A mound hid Viking treasures for centuries
In today’s newsletter, we explore how a farmer’s curiosity led to a Viking bonanza, discover how long COVID stays in our bodies, examine abortion’s non-controversial distant past, … and reveal a centuries-old mummy mystery.
A curious mound in a field caught the attention of a farmer. Was it a mass grave for victims of the Black Death? No, the mound contained an astounding burial site for two Viking women who died nearly 1,200 years ago in present-day Norway.
They were buried inside a Viking ship (pictured above), filled with treasure and intricate carvings, the grandest of Viking burials ever unearthed.
But mysteries abound over the identity of the women, their cause of death, and the meanings of some of the riches meant to accompany them into the afterlife, Heather Pringle writes for Nat Geo.
Read the full story here.
Pictured above, Viking mourners constructed a tent-like chamber on the burial ship for the two women, who died around the year 834.
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IN THE SPOTLIGHT
A mummy mystery: A long-dead ancient Egyptian woman was wrapped in linen with text in a strange language. It took decades before researchers determined it was Etruscan, from a pre-Roman people. Finding 1,300 words on the mummy’s wrapping, researchers learned more from the long-dead language, of which one word, adapted by the Romans, is the root of the words “person” and “persona,” Nat Geo HISTORY magazine reports. (Pictured above, Etruscan letters from a restored linen book, once torn into stripes to cover an Egyptian mummy.)
IN A FEW WORDS
When you see the world through other people’s eyes, you have a richer understanding of who you are and why people do what they do.Raghava KK, Artist, technologist, Nat Geo Emerging Explorer
LAST GLIMPSE
Shame: What caused America to lock up more than 120,000 civilians, two-thirds of them U.S. citizens, without due process during World War II? Nearly eight decades later, Junzo Jake Ohara struggles to answer. “I think it was probably because of prejudice,” says Ohara, who was confined for three years. “They were afraid of us, I guess.” The wartime imprisonment of Japanese Americans resonates today, Ann Curry wrote for Nat Geo. (Pictured above, from our Photo of the Day archival collection, is a young Dorothy Takii, who was shipped with her family to a prison-like facility in Arkansas.)
