One of the great tragedies of ancient history, memorialized in myths and Hollywood film, is the burning of the great library at Alexandria. But the reality of the Library's end was actually a lot less pyrotechnic than that. A major cause of the Library's ruin was government budget cuts.

Alexandria was a Hellenistic city founded in Egypt by Alexander the Great's invading forces. Ptolomy II Soter, who ruled after Alexander, wanted to found a museum in the Greek style, based on Aristotle's Lyceum in Athens. He imagined that this place - called Ptolemaic Mouseion Academy - would attract great scholars from all over the world. No longer would Alexandria be a colonial backwater or just a nice vacation spot for rich Greeks. Instead, it would become a great city of wealth and learning.

A local politician from the party of Russian President Vladimir Putin has accused Jews of destroying Russia.

The accusation by Oleg Bolychev, a legislator from the ruling United Russia party at the regional parliament in Kaliningrad, was made in the parliament on February 6, according to the Regnum news agency, which reported on it on Thursday.

During a debate, Bolychev called his detractors "Jews, mired in opposition," adding: "You destroyed our country in 1917 and you destroyed our country in 1991."

The Russian Jewish Congress condemned the lawmaker, saying it was indignant over the statement and calling on authorities to investigate it.

Bolychev also came under fire from colleagues within the ruling party, some of whom called for him to be expelled.

"It is incredible that a public figure can make such extremist statements," lawmaker Alexander Khinshtein told the AFP news agency.

Bolychev has rejected accusations that his remarks were anti-Semitic and decried claims of extremism as "ravings and provocations."

"I was not talking about Jews but about the situation in the country. I was speaking about traitors who destroyed a great state twice," he said.

A life-size bronze statue of the ancient Greek deity Apollo, dating back to 2500 years ago, has been discovered by a local fisherman in Gaza seashore, Press TV has reported.

The fisherman Jawdat Ghorab, 26, from the central Gaza Strip found the relic among rocks on the seashore last August.

After hearing rumors of such as discovery for months, the police investigated and seized the artifact, weighing 450 kg (1000 pounds) and 1.7 meters (5.8 feet) in height.

"The statue, with its green patina, was unlikely to have come from beneath the waves," said the young Gaza archeologist Fadel Al Utol.

He has suggested to the Hamas government's tourism and antiquities ministry that a Franco-Palestinian team helps restore the Gaza Apollo and put it on display in a local museum.

The Gaza Strip is rich with antiquities from different civilizations, though, most of its artifacts were stolen during the forty years of Israeli occupation of the territory.

Experts say that the discovery of the Apollo statue shows how this blockaded coastal strip was once a multicultural crossroad for various civilizations.

Homer left historians with the impression that the ancient Greeks and Romans had an underdeveloped appreciation of colour. The ancients, in fact, were a shade more sophisticated than that and understood colour in a completely different way to us, argues Mark Bradley.

People in ancient cultures saw colour in an altogether different way from you and me. The most famously perplexing description of colour in the ancient Mediterranean world is the 'wine-dark sea' in The Iliad and The Odyssey. Have you ever looked at the sea and thought that it was the colour of claret?

One of the first people to argue that the ancient Greeks had an under-developed colour sense was a 19th century British prime minister. As well as being a politician, William Gladstone was a classics scholar and in his spare time did a study of colour usage in early Greek literature.

According to Mark Bradley, Associate Professor of Ancient History at the University of Nottingham, Gladstone observed, quite rightly, that colour operated in a very different way in antiquity from what we are used to today. 'We have a great deal of difficulty in translating Homer's colour terms into modern western languages,' he says.

Gladstone noted that Homer actually uses very few colour terms, that black and white predominate, and that he uses the same colours to describe objects which look quite different.

'He believed that although Homer represented the origins of western literature and had very sophisticated ideas about characterisation and tragedy and plot and genre, that in fact his colour vocabulary was comparable to that of a contemporary infant of about three years old,' says Bradley.

A cloud of mystery still hovers over Stonehenge, the prehistoric stone circle located on Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire, England. In addition to wide-ranging theories about the monument's true purpose (Druid temple? Ancient healing complex? Alien landing site?), archaeologists have long debated how it came to be built, given that the distinctive bluestones used in Stonehenge's construction are native to southwest Wales, some 100-150 miles away from Salisbury. Now, new research has pinpointed the exact location of many of the rocks that make up Stonehenge, bringing us one step closer to solving at least one mystery behind the world's most famous ancient monument.
According to the established wisdom for some 90 years, many of the smaller rocks making up Stonehenge come from the Preseli Hills in Pembrokeshire, Wales. In 1923, geologist Herbert Henry Thomas first identified an outcrop known as Carn Meini as the source of the spotted dolerite bluestones used to build Stonehenge. (The distinctive markings are the result of elements within the bluestones cooling at different rates after an underwater volcano ejected the stones some 450 million years ago.)

