Thursday, July 18, 2013

The Mother of All Carved Lionesses? 40,000 Years Old!

Just about fell off my chair reading this article!  This lioness is an incredibly beautiful work of art -- and 40,000 years old.  Best of all is the re-uniting of the head with the body after so many years.

I've featured many carved lions and lionesses at this blog since it's founding back in April 2007.  I believe this one is the oldest thus far discovered. 

Ice Age Figurine's Head Found: Archaeologists Put New and Old Finds Together to Reassemble Ancient Work of Art

July 18, 2013 — Researchers from the University of Tübingen have successfully re-attached the newly discovered head of a prehistoric mammoth-ivory figurine discovered in 1931. The head was found during renewed excavations at Vogelherd Cave, site of the original dig in 1931. The recent excavations, between 2005 and 2012, have yielded a number of important finds. The discovery of this ivory head helps to complete a figurine which now can be recognized as a lion -- and demonstrates that it is possible to reassemble often fragmentary figurines from the earlier excavation.



The new discovery is presented in the 2013 edition of the journal Archäologische Ausgrabungen in Baden-Württemberg.

Vogelherd Cave is located in the Lone Valley of southwestern Germany and is by far the richest of the four caves in the region that have produced examples of the earliest figurative art, dating as far back as 40,000 years ago. Overall, Vogelherd Cave has yielded more than two dozen figurines and fragments of figurines. While the work of fitting together thousands of small fragments of mammoth ivory from Vogelherd is just beginning, the remarkable lion figurine, now with its head, forms an important part of the display of the earliest art at the Museum of the University of Tübingen (MUT) in Hohentübingen Castle.

Professor Nicholas Conard and his excavation assistant Mohsen Zeidi today presented the new discovery and discussed its scientific importance, after which the find rejoined the permanent exhibit at MUT.

Research Reveals World's First Calendar from 10,000 Years Ago

I would add the caveat -- that we have thus far uncovered...  This is really really cool!

Found after 10,000 years: the world’s first calendar

Humans had a sophisticated calendrical system thousands of years earlier than previously thought, according to new research.
The discovery is based on a detailed analysis of data from an archaeological site in northern Scotland – a row of ancient pits which archaeologists believe is the world’s oldest calendar. It is almost five thousand years older than its nearest rival – an ancient calendar from Bronze Age Mesopotamia.
Created by Stone Age Britons some 10,000 years ago, archaeologists believe that the complex of pits was designed to represent the months of the year and the lunar phases of the month. They believe it also allowed the observation of the mid-winter sunrise – in effect the birth of the new year – so that the lunar calendar could be annually re-calibrated to bring it back into line with the solar year.
Remarkably the monument was in use for some 4,000 years – from around 8,000BC (the early Mesolithic period) to around 4,000BC (the early Neolithic).

The pits were periodically re-cut – probably dozens of times, possibly hundreds of times – over those four millennia. It is therefore impossible to know whether or not they originally held timber posts or standing stones after they were first dug 10,000 years ago. However variations in the depths of the pits suggest that the arc had a complex design - with each lunar month potentially divided into three roughly ten day ‘weeks’ – representing the waxing moon, the gibbous/full moon and the waning moon.

The 50 metre long row of 12 main pits was arranged as an arc facing a v-shaped dip in the horizon out of which the sun rose on mid-winter’s day. There are 12.37 lunar cycles (lunar months) in a solar year – and the archaeologists believe that each pit represented a particular month, with the entire arc representing a year.

The 12 pits may also have played a second role by representing the lunar month. Mirroring the phases of the moon, the waxing and the waning of which takes 29 and half days, the succession of pits, arranged in a shallow arc (perhaps symbolizing the movement of the moon across the sky), starts small and shallow at one end, grows in diameter and depth towards the middle of the arc and then wanes in size at the other end.

In its role as an annual calendar (covering 12 months – one for each pit), a pattern of alternating pit depths suggests that adjacent months may have been paired in some way, potentially reflecting some sort of dualistic cosmological belief system – known in the ethnographic and historical record in many parts of the world, but not previously detected archaeologically from the Stone Age.

Keeping track of time would have been of immense economic and spiritual use to the hunter gatherer communities of the Mesolithic period. Their calendar would have helped them to pinpoint the precise time that animal herds could be expected to migrate or the most likely time that salmon might begin to run.

But Stone Age communal leaders – potentially including Shamans – may also have used the calendar to give themselves the appearance of being able to predict or control the seasons or the behaviour of the moon and the sun.

The site – at Warren Field, Crathes, Aberdeenshire – was excavated in 2004 by the National Trust for Scotland, but the data was only analysed in detail over the past six months using the specially written software which permitted an interactive exploration of the relationship between the 12 pits, the local topography and the movements of the moon and the sun.

The analysis has been carried out by a team of specialists led by Professor Vincent Gaffney of the University of Birmingham.

“The research demonstrates that Stone Age society 10,000 years ago was much more sophisticated than we had previously suspected. The site has implications for the way we understand how Mesolithic society developed in economic, social and cosmological terms, ” said Professor Gaffney.

“The evidence suggests that hunter-gatherer societies in Scotland had both the need and sophistication to track time across the years, to correct for seasonal drift of the lunar year and that this occurred nearly 5000 years before the first formal calendars known in the Near East. In doing so, this illustrates one important step towards the formal construction of time and therefore history itself,” he said.

More On the Controversy Surrounding Claim of Oldest Chinese Inscriptions Uncovered

Ooooh, it just makes me tingle all over when the experts get all bitchy with each other :)  Prior post.

From Art Daily, July 14-15, 2013

Experts row over 'earliest' Chinese inscriptions find at the Zhuangqiaofen archaeological site

BEIJING (AFP).- Fierce debate has erupted among experts in China over the discovery of 5,000-year-old inscriptions that some believe represent the earliest record of Chinese characters.

Pottery pieces and stone vessels unearthed at the Zhuangqiaofen archaeological site in the eastern province of Zhejiang push "the origin of the written language back 1,000 years", the state-run Global Times newspaper reported.

The inscriptions predate the oracles, writings on turtle shells dating back to the Shang Dynasty (C.1600-1046BC), which are commonly believed to be the origin of the written Chinese language system.

Some of the inscriptions were written together in what some experts believe resembles a short sentence.

Li Boqian, an archaeology professor from Peking University, said the symbols reveal the ancient Liangzhu civilisation -- which existed in Zhejiang and neighbouring Jiangsu in the Neolithic Age -- had already developed the basic structure of sentences from independent words, the Global Times said earlier this week.

Other specialists dismissed the significance of such a find. Xu Hong, an archaeology researcher from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, expressed scepticism on links between the inscriptions and the development of Chinese script.

"Even if those signs on the stones were characters, they were simply from a long dead east Asian country before the Middle Kingdom existed," he said on Sina Weibo, China's version of the social network Twitter.

"Many signs and character lookalikes earlier than the oracles have been found in east Asia."

Xia Jingchun, a professor of Chinese language from Beijing Technology and Business University, also wrote on Weibo: "It's long been believed by experts that there were more ancient characters than the oracles, because the oracles were too mature, and older languages are supposed to be less developed."

The inscriptions were found among artefacts unearthed between 2003 and 2006, state media said.



