Site of Greek Sanctuary of Goddess Artemis Confirmed

How many clues can you pick out of the following story that indicates this is, indeed, a genuine sanctuary of Artemis, besides the obvious one of finding a carved dedication on the site?  My answers are at the bottom.

From Greek website Tournos News

Inscription found in Paleochoria links goddess Artemis to Amarynthos sanctuary

August 19, 2019

A partially preserved inscription linking Artemis with the ancient town of Amarynthos was unearthed in Paleochoria, Evia, 2 km east of the modern-day town with the same name, the Ministry of Culture said on Monday, according to ANA.

Statue-based inscription to the goddess Artemis, her brother Apollo and their mother Leto. Photo Source: Greek Minister of Culture and Antiquities

The fragmentary inscription, "... of Artemis in Amarynthos", was reused in a Roman-era fountain, confirming that the foundations of the building in Paleochoria were related to the sanctuary of the goddess Artemis, first mentioned in Linear B tablets found in the Mycenaean palace of Thebes as "a-ma-ru-to".

The discovery was made during this season's excavations of the sanctuary by the Swiss Archaeological School in Greece (director Karl Reber) and the Antiquities Ephorate of Evia (Amalia Karapaschalidou, honorary ephor).

Excavations to locate the sanctuary began in 2006. This year's dig focused on the Paleochora area where a modern house was razed in 2018 after a University of Thessaloniki geological survey located remains of ancient buildings next to it.

In an announcement, the Ministry of Culture noted the find was "particularly significant, as the remains of the prehistoric settlement excavated in the '70s and '80s in the same area by the Greek Archaeological Service was one of the most important sanctuaries of ancient Euboea (Evia)."

It added that in recent years excavations have revealed two stoas dating to Hellenistic times, which serve to delineate the sanctuary east and north.

"With the discovery of the south wing of the eastern stoa," the Ministry said, "the sanctuary's limits on three sides are now known."

The site lies near a natural harbor. It was inhabited in the prehistoric and Classical periods, until Roman times (3000 B.C.-1st century AD), while during the Byzantine period two churches were built on top of the hill.

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I believe these are hints that this is a legitimate site of a goddess sanctuary:  

(1) The name of the place.  Amarynthos, in ancient times referred to as "A-ma-ru-tu."  However you want to slice the linguistic origins of the name, "Ma," "Mar," and "Mary" (ancient name assigned to females and Christian equivalent of the Mother Goddess concept), the common root in many different languages of the names of goddesses and mother goddesses is difficult to ignore.  You can locate lists online  of the names of goddesses and mother goddesses from around the world that either start with Ma/Mo/Mu or Meh, etc. or contain  Ma/Mar and variations thereof in the names of many other female dieties from all cultures and continents.  

(2) Archaeologically attested that two Byzantine period churches (presumably of Christian origin but I don't have information as to whether both existed more or less at the same time, or one was built upon the ruins of the other (often the case) and Catholic denomination not noted (Roman Catholic? Greek Orthodox?  Something else?)  

This was a deliberate policy enacted by the early Church fathers (eastern, western, and other sub-groups that broke away from the Roman Catholic Church of Rome) to adopt as their own Christian places of worship former sites of "pagan" temples and worship, often goddess sanctuaries and other sacred places such as sacred groves, sacred high places and sacred pools or other bodies of water by literally building over the the ruins of a former existing temple or sacred sanctuary or sacred grounds or as close thereto as possible.  However, it wasn't always necessary to build a church over the ruins of a "pagan" site of worship or sacred grounds; sometimes the Church Fathers just seized an existing building that was (presumably) a vacated former temple and re-dedicated it to their Three-in-One God, and sometimes in honor of the "Mother of God."  

There is no information in the article about the names of the two churches, but my guess is that they were dedicated to the Virgin Mary, whom the local people would have associated with the goddess Artemis.

Doing A Little Catch-Up: 4th Century CE Roman Board Game Discovered in Slovakia

This is the article (from 2018) mentioning the ancient Roman board game discovered in Slovakia that was cited in the post just below.  The discovery itself was made in 2006.

