Free Republic

In civilized nations the lives of ambassadors and diplomats are held sacred. When Xerxes sent ambassadors throughout Greece in 491 BC asking for the ritual tokens of submission, earth and water, many Greek cities agreed to submit. Not so in Athens and Sparta. In Sparta the ambassadors were thrown down a well ("Madness? This is Sparta!" as the movie 300 would have it). The deeply religious Spartans were appalled at what was done in the heat of the moment and sent two Spartan citizen soldiers (Sperthia and Boulis) to Persia to offer up their lives to atone for the sin...

600-year-old bra and underwear discovered in an Austrian castle Contemporary bras are more comfortable, modified versions of corsets — or so it was believed, until a 2007 discovery changed the way we see women's underwear. Working with a team of her colleagues, archaeologist Beatrix Nutz recently publicized her discovery of several linen bras and some underwear in a medieval castle. Nutz has presented academic papers about her discovery, and even analyzed the underwear for DNA (see picture). But the public didn't hear about the medieval bras until a BBC history program showed pictures of them. Nutz and colleagues also found...

Ancient 'Cow Woman' Skeleton Called Bizarre The skeleton of a 1,400-year-old Anglo-Saxon woman buried alongside a cow has emerged from a former children's playground near Cambridge in England, making the "cow woman" an extraordinary unique find. Described as "hugely exciting" and "bizarre," the burial was uncovered by students from Manchester Metropolitan University and the University of Central Lancashire. The find is believed to be the only one of its kind ever found in Europe. "Usually it is warrior men who are discovered buried with their animals. Never before have we found a woman buried alongside a cow," Faye Simpson, of...

Rome Icon Actually Younger Than the City The icon of Rome's foundation, a life-size bronze statue of a she-wolf with two human infants suckling her, is about 1,700 years younger than its city, Rome's officials admitted on Saturday. The official announcement, made at the Capitoline Museums, where the 30 inch-high bronze is the centerpiece of a dedicated room, quashes the belief that the sculpture was adopted by the earliest Romans as a symbol for their city. "The new dating ranges between 1021 e il 1153," said Lucio Calcagnile, who carried radiocarbon tests at the University of Salento's Center for Dating...

Nearly two pounds of still-green plant material found in a 2,700-year-old grave in the Gobi Desert has just been identified as the world's oldest marijuana stash, according to a paper in the latest issue of the Journal of Experimental Botany.

"President Obama’s smooth path to the Democratic nomination may have gotten rockier Monday, after a group of liberal leaders, including former presidential candidate Ralph Nader, announced plans to challenge the incumbent in primaries next year. The group said the goal is to offer up a handful of candidates from various fields and areas where the president either has failed to stake out a “progressive” position or where he has “drifted toward the corporatist right.”

SAO PAULO – A Polish priest accused of sexually abusing a former altar boy in Rio de Janeiro and turning his parish home into an "erotic dungeon" has surrendered and is now in police custody, a public safety official said Saturday.

Recent excavations have found more evidences on both Bronze Age and Iron Age in Thazi township, central Mandalay division, Myanmar, proving that the country passed through both Bronze Age and Iron Age in the ancient time. The Archaeology, Natural Museum and Libraries Department under the Ministry of Culture, in cooperation with the CNRC of France, excavated the areas around Ywagongyi village in the township for 20 days from Jan. 10 to 30, finding out the site where 44 bodies were buried along with two small bundles of bronze sheets, two iron objects, 14 stone beads of different colors, a fine...

I stumbled upon this today on YouTube. A dead whale is too big to bury. It is rotting and stinking. I know, let's try dynamite! WHALE AND DYNAMITE

The unique library of the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum, buried beneath lava by Vesuvius's eruption in AD79, is slowly revealing its long-held secretsSTORED in a sky-lit reading room on the top floor of the Biblioteca Nazionale in Naples are the charred remains of the only library to survive from classical antiquity. The ancient world's other great book collections -- at Athens, Alexandria and Rome -- all perished in the chaos of the centuries. But the library of the Villa of the Papyri was conserved, paradoxically, by an act of destruction. Lying to the northwest of ancient Herculaneum, this...

It’s a safe bet that most of you reading these words have been to a professional football game. Many of you—particularly those who live in Philadelphia—have probably witnessed the occasional brawls between the home crowd and those foolish enough to wear an opposing team’s colors. A few of you, I dare say, have been involved in such altercations. But how often have you witnessed football fans actually kill opposition partisans? Well, perhaps I should qualify that by saying American football fans. When was the last time you heard of agitated sports nuts rioting in the streets and burning down half...