© 1994-2013 Agence France-Presse     

Sunday, July 14, 2013

Chess Femme News

Unless otherwise noted, information from The Week in Chess.

Judit Polgar sighting!  She surprised me by coming out of retirement to play in this event.  She cut her eye teeth playing rapid and blitz chess, as did 12th Women's World Chess Champion GM Alexandra Kosteniuk, who also played in this event.  It was evident Polgar was rusty.

Geneva Chess Masters 2013 (Geneva SUI) Mon 24th Jun 2013 - Sun 30th Jun 2013 -Official Site - Live
Geneva Masters GpA (4 players 3 Rds DRR Indiv TC:25m+10spm) - Games in PGN: GpA Games
Geneva Masters GpB (4 players 3 Rds DRR Indiv TC:25m+10spm) - Games in PGN: GpB Games
Geneva Masters KO (4 players 2 Rds KO Indiv TC:25m+10spm) - Games in PGN: KO Games
Geneva Open A 2013 (43 players 9 Rds Swiss Indiv ) - Games in PGN: Open A

Geneva Masters GpA Geneva SUI Mon 24th Jun 2013 - Sun 30th Jun 2013
Leading Final Round 3 Standings:
RkNameRtg1234PtsTB1
1Mamedyarov, Shakhriyar2753*11138
2Kramnik, Vladimir28030*1125
2Pelletier, Yannick257400*114
4Polgar, Judit2696000*01
4 players

Geneva Masters GpB Geneva SUI Mon 24th Jun 2013 - Sun 30th Jun 2013
Leading Final Round 3 Standings:
RkNameRtg1234PtsTB1
1Nakamura, Hikaru2784*11138
2Bacrot, Etienne27250*1126
3Kosteniuk, Alexandra248900*113
4Edouard, Romain2666000*01
4 players

 In the Open, two chess femmes finished in the top 10:

Geneva Open A 2013 Geneva SUI Mon 24th Jun 2013 - Sun 30th Jun 2013
Leading Final Round 9 Standings:
RkNameTiFEDRtgPtsTB1TB2TB3
1Cornette MatthieuGMFRA25788.042.055.52724
2Bauer ChristianGMFRA26378.039.054.52730
3Hambleton AmanIMCAN24616.535.053.52455
4Cherniaev AlexanderGMRUS24476.033.551.52427
5Manea AlexandruIMROU23896.030.048.52423
6Mamedjarova TurkanWGMAZE22496.029.049.02339
7Le Roux Jean-PierreGMFRA25765.533.055.52468
8Bondar YevgenSUI23075.531.053.02417
9Mamedjarova ZeinabWGMAZE22645.530.051.52340


WGM Deysi Cori and her brother both played in the 21st Montacado Open (101 players):

21st Montcada Open Montcada i Reixac ESP Tue 25th Jun 2013 - Wed 3rd Jul 2013
Leading Final Round 9 Standings:
RkNameTiFEDRtgPtsTB1TB2TB3
1Flores Rios MauricioGMCHI24927.540.50.040.0
2Cabrera AlexisGMESP25257.036.50.037.0
3Cori JorgeGMPER25497.035.50.038.5
4Gleizerov EvgenyGMRUS25537.034.00.035.5
5Burmakin VladimirGMRUS25756.536.00.042.0
6Nisipeanu Liviu-DieterGMROU26676.534.00.039.5
7Cuartas Jaime AlexanderGMCOL24846.533.50.037.0
8Guerra Mendez Jose AngelIMCUB25056.530.50.034.0
9Saptarshi RoyIMIND24476.529.00.034.5
10Ortiz Suarez Isan ReynaldoGMCUB26126.035.00.042.5
11Ulibin MikhailGMRUS25236.030.50.035.0
12Fluvia Poyatos JordiIMESP24456.029.00.033.0
13Anurag MhamalFMIND24016.027.50.030.5
14Cruz CristhianGMPER24995.531.50.036.5
15Cori T. DeysiWGMPER24375.531.00.036.0


If I were the organizers, I would consider coming up with a somewhat different name for this tournament (45 players).  Okay, it's probably just in American English that "Lazy" is lazy (meaning something similar to no-account slothfulness) - sorry, I couldn't resist!

9th Lazy Open 2013 Lazy POL Sat 29th Jun 2013 - Mon 8th Jul 2013
Leading Final Round 9 Standings:
RkNameTiFEDRtg+PtsTB1TB2
1SHISHKIN, VadimGMUKR250246.539.5050.00
2WARAKOMSKI, TomaszIMPOL248856.538.5046.50
3MAJDAN-GAJEWSKA, JoannaWGMPOL237556.536.0046.00
4SIECIECHOWICZ, MarcinIMPOL246236.040.0050.00
5WEICHHOLD, Pawelk+POL238256.039.0049.50
6URBAN, KlaudiuszIMPOL246246.039.0048.50
7ALIAVDIN, NikolaiIMBLR234946.035.5045.00
8KANAREK, MarcelIMPOL247846.035.0043.00
9BUGALSKI, MichalkPOL216155.536.5045.50
10EGGINK, RyszardI++POL212155.535.5046.00

WGM Joanna Majdan-Gajewska -- I'm not familiar with her but she finished plus 5 and in 3rd place overall.  Now if I could ever achieve a result like this I'd next run for President of the United States.  Holy Hathor! 


The top finishing female in the 41st World Open  took place 29th June to 7th July 2013) was IM Irina Krush. There was a 10 way tie on 6/9. Varuzhan Akobian drew with black in an Armageddon game vs Yuniesky Quesada to win the event. (113 players)

41st Annual World Op Arlington USA Sat 29th Jun 2013 - Sun 7th Jul 2013
Leading Final Round 9 Standings:
RkNameTiRtgPts
1Akobian, VaruzhanGM26126
2Yuniesky, QuesadaGM26396
3Bruzon Batista, LazaroGM26896
3Laznicka, ViktorGM26846
3Negi, ParimarjanGM26346
3Erenburg, SergeyGM26156
3Gelashvili, TamazGM25726
3Holt, ConradGM25316
9Milov, VadimGM26435.5
10Shankland, SamGM26015.5
11Panchanathan, MageshGM25835.5
12Ramirez, AlejandroGM25835.5
13Mikhalevski, VictoGM25525.5
14Shulman, YuryGM25425.5
15Arnold, Marc TylerGM25255.5
16Fishbein, AlexanderGM25045.5
17Robson, RayGM26285
18Kacheishvili, GiorgiGM25885
19Izoria, ZviadGM25745
20Shabalov, AlexGM25535
21Lenderman, AleksandrGM25485
22Molner, Mackenzie SIM25015
23Yang, DarwinIM24855
24Krush, IrinaIM24805
25Vioreanu, BogdanIM24045
26Neimer, VitalyIM23935
27Harmon-Vellotti, Luke CFM23685

2013 Netherlands Women's Chess Championship

The Dutch Championships took place 5th to 11th July 2013.  Final standings:

ch-NED w 2013 Amsterdam NED Fri 5th Jul 2013 - Thu 11th Jul 2013
Leading Final Round 7 Standings:
RkNameTiRtg1234567PtsTPR
1Schut, LisaWIM2277½1111½16.02559
2Haast, AnneWIM2277½0101½14.02300
3Lanchava, TeaIM2287½10½0114.02299
4Peng, ZhaoqinGM2389½0011013.52234
5Bensdorp, MarliesWIM2263½00½1103.02202
6Van Weersel, ArletteWIM2176½11½0003.02214
7Paulet, IozefinaWGM2228½1100002.52155
8Middelveld, Martine2130½00½0102.02113
8 players

More news at Alexandra Kosteniuk's Chessblog

I'm An American Dog, Woof Woof!

