Gozzo the archaeologist

by Kujivunia

Rating: everyone
Tags: Slice of Life, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Random, Adventure, Griffons
Length: 3987

Why was Gozzo an archaeologist?

Gozzo is a griffin archaeologist. What treasure does he dream of finding?

Published 2022-09-07 14:30:00 UTC
Last updated 2023-10-25 10:18:16 UTC

1 Gozzo the archaeologist

Griffins doesn't like to share. When someone wants to emphasize someone's greed, that's what they say: greedy as a griffin. They won't give up anything or a word just like that. Even if you suddenly hear a griffin telling something, be sure: he either took a hard coin for it, or is trying to gain fame around him.

Almost every griffin was like that. Almost - it's not worth rowing everyone under the same comb. Just such a griffin, who did not fall under the crest of greed, was Gozzo.

However, he was not a simpleton either. He was a terrible gossip. In general, griffins don't like to gossip either—they usually don't get paid for it. And griffins are ready to sell a spear to their worst enemy if he suddenly loses or breaks his own.

Gozzo was an archaeologist. An old-school archaeologist, one of those who was ready to plow through the entire ancient mound in search of a gold cup that could be put on a shelf or sold for a substantial sum. But he was one of the first to realize that the ruins contain not only gold, but also gossip. And gossip, if properly presented, is worth more than any money.

The Gold Cup is good. But for one gold cup there will be five carts of pottery shards. And what is it - everything is in a landfill? Of course! Who needs this garbage? But Gozzo decided otherwise. Why did the proud griffin decide to dig in the trash?

It all started with an ancient forge. Gozzo quickly identified the melting furnace in the pile of bricks, and now he was carefully digging for some sword or gold ring that had rolled into a corner. And suddenly, at the very remains of the wall, he unearthed a rusty fragment of a sword. The fragment was rotten almost through, and Gozzo threw it back in a rage. I spent half a day digging up the floor of the forge — and all in vain!

The Gryphon lit a pipe with lousy tobacco. He couldn't find anything worthwhile for months, and his budget was melting like a lost horseshoe in the damp earth.

When the pipe was empty, Gozzo picked up the shovel again. He dug and dug, carefully examining every clod of earth with his sharp eyes. Nothing. It was getting dark, and it was getting harder and harder to find him. And suddenly, at the very remains of what had once been a wall, he unearthed a second fragment of a sword. This fragment also rusted almost through, and Gozzo threw it back in a rage, sending the most rude and unprintable curses after him. All day long he dug up the whole forge — in vain! There wasn't even the most overwhelming ring!

Hope is dead. He had already excavated almost the entire ancient village, and the forge was the last place where there could be anything interesting. Gozzo bought information about this place from some farmer whose plow came across a pot of silver pennies. It cost him a lot of money, but where there is one treasure, there must be another. The Gryphon took one last close look at his unsuccessful purchase and suddenly burst out laughing!

Gozzo imagined how a thousand years ago a blacksmith spent a whole day forging a beautiful sword that had already been paid for, forged the purest blade, put it in quenching oil, took the sword and burst. And the blacksmith's dreams of the fair suddenly collapsed with this blade. Then he, beside himself with rage, scattered the wreckage around the forge and left before the local gentleman found out what happened to his new blade. Gozzo became an archaeologist.

2 Gozzo-the archaeologist and the stone inside the head

Gozzo, an archaeologist, loved to dig into history. Garbage and trash were for him clues and keys to the mysteries hidden in the centuries.

For the third month, together with the young, he dug up the settlement of ancient ploughmen-brewers. But while his students were digging in the ground, he himself was digging in huge stacks of paper. The story flashed before his eyes.

The dump grew, dugouts were replaced by log cabins, stoves and barns appeared — then the earthlings mastered more and more land around, and the more extensive the fields were, the larger the village became, and the larger the village became, the more extensive the fields became.

A slagged plot of land, fragments of rust and a furnace — they even had their own forge to repair numerous plows.