From the Smithsonian Magazine Online

Researchers Are Trying to Figure Out How to Play This Ancient Roman Board Game 

Found in a grave in Slovakia in 2006, it is one of Europe’s best-preserved ancient gaming boards 

Jason Daily
January 10, 2018

(Slovak Academy of Sciences)

Despite all the plastic hippos, Pop-O-Matic bubbles and illustrations of Gum Drop Mountain, board games are not a modern phenomenon. In fact, whiling away the hours in front of board is an ancient past time and a board for an Egyptian game called Senet was even buried with King Tut. One of the best-preserved boards ever found in Europe is a Roman game unearthed in the tomb of a Germanic aristocrat in 2006. Now, as the History Blog writes, researchers are trying to figure out how the millennia-old game is played.

As the Slovak Spectator first reported, the board was found in a tomb unearthed near Poprad, Slovakia. The burial dates to 375 C.E., just on the cusp of the collapse of the Germanic tribes' relationship with occupying Roman forces.

It's likely the occupant of the grave was a leader of a foederati, or a band of Germanic mercenaries paid to fight for the Romans. According to the Spectator, the man was born in the area where his body was found, and spent some time in the Mediterranean region, possibly while serving in the Roman military. That might be how he acquired his wealth and taste for Roman board games.

The board itself is a piece of wood divided into squares, similar to a chess board. Found along with it were green-and-white glass, which appear to function as playing pieces. Analysis shows the glass itself likely came from Syria. While similar playing surfaces have been found carved into the floors of Greek and Roman temples dating back 1,600 years, this is the best portable wooden version of the game found in Europe.

"board game from the tomb of the German prince in Poprad is a great discovery and contribution to the history of games in Europe,” says Ulrich Schädler, director of the Museum of Games in Switzerland.
Schädler's team is now trying to figure out how to play the game before the board goes on exhibition at the Podtatranské Museum in Poprad later this year.  

It’s likely the board is designed to play Latrunculi or Ludus latrunculorum, which translates as “Mercenaries” or the “Game of Brigands” or some variant. That game was originally derived from an ancient Greek game called petteia which is referenced in the works of Homer. There are a handful of vague descriptions of how the game was played in ancient sources, but researchers have not successfully figured out the complete set of rules so far, though many gamers have come up with their own guesses.

“There were plenty of board games in ancient times with many variants, but reconstructing the playing technique is a very complicated process that only top experts can solve,” Karol Pieta, the archaeologist in charge of the dig, tells the Spectator.

The board game was not the only find in the burial chamber. Researchers also found lots of textiles and leather goods, as well as coins and furniture, which they are painstakingly conserving.

Scientists Are Figuring Out How to Play Some Ancient Board Games

Hmmmmm....

From Vice dot com

Scientists Are Discovering Long-Lost Rules for Ancient Board Games

You can play reconstructions of ancient board games thanks to these scientists and their algorithms

Matthew Gault
August 21, 2019

Cameron Browne doesn’t see games the way you and I do.

“I [deconstruct] them into their mechanisms,” he said. “I have quite a mathematical approach to games.” This perspective comes with the territory when you’re at the forefront of digital archaeoludology, a new field that uses modern computing to understand ancient games, like Browne is.

Humans have played games for millenia, and the oldest known board game is an Egyptian game that dates back to 3100 BCE called Senet.  “We almost never have the rules for these early games,” Browne said. “The rules have never been recorded, so our knowledge is largely based on historian’s reconstructions."

Browne is the principal investigator of the Digital Ludeme Project, a research project based at Maastricht University in the Netherlands that’s using computational techniques to recreate the rules of ancient board games. To assist in this work, Browne and his colleagues are working on a general-purpose system for modelling ancient games, as well as generating plausible rulesets and evaluating them. The system is called Ludii, and it implements computational techniques from the world of genetics research and artificial intelligence.

You can check out the Digital Ludeme Project here, and try out a beta version of an app that lets you test out its reconstructions of ancient games such as Hnefatafl—viking chess. While the games are imperfect, the idea is that computers can help scientists narrow down which plausible iterations of ancient games are more fun to play, and thus more likely to have existed in reality.

The first part of the process, Browne said, is to break games down into their constituent parts and codify them in terms of units called “ludemes” in a database. Ludemes can be any existing game pieces or rules that archaeologists know of. Once a game is described in terms of its ludemes, it becomes a bit more like a computer program that machines can understand and analyze for patterns. Cultural information, such as where the game was played, is also recorded to help evaluate the plausibility of new rulesets.

