Free Republic

Research on a Phoenician-era shipwreck off Xlendi in Gozo can help us better understand our past, Professor Timmy Gambin told The Malta Independent...“This is one of seven Phoenician shipwrecks in the world so any proper study that comes out of these seven shipwrecks is absolutely important.”Following the four-year excavation project of the Phoenician shipwreck that is located off the coast of Xlendi, the team of international experts, led by the University of Malta, has recently begun a new four-year Post-Excavation Project (2022-2025)...Gambin gave a brief overview of a few different methods within the post-excavation project.Firstly, he spoke about the method...

Motya, a small island that covers an area of just under 100 acres (40 hectares), sits off the western coast of Sicily. Bronze and Iron Age populations thrived there due to the abundant supply of fish, salt, fresh water and its protected location within a lagoon, Nigro wrote in the study. In the eighth century B.C., Phoenicians began settling there and integrating with locals, bringing their distinctive West Phoenician culture to the island.Just 100 years later, the settlement had grown into a bustling port city with a trade network stretching across the central and western Mediterranean. This brought Motya into...

Yahalom-Mack adds that her team was surprised to trace the ingots to Sardinia, which is “beyond the western Mediterranean, beyond the [Cypriots’] regular route of trade, which is Egypt, the Levant, Anatolia and the Aegean.” Though Cyprus was once considered a passive player in the Bronze Age metal trade, simply producing copper for other countries, more recent research has painted a portrait of a “small but agile nation with both formal and informal trade ties that may well have helped fill the power vacuum that occurred with the collapse of entranced empires around 1200 B.C.E.,” per the Times of Israel.Divers...

In general, historiography concerning ancient Sicily is overwhelmingly Greco-centric, i.e. focused on its Greek immigrants. Because the indigenous population’s architectonic remains are relatively invisible, whilst those of the Greek immigrants are monumental, the accepted historiography has been that the indigenous population had neither territory, power nor economic resources.It was instead accepted that as soon as the Greeks had established themselves on the island (on the western side in 628 BCE) they colonised and controlled the majority of the Sicilian lowlands, the economy and thus also the indigenous population.This outlook has contributed to an imbalance and a distorted picture of the...

Team finds secret of mummies' preservation October 22 2003 at 05:18PM By Chris Slocombe London - A German research team has unravelled the mystery of how the ancient Egyptians mummified their dead, using sophisticated science to track the preservative to an extract of the cedar tree. Chemists from Tuebingen University and the Munich-based Doerner-Institut replicated an ancient treatment of cedar wood and found it contained a preservative chemical called guaiacol. "Modern science has finally found the secret of why some mummies can last for thousands of years," Ulrich Weser of Tuebingen University told Reuters on Wednesday. The team extracted the...

Using the latest scientific techniques to solve the greatest mysteries of the ancient world's naval technology, our team of underwater detectives and elite naval commandos are investigating legends, in Season 4, Episode 2, "Ancient Super Navies."The HISTORY Channel® is the leading destination for award-winning original series and specials that connect viewers with history in an informative, immersive, and entertaining manner across all platforms. The network's all-original programming slate features a roster of hit series, premium documentaries, and scripted event programming.Ancient Super Navies | Ancient Discoveries (S4, E2) | Full Episode | History | Sep 8, 2021 | History

Republican Rome was pushed to the brink of collapse on August 2, 216 B.C., when the Carthaginian general Hannibal annihilated at least 50,000 of its legionaries at the Second Punic War’s Battle of Cannae.

Topics mentioned with David... Greek Dark Age, The Exodus, Trojan War, Hyksos Invasion, The Sojourn, Solomons Temple, Pyramid Construction, Diorite Bowls, Longevity, Babylon Chronology, Hammurabi, Bronze Age Collapse, Etrutria, Aeneas, Greek Expansion, Family Planning in the Ancient World, Festival Of Drunkenness, Golden Calf, Spiked Wine, Psychedelics, Phoenicians in South America, 1177BC, Historicity of The Old Testament, King Saul, King David, etc ...

Excavations at Tell el-Burak, about five miles south of the Lebanese coastal city of Sidon, have revealed the well-preserved remains of a wine press used from at least the seventh century B.C. It is the earliest wine press ever found in the Phoenician homelands, which roughly corresponded to modern Lebanon. The discovery is featured in a study published Monday in the journal Antiquity. Large numbers of seeds show grapes were brought there from nearby vineyards and crushed by treading feet in a large basin of durable plaster that could hold about 1,200 gallons of raw juice... The wine press was...

In 1972, in one of the early finds of marine archaeology, researchers discovered a trove of clay figurines on the seabed off the coast of Israel. The figurines -- hundreds of them, accompanied by ceramic jars -- were assumed to be the remains of a Phoenician shipwreck that had rested under the Mediterranean for 2,500 years. The artifacts were never fully analyzed in a scientific study, and were filed away and mostly forgotten for decades. But a new analysis by Meir Edrey, an archaeologist at the Leon Recanati Institute for Maritime Studies at the University of Haifa in Israel, and...

