Secret HistoryS


Gold Coins

Italian archaeological dig yields hundreds of ancient gold coins of 'inestimable value'

Jasmine Andersson
INews
Sun, 09 Sep 2018 17:14 UTC
gold coins archeology dig Italy
© Italian Ministry of CultureThe coins are priceless
An amphora filled to the brim with gold coins dating back to the 5th century has been found in an archaeological dig in Italy.

The collection, which contains an unspecified number of gold coins, was discovered in the Italian province of Como on Wednesday in a theatre basement not far from where the ancient city of Novum Comum once stood. The 5th century is when the Roman Empire fell.
Read More...
Star of David

'Rise and Kill First': NYT reporter's book on Israeli assassinations brims with jokes about killing Arabs

Philip Weiss
Mondoweiss
Sat, 08 Sep 2018 12:33 UTC
Rise and Kill First book cover
Ronen Bergman's new book, "Rise and Kill First".

Ronen Bergman's new book, "Rise and Kill First". Rise and Kill First is a staggering, investigative account of dozens of Israeli killings over many decades by Ronen Bergman, a leading Israeli journalist who is a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine.

Bergman has cultivated sources throughout the Israeli security establishment, and in creating what is often a page-turner that relates the details of one lethal operation after another, he tells his story entirely from the Israeli perspective.

As a result the book's tone is set by the black humor of Bergman's sources: the Israeli government killers. The author revels in their jargon - Red Page is the name for a "kill order" - and in their snuff jokes, the grisly humor that Israeli operatives employ when they describe killing Palestinians and other Arabs in their interviews with Bergman.

Comment: For more on Israel's sickening history of murder and assassination, check out:

Read More...
Cow Skull

Fishermen haul huge 10,000 year old Irish elk skull from lake in Northern Ireland


Live Science
Fri, 07 Sep 2018 01:14 UTC
elk skull fisherman
© Ardboe GalleryRaymond McElroy with his lucky catch
Fishermen in Northern Ireland pulled in the catch of a lifetime on Wednesday (Sept. 5), when they caught an enormous Irish elk skull that's estimated to be more than 10,500 years old. The impressive specimen is about 6 feet (1.8 meters) across and is almost fully intact.

Raymond McElroy and his assistant, Charlie Coyle, caught the massive antlers in their fishing net in the northwest region of Lough Neagh, a large freshwater lake. The men were fishing in water no more than 20 feet (6 meters) deep, about a half mile from shore, said Pat Grimes, a local historian who shared his photos of the impressive discovery.

"I was shocked to begin with when I got it over the side [of the boat] and saw the skull and antlers," McElroy told BelfastLive.

Irish elk (Megaloceros giganteus) have been extinct for more than 10,000 years, and were one of the largest deer species to ever roam the Earth, according to the University of California Museum of Paleontology. The name Irish elk is a bit of a misnomer on both parts, in that they're technically deer, and were found well beyond Ireland - they were present throughout Europe, northern Asia and northern Africa. Still, remains of these large beasts have been found in the bogs and lakes of Ireland more often than other parts of the world.

Comment: Exactly what triggered this major environmental shift is still up for debate in the scientific community, but what is clear is that it brought on extinction level events across the globe:

Read More...
Archaeology

Archeologists in Turkey find one of Christianity's most important sites & plan to open underwater museum


RT
Fri, 07 Sep 2018 15:03 UTC
Underwater city
© Mustafa Şahin/Lake Iznik Excavation Archive
A chance discovery by a team of archeologists in Turkey may have revealed one of the most significant sites in the history of Christianity after years of fruitless searching. And they're now planning an underwater museum.

When Constantine I, the first Roman Emperor to convert to Christianity, chaired the ecumenical Council of Nicaea in 325 AD, bishops from across the world descended on Lake Ascanius to iron out divisions in the early Christian church. The modern-day lake, Lake Iznik in Turkey, has for years been the focus of archaeologist trying to find treasures from that ancient time.

Now it turns out, what they had been searching for was right in front of them the whole time. And they finally found it thanks to some new aerial photographs commissioned by the government of Bursa province. The snaps clearly revealed the structure of a church submerged underwater.

Turkish archeologist Mustafa Şahin, who is the head of archaeology at Bursa Uludağ University, has been undertaking field surveys of the lake since 2006, but had never discovered the church. The ironic thing was, according to Şahin, the Bursa City Hall photography team had been capturing aerial photographs of the lake since 2013, "but hadn't thought of contacting any expert."
Read More...
Cheese

7,200 year old evidence of cheese making found in neolithic village in Croatia may be oldest yet

Nick Squires
Telegraph
Thu, 06 Sep 2018 18:55 UTC
Croatia archeological site
© Andrew M T Moore/SWNSSave One of the archeological sites in Croatia where the cheese residue was discovered
Neolithic tribes in Europe were producing cheese more than 7,000 years ago, archaeologists have discovered, after cheese residue was found in pottery discovered at digs on the Dalmatian coast of Croatia.

Analysis of the fatty residue revealed evidence of soft cheeses and yoghurts dating back 7,200 years, 4,000 years before the previously known date for cheese-making.

"This pushes back cheese-making by 4,000 years," said Sarah B McClure, associate professor of anthropology at Pennsylvania State University.


Comment: Apparently, back in 2012 they found evidence of cheese making by prehistoric European farmers, dating to between 7,200 and 6,800 years ago, further north, in what is now Poland.


The discovery was made at two archaeological sites in Croatia, where the remains of Neolithic villages and evidence of house structures were found, along with stone tools, pottery fragments and animal bones.

