Posted on 11/26/2002 7:57:18 AM PST by blam
Archaeologists announce discovery of underwater man-made wall
2002/11/26
The China Post staff
Underwater archaeologists yesterday announced the discovery of a man-made wall submerged under the waters of the Pescadores Islands that could be at least six and seven thousand years old.
Steve Shieh, the head of the planning committee for the Taiwan Underwater Archaeology Institute, said the wall was discovered to the northwest of Tong-chi Island in the Pescadores towards the end of September.
The stone wall, with an average height of one meter and a width of 50 centimeters, covers a distance of over 100 meters, Hsieh said.
The wall ran along the ocean floor at depths of between 25 and 30 meters, he added.
Shieh said that divers found several places along the wall where holes were apparently filled up with pebbles, possibly in an attempt to block winds.(Maybe to keep out the rising water?)
The wall was located by a team of divers working in cooperation with the National Museum of History and the Department of Environmental Sciences at the National Sun Yat-sen University.
In August, researchers scanning waters in the area with sonar discovered what appeared to be the remnants of four to five man-made walls running along the bottom of the sea.
Please see WALL on page(I could not find a map, if you can, please post it.)
Despite difficult diving conditions, Shieh said that a team of more than ten specialists was able to ascertain the positions of at least three of the wall sections.
The proximity of the wall to a similar structure found in 1976 suggests that it may be further evidence of a pre-historical civilization.
A three meter high underwater wall was discovered by amateur divers in waters off the nearby Hu-ching (Tiger Well) Island.
British archaeologists examined the find and proclaimed that the wall was probably made between 7,000 and 12,000 years ago.
The current find stands a mere 100 meters from the site of that discovery.
Six years ago, evidence of a sunken city in the area was found when amateur divers found the remains of what appear to be city walls taking the shape of a cross on the ocean floor.
Further examination suggested the ruins were made between seven and ten thousand years ago as well, although Japanese researchers put the walls construction at between 10,000 and 80,000 years ago.
Taken together, the discoveries have helped to overturn the established notion that Taiwan's earliest aboriginal inhabitants made their way here from mainland China some 6,000 years ago.(There goes the giant hynea theory, huh?)
The underwater finds are part of a growing body of evidence suggesting the existence of civilizations older than anything previously imagined.(suprise, suprise, suprise--Gomer Pyle voice)
On this theory, entire cities ended up underwater after sea levels rose towards the end of the last Ice Age, a date cited by Plato as being some 9,600 years ago.
One of the most dramatic examples of evidence of civilizations found on ocean beds has been megalithic structures off the coast of Yonaguni-jima in Japan that have been interpreted in some circles as being built for sacrificial rites. According to Shieh, a similar structure has been located off of the shores of Taiwan's Pingtung County .
Shieh said that he and his association have plans to explore that location as well as what appears to be a man-made path on the ocean floor off of Taitung County sometime next year.
If you don't want to believe recorded history then don't. Pliny had no reason to lie.
They were taken into captivity before the hike across Europe. Ask the Romans what these people were like. Does the sacking of Rome ring a bell?
On top of all that, the Assyrians were basically ruthless and when they enslaved some group of people, tended to spread them around so that they lost their identity and did not retain the cohesion to foment rebellions.
Thanks for making my point.
That would have the missing Israelites speaking lots of new languages and not just one, if that were the case.
The Assyrians had a big problem with the Babylonians.
Like so many "Catholic positions" this one is a farce and a fraud. It uses 3 paragraphs for a simple presentation of elementery ancient history concluding with the Lost Tribes being assimilated, of course. Then it goes on for another 20 paragraphs bashing British Israelism in general and a Herbert W. Armstrong in general. A classic case of bait and switch! No one on this thread brought up British Israelism until this post, but that was the Catholic churchs sneaky agenda all along.
I think the Catholic church, the Protestant church, and the Jewish churches all have a lot to lose if the real Lost Tribes are discovered to be Biblically alive and identifyable as it describes them. As joint champions of the status-quo including the flat earth and centre of the universe, they are certainly not to trusted with this sort of history. This post and link demonstrate again that they are not the solution, but a goodly part of the problem.
More good points? LOL You've been saying all along that Hebrew would've been preserved and then nanrod said Hebrew would not have been preserved in captivity and you say "good point"? You can't remember what you're saying.
The whole idea was to assimilate the conquered, not send them off on a funny new career.
So you think it was some kind of desegregated busing? LOL Put an Israelite house between two Assyrian houses? You're funny.
Tell me who these "celts" are. You guys are calling everyone celts. I'm interested in the Assyrians and Israelites.
I think you are correct about a lot of places being named after Dan. He did leave quite a trail of place names, but I don't know about Brandenburg. There are too many other solid names like the several rivers leaving the Black Sea starting with or sounding like Dan to try and make that stretch.
Earthquake and the earth was divided. Looks like something big happened and it wasn't the flood. hmmmm.
Brutality was a way of the times. Look at the Roman brutality in the arenas feeding Christians alive to the animals. And Roman historians have the audacity to accuse the Celtic invaders of being "barbarians"? I suspect most of the references calling one nation or another "brutal" is all in the eye of the author.
The longer names may have been phrases. Like maybe "river Dan crossed" may have become Riodaneber to use as a funny example using a couple of different languages and throwing the DN in there. There's too many to be a coincidence after Eastern Europe. I believe that's what happened. Plus at first notice there wasn't a vowel in the names such as Dneiper, etc., but as the languages modernized, more vowels were used to where the names sound modern as they went west. Makes sense to me, if anyone doesn't want to believe, then they won't.
