A 3,000-year-old cemetery containing the tombs of a wealthy clan has been uncovered in central China following two years of excavation by archaeologists.

The site in Anyang, Henan province, is thought to have been home to a clan named "Ce" during the Shang dynasty, said the Anyang Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology in a news release on Thursday.

The clan cemetery was found just 1.5 miles (2.4 kilometers) from the ancient capital of Yinxu, where the ruins of a palace and ancestral temple are located. The archaeological site contained 18 building foundations, 24 tombs, four horse and chariot pits, and a number of remarkably intact relics, including jade and stone items, and bronzeware inscribed with the character "Ce."

Technical glitch in Israel's state archive also shows David Ben Gurion called for Palestinian villages to be 'wiped out'

A technical error on Israel's state archive website has revealed that a prominent Israeli politician said in 1948 that he could "forgive instances of rape" committed against Palestinian women in the violence that preceded the founding of the Israeli state, Haaretz has reported.

Aharon Zisling, who would later serve as agriculture minister, made the remarks during a provisional government meeting discussing the war that led to Israel's creation, the newspaper reported on Wednesday.

"Let us say that instances of rape occurred in Ramle. I can forgive instances of rape, but I will not forgive other acts," Zisling is quoted as saying.

Among those who support the end of government fiat money, it's not uncommon to hear and see claims that gold is "the best money" or "natural money" or the only substance that's really suited to be commodity money. In many of these cases, when they say "gold" they mean gold, and not silver, platinum, or any other precious metal.

Naturally, one can expect to encounter these claims among those who have made a living out of promoting gold and gold-related investments for commercial purposes.

For example, consider Nathan Lewis's 2020 article in Forbes titled "Gold Has Always Been the Best Money." Lewis contends that gold and not silver is obviously the best money and its adoption as the metal behind the nineteenth-century gold standard was more or less inevitable and based on the alleged intrinsic superiority of gold as money. He writes:

In the late 19th century, a final decision had to be made between gold and silver. People chose gold; and silver, which had for thousands of years traded in a stable ratio with gold, lost its monetary quality and became volatile.

Lewis presents this as an event that was as natural as people choosing to ride in automobiles rather than on the backs of donkeys. Choosing gold over silver is progress, just like getting rid of the horse and buggy!

Lewis insists that "a final decision had to be made" between gold and silver and that "people" chose gold.

This leaves a lot unsaid, to say the least. Why, exactly, did this decision have to be made? Couldn't both metals serve as money? Moreover, who made this decision? Lewis says it was "people" who made the decision. Which people?

According to conventional archaeology, writing wasn't invented until 3000 to 4000 BC in Sumeria. However, an artefact was found over a decade ago which contradicts this belief - and perhaps this is the reason why few people know about the discovery.

The Dispilio tablet was discovered by a professor of prehistoric archaeology, George Xourmouziadis, in 1993 in a Neolithic lake settlement in Northern Greece near the city of Kastoria. A group of people used to occupy the settlement 7,000 to 8,000 years ago. The Dispilio tablet was one of many artefacts that were found in the area, however the importance of the table lies in the fact that it has an unknown written text on it that goes back further than 5,000 BC. The wooden tablet was dated using the C12 method to have been made in 5260 BC, making it significantly older than the writing system used by the Sumerians.

The text on the tablet includes a type of engraved writing which probably consists of a form of writing that pre-existed Linear B writing used by the Mycenaean Greeks. As well as the tablet, many other ceramic pieces were found that also have the same type of writing on them. Professor Xourmouziadis has suggested that this type of writing, which has not yet been deciphered, could be any form of communication including symbols representing the counting of possessions.

Two spectacular bronze helmets decorated with bull-like, curved horns may have inspired the idea that more than 1,500 years later, Vikings wore bulls' horns on their helmets, although there is no evidence they ever did.

Rather, the two helmets were likely emblems of the growing power of leaders in Bronze Age Scandinavia.

These two helmets seem to have In 1942, a worker cutting peat for fuel discovered the helmets — which sport "eyes" and "beaks" — in a bog near the town of Viksø (also spelled Veksø) in eastern Denmark, a few miles northwest of Copenhagen. The helmets' design suggested to some archaeologists that the artifacts originated in the Nordic Bronze Age (roughly from 1750 B.C. to 500 B.C.), but until now no firm date had been determined. The researchers of the new study used radiocarbon methods to date a plug of birch tar on one of the horns.

"For many years in popular culture, people associated the Viksø helmets with the Vikings," said Helle Vandkilde, an archaeologist at Aarhus University in Denmark. "But actually, it's nonsense. The horned theme is from the Bronze Age and is traceable back to the ancient Near East."

The new research by Vandkilde and her colleagues confirms that the helmets were deposited in the bog in about 900 B.C. — almost 3,000 years ago and many centuries before the Vikings or Norse dominated the region.

That dates the helmets to the late Nordic Bronze Age, a time when archaeologists think the regular trade of metals and other items had become common throughout Europe and foreign ideas were influencing Indigenous cultures, the researchers wrote in the journal Praehistorische Zeitschrift.

Even though time has existed since the beginning of, well, time, it was still necessary to invent it.
Time and astronomy are inseparable. Humans have been using the motions of the stars, Sun, and Moon for thousands of years to regulate their hunting, crops, religion, and lives in every way. And as astronomy developed, so did the need for more precise timekeeping.

