Rambling through the Ages

Discovery of ancient cave paintings in Petra stuns art scholars

2010-08-24T11:16:00.000-07:00

Winged child playing a flute while seated in a vine-scroll

Spectacular 2,000-year-old Hellenistic-style wall paintings have been revealed at the world heritage site of Petra through the expertise of British conservation specialists. The paintings, in a cave complex, had been obscured by centuries of black soot, smoke and greasy substances, as well as graffiti.

Experts from the Courtauld Institute in London have now removed the black grime, uncovering paintings whose "exceptional" artistic quality and sheer beauty are said to be superior even to some of the better Roman paintings at Herculaneum that were inspired by Hellenistic art.

Virtually no Hellenistic paintings survive today, and fragments only hint at antiquity's lost masterpieces, while revealing little about their colours and composition, so the revelation of these wall paintings in Jordan is all the more significant. They were created by the Nabataeans, who traded extensively with the Greek, Roman and Egyptian empires and whose dominion once stretched from Damascus to the Red Sea, and from Sinai to the Arabian desert.

Such is the naturalistic intricacy of these paintings that the actual species of flowers, birds and insects bursting with life can be identified. They were probably painted in the first century, but may go back further. Professor David Park, an eminent wall paintings expert at the Courtauld, said that the paintings "should make jaws drop".

At the instigation of the Petra National Trust (PNT), conservation experts Stephen Rickerby and Lisa Shekede restored the paintings to life. The work took three years, and was completed only last week. "The paintings were a real mess," Rickerby said.

He described what has emerged from the blackened layers as "really exceptional and staggeringly beautiful, with an artistic and technical quality that's quite unlike anything else".

Three different vines, grape, ivy and bindweed – all associated with Dionysus, the ancient Greek god of wine – have been identified, while the birds include a demoiselle crane and a Palestine sunbird with luscious colours. The scenes are populated by putti-like figures, one winged child playing a flute while seated in a vine-scroll, others picking fruit and fighting off birds pecking at the grapes. The paintings are exceptional in their sophistication, extensive palette and luxurious materials, including gold leaf.

Petra – the Greek word for "rock" – is one of the world's most famous archaeological sites, where ancient eastern traditions combine with Hellenistic architecture, with monumental buildings sculpted out of the solid red sandstone. A Unesco world heritage site since 1985, it was the Nabataeans' capital city, flourishing as an economic and religious centre from the third century BC for some 400 years. Its site, in the Shera mountains, was an important crossroads for Arabia, Egypt and Syria-Phoenicia.

The paintings are not at the main site, but at the less well known canyon of Siq al-Barid in Beidha – nicknamed "Little Petra" – about 5km away. As they are now the most important surviving examples of Nabataean art, they rank among Petra's most remarkable treasures and are likely to become a major tourist attraction, Rickerby said. They are located within the "biclinium" (dining area), a principal chamber and a recess, where ritual dining is thought to have taken place. The most outstanding painting covers the vault and the walls of the recess.

The site was a retreat for affluent Nabataeans. The surrounding land shows evidence of ancient vineyards and grape-pressing sites, which explains the significance of the paintings' subject-matter. The Greek historian Strabo conveyed a sense of their wealth when he wrote: "The Nabataeans are a sensible people, and are so much inclined to acquire possessions that they publicly fine anyone who has diminished his possessions."

Rickerby said: "They show a lot of external influences from the ancient world and are as good as, or better than, some of the Roman paintings you see, for example at Herculaneum… This has immense art-historical importance, reflecting a synthesis of Hellenistic–Roman cultural influences."

Park said: "Petra is a vast site at the cultural crossroads of the eastern Mediterranean, and among the rock-cut tombs and temples the survival of a fragile wall painting that decorated a dining hall is extraordinary… The quality of the painting is matched by the luxury of its materials, including gilding and translucent glazes. It is the only surviving [in situ] figurative wall painting from the Nabataean civilisation that created Petra.

"It provides an incredibly rare insight into the lifestyle of this ancient and little-known civilisation."

THE NABATAEANS

Few Nabataean manuscripts survive, but it is through the ancient historians Strabo, Josephus and Diodorus that we know something about them and their culture. Diodorus wrote of a people with diverse characteristics who were "exceptionally fond of freedom". Strabo described them as "exceedingly well-governed", with few slaves, banquets with girl singers and "drinking bouts in magnificent style" held by the king, in which "no one drinks more than 11 cupfuls, each time using a different golden cup".

