Secret HistoryS


Archaeology

Egypt says archaeologists uncovered 20 ancient coffins: "Most important discovery in years"


PhysOrg
Tue, 15 Oct 2019 18:24 UTC
new eyptian coffins
© Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities via APRecently discovered ancient colored coffins with inscriptions and paintings, in the southern city of Luxor, Egypt, Tuesday, Oct. 15, 2019.
Egypt's Antiquities Ministry says archaeologists have uncovered at least 20 ancient wooden coffins in the southern city of Luxor.

A brief statement from the ministry says Tuesday says archaeologists found the coffins in the Asasif Necropolis. The necropolis, located in the ancient town of West Thebes, includes tombs dating back to the Middle, New Kingdom and the Late Periods (1994 B.C. to 332 B.C.).
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Info

Second gate found in Hacilar Great Mound, Turkey


Hurriyet Daily News
Mon, 14 Oct 2019 02:24 UTC
Hacilar Great Mound
© Arkeolojik Haber
An excavation team working at Hacılar Great Mound are jovial after finding a second monumental gate in the province of Burdur, unveiling a discovery that a local kingdom ruled the region in southwestern Turkey for some time.

The Great Mound is located in the village of Hacılar, where Hacılar ceramics were discovered by the British archaeologist James Mellaart in the late 1950s. Excavations have been carried out in the field for eight years, and the city's second monumental gate was discovered this year.

The second monumental gate is located 200 meters from the first one in the settlement, which stood resistant to foreign threats with a chain of rooms called Casemate and was surrounded by an advanced defense system.

The presence of the second monumental gate, as well as the other findings obtained during the excavations, strengthened the idea of the existence of a local kingdom of the Hacılar Great Mound.

Speaking to the state-run Anadolu Agency, the head of the excavations, Istanbul University Archaeology Department's Professor Gülsün Umurtak, said that they reached the 350-meter defense system at the center of the mound.
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Star of David

The myth that the U.N. created Israel

Jerry R. Hammond
Foreign Policy Journal
Tue, 26 Oct 2010 00:00 UTC
United Nations
© Unknown
The popular belief that Israel was established by the United Nations is rooted in falsehood and prejudice against the rights of the Palestinians.

There is a widely accepted belief that United Nations General Assembly Resolution 181 "created" Israel, based upon an understanding that this resolution partitioned Palestine or otherwise conferred legal authority or legitimacy to the declaration of the existence of the state of Israel. However, despite its popularity, this belief has no basis in fact, as a review of the resolution's history and examination of legal principles demonstrates incontrovertibly.

Great Britain had occupied Palestine during the First World War, and in July 1922, the League of Nations issued its mandate for Palestine, which recognized the British government as the occupying power and effectively conferred to it the color of legal authority to temporarily administrate the territory.[1] On April 2, 1947, seeking to extract itself from the conflict that had arisen in Palestine between Jews and Arabs as a result of the Zionist movement to establish in Palestine a "national home for the Jewish people",[2] the United Kingdom submitted a letter to the U.N. requesting the Secretary General "to place the question of Palestine on the Agenda of the General Assembly at its next regular Annual Session", and requesting the Assembly "to make recommendations, under Article 10 of the Charter, concerning the future government of Palestine."[3] To that end, on May 15, the General Assembly adopted Resolution 106, which established the U.N. Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) to investigate "the question of Palestine", to "prepare a report to the General Assembly" based upon its findings, and to "submit such proposals as it may consider appropriate for the solution of the problem of Palestine".[4]
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Dig

Pictish stone with carved beasts, 'unlike anything found before'?


BBC
Mon, 14 Oct 2019 21:10 UTC
Pict stone
© John Borland/NOSASPictured from left the stone's carved beasts, an illustration of the beasts carvings and a side of stone later used as a grave marker
A 1,200-year-old standing stone discovered in the Highlands has carvings never before seen on a Pictish stone, archaeologists have said.

The stone was found lying in the ground and covered by vegetation at an early Christian church site near Dingwall.

Archaeologists have now revealed the side of the stone that was down in the earth and hidden from view was decorated with "two massive beasts".

Just over a metre of the original two metre-tall (6ft) stone survives.

Comment: See also: Also check out SOTT radio's:

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Star of David

Israel never had any intention of honoring either the 1947 Partition Plan or 1967 borders

Thomas Suárez
Middle East Monitor
Thu, 10 Oct 2019 17:32 UTC
Residents of Tel Aviv celebrating the passage of Resolution 181, November 29, 1947
© AFPResidents of Tel Aviv celebrating the passage of Resolution 181, November 29, 1947
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promised to annex parts of the occupied West Bank if re-elected in last month's General Election, eliciting outrage from world leaders. However, that "promise" to usurp not just the West Bank, but all of Palestine, is century-old news, an ongoing promise being kept, and no international outrage has ever really mattered in any case.

A well-worn chapter of Israel's creation myth explains its conquests thus: When in November 1947, the United Nations proposed partitioning Palestine into two states (General Assembly Resolution 181), Israel's founders embraced the offer with gratitude, whereas the Palestinians scoffed at it and attacked the fledgling "Jewish state".