The replica of a wooden Phoenician ship, which visited Lyme Regis last year, has completed its 6,000 mile voyage across the Atlantic. The Phoenicia visited Lyme Regis last July before setting out on its voyage from the old port of Carthage, Tunisia, in September. It called in at Cadiz (Spain), Essaouira (Morocco), Tenerife (Canary Islands) and Santo Domingo (Dominican Republic) before arriving in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, at the Coral Ridge Yacht Club on Thursday, February 4... The ship's trans-Atlantic voyage was part of the Phoenicians Before Columbus Expedition, designed, with the help of the US-based Phoenician International Research Center, to...

Archaeologists have discovered the remains of an entire Phoenician family buried together in a tomb in Achziv, an ancient population center on the Mediterranean coast near the northern city Nahariya. In 2017, a joint team from Jerusalem's Hebrew Union College and France's Lyon University uncovered the bodies of a man, woman and small child in an approximately 2,800-year old cist-grave, a burial site surrounded by rocks and covered with stone slabs, the Haaretz daily reported Tuesday. The child was between three and five years old. According to the archaeological team that excavated the tomb, items found buried with the family...

"ROME, November 6, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) – A reconstruction of a pagan idol who demanded child sacrifice was stationed at the entrance of Rome’s Colosseum as part of a secular historical exhibition. The statue of Moloch, worshipped by both the Canaanites and the Phoenicians, is part of an exhibit dedicated to Ancient Rome’s once-great rival, the city of Carthage. The large-scale exhibition, titled Carthago: The immortal myth, runs until March 29, 2020. . .Three ancient Greek historians all attest that it was customary in Carthage to burn children alive as offerings to the deity, whom they called Baal and Cronus or...

One of the enduring consequences of the era of Phoenician influence -- which had by around 800 BC progressed from trading outposts to full-blown colonies in southern Spain -- was the adoption of alphabetic writing by the native population, first in the south-west. The number of known Tartessian inscriptions on stone is now about 90 and steadily rising with new discoveries. Concentrated densely in southern Portugal (the Algarve and Lower Alentejo), there is a wider scatter of fifteen over south-west Spain. The best exhibition of the inscriptions is on view in the new and innovative Museu da Escrita do Sudoeste,...

A Phoenician Fortress in Oklahoma? The following pages of this website are the photographic documentation of various unusual phenomena my wife, Sue, and I have found in southern Oklahoma and north Texas. What you see is what we saw and with the exception of some graphic arrows in one of the photos, no manipulation of the visual facts has been done. The original seven pages of photos began back on September 10, 2000. My wife publishes a community newspaper called TGIF, the weekend bandit. Most simply refer to it as the Bandit. It is distributed in six counties in Oklahoma...

A team of marine archaeologists has uncovered a 3,600-year-old shipwreck in the Mediterranean, just off the coast of Antalya, Turkey. The ship, believed to have been a merchant vessel sailing from Cyprus, may be the oldest ever discovered, according to Haaretz... Based on its position and the large cargo of copper ingots found inside and around the wreck, it is likely to have been a trading ship, ferrying goods from Cyprus to the Aegean region. Although the ship is in very poor condition, and the hull has been almost completely destroyed, the bulk of the ship, together with its precious...

We offer here an answer to one of the most intriguing questions in ancient Mediterranean history: the timing/contexts and incentives of early Phoenician expansion to Mediterranean and Atlantic regions in Africa and Europe ~3,000 years ago. This was enabled by a rare opportunity to analyze a very large sample set of ancient silver items from Phoenicia. An interdisciplinary collaboration combining scientific methods with precise archaeological data revealed the Phoenicians' silver sources. We propose that Phoenicians brought silver to the Levant from southwest Sardinia ~200 years before they de facto settled there, and later, gradually, also from Iberia. We show that...

[snip] I'm in Syracuse on Sicily's east coast, founded by the Greeks 27 centuries ago. In the city's ancient heart is the Duomo, the Cathedral of Syracuse. Today, this is a Christian church, but to walk through its doors is to take a trip back in time to 500 years before Christ was even born. The Duomo began life in 480 BC as the building project of a Greek tyrant, who having beaten the Carthaginians in battle, used the loot to build this. And these are the columns from that temple, soaring up into the sky. It was topped by...

Major Quake Likely in Middle East, Survey Finds Kate Ravilious for National Geographic News July 26, 2007 In A.D. 551, a massive earthquake devastated the coast of Phoenicia, now Lebanon. The disaster is well-documented, but scientists had struggled over the years to locate the earthquake fault. Now a new underwater survey has uncovered the fault and shown that it moves approximately every 1,500 years—which means a disaster is due any day now. "It is just a matter of time before a destructive tsunami hits this region again," said Iain Stewart, an earthquake expert at the University of Plymouth in the...

The discovery of one of the world's oldest shipwrecks shows that European trade was thriving even in the Bronze Age, according to experts. The vessel, carrying copper and tin ingots used to make weapons and jewellery, sank off the coast near Salcombe in Devon and is thought to date from 900BC. But it was only last year that the South West Maritime Archaeological Group, a team of amateur archaeologists, brought its cargo to the surface. The discovery was not announced until this month's International Shipwreck Conference, in Plymouth, Devon. It is thought that the goods - 259 copper ingots and...