Using techniques from the world of algorithmic procedural generation, the team then uses the information in the database to infer and reconstruct rulesets of varying plausibility and playability for these ancient games.

“This is where the modern AI comes in and helps us evaluate these games from a new perspective,” Browne said. “To possibly help us arrive at more realistic reconstructions of how the games were played."

Next, the team uses algorithms to assess the generated rulesets. Artificially intelligent agents play these ancient games and their variants and build lists of moves. As the AIs play through different rulesets, they generate data about the game’s quality to help researchers determine if a ruleset is viable.

Fun is subjective, but Browne believes there are a few universal yardsticks. Games should have strategic depth, drama (the possibility of a comeback for a losing player), clear victories, a reasonable length, and they shouldn’t end in a draw too often.

The agents that play the games use Monte Carlo tree search, which was implemented in DeepMinds’ AlphaGo AI. However, the Digital Ludeme Project team didn’t want an AI as advanced as AlphaGo and so they didn't implement the deep learning tech that powers AlphaGo. They don’t need AI that can beat the top human players in the world; they just need something that works.

This approach has already found some success. In 2018, archaeologists discovered an ancient Roman board game in a tomb in Slovakia. Piecing together the rules of the game has proved an impossible task for researchers, but Browne and his researchers have a version of the game you can play right now.

Hard to Believe: A Hunt to Find a Scottish "Witch's" Bones

Holy Hathor.  I would say that words fail me, but that would be a lie.  I've got plenty of words about how I'd deal with the men responsible for these atrocities, I just can't write them down here - you'd all be horrified.

From thenational.scot

Bid to find missing bones of Scottish ‘witch’ feared to rise from dead

Nan Spowart, Journalist

August 24, 2019

A CAMPAIGN is to be launched for a national memorial to Scotland’s “witches” as well as the return of the missing remains of the woman given the country’s only revenant burial.

At a special ceremony at the grave of Lilias Adie next Saturday a proposal will also be put forward for a Witches Memorial Trail along the coastal path in West Fife.

Adie, who died in custody in 1704, became the only “witch” to be given a revenant burial as it was feared she would rise from the grave and return to wreak revenge on her persecutors.

The site in Torryburn is the only known witch’s grave in Scotland but it was robbed by curio hunters in 1852 and the last sighting of her skull was at the Empire Exhibition in 1938 at Bellahouston in Glasgow.

Now an appeal is being made for the return of her bones so that a proper memorial can be made to honour Adie and all those who suffered during the witch persecutions in Scotland.

Usually those accused of being witches were burned but because Adie died in custody after being maltreated it was thought her body would be reanimated by Satan and she would come back to terrorise those who had persecuted her.  [I sure hope she did!]  Medieval historians referred to these reanimated bodies as “revenants” from the Latin word “reveniens”, meaning returning, and the related French verb “revenir”, meaning to come back.

“Poor Lilias was treated so harshly but after her death she became almost a celebrity. Part of her coffin was owned by the world’s richest man and her skull was in the Empire Exhibition.”

Wood from the chest containing Adie’s body was taken from her grave in 1852 by curio hunters along with her skull and bones. They were working on the instructions of Dunfermline’s famed antiquarian Joseph Neil Paton who was keen on phrenology, a quasi-science widespread at the time, which postulated that a person’s character could be determined from the lumps and bumps on their skull.

He passed Adie’s skull on to the Fife Medical Association and it then went on to the University of St Andrew’s anatomical collection. Meanwhile some of the wood from her “coffin” was crafted into two walking sticks as trophy momentos.  One of these is in Dunfermline Museum and the other in the Dunfermline Carnegie Birthplace Museum.

Andrew Carnegie was given the walking stick by Robert Baxter Brimer, who had helped dig up Adie’s grave in 1852.

It’s also possible that Adie’s skull features in one of the paintings by Paton’s son, the artist Joseph Noel Paton, who often used items from his father’s collection in the background of his works.

There are old photographs of the skull taken 100 years ago at St Andrews University. This has allowed a facial reconstruction to be created – the only accurate likeness of a Scottish “witch” in existence.

Speirs, who was introduced to Adie’s case in 2014 by historian Dr Louise Yeoman, managed to find the grave on Torryburn’s foreshore. He has since been hunting for her skull and bones.

