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Gods, Graves, Glyphs
Weekly Digest #19

Anatolia

Arzawa

Posted by SunkenCiv
On General/Chat 11/26/2004 7:32:25 PM PST · 7 replies · 77+ views

The House of David (not the vanished religious sect by that name) ^ | circa 2002 | David R Ross
The language of the southwestern littoral of Anatolia - which includes Arzawa - was Luwiyan, which, like Kneshian, was a member of the Anatolian branch of the Indo-European family. For diplomatic correspondence, however, Arzawa used Kneshian - even when writing to the Egyptian king! It appears that this diplomatic faux pas was a result of Arzawa's provincial character; Kneshian was the language required to deal with the other states of Asia Minor, and especially with Hattusas.

Ancient Egypt

Italy Returns Stolen Oblisk To Ethiopia

Posted by blam
On News/Activism 11/27/2004 3:30:15 PM PST · 48 replies · 481+ views

Discovery News ^ | 11-27-2004 | Rossella Lorenzi
Italy Returns Stolen Obelisk to Ethiopia By Rossella Lorenzi, Discovery News Nov. 23, 2004 ó A cyclopean task will put to an end a decades-long diplomatic dispute between Italy and Ethiopia over a looted obelisk, according to a bilateral agreement signed last week in Rome. Signed by Ethiopian Foreign Minister Seyoum Mesfin and Italian Foreign Ministry Undersecretary Alfredo Mantica, the deal set up the final details over the transport of a 160-ton granite stele from Rome to the city of Axum. ì This is a symbol of national identity to Ethiopians. î The monument is one of a group of...

Tomb May Shed Light On 10th Plague

Posted by blam
On News/Activism 11/23/2004 6:11:43 PM PST · 76 replies · 2,238+ views

Boston Globe ^ | 11-23-2004 | Charles M. Sennott
Tomb may shed light on 10th plague By Charles M. Sennott, Globe Staff | November 23, 2004 LUXOR, Egypt ó Out of the blinding light of a fall morning here in the Valley of the Kings, American archeologist Kent Weeks led the way down a narrow, stone passageway and into the entrance of a tomb. Weeks peered his flashlight into the enveloping darkness of ëëthe hidden tomb,íí as he calls it, and pressed on through the damp, winding passages toward what may be his archeological teamís most significant find after years of methodical digging, scraping, and brushing. At the end...

Ancient Rome

Lives of the Twelve Caesars: Claudius

Posted by A.J.Armitage
On News/Activism 09/05/2001 12:10:40 PM PDT · 72 replies · 291+ views

Ancient History Sourcebook ^ | Suetonius
Translated by J. C. Rolfe. [Arkenberg Introduction]. Rolfe's annotations appear in brackets with no attribution; mine are noted. I have also replaced modern place names, as used by Rolfe, with those in use by the Romans and Hellenes; thus, for example, Rolfe's "Italy" is now "Italia". I. THE father of Claudius Caesar, Drusus, who at first had the forename Decimus and later that of Nero, was born of Livia within three months after her marriage to Augustus [38 B.C.] (for she was with child at the time) and there was a suspicion that he was begotten by his stepfather ...

Quality of Life in the Desert? High Living in Rome's Distant Quarries

Posted by SunkenCiv
On General/Chat 11/26/2004 6:09:01 PM PST · 8 replies · 85+ views

Univ of Leicester ^ | September 9, 2002 | Dr Marijke van der Veen
The distance and remote location of the quarry complexes did not affect the food supply. The workers had access not to a meagre diet of a few staples, but instead had access to a wide range of foods... Ancient texts suggest that the Romans used slaves and conscripts in the mines, and it was assumed that this was also the case at these quarry sites. Furthermore, the remote and desert location of the quarry complexes and consequent long supply routes were expected to have had a detrimental effect on the quality of the diet at these sites. The excavations revealed...

