Sprawled across a hemispherical mound where the Judaean Hills meet the desert, ancient Herodium lies deep inside the occupied West Bank but has borne up a treasure trove of finds for Israeli archaeologists.

Herod the Great, the Roman-era Jewish king infamous for the biblical massacre of the innocents, had a taste for theatre, new excavations of his vast palace complex south of Jerusalem have found.

Palestinian authorities have seized hundreds of antiquities as they smashed a major smuggling ring in the West Bank town of Bethlehem, police said on Wednesday.

Valuable objects from the Canaanite, Roman, Byzantine, Greek and Islamic periods were seized by police in a Bethlehem house on Tuesday night, said Colonel Hassan Abu Namus, who heads the Palestinian antiquities police.

JERUSALEM, Oct 21, 2007 (AFP) - Archaeologists have uncovered artifacts under Jerusalem's contested Al-Aqsa mosque compound that may shed light on the first Jewish temple, the Israel Antiquities Authority said on Sunday.

'An apparently sealed archaeological level dating to the first temple period was exposed in the area close to the southeastern corner of the raised platform surrounding the Dome of the Rock,' it said in a statement.

LONDON, Oct 15, 2007 (AFP) - An environmental protestor put anti-pollution face masks on at least two of China's terracotta warriors at an exhibition in London, to highlight China's pollution record, a report said Monday.

Martin Wyness jumped over barriers to place the masks bearing the slogan 'CO2 emission polluter' on the warriors, some 20 of whom have been on display at the British Museum since last month, the Evening Standard reported.

ATHENS, Oct 14, 2007 (AFP) - Three giant cranes began the painstaking task Sunday of transferring hundreds of iconic statues and friezes from the Acropolis to an ultra-modern museum located below the ancient Athens landmark.

The operation started with the transfer of part of the frieze at the northern end of the Parthenon.

That fragment alone weighed 2.3 tonnes and in the weeks to come, the cranes will move objects as heavy as 2.5 tonnes.

ATHENS, Oct 11, 2007 (AFP) - Greek authorities held a dress rehearsal on Thursday ahead of the weekend relocation of iconic statues and friezes from the Acropolis to a new museum located below the ancient Athens landmark.

Three giant cranes were stationed between the current museum near the famed Parthenon temple and the new site located about 300 metres (984 feet) downhill to transport a marble sculpture weighing 2.5 tonnes.

The sculpture was packed in a metal container.

DAMASCUS, Oct 9, 2007 (AFP) - Mural paintings dating back 11,000 years have been found in a building on a bank of the River Euphrates in northern Syria, a French archaeologist said on Tuesday.

Eric Coqueugniot said they were the oldest murals found in the Middle East.

'Geometric paintings -- black, white and red -- have been found on the wall of a house in Jadeh,' he said, adding that they were discovered in late September in a circular house with a diameter of 7.5 metres (25 feet).

GENEVA, Oct 9, 2007 (AFP) - Switzerland on Tuesday returned to Turkey a bronze hand which had been looted from a Roman archaelogical site near the southwestern Turkish town of Denizli, Swiss authorities said.

The artefact from the ancient Roman city of Laodiceia was sold at auction in Germany in 2005 to a Swiss bidder, who handed over the bronze after he learned that it had been stolen, the Swiss Federal Culture Office said in a statement.

ATHENS, Oct 4, 2007 (AFP) - The former curator of the Getty museum in Los Angeles will go before a Greek judge in November, charged with having knowingly acquired a stolen gold Hellenic crown for the museum's collection, her lawyer said Thursday.

Marion True was charged in January with handling stolen antiquities following the 1.15 million dollar (778,000 euro) acquisition of the crown in 1993 for the Getty.

The museum returned the masterpiece and three other works that illegaly left Greece in March.

MOSCOW, Oct 4, 2007 (AFP) - The remains of dozens of suspected victims of Stalin's purges have been found in the cellar of a building near the one-time headquarters of the Soviet KGB in central Moscow, an investigator told AFP Thursday.

