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William Shakespeare's birthplace will be de-colonised over fears that portraying his success as the 'greatest' playwright 'benefits the ideology of white European supremacy'. Shakespeare's Birthplace Trust owns buildings in the playwright's hometown of Stratford-upon-Avon. It wants to 'create a more inclusive museum experience' and announced it will move away from Western perspectives after concerns were raised that Shakespeare's ideas were used to advance 'white supremacy' ideas. The trust also said that some of its items could contain language or depictions that are racist, sexist, or homophobic. It comes amid an ongoing backlash against the writer. Some productions of his works...

Archaeological research carried out at the La Peña del Castro site, located in the municipality of La Ercina, in the province of León (Spain)... Researchers from the University of León have identified an inscription belonging to the Celtiberian alphabet, engraved on a small object linked to the textile activities of the settlement. This object is a spindle whorl, a counterweight used in spinning spindles, dating back to the 1st century BC.This finding is significant because it represents one of the earliest examples of alphabetic writing documented in the province of León and in the northern Iberian Peninsula. One of the...

Wednesday, 3 October, 2001, 18:00 GMT 19:00 UK Science shows cave art developed early Chauvet cave paintings depict horses and other animals By BBC News Online science editor Dr David Whitehouse A new dating of spectacular prehistoric cave paintings reveals them to be much older than previously thought. Carbon isotope analysis of charcoal used in pictures of horses at Chauvet, south-central France, show that they are 30,000 years old, a discovery that should prompt a rethink about the development of art. The remarkable Chauvet drawings were discovered in 1994 when potholers stumbled upon a narrow entrance to several underground chambers ...

Via Aleteia, here’s another very interesting thing on the musical front. At the beginning of the 20th-century, archeologists working at the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem discovered a set of organ pipes and a bell carillion. They have since been kept at the Holy Land Museum run by the Franciscan custody. According to the musicologist who is working on them, Dr David Catalunya, they had been brought to the Holy Land by the Crusaders in the early 12th century, and then hidden for safe-keeping during a Muslim invasion. They are in a very good state of preservation; Dr Catalunya...

To some lovers of classical sounds, organ music seems irremediably goyish, despite outstanding achievements by such Jewish composers as Aaron Copland and Arnold Schoenberg in writing for the so-called “king of instruments.” For these, “The Organ and Its Music in German-Jewish Culture,” recently published in paperback, will be a real ear-opener. Its author, musicologist Tina Frühauf, notes that “until the Middle Ages, the organ was not officially permitted in any Christian liturgy inasmuch as instrumental music was associated… with the Jewish services once held in the temple at Jerusalem.”Even after organs appeared in churches and became taboo for synagogues, there...

Various groups over the past two centuries have suggested that the people of Atlantis migrated to Europe after their civilization was destroyed and sank into the sea. This includes the Nazis, who used this belief as a basis for their ideas about racial superiority. What do the facts reveal about the argument that the inhabitants of ancient Atlantis migrated to Europe? Who were the Atlanteans? Atlantis was a mythical island described by the ancient Greek philosopher Plato. Its inhabitants, the Atlanteans, were an advanced and powerful people, known for their wealth, technology, and military might. However, their growing arrogance and...

Native Americans, English sailors and pirates all came together on Ocracoke Island in North Carolina to create the only American dialect that is not identified as American. I'd never been called a "dingbatter" until I went to Ocracoke, North Carolina for the first time. I've spent a good part of my life in the state, but I'm still learning how to speak the Hoi Toider brogue. The people here just have their own way of speaking: it's like someone took Elizabethan English, sprinkled in some Irish tones and 1700s Scottish accents, then mixed it all up with pirate slang. But...

March 10 (UPI) -- An 81-year-old woman going through boxes of her mother's belongings made a surprising discovery: an overdue library book checked out by her grandfather 99 years earlier. "I thought, I don't have grandchildren, and my kids are getting older. Even if my son took it, I didn't know what they'd do with it," Cooper told CNN. "I figured it belongs to the library."

...Sapinuwa, also known as Šapinuwa in Hittite, was a significant Bronze Age city of the Hittite Empire, located in modern Ortaköy, Çorum province, Türkiye, approximately 70 kilometers east of the Hittite capital, Hattusa. This ancient city served as one of the major religious and administrative centers of the Hittites, functioning as a military base and occasionally housing several Hittite kings.The identification of Ortaköy as the site of ancient Sapinuwa began when a local farmer discovered two clay cuneiform tablets in his field and reported the find to the Çorum Museum. This discovery prompted a survey in 1989, leading to further...

