25 Most Mysterious Ancient Artifacts Finds

Added: 2026-04-29

[00:00:00]Trying to understand an ancient artifact is all part of the discovery process for an expert. It's quite rare for an archaeologist to fully understand an artifact at first sight. They have to research it and find historical context for it first. Sometimes though, their research gets them nowhere. They're left with a mystery on their hands. And those mysteries [music] sometimes never get solved. Every artifact and discovery you're about to see in this video is a curiosity [music] that's kept its secrets.

[00:00:33]The Mloud [music] clan is one of Scotland's most ancient, and its survival may or may not be down to the existence of its [music] legendary fairy flag. Today, you'll find the tatty remnants of the flag on display in Dunvean Island on the Scottish island of Sky. The clan's members swear that it has magical properties. offering both healing and protection to anybody who touches [music] it. Even the elders of the clan, though, have no idea how old it is or [music] how it came to be in their possession. Some of them even say it was carried on banners during the crusades of the Middle Ages [music] and was weaved by the hands of magical fairies. In reality, it was probably weaved by [music] the skilled hands of Syrian crafts people. A 20th century analysis of the silk has proven it to be Syrian and suggests that it's about 1,600 years old. That makes the story about the Crusades possible. [music] In fact, it would have been considered ancient even by then. If the Mloud clan is ever in mortal danger, [music] folklore says that the flag is to be unfurled and waved, at which point [music] fairies will come and smite the clan's enemies. That's not the sort of behavior we usually associate with them.

[00:01:48]>> [music] >> The Lebornne Gospel book was already considered [music] a rare and unusual piece of work even before the Lebornne prayer wheel was discovered inside it on what appeared to be a blank [music] first page. The book comes from Lebornne Abbey in Varindorf, Germany, which was founded in the year 815.

[00:02:09]It was initially owned and operated by nuns, but [music] they were expelled by the bishop of Müster in 1131 to make way for a chapter of Benedictine [music] monks. The gospel appears to have been written prior to that somewhere towards the end of the 10th century. Its author is unknown, although a deacon called Gervadus might have [music] been responsible. The prayer wheel written in Latin and arranged in a series of concentric circles was probably added during the early 12th century. Its outermost circle tells us that the order of the diagram teaches us the way to return home. But the meaning of this isn't understood. [music] At the center of the wheel is the word God. Whoever created it didn't include any instructions, [music] and so we have no idea how it was intended to be used. As efforts were evidently made to conceal it, it might even have been considered arcane.

[00:03:05]On the slopes of Wongan in South Korea, you'll find an enormous, elaborately decorated 127 ton rock. The rock is called Guingamok, but it's better known to the world as turtle rock. Legend has it that anybody who rests their hand on the surface of the rock for a few moments will experience a feeling of great relief [music] and immense power. Plenty of people claim to have experienced that feeling, although there's no [music] scientific basis for saying that any such properties exist. The symbols [music] on its surface have never been translated and might never have been intended to be understood as a message.

[00:03:43]Local legends say that the rock breathes in something called chi energy from the sunrise and that the [music] best way to draw power from it is actually to touch it with your forehead rather than your hand. Belief in chi energy is reasonably common in Korea, Japan, and [music] China, and underpinned many ancient Chinese medical beliefs and practices.

[00:04:05]It was such beliefs that led to the carving of this monument. But the question of who carved it and when is a mystery that's been lost [music] to time.

[00:04:16]The emperors of ancient Rome were fond of creating enormous stone monuments to their successes so that history [music] would never forget them. One such monument is Trojan's column which was erected in Rome after Emperor Trojan's victory in the Dean Wars somewhere around the year 113. The design inspired the creation of Nelson's column in London, England. Many of the vanity pieces of Rome's long deadad emperors have been demolished, but this one has stood the test of time. It's just under 100 ft tall and features a 600 ft long freeze that wraps around the column 23 times. The freeze tells the story of how Trajan's genius led to not one but two vital military victories for the Romans in Eastern Europe between the years 101 and 106, which decisively tipped the Dean Wars in the empire's favor. Aside from representations of the emperor himself, the column features over 2,000 human figures and almost as many animals. The Romans wouldn't have had the help of cranes to build the structure. So, they must have completed the work by using a succession of platforms to lift the 20 massive 32 ton marble drums that make up the bulk of the monument. Emperor Trojan's statue was removed from the top of the column in [music] 1587 to be replaced with a statue of St. Peter by order of Pope Sixstus, but it otherwise remains untouched.