'Some workers who were cleaning out the cellar... found human remains at a depth of 40 or 50 centimetres (16 or 20 inches)' on Wednesday, said Sergei Buluchevsky, an investigator from the Moscow prosecutor's office.

Buluchevsky said police officers called to the scene counted 34 human skulls.

CAIRO, Oct 2, 2007 (AFP) - Egypt said Tuesday that Germany had agreed to return a 4,500 year old ancient Egyptian statue for a temporary exhibition at the inauguration of the new Egyptian Museum in 2011.

Antiquity supremo Zahi Hawass said the Roman and Pelizaeus Museum in Hildesheim had agreed to lend Egypt the seated statue of Hemiunu, architect of the Great Pyramid of Giza.

The famous statue is one of five that Hawass wants for the new museum's opening, including more controversially the bust of Nefertiti and the Rosetta stone.

ATHENS, Sept 28, 2007 (AFP) - Greece will dedicate a museum to Alexander the Great in the northern town of Pella, his birthplace and the seat of the Macedonian kingdom that ruled an empire from Europe to India, an official said Friday.

Expected to be ready by late 2008, the new museum will contain mosaics, weapons, jewellery and other finds from a 20-year excavation of the Pella archaeological site, an official at the culture ministry's museums department told AFP.

CAIRO, Sept 25, 2007 (AFP) - Egyptian antiquities supremo Zahi Hawass insisted Tuesday that Tutankhamun was not black despite calls by US black activists to recognise the boy king's dark skin colour.

'Tutankhamun was not black, and the portrayal of ancient Egyptian civilisation as black has no element of truth to it,' Hawass told reporters.

'Egyptians are not Arabs and are not Africans despite the fact that Egypt is in Africa,' he said, quoted by the official MENA news agency.

CAIRO, Sept 24, 2007 (AFP) - Eight baskets filled with fruits preserved for more than 3,000 years have been discovered by Egyptian archaeologists in Tutankhamun's tomb, the Supreme Council of Antiquities said on Monday.

A team of Egyptian archaeologists, led by antiquities supremo Zahi Hawass, made the disovery in the Valley of the Kings in the ancient city of Thebes, the modern-day Luxor, in southern Egypt.

'The eight baskets contained large quantities of doum fruits, which have been well preserved,' Hawass said in a statement.

ATHENS, Sept 24, 2007 (AFP) - Greece's new culture minister Michalis Liapis on Monday cited a 'historic debt' to reclaim the renowned Parthenon Marbles removed on the orders of a 19th century British ambassador.

'Now is the time for all of us, political leaders above all, to increase pressure for the return of the Parthenon Marbles from the British Museum,' Liapis told reporters during a visit to Athens' new Acropolis Museum, expected to open next year.

'Only then can we say that our historic debt will be settled,' he said.

JERUSALEM, Sept 23, 2007 (AFP) - A quarry which supplied blocks of stone for the construction of the second Jewish Temple has been uncovered in an area north of Jerusalem, an Israeli archaeologist said on Sunday.

The 'sensational' pit was unearthed some two months ago during regular inspections ahead of construction work at a site some four kilometres (three miles) north of Temple Mount, Yuval Baruch of the country's antiquities authority told reporters.

COPENHAGEN, Sept 19, 2007 (AFP) - Four people have been arrested in Denmark over the theft of a set of two gilded horns which are considered a national treasure, police said.

Two men and two women aged 19 to 46 were arrested overnight Tuesday around the central town of Horsens hours after the 'Guldhornene' were recovered by police.

The pieces are gold-plated silver replicas of two original gold horns made in 400 AD which were stolen in 1802 and destroyed.

LONDON, Sept 13, 2007 (AFP) - British museum-goers finally got their chance to see part of China's terracotta army Thursday, as a long-awaited major exhibition opened in London.

The British Museum is hosting 'The First Emperor: China's Terracotta Army' until April 6 and advance ticket sales are already breaking box office records, with 150,000 tickets sold before the exhibition had even started.