Major Archaeological Find in Puerto Rico Published: 10/28/07, 4:25 PM EDT By LAURA N. PEREZ SANCHEZSAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) - U.S. and Puerto Rican archaeologists say they have found the best-preserved pre-Columbian site in the Caribbean, which could shed light on virtually every aspect of Indian life in the region, from sacred rituals to eating habits. The archaeologists believe the site in southern Puerto Rico may have belonged to the Taino or pre-Taino people that inhabited the island before European colonization, although other tribes are a possibility. It contains stones etched with ancient petroglyphs that form a large plaza...

Public release date: 2-Aug-2007 Contact: Natasha Pinol npinol@aaas.org 202-326-7088 American Association for the Advancement of Science Beyond Mesopotamia: A radical new view of human civilization reported in ScienceMany urban centers crossed arc of Middle Asia 5,000 years ago A radically expanded view of the origin of civilization, extending far beyond Mesopotamia, is reported by journalist Andrew Lawler in the 3 August issue of Science. Mesopotamia is widely believed to be the cradle of civilization, but a growing body of evidence suggests that in addition to Mesopotamia, many civilized urban areas existed at the same time – about 5,000 years ago...

Mystery of Tut's Father: New Clues on Unidentified Mummy Brian Handwerk for National Geographic News July 10, 2007 Egyptologists have uncovered new evidence that bolsters the controversial theory that a mysterious mummy is the corpse of the heretic pharaoh Akhenaten, husband of Nefertiti and, some experts believe, the father of King Tut. (Photos: Who Was Tut's Father?) The mummy's identity has generated fierce debate ever since its discovery in 1907 in tomb KV 55, located less than 100 feet (30 meters) from King Tutankhamun's then hidden burial chamber. So an international team of researchers led by Zahi Hawass, head of...

The Kush kingdom was conquered by the Egyptians A team of archaeologists has discovered a huge ancient gold processing centre and a graveyard along the River Nile in northern Sudan.They were part of the 4,000-year-old Kush, or Nubian, kingdom. The scholars say the finds show the empire was much bigger than previously thought and rivalled ancient Egypt. The archaeologists are racing to dig up the Hosh el-Geruf area, some 225 miles from the capital, Khartoum, before the Merowe dam floods the area next year. The dam is due to create a lake 100 miles long and two miles wide,...

I just watched a trailer of the new movie coming out - 300. It looks fairly decent. Anyone have anything to say about the movie? There are scenes where the talk about freedom and being free. I do not know the history of back then, but watching the trailer, I seemed to get a connection with what is going on in the world right now concerning the WOT and the storyline of the movie. They go against Persia - modern day Iran. 300 against one million - the United States against the world. Am I reading too much into this?...

These Pictures tell it all! Muslims have stated that England will be the first country they take over! These are pictures not shown on American TV or in American Newspapers (as they might help Bush's war on terror), but were forwarded to me by a Canadian Friend who thought Americans ought to know! These pictures are of Muslims marching through the streets of London during their recent "Religion of Peace Demonstration." & Why would anyone think that we should be at war with such nice, peaceful Moslems?! Americans need to Know - You need to forward this one to everyone...

If the current trend continues, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is going to end up being involved in the journalistic equivalent of the Bay of Pigs. His article in the latest issue of Rolling Stone Republicans stole the 2004 election in Ohio is coming under a massive assault - and from the unlikeliest of places. Monday in Salon, Farhad Manjoo reduced RFK, Jr.'s seemingly authoritative argument to rubble. Democratic pollster Mark Blumenthal followed suit later the same day by taking down Kennedy's claim that exit polling is an "exact science" and highlighting how he either misinterpreted or willfully distorted numerous aspects...

MACHU PICCHU, PERU – The Incas built this mysterious city here, it is told, to be closer to the gods. It was placed so high in the clouds, at 7,700 feet, that the empire- raiding Spaniards never found, or destroyed, it. Today, visitors to Machu Picchu see well-preserved ruins hidden among the majestic Andes: complete with palaces, baths, temples, tombs, sundials, and agricultural terraces, and also llamas roaming among hundreds of gray granite houses. But they won't find too many bowls, tools, ritual objects, or other artifacts used by the Incas of the late 1400s. To see those, they have...