Secret HistoryS


Footprints

New Thracian grave found in northeastern Bulgaria


The Sofia Echo
Thu, 23 Jun 2011 12:41 UTC
Image
© Assen Tonev
Ancient Thracian golden and bronze finds have been excavated by archaeologists in the town of Opaka, district Turgovishte, in northeastern Bulgaria, private channel bTV reported on June 23 2011.

During excavations of the grave park, scientists found a preserved Thracian tumulus from 2nd century CE full of rich funeral artifacts.

The sites yielded unique discoveries - six leaves of a golden wreath and bronze figurines - and provided more proof of the continued importance of the town of Opeka in northeastern Bulgaria.

"The man buried must have been a prominent and wealthy Thracian public figure. As these golden and bronze jewellery and figurines are put only in the graves of the richest," archaeologist and historian Stamen Stanev from Popovo History Museum told bTV.

The body in the grave was burnt but the funeral objects around it had been preserved - glass, bronze and ceramic artifacts.

Archaeologists believe that all these funeral objects had been imported from abroad.

There were two ancient Thracian towns near the newly found tumulus, which altogether form a larger tumulus acropolis.

All findings will be restored and transferred to a museum.
Read More...
Compass

Crusader city discovered under an old Israeli port


IB Times
Thu, 23 Jun 2011 02:34 UTC
Image
© stock.xchngThe ancient site of Khan al-Umdan in the old city of Acre in Israel.
Archaeologists have unearthed an old city of Crusaders, which had been hidden for centuries under the port city of Acre along the Mediterranean Sea in Israel.

The newly excavated city adds to Israel's many heritage sites. It is believed to be last inhabited by residents in 1291, the year the crusader state power fell to a Muslim army from Egypt.

The existing Acre city, which was reduced to ruins by the end of seventeenth century, was built by the Ottoman Turks around 1750.

Preserving the newly discovered ruins of the older town is yet to be named and lay preserved under Acre's crust for hundreds of years.

"It's like Pompeii of Roman times - it's a complete city. It is one of the most exciting sites in the world of archaeology," Eliezer Stern, the Israeli archaeologist in charge of Acre, told the Associated Press.

The site will open to public later this year, he said.

Archaeologists disclosed some of the features of the new town that includes an arched passageway underground, graffiti of medieval times on walls, a cobblestone street and a row of shops that probably sold souvenirs for pilgrims, ampoules for holy water, clay figurines and more.

Acre was ruled by rules of many religions. The city houses fortresses, castles, churches and mosques that are evidences of its diverse history. Buildings from the Hellenistic-Roman period and the Crusader and Ottoman periods, Turkish baths, walled port and a Bahai temple suggest that the UNESCO World Heritage Site has strong Holy implications.
Read More...
Info

St. Sophia's Ancient Gospel

Natalia A. Feduschak
KyivPost
Thu, 23 Jun 2011 15:02 UTC
Queen Anna
© liveinternet.ruFrench queen Anna from Kyiv left a manuscript in the 11th century, on which French kings took oath for centuries.

Guides at Kyiv's famed St. Sophia Cathedral like to tell a story about this architectural wonder from the Kyivan Rus period.

Sometime in the 1920s, when tyrant Josef Stalin was demolishing churches throughout the Soviet Union, the government decided to tear down the 11th century cathedral.

The plan was to transform its grounds into a park commemorating a 1917 Crimean Red Army victory.

Along with others who lobbied the dictator to leave the cathedral alone were the French. St. Sophia, they said, also had important cultural meaning for them: Their 11th century queen, Anna, hailed from Kyiv and a book she carried to her new home was the one on which French
kings for generations had taken their oath.

The Soviets relented and St. Sophia was saved.

