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The world’s earliest alphabet, inscribed on stone slabs at several Egyptian sites, was an early form of Hebrew, a controversial new analysis concludes. Israelites living in Egypt transformed that civilization’s hieroglyphics into Hebrew 1.0 more than 3,800 years ago, at a time when the Old Testament describes Jews living in Egypt, says archaeologist and epigrapher Douglas Petrovich of Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Canada. Hebrew speakers seeking a way to communicate in writing with other Egyptian Jews simplified the pharaohs’ complex hieroglyphic writing system into 22 alphabetic letters, Petrovich proposed on November 17 at the annual meeting of the American...

Kingdom of David and Solomon Supported by Growing Evidence The evidence is coming together to support the Biblical record of David and Solomon. An Israeli publication updates the latest finds.In Haaretz, an Israeli news site, you can watch Bible stories rise from the dust. For decades, liberals critics have said that Biblical kings David and Solomon were mythical heroes invented by later Bible writers. It’s hard to say that any more. Philippe Bohstrom has done a service to those who prefer to trust the Bible over man’s changing opinions, pulling together in one place the latest findings that support...

Relics which escaped Reformation and became a symbol of resistance to Communism return to site of murder after 800 years in gesture of unity between Anglicans and CatholicsA fragment of bone believed to come from the body of Thomas Becket is to return to England from Hungary for the first time in more than 800 years in a vivid symbol of reconciliation between Anglicans and Roman Catholics. The relic, held in the Basilica of Esztergom, the country's most important Catholic church, is to form the centrepiece of an elaborate week-long "pilgrimage" to London and Canterbury involving the Hungarian President Janos...

Iraq's past was just a Saddamite plaything Mark Steyn National Post Tuesday, April 22, 2003 On our letters page last week, Douglas Anthony Cooper of Montreal chided me for my throwaway line about the anti-war crowd's sudden interest in property crime: "Steal the photocopier from Baghdad's Ministry of Genital Clamping and they're pining for the smack of firm government." "Some matters reside beyond the domain of comedy," writes Mr. Cooper. "The rape of the National Museum of Iraq and the torching of the National Library will be lamented by historians for centuries." He concludes, "A man of Mr. Steyn's sensibilities...

First domesticated 10,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East, wheat and barley took vastly different routes to China, with barley switching from a winter to both a winter and summer crop during a thousand-year detour along the southern Tibetan Plateau, suggests new research... "Wheat was introduced to central China in the second or third millennium B.C., but barley did not arrive there until the first millennium B.C.," Liu said. "While previous research suggests wheat cultivation moved east along the northern edge of the Tibetan Plateau, our study calls attention to the possibility of a southern route...

During the late Bronze Age, the cave appears to have been a repository for precious objects, with finds ranging from bronze bracelets via pottery to a swan's neck pin. Large quantities of human remains have also been discovered - especially those of children - suggesting that the cave may have been a centre for funerary rites. Intriguingly, on the frontal bone of one child, there is evidence suggestive of deliberate defleshing. Some of the cave's most important features, however, are the Pictish symbols that can be found on the walls of its entrance passages. Problematically, the cave is only accessible...

Thousands of Italians emigrated to Scotland in the 20th Century, but it seems that 400 years earlier a group of Scots may have settled in a village in the Italian Alps. So local legend has it… And there are plenty of signs to suggest that maybe, just maybe, it's true. High up in the mountains of northern Italy, just a few kilometres from the Swiss border, the people of the tiny village of Gurro speak a strange dialect, incomprehensible even to the other villages in the same valley. They have peculiar surnames, and the women's traditional costume features a patterned...

Witch prison found in 15th century Scottish church: Medieval chapel was used to hold suspects before they were killed and burnedIn the years before the Reformation, a small chapel in a church on the outskirts of Aberdeen had provided a quiet place for Catholic women to pray in peace. But within 30 years of the switch from Catholicism to the Protestant faith, St Mary's Chapel at the Kirk of St Nicholas in Aberdeen took on a far darker and sinister role. Historians have uncovered evidence that the chapel, built during the 15th century, served as a prison for suspected witches...

Several different types of sling bullets have been found at the site, from small lead bullets drilled with holes that the researchers think were designed to make a whistling noise in flight and terrorize their targets, to the largest lemon-shaped sling bullets, which weigh up to 2 ounces. "The interesting thing is that all the whistling sling bullets are from the Roman camp on the south face of the hill fort, so clearly they are using different sling bullets for different purposes," Nicholson told Live Science.

Let's get this out of the way: England's King Edward I was an ass. You may remember Longshanks from his villainous turn in Braveheart. Tall, forbidding, and bad-tempered, the 14th century monarch stomped his Welsh neighbors in submission, taxed the Irish into poverty, and stole money from his Jewish subjects, killing many of them and expelling the rest. When he was done with that he engineered a takeover of Scotland using tactics that would make Machiavelli blanch, including inflicting an unbelievably cruel death upon the leader of the Scots, William Wallace, that's familiar to movie fans.

