**Breaking News**
England
Matching historical records with physical discoveries is one of the most rewarding elements of archaeology, so it goes without saying that the discovery of Julius Caesar’s landing base is one of the most significant in British history.
The invasion of Albion by the Romans, who subsequently called it Britannia, is arguably the most defining turning point in British history, excluding the Norman invasion of 1066.
Once Romanised the British landscape was never the same again, and square buildings became the norm!
Suffice to say the site is now further inland due to silting and other natural occurrences, but when the Romans arrived it was the perfect landing spot, and very quickly the army went to work on building a fort. The rest, as they say, is history…
Peru
El Volcán lies in the Nepeña Valley in north-western Peru, and like most other constructions in the desert it’s made of mud (brick). It wasn’t identified as man-made until the 20th Century because it looks like the tip of a volcano. Of course, lying at ground level it couldn’t be a volcano, but certainly it looks no different to other natural mounds in its current state. However, originally it was clearly like most other pyramids and El Niño rains have eroded it to make it look like this. Looking at the interior the mud bricks are clear to see. The article neglects to mention this.
Excavations have produced a stairwell that had collapsed, and at the bottom a hearth which had carbon from fires. Dating of those fires puts the last use at between 1492 and 1602. Ironically this date is also slap bang in the middle of the Spanish invasion and conquest of the Incas.
The article states the fires lit coincide with four total solar eclipses that occurred (1521, 1538, 1539 and 1543), but since the Spanish conquest occurred between 1532 and 1572 I do not understand why the conclusion of these fires is based on solar eclipses.
The middle year of the fires using the carbon dates (using a classic bell graph, assuming the bell graph to be perfectly dated) would have been in 1547, long after the solar eclipses but during the Spanish conquest. Therefore the assumption that this mound was used in solar eclipse rituals would be false. It’s equally, or more, likely that the fires were used and then ceased when the Spanish put a stop to local “ritual”, or perhaps the people who were using it died in some way and therefore they were no longer making fires in the mound.
I’m proposing these alternatives because quite frankly I’m tired of the regurgitated story of ritual based around loose data. Everything, it seems, is ritual in the ancient world, perpetrating the myth of our ‘primitive’ ancestors who supposedly attributed any and every event to gods.
The notion that these fires were lit based around solar eclipses is just another guess. They may have had another purpose entirely. IF they were ritualistic, maybe they were going on for hundreds of years; maybe they were lit in the hope the Spanish would leave the country; maybe the people here were killed by then Spanish so the fires were no longer lit and they had nothing to do with eclipses. Or maybe they were cooking in there in the hope the smell and the fire itself would not be detected in the local area. So many possibilities, and too many to make guesses as to what was occurring here. At least the headline states El Volcan has experts “stumped”.
https://www.livescience.com/59544-mysterious-volcano-shaped-pyramid-in-peru.html
Greece (Crete)
Dr. Gareth Owens had been working alongside Professor John Coleman for six years trying to decipher the Phaistos disc. Coleman, an Oxford university professor of phonetics, and Owens, an expert on the Minoan language, combined forces to solve the riddle of the disc.
Found nearly 110 years ago the Phaistos disc has baffled many but in more recent years, and through the work of Coleman and Owens, it’s thought to contain a written ritual or prayer to a ‘mother goddess’. Not only that, but their combined efforts have now deciphered 90% of the disc – or so they say – the errors that both researchers had made individually had been resolved through their combined research, and now we can see the language on the Phaistos disc is that of both Minoan Linear A and Mycenaean Linear B.
However, the problem with this idea, and thus the ridicule that has ensued is that Minoan Linear A, rather like the Indus Valley script, is yet to be deciphered. Owens and Coleman argue, however, that other findings can prove what certain symbols mean by using the Mycenaean Linear B version since the same symbols also appear in the Minoan Linear A language.
To me it appears they are pretty close to a complete decipherment of the disc.
The video in this article, recorded in 2014, contains a spoken version of the poem to the mother goddess written on the disc, as deciphered by Coleman and Owens.
It is truly a profound and moving experience.
It really does sound as if our ancestors are reaching out to us across history and talking to us.
If you want to avoid the talk and go straight to the prayer then start the video at 18:00 minutes.
https://www.greecehighdefinition.com/blog/2017/6/1/decrypting-the-4000-year-old-phaistos-disk
**Breaking News**
Egypt
Not so breaking now as I was supposed to post this two days ago but I fell asleep instead!
The chamber found in the so-called Khufu pyramid is so large it reminds one of the Grand Gallery, which brings all kinds of thoughts and possibilities. I do not agree with the idea that this was made for weight distribution due to the size of it. I know little about building engineering but enough to know a chamber designed for weight distribution is never going to be this size. However, the idea that this is a secondary chamber designed to protect the Grand Gallery is highly plausible, but if that was the case it was probably only of use during construction – once the pyramid was finished the chamber was no longer of any use as the structure would hold its own. In other words, this was designed in case of any collapse above – material would fall into this chamber and keep the King’s chamber below in tact. On the contrary there may be nothing important to note about this chamber – perhaps it’s simply a space without a purpose, but knowing the Egyptians and their incredible engineering capabilities and knowledge this seems extremely unlikely. The fact that the dimensions are strikingly similar to the Grand Gallery could lead us towards the idea that this is a secondary gallery leading further into the pyramid… but it is worth getting so excited at this stage?
Either way, I hope sooner or later someone will be able to send a camera in to take a look.
