Mirror UK
By Alex Croft
20:33, 1 Oct 2023
An ordinary bush in a Japanese car park turned out to be covering something extraordinary – the 1,400-year-old tomb of an elite warrior.
The car park was being dug up to make way for a hotel courtyard in Ikaruga. But as the site is near the Horyuji Temple, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, experts decided to excavate the car park first.
They found a wealth of old artefacts including jewellery, iron swords, arrowheads and clay pots dating back to the late 6th century AD. The artefacts were all part of a special type of burial known as a kofun, reserved for rulers, warriors and nobility. Kofun tombs were built between the middle of the third century and the early seventh century.