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Scientists identified a unique engraving that could be the oldest three-dimensional (3D) map in the world

Leman Altuntaş
Arkeonews Net
Sat, 04 Jan 2025 00:13 UTC
Ségognole 3 cave
© SYGREF, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Scientists working in the Ségognole 3 cave, located in the famous sandstone massif south of Paris have identified a unique engraving that could be the oldest three-dimensional (3D) map in the world.

A recent study published in the Oxford Journal of Archaeology, reveals how hunter-gatherers over 20,000 years ago shaped and adapted the cave environment to represent water flow and potentially the surrounding landscape. Archaeologists found engravings of horses and the female human form in the cave along with the map, indicating that the site may have symbolic meaning.

The research team led by Médard Thiry and Anthony Milnes hypothesize that the set of engravings in the cave is an artificial representation of the surrounding landscape, a kind of "scale model" of the region with hydrological and geomorphological variations.

The scale model of Noisy-sur-École's landscape is situated on the floor behind the Ségognole 3 cave. The level of detail and accuracy is astounding. The cave's former occupants, hunter-gatherers, created an amazing miniature depiction of the area's hydrological and geomorphological features.

Researchers explained that the floor's surface was masterfully engraved to manipulate water flow through accurate channels, depressions, and basins. The specific indents of indents and inclinations in the stone represent the various hills in the area and how they correlate to the surrounding rivers, lakes, and deltas.

"The carved motifs and their relationship with natural features in the sandstone of the shelter can be
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More than 1,300 prehistoric burial mounds in western Azerbaijan systematically surveyed for the first time


Kiel University
Wed, 18 Dec 2024 23:24 UTC
Kurgans in West Azerbaijan
© Andrea RicciKurgans are a common feature of the landscape in many places in West Azerbaijan.
Spanning more than 1000 kilometres in length and up to 5600 metres in height, the mountain ranges of the Caucasus stretch between the Black and Caspian Seas. What appears to be a huge natural barrier was however an important contact and exchange zone between the highlands of West Asia and the Southeast European steppes for thousands of years. Despite this importance, archaeological data from the Caucasus and neighbouring regions remains fragmentary.

Researchers from the ROOTS Cluster of Excellence at Kiel University together with colleagues from the Academy of Sciences of Azerbaijan systematically surveyed and documented more than 1,300 archaeological sites in Azerbaijan in two field campaigns in 2021 and 2023. They have now published the results of their latest research campaign in the international journal Antiquity. The article is a follow-up of an overview of the results of the 2021 field campaign, which was published in the journal Archaeological Prospection earlier this year.
Site Survey
© Wolfgang RabbelThe researchers document and investigate a kurgan with a ground penetrating radar (right), an electromagnetic probe (left) and a camera attached to a kite.
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Chalkboard

What Is a University?

Dr. T. P. Wilkinson
Global Reasearch
Tue, 31 Dec 2024 00:00 UTC
University

Under the regime Americans call "free enterprise" or the "free market", exceptions are made to the supposed equal treatment of all economic actors.

While private business corporations and lesser entrepreneurs are at least nominally subject to taxes and other charges on their earnings or profits there is a class of institutions that have been exempted by statute from most such levies and impositions. These include charitable organizations and those devoted to education. Whereas in most of those countries constituting today's European Union education was a state or church activity (amounting the same thing), the issue of tax exemption did not arise.

However in the Anglo-American world where virtually everything is private and a commercial undertaking, the State (or its owners) adopted the mode of tax exemption to negatively support what was a public function in the "Old World". The renowned collegiate universities of Great Britain, e.g. the ancient universities of Oxford and Cambridge began under the auspices of the Latin Church, later nationalized as the Church of England.

The constituent colleges were endowed by benefactors for the protection of their souls in an age when salvation and damnation were still marketable commodities. Some endowments were certainly given in lieu of earthly punishment or in return for other favours. In any event the assets delivered to these originally clerical institutions were protected from creditors and other threats by virtue of royal authority, in secular and spiritual union. With the gradual secularization of the State as well as partial disestablishment of religion, the spiritual benefits of funding university education were enhanced or replaced by tax exemption. The colleges of the ancient universities received their foundations and endowments in return for prayers offered by the college members as intercessors for the souls of their benefactors, a relic of this practice can be found in the official prayer each college recites on the occasion of "hall", the evening meal taken by all the college's members.

