Free Republic

Ancient stone tablets could shed light on Surtepe excavations Wednesday, May 31, 2006 Results are being presented this week at the 28th International Congress on Excavations, Surveys and Research in Turkey, which started on Monday in Çanakkale, a western province that is also home to the ruins of ancient Troy ANKARA - Turkish Daily News Ancient stone tablets and seals unearthed during archaeological excavations at the Surtepe tumulus, seven kilometers north of Birecik in the southeastern province of Þanlýurfa, could shed light on other ancient structures discovered in the area. A team of experts headed by project director Jesus Gil...

From Indus Valley to coastal Tamil Nadu T.S. Subramanian Strong resemblances between graffiti symbols in Tamil Nadu and the Indus script Continuity of tradition: Megalithic pots with arrow-work graffiti found at Sembiankandiyur village in Nagapattinam district. CHENNAI: In recent excavations in Nagapattinam district in Tamil Nadu, megalithic pottery with graffiti symbols that have a strong resemblance to a sign in the Indus script have been found. Indus script expert Iravatham Mahadevan says that what is striking about the arrow-mark graffiti on the megalithic pottery found at Sembiyankandiyur and Melaperumpallam villages is that they are always incised twice and together, just...

Qasr'e Shirin's 6,000-Year-Old Mystery Feb 26, 2006 Discovery of some clay relics from Obeid Site (an ancient site in Mesopotamia and current Iraq belonging to the 4th Millennium BC) in the city of Qasr'e Shirin has laid the origin and destination of this city’s migrants about 6,000 years ago under ambiguity. Archeologists want to know whether these migrants came to this region from Mesopotamia or they were traveling among different regions of Zagros Mountains. "Continuation of the surveys and identifications in this city led to the discovery of 75 ancient sites most of which belong to the Obeid Site," said...

JEDDAH: On a lonely exposed hillside a few kilometers outside the capital of Al-Jouf province, Sakkaka, stand clusters of three-meter high fingers of stone. Etched with ancient Thamudic graffiti, these monuments to a long extinct culture have maintained their lonely vigil for six millennia. Many have fallen over and others lean at bizarre random angles. Al-Rajajil ("the men"), the sandstone stele weighing up to five tons each, is popularly called Saudi Arabia's Stonehenge. They are possibly the oldest human monuments on the peninsula. Some time in the Chalcolithic, or Copper Age, people living in the area where Al-Jouf is today...

Fire Destroys Large Part of Dead Sea Nature Reserve The Associated Press Published: May 31, 2005 JERUSALEM (AP) - Two-thirds of Israel's Ein Gedi nature reserve was destroyed by fire Tuesday, causing considerable damage to animal and plant life in the lush oasis sandwiched between the harsh Judean Desert and the Dead Sea. Residents of Kibbutz Ein Gedi nearby said the fire covered the kibbutz in smoke, the Haaretz daily reported. Tourists were evacuated from the area, but no injuries were reported. The cause of the blaze was not immediately known. Animal life in the reserve includes the deer-like ibex...

The ruins of the site rest atop a sandstone hill, hugging the far northern coast of the current State of Israel near the border with Lebanon. One can see later-period standing structures that provide the backdrop for what is now a national park and beach resort. But below the surface, and beneath the ocean waves, lie the remains of an ancient harbor town that reach back in history to as long ago as Chalcolithic times (4500 -3200 BC)... Known today as Tel Achziv, its remnants have been explored and excavated before, by Moshe Prausnitz from 1963 through 1964 and, in...

Archaeologists digging in Syria, in the upper reaches of what was ancient Mesopotamia, have found new evidence of how one of the world’s earliest cities met a violent end by fire, collapsing walls and roofs, and a fierce rain of clay bullets. The battle left some of the oldest known ruins of organized warfare. The excavations at the city, Tell Hamoukar, which was destroyed in about 3500 B.C., have also exposed remains suggesting its origins as a manufacturing center for obsidian tools and blades, perhaps as early as 4500 B.C... Expanded excavations at Tell Brak, Habuba Kabira, Hamoukar and elsewhere...

Jewelry from 3rd millennium B.C. discovered in southwest Iran Tehran Times Culture Desk TEHRAN (MNA) –- Ancient Iranians were fond of jewelry almost 4300 years ago and were highly skilled in producing jewelry and ornaments, Iranian archaeologists have concluded based on discoveries they made during their recent excavations at the ancient site of Shahdad in Kerman Province. According to the head of the archaeological team, Mir-Abedin Kaboli, archaeologists discovered the ruins of a developed city with industrial and residential areas and a graveyard after fourteen stages of excavations. “Many artifacts including rare stones, jewelry, engraved stones, and jeweler’s tools were...

Europe Seeks Its Origins In Catalhoyuk KONYA - Sociologist Jon T. Oplinger of the U.S. Maine University said that the data found in the archaeological site of Catalhoyuk could enlighten origins of Europe. In an exclusive interview with the A.A, Oplinger said that Prof. Dr. Waleck Dalpour and he wrote an article about communication and interaction among societies. "In our article, we referred to the figures on earthenware pots which were unearthed during the excavations in Catalhoyuk. Those figures can shed light on our history," he said. Highlighting importance of the findings regarding the development of genetic archaeology, Oplinger said...

