Korea’s oldest known firearm found in landmine search

Medieval

A small bronze artifact discovered during a search for landmines on South Korea’s Geumseongsan Mountain has been identified as Korea’s oldest gunpowder weapon. The discovery rewrites Korea’s weaponry history, predating the previous oldest firearm by at least 120 years, and possibly 180 years.

It was discovered in November 2023 by a soldier detecting landmines at the site of a planned hiking trail at the summit of the mountain. The area has been restricted since 1966 when an anti-aircraft battery was installed there, and the military has been clearing landmines to make it safe for the general public again. The object was found just four inches deep beneath a rock.

Known as a Hwangja Hwatong, meaning “Yellow-Character Hand Cannon,” the weapon is a cylinder that balloons out three thirds of the way down and ends in a slightly trumpet terminal that is a little wider in diameter that the straight cylindrical end. It is 23.75cm (9.35 inches) long with a bore diameter of 1.66 cm (.65 inches) and weighs 2.8 lbs. The trumpet end would have been mounted to the end of a long wooden staff and the device packed with gunpowder and a projectile (arrows or bullets) to fire out of the muzzle.

The handle and muzzle are inscribed with 28 characters that describe its manufacture in detail. The inscription reads: “In the 12th month of the Jeongsa year, the Hwangja Hwatong was made. It weighs one geun and 14 nyang. The supervising official was registrar An Hyu-bo, and the craftsman was Seok.” This is the first small gunpowder weapon found in Korea that is inscribed with its type name, production date, weight, plus the names of the government production manager and of the craftsman who cast it.

The inscription dates the weapon to a Jeongsa year, narrowing its creation to either December 1377 or December 1437. In 1377, the Goryeo Dynasty established its first state arms agency under the famed inventor Choe Mu-seon to counter naval raids by Japanese pirates. If it was forged in 1437, it originates from the golden age of King Sejong the Great, who spearheaded major artillery standardization.

Either timeline solidifies the hand cannon as the earliest verifiable firearm ever found on the Korean peninsula.

X-ray and metallurgical analyses revealed the cannon was cast from a traditional bronze alloy of copper, tin and lead. Researchers noted that the tin content was kept strictly below 10 percent — a precise engineering choice designed to give the barrel enough ductility to withstand explosive internal pressure without shattering. Residual traces of silver and sulfur further confirmed medieval smelting techniques rather than a modern reproduction.

The Hwangja Hwatong is now on display to the public for the first time at the National Palace Museum of Korea through November 22nd.

Norway’s largest hoard passes the 5,000 mark

Medieval, Treasures

Norway’s largest coin hoard has now officially passed the 5,000 coin count. The total is now up to around 5,200 coins recovered. The milestone 5,000th was an Otto-Adelheid penny, one of many of this type in the Mørstad Hoard.

The discovery was kept under wraps initially. When it was announced at the end of April, the coin count had just passed 3,000. Less than two weeks later, it had already passed 4,000. When excavation stopped for the summer, 4,886 coins have been unearthed. At that time, ground-penetrating radar found no evidence of further coins, so it seemed like maybe the silver harvest was complete, leaving farmer and landowner Ole Erik Hørstad free to sow and harvest his grain.

Metal detectorists returned after the harvest, and quickly found coins that were still there under the plow layer, so the count continued. The signals are becoming less frequent and the recent coins that have been found are at a greater depth.

Obverse of silver penny minted in the reign of Hispano-Viking King of Dublin Sigtrygg Olafsson Silkbeard, 995-1005. Photo by Julia H. Hiorthøy, courtesy University of Oslo Museum of Cultural History..As the new finds wind down, thousands of coins in the hoard are still being catalogued and examined by numismatists at the University of Oslo’s Museum of Cultural History. Earlier this summer, the first 100 coins were published in the museum’s online database. One of them is notable for having been issued by Sigtrygg Olafsson Silkbeard, Hiberno-Norse king of Dublin who ruled for 46 years (interrupted by conflict), until 1036. It was minted in Dublin between 995 and 1005 by moneyer Færemin.

