III International Chess Festival “President’s Cup”

May 9 – 21, 2008
180 players, 9 rounds,
First Place is $7,000, first woman finisher is $600

Standings after 8 Rounds:

28 24 GM Stefanova Antoaneta 2538 BUL 5,5
31 38 IM Paehtz Elisabeth 2449 GER 5,5
40 52 WGM Khotenashvili Bela 2333 GEO 5,0
42 59 WIM Batsiashvili Nino 2304 GEO 5,0
45 54 IM Zozulia Anna 2332 BEL 5,0
50 56 WGM Mamedjarova Zeinab 2322 AZE 5,0
63 111 Kazimova Narmin 2072 AZE 4,5
69 83 WFM Mammadova Gulnar 2188 AZE 4,5
70 128 Abdulla Khayala 1982 AZE 4,5
84 63 WGM Mamedjarova Turkan 2271 AZE 4,0
89 98 Huseynova Sahar 2106 AZE 4,0
94 99 Khudaverdieva Afag 2104 AZE 4,0
97 80 WIM Gavasheli Ana 2191 GEO 4,0
102 119 Guliyeva Sabina 2020 AZE 4,0
104 94 Ismailova Aytaj 2129 AZE 4,0
109 74 WIM Umudova Nargiz 2222 AZE 3,5
111 79 Isgandarova Khayala 2193 AZE 3,5
118 131 Mammadova Aysel Alishiraz qizi 1962 AZE 3,5
120 124 Agayeva Aytan 1989 AZE 3,5
122 121 WCM Fataliyeva Ulviyya 2003 AZE 3,5
125 95 WFM Ni Viktorija 2120 LAT 3,5
127 140 Hasanova Turkan 1897 AZE 3,0
128 172 Kazimova Firuza Bakhlul qizi 1700 AZE 3,0
168 156 Khalafova Narmin Ilgar qizi 1954 AZE 2,0
180 171 Karimova Nazrin Faiq qizi 1700 AZE 1,0

Narmin Kazimova is a young player who caught my eye by her performance at the recently-concluded European Individual Women's Chess Championship.

Mayor's Cup International Open (India)

Koneru Humpy stages a come back and finishes the tournament with 9.0/11, tied with leader Krasenkow (who lost his final game) and several other playcers. Krasenkow wins on tie-breaks and is declared the Champion. From Expressindia.com
Kransenkow triumphs
Express News Service
Posted online: Tuesday , May 20, 2008 at 04:40:08
Updated: Tuesday , May 20, 2008 at 04:40:08

Koneru finished in second place, and Bangladeshi GM Ziaur Rahman clinched third place. From The Daily Star, May 20, 2008.

Looking for Truth in Beringia

A fascinating article about a mammoth bone discovered in a cave nearly 20 years ago and the controversy it set off about just how early ancient man was in the Americas. The saga continues...

Beringia: humans were here
It was an extraordinary ancient land filled with fantastic creatures and intrepid people.
ALEX ROSLIN, Special to The Montreal Gazette
Published: Saturday, May 17

Beringia is thought by a handful of renegade scientists to be a prehistoric homeland for aboriginal people who later spread across the Americas and the key to one of archeology's greatest Holy Grails - figuring out how humans first got to this continent.

This July, Jacques Cinq-Mars, a renowned archeologist living in Longueuil, is heading to Beringia - a vast territory that once spanned the Yukon, Alaska and Siberia - in hopes of resolving a controversy he unleashed nearly 20 years ago when he chanced upon a curious-looking cave in the Yukon's Keele Mountain Range, perched on a ridge high above the Bluefish River.

Here, at a site known as the Bluefish Caves, Cinq-Mars's team discovered something that would turn archeology on its ear and has fuelled debate ever since - a chipped mammoth bone that appeared to have been fashioned into a small harpoon point. Radiocarbon dating showed the bone to be 28,000 years old.

The find stunned archeologists who had long presumed the first people to enter the Americas did so 13,000 years ago via a land bridge from Siberia after the end of the last Ice Age.

Until that point, routes from Alaska down into the Americas were blocked off by glaciers up to four kilometres thick, which would have cut off any possibility of migration for thousands of years.

But scientists have unearthed a growing number of ancient human sites across the continent that date back much more than 13,000 years. How did those people get here? No one knows for sure.

