Secret HistoryS


Oscar

How American history gets sacrificed at the altar of fake 'healing'

Robert Bridge
RT
Wed, 20 Dec 2023 20:04 UTC
statue
© AP/Kevin WolfWorkers prepare a Confederate Memorial for removal in Arlington National Cemetery
December 18, 2023 • Arlington, Virginia
US liberals continue to neglect the age-old truism that "those who forget their history are condemned to repeat it"...

There are no safe spaces left anywhere in America, especially if you're an old bronze statue dedicated to dead white men with epic stories to tell. Unlike other ill-fated statues, however, the latest one to be savagely plucked from the American landscape kept silent vigil for 109 years over the most revered graveyard in the country: Arlington National Cemetery, Washington, DC.

Unveiled by US President Woodrow Wilson on June 4, 1914, the 32-foot (9.8 meters) Reconciliation Memorial (known as the 'Confederate Memorial' to its detractors) towered over several hundred Civil War-era Confederacy tombs, that is, until this long-vanquished army suffered a second humiliating defeat, this time at the hands of America's Woke Army. Aside from the historical context that should have spared the memorial from the scrapyard, the statue itself, created by Moses Jacob Ezekiel, the first American-born Jewish artist to achieve international acclaim, was an exquisite piece of Neoclassical artwork.
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Chalkboard

Pythagorean theorem found on clay tablet 1,000 years older than Pythagoras

James Felton
IFL Science
Wed, 20 Dec 2023 16:49 UTC
It predates Pythagoras by over 1,000 years.
Clay Tablet
© Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin FRCP(Glasg) via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0); rotated, croppedThe proof is carved into clay.
Study math for long enough and you will likely have cursed Pythagoras's name, or said "praise be to Pythagoras" if you're a bit of a fan of triangles.

But while Pythagoras was an important historical figure in the development of mathematics, he did not figure out the equation most associated with him (a2 + b2 = c2). In fact, there is an ancient Babylonian tablet (by the catchy name of IM 67118) that uses the Pythagorean theorem to solve the length of a diagonal inside a rectangle. The tablet, likely used for teaching, dates from 1770 BCE - centuries before Pythagoras was born in around 570 BCE.

Another tablet from around 1800-1600 BCE has a square with labeled triangles inside. Translating the markings from base 60 - the counting system used by ancient Babylonians - showed that these ancient mathematicians were aware of the Pythagorean theorem (not called that, of course) as well as other advanced mathematical concepts.

"The conclusion is inescapable. The Babylonians knew the relation between the length of the diagonal of a square and its side: d=square root of 2," mathematician Bruce Ratner writes in a paper on the topic. "This was probably the first number known to be irrational. However, this in turn means that they were familiar with the Pythagorean Theorem - or, at the very least, with its special case for the diagonal of a square (d2 = a2 + a2 = 2a2) - more than a thousand years before the great sage for whom it was named."
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Archaeology

Interamna Lirenas: A Roman backwater town challenges assumptions about Empire's decline

Dario Radley
Archaeology Magazine
Thu, 14 Dec 2023 16:23 UTC
Interamna Lirenas excavation roman town
© Alessandro LaunaroView of the Interamna Lirenas excavation from above. The remains of the theater can be seen in the center, with the remains of the basilica behind it.
The discovery changes the whole timeline of the collapse.

In a thirteen-year study led by Dr. Alessandro Launaro from the University of Cambridge's Classics Faculty, a team of archaeologists has challenged prevailing assumptions about the decline of the Roman Empire in Italy.

The focus of their research, Interamna Lirenas, a town in Southern Lazio traditionally regarded as a failed backwater, has emerged as a resilient hub that defied expectations, thriving well into the 3rd century CE.

During the Crisis of the Third Century (CE 235-284), a period marked by the Roman Empire's near-collapse due to internal strife, barbarian invasions, and economic turmoil, Interamna Lirenas continued to flourish. Contrary to previous beliefs, the town's decline, as revealed by an extensive pottery analysis, began approximately 300 years later than initially assumed.
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Dig

Lost ancient colony discovered off coast of Australia that hundreds of thousands once called home

Katherine Donlevy
New York Post
Sat, 23 Dec 2023 04:36 UTC
australia coast
© wallixHundreds of thousands of people once lived on the northwest shelf of Sahul near Australia
Forget about the lost city of Atlantis.

