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The term Baghdad Battery is used to refer to three artifacts which were found together: a ceramic pot, a tube of one metal, and a rod of another. The current interpretation of their purpose is as a storage vessel for sacred scrolls from nearby Seleucia on the Tigris. Those vessels do not have the outermost clay jar, but are otherwise almost identical.〔 Wilhelm König was a professional painter who was an assistant at the National Museum of Iraq in the 1930s. When he returned to Germany in 1940 he authored a paper offering the hypothesis that they may have formed a galvanic cell, perhaps used for electroplating gold onto silver objects.〔(The Baghdad Battery ), Museum of Unnatural Mystery website.〕 This interpretation is generally rejected today.〔(Baghdad batteries ) on the Bad Archaeology Network website.〕〔("Erich von Däniken's Chariots of the Gods: Science or Charlatanism?" ), Robert Sheaffer. First published in the "NICAP UFO Investigator", October/November, 1974.〕 In March 2012, Professor Elizabeth Stone, of Stony Brook University, an expert on Iraqi archaeology, returning from the first archaeological expedition in Iraq after 20 years, stated that she does not know a single archaeologist who believed that these were batteries.〔Prof. Stone's statement, listed as a 'red flag' among (5 red flags why it was not a battery ) (with sources, on Archaeology Fantasies website)〕 ==Physical description== The artifacts consist of terracotta pots approximately tall (with a one-and-a-half-inch mouth) containing a cylinder made of a rolled copper sheet, which houses a single iron rod. At the top, the iron rod is isolated from the copper by bitumen, which plugs or stoppers, and both rod and cylinder fit snugly inside the opening of the jar. The copper cylinder is not watertight, so if the jar were filled with a liquid, this would surround the iron rod as well. The artifact had been exposed to the weather and had suffered corrosion. König thought the objects might date to the Parthian period (between 250 BC and AD 224); but according to St John Simpson of the Near Eastern department of the British Museum, their original excavation and context were not well-recorded (see stratigraphy), so evidence for this date range is very weak. Furthermore, the style of the pottery (see typology) is Sassanid (224-640).〔〔 Most of the components of the objects are not particularly amenable to advanced dating methods. The ceramic pots could be analysed by thermoluminescence dating, but this has not yet been done; in any case, it would only date the firing of the pots, which is not necessarily that of the complete artifact. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Baghdad Battery」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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