Cinq-Mars, a retired former curator at the Canadian Museum of Civilization, believes the answers lie in the lost land of Beringia.

Rest of article.

2008 U.S. Women's Chess Championship

I've updated Chess Femme News for Round 6, and will be updating more later tonight for other events. Enjoy!

Egyptian Antiquities To Go On Display At Athens Museum

From PRInside.com
Athens museum to show its priceless Egyptian collection
© AP
2008-05-13 19:09:00 -

ATHENS, Greece (AP) - A priceless ancient Egyptian collection opens to the public Wednesday, featuring a wooden body tag for a mummy, a stunning bronze statue of a princess, and a 3,000-year-old loaf of bread with a bite-sized chunk missing.

The National Archaeological Museum in Athens is putting more than 1,100 pieces from the collection on permanent exhibition, as more of its halls open to the public following years of renovation. The previous Egyptian display, shelved six years ago, included just 350 artifacts. Most of the current collection, which museum officials say is one of the best in the world, has never been shown to the public before due to lack of space. A further 6,000 Egyptian artifacts remain in underground storage.

One piece that made it into the display is the round, brown loaf of bread, which is missing a bite-sized chunk. Baked during the New Kingdom, between 1550-1075 B.C., it was placed in a tomb for the occupant's use in the afterlife. Museum officials are unsure what happened to the missing bit. [Well obviously, darlings, it was the Ka of the deceased enjoying a bit to eat after the grand ceremonies...]

Archaeologist Lena Papazoglou, curator of the museum's prehistoric, Egyptian and eastern collections, said Egypt's dry, hot climate helped preserve organic materials - food, wood and leather - for thousands of years.

"The exhibition includes intact birds' eggs," she said Tuesday. "If you shake them gently you can hear the yolks rattling inside."

The exhibition centerpiece is a bronze statue of the princess-priestess Takushit, dating to around 670 B.C. Standing 70 centimeters (27 inches) high and wearing a gown covered in hieroglyphs, the statue was found south of Alexandria in 1880. "This kind of bronze statue is very rare," said archaeologist Eleni Tourna.

At the other end of the sculptural scale is a thumb-sized bronze figurine of an African boy at a street market. "He has his wares spread in front of him and has dozed off in the heat, his pet monkey perched on his shoulder," Tourna said.

The miniature was made in the 3rd century B.C. in Alexandria, the Greek-Egyptian port city founded by Alexander of Macedon that grew into a major intellectual and administrative center. "Alexandria was the center of the then-known world," Tourna said, "Like the New York of antiquity."

The exhibition includes products from what Tourna calls Egypt's "death industry," such as pierced wooden tags from embalmers' workshops. They were inscribed with the name and designated grave of the corpse, to avoid embarrassing mix-ups.

The core of the museum's Egyptian collection was donated more than 100 years ago by two rich merchants from Alexandria's then-thriving Greek community. "They had access to the art market and were able to buy top-quality pieces," Papazoglou said.

Other pieces were donated by the Egyptian government in the late 19th century, while some were excavated in Greece.

The relationship between Greece and Egypt, two of the ancient world's major powers, peaked in the Hellenistic era, between 304 and 30 B.C. But interaction began some 4,000 years ago, during the Minoan period in Greece. Mycenaean pottery has been found in large quantities in Egypt, while Egyptian artifacts were excavated in the royal tombs and citadel of Mycenae, in southern Greece.

Another display due to reopen Wednesday at the National Archaeological Museum is the Stathatos collection, which focuses on ancient jewelry. In the future, museum officials plan to display important groups of glass, terra-cotta and ivory artifacts. [I'll bet there are some ancient game pieces in that collection that have yet to be identified as such!]

Built in 1866-89, the museum hosts some 20,000 exhibits from prehistoric to late Roman times.

On the Net: odysseus.culture.gr/h/1/eh151.jsp?obj_id=3249

The Eye Goddess Memorialized

Thank goddess for The New York Times, else I would never find out about such exhibits as this one:

From Around the Globe, a Mustering of the Tribes
By BENJAMIN GENOCCHIO
Published: May 16, 2008

All art fairs are messy, but the New York International Tribal & Textile Arts Show is messier than most. It assembles a ridiculously broad range of tribal art from Africa, Oceania, Asia and North and South America. It is a forceful, entrancing ensemble nonetheless.