And suddenly the number of potsherds began to grow exponentially, and not only on the landfill that had moved a lot since the settlement was founded. Yes, and a new landfill has appeared — chemically contaminated land in a ravine. Coins began to be found everywhere. The grain growers were refined to the point that brewers had to work to dispose of mountains of grain. And the villagers obviously could not master the intoxicating rivers, so the beer was on sale.

The beer idyll lasted for two hundred years. Coins, as well as shards, became more and more. Houses were compacted. The skeletons were getting smaller and smaller.

And suddenly, in place of the chemical ravine, a powerful layer of large shards appeared, and above it and to the surface — only the earth. In the village, a layer of a large fire was blackening, and a large burial ground appeared near the dump. Someone lived over the fire for some time, but there was less and less garbage, and after another two hundred years the cultural layer completely disappeared.

Everything was perfectly clear... and extremely incomprehensible. Gozzo could not get rid of the idea that something was wrong here. Where could a huge settlement for its time have gone? Where did the ploughmen go first, and then the brewers?

Crop failures? On chernozem? Excluded! A fire? It's easy for such a large and rich settlement to rebuild. Overproduction crisis? But the situation in the archives is the opposite — an acute shortage of beer in that era! Even the topical song “Give the pony a beer!” it dates from about the same time as this conflagration! An environmental disaster? In favor of this, the ravine is clearly chemically contaminated with beer pellets and the grinding of the skeletons of the population. A ruinous raid by neighbors? It is quite possible that the conflagration corresponds to this, and the burial ground too. On the other hand, the burial ground looks too stretched out in time, and there are too few traces of wounds on the bones.

Gozzo puzzled over this riddle for days and nights. Even a pipe with excellent buffalo tobacco did not help.

Another unremarkable, routine day was pierced by the surprised and delighted cry of the intern:

— Unicorn!

Gozzo fell out of oblivion and immediately found himself at the scene of the crime, namely at the dump of a beer pellet. Of course! Unicorn — in the village of earthponies metaculture of early post-windigos? Nonsense! But a skull with a horn pushed inside was clearly sticking out of the pile of shards. No one doubted his reality.

The early post-windigosis an era when all three races have already stopped fighting among themselves, firmly and clearly, but they have not yet begun to live together. So what made the unicorn come to the Earth ponies and die from a skull fracture?

The most capable students of Gozzo moved to the landfill. Soon the skeleton was carefully excavated and described. An elderly unicorn in magnificent robes (judging by the number of precious stones), with numerous bone fractures from blows with a heavy blunt object.

And next to him are two of his comrades with similar injuries and an earth pony with a beautiful golden tiara and a stone in the intracranial space.

Gozzo the archaeologist was grinning happily and puffing like a steam locomotive. Finally, he looked up from the pipe for a second, wiped a tear and spoke hoarsely:

— My chicks! Yes, this is the murder of the nobility on the basis of hatred right on the mysterious border of the two layers!

Barry and Emerald, two of Gozzo's students, earth and unicorn, exchanged meaningful glances.

— So it was a raid? But then why are there so few combat wounds in the burial ground, but so many underdeveloped skeletons?

— Please pay attention, dear students, to this cute scene! Once again! What do you see here?

"Four stoned merchants or lords?"

— Here you are! Remember the Rampant Redpoll, may Celestia keep his depraved carcass! What did he say? The cobblestone is a weapon of the proletariat! That's what he said!

Gozzo blew a very beautiful ring of smoke, admired it and returned to the story.

— And the case, dear students, was like this! A successful agricultural district turns to brewing and finds the most extensive sales markets throughout the district. The welfare of the population is growing. Merchants and owners of breweries are singled out, the governing bodies are moving from the council of elders to the trading house, because it is there that there are levers of economic influence!

Demand is growing, we clearly see this from the documents of the Early post-windigos, which means that the production of beer products is also growing. But agriculture at that time was still underdeveloped, and the growth of harvests did not keep pace with the growth of demand. In addition, the beer pellets, which they simply throw into a pile, do not go to the needs of the national economy, do not fertilize the land, but rot and emit toxic substances. Diseases. Mortality.

