Secret HistoryS


Archaeology

Archaeologists discover ancient Neolithic village in the Nile Delta

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.

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Archaeology

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

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:


Nuke

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

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.

Camera

Ancient Greek urn found from tourist's holiday photos

Vases
© Remo Casilli / Reuters
A tourist looking back over his holiday photos accidentally discovered a remarkably intact ancient amphora, estimated to date from the Byzantine period, floating in the sea off a beach on Greece's largest island, Crete.

The man noticed the suspicious object on Thursday afternoon while looking back at pictures he took of the calm sea at the popular Arina beach in Heraklion. Initially, the man feared the bobbing item was something sinister like a floating head, reports local media Neakriti.

He contacted the sea sports facility at the beach, showed them the image and directed them to the spot where he took his holiday snap, and they soon discovered that the strange object was an ancient amphora.

Document

Clinton-Yeltsin documents show 1990s 'equal partnership' for what it really was

YeltsinClinton
© ReutersUS President Bill Clinton holds a meeting with Russian President Boris Yeltsin in Istanbul, November 18, 1999.
Almost 600 pages of transcripts from meetings and phone calls between US President Bill Clinton and Russian President Boris Yeltsin paint a picture of a time when the West liked Russia because Moscow did what it was told.

"You have guided your country through a historic time and you are leaving a legacy that will leave Russians better off for years to come," Clinton told Yeltsin in a phone call on December 31, 1999, the day the Russian leader announced his surprise resignation.

"I know that the democratic changes you led made it possible for Russia to be integrated into the international community," Clinton continued, adding that historians will call Yeltsin "the father of Russian democracy" who worked to "make the world a safer place."


Snakes in Suits

'Not a Hero': John McCain's family ties to Jewish organized crime syndicates in Arizona

His support for pro-Israel, anti-Russian American foreign policy was zealous, verging on fanatical. This explains part of that puzzle.
This is a reprint of an article from August 2008 by the excellent Michael Collins Piper. Vladimir Putin once famously speculated that he thought McCain suffered from mental instability caused by his long detention in Vietnamese prisons, when trying to explain why McCain was so fanatically pro-Israel and hostile towards Russia. Perhaps Putin's vaunted intelligence resources hadn't filled him in on McCain's family ties.
If you still doubt that the big media is determined to keep under wraps the organized crime origins of the $200 million fortune of John McCain and his wife Cindy, take note of how the prestigious Washington Post touched on the issue in its July 22 edition. Rather, instead, note how the Post covered up the matter.
Hillary Clinton and John McCain
His positions on foreign policy were indistinguishable from Hillary's
The Post reported: Cindy Lou Hensley grew up as an only child, and a privileged one, in a large rancher in an upper-class section of Phoenix. Her dad, Jim Hensley, founded what became a large Anheuser-Busch distributorship, and her mom, Marguerite, was a proper belle who emphasized impeccable manners.

The Post also added, almost discretely, that Mrs. McCain's wealth "may" exceed $100 million (although most sources estimate it is worth $200 million or more) and - for the record - that "she was the apple of her father's eye."

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Stormtrooper

Flashback Covert muscle: Warlord killed in Chechnya was ex-US marine and suspected CIA agent

Rizvan Chitigov
The Russian FSB suspected that Chitigov had been maintaining ties with foreign intelligence services and was himself a CIA agent.
Rizvan Chitigov, who was killed in the district center Shali in Chechnya on Wednesday and was the third most influential warlord after Shamil Basayev and Doku Umarov, had graduated from an elite U.S. subversion and reconnaissance school and had served on a contract basis in a U.S. Marine battalion, Kommersant reports.

Marine dog tags indicating his name, and date and place of birth, were discovered on his body.

In the early 1990s, Chitigov went to America using the assistance of an international Muslim fund, which had a mission in Chechnya. Returning to Shali in 1994, he told his compatriots that he could have forged a career in the U.S. Navy (and was subsequently called "the American" after that), but a warlord, Khattab, persuaded him to return to his native republic.

Propaganda

War Propaganda: How is hawkish fanaticism whipped up at home? San Fransisco exhibition offers insight.