The Silkbeard beard coin is unusual in the hoard because there are maybe 10 Irish issues among the thousands of coins recovered. Most of them were struck in modern-day England and Germany, with the name of the city included in the instruction. English coins typically also bear the name of the moneyer who struck them, and several of those names, for example Beorn, Aslac and Cetil, sound Scandinavian.

According to senior adviser and coin expert Anne Skogsfjord, each coin requires at least an hour of work to catalogue, so processing the whole hoard is estimated to take at least a year, if everything goes well. A small selection of coins from the Mørstad Hoard will be exhibited at the museum this fall.

Roman shipwreck full of intact luxury ceramics found

Ancient

A Roman shipwreck with more than 6,000 pieces of intact tableware has been discovered off the Mediterranean coast of Adrasan in Antalya, Turkey. The unprecedented find includes stacks of still-nested plates, bowls and platters in 122 different shapes and sizes. It dates to the Late Hellenistic or Early Roman period, ca. 2,100 years ago.

Underwater archaeologists began excavating the site in 2025. At a depth of between 42 and 55 meters (138-180 feet ), they found an unusually large and diverse cargo of ceramics. In the first season of excavation, they recovered 6,511 intact pieces of ceramic tableware, plus thousands of fragments. The intact ceramics were transferred to Antalya Museum for conservation. The fragments went to Akdeniz University’s Conservation and Restoration Laboratory in Kemer to be puzzled back together, if possible.

The extraordinary high number of fragile ceramics to survive intact is attributable to the way the ship’s cargo was packed. The dishes were nested into each other, then packed in wooden crates with clay shock-absorbers between them. The system was so effective that the plates didn’t even break when the ship sank.

The ceramic tableware was manufactured in the ancient city of Rhosus (modern-day Arsuz) on the tip of the Iskenderun peninsula more than 250 nautical miles east of Adrasan. Rhosus was one of the foremost ceramic producers in the Roman world. It was synonymous with luxury tableware, even appearing in a letter statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero wrote to his friend Titus Pomponius Atticus in 50 B.C., teasing him about why he’d need such fine pottery.

“I have ordered the Rhosian ware for you. But what the deuce will you serve up in fine pottery, when you are accustomed to give us vegetarian fare on fern-pattern plates and in magnificent baskets?”

The ship wasn’t only carrying Rhosian ware. Amphorae manufactured on Aegean islands was also part of the cargo, as were coins from Antioch dating to the 1st century B.C.

The findings indicate that the ship was operating within a trade network connecting Antioch, the Aegean, Greece and the Italian coast around the middle of the 1st century B.C.

Researchers believe the ship departed from Rhosus and was likely sailing toward Rome when it struck a shallow area during a storm and sank.

Early medieval Arabic coins found in Poland

Medieval

Six early medieval Arabic silver dirhams and fragments of two more have been discovered in the woods near Elblag, northern Poland. They date to the first half of the 9th century, although may have been circulating more than a century after that.

Archaeologists believe the coins may have belonged to merchants who were in the area to do business at the nearby Viking port of Truso, just six miles or so from Elblag. Truso was founded on Lake Druzno at the mouth of the Vistula river. It was one of several emporia of craftsmanship and trade established by the Vikings in the Baltic Sea area. Its raison d’etre was long-distance trade of goods from as far as away as southern Europe and Asia. The Vistula connected it to Baghdad Caliphate, as well as the Kievan Rus and Byzantine Empire.

Dr. Marek Jagodziński said that his research indicates that Truso was founded by the Danes on the border between Slavic and Baltic settlements as early as the late 7th century. The emporium itself operated until the early 11th century, and was then an important location in the entire network of such emporiums that had sprung up around the Baltic Sea. […]

The discovery and study of the Truso fragment provided a wealth of extremely valuable information revealing both the complexity of this site and its importance in the Baltic economic zone and long-distance trade. Increasing evidence indicates that Truso also maintained trade relations with the state of the early Piast dynasty. It was the development and expansion of this early feudal monarchy that indirectly led to the decline of the Truso emporium – in the 11th century, Truso’s function was taken over by the Piast city of Gdańsk, said Dr. Marek Jagodziński.

