MESOPOTAMIA

Written sources from Mesopotamia suggest that kissing in relation to sex was practiced by the peoples of the ancient Middle East 4,500 years ago. The sources have been analysed by researchers from the University of Copenhagen and University of Oxford in a new article published in the journal Science.
Recent research has hypothesised that the earliest evidence of human lip kissing originated in a very specific geographical location in South Asia 3,500 years ago, from where it may have spread to other regions, simultaneously accelerating the spread of the herpes simplex virus 1.

But according to Dr Troels Pank Arbøll and Dr Sophie Lund Rasmussen, who in a new article in the journal Science draw on a range of written sources from the earliest Mesopotamian societies, kissing was already a well-established practice 4,500 years ago in the Middle East. And probably much earlier, moving the earliest documentation for kissing back 1,000 years compared to what was previously acknowledged in the scientific community.

"In ancient Mesopotamia, which is the name for the early human cultures that existed between the Euphrates and Tigris rivers in present-day Iraq and Syria, people wrote in cuneiform script on clay tablets. Many thousands of these clay tablets have survived to this day, and they contain clear examples that kissing was considered a part of romantic intimacy in ancient times, just as kissing could be part of friendships and family members' relations," says Dr Troels Pank Arbøll, an expert on the history of medicine in Mesopotamia.

He continues:

"Therefore, kissing should not be regarded as a custom that originated exclusively in any single region and spread from there but rather appears to have been practiced in multiple ancient cultures over several millennia."

Dr Sophie Lund Rasmussen adds:

"In fact, research into bonobos and chimpanzees, the closest living relatives to humans, has shown that both species engage in kissing, which may suggest that the practice of kissing is a fundamental behaviour in humans, explaining why it can be found across cultures."

As the 75th anniversary of the Palestinian Nakba, or 'catastrophe', is marked on Monday at the United Nations, pro-Israel advocates have been pushing an alternative version of historical events that positions Israel as the victim and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians as self-inflicted.

This Israeli narrative contends that as soon as David Ben-Gurion declared the independence of the Jewish state on 14 May 1948 five major Arab armies invaded historic Palestine to wage - along with the Palestinians - a "war of annihilation" against Israel and "push Jews into the ocean".

The outnumbered Israelis defended themselves and won the war, and in the process, Palestinians fled their homes.

"These are foundational narratives for Israeli Jews and also Diaspora Jews - they are taken as obvious truth," Dr Yair Wallach, historian, and senior lecturer in Israeli studies at SOAS, told The New Arab.

"Pro-Israel advocates have been pushing an alternative version of historical events that positions Israel as the victim and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians as self-inflicted.

"They connect 1948 (and Israel) with the Jewish memory of persecution; they provide justification for what Israel did to Palestinians as 'self-defence'; and it informs the understanding that Israel's very existence is always in danger, and it is force and force only that guarantees the security of Israel."

Archaeologists excavating in Iran's Mazandaran region have revealed that Iranian farmers were cultivating rice as far back as 3000 years ago.

Māzandarān is a historic northern Iran region bordering the Caspian Sea on the north. An early Iranian civilization flourished at the beginning of the first millennium BC in Tabarestan (Māzandarān).

Based on the results of an archaeological survey conducted by experts from the Peking University, rice cultivation in the Mazandaran region dates some 3,000 years, ISNA quoted Iranian archaeologist Ebrahim Amirkolai as saying on Thursday.

The study relies on evidence mostly accumulated from excavations conducted on Qale-Kesh, an archaeological site near Amol, the Amirkolai said.

It shows that the history of this grain's cultivation in Mazandaran goes back to the Achaemenid period and even further in time to 3,000 years ago, he explained.

Moreover, the excavations at the site revealed significant data about the Bronze Age and Iron Age, Amirkolai stated.

Around 8,000 years ago, Middle Eastern hunters carved to-scale plans of their 'desert kite' traps onto rocks.
Stars and lines engraved in rocks on the Arabian Peninsula may represent nearby hunting traps, making these carvings the first scale-plan diagrams in human history, according to a new study that reveals humans' sophisticated understanding of space around 8,000 years ago.

Archaeologists first noticed these structures, known as desert kites, about 100 years ago, when aerial photography began taking off with airplanes. Kites are large areas of land bordered by low stone walls, sometimes with pits scattered on the inside near the edges. Found primarily in the Middle East and Central Asia, kites are thought to have functioned like pens or traps for animals. Hunters would herd animals, like gazelle, into the kite through a long, narrow passage, where the game would be unable to escape the walls or the pits, making them easier to kill.

