Free Republic

In Plato’s account of Atlantis, found in both Timaeus and Critias, the legendary island civilization supposedly fought a war against the Greeks. This is a vital part of the account, for it is the whole reason why Plato included it in these dialogues. However, is there any evidence that this legendary war between Atlantis and the Greeks really happened? Plato’s account of the war against Atlantis In Timaeus, written around 360 BCE, Socrates expresses his wish to hear an account about Athens in action. Critias responds that he knows of such an account. He then goes on to tell Socrates...

The researchers found a Philistine cemetery in Israel – home to 145 human remains dating back to between the 11th and the 8th centuries BC. The discovery, made in 2013 and finally revealed in 2016, may yield answers to an enduring mystery surrounding the origins of the Philistines. It came at the end of a 30-year excavation by the Leon Levy Expedition. The Philistines were an ancient people who lived from the 12th century BC until 604 BC. They are known for their biblical conflict with the Israelites.

JERUSALEM — Goliath the Greek? Human remains from an ancient cemetery in southern Israel have yielded precious bits of DNA that a new study says help prove the European origin of the Philistines — the enigmatic nemeses of the biblical Israelites. The Philistines mostly resided in five cities along the southern coast of what is today Israel and the Gaza Strip during the early Iron Age, around 3,000 years ago. In the Bible, David fought the Philistine giant Goliath in a duel, and Samson slew a thousand of their warriors with the jawbone of an ass. Many archaeologists have proposed...

Over 100 years of excavations on Crete have exposed elegant Minoan frescoes that once adorned the walls of the island’s Bronze Age palaces. This distinctively colorful Aegean art style flourished in the Middle Bronze Age (1750-1550 B.C.). The nearby inhabitants of Akrotiri, a city on the Cycladic island of Thera (modern Santorini), painted numerous artworks in the style of the Minoan frescoes before the island was decimated by a volcanic eruption in the late 17th or 16th century B.C. Until recently, there was no archaeological evidence of Minoan frescoes beyond the islands of the Aegean. Art exhibiting Aegean characteristics has...

Since Colchis was famous in antiquity for gold and precious metal -- it's where the Greek hero Jason went to grab the legendary Golden Fleece -- you'd be wearing gold-spangled robes while pouring and drinking your famous Colchian wine from gold or silver vessels. You'd also be so rich you could afford to bury your wine service with you... A fascinating exhibition, "Wine, Worship & Sacrifice: The Golden Graves of Ancient Vani" at the Smithsonian's Sackler Gallery in Washington, D.C., through Feb. 24, gives a thrilling image of the plenty that nobility enjoyed in that far corner of the ancient...

Public release date: 20-Nov-2007 Contact: George Hunka ghunka@aftau.org 212-742-9070 American Friends of Tel Aviv University Digging biblical history, or the end of the world Professor Israel Finkelstein Some come to dig the Tel Aviv University-directed archeological site at Tel Megiddo because they are enchanted by ancient stories of King Solomon. Others come because they believe in a New Testament prophecy that the mound of dirt will be the location of a future Judgment Day apocalyptic battle. Hence the second, rather more chilling name for the site: "Armageddon." Tel Megiddo has been the subject of a number of decisive battles in...

It argues that the "palaces" could more likely be "temples" rather than residential buildings. For sure, archaeologists are quick to point out that certain parts of the palaces definitely had a religious function. But some go further. Archaeologist Oswald Spengler stated in the 1930s that these "palaces" were temples for the dead. His opinion was not taken seriously, as it went against the accepted belief. Wunderlich continued where Spengler had stopped. Both noted that the state of the palaces was particularly bizarre. Thousands of people are believed to have roamed the corridors of the Palace of Knossos, but the staircases...

The remains of an ancient Greek cargo ship that sank more than 2,300 years ago have been uncovered with a deep-sea robot, archaeologists announced today. The ship was carrying hundreds of ceramic jars of wine and olive oil and went down off Chios and the Oinoussai islands in the eastern Aegean Sea sometime around 350 B.C. Archeologists speculate that a fire or rough weather may have sunk the ship. The wreckage was found submerged beneath 200 feet (60 meters) of water. The researchers hope that the shipwreck will provide clues about the trade network that existed between the ancient Greek...

A team of archaeologists digging at Tel-Habuwa, near the town of Qantara East and three kilometres east of the Suez Canal... chanced upon a cachet of limestone reliefs bearing names of two royal personalities and two seated statues of differing sizes. The larger statue is made of limestone and belongs to a yet unidentified personage, but from its size and features archaeologists believe that it could be a statue of Horus, the god of the city. In 2001 archaeologists unearthed remains of a mud-brick temple dedicated to this deity. The second is a headless limestone statue inscribed on the back...

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.

Unearthed: the humble origins of world diplomacy By David Keys, Archaeology Correspondent 19 January 2003 Archaeologists have discovered evidence of an invasion of the Middle East by one of the world's first superpowers, which destroyed much of the region 33 centuries ago. Under the ruins of a 3,800-year-old royal palace in western Syria they have found part of an ancient diplomatic and administrative library, the most important archaeological discovery of its kind for more than 20 years. Accounts on clay tablets describe the region's conquest by one of the Bronze Age's superpowers, the Hittite Empire, in 1340BC. This helped to...

