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Kensington, Minn. (WCCO) Researchers have found new evidence of a secret code concealed on the Kensington Runestone, one of the most controversial pieces of Minnesota history. The rock was found near Alexandria, Minn. a century ago. It bears an inscription that places Norwegians here in 1362. Were Vikings exploring our land more than 100 years before Columbus? Or is the Kensington Runestone an elaborate hoax? New research suggests the rune stone is genuine, and a hidden code can prove it. "Eight Goths and 22 Norwegians on an exploration journey ... 10 men red with blood and dead ... 14 days...

The social status of a language is the most accurate way of predicting whether it will survive, argue researchers in a paper appearing today in the journal, Nature... "Thousands of the world's languages are vanishing at an alarming rate, with 90% of them being expected to disappear with the current generation," warned Dr Daniel Abrams and Professor Steven Strogatz, both of Cornell University in New York... The model is based on data they collected on the number of speakers of endangered languages - in 42 regions of Peru, Scotland, Wales, Bolivia, Ireland and Alsaçe-Lorraine - over time. All have been...

After the revival of the Welsh language, can Faliscan be far behind? Europe's interest in its 50 or so "minority languages" is growing, in inverse proportion to its birthrate. One or two of the 6,700 languages spoken on the planet go extinct every fortnight, but not all of them will go down without a fight. Peeking through the perforations in the veneer of European civilization are cultures that pre-date Rome. With apologies to comedian Robin Williams, a more fitting name for "Western civilization" might be the "Dead Peoples Society". The 17th-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes wrongly qualified the pope as "the...

Recent News! They discover proof that Atlantis did not submerge complete but only one part...By Salvador Morales. Atlantis News Agency. Madrid, Spain. 01-06-2005. The Spanish investigator and scriptologist, Georgeos Diaz-Montexano, has discovered paleographical proofs that in fact the island or peninsula (Nêsos) denominated like Atlantis or Atlantic, it was divided in two parts below the sea. To date all atlantologists and students of the Timaeus and the Critias de Plato had thought that in texts of the Greek philosophist narrated the collapse of the all island or Atlantis peninsula, nevertheless, Georgeos Diaz-Montexano has reviewed the oldest texts known writings in...

Anglo Saxon brooch has oldest writing in English By Paul Stokes (Filed: 07/06/2003) What is believed to be the oldest form of writing in English ever found has been uncovered in an Anglo-Saxon burial ground. It is in the form of four runes representing the letters N, E, I and M scratched on the back of a bronze brooch from around AD650. The six inch cruciform brooch is among one million artefacts recovered from a site at West Heslerton, near Malton, North Yorks, since work began there in 1978. Dominic Powlesland, the archaeologist leading the excavation team, said: "This could...

Yet even the catalog is wary of answering the question central to the "mystery" of the Etruscans: where did they come from? Did they migrate from Greece or beyond? Did they travel down from the Alps? Or, as their pre- Indo-European language might suggest, were they a people indigenous to today's Tuscany who suddenly acquired the tools for rapid development? Such are the pros and cons of each theory, the French historian Dominique Briquel notes in his catalog essay, that "the problem must be held to be unresolved." ...[T]hey spoke the same language, which also existed in a written...

Hey this is just a little break from the Election madness we will all be a part of tomorrow. Post any Latin quotes you like whether they be serious or funny. If you don't know any just do a google search on Latin Quotes there are some really great ones.

On 8/9 November 1997 the Swiss newspaper Neue Zurcher Zeitung reported that German and Turks archaeologists, who conducted excavations at the ancient site of Kaunos on Asia Minor coast just across the Greek island of Rhodes, unearthed an inscription in two scripts. The top part is inscribed in the Carian language and the same text is repeated in the lower part in classical Greek. The inscription is a resolution of the city of Kaunos to honor two Athenians, one of whom is Nikokles of Lycekleous a fairly know person and contemporary of Demosthenes. Thus, the stone was safely dated to...

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.

In this paper, the author proposes some specific attributions for signs deriving from the Carian or another West-Anatolian script found on in situ blocks from standing walls: quarry, block positioning, or team marks. The proposals are based on data from three distant yet related sites where such marks have been preserved, among which the Khnum temple terrace on Elephantine. In time, however, the quarry marks at Elephantine do not correspond with the other two sites. Therefore, the author proposes that the terrace was built several hundred years earlier than the Graeco-Roman Period to which the terrace is usually dated, or...