Comment: The possible reasons for man's rather sudden adoption of agriculture is an intriguing topic, for more on that, see: The Golden Age, Psychopathy and the Sixth Extinction

See also:

Read More...
Chess

James Corbett: The Secret Lie That Started The War In Afghanistan (VIDEO)

James Corbett
The Corbett Report
Tue, 04 Sep 2018 00:00 UTC
The Afghan War
Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed

How did the war in Afghanistan start? And how did NATO become involved in this conflict? These details are never discussed because they have for nearly two decades been hidden behind a shroud of secrecy. But now, after nearly two decades of lies, the remarkable truth about the secret documents that helped launch the Afghan war can finally be revealed. This is the story of The Secret Lie That Started the Afghan War.

For those with limited bandwidth, CLICK HERE to download a smaller, lower file size version of this episode.

For those interested in audio quality, CLICK HERE for the highest-quality version of this episode (WARNING: very large download).


Comment: And there is so much to corroborate the picture that Corbett paints in his video:

Read More...
Info

Early Roman water-mill complex was built for sailors, not locals

Andrew Masterson
Cosmos Magazine
Wed, 05 Sep 2018 19:12 UTC
Barbegal mill
© COPYRIGHT ROBERT FABRE, SAINT ETIENNE DU GRÈS, FRANCEThe remains of the massive Barbegal mill site in France.
A Roman water-mill located in what is likely to be one of the earliest industrial complexes in human history was not, as previously thought, critical for supplying the local population but had a more seasonal function, isotope analysis has shown.

The complex, which in its day comprised eight mill units sporting 16 wheels, is called Barbegal and located near the town of Arelate in France. It dates from the second century CE and was built under the aegis of the Roman occupation. Its foundations and other elements remain well preserved today.

Originally discovered in the 1940s, the Barbegal site is regarded as one of the earliest extant examples of how Roman industry developed in response to improvements in engineering. Writing in 1996, French archaeologist Phillippe Leveau characterised it as an example of "the role of technological change in the transition from Antiquity to the Middle Ages".

The site was also subject to continuous improvement. A report in 2007suggested that the range of millstones found there meant that Roman builders tested several designs to "take advantage of the increased power of hydraulically driven mills".

The mill had an estimated production capacity of 25 tonnes of flour per day - enough to feed the Arelate population of 27,000.

Impressive though Barbegal undoubtedly was, it was not an entirely indispensable piece of Roman infrastructure, a team headed by Gül Sürmelihindi from Germany's Johannes Gutenberg University now suggests.
Read More...
Archaeology

Archaeologists discover ancient Neolithic village in the Nile Delta


Asian Age
Mon, 03 Sep 2018 08:05 UTC
Neolithic
The ministry said the find indicates that humans inhabited the fertile Tell al-Samara, in the northern province of El-Dakahlia.
A joint Egyptian and French mission discovered several storage silos containing large quantities of animal and plant remains.

Archaeologists in Egypt say they have found one of the oldest-known villages in the Nile Delta dating back to the Neolithic era.

A joint Egyptian and French mission discovered several storage silos containing large quantities of animal and plant remains, as well as pottery and stone tools, the antiquities ministry said in a statement on Sunday.

Comment: See also:

Read More...
Archaeology

3,500-year-old papyri reveals ancient Egyptian medical practices

Nell Lewis
CNN
Fri, 31 Aug 2018 15:58 UTC
papyrus
This papyrus, from c. 1500-1400 BC, is inscribed with remedies for eye diseases
3,500 years ago, a woman might have done much the same thing to find out if she was pregnant as she would today: take a urine sample and wait patiently for a chemical reaction.

A papyrus from ancient Egypt instructs a woman to pee into a bag of barley and a bag of emmer (the variety of wheat cultivated by ancient Egyptians), according to a researcher at the University of Copenhagen, who is studying the document.

"If they grow, she will give birth. If the barley grows, it is a boy. If the emmer grows, it is a girl. If they do not grow, she will not give birth," reads the text, written in a hieratic script -- the ancient Egyptians' cursive form of Hieroglyphic writing -- and dated to the New Kingdom era, sometime between 1500 and 1300 BC.

The birth prognosis, which was first translated by a Danish Egyptologist in 1939, is just one example of a large collection of ancient Egyptian papyri belonging to the University of Copenhagen, acquired by grants from the Carlsberg Foundation. Of the 1,400 papyri, a tiny proportion are medical texts, most of which have remained untranslated.

Comment: The ancient Egyptians weren't the only people involved in curious medical practices:

Read More...
Nuke

United States of Psychopaths: Declassified 1960s docs reveal Pentagon plans to nuke USSR and China into oblivion


RT
Sun, 02 Sep 2018 09:41 UTC
Nuke tests 1952
© Intercontinentale/AFPUS troops during nuclear tests in Nevada. April 1952.
Plans for a nuclear war devised by the US Army in the 1960s considered decimating the Soviet Union and China by destroying their industrial potential and wiping out the bulk of their populations, newly declassified documents show.

A review of the US general nuclear war plan by the Joint Staff in 1964, which was recently published by George Washington University's National Security Archive project, shows how the Pentagon studied options "to destroy the USSR and China as viable societies."

The review, conducted two years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, devises the destruction of the Soviet Union "as a viable society" by annihilating 70 percent of its industrial floor space during pre-emptive and retaliatory nuclear strikes.

A similar goal is tweaked for China, given its more agrarian-based economy at the time. According to the plan, the US would wipe out 30 major Chinese cities, killing off 30 percent of the nation's urban population and halving its industrial capabilities. The successful execution of the large-scale nuclear assault would ensure that China "would no longer be a viable nation," the review reads.
Read More...