Mysteries of 3,000-year old kingdom of Jinsha

Mysteries of 3,000-year old kingdom of Jinsha

A construction site in the western suburbs of Chengdu in China's Sichuan province looked much like any other. It all started when a bulldozer driver heard a scraping sound as his machine hit deep into the ground. He struck a collection of golden, jade and bronze objects.

Workers and passers by snapped up the treasures and scurried off. Those too late to get anything, disgruntled, report the find to the police. And that's how, in February 2001, the world learned about the relics of a mysterious 3,000-year-old Jinsha kingdom in the mountains of southwest China.

'Jinsha culture is unique, quite different from cultures in other parts of China, but is scarcely mentioned by Chinese historians,' said Zhu Zhangyi, a veteran archaeologist in Sichuan and deputy-curator of the Jinsha Museum. 'The harsh geography made it difficult for outsiders to enter the kingdom and so it was able to preserve its endemic culture.'

Pharaoh Hatshepsut Died in Pain

Pharaoh Hatshepsut Died in Pain

Obese, plagued with decayed teeth and perhaps a skin disease, Queen Hatshepsut might have spent her last days in pain, according to a preliminary examination of the 3,000-year-old mummy thought to be that of Egypt's greatest female pharaoh.

Bald in front but with long hair in back, the mummy shows an overweight woman just over 5 feet tall, who died at about 50.

This was Hatshepsut, undoubtedly one of the most extraordinary women in recorded history.

Egypt's Pharaoh Hatshepsut Said Found

Egypt's Pharaoh Hatshepsut Said Found

The mummy of Hatshepsut, Egypt's greatest female pharaoh, has been identified, thanks to gum disease and a missing molar.


The find, said to be the most important in Egypt's Valley of the Kings since the discovery of King Tutankhamun in the early 1920s, follows a one-year investigation led by Zahi Hawass, Egypt's secretary general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities.


Hawass' work will be detailed in "Secrets of Egypt's Lost Queen," a documentary that airs Sunday, July 15 at 9 p.m. ET/PT on The Discovery Channel.

Trovo questo così molto affascinante. Quando ero un bambino, prima che ci sia una cosa come il cavo, l'unica cosa che potrebbe ottenerla che guardo la televisione per tutta la durata era un " Amo Lucy" fine settimana lunghissimo. Come adulto, potrei fare la stessa cosa con le esposizioni che si occupano dei risultati archaelogical, ma particolarmente allineo quando quei risultati sono mummie egiziane antiche. Non posso attendere per guardare questa esposizione.

I find this so very fascinating. When I was a child, before there was such a thing as cable, the only thing that could get me watching the television for any length of time was an "I Love Lucy" marathon weekend. As an adult, I could do the same thing with shows that deal with archaelogical findings, but especially true when those findings are ancient Egyptian mummies. I cannot wait to watch this show.

Archaeologists discover 3,000yo Egyptian mummy

Archaeologists have discovered the 3,000-year-old mummy of a high priest to the god Amun in Egypt, antiquities supremo Dr Zahi Hawass has told the official MENA news agency.

The 18th Dynasty mummy of Sennefer was unearthed in a tomb in the Valley of the Kings in the southern city of Luxor - one of the most famous archaeological sites in the world, by a team from Britain's Cambridge University.

Holy Sarcophagus Batman

This is too freakin cool and cool really isn't even the adjective for it, cooler than cool.

Archaeologists find tomb of King Herod

Under a baking sun, pieces of limestone carved with borders of rosettes and geometrical designs lay in three excavated pits Tuesday — a desert site Israeli archaeologists say is the tomb of King Herod, who ruled the Holy Land when Christ was born.

snip

Last month, his team started unearthing limestone fragments, from which emerged the picture of an ornately carved sarcophagus with decorative urns of a type never before found in the Holy Land.

"It's a sarcophagus we don't just see anywhere," Netzer told reporters at the university. "It is something very special."

Text reveals more ancient secrets

This is freakin cool!

Text reveals more ancient secrets

Experts are "lost for words" to have found that a medieval prayer book has yielded yet another key ancient text buried within its parchment.

Works by mathematician Archimedes and the politician Hyperides had already been found buried within the book, known as the Archimedes Palimpsest.

Pakistan's Cultural Heritage in Peril - Part 3

Here is part 3 of the article by Joachim Hoelzgen

A Fight against Time and the Water Level

In a recent presentation at the Aga Khan's Serena Hotel in Islamabad, Hauptmann outlined to the city's elites the harm the dam project would cause to the cultural legacy of the upper Indus River area. Senior officials from Pakistan's Culture Ministry attended and were surprised to hear what Hauptmann had to say about the remote river canyons. "They were completely taken aback to find that they hadn't been made aware of the cliff drawings before," Hauptmann recalls. It wasn't the kind of event that happens often in the Pakistani capital. With such heavy German involvement in the project, the country's ambassador also attended the event, serving as its chairman.

Raiders of the Lost Codex

Now this would be absolutely freaking cool to see. I can imagine the translation of now would be much different from the translation of the first Bible. I do hope these various people can come together long enough to do this.

Scholars Piece Together Ancient Bible

Parts of the 1,600-year-old Codex Sinaiticus -- which includes the world's earliest complete New Testament -- are scattered between Leipzig, London and St. Petersburg. Now researchers want to digitize the fragments and publish the whole volume on the Internet. But controversy still rages over the proper ownership of the relic.

Pakistan's Cultural Heritage in Peril - Part 2

I posted the link to part 1 of this story yesterday.

A Fight against Time and the Water Level

It now appears inevitable that Pakistan will construct the Basha Diamer Dam, imperilling a cultural legacy that goes back to the end of the Ice Age. With time running out, German archeologist Harald Hauptmann is racing to document the area's thousands of cliff carvings before they are lost.

Pakistan's Cultural Heritage in Peril

Dam Threatens Ancient Buddhist Stone Carvings

Some 35,000 petroglyphs located in Pakistan's Indus River area will soon be flooded by a giant dam. An archeologist from Heidelberg is trying to save as much as he can before encroaching modernity destroys the remote area's cultural history.

I do hope this archaeologist is able to save as much of this history as is possible. It is such a shame when history is destroyed like this. It's terrible enough that such historical objects were destroyed hundreds and thousands of years ago before their importance was realized. Now that we know the importance, we need to be doing everything possible to save sites such as this.