The Nabataeans were among the most successful merchants of their day, trading in spices, medicines, frankincense, precious jewels and metals. Exotic goods were brought by ship to ports in southern Arabia from India and the far east and taken overland to the Mediterranean. Accusations of a monopoly on many of their goods, brought complaints from the Egyptians, Greeks and Romans when they hiked up their prices.

They first appeared to history in 312BC in a cuneiform inscription, recording their defeat of a Syrian army. Although originally a nomadic people of ancient Arabia, they built the spectacular city of Petra as their capital. Such was its fame in antiquity that it was mentioned in Chinese records, as well as those of ancient Greece, Egypt, Rome and Byzantium. It boasted magnificent buildings and carved facades and piped water throughout the city.

Guardian.co.uk

Australia's oldest painting prompts history rethink

2010-08-19T23:12:00.000-07:00

Archaeologists say a rock painting in Arnhem Land is the nation's oldest dated picture showing Aboriginal people's first contact with the outside world.

The rock painting is a picture of a sailing boat and it is located at a remote shelter in north-west Arnhem Land.

Archaeologist Paul Tacon says there are telling signs it is a depiction of a Perahu - a boat popular in Indonesia and Malaysia around the 17th century.

"One of the distinctive features is a tripod mast, another is a rectangular sail. And those are quite clear in this image," he said.

He says beeswax pellets stuck to the painting have been dated back to the 1620s, making it the oldest dated picture of early contact in Australia.

He also says there is clear evidence Macassars from Indonesia were sailing to north Australia to fish for trepang in the 1700s.

The painting is forcing archaeologists to rethink when outsiders first arrived on Australian shores.

"This find is extremely significant because it is our oldest reliably dated contact rock art image," Mr Tacon said.

"It's also important because it hints that Aboriginal people of northern Australia were interacting with peoples from South-East Asia on a more frequent basis and over a longer period of the past than what we've realised."

Archaeologists are also finding rock art showing early Indigenous contact with other cultures, including boats, knives, cups and even a monkey.

Source: ABC News

Who owns Michelangelo's David, Italy or Florence?

2010-08-18T23:24:00.000-07:00

The city of Florence and the Italian government are embroiled in a dispute -- again -- over who owns one of the world's most famous statues, Michelangelo's David.

The issue has been simmering for years. The Florence mayor's office said the debate began in the early 1990, and the city's various mayors have brought it up from time to time.

It's mainly about the bottom line -- some 8 million euros a year in ticket sales at Florence's La Galleria dell'Accademia, also simply known as L'Accademia or the Accademia Gallery, where David is displayed. That money, however, goes to the Italian government, and not the city.

Florence Mayor Matteo Renzi recently asked that David's earnings go to Florence instead, because "after all, the David is ours,"' said one of his press officers.

While tourism brings money to Florence, it also brings a lot of costs, such as cleaning and security, said the press officer. The mayor does not feel it's fair that the burden of maintaining the city and its centuries-old buildings should fall solely on its citizens.

Following the request, the Heritage Ministry commissioned a study to determine who is the rightful owner of David.
The ministry's lawyers recently concluded that according to documents they found in archives, David belongs to Italy, not the city of Florence.

The government bases that assumption on the fact that Italy paid for David to be moved from its original spot, in central Florence's Palazzo Vecchio, to L'Accademia, according to Renzi's press officer.

Eugenio Giani, president of the Florence City Council, said in a statement Monday that "the opinion of the Roman lawyers is very dangerous," noting all of the city's "heritage" that fills state museums.

He points out that Florence's city hall commissioned and paid for the statue's creation in the 16th Century. It stood at the Palazzo Vecchio for nearly four centuries, until 1873, when it was moved to L'Accademia in order to better preserve it.

When Italy was unified in 1871, the Palazzo Vecchio was returned to Florence under law, he said. Giani said his records show the new Rome-based Italian government paid to move David because it took the responsibility of "tutelage" over the new nation's heritage.

"The state did not for sure want to lay claim to the ownership of the David given two years' prior law," he said. "Instead, it wanted to carry out a tutelage function, which is part of its competence to this day and by which the city of Florence had agreed to place the David at the Accademia."