[00:05:51]Liafale [music] stands at the top of the hill of Tara in Ireland and has been known by many names over the centuries. The most popular is the stone of destiny, but it's also known as the coronation stone and the screaming stone. That's because people believed that the stone would cry out when it was touched by Ireland's rightful king. Nobody [music] knows where the legend comes from, but it's known to have been a commonly held one at the time of the coronation of Merkatak Macker in the year 500. A mythical god-like [music] race known as the Tuwatha de Danan is credited with bringing the stone to Ireland. The tale of its arrival is told in a series of ancient poems called the laborgala, the authorship of which is unknown. The same texts also say that Kucalain was so furious that the stone wouldn't cry out for him that he attacked it with his sword, [music] splitting the rock and ensuring it would never cry out for anybody again. In reality, [music] the standing stone was probably erected during the Neolithic era by people who held rituals and ceremonies at the top of the hill. But where's the fun in believing that?

[00:07:03]When NASA launched the Pioneer 10 [music] space probe in 1972, it was a big moment for scientists. For the first time, the human race reached out toward the outer planets on a quest for understanding. To commemorate the occasion, Frank Drake and Carl Sean designed a plaque that was attached to the probe's antenna [music] support struts. The plaque contains basic information about the human race. The design of that plaque is very similar to the designs on these mysterious stones which were discovered fused together in a cave in Japan, Indonesia in 1992.

[00:07:41]Like the plaque, the stone seems to be engraved with a basic map of our solar system along with depictions of a man and a woman. You might assume that someone [music] copied the design of the plaque onto the stones, but that's impossible. The carvings are several thousand years old. To make things [music] even stranger, the stones apparently have a strong and unexplained magnetic field. It's such a strange discovery that most archaeologists and scientists choose to pretend that it doesn't exist rather than answer the questions of where it came from and how.

[00:08:15]Did a timetraveling alien race leave it behind as a joke.

[00:08:21]Not every challenging or mysterious artifact is ignored by the archaeological community. Some of them find their way into museums, even if we're not really sure what they are.

[00:08:32]Here's [music] one such object that's currently inside the archaeological museum of Heracleion in Cree. [music] It's a single block of solid stone that's been carved by ancient hands into a shape that resembles a giant honeycomb. Look closely and you'll see that the surface of the honeycomb is covered in small tube-like shapes. Some of the tubes are so small that they're almost microscopic. Nobody knows how old this artifact is or what it was made for.

[00:09:01]Nothing like it has ever been found anywhere else in the world. It presumably [music] had some practical or symbolic purpose, but it's impossible even to guess at what that [music] purpose might be. Dating stone artifacts is extremely difficult because of the lack of organic material. So, we don't even know how old it is. Could it be nothing more than a decorative object made by an artist to put on display in their home? Or might it have had a significance [music] that's lost on our modern eyes? It's impossible to say.

[00:09:33]The problem with [music] supposedly ancient inscriptions etched on stone is that it's not always easy to say what's real and what's a hoax. Take the Bat Creek inscription as an example. It was found in a burial mound close to Knoxville, Tennessee, USA in 1889.

[00:09:51]That means we've had over 130 years to examine it. And yet, we still don't know if it's a genuine ancient mystery or a more recent attempt at [music] fraud. If it's real, the symbols carved into its surface might be a pre-Colombian written language. Hundreds of attempts to translate the message have been made, but none have succeeded. There isn't a known language to compare it to, [music] and translating such a short series of characters without a comparison is probably impossible. It was initially suspected that the inscription was written in an ancient Cherokee language, but Seemetic [music] language expert Cyrus Gordon suggested in the 1970s that the characters might come from an early PaleoHebrew language. According to him, the message says for Judea and is proof that a Judean tribe arrived in the Americas long before any Europeans.