The level of population health is declining. And here you are! Economic growth is slowing down, labor productivity is falling, bread is getting less, food is getting scarce, labor productivity is falling and we are falling into a vicious circle! Hence the crushing and degradation of skeletons in the burial ground. Hence the shortage of beer! Remember, dear students, the folk song of the early post-windigos: “Give the pony a beer!".

Meanwhile, the merchant's house is obliged to maintain trade turnover, and here you are — the neighbors come to negotiate, and the hungry crowd decided to grind a few heads instead of bread.

"And the ashes?" — Emerald cautiously asks the dispersed teacher.

Gozzo looks at the youngsters with a triumphant look:

— So here it is!

Gozzo the archaeologist and the Battle of the Horn of Hakon

Gozzo the archaeologist loved to dig into history. Garbage and debris were for him clues and clues to the mysteries hidden in the centuries.

For the second season, he and his colleagues have been looking for traces of the battle at the Horn of Hakon. What did he know?

About a thousand years ago, Jarl Tryggvi Frode's son, whom we know from the saga of Sindri Whitebeard, conquered the settlement on the site of present-day Baltimare. The settlement grew rapidly, becoming rich in trade and sea fishing. Eight hundred years ago, the settled sea raiders were taken under their wing by the eastern griffins — for a certain bribe.

A hundred years later, the merchants of Baltimare increased their fat, got new connections and decided that they needed the withdrawn money themselves.

And so, six hundred years ago, griffin transport ships landed on the shores of the Baltimare River. They were brought by Gokhan himself, whose lands were going through hard times at this moment.

In the legend of the Gokhan massacre, it is written that twenty thousand griffins rushed into battle.

Gozzo knew it was nonsense. Gokhan led a punitive detachment from the state crumbling like a sand castle, and many forces had to be left to maintain order. Worse, Gokhan was sailing across the sea. The drakkar borrowed from the pony could only accommodate a couple of dozen griffins. Grekhan could afford no more than a hundred and fifty good drakkars, which means only about three and a half thousand warriors.

Gozzo couldn't tell how many ponies were up against them. In the annals it was said about forty forty lances. But everyone knows that the lance included not only the spearman himself, but also several squires. How many ponies were there? Five thousand? Seven thousand? No one knows. Only excavations could shed light on this mystery. And not only this one — as always, there were immeasurably more questions than answers.

Only one thing was clear—the place of the battle. A large narrow field in the bend of the Baltimare River, in the center of which stood a tall sharp stone, a natural spire. The people of Baltimare called him the Horn of Hakon, in honor of Sindri Whitebeard's father, Hakon Longhorn.

There really was such a place! It all fits together. The field is in a bend, in the middle of it is a high thin rock. There was one problem — for the last three hundred years, the field has been engaged in giving the local population rich harvests of cereals.

At the cost of hundreds of petitions, Gozzo and his newly founded guild of archaeologists were given permission to dig. And he went to dig.

The huge field was divided into hundreds of squares, each of which had to be checked with a pit, carefully and carefully removing the earth in thin layers. Met an artifact? Stop, don't touch, don't move! Take a piece of paper and sketch it. Then take off another layer of earth and repeat. And again. And again.

The archives were bursting with sketches of plows, buckles, fibulas and even rare coins. There was only one thing missing —military artifacts. Not a single scrap of chain mail, not an arrow tip, not a spear sting.

The archives grew, the budget melted, and the enthusiasm evaporated. There were still a dozen pits to make, but everyone had long understood that there had never been any fighting here.

But how did it happen? Everyone was asking this question, and first of all Gozzo. He organized all this, and the demand is from him. And not only from tired colleagues, but also from the authorities and farmers suffering monstrous losses.

