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BLOODY KING LINKED TO SAXON BEACH FIND By Richard Wright A RARE gold sword belt ornament which could have belonged to the seventh century Saxon king, Caedwalla, has been found on an Island beach - and there could be another hidden under the sands. Discovery of the intricate gold decoration encrusted with garnets is regarded as being especially historically significant because it could have belonged to the king reputed to have put a quarter of the Island population to the sword in his attempt to convert them to Christianity. Enthusiast Darren Trickey, 21, had gone out for a few minutes...

Sacred Precincts: A Tartessian Sanctuary in Ancient Spain Sebastián Celestino and Carolina López-Ruiz When the Phoenicians arrived on the Iberian peninsula, probably at the end of the ninth century B.C., they came into contact with an indigenous people called the Tartessians. The two cultures soon fused. The hybrid culture produced by this fusion of peoples is evident in a mysterious structure at Cancho Roano, deep in the heart of south-central Spain. The structure at Cancho Roano is sometimes called a “palace-sanctuary” because of its monumentality. But it was not a palace at all; it was simply a Tartessian sanctuary, which...

Granada, Spain – A dispenser of iced lemonade sits invitingly by the door of the newly whitewashed building — hospitality for summer visitors coming to the first mosque built in Granada in over 500 years. But looming over the freshly planted garden, seeming to quiver in the furnacelike heat, is another image: the Alhambra, a 14th-century Muslim fortress of red-tinted stone that is everything this mosque is not: ancient, battle-scarred, monumental. It seems at once a reminder of lost glories and a spur for their restoration. It may also inspire darker sentiments. For it was from the Alhambra's watchtower that...

Appalachian Sands Covered N. America Larry O'Hanlon, Discovery News Navajo Sandstone Sept. 12, 2003 — The vast and mysterious Sahara-like sea of sand that once covered much of western North America came from an Amazon-like river that brought sand from the far-off Appalachians, not the Rockies, geologists said. Thick remnants of the 190 million-year-old sand sea are found today in the scenic, buff-colored Navajo Sandstone cliffs of Utah, New Mexico, Arizona and Colorado. By studying durable minerals in the sandstone called zircons, Yale University geologist Jeffrey Rahl and his colleagues have found a chemical signature that reveals their surprisingly distant...

The secret of imperial purple has been rediscovered. A British amateur chemist has worked out how the ancient Romans dyed the togas of emperors this deep colour thanks to a bacterium found in cockles from the supermarket Tesco. The hue had special significance as the colour of imperial power. Cleopatra also had the sails on her ship dyed the same colour. The recipe for the dye had been kept a craft secret, even in ancient Egypt and Rome. There are few references to the dying process in the historical literature. Green to purple Modern chemistry can make every shade of...

Did Caligula have a God complex?Stanford, Oxford archaeologists find evidence that depraved tyrant annexed sacred temple BY JOHN SANFORD Archaeologists from Stanford, Oxford and the American Institute for Roman Culture have unearthed evidence that Caligula, in an act of astonishing hubris, extended his palace to the podium of a sacrosanct temple. The discovery, made during the final weeks of a month-and-a-half-long dig this summer in the Roman Forum, appears to support accounts by some ancient historians that the profligate but short-lived emperor was a megalomaniac. "It's the equivalent of Queen Elizabeth taking over St. Paul's Cathedral as an anteroom,"...

Hospitals owe debt to Islam By Steve Connor 11 September 2003 Modern medicine owes much to the scholars of the medieval Islamic world, who pioneered the diagnosis and treatment of human disease, a science historian told the conference. The very first hospitals were built around AD800 in Baghdad and they were much more sophisticated than the simple monastic hospices that grew up in Western Europe several hundred years later, said Emilie Savage-Smith of St Cross College in Oxford. The largest Islamic hospitals were built in Egypt and Syria in the 12th and 13th centuries. Patients were treated in wards dedicated...

<p>Many have expressed doubts America can influence the Middle East. But I submit that our cultural sway is already in evidence.</p> <p>Just when you thought no lawsuit could be more preposterous than the one filed by families who tried to sue McDonalds for making them fat, along comes evidence that lawsuit madness has taken hold in Egypt in a truly unique fashion.</p>

DNA study to settle ancient mystery about mingling of Inuit, Vikings By BOB WEBER (CP) - A centuries-old Arctic mystery may be weeks away from resolution as an Icelandic anthropologist prepares to release his findings on the so-called "Blond Eskimos" of the Canadian North. "It's an old story," says Gisli Palsson of the University of Iceland in Reykjavik. "We want to try to throw new light on the history of the Inuit." Stories about Inuit with distinct European features - blue eyes, fair hair, beards - living in the central Arctic have their roots in ancient tales of Norse settlements...

British and American archaeologists digging in the Roman Forum said yesterday they had uncovered evidence to suggest that the emperor Caligula really was a self-deifying megalomaniac, and not the misunderstood, if eccentric, ruler that modern scholars have striven to create. For several decades historians have been lifting their eyebrows at the Latin authors' portrait of Caligula as a madman who came to believe he was a god. But Darius Arya of the American Institute for Roman Culture said a 35-day dig by young archaeologists from Oxford and Stanford universities had reinstated a key element in the traditional account. "We have...