Remains Of Food Shed Light On Ancient Ways

Posted by blam
On News/Activism 11/20/2004 3:16:00 PM PST · 19 replies · 589+ views

The Bath Chronicle ^ | 11-20-2004 | Ben Murch
REMAINS OF FOOD SHED LIGHT ON ANCIENT WAYS BY BEN MURCH 11:00 - 20 November 2004 Exotic spices unearthed beneath the Bath Spa show military administrators lived in the lap of luxury in the city's early days. Food and architectural remains found preserved beneath the remains of Roman buildings provide new evidence of the high living enjoyed by the military rulers of what was then Aquae Sulis in the first century AD. The remains were discovered in 1999, but have only just finished being analysed. The ancient grapes, figs, coriander and a peppercorn - along with highly decorative architectural fragments...

Ancient Seas and Thereunder

Archaeologist Roots Out Historical Hooey

Posted by forsnax5
On News/Activism 11/27/2004 10:16:34 AM PST · 4 replies · 365+ views

The Day, New London, CT ^ | 11/26/2004 | JOHN JURGENSEN
CCSU researcher says lost city of Atlantis a myth Dr. Kenneth Feder, a professor of anthropology at Central Connecticut State University, is an expert in archaeological hoaxes and has written a book about the myth of Atlantis. He rejected a recent Atlantis discovery claim and the countless others that have come before it with the same simple argument ó namely, that Atlantis' only location was in the imagination of Plato, the man who first described it. The lost land of Atlantis has been discovered. Again. In a press conference last week, a U.S. researcher named Robert Sarmast announced that his...

Asia

Has Genghis' Tomb Been Found?

Posted by blam
On News/Activism 11/26/2004 12:11:59 PM PST · 50 replies · 1,422+ views

China.Org ^ | 11-26-2004 | Shao Da
Has Genghis' Tomb Been Found? After four years' work, a joint team of Japanese and Mongolian archaeologists announced on October 4 that they had found what they believe to be the true mausoleum of Genghis Khan (1162-1227). The ruins, dated to between the 13th and 15th century, were found at Avraga, around 250 kilometers east of Ulan Bator, the capital of the People's Republic of Mongolia. Team members said that they expect the discovery to provide clues to the whereabouts of the khan's actual burial site, which they believe may be within 12 kilometers of the mausoleum. There is a...

British Isles

Bronze Age Site Discovered At Gas Company (UK)

Posted by blam
On News/Activism 11/24/2004 12:25:07 PM PST · 11 replies · 275+ views

Scotsman ^ | 11-24-2004 | Louise Hosie
Bronze Age Site Discovered at Gas Company Dig By Louise Hosie, Scottish Press Association Archaeologists have discovered what they believe is the most comprehensively-dated Bronze Age site in Britain, it emerged today. The 29 cremations pits and a number of artefacts were uncovered by chance during the installation of a gas pipeline in Aberdeenshire. The pits include 10 pottery urns containing ashes of children and adults and two golden eagle talons. The talons are of particular archaeological importance as they have never been excavated from this period before. Archaeologists were called to the site near Maud by gas maintenance company...

Catastrophism and Astronomy

Evidence Of Tunguska-Type Impacts Over The Pacific Basin Around The Year 1178 AD

Posted by blam
On News/Activism 01/26/2003 9:36:14 AM PST · 47 replies · 290+ views

SIS Conference ^ | Emilio Spedicato
Evidence Of Tunguska-type Impacts Over The Pacific Basin Around The Year 1178 A.D. Emilio Spedicato University of Bergamo, Piazza Rosate 2, 24129 Bergamo, Italy, email: emilio@ibguniv.unibg.it In year 1178 A.D., as related by Clube and Napier in their book The Cosmic Serpent, a strange event was observed to affect the Moon, which may be explained by a large impact on the hidden face, originating the Giordano Bruno crater. A number of observations suggest that catastrophic cometary or meteoritic impacts around the same time also affected the Pacific basin: Maori legends of great fires destroying forests and the moa bird, to...