The coins are now undergoing conservation. Experts in medieval numismatics will examine and document them. When conservation and study are complete, the coins will go on public display at the Archaeological and Historical Museum in Elbląg.

Rare Medici porcelain vases donated to Florence museum

Museums, Renaissance

Two rare Florentine vases from the 16th century made in the attempt to produce in Europe porcelain of like quality and type as that imported from China have been donated to the Museum of San Marco in Florence. They are two of only 60 to 70 surviving pieces manufactured in the Casino di San Marco complex, established by Grand Duke Francesco I de’ Medici. Today only one other example of Medici porcelain is in a Tuscan Culture Ministry institution, so the donation of two vases triples the number in public collections in their place of origin.

Manufactured between 1575 and 1585, both vases are white with blue decoration and feature striking serpentine handles.

The first vessel is a jug, or mesciroba, 16 centimeters tall. It has a globular body, a long cylindrical neck, and a spout with a distinctive triangular cross-section, while the handle consists of two snake-like forms joined together—a design that gives the object a particularly elaborate appearance. The white surface is decorated in deep blue with peonies, daisies, and lotus flowers. The decoration draws specifically on Chinese porcelain from the Ming Dynasty and the Yongle period, but the Eastern model is not the object’s sole source of inspiration. The shapes of the flowers, in fact, derive from a decorative tradition that had already been influenced by Islamic metalware, while the structure of the vessel recalls the Hispano-Moorish mescirobes with tall necks and spheroidal bodies produced in the Valencia region between the 14th and 15th centuries. […]

The second piece, on the other hand, is slightly larger, about 20 centimeters tall, and has a different shape. It is a vase with an ovoid body, two opposing serpentine handles, and a hexagonal spout protruding from the body (its shape finds a parallel in the grotesque-decorated Urbino majolica pieces that had already been part of the Medici collections since 1569).

The grand-ducal workshop of Casino di San Marco was one of several founded by Francesco I as a laboratory for experimentation where painters, sculptors, academics and artisans worked together to investigate natural phenomena and invent new materials and processes. Francesco had a great personal interest in alchemy and glassmaking, as well as in collecting at and antiquities, and he invested much time and money promoting technical innovation by marrying the experimental sciences in the applied arts.

On the first floor of the palace alone were glass works, an alchemy laboratory, foundries for metal work, including the forging of steel tools hard enough to hew porphyry, furnaces where rock crystal was fused to create decorative objects and precious stones (emeralds, rubies) were counterfeited, and ovens for producing a soft paste porcelain that became known as “Medici porcelain.”

In 1575, the Florentine manufactory succeeded in producing the first examples of what would come to be known as “Medici Porcelain, ” a soft-paste porcelain that represented Europe’s first successful attempt to reproduce the Eastern material. The venture was short-lived, however: the very high temperatures required for firing and the high production costs limited its development, and the manufactory ceased operations after the death of Francesco I in 1587, resulting in a very limited production run (the inventories of the Medici court recorded about three hundred pieces, but today only sixty or seventy survive worldwide). It is in this context that the donation of the two vases to the Museum of San Marco should be viewed, as it expands an already extremely rare presence in Tuscan public collections.

Both vases bear the workshop’s mark on the bottom: the dome of Santa Maria del Fiore painted in blue, surmounted by the letter “F,” the initial identifying Florence. This is one of the features that allows us to recognize production linked to the court of Francesco I and immediately connects the objects to the experimentation carried out in the Tuscan capital.

The vases have gone on display in the Museum of San Marco’s Greek Hall, where they will be neighbors with Renaissance majolica apothecary jars from the Dominican convent that was across the street from the Casino di San Marco.