk about grave robbing but grave destroying instead.

What's the difference between archeology and grave robbing. Just time.

Taking all the tokens people gave the deceased for their afterlife journey sounds like highway robbery.

A Roman sarcophagus was found on a beach in Bulgaria last year [1]. It was used as a bar and had holes drilled for LED lighting.

[1] https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2024/08/12/beach-bar-sarc...

We are much closer in time to Marco Polo than Marco Polo was to this girl.

Obviously?

Video (in Hungarian) about the excavation and the opening of the sarcophagus. They remove the lid at 8:30.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LknkrGnCTG8

Where did the mud inside come from if it was still sealed?

limestone is porous and will allow water to eventually seep through.

a condensation cycle will occur, and drip percolate the soft tissue and adipocere into a slurry [coffin liquor] that will settle to the bottom of the sarcophagus.

I honestly cannot believe that I have been listening to Death Metal my entire life, and no one has ever used the term “coffin liquor” in a song.

I think “coffin liquor” would be a great name for an absinthe.

For what it's worth, Morpheus Descends had a song called 'Submerged in Adipocere', which is a similar kind of thing.

Just wanted to say hello to my fellow metalheads. And thanks for the song recommendation!

That's more Necrophagist kinda territory.

The famous last words: "Let's open this Sarcophagus and see what we find inside..."

What a strange way to date it. "The Roman sarcophagus from the III century CE is unearthed in Budapest". Okay? The Roman Empire did span that far in that time period, and IIRC that time period is already quite well represented archaeologically speaking.

>III century CE

IV century CE

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Goddamn the website is atrocious to use on a phone, let me pinch to zoom in on the photos!

Good post though.

What an aggressive website: at the same time, there's 2 different popups, a display ad and a video ad playing without being activated. Doesn't AP make enough money selling news to news organizations? Disgusting.

Underneath all of that mud there might be treasures.

Adblocking is the brush you need

uBlock Origin, my friend

>> Untouched by looters and sealed for centuries,

Until today. Open a grave one day and you are a grave robber. Open it on some other day and you are a scientist. I think the people who sealed the grave wouldn't see much of a difference.

And open a grave a third day, and you're just an ordinary grave digger, reusing the cemetery land.

Is that Yorick?

What would the people who sealed the grave do when they accidentally unearthed a sophisticated burial site from the middle bronze age? Leave it alone? Maybe. I'm not sure, humans are curious.

Well the effort and care put into the grave made us - 2000 years later in cyberspace - in a sense remember the person. Who was this young woman? They even gave us hints/rewards. Made us curious.

So maybe they prepared her for an afterlife ... of continued memory and presence among the living, which they with their technological limitations succeeded in, we are talking about her, now.

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