It Came from Outer Space?

Posted by SunkenCiv
On General/Chat 11/25/2004 5:13:07 PM PST · 7 replies · 155+ views

American Scientist ^ | November-December 2004 | David Schneider
Speranza points out another difficulty with the impact-origins theory. Large blocks of limestone sit within the boundaries of the Sirente "crater." Such limestone would not have survived an impact. So if Ormˆ's theory is correct, one must surmise that somebody set these giant chunks of rock in place since the crater formed. To Speranza, that just didn't make sense. Speranza and colleagues further argue that Ormˆ's radiocarbon dating gave one age for the main feature (placing it in the 4th or 5th century a.d.) and a completely different age for a nearby "crater" called C9, a date in the 3rd...

What Caused Argentina's Craters?

Posted by blam
On General/Chat 05/09/2002 3:17:12 PM PDT · 19 replies · 130+ views

National Geographic ^ | 5-9-2002 | Ben Harder
What Caused Argentina's Mystery Craters? By Ben Harder for National Geographic News May 9, 2002 For more than a decade, planetary scientists have been puzzling over a mixed bag of meteorite evidence scarring Argentina's plains. They gradually pieced together clues to reconstruct what seemed to be a rough-hewn but generally accurate account of a prehistoric meteorite impact. A mere 10,000 years ago, scientists deduced in the original theory, a sizable meteorite came hurtling through the atmosphere at a bizarrely low angle, smacked the ground with a glancing blow, and broke into numerous pieces that gouged separate, miles-long scars in the...

Origins and Prehistory

Did Humans And Neanderthals Battle For Control Of The Middle East?

Posted by blam
On News/Activism 03/08/2002 3:33:16 PM PST · 68 replies · 427+ views

National Geographic ^ | 3-8-2002 | Ben Harder
Did Humans and Neandertals Battle for Control of the Middle East? By Ben Harder for National Geographic News March 8, 2002 Thousands of years before Christians, Muslims, and Jews became locked in dispute over the Middle East, humans wrested control of the region from its true original inhabitants, the Neandertals, in what one scientist compares to a prolonged game of football. The Neandertals, stocky and intelligent humanoids, lived in Europe and Western Asia for thousands of years before the first humans settled in the area. Then true humans moved into the region from Africa. Face-to-Face Fight The new arrivals settled ...

Ode to the Code

Posted by SunkenCiv
On General/Chat 11/26/2004 5:37:52 PM PST · 1 reply · 41+ views

American Scientist ^ | November-December 2004 | Brian Hayes
What's so special about the one code that -- with a few minor variations -- rules all life on Planet Earth? The canonical nonanswer to this question came from Francis Crick, who argued that the code need not be special at all; it could be nothing more than a "frozen accident." The assignment of codons to amino acids might have been subject to reshuffling and refinement in the earliest era of evolution, but further change became impossible because the code was embedded so deeply in the core machinery of life... There has always been resistance to the frozen-accident theory. Who...

Ural Farmers Got Milk Gene First?

Posted by Lessismore
On News/Activism 11/20/2004 6:42:15 AM PST · 57 replies · 803+ views

Science Magazine ^ | 2004-11-19 | Jocelyn Kaiser
TORONTO, CANADA--More than 5000 experts met here from 26 to 30 October for the annual meeting of the American Society of Human Genetics. Longevity, milk digestion, and cancer were among the topics. By some estimates, less than half of all adults can easily digest milk, a trait believed to have first appeared in people who kept dairy animals. Now scientists have traced the genetic roots of milk tolerance to the Ural mountains of western Russia, well north of where pastoralism is thought to have begun. The surprising result may support a theory that nomads from the Urals were one of...