“I’ve written to various collections in Scotland but so far not been able to find them,” he said.

He said it seemed strange that there was no national memorial or retrospective apology to those who had been persecuted.

“It’s surprising there has been not yet been a degree of interest in the wrong done by the authorities in this case and there is no national memorial to commemorate these innocent people who were persecuted,” he said.

“It seems fitting to erect a memorial both to Lilias and more widely to all those persecuted as it was a horrible phase of historical injustice with a gender bias against women.

“Innocent people were persecuted and tried in an appalling way but that human suffering issue has been lost in the way we talk about witchcraft.

“The really stunning thing about Adie’s case is that it happened in 1704, the Enlightenment century and century of achievement.

“It’s a horrible reminder of the degree to which there was still a very strong belief in witchcraft.”

On Saturday a wreath will be laid on behalf of Fife Council by depute provost Julie Ford. Another wreath will be laid after a wreath-making workshop in Torryburn Hall led by countryside ranger Lyn Strachan and Councillor Kate Stewart, who has been a key driver in pushing for more recognition of Adie’s case.

“We are wanting a memorial not just for her but for everybody who perished after being accused of being a witch,” said Stewart. “There is no recognition that these people were killed for nothing.’’

“When you dig down it was a horrible, horrible time for ordinary folk, particularly women. The suffering was horrendous and we should recognise that wrong was done and remember them in a respectful way.”

She said a witch trail could link Torryburn with Culross, which was a centre of witch executions and is already attracting visitors after featuring in hit TV series Outlander.

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And so we arrive at the end of the article and get to the gist of this "drive" to recover Adie's remains and create a memorial for these women who were tortured and slaughtered:  TOURISM. MONEY.  Always profits over people. How disgusting.

Ancient Women's Voices in Modern Times: "The Silence of the Girls"

From Study Breaks

Pat Barker's "The Silence of the Girls" Gives the Perspective of Ancient and Modern Women Alike

The book reimagines "the Iliad" from the perspective of the epic's oft-ignored female characters.

Charlotte Susser, University of Chicago
August 23, 2019

"The Silence of the Girls,” written by Pat Barker, is a retelling of Homer’s “Iliad” from the perspective of a minor character — Briseis, Achilles’ war prize. Briseis, the queen of a city near Troy, is captured and enslaved by the Greek army and must learn to survive as the “bed-girl” of the famous hero Achilles. Tensions between the hero and the Greek commander Agamemnon escalate, and Briseis unwillingly sets in motion a quarrel that changes the course of the war. Even though she is a major catalyst of the story, Briseis hardly appears and is kept silent in the "Iliad."

Barker's “The Silence of the Girls” changes that by giving Briseis and the rest of the Trojan women their own voice. And their stories sometimes eerily echo those of modern women, forcing the reader to look at the experiences of both ancient and modern women alike.

Throughout the book, Briseis lives through and hears about many situations that modern women still find themselves in today. When Briseis is first led through the Greek camp as a new slave, she is catcalled and jeered at in ways reminiscent of today’s world. She recounts a specific cat-call: “Hey, will you look at the knockers on that!"

Along these lines, Barker uses modern swears to create the same jarring effect throughout “The Silence of the Girls.” The Greek men sing an obscene song about raping Helen and then killing her, with gratuitous cursing. The vulgarity of the song is shocking, even after all the previous horrible events, like Agamemnon spitting into Briseis’ mouth after he takes her from Achilles.

The book is one awful, shocking moment after another, and yet the cursing still shakes the reader. The modern swears bring readers out of the horrific life at the Greek camp and into today’s world, where horrible things still happen.

There are a few times when she tells stories that are eerily reminiscent of stories you hear today. When Briseis recalls her past friendship with Helen, she shares that the woman confided in her about her childhood sexually assault. Briseis thinks to herself: “Oh yes, I got that story too. Poor Helen, raped on a river bank when she was only ten. Of course I believed her. It was quite a shock to me, later, to discover nobody else did."

The moment harshly reminds readers of the #MeToo movement, which emphasizes the importance of believing survivors. This connection shows, once again, that the ancient world oftentimes bears an awful similarity to the modern one.