From the Alpha Galileo Foundation

An Alaskan Husky
Hairless and long-coat Chihuahua dogs of Mexico
Carolina "Yaller" dog
They may look different from each other but, just like us, they're all the same underneath the skin.

Asian origins of native American dogs confirmed


Once thought to have been extinct, native American dogs are on the contrary thriving, according to a recent study that links these breeds to ancient Asia.

The arrival of Europeans in the Americas has generally been assumed to have led to the extinction of indigenous dog breeds; but a comprehensive genetic study has found that the original population of native American dogs has been almost completely preserved, says Peter Savolainen, a researcher in evolutionary genetics at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.

In fact, American dog breeds trace their ancestry to ancient Asia, Savolainen says. These native breeds have 30 percent or less modern replacement by European dogs, he says.

“Our results confirm that American dogs are a remaining part of the indigenous American culture, which underscores the importance of preserving these populations,” he says.

Savolainen's research group, in cooperation with colleagues in Portugal, compared mitochondrial DNA from Asian and European dogs, ancient American archaeological samples, and American dog breeds, including Chihuahuas, Peruvian hairless dogs and Arctic sled dogs.  They traced the American dogs’ ancestry back to East Asian and Siberian dogs, and also found direct relations between ancient American dogs and modern breeds.

“It was especially exciting to find that the Mexican breed, Chihuahua, shared a DNA type uniquely with Mexican pre-Columbian samples,” he says. “This gives conclusive evidence for the Mexican ancestry of the Chihuahua.”

The team also analysed stray dogs, confirming them generally to be runaway European dogs; but in Mexico and Bolivia they identified populations with high proportions of indigenous ancestry.
Savolainen says that the data also suggests that the Carolina Dog, a stray dog population in the U.S., may have an indigenous American origin.

Savolainen works at the Science for Life Laboratory (SciLifeLab www.scilifelab.se), a collaboration involving KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm University, the Karolinska Institutet and Uppsala University.

Off With Their Heads (Literally!)

A stake through the heart isn't enough to kill Polish vampires, evidently...

Vampire graveyard found in Poland?

PR dla Zagranicy
Nick Hodge 12.07.2013 09:21
Archaeologists in Gliwice, southern Poland have discovered a burial ground where the dead were laid to rest in accordance with practices for alleged vampires.
Four skeletons were found at the site, where mandatory digs were being carried out prior to the construction of a ring road. In each case, the deceased had been buried with the head between the legs.

According to folk beliefs, this prevented a possible vampire from finding his or her way back to the land of the living. There was no trace at the burial ground of any earthly possessions, such as jewellery, belts or buckles.

“It's very difficult to tell when these burials were carried out,” archaeologist Dr Jacek Pierzak told the Dziennik Zachodni newspaper. However, it is believed that they took place in the early modern period. [So what is the time frame for the early modern period???]  Tests are due to me [be] made, so as to determine exact dates.

Archaeologists believe that the burials may have been done in such a fashion so as to protect locals from vampire attacks. Another theory is that the skeletons were the victims of cholera epidemic. [So it was a custom to cut off the heads of cholera victims???]  

Further research will be undertaken.

The last recorded instance of a vampire burial within current Polish borders was in the village of Stare Mierzwice, Masovia, in 1914. A corpse was dug up in the village, and the head was cut off and placed between the person's legs. (nh) [Good Grief!  1914 -- the 20th century, and people were still going around chopping the heads off of "vampires."  Amazing, just amazing.  But then, people can behave really stupidly.  Just watch the summer replacement television series "The Dome" and you'll see in the story line that is frightening because it rings so true just how ridiculous human beings can be.  Pathetic - and lethal to anyone who becomes "suspect."  Beware group think!] 

Oldest Chinese Symbols (Writing?) Discovered to Date

Fascinating story - and open about the ongoing debate as to what constitutes writing and what merely constitutes "symbols."  My question is - if a specific drawing of a symbol means something to the creator and to those who see it, isn't this writing?  After all, isn't writing merely a tool to convey meaning apart from the spoken word and gestures?

This is the photo of the ax head from the article -- would have preferred to see a line drawing of the markings:
A stone axe from near the Zhuangqiao relics site, in east China, shows a newly discovered form of primitive writing, archaeologists say. Photograph: AP

Story at The Guardian

Inscriptions found in Shanghai pre-date 'oldest Chinese language by 1,400 years'

Markings on artefacts from Zhuangqiao relics site date to 5,000 years ago and include string of words, says archaeologist
 
Associated Press in Beijing
  • guardian.co.uk,
  •  
    Primitive inscriptions dating back about 5,000 years – and believed to be 1,400 years older than the most ancient written Chinese language – have been discovered in Shanghai, archaeologists report.
    Chinese scholars are divided over whether the markings, found on artefacts at the Zhuangqiao relics site south of the modern city, are words or something simpler. But they believe the discovery will shed light on the origins of Chinese language and culture.

    The oldest writing in the world is believed to be from Mesopotamia (now Iraq), dating back slightly more than 5,000 years. Chinese characters are believed to have been developed independently. [I wonder what the consensus will be 100 years from now?  What if there is a missing link of writing akin to the missing link in human evolution?]

    The Chinese inscriptions were found on more than 200 pieces dug out from the neolithic Liangzhu relics site. The pieces are among thousands of fragments of ceramic, stone, jade, wood, ivory and bone excavated from the site between 2003 and 2006, Xu Xinmin, the lead archaeologist, said.

    Chinese scholars, of archaeology and ancient writing, who met last weekend in Zhejiang province to discuss the finding, thought the inscriptions did not indicate a developed writing system. However Xu said there was evidence of words on two pieces of stone axes.

    One of the pieces has six word-like shapes strung together and resembles a short sentence.

    "They are different from the symbols we have seen in the past on artefacts," Xu said. "The shapes, and the fact that they are in a sentence-like pattern, indicate they are expressions of some meaning."
    The six characters are arranged in a line, and three resemble the modern Chinese character for human beings. Each shape has two to five strokes.

    "If five to six of them are strung together like a sentence, they are no longer symbols but words," said Cao Jinyan, a scholar of ancient writing at Zhejiang University. He said the markings should be regarded as hieroglyphics.

    He said there were also stand-alone shapes with more strokes. "If you look at the composition, you will see they are more than symbols."

    But Liu Zhao, an archaeologist at Fudan University, Shanghai, suggested there was not sufficient material for a conclusion. "I don't think they should be considered writing by the strictest definition. We do not have enough material to pin down the stage of those markings in the history of ancient writings."

    For now the Chinese scholars are calling the markings primitive writing, a vague term that suggests they are somewhere between symbols and words. The oldest known Chinese writing has been found on animal bones (known as oracle bones) dating to 3,600 years ago, at the time of the Shang dynasty.

