Achaemenid-era Persian cup to be auctioned

I cringed when I read the current owner of this beautiful Achaemenid-era Persian gold cup actually used it for target practice when he was a boy.

An ancient gold cup, which was once acquired by a rag and bone man, that is expected to fetch several hundred thousand pounds at auction. Photograph: PA

"Now that the little gold cup has left the shoebox under his bed and is heading for an auction room, John Webber rather regrets the pot-shots he took with his air gun - even though the dents did flatten out nicely with the back of a spoon. After all, it now has a £500,000 price on its head.

If scientific tests and expert opinion are correct, his grandfather's gift must represent the best scrap metal find ever. The mystery object may be genuine lost treasure, a unique piece beaten out of a single sheet of gold in the Middle East, somewhere in the vast Achaemenid empire which spread from Persia to become the largest empire of the ancient world, until overthrown by Alexander the Great in 330 BC. The skill of the Achaemenid metal workers, who made exquisite objects in sheet gold and silver, was renowned."

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Authentic Viking DNA retrieved

"Although “Viking” literally means “pirate,” recent research has indicated that the Vikings were also traders to the fishmongers of Europe. Stereotypically, these Norsemen are usually pictured wearing a horned helmet but in a new study published in the journal PLoS ONE this week, Jørgen Dissing and colleagues from the University of Copenhagen, investigated what went under the helmet; the scientists were able to extract authentic DNA from ancient Viking skeletons, avoiding many of the problems of contamination faced by past researchers.

Using freshly sampled material from ten Viking skeletons from around AD 1,000, from a non-Christian burial site on the Danish island of Funen, Dissing and colleagues showed that it is indeed possible to retrieve authentic DNA from ancient humans.

Wearing protective suits, the researchers removed the teeth from the jaw at the moment the skeletons were unearthed when they had been untouched for 1,000 years. The subsequent laboratory procedures were also carefully controlled in order to avoid contamination.

Analysis of the Viking DNA showed no evidence of contamination with extraneous DNA, and typing of the endogenous DNA gave reproducible results and showed that these individuals were just as diverse as contemporary humans. A reliable retrieval of authentic DNA opens the way for a valuable use of prehistoric human remains to illuminate the genetic history of past and extant populations."

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Head of Cleopatra and mask thought to be Marc Antony's discovered near Alexandria

"An alabaster head of Cleopatra and a mask thought to belong to her lover Mark Antony have been found near Egypt's Mediterranean city of Alexandria, antiquities chief Zahi Hawass said on Monday.

The two treasures, a bronze statue of Goddess Aphrodite and a headless royal statue from the Ptolemaic dynasty, which ruled Egypt between 323 and 30 BC, were discovered by a joint Egyptian-Dominican Republic team of archeologists in the Tapsiris Magna temple, Hawass said.

Some 20 bronze coins stamped with Cleopatra's face were found in underground tunnels 50 metres (164 feet) deep in the archeological site, Hawass said."

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