Nergui, the Baltimare, one of the first associates of Gozzo, in his hearts voiced the question that tormented everyone:

— But how so?! Couldn't there have been a battle? They couldn't have made her up out of her head, could they? The chronicles of different cities, the legend of the Gokhan massacre, all of course pull a blanket over themselves, but the place is the same everywhere! Long narrow field…

— Long, narrow, that's right! — confirmed Gozzo, almost joining his palms and holding them from his face somewhere in the distance. — And Hakon's Horn is in place, here it is! Categorical compliance!

A beautiful and elegant unicorn with a very long horn approached them. A Canterlot aristocrat who abandoned the whim of balls and the dust of foundations for the sake of the romanticism of archeology, indestructible even by Gozzo's systematic approach.

— The real stallion was Hakon. Six centuries, and the horn is hard!

Lucille smiled awkwardly at his silly joke, designed to lighten the atmosphere.

— "The rock!" Nergui agreed.

— Note, dear colleagues, for the sake of cleanliness, we must work out all the options. There is a similar rock seven versts away. Ours is in a field in a bend, and that one is in the forest near the water. Categorical discrepancy with the texts!

—"A discrepancy", Nergui confirmed.

— But here we have already mastered the third hundred pits, and we observe a categorical discrepancy with the text! No material remains, no artifacts related to the described battle! Gozzo continued.

"A discrepancy," Nergui nodded again, "but the place is straight out of the annals. A long and narrow field, a high narrow rock in the middle, a bend in the end. It doesn 't fit in my head…

— What are we going to do, gentlemen? — the unicorn took responsibility and turned the topic to the frightening future of the expedition.

— Don't make against us pick, that save your little... ahem, — Nergui tried to raise morale with a bravura slogan, but stopped short.
Clearing his throat he added:
— Shall we go into the forest? Not that we have any other options, you know. It's harder to dig there, but we won't interfere with anyone.

In the evening, at dinner, Gozzo recounted the conversation of the rest of the expedition, and suggested moving on to the forest rock.

— Do you all agree, dear colleagues?

A young fawn, a representative of a little-known people, stood up and, still confusing the words of the Equestrian language, expressed a common opinion:

— Diggin' in thits fyeld is leg of hollow!

Everyone laughed wearily.

In the next couple of weeks, the expedition finished with this field, handed over the archives and tightly took up the forest around the rock.

And on the third day of work, a sketch of a wonderful gilded fragment of a helmet noser appeared in the archives.

That day, no one went to bed, and until the morning cheerful folk songs of various Equestrian cultures sounded in the forest. Only our old acquaintance, the unicorn Lucille, walked along the river bank in deep thought. The next day he disappeared.

A week later, Gozzo was lost in thought. There were plenty of artifacts, they found presumably the place of the Gokhan massacre, but why here? The thought haunted him.

At the same time, strange pegasus began to fly over the excavations.

And a couple of weeks later, Lucille returned beaming with joy with a whole suitcase of cards.

That evening, he told the fascinated expedition that a completely revolutionary movement had been born in conservative circles of Canterlot geographers dedicated to reconstructing the change of landscapes over time. It turned out that this forest was in the bend of the river, but then the river decided not to loop, but to go directly, and its bed straightened out, forming an oxbow lake. And the rock that stood in the center of the bend suddenly appeared on the shore of a direct current! And the old bend formed an old village, and a forest grew within its borders.

A childishly happy Gozzo-archaeologist got a new toy in his tenacious paws.

Gozzo-Archaeologist and the Lost City

Gozzo the griffin was a treasure hunter. He liked to dig in the ruins. The earth and ancient garbage hid priceless artifacts from him.

For many months he had been digging up the hill on which, according to ancient legends, the great city of pony Amikla stood, captured and destroyed to the ground in one of the raids of a cruel Handful of Robbers, a fierce and warlike ancient Griffin jarl.

Gozzo the treasure hunter knew well that almost any destructive raid is accompanied not only by ashes, but also by a lot of treasures. Locals always hope to dig up their gold in quieter times, although there is often no one to return for the treasure.