The exhibition could outstrip the Treasures of Tutankhamun display in 1972, seen by 1.7 million people.

CYRENE, Libya, Sept 12, 2007 (AFP) - In a country that is mostly desert, Libya wants to preserve a rare verdant region with archaeological treasures from the ravages of looting and encroaching urbanisation.

To meet that ambitious goal the north African country has launched the world's first large-scale conservation and sustainable development project in the mountainous region of Djebal Al-Akhdhar (Green Mountain), about 1,200 kilometres (750 miles) from the capital Tripoli.

OSLO, Sept 11, 2007 (AFP) - Norwegian archaeologists on Tuesday opened a coffin containing the bodies of two women buried together 1,200 years ago on board a Viking ship and began to try and identify the pair.

The skeletons were first discovered in 1904 before being reburied in 1948 in an aluminium coffin protected by a stone sarcophagus to preserve the remains until future scientific methods could help solve the mystery.

The coffin was exhumed on Monday from the burial mound in Slagen, southeastern Norway.

SEOUL, Sept 11, 2007 (AFP) - A 70-ton granite statue of Buddha which toppled over face-down 1,300 years ago in South Korea has been unearthed with its features intact.

The 5.6-metre (18-foot) sculpture was in May found buried in the southeastern city of Gyeongju and has been partially unearthed after months of work, news reports said Tuesday.

The nose missed a rock by only five centimetres when the statue toppled, the English-language JoongAng Daily quoted specialists as saying.

LONDON, Sept 10, 2007 (AFP) - An archaeologist using radar technology said Monday he has found the outline of what he believes is a 1,000-year-old Viking longship under a pub car park in north-west England.

Professor Stephen Harding used Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) to trace the outline of a vessel matching the scale and shape of a longship, perhaps from the time Vikings settled in Meols, on the Wirral peninsula in Merseyside.

Meols has one of Britain's best preserved Viking settlements, buried deep beneath the village and nearby coastal defences.

JERUSALEM, Sept 9, 2007 (AFP) - Israeli archaeologists said on Sunday they had discovered parts of an ancient drainage tunnel in Jerusalem that Jews had used to flee from the Holy City's Roman conquerors 2,000 years ago.

'The tunnel, in an excellent state of preservation, was found by chance,' said Eli Shukron of the Antiquities Authority, one of the two leaders of the dig.

NICOSIA, Sept 6, 2007 (AFP) - A shipwreck from the imperial Roman era, found off Cyprus, could lead to the discovery of vessels sunk in antiquity's largest naval engagement, the Battle of Salamis in 306 BC, said an official statement on Thursday.

'According to (historian) Diodoros, it was somewhere in the area where in 306 BC the Macedonian (King) Demetrius Poliorketes triumphed over Ptolemy of Egypt in one of the largest naval battles of antiquity,' said Cyprus' Antiquities Department.

JERUSALEM, Aug 31, 2007 (AFP) - Israeli officials cast doubt Friday over claims that remains of the second Jewish temple might have been found during work to lay pipes at the Al-Aqsa mosque compound in Jerusalem.

'If that was the case, the antiquities authority, which has an observer on site, as well as police, also monitoring the work, would have stepped in,' said archaeologist Dan Bahat, a former excavations official in Jerusalem.

JERUSALEM, Aug 30, 2007 (AFP) - Remains of the Jewish second temple may have been found during work to lay pipes at the Al-Aqsa mosque compound in east Jerusalem, Israeli television reported Thursday.

Israeli television broadcast footage of a mechanical digger at the site which Israeli archaeologists visited on Thursday.

Gaby Barkai, an archaeologist from Bar Ilan University, urged the Israeli government to stop the pipework after the discovery of what he said is 'a massive seven metre-long wall.'

CAIRO, Aug 27, 2007 (AFP) - Egypt has accused Belgian diplomats of driving four-wheel-drive cars over a fossilised whale in a protected desert area, but the Belgian embassy in Cairo on Monday denied the charge.

