Crete, Greece
The Minoans are a culture whereby the more we know about them the more mysterious they become.
A bizarre bull cult, which may have been an influence from ancient Egypt, although totally unlike its North African neighbour’s practices, is one of the most prevalent aspects of their culture. Many depictions show gymnasts leaping over bulls in a death-defying act that must have been as mesmerising as it was dangerous.
My favourite and most studied European culture is that of the Mycenaeans, and they were hugely influenced by the Minoans. In fact, there was probably an influx of Minoan people into the Peloponnese and other areas of mainland Greece after the eruption of Thera, which likely destroyed Knossos and other Minoan cities. Much of Mycenaean artworks, ceramics, and other artefacts are either Minoan imports, or hugely influenced by Cretan art.
Both the Linear A and Linear B scripts are so closely related we see a huge influence in the Mycenaean language from the Minoans. I have twice visited the ancient citadel of Mycenae and many of the other Mycenaean cities all over Greece, and their artefacts, priceless gold items, and rich grave goods point to the Minoans as the driving influence behind them. These lavish grave goods, mostly found at Mycenae itself, suggest a culture which had huge wealth and power. And thus we can glimpse through the window of the Mycenaeans and see clearly the Minoans.
The Minoans are without doubt the most important link between our own European cultures and the ages before it. Pre-Minoan sites are basic, and what we might perceive as the standard for most areas during that time period. We know about the Indus Valley culture, ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, and even Persia, but in Europe, before civilisation existed there is a wall of silence. There is not a connection between the Minoans and what occurred before, it is as mysterious as the culture itself. The Minoans are the most important influence on western civilisation and we must always remember that without them life would not be as it is today. We owe everything to them, for their sudden advanced technology, artefacts, and their living standards, which seemingly came from nowhere, are the backbone of ancient Greece itself.
Scotland
Honestly, I’m sick of this!
Scotland is home to some of the best and most important archaeological sites in the world, and if many of them were not so remote they would be more widely visited.
This article, beautifully presented, refers to the threat to Scotland’s archaeological sites due to ‘climate change’.
Now please can you tell me this – when were archaeological sites not under threat from climate change?
Most likely 99.9% of all archaeological sites have already been lost due to climate change, especially coastal sites, long before we started hearing this nonsense in modern times. It’s not a new phenomenon – the climate is changing every day. The earth is not a static object, and neither is the climate, so it’s not as if there is a sudden threat to these sites – the threat has been there since the sites were built.
Regardless of what people think, I am always being shouted at for not believing in the man-made climate change model. I am certain that the climate is changing because that’s what it does naturally. We are still coming out of an ice age, the seas are still rising, temperatures change year by year, and it’s a fact that in Roman times the climate was warmer than it is today. We do not have enough data to say that we are having such a huge effect on the climate. We are being told that we are affecting the climate through our activities, but while they preach to us that we must recycle, buy long life light bulbs and bags for life, these hypocritical monsters continue to pump dangerous chemicals into the seas, the atmosphere, and on human beings. Depleted uranium bombs, nuclear explosions, weapons of mass destruction, oil spills, fracking, plastics… the list is endless. So do you really believe what they tell us? I don’t.
No, don’t get me wrong, of course human activity is having some kind of influence, but I do not believe for one second it is on the scale we are being led to believe. There is an agenda regarding this issue and we are not being told the truth. That’s just my opinion, and I think we need to be careful on what we believe.
Iraq
The world’s first known customer complaint has been dated to 1800 BC and comes from Ur in Mesopotamia, modern-day southern Iraq.
The clay tablet depicts a complaint from a merchant called Nanni about the poor quality of the materials he had been sent by someone called Ea-nasir.
The complaint must have been worth Nanni spending a lot of time writing into the clay tablet in cuneiform, and it shows he was provided with poor quality copper from Ea-nasir. The shipment ordered would have been extremely valuable and no doubt the lesser quality products he was provided with caused Nanni a lot of resentment and anger.
Suffice to say there are no hearts or kisses at the end of the text.
https://qz.com/1364934/the-worlds-first-customer-complaint-is-almost-4000-years-old/
**Breaking News**
Italy
Everyone knows about the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD, and the subsequent pyroclastic flow that covered the entire town of Pompeii in hot ash, killing all in its path, but has the actual date ever been fully determined?
The recognised date is 24 August 79, based on Pliny the Younger’s detailed account, but certain evidence found, like autumnal fruits, have always cast doubt over that dating.
Now an incredible discovery may have put the date forward by two months to October 79. The remarkable thing about this is that we have a recognised ancient historian versus a bit of what is basically graffiti, and the latter may hold the most vital and more accurate evidence.
For most people altering the date by two months is hardly an earth-shaking revelation (excuse yet another bad pun) but actually this is vital to understanding the life of the people of Pompeii and its sister town, Herculaneum. They are unique in that the hot ash which buried the towns has provided us with the most preserved ancient remains of anywhere from 2,000 years ago, and an invaluable window into ancient Roman living.
United States
The title is a bit of a misnomer in the context of what I wish to discuss.
I think the question is more like, “Was there even a Noah in the first place?”
All of you will be aware of the long, drawn out argument of creationists versus evolutionists. You’re either on one side or the other. Either the earth was formed billions of years ago or it was formed around 6,000 years ago (in the Bible).
Both the Maya and the ancient Indians (Asia, not north America) refer to huge time scales in their calendar and epic stories respectively, so they clearly knew something.
So which side are you on?
I’m on both.
“What?” I hear you say, “How can you be on both sides?”
