Free Republic

Historians agree that some of the Roman military campaigns were motivated by the need to find and control ore reserves required for coinage. Monetary payments were made for a while using un-coined bronze called aes rude and cast bronze ingots called aes signatum. Rome eventually built its own mint and coined silver denarii and smaller coins of bronze. During Emperor Augustus’ reign, a gold coin called aureus was minted, which could be exchanged into silver denarii. Because the Greeks kept their silver drahms as a basis for their monetary system, money exchangers of various currencies were found in large cities....

The reputation of a disgraced wartime navy captain has been restored, thanks to the discoveries of a documentary featuring the finder of the Titanic. For more than 60 years, Captain Herbert G. Claudius was blamed for letting a Nazi U-boat ‘get away’, after it sank the Robert E. Lee passenger freighter in the Gulf of Mexico in 1942. But an undersea expedition – aided by Dr Robert Ballard who rediscovered the Titanic 30 years ago – has revealed the first published pictures of the submarine’s wreckage, showing how bombs dropped by Cpt Claudius’ crew successfully sunk the attacker U-166. ........

...In the course of both Boyd's and Watrous' excavations, more than 50 houses or areas with evidence of industrial activity have been uncovered -- 20 areas producing pottery, 15 producing stone vases, 18 producing bronze and bronze implements, and some with evidence for textile production. At one location on the north edge of the settlement, Buell points out an area of burned bedrock inside a space identified as a foundry. 'Here we have all sorts of scraps of bronze crucibles, bronze drips, copper scraps, and iron used for flux. Elsewhere, we also found a tin ingot, the closest known source...

Underwater explorers in Madagascar say they have found what is thought to be the treasure of notorious Scottish pirate William Kidd. Soldiers on Sainte Marie island have been guarding the 50kg silver bar after divers brought it to shore. Madagascar's president as well as UK and US diplomats received the suspected treasure at a ceremony on the island. Capt Kidd was executed in 1701 for piracy after returning from a voyage to the Indian Ocean.

Dorin Cioba the leader of three million Roma around the world, landed in Israel on Wednesday. Roma are widely known as Gypsies. On his first visit to Israel, Cioba, who is president of the International Romani Union, plans to visit the Roma community in Jerusalem as well as the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial. The photographer Roni Ben-Ari invited Cioaba to Israel for the opening of her exhibit that documents the life of Gypsies in the city of Lugoj, Romania. The exhibit opens on Thursday at the Museum of Israeli Art in Ramat Gan. "This is the first time that I...

NEW YORK — The directions, if a little stilted, look familiar: “The Order Of The Diagram Written Here Teaches The Return Home.”Think Parcheesi or Sorry.But then think again. The board is not cardboard or plastic; it’s 1,035-year-old vellum. And there are no dice — just prayers.Care to play?In April, Manhattan’s Les Enluminures Gallery, a dealer in medieval manuscripts, put a book on sale with a first page so rare that only five of its kind are known to exist. In fact, the book itself is rare, with a massive ancient carved-oak cover and sturdy clasps of worked copper. Dating back...

Hercules has been crushed — because of a selfie! A couple of tourists are in hot water after climbing onto a priceless marble statue of the mythical Greek hero in the northern city of Cremona, Italy, the Daily Mail reported. The miscreants put too much weight on the statue at the Loggia dei Militi palace during their boneheaded bid to snap a photo of themselves — shattering the crown of the Statue of the Two Hercules.

Midwife Mercada Dasa lived in the Old City of Jerusalem until 1948. In her attic she raised an unusual pet -- a white female snake about a meter and a half long -- and fed it sugar cubes. Just before the entry of the Jordanian Legion she left the besieged city with her family and her pet remained behind. That a midwife, whose family lived in Jerusalem since the time of the Second Temple, carried on a tradition of feeding white female snakes was part of the family's lore, but not something anyone considered significant. Now Mercada's grandson, Benny Avigdory,...

Dr. Mamdouh El Damaty announced the discovery of the remains of the eastern gate of Tharw fortres in Sinai which served as the Egyptian army headquarters in the New Kingdom. The discovery was made by the Egyptian team working at Tell Habwa in the east bank of the Suez Canal. The discovery also include mid brick royal warehouse belong to "Ramses II and Thotmoses III" and 26th Dynasty cemetery most of the graves are mud brick and group tombs of contains human remains showing battles injuries. The discovered part of the eastern gate of Tharw fortress are 3 fragments of...

