The 3,400-year-old royal city was built by Amenhotep III, abandoned by his heretic son, Akhenaten, and contains stunningly preserved remains.

Three thousand four hundred years ago, a contentious ancient Egyptian king abandoned his name, his religion, and his capital in Thebes (modern Luxor). Archaeologists know what happened next: The pharaoh Akhenaten built the short-lived city of Akhetaten, where he ruled alongside his wife, Nefertiti and worshipped the sun. After his death, his young son Tutankhamun became ruler of Egypt — and turned his back on his father's controversial legacy.

But why did Akhenaten abandon Thebes, which had been the capital of ancient Egypt for more than 150 years? Answers may lie in the discovery of an industrial royal metropolis within Thebes that Akhenaten inherited from his father, Amenhotep III. The find, which has been dubbed the "lost golden city of Luxor" in an announcement released today, will generate as much enthusiasm, speculation, and controversy as the renegade pharaoh who left it.

Soon after World War II, Germany was cleaved in two by the allies who won the war. 'West Germany' came under the influence of Western Europe and the US, and East Germany under the Soviet Union. The eastern section of Germany, under the political and ideological influence of Communism, came to develop one of the most notoriously oppressive secret police organizations in modern history: the Stasi.

On this week's show, we discuss Florian Henckel Von Donnersmarck's moving and expertly directed 2006 German film 'The Lives of Others' (spoiler warning!). The movie's depiction of life under Stasi control, the power dynamics at play in the Communist nation, and the lives it destroyed, among other things, all contribute to make the 'The Lives of Others' an instructive work from which to understand the destructive power of totalitarianism on a very personal level. However, the film also offers a light of hope in the face of immense bleakness.

Join us as we discuss the film, its overall plot and themes, expert characterization, historical accuracy (or lack thereof), and why it deserves a watch - or two! Just make sure the Stasi don't find out. They don't arrest people on a whim, after all.


We're also on LBRY!

Running Time: 01:07:39

Download: MP3 — 64.3 MB

A freshly unearthed Bronze-Age stone may be the oldest three-dimensional map in Europe, researchers say.

The 2m by 1.5m slab (5ft by 6.5ft), first uncovered in 1900, was found again in a cellar in a castle in France in 2014.

Archaeologists who studied patterns engraved on the 4,000-year-old stone say they believe the markings are a map of an area in western Brittany.

They say this makes the slab the oldest 3D map of a known area in Europe.

I have noticed that many pro-Chinese thinkers and writers have lately made the mistake of presuming that Chinese culture and civilization stands in total opposition to the divisive/imperially minded western culture which has laid waste to much of the world over the past centuries.

This perception has expressed itself in the various assertions that China's philosophy of Tianxia (rooted in the idea of a Mandate of Heaven to justify power systems) is both superior and apart from the system of Westphalia which arose in the form of a 1648 Peace Treaty that eneded the 30 years religious wars of Europe and established the foundations of the modern nation state.

Confucius

While the Principle of Tianxia is a beautiful and important concept for westerners to understand, and truly is the basis for international harmony which transcends the narrow limits of geopolitics plaguing the west, there is something dangerously false embedded in any thesis that assumes it to stand in opposition with Westphalia which needs to be exposed. The fact is that Tianxia is not only in complete harmony with the principle of Westphalia, but that the decay of western values into the Hobbesian mess of total war and economic manipulation is not due to anything within the Treaty of Westphalia but rather in spite of it.

The Eisenhower presidency would see Washington taken over by business executives, Wall Street lawyers, and investment bankers — and by a closely aligned warrior caste that had emerged into public prominence during World War II.

As discussed in part two of this series, the war in Vietnam did not start on its official date, November 1st, 1955, but rather 1945 when American clandestine operations were launched in Vietnam to "prepare the ground".

1. Fletcher Prouty, who served as Chief of Special Operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Kennedy and was a former Col. in the U.S. Air Force, goes over in his book "The CIA, Vietnam and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy," how the CIA was used to instigate psy-ops and paramilitary (terrorist) activities in Vietnam to create the pretext required for an open declaration of war and for the entry of the U.S. military into a twenty-year-long meat grinder.

This was a strategy reserved not just for Vietnam, but had become the general U.S. foreign policy in all regions that were considered threats to the Cold War Grand Strategy, as seen under the directorship of the Dulles brothers (See Part 1 and Part 2 of this series).

In 1920, Scientific American reported that the atmosphere was deficient in CO2, and that crop productivity could be greatly enhanced by introducing CO2 emissions from from smokestacks, and that earth was covered with luxuriant forests when CO2 levels were much higher.

