Bahrain has discovered a pair of ancient dice, considered to be the first ever found in the county and probably used for gaming or fortune telling rituals, authorities said on Tuesday.
The dice were found during an archaeological excavation at Abu Saiba, a village in the northern part of the country.
“Many details are not known about the story of the dice’s origin, but it is considered the first dice discovered in Bahrain. It was part of a game or ritual of fortune-tellers,” the director of the department of antiquities and museums, Salman Al Mahari, told Al Arabiya TV.
“What looks like a hill cemetery was found dating back to the middle Tylos period (50 BC to 150 AD), with a maximum diameter of 70 metres, and a height between 4 and 4.5 metres,” Mr Al Mahari said.
Tylos is what the Greeks called Bahrain, which was a centre of pearl trading.
The department has been working on the site since 2017. It has conducted digs of a third of the total area of the hill, finding 93 burial sites.
This year, 23 new tombs were discovered and 11 were fully excavated.
Of those excavated, three were intact. The others had been looted, their contents stolen. Experts said they have provided interesting archaeological and anthropological material for the government.
“The main objective of excavating the Abu Saiba site is to study the culture of the people of Bahrain during the Tylos period to obtain accurate information about their funeral rituals, culture and trade relations,” archaeologist Julien Cooney said.
The burial sites provide information on the age, sex and health of those buried, he said.
In 2019, the Unesco World Heritage Committee voted to add Bahrain’s Dilmun Burial Mounds to the World Heritage List.
The landmark comprises 21 archaeological sites, in the western part of the island. They were built between 2050 BC and 1750 BC.
It provides evidence of the Early Dilmun civilisation, in about the second millennium BC, when Bahrain became a trade hub.
The island has one of the largest-known prehistoric cemeteries in the world.
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One in four Americans don't plan to retire
Nearly a quarter of Americans say they never plan to retire, according to a poll that suggests a disconnection between individuals' retirement plans and the realities of ageing in the workforce.
Experts say illness, injury, layoffs and caregiving responsibilities often force older workers to leave their jobs sooner than they'd like.
According to the poll from The Associated Press-NORC Centre for Public Affairs Research, 23 per cent of workers, including nearly two in 10 of those over 50, don't expect to stop working. Roughly another quarter of Americans say they will continue working beyond their 65th birthday.
According to government data, about one in five people 65 and older was working or actively looking for a job in June. The study surveyed 1,423 adults in February this year.
For many, money has a lot to do with the decision to keep working.
"The average retirement age that we see in the data has gone up a little bit, but it hasn't gone up that much," says Anqi Chen, assistant director of savings research at the Centre for Retirement Research at Boston College. "So people have to live in retirement much longer, and they may not have enough assets to support themselves in retirement."
When asked how financially comfortable they feel about retirement, 14 per cent of Americans under the age of 50 and 29 per cent over 50 say they feel extremely or very prepared, according to the poll. About another four in 10 older adults say they do feel somewhat prepared, while just about one-third feel unprepared.
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