Free Republic

- And so many Christian ones? The institution of the Nobel Prize is one of the few things that's just as big outside Scandinavia as it is within the old land of the Vikings. (There will probably never be a McLutefisk, I guess..) In similarity with most members of this forum, I don't think people like Al Gore belong in the company of (other Nobel laureates) like Einstein, Fermi, Wałęsa, Hemingway, Marconi, Bohr, and Churchill. The older and wiser I have become, the more I've realized we Europeans often look up to the wrong kind of Americans (- but we...

The smuggling of stolen antiquities from Iraq's rich cultural heritage is helping finance Iraqi extremist groups, says the U.S. investigator who led the initial probe into the looting of Baghdad's National Museum. Marine Reserve Col. Matthew Bogdanos claimed both Sunni insurgents such as al-Qaida in Iraq and Shiite militias are receiving funding from the trafficking. Bogdanos, a New York assistant district attorney, noted that kidnappings and extortion remain the insurgents' main source of funds. But he said the link between extremist groups and antiquities smuggling in Iraq was "undeniable." "The Taliban are using opium to finance their activities in Afghanistan,"...

A unique exhibition of 2,000-year-old paintings called Pompeian Red has opened at the National Museum of Rome.

My husband and I are expecting fraternal twin boys in March, and we have reached the stage of discussing names. My husband is a small-L libertarian, while I am more conservative, but we agree that we would like to give our sons names to live up to. (For instance, we are seriously looking at Washington, Jefferson and Franklin as middle names, since we like the idea of giving the boys the names of some of our most important and admirable founding fathers.) We are also fans of history, particularly the Roman era, and would be interested in considering names of...

Antiquity unearthed Downtown Lindsay A. Miller / Arizona Daily Star Desert Archaeology crew member Jennifer Sandretto fields a question from Tucson resident John Cushman about the excavation site at a triplex on Court Avenue Downtown. Lying beneath the triplex is a pit house dating back 2,000 years, which predates the Hohokam Indians by centuries. The triplex is destined to become a museum in the Presidio Historic Park, a Rio Nuevo project Downtown. The shallow trenches and holes in the dirt, roped off in the back yard of an old adobe row house Downtown, seem at first like nothing more than...

While browsing through the ancient Persian history, I was struck and fascinated by another subject Zoroastrianism. Zoroastrianism has not only made a major contribution to the ancient philosophical thought but has also had a deep imprint on the Persian history and culture. Since ages, man has been striving to search for the meaning and purpose of life. Two ancient philosophies threw up answers to this eternal quest. One came out of the Vedic thought of re-incarnation (samsara) which believed in perpetual cycles of life, death and re-birth. It believed that soul (atma) finally got liberated (moksha) based on man's good...

Ownership dispute has been set aside for joint study and digitisation of the world’s oldest bibleAn emotional reunion took place in the vaults of the British Library last month, when the archbishop responsible for St Catherine’s Monastery on the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt was shown the Codex Sinaiticus, the world’s oldest Bible. The manuscript, which had almost certainly been at the desert monastery from the sixth century onwards and possibly from two centuries earlier, was taken to Russia in the 19th century in controversial circumstances. It is so precious that only four scholars have been allowed full access to the...

A team coordinated by Tura Beach archaeologist Dr Judith Cameron has discovered and preserved the oldest complete shroud found in Southeast Asia, dating back some 2,300 years to the Bronze Age Dongson culture. The cloth was found in a wooden boat-shaped coffin covered by thick black mud in a canal in the Red River plains area of Vietnam in December last year. In what has been hailed as a major find, team leader Professor Peter Bellwood of the Australian National University said that the boat coffin - unearthed at Dong Xa, 50km southeast of Hanoi - was possibly also the...

Feb. 3 — An Iraqi dam under construction on the Tigris River threatens to submerge the remains of the spiritual capital of the ancient Assyrian empire in an act archaeologists liken to flooding the Vatican.Much of the city of Ashur, which thrived for more than 1,000 years until the Babylonians razed it in 614 B.C., could vanish under a lake to be created by the Makhoul dam, U.S. and European archaeologists said.More than 60 outlying historical sites are also threatened.Ashur, or Assur, was of such importance that it lent its name to the Assyrian civilization itself."Losing it would be...