Fertilizing the air with carbon dioxide to promote plant growth

ONE of the principal constituents making up the body of a plant is carbon, representing about one-half of its organic substance. The opinion that this carbon is derived from the soil has long been abandoned, modern investigation having shown atmospheric carbonic acid to be absorbed by means of the chlorophyll or green matter of the leaves and decomposed into its elements, the carbon, in conjunction with the root sap and atmospheric moisture, being worked into organic compounds.

Whereas atmospheric air at present is relatively poor in carbonic acid, of which it contains only about .03 per cent, at an early period in the development of our planet, when this was covered with the luxuriant forests our coal deposits are derived from, it comprised incomparably greater quantities of this gas. This fact suggested the idea of heightening the fertility of the soil by increasing its carbonic acid content and thus producing conditions resembling those of antediluvian ages.

Washington's involvement in the violent overthrow of the democratically elected government of Chile in September 1973 is by this point well known. The pivotal role played by Brazil has not been as clear until now.

On the anniversary of the 1964 US-backed coup that led to Brazilian President Joao Goulart being replaced by a military junta, the National Security Archive has published a trove of previously classified documents showing the role that junta later played in subverting democracy in Chile, and its subsequent support of General Augusto Pinochet's brutal repression of political opponents.

The file trail begins September 22, 1970, 18 days after Salvador Allende of the Popular Unity alliance narrowly won the Chilean presidency. A document, prepared for General Emilio Garrastazu Medici - then the third president of Brazil's military dictatorship - summarizes a recent meeting between the US ambassador to Chile, Edward Korry, and his Brazilian counterpart.

Following Allende's victory, Korry, a veteran diplomat during the administrations of Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, vowed that "not a nut or bolt shall reach Chile" under the socialist's rule, and if and when he took office in November that year, the US would "do all within our power to condemn Chile and the Chileans to utmost deprivation and poverty."

Accordingly, the summary makes clear US plans to undermine Allende were well underway by the time the two ambassadors met.

An international team including the geologist Michael Meyer provided the oldest proof for modern humans in the Kalahari Desert in Africa. The archaeological finds are more than 100,000 years old, as constrained by Optically Stimulated Luminescence (OSL)-dating in the Innsbruck laboratory. The study is challenging the idea that modern human behaviour was linked to coastal environments.
The origins of modern humans and modern human cognition are thought to lie in southern Africa, as suggested by numerous archaeological findings from the southern tip of the continent. Many of these archaeological sites are located near the coast. This led to the widespread view that the evolution of complex symbolic and technological behaviour of Homo sapiens presupposing cognitive abilities very similar to ours today, were linked to the sea and it´s rich marine resources such as shellfish, fish and and marine mammals.

However, new archaeological findings in the Kalahari Desert in South Africa (the "African Outback") now shed new light on human prehistory and the evolution of modern human behaviour. The current archaeological thinking is that behavioural innovations in early human history are tied to coastal landscapes, and particularly to the south coast of South Africa that is particularly rich in natural resources and offered plenty of marine food year-round, hence served as an evolutionary hotspot for our species. And indeed, archaeological evidence for early behavioural innovations are clustering along South Africa´s coast line.

"In the present study we analysed findings from a rock shelter more than 600 kilometres inland and determined an age of 105,000 years for the archaeological layers and artefacts. They prove behavioural patterns equivalent to those found near the coast at the same time," explains Michael Meyer. The geologist is head of the OSL Laboratory at the Institute of Geology at the University of Innsbruck and was responsible for dating the sediment samples from the South African archaeological excavations together with Luke Gliganic, a former post-doctoral researcher at the University of Innsbruck. The results were published in the journal Nature.

Neolithic people were manufacturing salt in Britain almost 6,000 years ago, before the building of Stonehenge and more than two millennia earlier than was first thought, a new archaeological discovery suggests.

Excavations at a site at Street House farm in North Yorkshire have revealed evidence of the earliest salt production site ever found in the UK and one of the first of its kind in western Europe, dating to around 3,800BC.

The finds, uncovered at a coastal hilltop site near Loftus, include a trench containing three hearths, broken shards of neolithic pottery, some still containing salt deposits, shaped stone artefacts and a storage pit - all key evidence of salt processing.

It likely had eight legs, and at least one of them is still brandishing a knife. That's the report from archaeologists in northern Peru, who have announced the discovery of a 50-foot mural that once was the centerpiece of a pre-Columbian shrine.

The find was made in November 2020, when farmers seeking to expand their land partially destroyed a huaca — a Peruvian ceremonial structure — sitting among their avocado and sugar cane crops. The huaca, now cut in half, revealed a striking mural.

"What we have here is a shrine that would have been a ceremonial centre thousands of years ago," Régulo Franco Jordán, one of the archaeologists who went about excavating and preserving the elements of the ancient artwork that hadn't been demolished, told the Peruvian newspaper La República.