Free Republic

Heartbreaking, Father Tony Boutros, representative of the Greek Catholic Church in Sweida, Syria, makes an appeal to the international community to save Christians and Druze from an Islamist genocide. “We Christians and Druze are one. Look at the massacre they are committing against us. We need protection to continue living in the land we have peacefully lived together for hundreds of years.” ... Who is doing the Killings? What’s UN doing? ... not seeing Christian pastors/priests speaking up ... This is the history of Islam. Conquer. Destroy. Kill non Islamic citizens. Then destroy a country and send it back into...

Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey has long coveted the Greek Aegean islands in the disputed waters between the two countries, and now it has made its claim official. ... Turkey “has provoked Greece by submitting a map to UNESCO claiming parts of the Aegean Sea – which has been the primary point of contention and discussions between the countries ... Erdogan refuses to recognize the Treaty of Lausanne, which ceded the Aegean islands in question now to Greece, despite the fact that the Republic of Turkey duly ratified the treaty on Aug. 23, 1923, as well as the fact that Turkey...

Funerary stele inscribed with “ΙΧΘΥϹ ΖΩΝΤΩΝ” (“fish of the living”), an early Christian symbol. National Roman Museum. Credit: Marie-Lan Nguyen, Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain. ======================================================================== The humble fish, or ichthys (ἰχθύς) in Greek, was a symbol that played a crucial role in the early years of Christian history when people were afraid of telling others that they believed in this new religion. The fish (ichthys) was a symbol of Christian faith and a secret code. It became a profound declaration of the early followers of Jesus, who abandoned idols and believed in this new religion. This simple yet effective way...

Reseachers uncover a pyramid-like structure in the Judean Desert, photo taken March 2025 (photo credit: JUDEAN DESERT SURVEY UNIT, ISRAEL ANTIQUITIES AUTHORITY) =============================================================================== Experts uncover a massive pyramid-shaped structure, ancient papyrus documents and rare artifacts from Hellenistic-era rule in southern Israel, shedding new light on the region’s history. An excavation in the Judean Desert unearthed a massive 2,200-year-old pyramid-shaped structure alongside ancient papyri, weapons, tools, and fabrics, which experts are calling one of the richest archaeological excavations in the area. The Israel Antiquities Authority and the Heritage Ministry, which are jointly leading the dig north of Nahal Zohar, say...

Archaeologists in Egypt have discovered the royal tomb of an unknown king...The tomb was found within an ancient Egyptian necropolis in Abydos. The burial is located about 23 feet (7 meters) underground and contains a limestone burial chamber covered with mudbrick vaults, the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities wrote in a statement. The burial chamber was originally about 16 feet (5 m) high.The king's reign dates to the "Second Intermediate Period" (circa 1640 to 1540 B.C.), when northern Egypt was ruled by a group called the Hyksos and the southern part of Egypt was controlled by multiple Egyptian kings...The...

The news out of Syria is nothing short of horrific, and it provides a fresh illustration of what a catastrophic failure the Obama strategy ... “hundreds of Christians, including Greek Orthodox, and Alawites have been killed after clashes broke out on Thursday in the Latakia and Tartous regions on Syria’s Mediterranean coast ... That death toll may be a tragic underestimation . ... the death toll could be as high as 1,800, mostly Alawites, but also Christians.” The perpetrators are members of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the Islamic jihad group that toppled the Assad regime and took control of Syria several...

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...

On this Chanukah, menorahs will be lit not only in the land of Israel, from Jerusalem to Gaza, but in Lebanon and on the heights of Mt. Hermon overlooking Syria. Vacationing families will visit the waterfalls of the Hermon Stream in the Golan Heights from which the Syrian Greek armies had descended thousands of years ago to conquer Israel leading to the events of. Chanukah. The lights of the menorahs over darkness are a reminder that miracles can still happen here. The Syrian Greeks had called the area Paneas after their god Pan and the Arab Muslim conquerors had retained...

Two brothers who kept a “human sacrifice” hit list of cops, judges, politicians, celebrities and “banker scum” were nabbed with an arsenal of homemade bombs and ghost guns in their family’s Queens apartment, prosecutors said Monday. Wannabe anarchists Andrew Hatziagelis, 39, and his 51-year-old brother, Angelo, were hit with a 130-count indictment after cops and federal agents seized a cache of weapons that included “improvised” explosive devices, body armor and a collection of AR-15-style and 9mm ghost guns. The pair also allegedly scribbled “hit list” on a scrap of notebook paper that included a list of potential targets that also...