    Wednesday, July 10, 2013

    Analysis of an Ancient War Wound (and the Soldier Survived, Too)

    From Live Science

    Well, I'm not sure how the formatting is going to turn out on this article, I hope it is readable!  It sure is interesting.  
    Date: 02 July 2013 Time: 06:58 PM ET
     
    Dr. Helise Coopersmith is a musculoskeletal and body imaging radiologist for the North Shore-LIJ Health System, assistant professor of radiology at the Hofstra North Shore-LIJ School of Medicine and a member of the Hofstra medical school's admissions committee. She contributed this article to LiveScience's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.
     
    I have worked as a musculoskeletal radiologist for many years and have seen a wide range of bone injuries. But recently, I found myself for the first time using my X-ray table to look at a 2,500-year-old bone and a piece of an ancient arrow.
     
    The bone, discovered in Northern Greece, was brought to me by Anagnostis Agelarakis, a professor and chair of anthropology at Adelphi University. It was a section of the ulna bone, which is the inner of two forearm bones.  
     
    My initial impression was surprise. Although the outer region of bone, the cortex, was thinned by time, and the inner region, the medullary cavity, had long since disintegrated, the girth and contours of the bone were quite similar to a human bone one would see today.
     
    But, most notably, there was a turquoise-colored object jutting out from the bone, and according to Agelarakis, this was one of four sides of a bronze arrowhead. He proposed that this piece of the arrowhead was never removed by the field surgeons of the time because a barbed component anchoring it into the bone would have damaged the superficial soft tissues if removal were attempted.

    Beside my X-ray table, I had a photograph of the re-assembled skull that was found with the ulna bone and a sketch by scientific illustrator Argie Agelarakis (Anagnostis's wife) of what the soldier's face may have looked like around the time of his eventual death, presumably at about 58 to 62 years of age.

    My team and I took three X-rays of the ulna bone, and we found that indeed the films confirmed what Anagnostis Agelarakis had suspected.

    There was a barbed component to the arrowhead that could not be seen with the naked eye. The full extent of the remaining arrowhead could now be seen and was seated superficially within the bone, located only within the cortex, or outer shell. This supported Agelarakis's notion that the arrowhead could have been removed if not for its barbed component.

    There was a large bony (osseous) spur adjacent to the arrowhead, which make sense as the human body can form extra bone material in response to trauma. Such spurs take many months to fully mature, which implies that the soldier lived for a long time after the injury. Also, there was no bony erosion adjacent to the arrowhead, confirming that the arrowhead did not cause life-threatening infection.

    We also noted that the arrowhead and the osseous spur were in the region of the flexor digitorum profundus muscle, which means the injury would have made it difficult for the soldier to flex his fingers and grasp objects.

    There was a story behind the objects we were seeing, the story of an ancient Greek warrior who was an injured veteran, like many who are celebrated today and served by the hospital I work in.
    It is amazing to think that the same X-ray technology that we use to diagnose conditions for our patients can answer age-old questions and help solve historical mysteries.
     
     

    Farming Invented at Least Twice -- Once on the Persian Plateau

    Absolutely fascinating.  I've long believed that if there is some truth, however mangled, in the old biblical accounts, then maybe, just maybe, the biblical traditionalists are looking for the remains of Noah's ark in the wrong area (Ararat in Turkey).  To my train of thought, it follows that when Noah and his family eventually disembarked the ark (har!), it wasn't too long thereafter that the first evidences of agriculture appeared in our archaeological record, including the first evidence of deliberate grape-growing (called "vineyards" but methinks they weren't anything like the vineyards of today).  Just imagine...

    From sciencemag.org

    Farming was so Nice, It was Invented at Least Twice

    on 4 July 2013, 2:15 PM
     
    The invention of farming some 10,000 years ago set the stage for the rise of civilizations in the Near East. Yet archaeologists disagree about how it happened. Some say it arose in a single spot near the Mediterranean, and spread from there. Others argue it had multiple independent origins, a view that is getting new credence, thanks to findings from an early farming site in Iran.
     
    Whether farming arose once or a hundred times, it happened first in the Fertile Crescent, a broad region stretching from the Mediterranean Sea to Iran. Most research over the past decades has focused on the western stretches of the Fertile Crescent—including modern-day Israel, Palestine, Syria, Jordan and Turkey—in large part because those were the easiest areas to work in, both logistically and politically. Recent excavations in those areas have suggested that hunter-gatherers first began to gather and plant seeds from wild cereals and legumes, such as wheat, barley, and lentils, as early as 13,000 years ago. Over a few thousand years of such cultivation, the wild forms of these plants mutated into new, domesticated species that were easier to manage and harvest, making farming more productive and efficient.
     
    Until recently, the oldest known farming villages had been found at sites in Palestine, Syria, and eastern Turkey, where archaeologists radiocarbon dated the earliest domesticated plant species to about 10,500 years ago. Only a few sites were known as far east as Iran, and most of them had been excavated in the 1960s and 1970s, before that country's 1979 Islamic Revolution made it nearly impossible for Western archaeologists to work there—and also before the advent of modern archaeobotanical techniques that make it much easier for researchers to recover tell-tale plant remains.
     
    About five years ago, archaeologist Nicholas Conard and archaeobotanist Simone Riehl of the University of Tübingen in Germany hooked up with researchers at the Iranian Center for Archaeological Research (ICAR) in Tehran, and particularly Mohsen Zeidi, an experienced ICAR excavator, to begin work at the early farming village of Chogha Golan, in the foothills of the Zagros Mountains in western Iran. Iranian archaeologists had discovered the village about 15 years earlier, but never fully excavated it. While digging in 2009 and 2010, the team uncovered extensive evidence for the processing of plants in the village, including mortars, pestles, and grinding stones. The dig also yielded a huge quantity—more than 21,000 individual pieces—of charred plant remains, which Riehl analyzed for a report online today in Science.
     
    Radiocarbon dating of the archaeological deposits, some 8 meters in depth, showed that Chogha Golan had been occupied continuously between about 12,000 and 9,700 years ago or even later . That allowed Riehl and her colleagues to trace the use of plants over that entire period of time. They found that the people of Chogha Golan apparently began cultivating wild barley, wheat, and lentils more than 11,500 years ago, and that domesticated forms of wheat appeared about 9,800 years ago, nearly as early as at sites to the west. The team concludes that the advent of farming at Chogha Golan, and in the eastern Fertile Crescent, was an independent event that paralleled developments much farther west. This suggests, researchers say, that farming was more or less inevitable once the Ice Age had ended and climatic and environmental conditions were right for it, rather than being a fluke that arose in just one location.
     
    "These results do support the idea of multiple origins of agriculture," says Roger Matthews, an archaeologist at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom. He adds that the findings are consistent with recent DNA studies that also suggest multiple origins for both domesticated plants and animals. They also echo work that he, along with other British and Iranian archaeologists, has carried out at another Iranian site called Sheikh-e Abad, where it appears that wild goats were herded and penned, "a transitional stage between wild and domesticated that matches well with the transitional stages in plant use" found at Chogha Golan.
     