Because of their massive size — averaging close to the square footage of two football fields — kites cannot be seen in their entirety from the ground. But the advent of publicly available, high-resolution satellite images, such as those from Google Earth, has jump-started the study of desert kites in the past decade.

A pair of unknown and "exceptionally rare" portraits by Rembrandt have been discovered in a private collection in the UK.

The intimate paintings of relatives of the Dutch master are now expected to sell for between £5 million and £8 million ($6.25 million-$10 million) at auction.

Signed and dated 1635, the pictures are of an elderly husband and wife who were related to Rembrandt by marriage.

Measuring just under 8 inches high, the paintings depict wealthy plumber Jan Willemsz van der Pluym and his wife Jaapgen Carels, who were from a prominent family in the Dutch city of Leiden.

The remains of two people believed to have been killed by an earthquake that accompanied the AD79 eruption of Mount Vesuvius have been found in the ruins of the ancient Roman city of Pompeii.

The skeletons, thought to belong to two men in their mid-50s, were found during excavations at the Insula dei Casti Amanti, or Insula of the Chaste Lovers, an area of Pompeii made up of a cluster of homes and a bakery.

The well-preserved remains were found beneath a collapsed wall. Bone fractures indicate that the men probably died as a result of multiple injuries sustained as the building they sought refuge in caved in because of an earthquake that struck during the early stage of the volcanic eruption.

Scientists believe they have discovered the earliest human footprints - tracks left by a family of extinct humans 300,000 years ago.

The perfectly preserved prints of a small family of 'Heidelberg people,' a species of human long since extinct, were uncovered in Germany.

This subspecies of archaic humans, formally known as Homo heidelbergensis, were the first to build homes and hunt large animals but disappeared from the Earth about 28,000 years ago - and experts say it was because of climate change.

The traces were discovered in the Paleolithic site complex of Schöningen in Lower Saxony, along with ancient animal imprints, including the first evidence of elephants in the region.

The first (original) Nazi Party was in Germany, but the ideology, of imperialistic racist fascism (the lower-case "nazism" ideology, instead of just the original, upper-case "N" Nazi Party that was an example of it) can be in any country.

German racist-fascism or Nazism was organized by Hitler as anti-Jewish, anti-communist, and for a Thousand-Year Reich in which "Aryans" or purebred descendants of Adam and Eve in Genesis 3, would have control over the entire world, and there would be no descendants from the snake (Satan) in Genesis 3, which Hitler believed Jews to be.
The Slavic peoples in the Soviet Union would become enslaved to Aryans, and that land would be the main breeding ground or "Lebensraum" to expand the numbers of Aryans so that they could achieve further conquests, and he thought that the most difficult country for Germany to defeat would be America — but, that he and his fascist allies would first need to defeat all of Eurasia. Then, he would take on America. That was his plan, ever since 1919, and as of 1928, his Second Book, and it never changed.

Conquest of all lands, and extermination of all Jews, was to produce his Thousand-Year Reich, which he thought would be "Paradise." Nazism wasn't only about exterminating Jews. It was also, very importantly, about conquering the Soviet Union.

There are numerous symbolic links between Catalhoyuk (Central Turkey, 7100-6000 BCE) and Gobekli Tepe (southern Turkey, ~10,000-8000 BCE) that show they knew the same (or similar) astronomical zodiacal system.
First, see here for a list of known 'Master/Mistress-of-Animals' symbols from around the Near Eastern region. Above is a 3rd millennium BCE example from Ur, Mesopotamia.
We also have a Mistress-of-Animals, or Potnia Theron, at Catalhoyuk (above). This shows symbolism from the 8th millennium BCE survived until the Bronze and Iron Ages.

1984, Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451, The Gulag Archipelago - there are many great books on 20th-century totalitarianism. But few of them have the power and poetry of Ernst Jünger's 1951 The Forest Passage. Both a man of his time - and ahead of his time - the German-born Jünger was not only a staunch but careful critic of tyranny; he could see through the "soft power" manipulations of much subtler forms of centralized oppression as well. And call it out for exactly what it was.

Given Jünger's broad vision and deep insight, one could be forgiven for thinking that the The Forest Passage was written only yesterday. It is packed with perennial truths that apply to the politics and psychology of Western civilization over the last 100 or so years. Join us this week on MindMatters as we give Ernst Jünger's gem of a book its due, and begin to explore what it means to be, or become, a 'forest rebel'.


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