There are many ways to ask, "What is the time?" Astronomers can use solar standard time, mean solar time, sidereal time, Universal Time, or Julian Date and its many modified forms. Astronomers describe three different types of twilight, the equation of time, 24 time zones, and an astronomical day. Understanding these different "times" gives us a better idea of our relationship with the sky above, and the spinning Earth on which we live.

The beginning of time

Early civilizations developed two types of calendars. The oldest is lunar in nature. It might seem more logical for the Sun to have been the first timekeeper, but archaeologists have found bones of mammoths and other animals dating over 20,000 years old that appear to have carvings recording phases of the Moon. During that period of human history, hunters tracking game needed to know how long they had been gone from their camp, making the Moon the obvious choice to track the passage of time.

It would be millennia before the Sun replaced the Moon in our modern calendar. This is because Earth and the Moon are involved in a cosmic mashup that is difficult to untangle. Most ancient cultures heralded the beginning of the month when the thin crescent or "New Moon" could be seen after sunset. There are 354 and a fraction days in a lunar year with 12 lunar months. Earth, however, revolves around the Sun every 365.242 days. While this was not a problem in a purely ceremonial or religious calendar, trying to mesh these two calendars was impossible.

The solution to this issue was proposed by Sosigenes of Alexandria, Cleopatra's court astronomer and arguably the most influential astronomer in all of history. Julius Caesar employed Sosigenes to fix the old Roman lunar calendar. By Caesar's time, the lunar calendar had become so out of sync with the seasons that it required a decree from the emperor to remedy the situation. At Sosigenes' suggestion, the old lunar calendar was replaced with one which used only the Sun to delineate the year. The Moon was left to drift through the 12 months of Caesar's new calendar.

This Julian calendar also implemented leap years, adding one extra day every four years. But this was not quite a perfect fix, as the last fraction of a day in a year is slightly less than one-quarter of a day. By the 16th century, the Julian calendar was also out of step with the seasons. This led Pope Gregory XIII to implement updates in 1582 that dictated leap years be skipped on years divisible by 100 except when divisible by 400. So while 1900 was not a leap year, 2000 was. Two thousand years later, the whole world still uses the modified calendar of Sosigenes.

Belgium has "overwhelming responsibility" for the killing of Prince Louis Rwagasore, the popular Burundian leader who sought to unite the country's ethnic groups as it gained freedom from the colonial power, new evidence shows.

Weeks after being elected prime minister in a landslide, Rwagasore, the 29-year-old son of a former king, was assassinated in October 1961. The governing Belgian elite masterminded the shooting while Brussels turned a blind eye, according to archived records uncovered by Flemish sociologist Ludo De Witte.

Although the shooter, a Greek national, and five accomplices were executed, De Witte said that probes by the Belgian colonial court, the government of independent Burundi, and the UN all neglected Belgium's role in the killing, which led to decades of war, ethnic tensions, and instability.

Hunter-gatherers who lived more than 2,000 years ago near the top of the world appear to have run ironworking operations as advanced as those of farming societies far to the south.

Excavations in what's now northeastern Sweden uncovered ancient furnaces and fire pits that hunter-gatherers used for metalworking. A mobile lifestyle did not prevent hardy groups based in or near the Arctic Circle from organizing large-scale efforts to produce iron and craft metal objects, say archaeologist Carina Bennerhag of Luleå University of Technology in Sweden and colleagues. In fact, hunter-gatherers who moved for part of the year across cold, forested regions dotted with lakes and swampy patches apparently exchanged resources and knowledge related to metallurgy, the extraction of metals from ores, the researchers report in the December Antiquity.

International experts Jan Brouwer and Gus van Veen have examined the Teymareh site estimating its carvings were made 40,000-4,000 years ago.

Having a considerable potential to become a UNESCO World Heritage, the site was named a common cultural heritage between the two provinces of Isfahan and Markazi in 1389 (Mar. 2010 - Mar. 2011), the report said.

It embraces countless petroglyphs from prehistorical times to the (early) Islamic eras, yet, over the past couple of years, some local entities have issued mining licenses and allowed shepherds to graze their livestock there, the news agency said.

According to a local tourism official, currently, mines operations are a serious threat of destruction for this area as miners demolish that landscape that contains ancient petroglyphs to obtain resources for silica (the element needed to make glass)... and they turn them into rubbish.

In 2020, a prehistorical petroglyph, which bears Pahlavi script written by ordinary people of the time, was found during an archaeological survey in Teymareh. "This is the sixth petroglyph, engraved with Pahlavi script, which has so far been found in the highlands of Teymareh. And the petroglyph is estimated to date back to 2,200 years ago," according to Iranian archaeologist Mohammad Nasserifard.

A US spymaster inadvertently helped the Nazis develop one of the most effective disinformation campaigns of the second world war by spreading rumours about Hitler's plans for a Where Eagles Dare-style Alpine redoubt, a historian with access to classified US military records has found.

The myth that the Nazis were amassing weapons and crack units of 100,000 fanatical soldiers in the spring of 1945 for a last stand in the Austro-Bavarian Alps was without any basis in fact but had a powerful hold on the imagination of American and British military leaders, who feared it could prolong the war for years.

Thomas Boghardt, a German historian at the US Army Center of Military History in Washington DC, argues in a new book that the myth of an Alpine Nazi fortress was not a crucial factor behind American forces abandoning the race to Berlin in favour of a southward push but was one that US spycraft had a hand in making.