Scientists stumbled upon a massive forgotten colony off the coast of Australia that was once home to hundreds of thousands of people.

Various artifacts and signs of human life were discovered on the northwest shelf of Sahul, located off the coast of the northern region of Kimberley on a landmass that connects to New Guinea, according to a study in Quaternary Science Reviews.

The drowned piece of land was likely a thriving ecosystem during the Late Pleistocene period, which dates back as far as 2.5 million years.

The now-submerged landmass was nearly 250,000 square miles — more than 1.6 times the size of the United Kingdom.

The shelf — once thought to be a desert — was filled with habitable fresh and saltwater lakes, rivers and streams, as well as a large inland sea, that could have supported between 50,000 and 500,000 people.
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Info

8,500-year-old skull with traces of trepanation discovered in central Turkey

Leman Altuntaş
Arkeonews Net
Sat, 23 Dec 2023 02:17 UTC
Ancient Skull
© Anadolu Agency
Traces of trepanation (skull drilling operation) were found on a skull found in the 9,000-year-old Çatalhöyük, near the modern city of Konya in central Turkey.

Millennia before the rise of Mesopotamian cities to the south, the proto-city Çatalhöyük thrived in central Anatolia. Sprawled over 34 acres and home to as many as 8,000 people, it was the metropolis of its day. People lived in this community continuously for almost 2,000 years.

In their statement to the Anadolu Agency (AA), archaeologists said that they came across an interesting grave containing 7 individuals during the excavations last year.

During the studies carried out on human skeletons excavated on the floor of a house, a hole with a diameter of 2.5 centimeters was found on the skull bones of a young male individual.

Çatalhöyük Excavation head and Anadolu University Faculty Member Associate Professor Ali Umut Türkcan said in his statement;
There has been a settlement throughout 16 stratifications. It is a unique region in the world. It is a settlement where the culture progressed very slowly and was abandoned. Our work continues especially in the neighborhood we found on the long street next to the exhibition area, which we call 'northern Korugan'. We opened a new area towards the slope of the settlement. While opening that area, we found the second neighborhood.

We identified a large building in the new area. We concentrated the work on the building of approximately 80 square meters, with 5 chambers. Last year, we came across a grave covered with a vulture's claw in a house here. The anthropologists of the excavation made detailed examinations of the grave containing 7 individuals. A young man "The drilling process in the individual's skull caught our attention. In Çatalhöyük, we saw a clear example of trepanation for the first time.
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Info

Analysis of ancient Scythian leather samples shows that the leather was made from human skin

Leman Altuntaş
Arkeonews Net
Wed, 20 Dec 2023 04:38 UTC
leather object fragments
© PLOS ONE (2023)A selection of the leather object fragments analyzed in this study: 1. Ilyinka kurgan 4 burial 2; 2. Ilyinka kurgan 4 burial 3; 3. Vodoslavka kurgan 8 burial 4; 4. Orikhove kurgan 3 burial 2; 5. Zelene I kurgan 2 burial 3; 6. Kairy V kurgan 1 burial 1; 7. Ol’hyne kurgan 2 burial 1; 8. Bulhakovo kurgan 5 burial 2; 9. Zolota Balka kurgan 13 burial 7 (Image: M. Daragan). The units of the scale bars are cm.
The ancient Scythians' history as fearsome warriors dates back more than 2,000 years, and now research from a multi-institutional team of anthropologists confirms that they are pitiless warriors. Researchers have discovered that Scythian warriors carried their arrows in leather quivers made from the skin of their defeated enemies.

The Scythians (6th to 3rd centuries BC) were a nomadic people known for their fierce nature and mastery of horsemanship in the ancient Eurasian steppes. Their lives were deeply intertwined with the wild, expansive landscapes they roamed. Living in harmony with the harsh environment, they developed a formidable reputation as warriors and skilled riders.

Their nomadic lifestyle meant they were in constant movement, adapting to the ever-changing conditions of the steppe. They were expert archers, able to shoot accurately from horseback while galloping at high speeds — a skill that made them formidable in battle.