    For the freedom you enjoyed yesterday... Thank the Veterans who served in The United States Armed Forces.     Looking forward to tomorrow's freedom? Support The United States Armed Forces Today!     ANCIENT WARFARE ANCIENT ROMAN MILITARY(continuation)   PART II-D: Julius Caesar (100 - 44 B.C. )Youth to Consulate Descended from an impoverished patrician family which had long been attached to the senatorial clique, Caesar's immediate forbears had fallen from prominence in the decades before his birth and there had been no Consuls in his immediate family for generations. The office of Consul - one of...

The Real Ten Commandments By Richard Carrier I keep hearing this chant, variously phrased: "The Ten Commandments are the foundation of Western morality and the American Constitution and government." In saying this, people are essentially crediting Moses with the invention of ethics, democracy and civil rights, a claim that is of course absurd. But its absurdity is eclipsed by its injustice, for there is another lawmaker who is far more important to us, whose ideas and actions lie far more at the foundation of American government, and whose own Ten Commandments were distributed at large and influencing the greatest civilizations...

The August 9, 2003 edition of the Egyptian weekly Al-Ahram Al-Arabi featured an interview with Dr. Nabil Hilmi, Dean of the Faculty of Law at the University of Al-Zaqaziq who, together with a group of Egyptian expatriates in Switzerland, is preparing an enormous lawsuit against "all the Jews of the world." The following are excerpts from the interview: [1] Dr. Hilmi: "… Since the Jews make various demands of the Arabs and the world, and claim rights that they base on historical and religious sources, a group of Egyptians in Switzerland has opened the case of the so-called 'great exodus...

Meet the ancestors Aug 20 2003 By Mike Hornby, Daily Post Staff AN ARCHAEOLOGICAL dig in a Cheshire hamlet has emerged as one of Britain's most important excavations ever. Archaeologists working in Poulton, south of Chester, have discovered evidence of human activity dating back 9,000 years.They have unearthed five Bronze Age burial mounds, two Roman buildings and a medieval chapel and cemetery. The series of remarkable discoveries was made during excavations to find the lost Abbey of Poulton which once stood on the site. Archaeologist Mike Emery has run the dig, on farmland bordering the Duke of Westminster's Eaton estate,...

Week of Aug. 9, 2003; Vol. 164, No. 6 A human migration fueled by dung? Sid Perkins Science News Magazine From Reno, Nevada, at a meeting of the International Union for Quaternary Research When people made their way from Asia to the Americas, the path they took may have been covered in dung. At the peak of the last ice age, when sea levels were low, a land bridge that's now submerged in many places connected what are now Alaska and northeastern Russia. Although much of the area was dry more than 50,000 years ago, firm archaeological evidence of human...

Who Built the Pyramids? Not slaves. archeaologist Mark Lehner digging deeper, discovers a city of privileged workers. by Jonathan Shaw The pyramids and the Great Sphinx rise inexplicably from the desert at Giza, relics of a vanished culture. They dwarf the approaching sprawl of modern Cairo, a city of 16 million. The largest pyramid, built for the Pharaoh Khufu around 2530 B.C. and intended to last an eternity, was until early in the twentieth century the biggest building on the planet. To raise it, laborers moved into position six and a half million tons of stone—some in blocks as large...

Dave Fortsch has simple advice for those trying to imagine what it would have been like to stand 15,000 years ago where modern-day Bannock County meets Oneida County. "Hold your breath," the white-haired, wiry Idaho State University geology professor says cheerfully. "We're under 300 feet of water here." For Fortsch, the signs of prehistoric Lake Bonneville - a large freshwater lake about the size of Lake Michigan that existed from about 32,000 to 14,000 years ago - and the flood that resulted when it overflowed at Red Rock Pass near Swan Lake are everywhere he looks. Fortsch stands in front...

Caligula's Roman palace discovered By Bruce Johnston in Rome (Filed: 08/08/2003) The ancient palace in Rome that provided the backdrop for many of Emperor Caligula's wildest depravities has been found by British and American archaeologists. After two months of digs at the edge of the Forum close to the Palatine Hill, the group - involving Oxford and Stanford Universities, the British School at Rome, and the American Institute for Roman Culture - were confident that they had found the site. While it had been known from ancient sources that the palace was in the area, it had never been located...

Onward Christian soldiers Forcing Balkan-born boys to fight for Allah parallels Sudan slavery Editor’s note: WorldNetDaily.com international correspondent Anthony C. LoBaido traveled to Cyprus, Turkey, Iraq and Kurdistan last year, researching stories on the Crusaders, Knights Templar, Noah’s Ark and the Kurds. In this report, LoBaido details the ancient account of the Janissaries, Christian boys living in the Balkans who were taken by the Ottoman sultans to be their elite guards. This account finds a modern-day parallel in the ongoing war in Sudan. By Anthony C. LoBaido © 2001 WorldNetDaily.com The Sudan government's current practice of forcing Christian boys into slavery...