    George Willcox, an archaeobotanist affiliated with the University of Lyon in France, agrees that the geographical distance of the Zagros Mountains from the western Fertile Crescent could suggest an independent origin for crop cultivation. But he cautions that "it is too early to argue one way or the other" whether the actual domestication of cereals, as opposed to cultivation of wild forms, was an independent event. It is still possible, Willcox says, that the domesticated wheat found at Chogha Golan, which at 9800 years was several hundred years younger than the earliest known domesticated species, was introduced from further west.

    Part of Old Kingdom Sphinx Uncovered in Tel Hazor (Northern Israel)

    From phys.org.news

    Unique Egyptian sphinx unearthed in north Israel (Update)

    Jul 09, 2013 by Jonah Mandel
    Part of an ancient Egyptian king's unique sphinx was unveiled at a dig in northern Israel on Tuesday, with researchers struggling to understand just how the unexpected find ended up there.
     
    An Australian excavation volunteer on July 9, 2013, displays part of an ancient Egyptian king's unique sphinx with a hieroglyphic inscription dating circa 3rd century BCE, found during excavation at the northern Israeli site of ancient Tel Hazor. The sphinx was unveiled with researchers struggling to understand just how the unexpected find ended up there.
    The broken granite sphinx statue—including the paws and some of the mythical creature's forearms—displayed at Tel Hazor archaeological site in Israel's Galilee, is the first such find in the region.
     
    Its discovery also marks the first time ever that researchers have found a statue dedicated to Egyptian ruler Mycerinus who ruled circa 2,500 BC and was builder of one of the three Giza pyramids, an expert said.

    "This is the only monumental Egyptian statue ever found in the Levant - today's Israel, Lebanon, Syria," Amnon Ben-Tor, an archaeology professor at the Hebrew University in charge of the Tel Hazor dig, told AFP.  It is also the only sphinx of this particular king known, not even in Egypt was a sphinx of that particular king found."

    Ben-Tor said that besides Mycerinus's name, carved in hieroglyphics between the forearms, there are symbols reading "beloved by the divine souls of Heliopolis".  "This is the temple in which the sphinx was originally placed," Ben-Tor said of Heliopolis, an ancient city which lies north of today's Cairo.

    Tel Hazor, which Ben-Tor calls "the most important archaeological site in this country," was the capital of southern Canaan, founded circa 2,700 BC and at its peak covering approximately 200 acres and home to some 20,000 Canaanites. It was destroyed in the 13th century BC.
     
    "Following a gap of some 150 years, it was resettled in the 11th century BC by the Israelites, who continuously occupied it until 732 BC," when it was destroyed by the Asyrians, Ben-Tor said.

    He said the find was approximately 50 centimetres (20 inches) long, and estimated the entire statue was 150 centimetres (60 inches) long and half a metre (20 inches) high".

    How, when and why it reached Tel Hazor remains a mystery.  "That it arrived in the days of Mycerinus himself is unlikely, since there were absolutely no relations between Egypt and this part of the world then," said Ben-Tor.

    "Egypt maintained relations with Lebanon, especially via the ancient port of Byblos, to import cedar wood via the Mediterranean, so they skipped" today's northern Israel, he said.
     
    Another option is that the statue was part of the plunders of the Canaanites, who in the late 17th and early 16th century BC ruled lower Egypt, the expert said.  "Egyptian records tell us that those foreign rulers... plundered and desecrated the local temples and did all kinds of terrible things, and it is possible that some of this looting included a statue like this one".

    But to Ben-Tor the most likely way the sphinx reached Tel Hazor is in the form of a gift sent by a later Egyptian ruler.
     
    "The third option is that it arrived in Hazor some time after the New Kingdom started in 1,550 BC, during which Egypt ruled Canaan, and maintained close relations with the local rulers, who were left on their thrones," he said.  "In such a case it's possible the statue was sent by the Egyptian ruler to king of Hazor, the most important ruler in this region."

    Shlomit Blecher, who manages the Selz Foundation Hazor Excavations in Memory of Yigael Yadin, was the archaeologist who actually unearthed the finding in August 2012.  The statue's incrustation was meticulously removed over a period of many months by the excavation's restorer, before the intricate carvings and hieroglyphics were fully visible.

    "It was the last hour of the last day of the dig," she told AFP of the moment of the find. "We all leapt with joy and happiness, everyone was thrilled."
     
    "We hope the other pieces are here and that we find them in the near days," she said. [So do I!]

    Ben-Dor said the statue was most likely deliberately broken by new occupiers at Tel Hazor in an act of defiance to the old rule.  Finding the sphinx was "unexpected," said Ben-Tor, "but fits" archaeological facts and findings. "When you're in a bank, you find money," he said.

    To Ben-Tor, however, the true coveted find would be archives buried somewhere on Tel Hazor that could serve as an inventory to the ancient city's content.  "I know there are two archives," he said. "We already have 18 documents from two periods, the 17th and 14th century BC. If I found those archives, people would come running here."

    Tuesday, July 9, 2013

    Big News: Untouched Wari Tomb Discovered in Peru

    Lots of news stories about this find -- THREE QUEENS!

    Heather Pringle
    Published June 27, 2013

    First Unlooted Royal Tomb of Its Kind Unearthed in Peru
    Three queens were buried with golden treasures, human sacrifices.


    June 27, 2013 4:25 pm
    Smithsonian.com
    Smart News

    Unlooted Royal Tomb Found in Peru

     

    Archaeologists Keep Wari Tomb Discovery Secret to Prevent Looting

    Buried With Flowers

    Hola darlings!  I took a brief respite and when I was ready to come back, I was confronted with internet connectivity problems, ACHHHH!  Anyway, connectivity issues have FINALLY been resolved.  So now I'm going to try and play catch-up with some of the fascinating stories that have come and gone.

    A very interesting story about definitive evidence of flowers having been buried with two bodies some 12,000 years ago. Amazingly, the only grave with evidence of flowers being buried with the body is a 70,000 year old Neanderthal burial -- which is controversial. 

    Here's the story from National Geographic:

    Mysterious Pair Buried With Flowers—Oldest Example Yet

    Aromatic sage and mint lined graves found on Israel's Mount Carmel.

    Ker Than
    Published July 1, 2013

    Imprints of stems and blossoms stamped into the dirt of ancient graves are the oldest definitive proof of flowers decorating graves—a common practice around the world today—a new study says.
     
    Scented flowering plants, such as mint and sage, were imprinted in soft mud after they decomposed some 12,000 years ago in the graves, which are located in a cave on northern Israel's Mount Carmel.
    Ancient mourners lined four graves with the flowers, most notably one that holds the bodies of two people.
    The pair—an adult male and an adolescent of undetermined sex—belonged to the primitive Natufian culture, which flourished between 15,000 and 11,600 years ago in an area that is now Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria.
     
    The Natufian society was one of the first—possibly the first—to transition from a roaming hunter-gatherer lifestyle to permanent settlements, and was also the first to establish true graveyards, said study leader Daniel Nadel, an archaeologist at the University of Haifa in Israel.
     
    "There are examples of groups living in a camp for a few years, but some of the [Natufian] sites we know about were used for thousands of years," Nadel said.
     
    So what's new?
     
    The new discovery indicates that the Natufians were also among the first to use flowers to honor their dead.
     
    The only potentially older instance of funerary flowers is a dusting of pollen found at the site of an approximately 70,000-year-old grave of a Neanderthal dubbed Shanidar IV in Iraq. However, some scientists have argued that holes found at that site were made by burrowing rodents that stored seeds and flowers in the grave.
     