Now, a millennium after Anna left Kyiv, Ukrainians are able to get a better understanding of what all the fuss was about with the 2010 publication of the Reim's Gospel of Anna Yaroslavivna.
Read More...
Info

Sacks of Human Waste Reveal Secrets of Ancient Rome

James Owen
National Geographic News
Thu, 23 Jun 2011 14:49 UTC
Ancient Chamber
© Domenico Camardo, Herculaneum Conservation ProjectNow excavated, an ancient Roman chamber once held tons of decayed garbage and human waste.

You might turn your nose up at sifting through hundreds of sacks of human excrement, but researchers are doing just that in Italy - and happily.

The unprecedented deposit is said to be yielding new insights into everyday life in the ancient Roman Empire.

Admittedly, at 2,000 years old, the feces "isn't remotely unpleasant," Roman historian Andrew Wallace-Hadrill said. "There's absolutely no scent. It's exactly like earth compost."

Ten tons of the stuff has been excavated from a cesspit beneath the ancient town of Herculaneum, near Naples.

Flushed down sewers from apartment blocks and shops, the deposit - the largest collection of ancient Roman garbage and human waste ever found, researchers say - dates to about A.D. 79. That year a catastrophic volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius buried Herculaneum, along with its more famous neighbor, Pompeii.

Lost jewelry, coins, and semiprecious stones from a gem shop have been found, along with discarded household items such as broken lamps and pottery, according to Wallace-Hadrill, director of the Herculaneum Conservation Project, a Packard Humanities Institute initiative.

And, coming from a onetime district of shopkeepers and artisans, the organic material has revealed just what your run-of the-mill Roman might have eaten in this coastal town, according to project scientists, who collaborated with the British School at Rome and the archaeological authorities for Naples and Pompeii.
Read More...
Arrow Down

Van Gogh's "Self-Portrait" Actually His Brother: Study


Agence France-Presse
Tue, 21 Jun 2011 06:03 UTC
Image
© unknown
Art researchers at Amsterdam's Van Gogh Museum said Tuesday they have "discovered" a work by Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh -- long thought to have been a self-portrait -- was in fact a picture of his younger brother Theo.

"According to current opinion, Vincent van Gogh never painted his brother Theo, on whom he was dependent," the Van Gogh Museum said in a statement.

But senior researcher Louis van Tilborgh now believed the 1887 painting of a man wearing a light-coloured hat and a dark blue jacket was in fact Van Gogh's brother Theo, Vincent's junior by five years.

"The conclusion is based on a number of obvious differences between the two brothers," said the museum, pointing out dissimilar features including the neatness of the subject's beard and his round-shaped ear, "something Vincent did not have."
Read More...
2 + 2 = 4

Are We All Asian After All

Tonyleather
Scienceray.com
Tue, 21 Jun 2011 00:00 UTC
New research suggests that the ancestors of Homo sapiens may not have evolved in Africa at all, but Asia instead. Are we all secret Chinese clones?

It has long been held by evolutionary experts that the original ancestors of humanity were found in Africa, but new research is suggesting that early examples of the genus Homo - we are the Homo sapiens variety - might well have actually evolved in Asia before journeying to Africa, not,as many scientists have assumed in the past, the other way round.

Paleoanthropologists have long favored an African origin option, especially for the evolution of our human ancestor Homo erectus, though the latest finds reveal that these 'people' lived at Dmansi, a West Asian site between1.85 and 1.77 million years ago, quite possibly a little sooner in time than the earliest African so far discovered.
Read More...
Clock

Image of Ancient Mammoth or Mastodon Found on Bone in Florida


Associated Press
Wed, 22 Jun 2011 00:00 UTC
Image
© Jeff Gage/Florida Museum of Natural History
Washington - Some of the earliest Americans turn out to have been artists.

A bone fragment at least 13,000 years old, with the carved image of a mammoth or mastodon, has been discovered in Florida, a new study reports.

While prehistoric art depicting animals with trunks has been found in Europe, this may be the first in the Western Hemisphere, researchers report Wednesday in the Journal of Archaeological Science.

"It's pretty exciting, we haven't found anything like this in North America," said Dennis J. Stanford, curator of North American Archaeology at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, who was a co-author of the report.