It’s clear the earth was formed a long time ago and that evolution occurs. You can see it in your own offspring in the genetic variation you have created. I think to deny such evidence is ridiculous.
So, you believe that there was a Big Bang and then the universe aged a few billion years and then stars were created and planets and eventually life. But where did that life come from? Was it made out of a cosmic soup, like the elusive elixir of life?
I don’t think so.
If you want to push yourself towards insanity, try this:
The Big Bang created the universe, apparently from a single point of nothingness.
But what created that point of nothingness?
There could not have been “nothing” because that’s not possible. Einstein stated clearly that E = mc2 and in that equation is the unbreakable rule that energy cannot be destroyed, it can only be transformed into something else. So in your Big Bang you have to conclude that there was something which created the Big Bang. So you have to ask – what was it? And then when you have grasped the concept that something must have created the Big Bang then you have to ask – what created the something that created the Big Bang? And so it goes on.
What we are left with is a creator force, something that is responsible for the creation of the universe, and that is why I am firmly in both camps – evolution is a part of life, but something surely created it. Even Darwin himself was of this opinion.
One camp argues red and the other camp argues blue, but the colour is actually green. So while they continue to bang their heads against each other with huge ridicule from both camps, perhaps it’s about time they realised they are both right and they are both wrong.
But the fundamental issue from the perspective of archaeology is this – our ancestors wrote amazing stories about this issue and they have been debunked and ridiculed as primitive people who had to write down silly stories to remember stuff. However, the facts clearly show they were far more advanced than we are, both in their natural thinking and their ability to conceptualise how the universe actually works.
While we advance rapidly with technology, we regress in common sense and the ability to grasp the obvious basics of the universe, which our ancestors tried to pass onto us in the most simplistic way possible – Noah, for example. Think about what that story is actually telling us.
Have you ever put something in front of a cat and the cat can’t see it because it’s blind when something is right under its nose?
That’s us.
The Americas
In the 1970s Virginia Steen-McIntyre was a geologist working for the US Geological Survey (USGS) and was sent to an archaeology site in Mexico to date a series of artefacts located in sediment. The archaeologists involved suggested a date of 25,000 years – at that time double the accepted date of human arrival in the Americas – but Steen-McIntyre’s results suggested otherwise. After a series of state-of-the-art tests on the stratification layers the results came back as 250,000 years.
The lead archaeologist then dismissed her findings and requested a new set of dates, but she refused to change the scientific results that she had uncovered, citing that the science could not be altered. Suffice to say her paper was thrown out and she subsequently lost her teaching job at an American university and her papers were rarely accepted by academia or the peer review process.
This is what can happen when you step out of line of mainstream accepted theories. Of course, in the 1970s things were a lot worse than they are today, but this is just one example of many where discoveries that wipe out accepted theories are brushed under the carpet by mainstream academia. We are being lied to, drip fed information based on strict guidelines, and if anything is contradictory to those strict set of guideline it is dismissed completely. And occasionally, as in the case of Steen-McIntyre, careers are destroyed.
One of the most hotly debated theories is of course the arrival of human beings in the Americas. Despite dozens of bits of evidence placing human beings in the Americas long before 20,000 years ago the inability of academia to accept these dates, and the entrance path in which humans arrived, continues to be based around a Bering Straight land bridge and an ice-free corridor. The former is an acceptable idea although the dates are clearly wrong, but the idea of the ice-free corridor that opened up for a short time is about as viable as Man walking on Jupiter.
We must continue to fight the arrogant and often idiotic ideas laid down by – once again – outdated and defunct Darwinian models of human evolution.
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/debate-ice-free-pathway-americas-heats
Australia
How do these people ever get jobs?
I’ve heard many a ridiculous theory from archaeologists and anthropologists, but this ranks as one of the highest.
Homo erectus went extinct because it was ‘lazy’, apparently.
In the article is states:
“They really don’t seem to have been pushing themselves,” Dr. Shipton said. “I don’t get the sense they were explorers looking over the horizon. They didn’t have that same sense of wonder that we have.”
How on this great earth do you make statements like that with an extinct species when there is no evidence?
And as usual, the “climate change” excuse comes into the picture as well.
Just like the age-old ‘sacrifice’ term used as an excuse when archaeologists haven’t got a clue what’s going on with a strange burial, we are seeing ‘climate change’ as another pathetic term with absolutely no evidence whatsoever. Climate change has become a part of modern science, and although I’m not suggesting it wasn’t apparent in the past, for the climate has been changing since the earth was formed and will never stop, it’s just a nice little term used because everyone is familiar with it. In the old days people reported seeing elves and fairies as ways of explaining paranormal experiences. Now we say it’s ghosts and aliens, because that’s the level of understanding we have now. And climate change is a similar model being used to explain away anything when you haven’t got another reason. It’s totally ridiculous.
The day we start to realise how very clever these creatures were – sometimes more advanced than us – the quicker we will ourselves evolve.
https://phys.org/news/2018-08-laziness-extinction-homo-erectus.html
India
What a discovery!
India’s history can be traced back quite far, but nothing like these rock carvings has ever been discovered before.
Interesting are the animals portrayed that are not native to India, hinting at something extremely important occurring in Maharashtra.
I’m still convinced civilisation started in India and these rock paintings, which could be tens of thousands of years old, certainly fill in a missing gap in India’s history.
The question now is – who were they are where did they come from?
Only a body in the vicinity will answer those questions, but let’s hope and pray the archaeologists can find any artefact that could be carbon dated.