    "From [the Neanderthal] example until the Natufians"—a period spanning some 50,000 years—"there is not one example [of flowers decorating graves]," said Nadel, whose study appears this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
     
    He noted, however, that this doesn't necessarily mean that people weren't using flowers at graves during that entire time. More likely, the flowers decayed over time.
     
    "Finding such flowers is very difficult," Nadel said. "Asking for such preservation is asking for a lot."
     
    Why is it important?
     
    The evidence suggests the pair's grave was prepared with great care. First, a pit was dug, and then a thin veneer of mud was used to cover the sides. The bottom of the grave was lined with the plants—which bloom in pink and lavender—before the bodies were placed inside.
     
    The scented flowers were likely chosen as much for their aromas as their appearance.
     
    "There are hundreds of flowers on Mount Carmel during the spring, but only a small group provide very strong fragrances. It's impossible that the Natufians didn't recognize the smell" when they chose them for the graves, Nadel said.
     
    What does this mean?
     
    Based on items found in other graves at the cave cemetery—such as animal bones—Nadel thinks the pair was buried with great pomp and circumstance.
     
    "They didn't just place the bodies inside the graves and leave," he said. "We have to envision a colorful ceremony that maybe included dancing, singing, and eating. They may have hunted a few animals and had a big meal around the graves and then threw bones or meat inside."
     
    If Natufian burial practices were anything like those of modern cultures, the grave flowers were intended not only for the dead, but also for the living, Nadel said.
     
    "We create ceremonies and make a big fuss to show our respect for the dead," Nadel said.
     
    What's next?
     
    Nadel and his team are currently working to identify the age, gender, and relationship of the individuals in the flower-lined graves.
     
    For example, in the case of the double burial, "are they relatives?" he said. "Are they parent and child? Are they brothers? Or friends? Did they die together? And how come they were buried together? We don't know."

    Daniel Nadel's research was funded in part by the National Geographic Committee for Research and Exploration.

    Wednesday, June 26, 2013

    700,000 Year Old Horse's DNA Sequenced

    A horse is still recognized as a horse, from DNA 700,000 years old.

    From Scientific American Online:

    Horse Fossil Yields Astonishingly Old Genome—Are Similarly Ancient Human Genomes Next?
    Researchers have recovered DNA from a nearly 700,000-year-old horse fossil and assembled a draft of the animal’s genome from it. It is the oldest complete genome to date by a long shot–hundreds of thousands of years older than the previous record holder, which came from an archaic human that lived around 80,000 years ago. The genome elucidates the evolution of modern horses and their relatives, and raises the question of whether scientists might someday be able to obtain similarly ancient genomes of human ancestors.

    Ludovic Orlando of the University of Copenhagen and his colleagues extracted the DNA from a foot bone found at the site of Thistle Creek in Canada’s Yukon Territory in permafrost dating to between 560,000 and 780,000 years ago, which falls within the so-called early Middle Pleistocene time period. They then mapped the fragments of DNA they obtained against the genome of a modern horse to piece together a draft of the ancient horse’s genome.

    Comparing that sequence to the genomes of a 43,000-year-old horse, a donkey, five modern domestic horses and a modern Przewalski’s horse (a type of wild horse native to Mongolia), the researchers were able to gain insights into some key aspects of horse evolution. Their findings indicate that the last common ancestor of the members of the genus Equus—which includes modern horses, donkeys, asses and zebras, along with their extinct relatives–lived some 4 million to 4.5 million years ago, double the estimate suggested by the oldest unequivocal Equus fossils. The results also allowed the team to chart the demographic history of horses over the past two million years, revealing how the population waxed and waned as climate shifted and grasslands expanded and contracted. In addition, the researchers identified several genome regions in modern horses that seem to have been targeted by natural selection acting to promote advantageous gene variants related to immunity and olfaction, as well as a number of genome regions that may have undergone selection related to domestication. A report detailing the study will be published in the June 27 Nature. (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.)

    This is a pretty exciting development (so exciting, in fact, that I’m interrupting my vacation to write about it). And I can’t help but think back, as I do whenever a new ancient DNA story breaks, to the first time I ever reported on DNA from deep time. The year was 1997. Researchers had just announced that they had sequenced DNA from a 40,000-year-old Neandertal fossil. Specifically they had sequenced DNA from mitochondria—the cell’s energy-producing organelles, which contain their own DNA that is passed on along the maternal line.

    The Neandertal mitochondrial genome was a huge breakthrough—and it seemed to settle a long-running debate over Neandertals and the origin of anatomically modern Homo sapiens. But mitochondrial DNA represents only a tiny fraction of an individual’s genetic information; the real action is in the DNA that resides in the cell’s nucleus—the nuclear genome. The scientists I spoke to back then—geneticists and paleontologists—longed for a nuclear genome from a Neandertal. But they were quite certain that they would never ever get one. Mitochondrial DNA is far more abundant than nuclear DNA, because a cell can contain hundreds of mitochondria, whereas it has just one nucleus. Thus the chances of finding nuclear DNA that has survived the ravages of time is far, far lower than those of obtaining mitochondrial DNA—itself a rarity.

    And yet. Fast forward to 2010 and the impossible dream was realized: a draft sequence of a nuclear genome of a Neandertal. More recently the sequencing of nuclear DNA retrieved from an enigmatic finger bone from Denisova Cave in Siberia has revealed a previously unknown kind of human. And scientists have obtained an astonishingly complete Neandertal genome from the same cave site. These ancient nuclear genomes paint a rather different picture of archaic-modern human relations than the early mitochondrial DNA work did, and are providing a wealth of fascinating insights into our own evolution and that of our relatively recently extinct cousins.

    This fantastically old horse genome got me thinking about the possibility of recovering DNA from comparably ancient human relatives—ones who roamed the earth long before the Neandertals and the Denisovans. If scientists had such data, what would they try to learn from it? When I asked paleoanthropologist John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin this question, he had this to say:
    “Right now the Denisovan and Neandertal genomes have raised a new scenario of population structure for Middle Pleistocene people. They show us that earlier hominins in Eurasia were largely supplanted, possibly with some mixture, by a dispersal of Neandertal and Denisovan ancestors. What was that pre-Neandertal population like? Did it have its own unique events shaping its evolution? How many times did large-scale dispersals of human populations sweep across the Old World? And what happened to African ancestors during this key Middle Pleistocene time period?”

    Now, lest we get ahead of ourselves, it must be noted that the horse fossil was found in permafrost, which no doubt contributed to the preservation of the DNA. So will scientists have to find a Middle Pleistocene human on ice (or ice-cold soil) to have any hope of getting a genome out of it? Not necessarily. The Denisova specimens weren’t preserved in permafrost and their ancient DNA is first class. Still, they are far younger than the horse fossil. But according to ancient DNA expert Hendrik Poinar of McMaster University in Canada, the key to DNA preservation is dry conditions. “While cold and dry is best, warm and dry will still work,” he explains.

