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Description: Known across the world by many names such as: "Gypsies", "Roma", "Romani", "Sinti", etc... ; the Gypsies played a crucial role in the development of the Balkans & the history of many of the countries that inhabit the region today such as: Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Greece, Bosnia, Albania, Macedonia, and many others outside of the region. Yet, when talking about history, very rarely are the Roma mentioned or talked about. In this video we go over the origin of the Roma in India, their migration across the Silk Road and into the Balkans, their life in the Balkans...

"This is the earliest evidence for the loss of seasonal egg laying yet identified in the archaeological record," says Dr Robert Spengler, leader of the Domestication and Anthropogenic Evolution research group at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology, Germany, and principal investigator on the study."This is an important clue for better understanding the mutualistic relationships between humans and animals that resulted in domestication."The research team collected tens of thousands of eggshell fragments from archaeological sites along the main Central Asian corridor of the Silk Road. Using a method of biomolecular analysis known as ZooMS (Zooarchaeology by mass spectrometry) they were...

Filled with wonders, Marco Polo's tales are the first European account of the Silk Road. But, 700 years after the famed Venetian merchant and explorer's death, can they be trusted? Can a man who claimed to have seen a unicorn in the Indonesian island of Sumatra be trusted? This and other similarly valid questions have cast doubt on the truthfulness of Marco Polo since the 14th Century, when his book The Travels of Marco Polo became a bestseller and was translated into dozens of languages, hand-copied in countless manuscripts and available at any lavish court in Europe. Polo's tales are...

There are few events in human history as ominous — both in name and impact — as the Black Death. The bubonic plague pandemic made its way across Eurasia and north Africa between 1346 and 1553. It's estimated to have killed up to 200 million people, or 60 per cent of the Earth's entire population at the time. Now, scientists believe they have pinpointed the origin of the Black Death to a region of present day Kyrgyzstan called Issyk-Kul, once a stopover on the Silk Road trade route in the 14th century. Its place of origin has been one of...

A Silk Road stopover might have been the epicentre of one of humanity’s most destructive pandemics. People who died in a fourteenth-century outbreak in what is now Kyrgyzstan were killed by strains of the plague-causing bacterium Yersinia pestis that gave rise to the pathogens responsible several years later for the Black Death, shows a study of ancient genomes. “It is like finding the place where all the strains come together, like with coronavirus where we have Alpha, Delta, Omicron all coming from this strain in Wuhan,” says Johannes Krause, a palaeogeneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in...

arch 3 is World Wildlife Day. It is a United Nations International Day to celebrate wild animals and plants on the planet and the contribution that they've made to our lives and the health of the earth. In northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, thousands of Marco Polo Argali sheep were recently spotted migrating across the Pamir Plateau. The species is second-class national protection status in China, and its gradually growing population hovers around 20,000 in Taxkorgan Tajik Autonomous County.

The Yangtze No. 2 Ancient Shipwreck, the largest wooden shipwreck discovered underwater in China to date, was recently lifted out of the waters off Hengsha Island in Shanghai's Chongming district.The 150-year-old "time capsule" carries rich historical information. It marks another milestone achievement in China's underwater archaeology and provides valuable evidentiary materials for the studies of China's maritime civilization and for the mutual exchanges among civilizations in ancient times.The Yangtze No. 2 Ancient Shipwreck is one of the largest and best-preserved wooden shipwrecks discovered underwater in China and even the world at large and carrying the richest cultural relics.Based on its...

Historians say early churches and monasteries spread along the Persian Gulf to the coasts of present-day Oman and all the way to India. Archaeologists have found other similar churches and monasteries in Bahrain, Iraq, Iran, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.

@RealRossU Tomorrow I’ll begin my 10th year in prison. I don’t know what to say. I screwed up. I ruined my life and caused a lot of pain. When I look back and see my many mistakes, I feel immense regret.

The invisible government of the Deep State has long worked with the Nazis to accomplish its nefarious objectives, going back to the rise of Hitler. =============================================================== Witness Osh, Kyrgyzstan, a modest outpost in Central Asia. Boiling clouds enliven the sky as a breeze lazily strums the tall grass. Meanwhile a farmer tends his yaks, as clouds of gnats move across a meadow in a body like a mournful specter. Life here has gone on in a relatively unbroken pattern for thousands of years. But peasants have noticed something unusual appearing in the soil of late: train tracks. The construction is...

...Eighth century Asia was an ever-shifting mosaic of different tribal and regional powers, fighting for trade rights, political power and/or religious hegemony. The era was characterized by a dizzying array of battles, alliances, double-crosses and betrayals.At the time, nobody could have known that one particular battle, which took place on the banks of the Talas River in present-day Kyrgyzstan, would halt the Arab and Chinese advances in Central Asia and fix the boundary between Buddhist/Confucianist Asia and Muslim Asia.None of the combatants could have predicted that this battle would be instrumental in transmitting a key invention from China to the...