Many of the paintings and statues in Italian-run Florence museums such as the Uffizzi Gallery belong to the city, Giani said. Some of the proceeds should be given to Florence, he said: "The city of Florence has the right to partake in the profits."

Michelangelo, who was a native of Florence, completed the sculpture in 1504. It has been a symbol of Florence's defiance against its enemies ever since.

Renzi told the Florence daily newspaper Il Corriere Fiorentino "with all due respect to the Roman lawyers, the incontestable documents held in possession by the state administration are clear: the David belongs to the city of Florence."

The Italian Heritage Ministry's Sandro Bondi indicated in a statement Monday he is not ready to hand over ownership of the statue.

Bondi said he found himself embroiled in "an absurd and inopportune" dispute about the statue "against (his) will." His statement referred to the question of the statue's ownership as "a petty matter" -- but one that also should "be addressed in a sharing, planning manner." He said he would work with Florence representatives in such a manner, with a goal of avoiding controversy.

Source: CNN

Prehistoric Cave Paintings Discovered in Dominican Republic

2010-08-17T18:47:00.000-07:00

SANTO DOMINGO – A Dominican man discovered in the northern town of Monteclaro a cave with petroglyphs and other examples of prehistoric cave art, the daily Listin Diario said Tuesday.

The discovery was made by area resident Raul Fernandez.

The cavern has 61 petroglyphs and two bas-relief sculptures, the newspaper learned from Spanish archaeologist Adolfo Lopez, who is in charge of researching the area and believes that the petroglyphs and sculptures could be 5,000 years old.

Lopez, a specialist in cave art at Madrid’s Universidad Complutense, said that one of the Monteclaro sculptures is among the three most important ever found of pre-Columbian cave art, due to its particular shape and because such works are so rarely found, the daily said.

“This sculpture is the last bas-relief of quality to be found in the Antilles. It portrays a figure sitting in a fetal position, which gives the idea that it is dedicated to fertility,” he said.

Lopez christened the cave with the name of “Raul de Monteclaro” in honor of its discoverer and the place where it is located.

The scientist said that the cave could “perfectly well” be declared a World Heritage Site by the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.

Lopez said he hopes that some scientific institution will work in the area in order to discover its cultural values and its antiquity. EFE

Source: Latin American Herald Tribune

Stone Age Carving: Ancient Dildo?

2010-08-16T14:38:00.000-07:00

I'm back and I have a load of articles to post up over the coming weeks (and always gathering more). I figured I'd come back with a bang (and a giggle) and post up this article.

Is it a toy or a tool? and does it give new meaning to the term "boner"?
~Zelzega

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Sex toys have come a long way since the Stone Age – but then again, perhaps not as much as we might think.

An excavation in Sweden turned up an object that bears the unmistakable look of a penis carved out of antler bone. Though scientists can't be sure exactly what this tool was used for, it's hard not to leap to conclusions.

"Your mind and my mind wanders away to make this interpretation about what it looks like – for you and me, it signals this erected-penis-like shape," said archaeologist Göran Gruber of the National Heritage Board in Sweden, who worked on the excavation. "But if that's the way the Stone Age people thought about it, I can't say."

The resemblance is uncanny.

Ancient phallic objects

The carved bone was unearthed at a Mesolithic site in Motala, Sweden, that is rich with ancient artifacts from between 4,000 to 6,000 B.C. The area's unique features may have allowed bone artifacts, which usually get destroyed over the millennia, to survive.

The dildo-like object is about 4 inches (10.5 cm) long and 0.8 inches (2 cm) in diameter.

It's not the first time that such a phallic object has been found from the ancient world. Another item strongly resembling a penis was unearthed in Germany in 2005. That one is even older – dating from 28,000 years ago – and made of stone.

It's not immediately clear whether the tool would have been one most likely to be used by men or women or both.

Sexual symbolism isn't uncommon on ancient artifacts, though more often female symbols, such as those representing a fertile mother Earth, are seen.

Pictures and Full Story at Live Science

>_>

2010-07-14T22:47:00.000-07:00

So it's been nearly a month. I apologize for falling behind on postings, I should be back to posting again in a couple of weeks. I need to set aside a specific time to spend for posting, I really do.

I'll try to stay on top of it more!

Quest to find lost monastery intensifies

2010-06-21T17:56:00.001-07:00

ARCHAEOLOGISTS began the latest stage in a hunt for traces of a long-lost mediaeval monastery in the north-east.

