Free Republic

A major global cooling event that occurred 4,200 years ago may have led to the evolution of new rice varieties and the spread of rice into both northern and southern Asia, an international team of researchers has found. Rice is one of the most important crops worldwide, a staple for more than half of the global population. It was first cultivated 9,000 years ago in the Yangtze Valley in China and later spread across East, Southeast, and South Asia, followed by the Middle East, Africa, Europe, and the Americas. In the process, rice evolved and adapted to different environments, but...

Babylon has seen it all. From its peak as the Neo-Babylonian capital under King Nebuchadnezzar through its heavy-handed 1987 reconstruction by Saddam Hussein to its post-invasion demise when American and Polish troops ran roughshod over its ruins and ISIS threatened its very existence, the ancient city has witnessed empires come and go. The 2500-acre site, 50 miles south of Baghdad, comprises both the ruins of the ancient city as well as surrounding villages and agricultural areas. Between 626 and 539 BCE, the city was the capital of the Neo-Babylonian empire and the largest metropolis in the world. It was here...

What did a meal taste like nearly 4,000 years ago in ancient Babylonia? Pretty good, according to a team of international scholars who have deciphered and are re-creating what are considered to be the world's oldest-known culinary recipes. The recipes were inscribed on ancient Babylonian tablets that researchers have known about since early in the 20th century but that were not properly translated until the end of the century.

Fed on an anti-infidel diet from childhood, Pakistanis no matter where they are born, grow up ready for jehad. Even Muslims with a nominal Pakistani connection are beyond help. Pakistan is a country where the arrow of time is travelling backwards. In the 'Land of the Pure', Prime Minister Imran Khan promises to create a mythical seventh century Riyasat-e-Madina (1) yet Islamic demagogues such as Maulana Fazlur Rehman call him a Jewish agent. Rehman and hundreds of thousands of his frenzied followers are protesting nationwide, seeking Khan's resignation. With the corrupt, cowardly and jehadi generals of the Pakistan Army choreographing...

Fossil coral records provide new evidence that frequent winter shamals, or dust storms, and a prolonged cold winter season contributed to the collapse of the ancient Akkadian Empire in Mesopotamia. The Akkadian Empire (24th to 22nd century B.C.E.) was the first united empire in Mesopotamia and thrived with the development of irrigation. Yet, settlements appear to have been suddenly abandoned ca. 4,200 years ago, causing its collapse. The area would also not experience resettlement until about 300 years later. Past studies have shown that the Akkadian Empire likely collapsed due to abrupt drought and civil turmoil. However, the climatic dynamics...

Hartmut Kühne, University Professor at the Institut für Vorderasiatische Archäologie, presents "The Collapse of the Assyrian Empire and the Evidence of Dur-Katlimmu". The collapse of the Assyrian Empire was the prelude to the end of the Mesopotamian domination of the Ancient Near East in 539 BC to be followed by the Persian hegemony. The metropolitan core region of Assyria laid waste, as is known from extensive excavations in the Assyrian capitals; neither the Babylonian nor the Median successors cared for a reconstruction program. But how did the Assyrian home provinces survive the collapse? This poorly known chapter of history is...

A 3,300-year-old treasure trove of gold found in northern Germany has stumped German archeologists. One theory suggests that traders transported it thousands of miles from a mine in Central Asia, but other experts are skeptical. Archeologists in Germany have an unlikely new hero: former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder. They have nothing but praise for the cigar-smoking veteran Social Democratic politician. Why? Because it was Schröder who, together with Russian leader Vladimir Putin, pushed through a plan to pump Russian natural gas to Western Europe. For that purpose, an embankment 440 kilometers (275 miles) long and up to 30 meters (100 feet)...

How long have humans brewed beer? Patrick McGovern, the world's foremost historian of ancient brews, hints in Ancient Brews (2017) that this activity has been around possibly at least for 11,000 years based on vessels from Gobekli Tepe in Anatolia (Turkey). How sophisticated was brewing in antiquity? Since the ancient artifact ca. 100 CE known as the "Baghdad Battery" was discovered in the 1930's, the purpose for which it was used has been a mystery. Wilhelm Koenig, a German curator of the Baghdad Museum, discovered it near Ctesiphon - the Sassanid capital and previously in the Parthian Empire around 1936...

An international research team, coordinated by the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History (MPI-SHH) and the Eurasia Department of the German Archaeological Institute (DAI) in Berlin, is the first to carry out systematic genetic investigations in the Caucasus region... based on analyses of genome-wide data from 45 individuals in the steppe and mountainous areas of the North Caucasus. The skeletal remains, which are between 6,500 and 3,500 years old, show that the groups living throughout the Caucasus region were genetically similar, despite the harsh mountain terrain, but that there was a sharp genetic boundary to the adjacent...

Gol-e-Zard Cave lies in the shadow of Mount Damavand, which at more than 5,000 metres dominates the landscape of northern Iran. In this cave, stalagmites and stalactites are growing slowly over millennia and preserve in them clues about past climate events. Changes in stalagmite chemistry from this cave have now linked the collapse of the Akkadian Empire to climate changes more than 4,000 years ago... It appears that the empire became increasingly dependent on the productivity of the northern lands and used the grains sourced from this region to feed the army and redistribute the food supplies to key supporters....