When the souls of the dead declined in importance, the privileges accrued to the living by exempting scholars from the burdens and obligations placed on the rest of society by its rulers. In the United States, its own "ancient" universities were modelled on those in the United Kingdom.
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Dollar

'CIA sidekick' gives £2.6M to UK media groups

Matt Kennard, Mark Curtis
Declassified UK
Mon, 17 Jan 2022 00:00 UTC
Reagan speaks
© Fox Photos/Hulton Archive/Getty ImagesUS President Ronald Reagan speaks outside 10 Downing Street • 9 June 1982 • outlining his vision for NED
A US government-funded agency, that claims to promote democracy but which helps undermine governments independent of Washington, has moved decisively into Britain's media space since 2016.
  • National Endowment for Democracy (NED) has funded groups such as Bellingcat, Index on Censorship, Article 19, Finance Uncovered, and the Thomson Reuters Foundation
  • Former CIA officer tells Declassified the NED is a "vehicle" for US government "propaganda"
The National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a non-profit corporation funded by the US Congress, has ploughed over £2.6m into seven British independent media groups over the past five years.

The NED was "created...to do in the open what the Central Intelligence Agency has done surreptitiously for decades", the New York Times reported in 1997. That included spending millions of dollars to "support things like political parties, labor unions, dissident movements and the news media in dozens of countries."

Since the end of the Cold War, the NED has grown and been involved in trying to undermine or remove governments independent of Washington, including democratic ones in Bolivia, Ecuador and Venezuela.
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Archaeologists recover remarkably preserved shrines from a temple in Iraq

Jill DiSanto
Penn Museum
Fri, 20 Dec 2024 05:00 UTC
Cuneiform inscriptions
© Penn MuseumCuneiform inscriptions on a kudurru (stone monument), which dates to 797 BCE, found by Penn Museum and Iraqi archaeologists at Nimrud, Iraq (2024).
At the ancient Assyrian city of Nimrud in northern Iraq, a temple razed by fire around 612 BCE, has remarkably preserved shrines that were recovered by the Penn Museum and Iraqi archaeologists on a site excavation this year as part of the Penn Nimrud Project, one of several cultural heritage preservation and protection initiatives of Penn's Iraq Heritage Stabilization Program (IHSP). These recent discoveries enhance our understanding of one of the world's first empires while also highlighting archaeology's integral role in cultural heritage restoration.

Penn Nimrud Project expands 19th-century excavations

Known as Kalhu by Assyrians and Calah in the Bible, Nimrud's vast archaeological mounds first excavated in the 19th century, provide evidence confirming how ancient Mesopotamia contributed to human advancement. Assyria also represents a crucial part of Iraq's cultural identity, which the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) attempted to erase by destroying major Mesopotamian monuments between 2014 and 2017. Two of these sites at Nimrud were the Ninurta Temple and its Ziggurat (stepped temple tower) and the famed Northwest Palace built by King Ashurnasirpal II (883-859 BCE) who reigned over Nimrud, the newly appointed capital of the Neo-Assyrian state.

Despite previous excavations led by the English archaeologist Sir Austen Henry Layard and then by British archaeologist Sir Max Mallowan, husband of renowned mystery author Agatha Christie, the temple remained poorly documented and predominantly unexplored until now.

Penn IHSP safeguards at-risk cultural heritage sites in Iraq and Syria. By working collaboratively with government authorities, international experts, and local stakeholders, the Penn Nimrud Project, a part of IHSP, seeks to repair recent damage, reopen the site to tourism, and refine our understanding of Nimrud's temples and Assyrian religious practices. All artifacts recovered from excavations remain in Iraq.
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Brain

Group publishes details about CIA mind control studies


RT
Tue, 24 Dec 2024 10:19 UTC
museum
© HUM Images/Universal Images/Getty ImagesThe CIA Museum at the US Spy agency's headquarters at Langley, Virginia
Historic memos about brainwashing "Russian agents" and drugging US inmates with LSD have been put online.

Documents shedding light on the CIA's notorious mind control program decades ago are being published by a transparency group.

The National Security Archive, an NGO dedicated to using Freedom of Information Act requests to expose government secrets, put some of the records online on Monday to mark 50 years since the CIA's activities were exposed by the New York Times. A full collection of more than 1,200 documents is to be hosted by ProQuest, a scholarly research assistance firm.

Starting in the early 1950s, the CIA secretly searched for ways to control human behavior with drugs, including the then novel hallucinogen LSD, hypnosis, and extreme maltreatment, such as sensory deprivation.
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7,000-year-old alien-like figurine from Kuwait a 'total surprise' to archaeologists

Hannah Kate Simon
Live Science
Tue, 17 Dec 2024 18:05 UTC
A newfound clay head from the sixth millennium B.C. is the first of its kind ever found in Kuwait, but similar finds have been unearthed from ancient Mesopotamia.
Ancient Alien Clay Figure
© Adam Oleksiak/CAŚ UWThe clay head unearthed at Bahra 1 in northern Kuwait dates back nearly 7,000 years.
Archaeologists in Kuwait have discovered a 7,000-year-old clay figurine that looks eerily similar to a modern-day depiction of an alien.

