Free Republic

Ancient Navigators Could Have Measured Longitude -- in Egypt in 232 B.C. !by Rick Sanders Around the year 232 B.C., Captain Rata and Navigator Maui set out with a flotilla of ships from Egypt in an attempt to circumnavigate the Earth. On the night of August 6-7, 2001, between the hours of 11 PM and 3 AM, this writer, and fellow amateur astronomer Bert Cooper, proved in principle that Captain Rata and Navigator Maui could have known and charted their location, by longitude, most of the time during that voyage. The Maui expedition was under the guidance of Eratosthenes, the...

Voyage to prove pharaohs traded cocaine By Tom Leonard in New York Last Updated: 2:21am BST 30/05/2007 An adventurer who believes that ancient man regularly crossed the Atlantic Ocean 14,000 years ago plans to recreate such a voyage in a 41ft raft made of reeds and eucalyptus tree branches. Basing his theory on the thinnest of historical evidence, Dominique Gorlitz believes that the discovery of traces of tobacco and cocaine in the tomb of the pharaoh Rameses II proves that there was trade between the Old and New Worlds. He also claims that 14,000-year-old cave paintings in Spain show that,...

American Drugs in Egyptian MummiesS. A. Wells www.colostate.edu Abstract: The recent findings of cocaine, nicotine, and hashishin Egyptian mummies by Balabanova et. al. have been criticized on grounds that: contamination of the mummies may have occurred, improper techniques may have been used, chemical decomposition may have produced the compounds in question, recent mummies of drug users were mistakenly evaluated, that no similar cases are known of such compounds in long-dead bodies, and especially that pre-Columbian transoceanic voyages are highly speculative. These criticisms are each discussed in turn. Balabanova et. al. are shown to have used and confirmed their findings with...

For in Manchester, the mummies under the care of Rosalie David, the Egyptologist [Keeper of Egyptology, Manchester Museum] once so sure that Balabanova had made a mistake, produced some odd results of their own... "We've received results back from the tests on our mummy tissue samples and two of the samples and the one hair sample both have evidence of nicotine in them. I'm really very surprised at this."

Mummy Hair Reveals Drinking Habits By Rossella Lorenzi, Discovery News Sept. 23, 2004 Mummy hair has revealed the first direct evidence of alcohol consumption in ancient populations, according to new forensic research.The study, still in its preliminary stage, examined hair samples from spontaneously mummified remains discovered in one of the most arid regions of the world, the Atacama Desert of northern Chile and southern Peru. The research was presented at the 5th World Congress on Mummy Studies in Turin, Italy, this month. “ In modern human hair the levels would generally be in the ranges of social drinking, but we...