"The Silence of the Girls” is not all about the awful moments, however. Barker draws out similarities between ancient and modern women in some uplifting ways as well. When Briseis is remembering Helen’s friendship, she recalls Helen’s beautiful tapestries that she herself weaved. Briseis calls them Helen’s way of making herself human in response to the rampant objectification and shame that she faced. Briseis thinks, “[Helen] was so isolated in that city, so powerless … and those tapestries were a way of saying: I’m here. Me. A person, not just an object to be looked at and fought over."

Even in Helen’s impossible situation, trapped between two peoples who both hated and fought over her, she manages to find a way to be herself and to be human. Even though these words are given to a woman who lived thousands of years ago, they ring true for people today. 

Brisies also has her own moment of defining herself as a person. At the beginning of the novel, Briseis’ struggle with personhood and identity is heartbreaking as she is faced with slavery in the Greek camp after her (relatively) free life in the Trojan city. When Briseis goes to work in the medical tent at the Greek camp, she finds something she likes and is interested in. She narrates, “I really started to think: I can do this. And that belief took me a step further away from being just Achilles’ bed-girl — or Agamemnon’s spittoon."  

After everything Briseis has been through, after rape and objectification, she finds a sense of purpose and sense of self. It’s inspiring, to say the least.

Perhaps most importantly, “The Silence of the Girls” is about finding—and creating—a space for a woman’s perspective in a world dominated by men. Briseis recalls a famous moment at the end of Homer’s “Iliad” when Priam, the king of Troy, comes to beg Achilles to return his son Hector’s body to him for burial. Priam says, “I do what no man before me has ever done, I kiss the hands of the man who killed my son."

This moment has proven fascinating for many Homeric scholars, and yet Barker doesn’t care to analyze it herself. Instead, Briseis has her own story to tell, and she thinks, “And I do what countless women before me have been forced to do. I spread my legs for the man who killed my husband and my brothers.” Her words remind readers that Priam’s story, while painful, has already been told and that this is Briseis’s story now.

"The Silence of the Girls” gives a voice to the women whose perspectives were not told in Homer’s epic. This book is about breaking a repeated phrase: “Silence becomes a woman.” In the book, Briseis and Tecmessa, another captive Trojan woman, think about this phrase and then laugh and whoop and screech as loud as they can, even with all the men around them watching incredulously.

This book breaks the silence for ancient women through moments like this and also just by telling their stories and giving them a voice. It also recalls the #MeToo movement again for the modern readers, as well as the Time person of the year in 2017, “The Silence Breakers.” Once again, “The Silence of the Girls” connects ancient and modern women and tells their stories together.

Sorceress Kit? Roman Female Craft Kit? Or - What? Inquiring Minds Want to Know!

Leave it to Mary Beard to get to the heart of the matter.  You ROCK, MB!

From The Times Literary Supplement 

A Sorceress at Pompeii?

Mary Beard
August 19, 2019

The recent discovery at Pompeii – of what was once a boxful of beads and amulets – is of course a great find. And it is starting to be written up as a “sorceress’s toolkit”. And so indeed it might be.

By courtesy of Cesare Abate from ANSA agency

But my heart sinks a little as I foresee that all doubt will soon be left aside, and it will become simply “the sorceress’s kit from Pompeii” (in the usual way that archaeological hypotheses get more confident the further along the food chain they go).

Let me confess that I have had no more contact with this find than most of the rest of us, and am relying on the photos that have been released (one is at the top of this post). What we seem to have is a motley collection of beads, scarabs, skulls, a few willies and more. The wooden box they were kept in has “deconstructed” but the metal hinges attest that it was once there.

My problem is that what you call it makes a huge difference to how you think about it. I would be quite happy calling it someone’s precious box of charms – but there is, in our imaginations, a million miles between that and the “sorceress’s kit”. If you really want it to be the latter, you have to overlook the fact that a lot of the objects are plain ordinary beads AND you have to put a lot of weight on the “magical” properties of willies and scarabs and skulls. They may indeed have been “magical” (whatever exactly “magical” means) but they may also have been cheap exotic jewellery. (As for the scarabs, you only have to look at the Egyptian material from Pompeii more widely to see that some of it was heavily and “religiously” Egyptian and some wasn’t.) At first look, the jury’s out for me: somewhere between street magic and a slightly gothic jewellery box.