The Meghalayan...runs from 4,200 years ago to the present. It began with a destructive drought, whose effects lasted two centuries, and severely disrupted civilisations in Egypt, Greece, Syria, Palestine, Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, and the Yangtze River Valley. The Meghalayan Age is unique among the many intervals of the geologic timescale in that its beginning coincides with a global cultural event produced by a global climatic event... The middle phase of the Holocene will be referred to as the Northgrippian, and runs from 8,300 years ago up to the start of the Meghalayan. The onset for this age was an...

University of Tübingen archaeologists headed by Professor Peter Pfälzner have made sensational finds in the Kurdistan region of northern Iraq. The researchers from the Institute for Ancient Near Eastern Studies found a cuneiform archive of 93 clay tablets dating from... the Middle Assyrian Empire. The tablets were found at the Bronze Age city site of Bassetki, which was only discovered in 2013... The researchers unearthed a layer from the little-known Mittani Kingdom (approx. 1550 - 1300) for the first time at this location. Two Mittani cuneiform tablets found in this level document intense trade conducted by the city's inhabitants around...

Sumerians settled in Mesopotamia, an area of modern Iraq known as the cradle of civilization, more than 6,000 years ago, where they invented writing, the wheel, the plough, irrigation, the 24-hour day and the first city-states. Mission co-leaders Licia Romano and Franco D'Agostino of Rome's Sapienza University said Tuesday they discovered one of their ancient ports in Abu Tbeirah, a desert site about 7 kilometers (4.3 miles) south of the town of Nasiriyah. The port's basin, measuring 130 meters (142 yards) in length and 40 meters (44 yards) wide, with a capacity equal to nine Olympics-sized pools, may have also...

With its impressive pyramids and complex rules, Ancient Egypt may seem to many the epitome of an advanced early civilisation. But new evidence suggests the Indus Valley Civilisation in India and Pakistan, famed for its well-planned cities and impressive crafts, predates Egypt and Mesopotamia. Already considered one of the oldest civilisations in the world, experts now believe it is 8,000 years old - 2,500 years older than previously thought.

Severe climate change was the primary driver in the development of civilisation, according to new research by the University of East Anglia. The early civilisations of Egypt, Mesopotamia, South Asia, China and northern South America were founded between 6000 and 4000 years ago when global climate changes, driven by natural fluctuations in the Earth's orbit, caused a weakening of monsoon systems resulting in increasingly arid conditions. These first large urban, state-level societies emerged because diminishing resources forced previously transient people into close proximity in areas where water, pasture and productive land was still available. In a presentation to the BA...

National borders are being superseded by the ancient battleground of al-Jazira. ___ Policymakers and media people—as well as anyone interested in the Middle East, Islam, terrorism, and related issues—need to be talking about al-Jazira. I am not talking here about the Qatar-based media operation that we usually call al-Jazeera. Rather, I am referring to those regions of Eastern Syria and Northern Iraq that have been in the news so much recently because they are the main stamping grounds of ISIL, and the core of the Islamic State, the Daesh. This is not just a question of applying a handy geographical...

The ancient city of Gezer has been an important site since the Bronze Age, because it sat along the Way of the Sea, or the Via Maris, an ancient trade route that connected Egypt, Syria, Anatolia and Mesopotamia. The city was ruled over many centuries by Canaanites, Egyptians and Assyrians, and Biblical accounts from roughly the 10th century describe an Egyptian pharaoh giving the city to King Solomon as a wedding gift after marrying his daughter. .... The site has been excavated for a century, and most of the excavations so far date to the the 10th through eighth centuries...

Two of the ancient cities now being destroyed by Islamic State lay buried for 2,500 years, it was only 170 years ago that they began to be dug up and stripped of their treasures. The excavations arguably paved the way for IS to smash what remained - but also ensured that some of the riches of a lost civilisation were saved. In 1872, in a backroom of the British Museum, a man called George Smith spent the darkening days of November bent over a broken clay tablet. It was one of thousands of fragments from recent excavations in northern Iraq,...

'Two of the ancient cities now being destroyed by Islamic State lay buried for 2,500 years, it was only 170 years ago that they began to be dug up and stripped of their treasures. The excavations arguably paved the way for IS to smash what remained - but also ensured that some of the riches of a lost civilisation were saved. In 1872, in a backroom of the British Museum, a man called George Smith spent the darkening days of November bent over a broken clay tablet. It was one of thousands of fragments from recent excavations in northern Iraq,...

A bid by an Australian archaeologist and other sailors to recreate an ancient voyage in a traditional reed boat has struck trouble in the Arabian Sea. Nautical archaeologist Dr Tom Vosmer and seven other sailors had set off from Oman for a two-week voyage in the Magan, a 12-metre-long sailing boat made of reeds, rope and wood, but capsized within hours. "Water leaked into the Magan causing it to capsize, but a support ship from the Omani royal navy accompanying the boat intervened and rescued the sailors," a source from Oman's culture and national heritage ministry which organised the trip...