Japanzis propaganda
© Public domain.A World War II propaganda poster.
Jim Harrison's novella Legends of the Fall, made famous by the 1994 film starring Brad Pitt and Anthony Hopkins, recounts the tragedies that ensue when the three sons of an aristocratic Montana rancher ride north in 1914 to enlist in the Canadian Expeditionary Force. Given that an estimated 17 percent of Montana's young men volunteered or were conscripted to fight in the bloody trenches of France and Belgium during World War I, Harrison drew from the real history of a young state that was largely enthusiastic about that war.

Such ardor can, however, have a darker side. In 1918, Montana passed the nation's harshest sedition law, which criminalized criticism of the war effort and served as a model for the federal government's own Sedition Act enacted a few months later. Although the war was nearly over when it was passed, 200 Montanans, many of them German immigrants beset by a nationwide anti-German hysteria, were charged and 79 were convicted for being vocal in their opposition to the war.

Nuke

Double-flash from the past and Israel's hush-hush nuclear arsenal

Vela event globe
© Science & Global Security/KJN
For more than half a century, Israel has maintained a cover of silence and opacity regarding its nuclear program and arsenal, backed up by the threat of severe punishment and persecution for any Israeli (see Mordechai Vanunu) who dares publicly breach the cover. In return for this silence, plus a pledge of restraint on certain nuclear development activities, the United States has reportedly agreed in writing not to pressure Israel to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty or get rid of its nuclear arsenal. (See this recent New Yorker article by Adam Entous.) US policy on Israel also includes its own public silence concerning Israeli nuclear weapons. But this policy should change as a result of a new scientific study of an event that took place nearly 40 years ago, during the Carter Administration. That study makes it virtually certain that the event was an illegal nuclear test. This strengthens previous analyses concluding that Israel likely carried out a nuclear test in violation of US law and the Limited Test Ban Treaty. The response to this new study will determine whether the United States and the international community of nations are serious about nuclear arms control.

On September 22, 1979, a US Vela satellite, designed to detect clandestine nuclear tests, recorded a "flash" off the coast of South Africa that every nuclear scientist monitoring the satellite's detectors at the time believed fit the classic description of a nuclear explosion. President Jimmy Carter's book based on his White House diaries notes that he was immediately informed of the "flash" by his national security team; with the information came speculation that the event was an Israeli nuclear test at sea, with South African participation.

Comment: Busted.


Info

The ancient stories of indigenous people preserve memories of geologic catastrophes over thousands of years

Klamath Chief
© EDWARD S. CURTIS/LIBRARY OF CONGRESS/CORBIS/VCG VIA GETTY IMAGES
A member of the Klamath people, looking out over Crater Lake, the creation of which is enshrined in their oral traditions.
Instinctively you might think that if we - humanity that is - could not read or write, then we would have difficulty remembering how to do things. You are right, of course, particularly when it comes to complicated tasks such as building Large Hadron Colliders or even organising a sports tournament, but perhaps we should not uncritically rush to such a judgement.

Research is showing increasingly clearly that pre-literate societies, in which no-one read or wrote, were capable of accumulating vast bodies of knowledge and passing these on in intelligible form for thousands of years.

When the Klamath people of Oregon, US, were first encountered by Europeans, they recorded stories about the terminal eruption of the massive volcano - later named Mt Mazama by geologists - that once towered over the landscape where iconic Crater Lake now lies.

The stories described the sounds and the nature of this spectacular eruption, leaving us in no doubt that the Klamath must have witnessed it. Until comparatively recently, the community passed on such knowledge only orally. Mt Mazama is now known to have disappeared from the Oregon landscape about 7600 years ago, leaving us to wonder how such stories could endure so extraordinarily long.

This is not an isolated example. From all around the coast of Australia - a land area about the same size as the conterminous United States - we find 22 groups of indigenous stories recalling a time when the ocean surface was much lower, shorelines were further out to sea (sometimes by hundreds of kilometres), and places that are today offshore islands were joined to the mainland.

Most of these stories can only be memories of the time, after the end of the last Ice Age, when the sea level across the entire planet was rising as a result of land-ice melt. Around Australia, this process ended about 7000 years ago, meaning that the stories must have endured at least this long, transmitted orally across some 300 to 400 generations to reach us today in a form that allows little uncertainty about what they recall.