Thomas' theory was that around 5,000 years ago, during the Neolithic era, humans quarried approximately 80 bluestones (each weighing up to three tons) specifically for Stonehenge. They transported the stones to the site in Wiltshire by moving them south, down from the Preseli Hills, and loading them on rafts to carry them up the Bristol Channel. Other geologists, however, argued that humans had no role in transporting the stones at all. According to this competing school of thought, an Ice Age glacier carried the bluestones to the Wiltshire region some 20,000 years ago, and they were already available locally when Neolithic man began building Stonehenge.

A team of Spanish and Egyptian archaeologists made a find in a southern Egyptian tomb that opens the way to a reinterpretation of Pharaonic chronology, since it could show that Amenhotep III and his son Amenhotep IV reigned together.

The team, headed by Spaniard Francisco Martin Valentin and funded by Spain's Gaselec foundation, excavated the remains of a wall and columns of the mausoleum of a minister of the 18th Pharaonic dynasty - 1569-1315 B.C. - in the province of Luxor.

What is exceptional about the discovery, Martin Valentin told Efe, is that in the excavation they found the names of Amenhotep III and Amenhotep IV carved together.

This "could confirm that the two Pharaohs governed jointly between nine and 10 years of the 39 that Amenhotep III governed, since the hieroglypics on the columns explain that they were both sovereigns of Upper and Lower Egypt," the archaeologist said.

"There is nothing similar in Pharaonic history," Martin Valentin said decisively.

The reigns of Amenhotep III, also known by the Hellenized name of Amenophis III, and of Amenhotep IV, who went down in history as Akhenaten, are among the most significant in Ancient Egypt for a number of reasons.

It's tempting to dismiss the mid-16th-century depictions of Biblical miracles, flaming comets, multi-headed beasts, and apocalyptic chaos that fill the pages of the "Augsburg Book of Miraculous Signs" as the superstitious vestiges of the post-Medieval mind. But according to the co-authors of Taschen's new, 568-page boxed volume called "Book of Miracles," the Protestant citizens of Augsburg, Germany, were enthusiastic and active collectors of portrayals of portentous signs, as well as written descriptions of ancient and astrological prophecies. Gathering the myriad broadsheets and pamphlets about the imminent apocalypse into so-called Books of Wonders, of which the privately commissioned "Augsburg Book of Miraculous Signs" is probably the most important surviving example, was a way for people to connect the dots between ancient prophecies, their contemporary fears, and unexplainable phenomena, especially in the skies.

In part, their passion stemmed from a collector's fascination with such topics, but Germany's 16th-century Protestants were also motivated by religious antipathy toward the Catholic Church, whose Pope they derided as the Antichrist. Some took the epithet for fact: For them, since the end was nigh, it behooved one to pay attention to the signs.

The history of our planet is far more complex than most people would dare to imagine. According to the commonly accepted version of history that is taught in high schools and colleges all over the United States, ancient man was a very simple creature with extremely limited knowledge. Unfortunately for those that promote this flawed version of history, archaeologists keep digging up stuff that directly contradicts it. The truth is that there is a tremendous amount of evidence of great intellectual achievement in the ancient world.

For example, just consider the Great Pyramid of Giza. It is a true technological marvel. It is such a massive structure built with such extraordinary precision that modern technology is only just now starting to catch up with it. We think that we could possibly build a similar structure today if we wanted to, but modern man has never actually constructed anything like it. And as you will see below, the Great Pyramid of Giza is far from the only example of advanced technology in the ancient world that we find in Egypt.

Posted above is a photograph of a wall in an ancient Egyptian temple at Abydos. Look at the hieroglyphics very carefully.

Do you see anything strange?

A treasure trove of fossils chiseled out of a canyon in Canada's Kootenay National Park rivals the famous Burgess Shale, the best record of early life on Earth, scientists say.

"Once we started to break fresh rock, we realized we had discovered something incredibly special," said Robert Gaines, a geologist at Pomona College in Pomona, Calif., and co-author of a new study announcing the find. "It was an extraordinary moment."

The Burgess Shale refers to both a fossil find and a 505-million-year-old rock formation made of mud and clay. The renowned Burgess Shale fossil quarry, a UNESCO World Heritage site located in Yoho National Park, is in a glacier-carved cliff in the Canadian Rockies. The fossils were discovered in 1909. Since then, several other fossil sites have been found in the Burgess Shale, but none as rich as the original.

Fire in the sky, torrential rains, droughts and Biblical floods - all supposedly brought on by the sins and wickedness of man. Is it really a surprise we are hearing it all once again today?

The online Spiegel today has a report on a new book titled The Book of Miracles which presents and examines a collection of 16th century depictions of celestial phenomena and portentous signs. They were recently discovered as part of a collection of 169 illustrations created in Augsburg, Germany around 1552. End-of-world visions, it turns out, are a human mental disorder that has been around for as long as civilization itself.


The images were created as Europe was in the grips of the Little ice Age, a time of bad weather, bitter cold, storms and crop failures, starvation and human misery. The 16th century depictions reveal images of a civilization obsessed with the end-of-the-world. Priests and elitists of the time conducted terrifying witch hunts to find those allegedly responsible for the black magic that cooked up the extreme weather.

Sound familiar?