Posted on 02/14/2005 7:42:21 AM PST by Mike Fieschko
I've been to Herculaneum and Pompeii. I would say these are perhaps the most fascinating places I have ever visited. They have been excavating these two cities for 100 years, and it continues. I plan to take my wife there. I want to see it again myself.
I have read several scholars who believe the book of Acts was written somewhere between 75-100 AD. In addition I would love it if they found additional commentaries by Julius Ceasar - especially commentaries on his campaigns in Africa and Spain. Ceasar's commentaires on his Civil War campaign suddenly stop shortly before the civl war was over, around the time of the death of Pompey. Many have speculated that this is because Ceasar no long needed to justify his acts in the civil war after he became King of Rome so he stopped writing. I would love to discover that he continued his writing but it was just lost all these centuries.
While it's conceivable that at some point, a Roman galley may have been blown across the Atlantic (although, given prevailing winds, it seems highly unlikely), that's a far cry from knowledge of the Western Hemisphere. Ptolemy was the greatest geographer of the classical world, and he had no knowledge of the Western Hemisphere. The Greek, Krates of Mallos, who lived several hundred years beforehand, predicted that North and South America would exist, but not because of any knowledge of them, but because he thought that the world would look funny if there weren't continents in the Western Hemisphere to make the world symmetrical.
However, there are too many instances of pre-Columbian European and Middle Eastern artifacts in the Americas to attribute to alleged fraud on the part of Spanish conquistadors, English Pilgrims, or Swedish immigrants. Like the moon voyage in the 1960s, some exploration may have been accomplished by Europeans and others, but was not pursued because of its unprofitability.
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Just updating the GGG info, not sending a general distribution. |
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The scrolls were in crates and it appears that slaves were removing them from the libraries when they were inundated with ash from the eruption.They were buried by pyroclastic flow, not ash, afaik.
well, at 1000 degrees C, that probably rules out much in the way of residual info on them.
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