But while this figurine may look more supernatural than human, its style was common in ancient Mesopotamia, although it's the first of its kind ever to be found in Kuwait or the Arabian Gulf.

The small, finely crafted head, with slanted eyes, a flat nose and an elongated skull, was found during excavations this year at Bahra 1, a prehistoric site in northern Kuwait where a joint Kuwaiti-Polish team has been excavating since 2009. Bahra 1 was one of the Arabian Peninsula's oldest settlements, with occupation lasting from around 5500 to 4900 B.C.

During this time, Bahra 1 was settled by the Ubaid, a culture that originated in Mesopotamia and is known for its distinctive pottery, including its alien-like figurines. The Ubaid intertwined with Neolithic, or New Stone Age societies in the Arabian Gulf in the sixth millennium B.C. and turned the area into a sort of ancient melting pot, said Agnieszka Szymczak, an expedition leader at Bahra 1 in charge of the small finds at the site, like the newly discovered figurine.

The collision of these peoples and their cultures resulted in a "prehistoric crossroads of cultural exchange," Szymczak, an archaeologist at the University of Warsaw's Polish Centre of Mediterranean Archaeology, told Live Science in an email. Part of this exchange included art, like the recently unearthed figurine.
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Remarkable 2-meter-long stone block found at 12,000-year-old Boncuklu Tarla site in Southeastern Türkiye

Oguz Buyukyildirim
Arkeonews Net
Tue, 17 Dec 2024 23:30 UTC
Stone Block
© Anadolu Agency
A remarkable 2-meter by 20-centimeter processed stone block was discovered during the archaeological excavations at Boncuklu Tarla (Beaded Field), which illuminates the history of humanity with its 12,000-year past in the Ilısu neighborhood of the Dargeçit district of Mardin.

The region, which has hosted 25 civilizations throughout history, including Sumerians, Akkadians, Babylonians, Hittites, Assyrians, Urartians, Romans, Abbasids, Seljuks, and Ottomans, continues to reveal ancient human life.

Archaeological excavations in Boncuklu Tarla, initiated in 2012 by the Mardin Museum Directorate have been continuing and led by Associate Professor Ergül Kodaş, a faculty member in the Department of Archaeology at Mardin Artuklu University.

In Boncuklu Tarla, which has an area of approximately 2.5 hectares and was included in the 'Heritage for the Future Project' of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism this year, many finds belonging to the period from the Late Epipaleolithic period to the Neolithic Age have been unearthed so far.

The excavations finally uncovered the remains of a 'public building', which is estimated to be about 12 thousand years old.
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Cross

Experts claim ancient engraved amulet could 'turn back history' of Christianity

Asia Grace
New York Post
Mon, 16 Dec 2024 16:42 UTC
christian amulet found alps
© Archäologisches Museum FrankfurtThe amulet was found buried with a presumably “devout Christian” who likely died sometime between 230 and 270 AD.
Now here's a divine development.

Just ahead of the holidays, archeologists have "digitally unrolled" a 1,800-year-old silver amulet to decipher an inscription that's being hailed as the oldest known evidence of Christianity in Europe.

Authentic evidence of pure Christianity north of the Alps has never existed before now. And the findings have the potential to change holy history forever.

"It will force us to turn back the history of Christianity in Frankfurt and far beyond by around 50 to 100 years," said Mike Josef, mayor of Frankfurt, Germany, where the artifact was exhumed.
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Star of David

Fmr Israeli President: Queen Elizabeth 'believed that every Israeli was either a terrorist or a son of a terrorist'


The Times of Israel
Mon, 16 Dec 2024 13:22 UTC
Queen Elizabeth II Prince Charles Camilla
© Daniel Leal/AFPFile - Britain's late Queen Elizabeth II (R) stands with Britain's Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall (L) and Britain's Prince Charles, Prince of Wales to watch a special flypast from Buckingham Palace balcony as part of Queen Elizabeth II's platinum jubilee celebrations, in London on June 2, 2022.
Former president Reuven Rivlin is quoted as saying that ties between Israel and the late Queen Elizabeth II were "difficult" because of her views on the Jewish state.

"The relationship between us and Queen Elizabeth was a little bit difficult because she believed that every one of us was either a terrorist or a son of a terrorist," Rivlin told a gala event in London commemorating 100 years of Haifa's Technion Institute of Technology, according to the British Jewish News.

"She refused to accept any Israeli official into [Buckingham] Palace, apart from international occasions," he added, noting by way of comparison that King Charles III was always "so friendly."
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