Free Republic

...Professor Michael Hudson characterizes the relationship between creditors and debtors as a 5,000 year long war which in our time is being won by the creditors. Indeed, an independent oligarchy of creditors has been created and is currently buying up land that the population itself cannot afford to own. As Professor Hudson puts it, when you look at history in terms of the fight between creditors and debtors, it is a debt crisis that enslaved the Roman Empire and led to the fall of Rome. You have had the same tension in miniature in almost every subsequent economy. It is...

Ancient mathematical texts discovered at the Maya city of Xultun in Guatemala have revealed the name of a Maya astronomer for the first time, offering rare evidence of the scholars behind one of the ancient world’s most advanced systems of mathematics and astronomy. Researchers reconstructed and transcribed dozens of tiny inscriptions found on the plaster walls of a small building at the site. Their work uncovered a unique mathematical formula and identified its author, marking the first known case of a Classic Maya mathematician-astronomer being directly credited for his work. The findings were published in the journal Antiquity. Wall writings...

The carvings at Göbekli Tepe even show the movements of the constellations. Image credit: Dr Martin Sweatman Acataclysmic comet impact 13,000 years ago may have sparked the rise of civilization, according to the authors of a new study. The event – which many scientists believe never happened – may even be documented at the world-famous site of Göbekli Tepe, forming part of a series of carvings that the researchers say represent the world’s oldest solar calendar. Located in southern Türkiye, Göbekli Tepe is a pre-pottery Neolithic complex that is estimated to be around 12,000 years old. Analyzing an intricately carved...

Göbekli Tepe was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2018, and it's not hard to see why. Image credit: Resul Muslu/Shutterstock.com ============================================================================ Did a cataclysmic comet impact 13,000 years ago spark the rise of civilization? That's the explosive claim behind a study of carvings at the world-famous site of Göbekli Tepe, which researchers say encode not just a catastrophic comet strike, but the world's oldest solar calendar. Located in southern Türkiye, Göbekli Tepe is a pre-pottery Neolithic complex that is estimated to be around 12,000 years old. Analyzing an intricately carved pillar at the site, the study authors propose...

For over a century, post-modern critics have insisted that literature must be liberated from the stifling realm of moralism in order to become truly authentic in its artistic approach. The various platitudes in this vein have been prolific: “Morality ruins creativity,” “beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” or the proposition of “art for art’s sake,” which all seem less as genuine insights into the faculty of human creativity and more as rhetorical shields against difficult questions relating to the nature of truth. In our own contemporary age, the argument has at least partially mutated, but it has never...

In a recent discovery, scientists have uncovered the first kiss in recorded history. Evidence suggests that our ancestors may have engaged in kissing as early as 4,500 years ago. The evidence comes in the form of clay tablets found in regions that now make up Iraq and Syria. These tablets, originating from the earliest Mesopotamian societies, indicate that kissing was a common practice. Moreover, it is even suggested that such acts may have played a role in transmitting cold sores. Researchers from the esteemed University of Copenhagen have proposed that kissing was not limited to a particular region but rather...

A convoy of police cars, lights flashing, tail the large yellow truck up to the back gates of London’s British Museum. It’s just before 3 a.m. on July 10, a date that has been kept under wraps for months. After the truck pulls into the museum’s loading bay, four men open its back doors to reveal a cage-like rectangular crate. Inside it is another crate, inside that crate is a metal shell, and inside that shell, folded back and forth on itself 28 times, is a precious and fragile artifact, nearly a thousand years old. The journey this truck has...

The Bayeux Tapestry has arrived in the UK, for the first time since it is believed to have been created here nearly 1,000 years ago. At 02:50 BST, chaperoned from a secret location in northern France by a police guard, it was driven into a loading bay at the British Museum, which will put it on display in September. The 70m-long 11th Century embroidery depicts in 58 scenes events leading up to the Battle of Hastings and Norman Conquest of England in 1066 - the moment that changed the country forever. The heavy-looking crate, encased in an aluminium frame, was...

Studying old paintings can give us a surprising glimpse of historic natural history. In 1611, the Flemish painter Jan Brueghel the Elder finished his epic allegorical painting Air. In it, he depicted the Muse of Astronomy, Urania, reclining on a cloud as a menagerie of feathered birds surrounds her. But while studying the animals in the picture, one researcher spotted something far more intriguing: in the top right corner, there appeared to be a bat carrying a bird in its mouth. For most people, this might not mean much. But for the ecologist Pedro Romero-Vidal it set his mind racing,...

Ancient inscriptions written in Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke, have revealed a forgotten chapter of early Christianity's rise across the Roman Empire. Etched into stone, the text mentions both Jesus Christ and Mithras, the deity worshipped by a mysterious all-male religion once popular among Roman soldiers and merchants. The inscriptions were discovered at the entrance to an underground Mithras temple in southeastern Turkey, where researchers say it records the sanctuary's symbolic closure by early Christians around 1,700 years ago. Located at Zerzevan Castle, the remarkably preserved temple still contains four sacrificial hangers, a basin believed to have collected the blood...