[00:10:45]Unsurprisingly, the controversial theory has few [music] supporters in the 21st century.

[00:10:54]If you can work out the true purpose of Volvvel paper machines, you'll outstrip the achievements of any living [music] historian. What we know for certain is that the surprisingly complex machines can be [music] used to calculate the date and the time. According to Rammon Lul of Mayorca, the man [music] who invented the Volv in the 13th century, they can also calculate and [music] identify absolute truth. It would be easy to dismiss such a claim as the ramblings of a madman, but Lul was among the most respected scientists of his era. His invention is comparable to the astrolabe with the important distinction that the Volvll is much smaller and made of paper rather than brass and steel.

[00:11:37]LOL believed that every religion in the world of his time ought to be assimilated into one and he also believed that the vulvvel would somehow help with that process. If anybody ever understood how that process would work, the information has been lost. We know that aligning the hole in the vll with the pole star and then centering the crossed circles around it would give you the date and the approximate time and maybe your approximate location too. But how it could determine the truth is a mystery. Still, that didn't prevent them from being banned for fear that they [music] could be used in witchcraft or sorcery.

[00:12:16]Today, we know former [music] Viking chieftain Harold Bluetooth best because his name has been taken and appropriated by Bluetooth technology along with his personal rune. The rune serves as the technologies logo. Prior to this though, he was best known for creating the enormous [music] rune complex in Denmark known as the Yelling Stones. These enormous rocks are a record of the conversion of the Vikings from their ancient Norse [music] religious beliefs to Christianity. The process happened slowly between the years 826 and 965.

[00:12:52]On the stones, [music] we see scenes taken from ancient Norse legends and myths. But as the stories progress, the ancient Norse heroes are defeated by Christ and other scenes from Christian iconography. Historians in the country view the Jelling Stones almost as a birth certificate, marking the beginning of medieval Denmark and the beginning of the end for the Vikings and their way of life. While much of the narrative of the carvings can be understood, there are still sections that are hard to follow and in places become totally undecipherable.

[00:13:25]>> [music] >> Sadly, if we don't understand them now, it's unlikely that we ever will.

[00:13:33]Speaking of hard to decipher ancient runes and symbols, here's the Koval Spear head. It was found by a farmer as he plowed his field in Volkia, Ukraine in 1858. The iron spearhead is covered in small, [music] delicately carved inscriptions and ornamentation, very little of which has ever been fully translated or understood. Historians think the artifact was made during the 3rd century and is probably, but not definitely, a relic of the Goths. From the small sections we can translate, we can say that the spear head contains the words thither rider, which is a good luck message and also a description of the spear's trajectory. The presence of a crescent moon symbol [music] might imply that the spear head was thought to have magical properties. That wouldn't be unusual for the gods. Many Germanic warriors [music] believed their spears to be either blessed or magical. Maybe these magical properties [music] might explain how the artifact has disappeared. The version of the Kovville spearhead on display in Berlin is a replica, as is the one in Warsaw. The original was taken by Nazi SS officer Peter Pollson [music] during the Second World War and has never been seen since.

[00:14:50]Most of you will have heard legends about a statue that [music] can weep, bleed, or do something else that statues shouldn't be capable of. Here's a statue that's said to be able to do both of those things [music] and a whole lot more. It's the Lady of Akita, a representation of the Virgin Mary that was carved by a Buddhist wood cutter during the 1960s and then given to a convent in the town of Akita, Japan within 10 years of being installed. The statue developed a nationwide reputation for performing miracles. Aside from the crying and the weeping, many instances of which have been witnessed by multiple people, the statue has been credited with curing [music] blindness, deafness, and even cancer. The official position of the Catholic Church is that the statue is a holy object, and the miracles are real. [music] Video footage of both the weeping and the bleeding can be found on the internet. But there's a catch. Samples of blood have been taken from the statue on two separate occasions during the 21st century, and subsequent tests have shown that the blood came from two different human individuals. That implies that some people in the convent [music] are feeding the statue their own blood. The Lady of Akira is almost certainly a hoax, but that won't shake the faith of most believers.