PreColumbian, Clovis, PreClovis

Ancient bison done in by climate, not hunters. Conclusion of study already drawing fire. (update)

Posted by FairOpinion
On News/Activism 11/26/2004 9:42:16 PM PST · 18 replies · 331+ views

San Francsico Chronicle ^ | Nov. 26, 2004 | David Perlman
Thousands of years before white and Indian hunters drove the buffalo of America's Great Plains to virtual extinction, the ancestors of those lordly animals suffered a similar fate -- but it was major climate change, not hunting, that did them in, says an international research team. Now researchers from five nations say the decline of the ancestral bison -- which lived in a region that now comprises northeastern Siberia, Alaska and Canada's Northwest Territories, a region scientists call Beringia -- began more than 23,000 years before the first wave of humans is believed to have migrated from Siberia to Alaska.

The Politics of Dead 'Native Americans'

Posted by farmfriend
On News/Activism 11/22/2004 11:48:40 PM PST · 6 replies · 291+ views

Tech Central Station ^ | 11/23/2004 | Jackson Kuhl
The Politics of Dead 'Native Americans' By Jackson Kuhl On September 23, Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell (R-Colorado), head of the Committee on Indian Affairs, introduced bill S.2843, a laundry list of editorial fixes to various laws affecting Native American tribes around the country. Tacked on at the very end of S.2843, however, is a one-sentence "Amendment of Definition" to the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act NAGPRA), the same law that was the fulcrum in the Kennewick Man case. Campbell's amendment seeks to add the words "or was" to the definition of "Native American" (Section 2(9)) so that it...

Easter Island, Fools' Paradise

Posted by blam
On News/Activism 11/21/2004 12:48:29 PM PST · 84 replies · 1,864+ views

TLS ^ | 11-18-2004 | Roland Wright
Easter island, fools' paradise Ronald Wright 18 November 2004 The greatest wonder of the ancient world is how recent it all is. No city or monument is much more than 5,000 years old. Only about seventy lifetimes, of seventy years, have been lived end to end since civilization began. Its entire run occupies a mere 0.002 per cent of the nearly 3 million years since our first ancestor sharpened a stone. The progress of ìman the hunterî during the Old Stone Age, or Palaeolithic ñ his perfection of weapons and techniques ñ led directly to the end of hunting as...

False Bay Cave Shows Signs Of Prehistoric Man

Posted by blam
On News/Activism 11/22/2004 12:08:43 PM PST · 22 replies · 586+ views

Cape Argus ^ | 11-22-2004 | Daniel Ashby
False Bay cave shows signs of prehistoric man November 22, 2004 By Daniel Ashby A team of international scuba divers have located an underwater cave which reveals "promising signs" of prehistoric human activity. Maritime archaeologist Dr Bruno Werz described the site in False Bay as "worthy of international exploration and excavation". He said: "The cave has the correct overhang and orientation for prehistoric cave dwellers. It would have been raised above the landscape allowing the inhabitants to spot game and command a strategic view. "There is evidence around the cave of the type of vegetation that prehistoric man would have...

The First Americans May Have Come By Water

Posted by blam
On News/Activism 12/10/2001 7:30:51 PM PST · 66 replies · 498+ views

Discovering Archaeology Magazine ^ | E. James Dixon
The First Americans May Have Come by Water by E. James Dixon If the foragers who created Clovis culture walked into North America, they had to pass through the long-described ìice-free corridor.î But a growing body of evidence indicates that pathway between the great glaciers of the last Ice Age was closed ó in fact, the way south may have been blocked until centuries after the dawn of Clovis. If the first Americans could not walk into the New World, how did they get there? Coastal or ocean routes navigated by watercraft are the most likely explanation. No reliably dated ...

The Hidden History Of Men (Anthropology)

Posted by blam
On News/Activism 11/21/2004 3:13:58 PM PST · 33 replies · 703+ views

Discover Magazine ^ | 12-2004 | Robert Kunzig
The Hidden History of MenA research team braves Central Asia to capture a surprising genetic record of human migration and military conquest By Robert Kunzig DISCOVER Vol. 25 No. 12 | December 2004 | Anthropology One day last fall, in the home freezer of Spencer Wells, there were these things: a large leg of lamb, a few quarts of milk, and underneath, DNA samples from 2,500 people in Central Asia. Wells is an anthropological geneticist and an energetic collector of DNA, especially Y chromosomes. He lived then in an old stone house outside Geneva, but he was raised in Lubbock,...