On exami[ni]ng hair samples of mummies in the scanning electron microscope we found a piece of tissue between the curls which had the characteristic appearance of silk. To show that the specimen was silk, we performed infrared studies using multiple internal reflection, allowing nondestructive identification of the material. The spectra clearly identified silk.We performed amino-acid anaylsis of the sample according to the method in ref. 2 and obtained the typical spectrum of hydrolysed silk, with high glycine, serine and alanine peaks as originally described by Shimura. To exclude the possibility that the silk specimen could have been added later to...

In 1965, a mural was discovered in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, when local authorities decided to build a road in the middle of the Afrasiab tepe. A tepe is a mound marking an ancient site, in this case pre-Mongol Samarkand. When it was found, the mural was weathered and its images obscured. But those who discovered it had the foresight to make a drawing of it, from which replicas have been made. A replica of this mural is now being shown as part of the exhibit "The Crossroads of Civilizations: The Asian Culture of Uzbekistan" until September of next year at the...

"The ruler of Da Qin is not permanent. When disasters result from unusual phenomena, they unceremoniously replace him, installing a virtuous man as king, and release the old king, who does not dare show resentment..."Here we have the words of the early third century Chinese historian Yu Huan, who lived during the Three Kingdoms period of Chinese history. Though he never left China, he collected large amounts of information on the countries to the West, chief among them the Roman Empire.Enormous thanks to John E. Hill for kindly allowing us to use his translation, and for tips on the possible...

Separated by geography and language, there's not much that might seem to connect India's five dwindling Jewish communities – except praying in Hebrew, and food. ...Kolkata is home to the Baghdadi Jews, who were once abundant enough to warrant five synagogues; now there aren't enough for a minyan (minimum [10] male Jews required for liturgical purposes). Magen David and the smaller Beth El Synagogue were both classified as protected monuments and renovated by the Archaeological Survey of India in 2017. ...The story of disappearing Jewish populations finds echoes elsewhere in India. Jews are believed to have first arrived in India...

China, Russia welcome Iran into the fold M K Bhadrakumar April 18, 2006 The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), which maintained it had no plans for expansion, is now changing course. Mongolia, Iran, India and Pakistan, which previously had observer status, will become full members. SCO's decision to welcome Iran into its fold constitutes a political statement. Conceivably, SCO would now proceed to adopt a common position on the Iran nuclear issue at its summit meeting June 15. Speaking in Beijing as recently as January 16, the organization's secretary general Zhang Deguang had been quoted by Xinhua news agency as saying:...

Julian Assange has had a stroke in Belmarsh Prison, his fiancee Stella Moris revealed last night. The WikiLeaks publisher, 50, who is being held on remand in the maximum-security jail while fighting extradition to America, was left with a drooping right eyelid, memory problems and signs of neurological damage. He believes the mini-stroke was triggered by the stress of the ongoing US court action against him, and an overall decline in his health as he faces his third Christmas behind bars.

An international team of archaeologists and historians has completed an extensive analysis of a rare leather armor waistcoat recovered from the grave of an ancient horse-riding soldier in Northwest China. Notably, the climate in that region of China is desert-like and bone-dry. This is significant, because the arid conditions and lack of moisture in the soil allowed the leather armor to survive intact despite being buried for nearly 3,000 years. Under the supervision of archaeologist Patrick Wertmann from the Institute of Asian and Oriental Studies at University of Zurich, the research team members used radiocarbon dating procedures to establish the...

Dong Jingwei, who has been rumored to be a high-ranking defector to the United States, attended a meeting in Beijing on June 23, according to the Chinese Ministry of Public Security (MPS). The MPS announced on its website that Dong participated in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) security meeting in Beijing on Wednesday, as a member of the China team which was led by Zhao Kezhi, China’s public security minister. In the announcement, the ministry released a photo, in which Dong was sitting at the right end of the table. This is the first time that the Chinese regime has...

Christian Designs Found in Tomb Stones of Eastern Han Dynasty [2002-08-02] Studies show that as early as 86 A.D., or the third year under the reign of "Yuanhe" of Eastern Han, Dynasty Christianity entered into China, 550 years earlier than the world accepted time. When studying a batch of stone carvings of Eastern Han Dynasty (25-220 A.D.) stored and exhibited in the Museum of Xuzhou Han Stone Carvings, Christian theology professor Wang Weifan was greatly surprised by some stone engravings demonstrating the Bible stories and designs of early Christian times. Further studies showed that some of these engravings were made...