[00:16:09]Any artifact [music] left behind by the Pictish people, an ancient culture that lived in Scotland, is bound to be a mystery. We know virtually nothing about the Picss, including their name. We only call them the Picss [music] because that's the name the Romans used for them, and it's thought to have been an insult. One of the largest and most mysterious Pictish artifacts is the Riney Man. This 6-ft tall monument was discovered in 1978 in Aberdeenshshire and depicts a man with a headdress carrying an axe. Although it's difficult to date [music] stone, archaeologists think that the monument was carved during either the fifth or [music] sixth century. There's some indication that the area it was found in was a burial site for high status pictish individuals. [music] So, it's possible that the individual whose likeness is carved into the stone was an important person and perhaps even a tribal leader.

[00:17:04]The ax he's carrying is of a type that the picss used in animal sacrifices.

[00:17:09]That might mean that the stone itself was used in animal sacrifices, although there's no proof of that. It might merely have been a decoration for the entrance to a fort that once stood here.

[00:17:22]At first glance, the Tabnit sarcophagus [music] looks like an ancient Egyptian relic.

[00:17:28]Everything about it screams Egyptian, right down to the headdress [music] of the figure depicted on the lid, and the hieroglyphs carved into its surface. It isn't Egyptian, though. The Tubnit sarcophagus is Phoenician. Tabnet, the man inside the 2,500year-old casket, was both the ruler of Sedon and the high priest of Ash Torreth during his lifetime. [music] The first clue for archaeologists that this wasn't an Egyptian burial was the fact that when the [music] sarcophagus was opened in the late 19th century, Topnit's mummy still had all of its internal organs intact. That [music] differs radically from the standard Egyptian procedure for mummification. Despite that, the sarcophagus was almost certainly made in an Egyptian workshop. [music] So that begs the question of why an Egyptian didn't carry out the imbalming and mummification. Even the hieroglyphic script is confusing. Written in a mix of Egyptian and Phoenician, [music] the Phoenetians were a powerful, wealthy civilization at around the same time the Egyptians were in their [music] pump. So why would they borrow so heavily from Egyptian traditions to bury one of their leaders? Why aren't any of their other leaders buried [music] this way? It's a total mystery.

[00:18:45]Around 360 years ago, someone went to a lot of trouble to make this absolutely beautiful emerald watch from a single jewel. Unfortunately, it subsequently ended up buried underneath a cellar in London for centuries. The watch is the most outstanding [music] single artifact in a collection that was found during an excavation in 1912 and is now known as the Cheapside Horde.

[00:19:10][music] It's hard to say how long it was buried, but the archaeologists who found it noted possible damage to the items caused by the heat of the Great Fire of London. That happened in 1666, so it's safe to assume the precious [music] objects were already buried by then. Another artifact in the horde, a gemstone known as the Stafford Inaglio, [music] is engraved with a heraldrich badge associated with William Howard, Viccount Stafford, which suggests a creation date of 1640 [music] at the earliest. The most probable reason for the burial is that the artifacts belong to someone who went off to fight [music] in the English Civil War and decided to hide their valuables before they left.

[00:19:55]If they didn't come back from that war, nobody would have known to go looking for them. [music] And so they didn't.

[00:20:04]Our next artifact is a clever one. But historians aren't sure whether it was designed to amuse or to frustrate. It's the Tantalus cup, also sometimes known as the [music] Pythagorean cup after its inventor, Pythagoras of Samos. Legend has it that Pythagoras was bored of his students being drunk and even more bored of his workers [music] turning up drunk.