An Egyptian security source said that two diplomatic vehicles 'destroyed a whale fossil' by driving over it around 150 kilometres (95 miles) south of Cairo. He said that the drivers had also failed to stop when asked to do so.

The cars' licence plates were traced to the Belgian embassy, where spokesman Ivan Feyz denied any damage had been done.

CAIRO, Aug 26, 2007 (AFP) - European diplomats in four-wheel drive cars have caused millions of dollars worth of damage to a fossilised whale lying for millions of years in the Egyptian desert, a security source said on Sunday.

'Whale Valley officals have informed the authorities that people from two diplomatic corps vehicles destroyed the fossil,' the source told AFP after the destruction was discovered around 150 kilometres (95 miles) south of Cairo.

CAIRO, Aug 22, 2007 (AFP) - A German man has returned several stolen pharaonic carvings to Egypt in the hope that his stepfather's soul can now rest in peace after he was reportedly struck down by the curse of the pharaohs.

The man went to the Egyptian embassy in Berlin last week and handed over an envelope containing carvings his stepfather had taken from a tomb in Egypt's Valley of the Kings in 2004, the Supreme Council of Antiquities in Cairo said in a statement.

PHNOM PENH, Aug 16, 2007 (AFP) - Uncontrolled development around Cambodia's Angkor temples poses a serious threat to one of the region's great wonders, said the archaeologists who this week revealed the full extent of the site.

Angkor was a 'vast and populous network ... stretching far beyond the well known temples of the central archaeological park,' said the Greater Angkor Project (GAP) at the University of Sydney on its website.

ANKARA, Aug 14, 2007 (AFP) - Turkey on Tuesday signed a deal with an international consortium for a loan of 1.2 billion euros (1.63 billion dollars) to build a major dam on the Tigris River, Anatolia news agency reported.

The project for the Ilisu Dam, to be completed with a hydroelectric power plant, was launched in August 2006 despite fierce criticism that it will devastate a millenia-old historic site and displace thousands of Kurds.

CHICAGO, Aug 13, 2007 (AFP) - Archaeologists using radar imagery have shown that an ancient Cambodian settlement centered on the celebrated temple of Angkor Wat was far more extensive than previously thought, a study released Monday said.

The medieval settlement surrounding Angkor, the one-time capital of the illustrious Khmer empire which flourished between the ninth and 14th centuries, covered a 3,000 square kilometer area (1,158 square miles).

BUKKABRANY, Hungary, Aug 6, 2007 (AFP) - Archaeologists have found an eight-million-year old forest of cypresses, well preserved and not fossilised, in Bukkabrany in north eastern Hungary.

'The discovery is exceptional as the trees kept their wooden structure, they neither turned into coal nor were petrified,' Tamas Pusztai, the deputy director and head of the archaeological department at the local Otto Herman museum who oversaw the excavation, told AFP.

ATHENS, Aug 1, 2007 (AFP) - Greek archaeologists plan to excavate an ancient colony founded by Alexander the Great in the Gulf of Kuwait in the fourth century BC, officials said Wednesday.

'The site on Failaka Island is of particular importance to (Greece) as it was founded by Macedonians and other Greeks on Alexander the Great's expeditionary force,' said culture ministry general secretary Christos Zahopoulos.

BEIJING, July 31, 2007 (AFP) - Archaeologists in China have made a crucial textile discovery in a 2,500-year-old tomb that could rewrite the Asian nation's long history with cloth, state press reported Tuesday.

'Chinese anthropologists suspect the textile industry burgeoned in distant periods of history and this is the first piece of concrete evidence to support their hypothesis,' Xinhua news quoted Wang Yarong, a Beijing archaeologist, as saying.

BEIJING, July 31, 2007 (AFP) - Archaeologists in China have made a crucial textile discovery in a 2,500-year-old tomb that could rewrite the Asian nation's long history with cloth, state press reported Tuesday.

'Chinese anthropologists suspect the textile industry burgeoned in distant periods of history and this is the first piece of concrete evidence to support their hypothesis,' Xinhua news quoted Wang Yarong, a Beijing archaeologist, as saying.