Ten 'Out-of-Place' Artifacts That Supposedly Rewrite History

The object is modest: a small clay jar holding a copper tube sealed with bitumen, with an iron rod inside. It turned up in 1936 at Khujut Rabu, near the ancient city of Ctesiphon. Two years later Wilhelm König, working at the Iraq Museum's laboratory, suggested it was a galvanic cell, perhaps used to electroplate jewelry. The idea spread fast, and the jar became known as the Baghdad Battery.

Fill a replica with vinegar or lemon juice and it does produce a small voltage, around a volt per jar. That is the whole case for ancient electricity, and it is thin. No wires, conductors or electrical devices have been found with it. The copper tube did not stick out past the seal, so there was nothing obvious to connect a wire to. The gilded objects König had in mind were apparently gilded with mercury and heat, a well-known ancient technique, not electroplating. The excavation records are poor, and the pottery style points to the Sasanian period rather than the earlier Parthian date König proposed.

Most archaeologists read it as a storage vessel for sacred scrolls or as a ritual object, since similar jars from nearby Seleucia and Ctesiphon are thought to have stored scrolls. University of Pennsylvania archaeologist William Hafford has argued it was a magical device for a prayer or curse. The jar itself has been missing since the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

In 1929, during work at Istanbul's Topkapi Palace, scholars came across a fragment of a world map drawn on gazelle skin. It was signed by Piri Reis, an Ottoman naval captain and cartographer, and dated 1513. Only about a third survives, showing the Atlantic with the coasts of Europe, Africa and South America. Its bottom edge, where the coast of South America bends sharply east, later became the most argued-over coastline in fringe literature.

The historian Charles Hapgood claimed that this southern coast was Queen Maud Land in Antarctica, mapped accurately without its ice. Since Antarctica's coast has been buried under ice for millions of years, that would mean someone surveyed it in deep prehistory. The theory became a staple of lost-civilization books.

Piri Reis, though, told readers exactly how he worked. Notes on the map say he compiled it from about 20 sources, including maps from the age of Alexander the Great, an Arab map of India, four Portuguese charts and a map by Columbus, which the notes say supplied the western coasts and islands. A simpler reading of the southern bend is that the coast was turned to fit the edge of the parchment, a common mapmaking compromise. What the map really shows is an Ottoman scholar with access to the newest European discoveries, synthesizing them within about 20 years of Columbus's first voyage.

In 1898, excavators at Saqqara found a small wooden bird in the tomb of a man named Pa-di-Imen. Carved from sycamore and dating to about 200 BC, it weighs roughly 39 grams (under 1.5 ounces) and has a wingspan of about 7 inches (18 centimeters). It has no feet and no carved feathers, and its tail is vertical, like a rudder. To modern eyes, it looks a little like a model airplane.

That resemblance is the whole OOPArt case. Starting in the late 1960s, Khalil Messiha argued that the bird was a scale model of an Egyptian glider and that a horizontal tail had broken off. Models he built with a tail added flew briefly when thrown, and the popular press ran with the idea of pharaonic aircraft.

The trouble is that the original, as found, would not fly well. Without a horizontal stabilizer it is unstable, and a 2023 computer simulation by researchers in Bremen, Germany, found poor gliding performance and pitch instability. No full-size craft, no technical drawings and no texts describing flight have ever turned up in Egypt. Egyptologists see a more familiar object: a stylized bird, possibly a falcon, the form of gods such as Horus. Suggestions include a toy for an elite child, a weather vane, or an ornament from a sacred boat. Its exact purpose is uncertain, but nothing about it requires aviation.

In 1966, Javier Cabrera, a physician in the desert city of Ica in southern Peru, received an engraved stone as a birthday present. He believed it showed an extinct fish, and he began collecting more. Soon he had thousands: smooth dark stones etched with people performing surgery and living alongside dinosaurs. Cabrera credited them to a lost race he called Gliptolithic Man and claimed it had come from elsewhere. By his death in 2001, an estimated 50,000 such stones were in circulation.

The source was not a lost race. After a BBC documentary and a Peruvian inquiry in the 1970s, a local farmer named Basilio Uschuya admitted he had been carving stones and aging them to sell to visitors. He later gave conflicting accounts about how many he had made. Journalists filmed local artisans turning out convincing copies in minutes with a dentist's drill, then rubbing them with animal dung and baking them in coals. When examined under magnification, the stones lacked the weathering an ancient carving would show.

The dinosaurs, meanwhile, look a lot like 1960s pop culture. The real loss is that the hoax crowded out Ica's genuine past. The Paracas and Nazca cultures of the region left superb textiles and pottery, but, as art historian Nancy Kelker has noted, no archaeological record of etched stones like these.

In 1850, the British archaeologist Austen Henry Layard was digging in the North West Palace at Nimrud, a capital of the Assyrian Empire in what is now northern Iraq. Among the finds was a small oval of rock crystal, about 1.6 inches (4.2 centimeters) long, ground flat on one side and gently curved on the other. Held up to the eye, it magnifies, roughly threefold, with a focal length of about 4.7 inches (12 centimeters). It now belongs to the British Museum.

That property has made it a favorite exhibit for claims of lost optical technology. In 1999 Giovanni Pettinato of the University of Rome went furthest, proposing it was part of an Assyrian telescope and linking it to Assyrian descriptions of the planet Saturn. Most specialists on Assyria were unconvinced: the crystal is roughly ground, its focus is poor, it is pocked with natural flaws, and no surviving Assyrian text mentions a telescope.

The British Museum's own catalog calls it an inlay and judges its optical properties probably accidental. Layard reported finding it beneath fragments of blue glass from a decayed decorated object, which fits a piece of furniture or a box. Either way, the object shows real Assyrian skill: lapidaries who could grind and polish hard quartz into a smooth, even shape without modern machinery.