[00:20:27]So he invented the tantalus cup to stop it from happening. If you fill the cup up to the halfway point, nothing happens and you [music] can drink from it as normal. Fill it beyond that point, though, and the U-shaped [music] pipe hidden in the center of the cup detects the change in pressure, opens a valve, and dumps the contents of the cup out of the bottom. and presumably all over the drinker. This would have been funny to watch. So, you can see how some historians have come to assume it was a joke. [music] Nobody's ever been able to prove that the cups are even connected to Pythagoras. But, as the earliest one ever found is [music] 2,600 years old, we can at least say that it comes from the [music] right era.

[00:21:12]The inscriptions on the tombs, temples, and other monuments of ancient Egypt usually tell of the might of a pharaoh, the divinity of a god, or a magnificent achievement by the Egyptian people.

[00:21:25]There are exceptions to that, though.

[00:21:27]This is the famine stella, a long form inscription carved in hieroglyphs onto the side of a rock in Sahel Island, not far from Azwan. The Stella is so named because it tells the story of a terrible drought that struck the land during [music] the reign of the Pharaoh Joser, who ruled 2,600 years ago. The famine was brutal and [music] lasted for 7 years. What's odd is that the inscription doesn't appear to have been created until the days of the TMic Kingdom, [music] which is 300 years after Dozer died. Historians have no idea why such a long inscription would be created so many years after the drought happened, unless it was an attempt to discredit one of Dozer's [music] descendants, who may have had their eyes on the throne. Alternatively, it may have had religious connotations.

[00:22:18]The god Kum [music] is credited with eventually ending the famine. So, Kenum's followers might have been making their case for power and [music] influence among the fraught religious picture of the TMIC dynasty. We'll probably never know for sure.

[00:22:35][music] Artifacts like China's puzzle balls, also known as the puzzle balls of Guanghu, can never be produced again.

[00:22:44]That's because they're made of ivory, and there are now legal limitations on what can be done with ivory. Even [music] if it were permissible to use ivory for such a purpose, though, it's not certain that we'd be [music] able to replicate them. Their level of complexity is simply astounding. The first mention [music] of them comes from the writings of the Ming scholar Ka Xiao in 1388 in which he [music] referred to them as the devil's work balls. He was suspicious that the beautiful balls had been created by witchcraft. Xiao couldn't fathom how the inner balls float freely inside the outer ones, [music] or how the network of holes in their surfaces seems to change as the outer ball rolls across the inner. Two 19th century examples of puzzle balls are held in the collection of Chicago's Heritage Museum of Asian Art, [music] by which time the art of making them had reached its peak. One of their examples has 25 [music] separate layers of ivory.

[00:23:42]The objective of a puzzle ball is to solve it by making all of the holes align using a toothpick or something similar. But the task is far harder than Rubik's cube. [music] Some people say that the Cold Stream stone [music] is the oldest work of art in the world. It's a controversial claim, so let's examine it. The stone was found more than 100 years ago in [music] a rock shelter on the banks of South Africa's Lauing River. The scene painted upon its surface is basic. We see three human figures, each represented [music] by a different color, seemingly engaged in a hunt.

[00:24:20]There may once have been more to [music] the scene, but the stone was found 2 ft underground in warm, wet conditions thanks to the [music] river. The river has eroded the stone and should have destroyed the artwork, too. But these layers of paint have managed to cling [music] on. The most likely candidates for the creation of the piece are the San Hunter gatherers. The San people are among the oldest cultures on Earth with origins that can be traced [music] back more than 40,000 years. We'd have an easier time accepting that this is a genuine artifact were it not for its condition. There are suspicions that rather than being a genuinely ancient piece, it was buried in the river very close to the time of its discovery, and so the whole thing's a hoax. The jury is still out on that matter.

[00:25:09][music] The scene on the Cold Stream stone has been interpreted as a hunting scene, but ancient artwork isn't always so easy to interpret.