But sorceress? Now part of my heart leaps up to find a newly found object attributed to the ownership of a woman. But part of my heart leaps down at the sense that once again the only places we think of women are absolutely stereotypical “female” areas. (I get so fed up going into museums which genuflect to women in the ancient world with a case on cosmetics … apparently entirely forgetting that most women in the ancient world, like the modern, spent a lot more time working than primping. And some ancient men were well known to use “products” too.)

Now, one of the puzzles of such archaeological finds is that you almost never know who owned them, whether man or woman. (Even when you find material with identified skeletons in graves, you are not entirely certain that the dead person had been buried with their own possessions.) The bottom line is that we don’t know whose box of tricks this was. But the female “sorceress” line is not as certain as it is being made to seem. Part of it rests, I suspect, on the old stereotype of the witch (when we know that magic/fortune telling/sorcery was practised by men and women in antiquity). But part of it rests on trying to press the significance of the presence of amber in the collection, which it is said was connected with good luck in fertility and childbirth (hence a woman’s kit).

True, there is some evidence of that kind of connection, even if weaker than it is presented. (Much depends on such things as discoveries in Etruria where “fertility-like things” – a difficult category to define – have been found made in amber; one is a little figurine of a woman giving birth to a baby … or possibly to a monkey; people disagree!) But if you turn to what the elder Pliny has to say about the uses of amber in his ancient encyclopedia, you will find that he documents its use in treating problems with the throat, mouth and bladder; in his view, at least, it’s not just a women’s product. Some of the widespread evidence about amber is collected here. And it’s not all “medical” anyway.

So, “sorceress’s kit” this new find may be. But can we agree to keep the question mark in? It’s a “possible sorceress’s kit".

Mega Volcanic Eruptions in 536 and 540 CE and Aftermath Caused the Collapse of Multiple Societies and Massive Deaths

"...the volcanoes decreased average global temperatures by as much as 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit. Crops in northern Europe and elsewhere failed, likely triggering starvation and disease."

I zeroed in on that 36 degrees F decrease in temperature, because a few days ago, I read an article at The Washington Post about the recent average 2 degrees Centigrade increase in temperatures in the United States - which equates to 3.6 degrees F.  If a drop of less than 4 degrees F caused massive crop failures and famines around the globe, triggering societal collapses in one area after another and roving groups of bandits and invaders looking for food, water and animals - what do you think a 3.6 degrees F rise in temperature on average may do to crop production, local ecosystems and their plants and animal life?  

The "disease" the quote above refers to is the plague of Justinian, which killed "tens of millions of people" starting in 541, arguable the worst year of the combined sustained impact of the catastrophic volcanic eruptions in 536 and 540.

This scares the bejesu out of me!  The climate change in the 6th century CE was "mini" (it lasted about 10 years) compared to what we can expect to get worse and deepen from now into the foreseeable future - and beyond that. 

If you want to read the articles I did, here they are:

"2 Degrees Centigrade Beyond the Limit
Extreme Climate Change Has Arrived in America"
Steven Mufson, Chris Mooney, Juliet Eilperin and John Muyskens
Photography by Salwan Georges
August 13, 2019"
The Washington Post Online

"The Global Cooling Event of the Sixth Century.  Mystery No Longer?"
Dr. Tim Neufield, Princeton University
May 1, 2016
Historical Climatology Blog
(This is the first article I read about the period in the 6th century CE called the "Mini-Ice Age."  It can get a little bit technical in places, but not overly so).  

"Colossal volcano behind 'mystery' global cooling finally found"
Michael Greshko
August 23, 2019
National Geographic Online
(While this article does not pinpoint the location of the massive volcanic eruption that occurred in 536 CE, it does refer to it.  The article itself is about the eruption in 540 CE and how researchers eventually narrowed the eruption site down to a volcano in Central America).  

Well, You Can't Say I Didn't Warn You...

Starting off such a lovely morning here in good ol' Milwaukee, I am greeted by these headlines:

From The New York Daily News.  Oh, and so as not to leave anything out for the fake "Christians" who are willing to be Judases to the faith as long as Trump keeps appointing "conservative" Judges who all hate females, he also parroted a nut case that had been on Fox and Friends earlier in the day and called himself "The Chosen One."

I've been telling my friends and family since he commenced his campaign in 2015 (and never stopped) that Trump is the Antichrist.  I believe it.  Just wait - it WILL get worse.  Every time you think he's gone off the cliff, he does something even worse.  Remember - this is the man that some of  YOU voted for, and he has control over the "nuclear football."