In their project, reported on the open-access site PLOS ONE, the researchers tested an account by the Greek historian Herodotus regarding certain behaviors of ancient Scythian warriors.
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Star of David

How Israel's genocidal war against Palestinians is a colonial tradition

Joseph Massad
Middle East Eye
Mon, 18 Dec 2023 13:05 UTC
Flag
© Clodagh Kilcoyne/ReutersAn Israeli flag planted by Israeli forces flies among debris in northern Gaza following Israeli bombardment on 12 December 2023.
Palestinian resistance must always be situated within the history of anti-colonial struggle just as Israel's genocidal war should be recognised as a continuation of this colonial lineage...

The horror that Israel and its western sponsors have felt since the 7 October Hamas retaliatory operation stems from their racist contempt for the indigenous Palestinians, which led them to believe that Israel could never be successfully attacked militarily.

But this sense of western humiliation that a colonised, "racially inferior" non-European people can resist and defeat their colonisers is not unprecedented in the annals of colonial history.

In the late 19th century, the British suffered a most illustrious colonial defeat at the hands of the Zulu kingdom's army. During the January 1879 Battle of Isandlwana in southern Africa, the 20,000-strong lightly-armed Zulu army humiliated the British colonial forces, despite their superior weaponry, killing 1,300 (700 of whom were African) out of a total of 1,800 invading soldiers and 400 civilians. The battle left between 1,000 and 3,000 Zulu forces dead.
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Eye 1

SOTT Focus: Hitler, the Ultimate Rorschach Test

L.P. Koch
LucTalks
Sun, 17 Dec 2023 07:17 UTC
hitler
We can't help but view history through the lens of our most deeply held beliefs.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in how people look at Hitler and the Third Reich: we slap our priors on a hyper-complex era permitting a nigh-infinite number of angles, and as if by magic, the whole thing sorts itself out into a neat little narrative.

And so, leftists will claim that Hitler was just a conservative on steroids, and see, that's where conservatism inevitably leads.

Marxists will make the case that the Nazis were really just Capital's reaction to the otherwise inevitable proletarian revolution, therefore postponing the communist utopia by way of collusion between industrialists, Junkers and Western bankers.

Conservatives argue that akshually, Nazism was just communism, because dontcha know, there's an "S" in "NSDAP."1

Revisionists give this a further twist by claiming that the real bad guy in this whole story wasn't Hitler, but Stalin: it was he who started WWII by forcing Hitler's hand.
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Star of David

The price of 'victory': How Israel created one of its own worst enemies


RT
Sun, 17 Dec 2023 10:45 UTC
composite
Ariel Sharon • Menachem Begin
The Jewish state triumphed in the 1982 Lebanon War, but years later the victory appears pyrrhic...

The battle for Gaza adds yet another page to Israel's long list of military operations in Arab nations and enclaves. We are shocked by the brutal fighting going on today, but history has seen many similar military operations where it was impossible to draw the line between war and terrorism. The 1982 Lebanon War is one such example. Israel may have won that war, but as a result it only acquired a fiercer enemy.

Setup for slaughter

By the mid-1970s, Israel had defeated the regular armies of several opposing Arab nations. However, the Jewish state still had an irreconcilable enemy: the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) headed by Yasser Arafat. The PLO was initially based in Jordan, but when it came into conflict with the local authorities, it was forced to move to Lebanon.
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Blue Planet

'Unique' cave art discovered in Madagascar hints at connections with ancient Egypt and Borneo

David Burney
The Conversation
Sun, 17 Dec 2023 15:17 UTC
Andriamamelo cave
© David BurneyAndriamamelo cave art panel
The art is the first ancient pictorial art, which depicts images of nature with human-like and animal-like figures, to be found in Madagascar.

Unique, prehistoric rock art drawings have been discovered in the Andriamamelo Cave in western Madagascar.

I was part of a team that discovered and described these ancient treasures. They're the first truly pictorial art, depicting images of nature with human-like and animal-like figures, to be seen on the island. Until recently, rock art in Madagascar had only yielded a few sites with basic symbols.

The dramatic discoveries contained several surprises, including hints at some remarkable cultural connections.

Comment: Recent discoveries have revealed extensive trade networks across vast swathes of the planet in the Bronze Age, and early Medieval Age, and which were previously thought to have been improbable.

At the same time, with regards to certain symbolism, there is data showing that it may have been inspired by people observing phenomena in the skies, and sometimes the slight differences to similar symbols has been shown to be due to the oberserver's geographic location and thus their vantage point: Depicting plasma? Ancient 'mantis-man' petroglyph discovered in Iran

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