They hunted these animals, Stanford explained, and "you see people drawing all kinds of pictures that are of relevance and importance to them."

"Much of the real significance of such finds is in the tangible, emotional connection they allow us to feel with people in the deep past," said Dietrich Stout, an anthropologist at Emory University in Atlanta, who was not part of the research team.

The bone fragment, discovered in Vero Beach, Fla., contains an incised image about 3 inches long from head to tail and about 1 3/4 inches from head to foot.
Read More...
Arrow Down

Bulgarian Archaeologists Uncover Story of Ancient Thracians' War with Philip II of Macedon


novinite.com
Tue, 21 Jun 2011 00:00 UTC
Image
© National History MuseumThe freshly uncovered section of the northeastern wall of the Thracian kings' residence.
Bulgarian archaeologists have made crucial discoveries at the residence of the rulers of the Odrysian Kingdom, the state of the most powerful tribe of Ancient Thrace, including details about its sacking by the troops of Philip II of Macedon.

The discoveries have been made within the project of Bulgaria's National History Museum, whose team started in early June 2011 the largest alpine expedition in the history of Bulgarian archaeology in order to excavate the residence of the rulers of the Odrysian Kingdom.

Bulgarian archaeologists uncovered the unique residence of the rulers of the Odrysian Kingdom in July 2010, after its location was initially detected in 2005.

The residence is located on the Kozi Gramadi mount in the Sredna Gora mountain, in the village of Starosel, close to the resort town of Hissar in central Bulgaria, at about 1 200 m above sea level.

The National History Museum announced Tuesday that its archaeologists have uncovered in full the northeastern wall of the Thracian kings' residence; it is 13 m long, and has been preserved at a height of 2 m, according to the head of the expedition, Prof. Ivan Hristov.

Not unlike the facade of the building uncovered in 2005, the northeastern wall is made with "perfectly prepared stone blocks with encarved decorations." The building is believed to have hosted the treasury of the Odrysian rulers. It was erected by Ancient Greek architects between 354 BC and 342 BC, which is also when the Thracian kings' residence is dated, during the rule of Odrysian king Teres II (351 BC-341 BC).
Read More...
Info

Iraq's Ancient Ur Site in Danger

Jacques Clement
Agence France-Presse
Mon, 20 Jun 2011 10:20 UTC
Ur City
© Getty ImagesThe Ur archeological site, where Abraham was supposedly born, as shown in 2008 when Coalition Forces used it as one of their bases.

Standing before the imposing ziggurat which was once part of a temple complex at the Sumerian capital of Ur, Iraqi archaeologist Abdelamir Hamdani worried about the natural elements that are eating away at one of the wonders of Mesopotamia.

"Is there anybody thinking about preserving these monuments?" asked the doctoral student from New York's Stony Brook University who is one of the leaders of a nascent project to conserve the few unearthed remains of ancient Mesopotamia, one of the cradles of civilization.

The buried treasures of Ur still beckon foreign archaeologists who have begun cautiously returning to Iraq, but experts like Hamdani say that preserving the sites is more urgent than digging for more.

Ur, the Biblical birthplace of Abraham, and which more than 4,000 years ago was the capital of a prosperous empire ruling over Mesopotamia, is believed to have so far relinquished only a fraction of its buried antiquities.
Read More...
Magnify

Researchers Explain Ancient Copper Artifacts

Erin White
usnews.com
Wed, 15 Jun 2011 09:41 UTC
Northwestern University researchers ditched many of their high-tech tools and turned to large stones, fire and some old-fashioned elbow grease to recreate techniques used by Native American coppersmiths who lived more than 600 years ago.

This prehistoric approach to metalworking was part of a metallurgical analysis of copper artifacts left behind by the Mississippians of the Cahokia Mounds, who lived in southwestern Illinois from 700 until 1400 A.D. The study was published in the Journal of Archaeological Science in May.
Read More...