Devastating 'World War ZERO' destroyed ancient Mediterranean civilisations and plunged Europe into a dark age 11:41, 13 MAY 2016 UPDATED 11:44, 13 MAY 2016 BY JASPER HAMILL Controversial theory finally identifies mysterious 'Sea Peoples' blamed for cataclysmic series of events which changed the course of history It was a disaster which destroyed the ancient world's greatest civilisations and plunged Europe into a dark age that lasted centuries. Now one archaeologist think he's worked out who's to blame for sparking an event he calls "World War Zero", but which most academics refer to as the The Late Bronze Age Collapse ....

The Trojan War was a grander event than even Homer would have us believe. The famous conflict may have been one of the final acts in what one archaeologist has controversially dubbed "World War Zero" -- an event he claims brought the eastern Mediterranean Bronze Age world crashing down 3200 years ago. And the catalyst for the war? A mysterious and arguably powerful civilisation almost entirely overlooked by archaeologists: the Luwians. By the second millennium BC, civilisation had taken hold throughout the eastern Mediterranean. The Egyptian New Kingdom coexisted with the Hittites of central Anatolia and the Mycenaeans of mainland...

The reign of Ramesses III, the second pharaoh in Egypt’s 20th dynasty, was not the most stable chapter in the empire's history. There were endless wars with the “Sea Peoples”... which drained the treasury, bad weather that interrupted food supplies, along with political unrest... In 2012, eminent Egyptologist Zahi Hawass and Cairo University radiologist Sahar Saleem scanned Ramesses III mummy and revealed that an assassin cut through his esophagus and trachea, killing him almost instantly. But a new book by the pair... makes the story a little more complicated, suggesting that the pharaoh was likely murdered by multiple assailants. The...

Midwife Mercada Dasa lived in the Old City of Jerusalem until 1948. In her attic she raised an unusual pet -- a white female snake about a meter and a half long -- and fed it sugar cubes. Just before the entry of the Jordanian Legion she left the besieged city with her family and her pet remained behind. That a midwife, whose family lived in Jerusalem since the time of the Second Temple, carried on a tradition of feeding white female snakes was part of the family's lore, but not something anyone considered significant. Now Mercada's grandson, Benny Avigdory,...

Fractured human remains found on a German river bank could provide the first compelling evidence of a major Bronze Age battle.Archaeological excavations of the Tollense Valley in northern Germany unearthed fractured skulls, wooden clubs and horse remains dating from around 1200 BC. The injuries to the skulls suggest face-to-face combat in a battle perhaps fought between warring tribes, say the researchers. > The archaeologists also found remains of two wooden clubs, one the shape of a baseball bat and made of ash, the second the shape of a croquet mallet and made of sloe wood. Dr Harald Lubke of the...

"Our evidence shows definitively that the population decline in this period cannot have been caused by climate change," says Ian Armit, Professor of Archaeology at the University of Bradford, and lead author of the study. Graeme Swindles, Associate Professor of Earth System Dynamics at the University of Leeds, added, "We found clear evidence for a rapid change in climate to much wetter conditions, which we were able to precisely pinpoint to 750BC using statistical methods." According to Professor Armit, social and economic stress is more likely to be the cause of the sudden and widespread fall in numbers. Communities producing...

Conventional estimates for the collapse of the Aegean civilization may be incorrect by up to a century, according to new radiocarbon analyses. While historical chronologies traditionally place the end of the Greek Bronze Age at around 1025 BCE, this latest research suggests a date 70 to 100 years earlier. Archaeologists from the University of Birmingham selected 60 samples of animal bones, plant remains and building timbers, excavated at Assiros in northern Greece, to be radiocarbon dated and correlated with 95.4% accuracy using Bayesian statistical methodology at the University of Oxford and the Akademie der Wissenschaften Heidelberg, Germany. 'Until very recently...

Outside the Greek mainland and Aegean Island a possible representation of Achaean warriors equipped with boar tusks helmets is from an Egyptian papyrus fragments from Tell el-Amarna, home of Amenhotep III's son, dated around 1350 BC (*2). In this papyrus some warriors are depicted with conical pale-yellow helmets which remaind in general design the typical Aegean boar tusks helmet. This identification is strengthened by the find of a piece of boar’s tusk, with perforations for attaching it to a leather frame, during excavations at Qantir, the site of the Ramesside capital Pi-ramesse in the eastern delta. It appears likely that...

More than 3,200 years ago, life was abuzz in and around what is now this modern-day Israeli metropolis on the shimmering Mediterranean shore. To the north lay the mighty Hittite empire; to the south, Egypt was thriving under the reign of the great Pharaoh Ramses II. Cyprus was a copper emporium. Greece basked in the opulence of its elite Mycenaean culture, and Ugarit was a bustling port city on the Syrian coast. In the land of Canaan, city states like Hazor and Megiddo flourished under Egyptian hegemony. Vibrant trade along the coast of the eastern Mediterranean connected it all. Yet...