4,000 Year Old "Hounds and Jackals" Board Found Carved into Rock Shelter in Azerjaiban

Late reporting this - that's what I get for not going through my "emails to myself" which is what I do when I find something I want to post here.  Doesn't work if I don't do it!

From Live Science

4,000-Year-Old Game Board Carved into the Earth Shows How Nomads Had Fun

By Tom Metcalfe December 10, 2018

A pattern of small holes cut into the floor of an ancient rock shelter in Azerbaijan shows that one of the world's most ancient board games was played there by nomadic herders around 4,000 years ago, according to an archaeologist who has investigated the find.

A distinctive pattern of holes scored into the rock of an ancient shelter in Azerbaijan are the remains of a board for one of the world's oldest games.

(Image: © Walter Crist/Gobustan National Park)

Walter Crist, a research associate with the American Museum of Natural History in New York, visited the rock shelter in a national park in Azerbaijan last year, searching for traces of the ancient game now known as "58 Holes."

The game is also sometimes called "Hounds and Jackals." British archaeologist Howard Carter found a game set with playing pieces fashioned like those animals in the tomb of the ancient Egyptian Pharaoh Amenemhat IV, who lived in the 18th century B.C.

The distinctive pattern of round pits scored in the rock of the shelter in Azerbaijan came from that same game, Crist told Live Science. But the Azerbaijan version may be even older than the game set found in the pharaoh's tomb.

Evidence from rock drawings near this shelter suggested that it dated to the second millennium B.C., or about 4,000 years ago, when that part of Azerbaijan was populated by nomadic cattle herders, he said.

At that time, the game was widespread across the ancient Middle East, including Egypt, Mesopotamia and Anatolia, he said.

"It suddenly appears everywhere at the same time," Crist said. "Right now, the oldest one is from Egypt, but it's not by very much. So, it could just be because we haven't found it from somewhere else older. So, it seems to [have] spread really quickly."

Crist was looking for the remains of another copy of 58 Holes or Hounds and Jackals that he had seen in a photograph in a magazine from Azerbaijan.

But after arranging to fly there, he learned a new housing development had buried the archaeological site near the country's capital, Baku.

So, Crist investigated other archaeological sites in Azerbaijan, which led him to the Gobustan National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage site in the southwest of the country, which is famed for its ancient rock carvings and drawings.

Archaeologists at the park knew about the holes in the rock shelter, but not that they had been used as a board game.The holes are cut into the rock of the shelter in a distinctive pattern that shows how they were used, Crist said. "There is no doubt in my mind — the games played for about 1,500 years, and very regular in the way that it's laid out," Crist said.

Though the rules of 58 Holes are unknown, many think it was played a bit like modern backgammon, with counters, such as seeds or stones, moved around the board until they reached a goal.

"It is two rows in the middle and holes that arch around outside, and it's always the fifth, 10th, 15th and 20th holes that are marked in some way," Crist said of the pattern cut into the rock shelter. "And the hole on the top is a little bit larger than the other ones, and that's usually what people think of as the goal or the endpoint of the game."

Players may have used dice or casting sticks to regulate the movement of counters on the board, but so far, no dice have been found with any ancient game set of 58 Holes or Hounds and Jackals, he said.

While it has been reported that the game is an ancient ancestor of modern backgammon, Crist rejects that idea — they have some similarities, but backgammon was derived from the much later Roman game Tabula, he said.

The game of 58 Holes is old, but it's not the oldest yet found; the Royal Game of Ur, dating from the third millennium B.C., is older, for example. Crist has also studied the ancient Egyptian board games of Senet and Mehen, which appeared starting around 3000 B.C.

Ancient players

Crist said the use of such ancient games throughout a wide area showed that they were able to cross cultural boundaries. [Photos: Ancient Tomb and Board Game Found in China]

"People are using the games to interact with one another," he said. Games were "kind of a uniquely human thing, kind of an abstraction — moving stones in blank spaces on the ground has no real effect on your daily life, except for the fact that it helps you interact with another person.

"So, a game is a tool for interaction, kind of like language — a shared way of being able to interact with people," Crist said.

He presented his findings at the American Schools of Oriental Research annual meeting in Denver in November.