The experts want to excavate the home of the Book of Deer, which was written by Scottish monks around the 10th century.

The gospel book contains the earliest examples of Gaelic literature and is thought to be the oldest-surviving manuscript in Scotland.

It is now on display at Cambridge University and is held up as a highly-significant volume which gives an insight into pre-Norman culture and society in the area previously known as Pictland.

description

The book contains seven handwritten passages of Gaelic text, written in the margins.

These describe – among other things – how a monastery was founded by St Columba and St Drostan at Deer, near Mintlaw.

It has never been established exactly how big the building was, how long it survived or how many monks lived there.

Archaeologists from Glasgow University were yesterday drafted in by the friends of the Book of Deer group to try to trace any remains of the building.

Their meticulous search, which has so far failed to yield any clues, is taking place inside the old church at Old Deer and in the church graveyard.

Yesterday’s archaeological work coincided with a visit to Old Deer by local schoolchildren who were given a chance to take part in their own digs.

Local historian Derek Jennings teamed up with Aberdeen archeologist Alison Cameron for the event.

Mr Jennings said the pupils – from primary schools at New Pitsligo, Stuartfield, Pitfour and Fetterangus – had a “fantastic” day.

“We gave them their own mud boxes to excavate which had pottery and other artefacts hidden in them,” he said.

“After that we showed them a video on the Book of Deer and the monastery.

“It really was a very educational yet hands-on day for them.”

The Glasgow archeologists will continue their efforts to locate the site of the monastery at Old Deer until tomorrow.

The Press and Journal

Roman town found in Sofia

2010-06-18T13:43:00.000-07:00

Sofia - The remains of an ancient Roman town were on Thursday unveiled to the public in the centre of the Bulgarian capital Sofia.

Excavation of the site - which currently includes a Roman palace, baths and burial sites, as well as a more recent 13th century church - began several years ago.

It is hoped that the remains will be preserved as a major heritage site and tourist attraction.

Archaeologists believe the site - which formed the intersection of the two major streets of the ancient Roman town Ulpia Sedica - could prove even more extensive, with at least two more Roman palaces waiting to be uncovered.

Debate has raged for years over the fate of the site as the excavations notably proved a major headache for plans to extend the Sofia underground, with a major station situated right below the historical site.

But the authorities finally opted to preserve the remains where they were.

The total cost of the ambitious project, which will entail a complete reconstruction of central Sofia and is scheduled to be finished in 2011/2012, is an estimated $12m.

Ulpia Serdica
"It'll be a perfectly preserved underground museum covering an area of 1.9ha," said Deputy Culture Minister Todor Chobanov at a tour of the site for the media.

"This could put Sofia on par with other major cultural heritage sites such as Rome," Chobanov said.

With the help of EU money, "this huge space can be used as a centre for exhibitions and performances, which is something that Sofia did not really have until now," said chief architect Petar Dikov.

An ancient Thracian settlement, Bulgaria's capital was conquered by the Romans in the first century BC and renamed Ulpia Serdica.

Parts of the Roman fortress in the area close to the current excavations site and an adjacent church dating back to the fourth century have already been excavated and fully reconstructed.

News24.com

Cambridge aims to become the world's library

2010-06-17T17:16:00.001-07:00

Donation launches project to make priceless treasures available digitally through the internet

Cambridge University Library has announced visionary plans to become a digital library for the world - following a £1.5m lead gift pledged by Dr Leonard Polonsky.

Home to more than seven million books and some of the greatest collections in existence, including those of Newton and Darwin, the Library will begin digitising its priceless treasures to launch its Digital Library for the 21st Century.

University Librarian Anne Jarvis said: “Our library contains evidence of some of the greatest ideas and discoveries over two millennia. We want to make it accessible to anyone, anywhere in the world with an internet connection and a thirst for knowledge. This will not only make our collections available to the world; it will also initiate a global conversation about them.

“At the click of a mouse, students or scholars of divinity or politics, history, physics, medieval languages or the history of medicine, will be able to plunge into the worlds of Mediterranean Jewish, Muslim and Christian communities of the 11th Century, or into the minds of Isaac Newton and his contemporaries.”

Dr Polonsky’s generous gift will allow the University Library to set up the essential infrastructure required for this sophisticated digitisation project.