But it turned out that Gorst was also a treasure hunter, and left nothing to Gozzo. The latter found arrowheads, skeletons of ponies, foundations of buildings, whole mountains of clay shards and bricks. And not a single treasure.

Gozzo was desperate. He dreamed that the rune masters would stop enchanting battle swords and money safes and finally invent a magnet for jewelry. But the rune masters did not want to invent a magnet for jewelry in any way, and Gozzo-treasure hunter could not find the treasure in any way.

The Gryphon filled his trusty pipe with tobacco. He wasn't one to give up easily. On the contrary, he was very stubborn. There was only one thought in my head: to dig deeper. He had already tried, but until now there were some clay crumbs instead of stone walls at a greater depth. Obviously, this place used to be much poorer. On the other hand, Gorst the Robber did not look like someone who likes to dig deep, and perhaps some ancient and poor treasures have been preserved for centuries, hiding from everyone under meters of soil.

In the first month of in-depth excavations, Gozzo collected several boxes of ordinary treasures, and then completely dug up the royal tomb, with many golden artifacts, the most wonderful of which were the golden funeral masks of the kings of this city. The griffin immediately realized that he had found the treasures of Falalei himself, who died in this massacre of King Amikles.

Gozzo took out the entire treasure and sold it to the Canterlot Museum. In return, he received a considerable sum and the eternal glory of the discoverer. The resounding success drowned out the voices of critics and skeptics. Someone doubted that all these valuables were one treasure, and considered them a combined hodgepodge from all over the excavation. Others complained about the excavated ruins, where layers of different epochs were mixed into one vinaigrette, from which absolutely no information could be obtained, except that a treasure-digger had been here.

Gozzo paid no attention to them. Fame and money are enough for him. Everyone is capable of criticizing. But who found the treasure of Falalei — Gozzo or his critics? Who made the greatest discovery, who found the two main characters of the "Amikliad", the city of Amikli and its king Falalei — Gozzo or his critics?

But many years later, Gozzo's criticism was joined by the most powerful, most dangerous and most unwanted critic. He was a confident middle-aged archaeologist who had personally developed some archaeological techniques. He came up with the idea of photographing every layer and every find on the spot in order to carefully document the context. It was he who found the site of the Gokhanov massacre, mysteriously eluding generations of archaeologists. It was Gozzo, the archaeologist.

Gozzo the archaeologist resumed the excavations of Amikl, but for a whole week he could not gather his will into a fist, but only drank and cried in his tent, with wild eyes wandered through the vinaigrette from the archaeological layers, shook his fists and exclaimed "Damn you, Gozzo!" - such was the depth of the depths of his mental shock and pain.

One thing consoled him: despite all his stubbornness and determination, Gozzo the treasure hunter was not a tractor. He could not dig up the whole city, and the remains of stone buildings were not particularly destroyed.

For many seasons, Gozzo, an archaeologist, came to dig Amicles, and was able to describe as many as eleven layers, from the primitive parking lot of the oldest ponies, to a thriving center of local trade, which eventually declined and turned into a wooded hill. The only trouble is that the events of the "Amikliad" took place on the Amikli-seven layer, which was confirmed by the conflagration, traces of violent death on chopped skeletons and characteristic bronze arrowheads of the Amiklian era, which could be used by a Handful of Robbers, the ancient Gryphon drottnar, as Gozzo the archaeologist called him, or the leader, as the ponies called him.

Gozzo found the "Falaleian treasure" in the Amikla-two layer, which was a thousand years older than Gorst's raid. Then the city also burned down, and also from a raid... by someone who fired arrows with stone tips -a slightly outdated design not only for Gorst, but also for his twenty—times-great-grandfather.

An annoying mistake was made by a whole tsunami of descriptions of finds on each of the layers and scientific papers on these piles of documents. Falaleian Amicles-seven long summers that were a dark horse against the background of Amicles-two with their rich treasure, finally got their deserved fame.