    Poinar additionally noted that he is certain that researchers will eventually recover genomes even older than this 700,000-year-old (give or take) one. Which brings me to my final thought. When I learned of the horse genome, the first thing I thought was: what does this mean for Australopithecus sediba, the two million-year-old fossil species unearthed in at the site of Malapa in South Africa a few years ago. It has been held up as a candidate for the long-sought ancestor of our genus, Homo. These fossils are exquisitely preserved and may even contain organic material. Some of the remains are completely encased in rock, visible only with computed tomography and other imaging techniques. Might scientist be able to extract DNA from these fossils—and might that DNA be sufficiently well preserved to yield a genome? “I think DNA from Malapa is very possible and an exciting prospect,” Poinar says.

    In fact, efforts are already under way to recover DNA from the A. sediba fossils, “We are in the process of looking and there are specimens presently being investigated,” says paleoanthropologist Lee Berger of the University of the Witwatersrand, who is leading the recovery and analysis of the fossils from Malapa. “It is of course unlikely in a [two million-year-old] fossil,” he notes, “nevertheless, Malapa has as good a chance as anywhere if the impossible is going to prove possible.”

    I’m going to resume my vacation now. But I’ll be daydreaming about genomes from our long-vanished cousins. The future of ancient DNA research has never looked brighter.

    Monday, June 24, 2013

    Pissed Off Shabti Demands Bread, Beer and Beef!

    Hey, I don't blame the dude. He's been starving for the past 80 years!  Now he's going on march to demand BREAD, BEER, AND BEEF!  Hey dude, I hear you.  I love them, too!  Surely it must be possible to satisfy Neb-Senu's appetite by providing miniaturised versions of bread, beer and beef on a mini offering table presented before him.  Come on, people! Feed Neb-Senu! 

    There is a video embedded in the news article below, but I was not able to capture it to post here.  I found this same video, minus sound, at You Tube, and you can watch and judge for yourselves, minus the distraction of commentary!




    Neb-senu is the tall ebony-colored Shabti on the right-end of the row (farthest away from viewer).

    Ancient Egyptian Statue Mysteriously Rotates at Museum




    An ancient Egyptian statue in a British museum has sparked debate after it was captured on video seemingly rotating on its own.

    The 10-inch tall statue of Neb-senu has been on display at the Manchester Museum in Manchester, England, for 80 years but it was only recently that museum staff noticed the statue moving.

    "Most Egyptologists are not superstitious people. I wondered who had changed the object's position without telling me," the museum's curator, Campbell Price, told the U.K.'s Sun. "But the next time I looked, it was facing in another direction-and a day later had yet another orientation."

    With his curiosity piqued, Price returned the statue of the Egyptian idol to its original position in a locked glass case and set up a camera to film the statue over an 11-hour period. The resulting time-lapse video, Price says, shows the statue moving on its own.

    Other experts attribute the rotation to a more scientific reasoning, such as subtle vibrations that cause the statue to move.

    "The statue only seems to spin during the day when people are in the museum," Carol Redmount, associate professor of Egyptian archeology at the University of California, Berkeley, told ABC News. "It could have something to do with its individual placement and the individual character of the statue."

    The statue, made from serpentine, shows what is likely an official with "priestly duties," according to Price, wearing a shoulder-length wig and knee-length kilt.

    The hieroglyphs on the back of the statue spell out, "bread, beer and beef," a "prayer for offerings for the spirit of the man," Price told the Sun.

    ********************************************

    One of my favorite old-time movies is "Miracle of the Bells."  It starred, of all people - Fred MacMurray (he later went on to television fame in the 1960's as the father of "My Three Sons" and a drop-dead gorgeous actress who sported only one name - Valli (Dorothy Sebastian).  In the film, she plays an actress who strikes it big by scoring the lead in a major film production of "Joan of Arc" -- but before the film can be completed she dies of -- I think -- tuberculosis.  The producers decide to pull the film from distribution rather than working around an ending with an unknown, now dead, although brilliant, actress.  Fred MacMurray, who had befriended the "Kid" as he called her, years before, when she was a struggling actress dancing in a two-bit woo-woo show to make ends meet, hits upon an ingenious plan to not only pay homage to the girl he maybe could have loved and maybe even did love and his coldest, calculating most commercial reporter instincts to promote the film and, he hopes, put enough pressure on the Hollywood producers to release the film, which shows the "Kid" at her finest.

    And I have to say that, without watching a single scene fresh of the movie, I don't even know if' it has ever been released as a video, just remembering Valli acting as Joan of Arc was a very emotional and transcendent experience as I watched the old film on cable TV years ago in the 1980's (when it was still reasonably priced - I don't have cable TV now).

    Anyway, the grand climax of the movie takes place in the actress's hometown church -- a small, struggling mining town in Pennsylvania, I believe.  As the church is packed with people for her final memorial service, the bells of the church begin to ring, and all across the town, all other church bells begin to ring too.  This is spread across the region, from town to town, city to city, as many church bells begin to ring at precisely the same time, and -- miraculously, all across the United States, as people had read reporter Fred MacMurray's touching tribute to the deceased actress and the demise of her one and only and greatest film role of all time in a movie that would never be seen, was spread across the land in the week before the memorial service took place.

    In the local church where the deceased actress lay in a fine coffin beneath a hovering stone sculpture of the Archangel Michael, as the church bells begin to ring, and other bells from other churches join in, filling the air with deafening sound, suddenly, to the amazed eyes of all beholding, the Archangel begins to move! 

    The Archangel, in fact, moves about 45 degrees so that He is now hovering with (I seem to recall) a mighty sword arched over the dead actress's coffin, as if protecting it, as if blessing it.  And the head of the statue appears to be gazing down at her, as she lays at rest. 

    Of course the story of the miraculous event that occurred in that little, tired church in Pennsylvania, spreads across the United States in a firestorm -- or what was a firestorm back then, when there were only telephones and telegraphs! 

    Enough publicity is generated, and enough public opinion arises, that the Hollywood producers who had pulled Valli's finest hour as Joan of Arc announce that they are releasing the film after all!

    And thus, the Miracle of the Bells ends on a sad, but triumphant note.

    Well, it got to me, heh?  I still remember so much of it, even after all these years! 

    Now, let me tell you darlings, Father Paul, who was the young but worldly wise priest of the old parish church where the actress was laid to rest, he was played by none other than a young and very skinny FRANK SINATRA!  And he didn't sing a note, either! 

    Valli went on to play in another bizarre but smash film that has become a cult classic: The Red Shoes.

    I do not remember any other films in which she starred.  But those two films were enough to fill the plate of a great actress, back in those days.

    Anyway -- back  to the Miracle of the Bells.  Father Paul deduces that it was the vibrations of the extended bell ringing that caused the stone sculpture of Michael the Archangel to swing around on its base to face protectively over Valli's coffin.

    Vibrations.  The Music of the Goddess.  Oh, if only we would stop and take awhile to listen once again to the Divine Music.

    P.S.  Guess what, darlings!  The colorized version of The Miracle of the Bells is available to view on You Tube:




    So, is it just vibrations (shades of the Beach Boys' smash song from the mid 1960's Good Vibrations...) that is causing Neb-Senu to spin in his glass case?  And was it just good good good vibrations that caused the admittedly fictional stone stature of Michael the Archangel to pivot around on his pedestal to protectively overlook the coffin of the actress played by Valli?

    A Couple Personal Super Moon Photos

    Hola darlings!