The first character is the sampi, as it was used (briefly) in the Ionic alphabet as a sibilant. The first question to answer is whether it should be separated from the numerical sampi at all... The second question is what the phonetic value of sampi was... Jeffery (1990:39)... also suspects that sampi was originally borrowed from Carian, and used to express the Carian sibilant in loanwords... In the pre-Hellenic language of Lemnos (possibly related to Etruscan), it is used, but Jeffery has no idea what it sounded like. In the older inscriptions of the non-Hellenic language of Phrygia (related...

Archaeologists, anthropologists and ethnographers work hand in hand with historians. Their job is to present information that protects and preserves political history. As a unified group these folks soundly condemn the work of Dr. Fell. They do so without basis in fact and a vengence undeserved. (See Dr. Norman Totten's response here.) His revelation that the Celtic, Arabic and other People visited, emigrated and traded with Native Americans is simple truth. History hides these facts from the general population. They would rather keep the idea that the Native Americans were illiterate savages, incapable of civilized behavior. Nothing could be farther...

Data links early settlers to African diaspora DIFFERENT STORIES: While genetic research puts this land on a main route of early humans' dispersion, anthropologists tie early settlements to the Pearl River Delta By Wang Hsiao-wen STAFF REPORTER Sunday, Aug 29, 2004,Page 2 Long before Portuguese sailors put "Formosa" on the world map, and long before Chinese people crossed the dark current to set up home here, this land was inhabited by Austronesian Aborigines for thousands of years. Multigenetic analysis reveals that Austronesian tribes arrived as early as 14,000 years ago. According to Marie Lin (ªL¶ý²ú), who conducted the research as...

KO-RE-TE, PO-RO-KO-RE-TE [koreter, prokoreter] -- Such officials are known at both Knossos and Pylos. The titles bear a suspiciously close resemblance to the Latin terms curator and procurator ("guardian" and "manager, imperial officer/governor" respectively). The Linear B evidence suggests that the koreter was a local official in charge of one of the sixteen major administrative units within the Pylian kingdom, and the prokoreter was evidently his deputy.

...my friends like Asko Parpola, Professor Mahadevan, and the Russians Professors who have worked on this subject. They have all been working on the assumption that the language of the Indus people was Dravidian, that the people who build the Indus Civilization are Dravidian. But unfortunately I, as well as my friend Prof. B.B. Lal in India, have not been able to agree with this... On the other hand, I have been talking to Prof. Parpola that certainly this is an agglutinative language, there is no doubt. That has been accepted by all of us. Dravidian is an agglutinative language....

Ancient clay stamp seals and sealings of Sri Lanka by Rajah M. Wickremesinghe The world's oldest clay stamp seal had been unearthed in 1990 in the ancient Mesopotamian city of Ur. This city was situated in Southern Iraq along the river Euphrates, below present day Baghdad. The seal is attributed to a king of the 1st dynasty of Babylon circa 2550 BC. Sarah Kielt has in her work expressed the opinion that the various types of seals discovered by archaeologists can be dated from as far back as 6000 BC particularly in the ancient civilisations of the Near East. Roger...

Translators unravel old scroll's secrets 2003-01-07 By Diane Clay The Oklahoman On a dry day 2,000 years ago, a worker charged with mummifying a body among the tombs of Egypt preserved what would become one of the largest ancient literary finds in history. Experts, including Cincinnati professor Kathryn Gutzwiller, said the worker cut and molded a piece of papyrus -- what to him was a scrap of paper -- into a chest cover that resembled papier-mache. The cover formed a hard layer on the mummy before intricate decorations were added. The mummy was entombed, along with the papyrus, until 1992,...

From the issue dated October 4, 2002 http://chronicle.com/free/v49/i06/06a01801.htm A Lost Buddhist Literary Tradition Is Found Scholars decipher a stunning findan unknown canon in an ancient dialect By PETER MONAGHAN Seattle In certain cliffhangers on late-night television, dashing and strangely underdressed archaeologists in faraway places unearth artifacts of uncertain provenance. The discoveries cast new light on an ancient civilization. In reality, archaeologists are less swashbuckling, but once in a great while they do turn up objects -- ancient manuscripts, say, inscribed in little-known languages -- that have that effect. Through some stunning finds over the last decade, researchers studying early Buddhist manuscripts here...

Aramaic was the language of Semitic peoples throughout the ancient Near East. It was the language of the Assyrians, Chaldeans, Hebrews and Syrians. Aram and Israel had a common ancestry and the Hebrew patriarchs who were of Aramaic origin maintained ties of marriage with the tribes of Aram. The Hebrew patriarchs preserved their Aramaic names and spoke in Aramaic.The term Aramaic is derived from Aram, the fifth son of Shem, the firstborn of Noah. See Gen. 10:22. The descendants of Aram dwelt in the fertile valley, Padan-aram also known as Beth Nahreen.The Aramaic language in Padan-aram remained pure, and in...