The first collections to be digitised will be entitled The Foundations of Faith and The Foundations of Science. The goal for both is that they become ‘living libraries’ with the capacity to grow and evolve.

The Library’s faith collections are breathtaking. They include some of the oldest and most significant Qur’ans ever to be uncovered, as well an Eighth Century copy of Surat al-Anfal. The Library also holds the world’s largest and most important collection of Jewish Genizah materials, including the Taylor-Schechter Genizah Collection – 193,000 fragments of manuscripts as significant as the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Its Christian holdings include an incomparable collection of manuscripts including the Codex Bezae Cantabrigiensis (one of the most important Greek New Testament manuscripts), the Book of Deer and the Book of Cerne.

The University Library also holds some of the world’s most important records of the development of modern science - including the most comprehensive collection of Newton’s papers (heavily annotated copies of Principia, lectures as Lucasian Professor and proofs of Opticks), and those of John Flamsteed and Edmond Halley, contemporaries of Newton, with whom he corresponded.

If the project proves successful (further funding is needed and other donors are being sought), the collections of scientific giants such as Charles Darwin, James Clerk Maxwell, and Stephen Hawking could also be digitised, along with other major collections in the fields of humanities and social sciences.

Jarvis added: “Faith and science will be the two cornerstones of the project, both of fundamental importance in our quest to understand the world and our place in it.

“Thanks to Dr Polonsky, we are at the start of what we believe will be an incredible journey into the digital future. Hopefully his generosity will encourage others to follow his lead so we can make one of the world’s great libraries available, literally, to anyone around the world.”

Dr Polonsky said: “As reading and research become increasingly electronic, my hope is that this grant will serve as a catalyst for the digitisation and linking of the great libraries of the world so that their riches can be enjoyed by a global public."

University of Cambridge

Rare Discovery of 3,500-Year-Old Objects

2010-06-16T12:41:00.001-07:00

Archaeologists have discovered a rare treasure of intact ancient vessels in a natural hollow in bedrock in the Lower Galilee, southeast of Haifa. The bedrock was exposed in Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) excavations prior to the installation of a northern gas pipeline by the Israel Natural Gas Lines Company.

The area has revealed several archaeological finds, but the latest discovery was surprising because the 3,500-year-old cultic vessels were found intact. The vessels were used in pagan rituals before the People of Israel reached the Holy Land from Egypt.

Among the finds that were recovered were a cultic vessel that was used for burning incense, a sculpted face of a woman that was part of a cultic cup used in dedicating a libation to a god, and goblets and bowls with high bases and tableware that was intended for eating and drinking.

Other vessels that were found had been brought from Mycenae in Greece, including a storage vessel for precious oils – evidence of the ancient trade relations that existed with Greece.

Archaeologists Uzi Ad and Dr. Edwin van den Brink, the excavation directors said that the discovery is extremely rare. In most excavations fragments of pottery vessels are found, whereas the latest find allowed the unbroken vessels to be removed from the rock-hollow intact.

Full Story at IsraelNationalNews.com

Monet water-lily painting to raise £40m at auction

2010-06-04T10:38:00.000-07:00

The painting - dating back a century and from his most famous series of works - will be part of the most valuable art auction yet to take place in the city later this month.

The impressionist and modern art at Christie's sale also features a ''blue period'' Picasso, also tipped to go for up to £40 million, after being withdrawn from sale four years ago.

Together with works by Magritte, Klimt and Van Gogh, the sale on June 23 is expected to raise between £160 million and £230 million.

The art market has seen prices soar in recent months. An equivalent sale at Christie's in New York last month saw the highest price ever paid at auction for an artwork when a Picasso masterpiece went for £70 million.

Monet's 1906 painting Nympheas was one of many he painted in his water garden at Giverny with the pond and lilies depicted in often huge scale.

It is the largest of nine surviving works from that year. He would often destroy with which he was not satisfied.

And it is one of only five which formed part of his famed display of monumental water-lilies at the Musee de l'Orangerie in Paris in 1909. A rare study for that exhibition sold for £41 million in London in 2008, a new world record for a Monet.

Nympheas was in the family of one collector for several decades and was bought by the present owner at auction at Christie's New York in May 2000. It is expected to sell for between £30 million and £40 million.

Giovanna Bertazzoni, director and head of impressionist and modern art at Christies, London, said: ''Claude Monet's water-lily paintings are amongst the most recognised and celebrated works of the 20th century, and were hugely influential to many of the following generations of artists.