Skeletal collections with trauma found from the Neolithic period in Anatolia suggest that injury was caused by daily activities and lifestyle, rather than systematic violence. However, shortly after this period there is an increase in trauma associated with violence that may suggest an increase in stress within and between populations in this area... The human remains come from the site of Titris Hoyuk, dating to 2900-2100 BCE. The site grew very quickly in this period from a small farming community to an urban centre within a large mud-brick fortification wall built over a stone foundation. Within one of the house...

Predating Stonehenge by 6,000 years, Turkey's stunning Gobekli Tepe upends the conventional view of the rise of civilization Six miles from Urfa, an ancient city in southeastern Turkey, Klaus Schmidt has made one of the most startling archaeological discoveries of our time: massive carved stones about 11,000 years old, crafted and arranged by prehistoric people who had not yet developed metal tools or even pottery. The megaliths predate Stonehenge by some 6,000 years. The place is called Gobekli Tepe, and Schmidt, a German archaeologist who has been working here more than a decade, is convinced it's the site of the...

BUFFALO, N.Y. — Think Greenland’s ice sheet is small today? It was smaller — as small as it has ever been in recent history — from 3-5,000 years ago, according to scientists who studied the ice sheet’s history using a new technique they developed for interpreting the Arctic fossil record. “What’s really interesting about this is that on land, the atmosphere was warmest between 9,000 and 5,000 years ago, maybe as late as 4,000 years ago. The oceans, on the other hand, were warmest between 5-3,000 years ago,” said Jason Briner, PhD, University at Buffalo associate professor of geology, who...

Should diaspora Jews have a say in the political negotiations about Jerusalem? "Arafat balked at not having sovereignty over all of East Jerusalem, including the Temple Mount." That's former President Bill Clinton's version of the defining moment of the failed Camp David summit of 2000. "He turned the offer down." Clinton "called Arab leaders for support," but "most wouldn't say much." Not one of them was brave enough—or stupid enough—to take the credit and the blame for helping Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat give up, even if only symbolically, on Muslim control of the Temple Mount. So, the problem of...

Enigmatic circular stone formations reminiscent of those in Europe are found on remote hilltops and valleys throughout Saudi Arabia. The rings are 5 to 100 meters in diameter and are surrounded by stone walls a foot or two tall. Some of the rings have "tails" that stretch out for hundreds of meters. From the air, the patterns have a striking resemblance to designs etched in Peru's Nazca plateau. Little is known about the circles and virtually nothing about their purpose.

Despite the tendency to see Iran as an Islamic monolith and the attempts of the ruling clerics in Tehran to cast it as such, the full complexity of Iranian identity is little understood and almost never discussed—even by Iranians themselves. Long before it was absorbed into the Islamic empire by Arab armies under Caliphs Umar and Uthman in the mid-seventh century, Persia had been the birthplace of Zarathustianism, or Zoroastrianism, the world’s first monotheistic religion.The religion was forged some 3,500 years ago around the philosopher-prophet Zarathustra’s teachings, which emphasized personal morality and a conscious choice between good and evil. From...

Far removed from Tehran's bustling tin-roofed teashops and Isfahan's verdant pomegranate gardens, the deserts known as Dasht-e Kavir and Dasht-e Lut meet at the city of Yazd,once the heart of the Persian Empire. Walking across the wind-whipped plains of the forgotten city, a young Iranian woman dressed in colorful floral garbs points out a sand-dusted tower hovering in the distance like a dormant volcano under a relentless sun. "This is where we put tens of thousands of corpses over the years," she explains with a congenial smile. The funerary tower is part of the ancient burial practice of Zoroastrianism, the...

Still, the world's oldest known leather shoe, revealed Wednesday, struck one of the world's best known shoe designers as shockingly au courant. "It is astonishing," Blahnik said via email, "how much this shoe resembles a modern shoe!" Stuffed with grass, perhaps as an insulator or an early shoe tree, the 5,500-year-old moccasin-like shoe was found exceptionally well preserved—thanks to a surfeit of sheep dung—during a recent dig in an Armenian cave.

This is what may have happened around 3,200 BC on the Lake of Mondsee (Lake Constance), resulting in the exodus of a metalworking community that lived there. When the site of this particular settlement was excavated in the 19th century, 595 stone axes and studded battleaxes, 451 arrowheads along with 12 copper axes and six daggers were discovered. These items represented highly sought-after status symbols, and would never have been left behind intentionally, unless of course the settlement had been abandoned as the result of a disaster. Well preserved foods such as charred hazelnuts, grain and pieces of apples were...

The people of the Mondsee Lake settlement were apparently relatively advanced within this cultural group. They had metallurgical skills, which were rare in Europe. They cleverly searched the mountains for copper deposits, melted the crude ore in clay ovens and made refined, shimmering red weapons out of the metal. In dugout canoes... they paddled along the region's river networks and sold their goods in areas of present-day Switzerland and to their relatives on Lake Constance. Even Otzi the Iceman had an axe, made of so-called Mondsee copper. At approximately 3200 B.C., says Binsteiner, the master blacksmiths were struck by a...

"This tomb of a man in his 30s from the early Chalcolithic period did not seem unusual at first glance. He was buried in accordance with the burial traditions of the period. ... On closer examination of the skeleton, we discovered a deep arrow wound in the bottom of his spine," paleoanthropologist Songül Alpaslan Roodenberg from the excavation team told the Anatolia news agency. "The arrow tip explained the cause of this Aktopraklik man's death almost precisely," she said... Adding that it is very probable that the man died quickly due to excessive bleeding, the paleoanthropologist said: "it seems that...