The Hidden History of Men

Posted by SunkenCiv
On General/Chat 11/21/2004 12:00:12 PM PST · 5 replies · 101+ views

Discover ^ | December 2004 | Robert Kunzig
Before long, the record of that ancient migration will begin to vanish. Our ancestors took tens of thousands of years to spread around the planet; people today move from Lubbock to Geneva or from Tamil Nadu to Texas in hours. In the process they wipe out genetic clues to the past. Think of our genes as the vestiges of an ancient library in which geneticists are trying to piece together and decipher the books; now think of that ruin being paved over for a new airport... When Wells arrived at Stanford in 1994, Cavalli-Sforza's lab was just plunging into studies...

New World Newcomers: Men's DNA supports recent settlement of the Americas

Posted by SunkenCiv
On General/Chat 11/25/2004 7:39:06 PM PST · 2 replies · 75+ views

Science News ^ | Week of Aug. 9, 2003; Vol. 163, No. 6 , p. 84 | Ben Harder
Scientists generally agree that the first people to reach the New World crossed from Siberia into North America, but just how and when this immigration unfolded remains controversial. Archaeological data indicate the presence of people in the Americas by about 14,000 years ago... and some studies of DNA from cellular structures called mitochondria have suggested that an immigration occurred perhaps 30,000 years ago. To address this disagreement, anthropologists have turned to variations in DNA on the Y chromosome, which passes from father to son. One such polymorphism, called M3, turns up among most Native American men but is absent in...

Viking Map May Rewrite US History

Posted by blam
On News/Activism 11/26/2004 12:01:26 PM PST · 115 replies · 2,886+ views

ABC/AFP ^ | 11-26-2004 | AFP
Viking map may rewrite US history AgenÁe France-Presse Friday, 26 November 2004 Experts are testing the map to see if it is really evidence for Vikings landing in the New World first, not Columbus (Image: Climate Monitoring & Diagnostics Lab) Danish experts will travel to the U.S. to study evidence that the Vikings landed in the New World five centuries before Columbus. A controversial parchment said to be the oldest map of America could, if authentic, support the theory that the Vikings arrived first. The map is said to date from 1434 and was found in 1957. Some people believe...

Thoroughly Modern Miscellany

Hendrick Hamel

Posted by Ptarmigan
On General/Chat 09/13/2004 8:37:16 PM PDT · 5 replies · 102+ views

Hendrick Hamel is a Dutch sailor that ended up in Korea in 1653. Hamel and sixty-four crew members left on the Sperwer from Batavia. The Sperwer encounters a storm and the ship is gone. 28 of the 64 died. They wash ashore on Cheju Island. From their, it starts Hamel's adventure in Korea. He was like the Marco Polo of Korea. It could be possible that I could have non-Korean ancestry in me, perhaps a Dutch ancestry in me. The Journal of HamelKorea Through Western Cartographic Eyes

Stone Defends Alexander

Posted by Racehorse
On News/Activism 11/18/2004 11:03:39 AM PST · 65 replies · 1,405+ views

Megastar.com ^ | 18 November 2004 | Sid Billington
"Alexander lived in a more honest time," Stone told Playboy magazine. As you do. "We go into his bisexuality. It may offend some people, but sexuality in those days was a different thing. Pre-Christian morality. Young boys were with boys when they wanted to be."But Stone said he had no interest in showing gay sex scenes. "You only need five words. Alexander says, 'Stay with me tonight, Hephaistion,' and you get it. If you don't get it, f*** you, it's your problem."

end of digest #19 20041127