AN APPLE A DAY may or may not keep the doctor away, but it's a sentiment shared by just about everyone our Mo Rocca has been visiting: At the Johnny Appleseed Festival in Fort Wayne, Ind., there's no such thing as a bad apple. There you can indulge in apple dumplings -- a skinless apple wrapped in dough, and deep-fried. Rocca asked, "How healthy is this? "Very healthy -- it's an apple!" he was told Or partake of apple petals ("Better than apple dumplings!" enthused cutthroat vendor Logan Forbing), and sample some apple sausages. Fort Wayne is where John Chapman...

...Ms Howard, otherwise known as 'Indiana Joan', volunteered on archeological digs for around 11 years with British and American archaeologists in Syria, Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine and Israel from around 1967... Her collection includes neolithic axe heads more than 40,000 years old, pottery and weapons from the Phoenicians and the Romans, coins and seals and jewellery from the time of the pharaohs, and a precious funerary mask from Egypt. She said a favourite was a Roman dagger she found buried with the skeletal remains of its owner. Another was the wrappings of a mummy's remains and a cat claw wound...

Even skeptics are wowed by the high-tech museum. Pulitzer Prize winner Philip Kennicott called Museum of the Bible ‘stocked with historic treasures.’ By Josh ShepherdNovember 20, 2017 The professor of Jewish studies passes under an ornate archway, leading to another part of the sprawling History of the Bible floor. Keeping up with him isn’t easy, as we dodge workers who continue to install museum panels before opening day.“There’s nothing false anywhere,” Professor Lawrence Schiffman says over his shoulder, gesturing towards dozens of Torah scrolls carefully lit for preservation. “I’ve been walking around even today, reading more labels. We keep...

The first is a trip down the river Thames and a look at the Pool of London, then one of the busiest ports in the world. Lots of steamships. The second, linked in the comments below, shows scenes along the Great North Road which was a major coaching road in the 18th and 19th centuries passing through lots of very old small towns and villages.

With a vial of saliva and a little cutting-edge science, AncestryDNA can tell you if you’ve got any Irish heritage in your genes. And with a lot of cutting-edge science, researchers in December 2015 published a study telling the world where that Irish heritage first originated. By studying the 5,000-year-old remains of a female farmer buried near Belfast, Ireland, and the remains of three men buried 3,000 and 4,000 years ago on Rathlin Island in County Antrim, archaeologists and geneticists now say they now know where the modern Irish people originally came from. The remains of the Stone Age female...

Full title: Human skeleton discovered at Antikythera shipwreck after more than 2,000 years at the bottom of the sea Buried beneath sand and the fragments of ancient pottery, researchers have discovered the 2,000-year-old remains of a sailor who died upon the ill-fated 'Antikythera ship.' Archaeologists have investigated the famous shipwreck off a tiny Greek island for which it's named for over a century, revealing a trove of remarkable artefacts – including the mysterious 'Antikythera Mechanism,' thought to be a 'guide to the galaxy.'

In a stunning discovery, archaeologists in Jerusalem have uncovered a new section of the Western Wall that has been hidden for 1,700 years. Recent excavations at the holy site, which were announced Monday, revealed eight stone courses, or horizontal layers of stones, buried under 26 feet of earth. The completely preserved stone courses are constructed from massive stones and were discovered in Jerusalem’s Western Wall tunnels. The Western Wall is part of an ancient retaining wall supporting the Temple Mount where the Jewish First and Second Temples once stood. When experts from the Israel Antiquities Authority removed the soil, they...

FULL TITLE: Controversial footprint discovery suggests human-like creatures may have roamed Crete nearly 6m years ago The human foot is distinctive. Our five toes lack claws, we normally present the sole of our foot flat to the ground, and our first and second toes are longer than the smaller ones. In comparison to our fellow primates, our big toes are in line with the long axis of the foot – they don't stick out to one side. In fact, some would argue that one of the defining characteristics of being part of the human clade is the shape of our...

The ship bound for Rome sunk in 1BC and was first discovered off the coast of Greece in 1900. And yet the Antikythera shipwreck is still providing new discoveries. The Guardian reports an expedition to the site last month turned up a silver tankard, a human bone, and much more. Perhaps most exciting: the arm of a bronze statue and evidence that the remains of at least seven bronze statues are still buried there.

Researchers have discovered a new cave in Israel that they say once held Dead Sea Scrolls, making it just the 12th such cave of its kind found. The find is thus a milestone, according to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The cave was looted long before the archeologists excavated it, but inside they found telltale signs that scrolls had been there: broken storage jars and lids on its edges and in a tunnel in the back.