[00:25:18]>> [music] >> What are we to make of this pottery bust which was created in East China some 7,300 years ago? The person [music] depicted on the bust appears to be smiling. But why do they have so many perforations running across their face?

[00:25:34]Are they male or female? What's the meaning of the symbol on their headdress? None of these questions have ever been answered conclusively. The curious face is one of 600 artifacts [music] that were found from a late stone age site in Shong Dong village Ani in 1985. The [music] age of 7,300 years was determined after carbon 14 technology [music] was used to test it.

[00:25:58]The purpose of the artifact, however, eludes us. It's unlike anything else that's ever been found elsewhere in China. Every other item recovered during the 1985 excavation [music] was either a weapon or a recognizable utensil of some kind. There are perceived similarities between the [music] symbol on the head of this figure with symbols used by the mech and the Maya. That ought to be impossible because of the distance between China and South America. [music] Might there have been contact between these ancient people? If so, how [music] did the Vikings deliberately create magnifying glasses? We don't know, but we do know that they created [music] glasses capable of magnification. We call them visi lenses.

[00:26:46]The existence of the artifacts [music] is a fact. The debate is about what they were used for and whether the Vikings made them purely because of their [music] magnification properties. The only place the lenses have ever been found is on Sweden's Gotland Island, which suggests that knowledge of how to create them [music] was confined to a small geographical area. The evidence that supports the idea of their creation being deliberate is strong. Visb lenses [music] have almost no spherical aberration, and the magnifying effect from one visi lens to another is almost [music] identical. The Vikings weren't big readers, so it's unlikely that they'd have used the tools to read books. Instead, it's more likely that they used them to magnify the rays of the sun and thereby start fires. Given that the lenses have only ever been found in one place, and all of them appear to have been made between the 11th and 12th centuries, it's possible that there was only ever one person capable of making them, and they took their knowledge to the grave with them when they died.

[00:27:49]>> [music] >> As all good Christians will know, the New Testament tells us that Jesus fed 5,000 people with loaves and fishes.

[00:28:00]There's always been a debate between religious scholars about precisely where that miracle [music] is supposed to have taken place, but that debate might have been ended by this September 2019 discovery in the famous burnt church of Hippos in Israel. The church was built during the fourth or fifth century, but was destroyed by fire during the seventh. [music] The layers of ash and debris from the fire protected whatever was beneath them. [music] And so in 2019, archaeologists dug through it and found this stunning mosaic floor. [music] As you can see, the mosaic clearly features images of loaves and fish.

[00:28:38]Historians have taken that as a sign that this is [music] where people in the 4th century believed the miracle to have happened. That idea runs contrary to the previously prevailing theory, which was that the feeding [music] of the 5000 happened on the northwestern coast of the Sea of Galilee. The church is also on the coast of the Sea of Galilee, but it's on the [music] eastern side. The presence of the mosaic isn't absolute proof, but it must have been put here for a reason.

[00:29:09]Astronomy [music] was important to all of our ancient ancestors, no matter where we are in the world. Looking to the sun, moon, stars, and planets [music] is how they gauged the passing of time and the changing of the seasons.

[00:29:24]Many of our ancient ancestors [music] were more advanced in their knowledge of astronomy than you'd expect them to be, and the creators of the Dun Huang star chart had knowledge that ought to have [music] been impossible. The map was found in the Magaw caves of Ming Shahill. From the 4th century to the [music] 15th, the caves were occupied by Buddhists who use them as shrines. In 1900, Tauist priest Wang Yonlu came [music] to the cave to perform the first detailed archaeological study of their contents. It was then that the star chart was found among a whole 40,000 [music] documents that he recovered from the 17th cave. Based on the evidence, the chart of the heavens was created during the 7th century and shows the positions of various celestial bodies as they would have looked back then. What baffles modern-day astronomers is that the chart also appears to show Uranus and [music] Neptune, which ought to have been impossible at the time. The planets are invisible to the naked eye. So, how was the creator of this chart aware of them? [music]