A DIRECT ancestor of Monty Python's renowned "Dead Parrot" sketch has been found in a book of jokes dating back to Greece in the fourth century AD. A new English translation of Philogelos: The Laugh Addict contains a joke in which a man complains that a slave he has just bought has died. "By the gods," answers the slave's seller, "when he was with me, he never did any such thing." In the Python sketch, written 16 centuries later, the shopkeeper claims the parrot, a "Norwegian Blue," is not dead, but just "pining for the fjords."

t's long been held that the old jokes are the best jokes - and Monty Python's Dead Parrot sketch is no different. A classic scholar has proved the point, by unearthing a Greek version of the world-famous piece that is some 1,600 years old. A comedy duo called Hierocles and Philagrius told the original version, only rather than a parrot they used a slave. It concerns a man who complains to his friend that he was sold a slave who dies in his service. His companion replies: "When he was with me, he never did any such thing!" The joke...

During the Roman period, Apsaros was an important port and garrison on the Colchis coast—a term that refers to a historical region on the eastern coast of the Black Sea, roughly corresponding to what is now western Georgia—Karasiewicz-Szczypiorski said. Apsaros, constructed around 2,000 years ago, was of particular importance in the time of the Roman emperors Trajan (who ruled from A.D. 98-117) and Hadrian (who ruled from A.D. 117-138).The votive plaque found during the 2024 excavation season at the site, which ran from mid-May to the end of July, is essentially a thin gold plate. It features a Greek inscription...

Artnet News reports that the Euripides Papyrus, which was discovered in Egypt in 2022, has been translated by Yvona Trnka-Amrhein and John Gilbert of the University of Colorado Boulder. The papyrus was found in a clump in a corner of a pit grave at the necropolis of Philadelphia by archaeologist Basem Gehad of Egypt's Ministry of State for Antiquities, and has been dated to the third century A.D. based upon its writing style and archaeological context. The translation has revealed some 100 previously unknown lines written by the Greek playwright Euripides in the fifth century B.C. The lines come from...

Ansarallah, the Shiite jihadist terror organization commonly known as the Houthis, published a video on Thursday that it claimed showed its members boarding the Greek-flagged oil tanker Sounion and planting bombs while chanting, “Allahu akbar.” The Houthis, who control the Yemeni capital of Sana’a and launched a terrorist campaign to disrupt commercial shipping in the Red Sea late in 2023, attacked the Sounion on August 21, reportedly using projectiles and a private attack at sea. The attack necessitated the evacuation of the ship’s crew, leaving the oil tanker and its cargo of 150,000 tons of crude oil abandoned, a floating...

==CHAPTERS==0:00 Introduction0:10 The space between words1:34 What is punctuation?2:04 The first punctuation2:54 Period/full (.) stop & comma (,)5:11 Colon (:) & semicolon (;)6:57 NordVPN7:55 Question mark (?)10:12 Exclamation mark/point (!)11:47 Quotation marks (")13:50 Brackets (())14:57 Dash (–) & hyphen (-)16:00 Apostrophe (')17:28 Ellipsis (...)18:40 MERCH!Where does punctuation come from?! | 18:55RobWords | 538K subscribers | 144,436 views | August 17, 2024

In this episode, we'll trace English back to its oldest known ancestor: an ancestor it shares with almost all of Europe's languages, as well as some Asian languages. That ancestor is called Proto-Indo-European.I also talk about the controversial Nostratic language family and ask whether there could really be a "Proto-Earth" language. What is Proto-Indo-European? | Tracing English as far back as possible20:45 | RobWords | 515K subscribers | 126,562 views | July 13, 2024

A small, 1,600-year-old papyrus fragment discovered in a German archive has been revealed to contain the earliest known copy of the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, an early Christian text describing the childhood of Jesus that once enjoyed enormous popularity but was not canonized into the New Testament.

A newly deciphered manuscript dating back more than 1,600 years has been identified as the earliest known account of Jesus Christ’s childhood. The manuscript, written on papyrus in either the 4th or 5th century, had been stored at a library in Hamburg, Germany, for decades and was long believed to be an insignificant document. However, two experts have now decoded the text and say it is the earliest surviving copy of the Infancy Gospel of Thomas. “The papyrus fragment is of extraordinary interest for research,” Lajos Berkes, a theology lecturer and one of the two men who deciphered the document,...

Experts in Germany have uncovered a deciphered manuscript that has been determined to be the oldest record of Jesus Christ’s childhood. As CBS News reported, the 1,600-year-old document had been stored in a university library in Hamburg, Germany, for decades. It was ignored until Dr. Lajos Berkes, from Germany’s Institute for Christianity and Antiquity at Humboldt University in Berlin, and professor Gabriel Nocchi Macedo from Belgium’s University of Liège looked it over and revealed it as the earliest surviving copy of the “Infancy Gospel of Thomas,” a document detailing Jesus Christ’s childhood. The two experts said in a news release...

Hollywood movies like Marley & Me or Hachi: A Dog’s Tale have brought both joy and tears to millions of viewers around the world, with their ability to capture the special bond between humans and their canine companions – aptly dubbed “man’s best friend”. In some ways, not much has changed over thousands of years. The ancient Greeks had their very own stories concerning this special relationship between man and dog. Of all the tales in Greek mythology, one of the most touching and relatable is that of the loyal dog Argos separated from his master Odysseus. Argos was Odysseus’...