Located in Thailand's Loei Province, Phu Khat stands as the highest peak in the Phu Khat Wildlife Sanctuary, rising to a height of 1,307 metres above sea level.In a routine patrol by Rangers from the sanctuary, two previously unknown archaeological sites were discovered near the mountain summit, both only 300 metres apart.Collectively named Pha Pang Puey, the sites feature carved or eroded linear markings across the rock face, forming geometric or abstract patterns rather than natural fractures – indicating ancient rock art. The rock surface is primarily reddish-brown, interspersed with lighter grey patches caused by lichen and erosion.According to experts,...

A well-preserved Byzantine-era residential city in the western desert is one of two major archaeological finds announced by Egypt .. The recent discoveries at the Dakhla Oasis and at the Marina el-Alamein archaeological site, near Alexandria, are the latest findings which the Egyptian government hopes will boost the country’s vital tourism sector, partially driven by antiquities sightseeing. ... The Tourism and Antiquities Ministry said that the first discovery reveals details of daily life, urban development and economic activities in the Dakhla Oasis in the fourth century, when Egypt was part of the Byzantine empire. ... A basilica church dating back...

A new study compares the carved symbolism of Göbekli Tepe’s Vulture Stone with ritual imagery from the Trypillia culture, suggesting that early farming societies in Anatolia and Eastern Europe may have shared cosmological ideas about time, death, sacred space and the movement of the heavens.At Göbekli Tepe, the famous Vulture Stone has never been easy to read. Its carved birds, snakes, scorpion, abstract signs and headless human figure have inspired competing interpretations for decades. Was it a scene of death ritual, an astronomical code, a mythic narrative, or something more complex? A new study argues that the answer may not...

...To read it, we never unrolled it physically. Instead, we scanned it with high-resolution X-rays, reconstructed the wound sheet inside the volume, flattened it into a readable surface, and used machine learning to bring out the faint traces of ancient ink...PHerc. 1667 is what survives of a larger roll: earlier attempts to open it by hand -- in the nineteenth century, and again in 1969 and the 1980s -- destroyed its outer layers and left only the compact inner core, about 8 cm of an original height of 19–24 cm. From that surviving portion we have now recovered and read...

Excavators of Tel Hadid recently released the discovery of a unique seal stamp from the seventh century b.c.e., the time of Assyrian domination of the Levant. It is not the first find from this remarkable site that gives us a better understanding of the people who were moved into Israel during the Assyrian period...The first thing to stand out about the small oval seal (less than 2 centimeters at its widest) is its unique material. Made out of the inner shell of a nacreous mollusk, also known as mother-of-pearl because of its role in the creation of pearls, it is...

Dig explores whether the legendary figure Achilles has roots in late Bronze Age history. The video analyzes linguistic clues, Mycenaean-era records, and parallels between the epic hero and a renegade figure known from historical Hittite diplomatic texts, examining how oral traditions may have synthesized real events into myth. The Real Man Behind Achilles? | 26:08 Dig. | 37.8K subscribers | 32,790 views | June 19, 2026 00:00 Achilles Impact 00:57 Academic consensus? 02:15 Proto-Indo European background 05:03 Linear B and Etymology 08:13 Konstantinos Kopanias 09:19 A Biography of Achilles 15:36 A Biography of Piyamaradu 23:17 To [sic] similar to be...

The discovery of an Anglo-Saxon tool in Kent could reveal more about where Britain's "iconic archaeological treasures" were made, according to experts. A small copper-alloy die stamp was found by metal detectorist Stephen Newbury near Lynsted, which has officially been declared as treasure by a coroner for being of significant historical interest, Kent County Council (KCC) said.The sixth or seventh century item is believed to have been used to create decorative metal foils for military equipment such as helmets. It is the only confirmed example of its kind found in Britain, according to analysis from KCC and the British Museum,...

From Roman freedom to Viking happiness, the iconic words in the Declaration of Independence reveal thousands of years of humans wrestling with how to live well together – and the power of language to put those ideas into action. "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." When Thomas Jefferson drafted these words in the Declaration of Independence, two things were on his mind. One: he needed to find "terms so plain and...

The author of a new book about William Shakespeare is claiming that the works of the famed playwright were actually written by a black, Jewish woman. The book, The Real Shakespeare: Emilia Bassano Willoughby by Irene Coslet, argues that Shakespeare was actually Emilia Bassano, a dark-skinned Jewish woman who was an English poet during the Elizabethan period. The Amazon description for the book, which says it is set to be released on March 30, questions if Shakespeare was indeed “a white man from Stratford.” “Debate still rages over the identity of the most beloved poet of all time and ‘father’...

...Although the researchers found traces of ancient human DNA in one pigmented calcite crust sampled in Escoural Cave (Portugal), to their surprise they also found ancient human DNA in several nonpigmented parts of the cave wall in Escoural as well as in Covarón Cave (northern Spain), which had initially been sampled as negative controls.The study shows that human DNA can be preserved on cave walls long after the populations that visited the cave have disappeared...Of the 54 samples collected, only five yielded authentic ancient human mitochondrial DNA...two of these samples showed no detectable faunal mitochondrial DNA, a rare finding that...