Sometime after 1200 BCE, civilization collapsed, and a dark age prevailed. The Late Bronze Age collapse of societies throughout the Levant, the Near East and the Mediterranean some 3,200 years ago has been a mystery. Powerful, advanced civilizations disappeared, seemingly overnight. Now an archaeologist believes he has figured out what lay behind the cataclysm. The trigger seems to have been the invasion of ancient Egypt in 1177 BCE by marauding peoples known simply as the “Sea Peoples,” as recorded in the Medinet Habu wall relief at Ramses III' tomb. The relief depicts a sea battle (and also carts full of...

For decades, museums and textbooks confidently asserted that mud rocks—such as limestone, siltstone, mudstone, and shale—were formed over vast eons as super-fine sediments slowly settled to the bottom of shallow lakes or seas. But new flume studies are challenging old ways of thinking about mud rock formation...

Previous studies have suggested that Indonesia's Toba supervolcano, when it erupted about 74,000 years ago, triggered a 1,000-year episode of ice sheet advance, and also may have produced a short-lived "volcanic winter," which drastically reduced the human population at the time.

SETI Invites Alien Talk May 24, 2009 — They may not be saying much to us, but we can think about what to say to them – aliens, that is.  Space.com reported on the latest project from the SETI Institute: invite people all over the world to ponder, “What would you say to an extraterrestrial civilization?”     The SETI Institute is launching a new website, Earth Speaks, to gather people’s ideas about what we should say to an alien civilization should contact be made.  “By submitting text messages, pictures, and sounds from across the globe,” CEO Thomas Pierson explained,...

Building Planets: Can’t Make Them, But HurryMay 21, 2009 — Constructing planets is a delicate business.  Trying to get tiny bits of dust to join up into balls has never been found to work.  It has to work fast, though, because unless the whole planet clears its dust lane, it will be dragged into the star in short order.  It seems you can’t get there from the bottom up, and even if you could, you’d be in trouble.  These and other problems with planet-building were discussed this month in two papers in the Annual Review of Earth and Planetary...

Strata Data Axes Asteroid Dinosaur Demise by Brian Thomas, M.S.* In 1980, a theory was proposed that an asteroid or comet impact was primarily responsible for the mass dinosaur extinctions that were observed in the fossil record. But while the impact tale has become widely accepted in popular culture, critical questions remain unanswered. Further scientific investigations have revealed geological and fossil evidence that is inconsistent with a single-impact extermination.[1,2] And recently, geologists catalogued even more data that is incompatible with the asteroid story...

Worldwide FLOOD Worldwide EVIDENCE When the Bible refers to a worldwide Flood in Genesis 7–8, that’s exactly what it means. Not local, not metaphorical, not some crazy dream—the waters covered the whole earth. Don’t just take our word for it, though. Take a look at the evidence right beneath your feet...

A dinosaur bone buried for 80 million years has yielded a mix of proteins and microstructures resembling cells. The finding is important because it should resolve doubts about a previous report that also claimed to have extracted dino tissue from fossils...

Are Secular Geologists Ready to Consider a Global Flood? April 30, 2009 — Everyone knows the Bible tells the story of a global flood in Noah’s day. Creation scientists argue that its effects would have left visible evidence today – including most of the sedimentary layers and most of the fossil record. Secular geologists have laughed off this story since the 18th century as nothing but myth, of course, but a paper in the Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences suggests that some of them are re-evaluating the role of “megafloods” in earth history. Some megafloods might be considered...

Have you mowed your lawn lately? If so, you may have committed a grave ‘plants rights’ crime, according to the Swiss Federal Ethics Committee on Biotechnology. In what reads like a clever parody, their twenty-four page report argues that plants may well be deserving of nearly the same reverence a human life is due (of course, in practice, these hypocrites would treat plants with greater reverence than human lives, see below). --snip-- Ironically, the great apologist G.K. Chesterton predicted a century ago the move toward plant rights when he discussed animal rights (although he can hardly have been serious when...

We need to do something get the pitchforks, bring back public hangings look at these crooks dumping their toxic waste off on you, your children and grandchildren!!!!