''It is extremely exciting that with this work, the blue period Picasso, Klimt's portrait of Ria Munk and Van Gogh's 1889 masterpiece, we will be presenting at auction celebrated works from the most formative years of four of the most important and influential artists of the last century.''

The Picasso which is to be sold - Portrait of Angel Fernandez de Soto - is from the collection of Lord Lloyd-Webber and was dropped from a New York sale at the last moment due to an ownership claim.

The dispute, which dated back to a sale in the 1930s, has now been settled and Christie's said the claimants had ''withdrawn all claims to the painting''.

Sale of the 1903 Picasso will benefit the Andrew Lloyd Webber Foundation, a charity which promotes arts, culture and heritage.

Other prominent works in the sale include (with estimated prices):

:: Frauenbildnis (Portrait of Ria Munk III) - Gustav Klimt (£14 million to £18 million);
:: Parc de l'hopital Saint-Paul - Vincent van Gogh (£8 million to £12 million);
:: Le Baiser - Pablo Picasso (£8 million to £12 million);
:: La Liseuse - Pablo Picasso (£6 million to £9 million);
:: Nu a la chaise longue - Henri Matisse (£5.5 million to £8.5 million);
:: Les barricades mysterieuses - Rene Magritte (£3 million to £4 million).

Telegraph.co.uk

Tourists soon can see Colosseum’s underside

2010-05-27T20:13:00.000-07:00

ROME - Tourists will soon be able to visit the underground of the Colosseum, where gladiators once prepared for fights and lions and tigers were caged before entertaining a bloodthirsty public.

Rome culture officials said Wednesday that, after several months of work to make the area safe for visits, the public will be allowed to add the underground section to tours of the arena starting in late summer. No exact date has been set.

Architect Barbara Nazzaro told Associated Press Television News that tourists will be able to see the spaces where lions, tigers and bulls were kept in cages before they were hoisted on elevators to ground level for entertainment in the ancient arena.

Elephants were too heavy for the rope-hoisted elevators. They made their grand entrance into the Colosseum through main gates.

The ingenious system of lifts allowing wild animals to suddenly pop up at ground level made for an awesome sight, Nazzaro said. "This was very appreciated by the public," she said.

The animal show was just one part of a day's entertainment at the arena. First, the audience watched a hunting spectacle, then came executions, and finally the gladiators squared off, said Nazzaro, who worked on the project to open the space to today's public.

A piece of mortar recently broke off from a part of the Colosseum during closing hours, but caused no injuries. Officials say the monument is in need of constant monitoring and maintenance, but its overall stability is not at risk.

MSNBC

Greek Police Seize 2 Statues From 2 Farmers

2010-05-26T15:16:00.000-07:00

Police in southern Greece have seized a rare twin pair of 2,500-year-old marble statues and arrested two farmers who allegedly planned to sell them abroad for euro10 million ($12.43 million), authorities said Tuesday.

"This is a very important find, of fabulous value, and (both statues) were ready to be taken out of Greece," Culture Minister Pavlos Geroulanos said.

Archaeologists said Tuesday the statues are "outstanding works of art" and may have come from a temple or cemetery in a lost ancient city in the Peloponnese region in southern Greece. Both are in excellent condition, but lack sections of their lower legs and were gashed by a plow or digging machinery.

They stand 1.82 meters (5 feet 9 inches) and 1.78 meters (5 feet 8 inches) high, and were probably carved by the same sculptor out of thick-grained island marble between 550-520 B.C, at the height of the archaic period of sculpture.

The statues are of the stiff, highly formalized Kouros type widespread in the 7th and 6th centuries B.C. which portrayed gods, heroes or aristocrats and were painted in bright colors. From the 5th century on, Greek sculpture became more fluid and lifelike, culminating in the naturalism of the Hellenistic era.

Such discoveries in good condition are uncommon — about three have turned up during excavations in the past decade. But matching pairs are particularly rare.

Although the precise spot of the find is still unclear, authorities believe it may coincide with the lost ruins of Tenea, a city that according to ancient writers lay between Corinth and Mycenae and was first populated by prisoners of war brought back by victorious Greeks from the Trojan War — recorded in Homer's "Iliad." A similar, but slightly earlier statue discovered in what may have been Tenea's cemetery is displayed in Munich.