The result of this alleged Palestinian intransigence? The "fundamental fact", as the pro-Israel spin-doctors at CAMERA put it, is that had the Palestinians accepted partition, there would have been a Palestinian state since 1948, "and there would not have been a single Palestinian refugee".

This is more than bizarre rationalisation for seven decades of imperialism and ethnic cleansing; it is historical invention. The Zionist movement never had any intention of honouring any agreement that "gave" it less than all of Palestine. Mainstream leaders like the "moderate" Chaim Weizmann and iconic David Ben-Gurion feigned acceptance of partition because it handed them a weapon powerful enough to defeat partition: statehood.

Comment: See also:

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Gold Coins

Hundreds of 8th century Arabian coins found in Poland by man digging for mushrooms

Matt Day
The First News
Wed, 09 Oct 2019 12:00 UTC
Bartosz
© Muzeum w Lęborku/FacebookMushroom picking Bartosz Michałowski found the silver coins in a landslip on the banks of the River Słupia near his village of Strzelinko, not far from the northern town of Słupsk.
A mushroom picker foraging in woods beside a river got more than just fungus after he unearthed a "sensational find" of hundreds of rare Arab coins dating back centuries.

Bartosz Michałowski found the coins in a landslip on the banks of the River Słupia near his village of Strzelinko, not far from the northern town of Słupsk.

Experts from a museum in Lębork have examined the treasure and said that all but two of the coins are Arab in origin and date back to the 8th and 9th centuries.

Comment: Dates, heraldry, and purity, are just some of data points that can be derived from ancient coinage, and the insights they provide into the past can be striking:

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Info

Neolithic agricultural revolution and the origins of private property

Jenna Marshall
Santa Fe Institute
Thu, 10 Oct 2019 22:02 UTC
Cave painting of cow & horses, Lascaux, France
© AlamyCave painting of cow & horses, Lascaux, France.
Humankind first started farming in Mesopotamia about 11,500 years ago. Subsequently, the practices of cultivating crops and raising livestock emerged independently at perhaps a dozen other places around the world, in what archaeologists call the Neolithic Agricultural Revolution. It's one of the most thoroughly-studied episodes in prehistory — but a new paper in the Journal of Political Economy shows that most explanations for it don't agree with the evidence, and offers a new interpretation.

With farming came a vast expansion of the realm over which private property governed access to valued goods, replacing the forager social norms around sharing food upon acquisition. A common explanation is that farming increased labor productivity, which then encouraged the adoption of private property by providing incentives for the long-term investments required in a farming economy.

"But it's not what the data are telling us", says Santa Fe Institute economist Samuel Bowles, a co-author of the paper. "It is very unlikely that the number of calories acquired from a day's work at the advent of farming made it a better option than hunting and gathering and it could well have been quite a bit worse."
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Gene analysis reveals Bronze Age slavery

Barry Keily
Cosmos Magazine
Sun, 13 Oct 2019 21:49 UTC
Genetic Analysis
© Open Forum Australia
High status families in late Neolithic and Bronze Age Germany kept slaves, genetic analysis reveals.

The finding, reported in the journal Science, provides fresh insight into ancient life in Europe, showing that complex slave-owning societies were well established long before those of classical Greece and Rome.

The research, centred on genome-wide data gathered from 104 individuals buried in Germany's Lech Valley between about 2500 BCE and 1700 BCE, was conducted by researchers led by archaeo-geneticist Alissa Mittnik from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, in Jena, Germany.

The scientists gathered nuclear and mitochondrial DNA from each individual and compared it to genetic databases covering ancient and modern humans. They also looked at how the graves were arranged and examined the relationship between the number and type of artefacts buried in each.

The picture that emerged was of a surprisingly stable and enduring society that depended on the import of fertile women and menial underlings. The Lech Valley hosted a farming community, Mittnik and colleagues concluded, that persisted for about 700 years.

The people of the valley were a mixture of Western Hunter-Gatherers, Anatolian Neolithic farmers and Steppe pastoralists, with the farmers' genetic heritage becoming more dominant as the centuries passed.
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Pyramid

The age of the Great Sphinx

Dr. Martin Sweatman
Prehistory Decoded
Sat, 12 Oct 2019 19:00 UTC
Shows that the feline symbol represented the constellation Cancer, not Leo, in the ancient European zodiac, and therefore reveals the true age of the Great Sphinx of Giza.
The Great Sphinx
© Prehistory Decoded
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Colosseum

Vivid gladiator fresco discovered at Pompeii

Ella Ide
Phys.org
Fri, 11 Oct 2019 12:00 UTC
gladiators
The fresco was uncovered in what experts think was a tavern frequented by gladiators
A vivid fresco depicting an armour-clad gladiator standing victorious as his wounded opponent stumbles gushing blood has been discovered in the ancient Roman city of Pompeii, Italy's culture ministry said Friday.

The striking scene in gold, blue and red was uncovered in what experts think was a tavern frequented by gladiators, who fought each other, prisoners and wild animals for the public's entertainment.

"We do not know how this fight ended. Gladiators were killed or shown mercy," Pompeii's director Massimo Osanna said.

A "Murmillo" fighter wearing a plumed, wide-brimmed helmet with visor, holds aloft his large rectangular shield in his left hand, as he grips his short sword in the right.

Comment: See also:

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