This year’s fair has relocated to smaller quarters in the 69th Regiment Armory on Lexington Avenue, at 26th Street, far south of its former home in the Park Avenue Armory. There is a tighter floor plan downtown — where the fair actually began 14 years ago, under a different name — but it looks and feels pretty good, with 76 participating galleries from 10 countries.

...

The New York International Tribal & Textile Arts Show runs through Sunday at the 69th Regiment Armory, Lexington Avenue at 26th Street; (212) 532-1516, caskeylees.com.
********************************************************************************
Ach! Too bad the show finishes today. I highly recommend checking out the slide show at The New York Times article, which contains a short sampling of some of the art and artifacts at the show, absolutely stunning, wonderful pieces.

The "rug" image I included here is from the slide show. If that isn't a representation of an Eye Goddess, I'll eat my wool beret. Yes, she's from the 19th century - but she's from eastern Anatolia, an ancient hotbed of goddess worship (and I'll bet she's still worshipped there today, despite Islam).

Take and look and see what I see: She's got a sort of diamond-shaped head with two eyes (classic eye goddess iconography), a tree of life in the upper third of her body, and what look to be "chakra" points down the remaining two-thirds of her body. She's also outlined with - for lack of a better term on my part - an "energy mantra" that reminds me very much of the ancient serpent figures we see enclosing/ guarding the Sun God Re/Ra in ancient Egyptian iconography -- the serpents were representations of Mehen, the ancient serpent goddess/protector of Pharaoh as manifestation of the Sun God, as well as the serpent-had fringed cloak worn by archaic Athena. Altogether, She's an excellent example of ancient religious symbolism melding into certain iconic displays over the millenia.

I very much doubt this "rug" was ever meant to be walked upon as we trod upon our rugs today. For one thing, notice the much wider designed border at the "top" of the rug (above the Goddess' head) than at the bottom. I believe it was designed this way to facilitate hanging. The white "zig-zag" pattern across the top (an ancient pattern that is familiar on many goddess icons, I call it "M/V" for the wave-like pattern it forms, or "chevron") forms eight each "triangles" whose bottom edges are formed or closed by two miniature "eyes," also picked out in white threads. Extremely clever design on the part of the female weaver, because these "triangles" in and of themselves each represent a miniature "eye goddess" - diamond shaped head with two eyes!

Notice, too, the use of EIGHT - and the multiple of TWO TIMES EIGHT - or SIXTEEN. Hmmmm, where have we seen those numbers crop up before??? Hint: In chess.

The History of the Horse

Every chess player knows the role that the horse plays in the board game, even if he or she doesn't know the history behind the creation and evolution of the pieces. The "horse" - the knight piece in modern western chess - was a staple in the earliest Persian and Indian incarnations of the game (calvary), and has always had it's distinctive "L"-shaped move. (Image: Sassanid king Khosrau II (591-628 CE) mounted on his favorite charger, Shabdiz. Both horse and rider are arrayed in full battle armor. From Taq-e Bostan, Wikipedia)

In today's game the rook is also known as a castle. But, delving back into the history of chess, the rook was originally a horse-drawn battle chariot (in Persia, it was called a ruhkh after the King's champion) and was the most powerful piece on the board, before the modernization of the game in the late 1400's (probably in Spain) gave rise to sweeping new moves by the Queen and the Bishop. The rook's wide-ranging vertical and horizontal movement has remained unchanged throughout history.

Now, an exhibit at the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry (I love visiting there and have done so ever since I was a kid) delves into the history of the horse and its relationship with man - a fascinating study. Reported on at The New York Times: Man's Best Friend - Hoofed Department.

One thing I noted with interest: if the horse was hunted to extinction in the Americas by 10,000 BCE, that means that man here had not learned to tame the horse and use it for pulling loads and riding (if man here had used the horse in these ways, it would not make sense that he would hunt the animal to extinction, it would prove too costly to his existence). This provides indirect support, perhaps, for theories supporting the immigration of mankind into the Americas, then, before the taming of the horse in the Old World, which I believe earliest evidence now places some 15,000 to 16,000 years ago in the Eurasian steppes.