The Moutier-Grandval Bible, an illustrated ninth-century masterpiece considered one of the finest manuscripts in the world, is back in Switzerland, where it miraculously survived the ages in impeccable condition... The priceless Bible was produced in Tours in France in around 830-840, before making its way to Moutier-Grandval Abbey, in the mountainous Jura region in northwestern Switzerland. Now in the care of the British Library, the 22-kilogramme (50-pound) manuscript is being loaned for three months to the Jura Museum of Art and History in the region's tiny capital Delemont. It is only the second time it has been loaned from London,...

Christopher Nolan’s latest epic production, ”The Odyssey”, brought Hollywood star Matt Damon to Greece. Filming is underway for the highly anticipated adaptation of Homer’s legendary epic poem in Greece with the production already working hard for the much-anticipated film. With a star-covered cast and a whopping $250 million production budget, this ambitious cinematic project is expected to be one of the most talked-about films of recent years. Matt Damon in Greece to begin filming Matt Damon, who will star in the new film as Odysseus, arrived in Greece a few days ago to film key scenes for the new film...

La Brújula Verde reports that the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities completed a two-year excavation and preservation project of an ancient mining camp at Jabal Sukari near the Red Sea. Archaeologists were under pressure to complete the project as the site is currently endangered by modern mining activities. The Egyptian team uncovered a vast gold processing complex that dates back 3,000 years, as well as a settlement inhabited by those who worked at the mine. The mining facility included specialized factories for extracting the gold from quartz veins, which has provided new information about ancient methods of obtaining and...

The ‘music of the spheres’ was born from the effort to use numbers to explain the universeAn image of a white half circle at the bottom-center on a starry background. There are 8 arches spreading away from the circle. The Pythagoreans believed that the motions of the heavenly bodies, with just the right ratios of their distances from a central fire, made pleasant music — a concept that evolved into the “music of the spheres.” If you’ve ever heard the phrase “the music of the spheres,” your first thought probably wasn’t about mathematics. But in its historical origin, the music...

The subject of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel has fascinated Biblical researchers for centuries, if not longer. One theory which started becoming popular in the sixteenth century is that some, if not all, of these Ten Tribes migrated to ancient Britain. The theory is much less popular today than it once was. However, it has experienced something of a resurgence in recent decades. According to proponents of the theory connecting the Israelites to the Britons, the Cimmerians can be identified as the deported Israelites. There are two main pieces of evidence for this. The first is that they appear...

This was the moment that got him elected.

A new study has determined that the famous Galloway Hoard may not have belonged to a single wealthy individual but perhaps to an entire community, according to a statement released by National Museums Scotland. In 2014, metal detectorists in Kirkcudbrightshire discovered a collection of Viking Age objects that were buried around a.d. 900. The treasure included 11 pounds of silver and gold, an Anglo-Saxon crucifix, various pendants, brooches, and bracelets, and a silver gilt vessel that originated in the Sasanian Empire of Iran. A recently translated runic inscription found within the interior of one silver armband reads, "this is the...

Skeletal collections with trauma found from the Neolithic period in Anatolia suggest that injury was caused by daily activities and lifestyle, rather than systematic violence. However, shortly after this period there is an increase in trauma associated with violence that may suggest an increase in stress within and between populations in this area... The human remains come from the site of Titris Hoyuk, dating to 2900-2100 BCE. The site grew very quickly in this period from a small farming community to an urban centre within a large mud-brick fortification wall built over a stone foundation. Within one of the house...

The Indus Valley civilization was one of the most advanced in the world for over 500 years. More than 1000 settlements sprawled across 250,000 square miles of what is now Pakistan and northwest India from 2600 BCE to 1900 BCE. It had several large, well-planned cities like Mohenjo-daro, common iconography, and a script no one has been able to understand. Linguists studying the Indus script don't know anything about the underlying language and there's no multilingual Rosetta Stone, but scholars have analyzed its structure for clues and compared it to other scripts. Most Indologists think it's “logo-syllabic” script like Sumerian...

A letter written by George Washington, providing rare understanding of his confidence in regular Americans to fight and win the revolutionary war, has been put up for sale on Presidents Day. The first US president penned the document as leader of the Continental Army in 1777, shortly after British forces ransacked a vital military supply depot in Danbury, Connecticut – a devastating action that fellow general Samuel Parsons wrote him was “an event very alarming to the country”. The handwritten reply, hidden from public view for decades in a private collection in New England, shows that Washington refused to consider...

The entrance to the Maszycka Cave in southern Poland (Credit: Darek Bobak) In a nutshell * Scientists found evidence of cannibalism in an 18,000-year-old Polish cave, where at least ten people — including children — were systematically butchered and eaten, likely due to territorial conflicts rather than survival needs * The Magdalenian people who created famous cave art like Lascaux were capable of both sophisticated cultural achievements and extreme violence, challenging our understanding of prehistoric societies * As populations grew after the last Ice Age, competition for resources likely led to violent conflicts between groups, with evidence of similar cannibalism...