    These are not the best quality, but I did get out last night and took several photographs of the Super Moon from the vantage point of my front yard near the end of my garage.  I forgot about getting out at Moon rise due east which happened a few hours earlier (I was busy ripping carpeting off my staircase), but the photos I took were looking toward the southeast and the Moon was just beautiful!  I wish I could have captured it much better.  Oh well.

    These photographs that I'm posting remind me a little of water-colors; they were taken about 10:00 p.m. last night.  It was very humid and "dewey" last night -- at one point yesterday the dew point was at SEVENTY!  In Milwaukee, Wisconsin!  Holy Hathor!  Dew point is worse than humidity.  I have discovered over the past several years, since local weather forecasts have started reporting on dew points, that I get extremely uncomfortable at anything over 55.  Sixty is torture.  Seventy is HELL.


    The photo below is the best of the photos I took -- slightly less blurred looking and no water spots (or Phantom Moons, as I prefer to think of them):


    I wished Mr. Don was here to see this with me.  Even my poor photo captures the incredible beauty of the Moon's light bouncing off the clouds last night, and the partial echo of the Moon's incredible glow from the street lamp.

    Sunday, June 23, 2013

    9 Queens Upcoming Events

    Hola!  Check out the latest from 9 Queens.  I hope you are supporting them!  9 Queens does great work with kids and women.  We need more of them around - across the entire USA!!!



    Shang Dynasty Capital To Be Excavated

    From Zeenews.com
    June 23, 2013

    China begins excavation to discover 3000-year-old ancient city

    Beijing: Chinese archaeologists have started a three-month excavation project in north China's Hebei Province to discover an ancient state capital dating back to more than 3,000 years.

    The excavation project is taking place in the Caijiafen village. The State Administration of Cultural Heritage has approved the excavation in April.
    Archaeologists and historians believe that Caijiafen village has served as the capital of Guzhu state, a vassal state of the Shang Dynasty (1600 BC to 1046 BC), according to Xie Fei, an expert from the Hebei Provincial Cultural Heritage Bureau.

    The excavation will help in unveiling the history and culture of the ancient state, Xie told state-run Xinhua news agency.
    About 30 archaeologists from Renmin University and Hebei Provincial Cultural Heritage Bureau are participating in the excavation project.

    PTI

    Super Moon Over Rotterdam

    Hola darlings!

    Yesterday was the "super Moon" event - as I understand it, the Moon happened to be a point in its rotation around the Earth closest to it and this coincided with the "full" Moon, making the Moon look super-large and particularly close in the skies in the northern hemisphere last night.  I happened to see this breathtaking photograph at Xinunet while I was checking out a story on the upcoming excavation of an ancient Shang Dynasty capital.



    What struck me was the juxtoposition of the lunar crescent on the top of a mosque against the full Moon Goddess in all of her glory rising above Rotterdam in The Netherlands!  A truly international symbol as well as an international event published in international news coverage.  How connected we have become.  If only we would remember that underneath our different skin colors and cultures, we're all the same, too.

    Does that crescent symbol look familiar to you?  It sure does to me...


    Above is one of the sides of the incredibly beautiful and ancient Narmer Palette from pre-dynastic Egypt, although some historians call it Dynasty Zero.  Zero because it was right around the time Narmer was united Upper and Lower Egypt into one kingdom.  Check out Hat-hert a/k/a Hathor, the cow/lunar goddess, who was later turned into a daughter of the Sun god, Re, and became a solar goddess. But her first, and most ancient, association is with the Moon, and in some depictions of Hat-hert and later, Isis, she wears the "horns" of the Moon (a/k/a cow horns) enclosing the sacred solar disc.  Hat-hert also prominently appears on the reverse side of the Narmer Palette.  The Palette's antiquity is attested to by the fact that Hat-hert is depicted in her original cow form.  In later incarnations during her long herstory in ancient Egypt, Hat-hert was depicted as a woman with cow-ears, and still later, as a woman wearing a "crown" of cow horns. 

    Here is a much later depiction of the lunar crescent worn as a crown by this beautifully formed alabaster goddess who "may" be Ishtar (Astarte), from a "necropolis of Hillah, near Babylon" with a 400 year swing date of 2nd Century BCE or CE, at the Lourve (photo from Wikipedia Commons):

     
    At Carthage, the Moon goddess was worshipped as the fearsome Tanit, sometimes depicted with a lion's head (Hat-Hert was sometimes transformed into a lioness to wreak destruction upon sinning Egyptians, harking back to predynastic depictions of Hat-Hert as a warrior goddess:

      Tanit, to whom infants and young children were sacrificed by the CARthiginians (CAR is another archaic Moon goddess, whose worship is found in ancient place-names, I've written about her, too) is said to be an incarnation of Astarte:


    The photo above is from Wikipedia Commons.  Do you see a resemblance between this form of the Goddess and the ancient Egyptian "ankh" symbol?  I also couldn't help but notice that in this depiction of a lunar goddess, the crescent Moon is "inverted" over the Goddess' head and I was much struck by its resemblance to some depictions I've seen of doves, so often associated with the Roman Catholic Mother of God, the Virgin Mary.  Periodically in modern-era Egypt (prior to the Islamists taking over the government after the overthrow of Mubarak), thousand of people attested to seeing the Virgin Mary appearing in the skies above Coptic Christian churches, often surrounded by "doves."  I've written about some of these apparitions of the Virgin Mary. 

    If you're interested in learning more, please check out:

    July 2, 2009:  The True Origins of the Koran (formatting is screwed up on this post, and many of my older posts, due to various changes that Google Blogger has gone through since the founding of this blog.  I hope you will take the time to slog through it despite no paragraph breaks!)

    April 15, 2008:  Goddess Tanit

    July 4, 2008:  The Goddess of the Moon

    Did you know that the Moon Goddess has an intimate connection with Chinese Xiang'qi and the even older "pre-chess" game of Xiang'xi?  Oh yeah, if you read herstory between the lines, sometimes one can discern the truth.  Please check out my post from October 27, 2007:  The Chinese Moon Goddess and Chess

    And if you would like to read more about some of the Virgin Mary apparitions:

    August 24, 2007:  Goddess Sighting: Our Lady of Guadalupe (check out the nice crescent Moon the Our Lady is standing upon)

    Our Lady of Zeitoun, from Wikipedia (I'm sure I posted about this and other Virgin Mary apparitions occurring in Egypt, but right now I cannot find them in my blog and I don't have time to hunt and peck at the moment)

    At Tour Egypt:  Egypt: Egypt's 1960's Remarkable Virgin Mary Sightings, Egypt
    Check out the "dove" above the "Virgin Mary" figure -- does it remind you of the crescent Moon depiction in the ancient stone carving above Tanit's head at Carthage (above):



    She reappeared again in 2009, at a different location, but this time the birds around here were described as a swirl of pigeons and the Goddess had been reduced to appearing as an amorphous "flash of light."  Well, maybe.  Depends who you talked to when it happened...  Such things, after all, are in the eye of the beholder:

    December 15, 2009:  EGYPT: Is it the Virgin Mary or just a curious flash of light?

    For my part, I think the Mother has been, and is still trying, desperately, to reach out to us, but we're just not getting Her message.  Beware when she returns as Kali or Car.  And those in the know won't be able to say we weren't warned.
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