No, I don't think so. The whole idea was to place the Northern Israelite Kingdom INTACT on the Assyrian borders between the Medes and the Persians. This was so they would act as a buffer state between them and allow the Assyrians to deploy their troops in "productive warfare" rather than domestic peackeeping.
Later on, when Assyria moved too many troops to the west in order to conquer Egypt, the Israelites joined with the Medes and Persians and attacked Assyria, and their whole empire fell apart.
God told the Judeaens to go into captivity with the Babylonians and they would be OK, he didn't promise the same with the Northern Tribes. I believe there was a difference in the level of brutality.
Actually, if you look in ANY decent book on The Celts you will find those same germanic tribes and many more smaller tribes identified as Celts. That's really pretty basic Celtic History.
The people the Hebrews got the "new" language from. In your version of events they have "new" language which isn't Assyrian. (And neither is German Assyrian, by the way.)
Taken out of their old homeland, a people will either of necessity adopt a new language from a dominant, pre-existing culture or else their language will stay recognizeably in the same linguistic family. They won't make up a new language in an existing-but-different linguistic family. What is the origin of the Celtic language family?
That's true. You have a good point there.
Do you believe everything you read?
No, do you?
Do you ever think for yourself?
Aye.
Absolutely not. Celtic = Irish, Scots, Welsh, Cornish, Breton, etc.
Germanic = German, Danish, Gothic, Vandal, Frankish, Anglo-Saxon, etc.
Two distinct subfamilies of Indoeuropean and two distinct historical cultures are represented here.
And they have been addressed. The Israelites were taken captive. Captivity is not a good environment to preserve your language. Therefore the argument is senseless.Fine. Skip the Celts and go straight to the diffusion of the Ten Lost Tribes, as well as the Assyrians though Europe after the 8th Century B.C.
Explain.No, you apparently don't understand what happens when two large populations of people interact, assimilate together, or one to another. Even if one language dominates, relic words are preserved. This is one of the ways in which languages develop.
If one language doesn't have a word that suddenly becomes useful, say for a new food, like sushi, or a new concept, like the number zero, then the existing word will be used even if it comes from non-related language.
You want examples of Hebrew words used today, I found one one in Gen 1:1, the first verse I looked at. If you really think the crux of the argument lies on language, then look yourself.The words "pundit" and "pajamas" came into the English language via the British occupation of India. They are now ubiquitous, and I'll bet your English-only Indian friends use them.
It'll never be sewn up. It's something that has to be arrived at logically and since you're placing so much importance on finding Hebrew in modern English, then you're not thinking logically.I didn't say that I thought that language was the crux of the argument, it is simply a matter that has to be addressed.
Large populations of people leave evidence of their existence and identity in their wake. They can do this through buildings, weapons, crafts, writings, etc. Another way they leave evidence is through language, particularly if the claim is made that living descendents of these peoples have been identified. This is very, very common.
The absence of any single one of these generally expected types of evidence doesn't necessarily disprove that a people existed, but such absences need to be addressed and reasonably explained.
You're a Christian and you can't follow the simple teachings of Genesis? It says who is who, all twelve tribes. They would be as the sands of the sea and great nations in the last days.Quite the contrary. It's logical to expect relic words of such a large, Semitic-speaking population as the Lost Tribes to persist in the populations in which they assimilated, or that the language of their modern descendents would bear a close linguistic relationship.
This line of inquiry is nothing but logical.
I don't know what a celt is. I know who the Israelites are though.Where in Genesis, or any other part of the Bible, does it say that the Lost Tribes are specifically identified as the Celts, or any other particular people?
I've said several times, including in the passage which you excerpted, that I believe in the contemporary existence of the Lost Tribes. I'm more than willing to consider your hypothesis, if only you'd deal with the logical ramifications of it.
You're ignoring all other evidence and are saying that since we don't speak Hebrew that we aren't Israelites.Based on what, exactly?
What is the source of your belief that Britain and America are the Lost Tribes?
Do you really think a language can survive captivity and a 2000 year journey through foreign lands? The English of 1500 hasn't even survived in it's form of 1500. And the people haven't had anything of the sort happen to them such as the Israelites of the captivities and migrations.Not at all. I've said I'm reserving judgement until I see proponents address the matter directly.
Languages don't survive. Relic words do.
Look at any decent dictionary, and you'll see what I mean. All of those parenthetical notations about Middle English, Old French, Latin, Greek, etc. mark the linguistic paths back to those relic words and the languages from whence they came. It's through the comparative analysis of relic words that we have the understanding we do of the various linguistic families. There is a fair body of scholarship in this regard. Perhaps it's all wrong, but it will take quite a comprehensive dissertation to demonstrate that.
Here's the language problem in a nutshell: either the Semitic-speaking Lost Tribes evolved a number of languages which have been mistakenly attributed to the Indo-European group, or they learned some number of Indo-European languages from others.
If it's the former, significant portions of linguistic understanding are wrong. Compelling evidence is required to demonstrate this.
The latter possibility is far less problematic, particularly if Semitic relic words can be found in the languages of those peoples you claim are the Ten Tribes. That bar isn't so high, and finding such words only bolsters your argument.
Failing that, even the possibility that the Semitic relic words do not exist in the modern languages isn't necessarily fatal. But it would be highly unusual, and would need to be addressed, just as the absence of living quarters, pottery or spearpoints would need to be addressed if they were missing.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.