Archaeologists hope to find the missing leg sections, because the breaks are recent.

Antiquities looting is a major problem in Greece, where treasures — by law all state property — can lie inches below farmers' plows or modern buildings, especially in cities like Athens that have been constantly inhabited for thousands of years.

Dozens of illegally exported finds have been returned to Greece over the past few years, including four masterpieces from the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.

Full Story and more pictures at NPR

Colossal statue of Thoth discovered at temple of Amenhotep III in Luxor

2010-05-26T15:02:00.000-07:00

A colossal statue of the ancient Egyptian god Thoth, the deity of wisdom, is the latest artefact to be discovered near the mortuary temple of Amenhotep III during archaeological works aimed at controlling the subterranean water level on Luxor's west bank.

The 3.5 metre tall red granite statue is one of several artefacts discovered in the area since excavations began. The head of a 2.5 metre high statue depicting Pharaoh Amenhotep III in a standing position – possibly the best preserved depiction of the pharaoh’s face found to date - was unearthed at the King's funeral temple at Kom El-Hettan only months ago. A statue of the god Thoth in the shape of a baboon was also discovered. Last year two black granite statues of Amenhotep III were found at the temple, as well as a 5 metre high statue similar to the Thoth statue just found.

Amenhotep III ruled Egypt between 1390 BC and 1352 BC, and recent DNA and forensic research suggests that he was probably the grandfather of Tutankhamun. His temple was built closer to the river than any other temple at Thebes - right on the edge of the floodplain – and within 200 years it had collapsed. Many of its stones were subsequently removed for the building projects of later pharaohs.

The famous Colossi of Memnon, two 18-metre-high stone statues of Amenhotep III, are all that remains of the pharaoh's mortuary temple, once the largest religious complex in ancient Egypt.

In a statement, Secretary General of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA) Dr Zahi Hawass said that evidence found during the excavation suggests that more colossi could yet be found at the site. Afifi Rohayem, assistant director of the excavations, suggests that an avenue of Thoth statues could be found on the original path leading to Amenhotep III's funerary temple.

Since 1998, the mortuary temple of Amenhotep III has been on the World Monument Fund's list of the planet's 100 most endangered monuments. Extensive excavation and restoration works at the temple site are taking place.

“I believe that in less than 20 years we will have achieved our objectives here,” Dr Hourig Sourouzian, head of the conservation project, said in a video interview with Heritage Key. The final stage of the works at Amenhotep III's mortuary temple will be the creation of an open-air museum.

Experts agree painting is likely self-portrait by da Vinci

2010-05-26T14:57:00.000-07:00

The portrait of a middle-aged man — an oil-on-wood painting once used as a serving tray — is likely the image of Leonardo da Vinci done by the master himself, says a panel of experts that includes a Calgary art historian.

A dozen of scientists and David Bershad, an art history professor at St. Mary's University College, agree. The image of a man with blue eyes, long greying hair and a moustache appears to be a self-portrait of the renowned Renaissance artist, inventor and thinker.

Coming to that conclusion brought together da Vinci's own passions for art and science as experts used fingerprint analysis, carbon dating and even facial reconstruction software to answer three key questions:

- Does the painting date from the right time period?

- Is it a portrait of da Vinci?

- And, was it painted by the master himself?

"I believe it's a Leonardo," Bershad said Tuesday, the day after returning from Italy, where he was able to look at the portrait in person. "It's exciting to come to that conclusion."

Bershad was the lone art historian — and sole North American — asked to help assess the authenticity of the portrait, which was discovered in 2009 by a medieval historian studying the art collection of a family in Acerenza, a town in southern Italy.

The scientific findings of numerous other experts asked to examine the portrait were presented earlier this month at a conference in Chieti, Italy.

A fingerprint whorl, an inscription on the back of the portrait, the pigments in the paint and even the way the eyes of the man are portrayed all lead experts to believe it is a self-portrait of da Vinci.

"Every one of the experts thought from the beginning there was no way it is a Leonardo. None of us started with that assumption," Bershad said. But as the experts began to look past the grime that has gathered on the portrait over the centuries, clues began to reveal themselves.

Carbon dating established the painting was from the late 15th or early 16th centuries. A forensic anthropologist then concluded the ridges and whorls of a thumbprint found in the painting is the same as one found on da Vinci's Lady with an Ermine.

Bershad said some may argue the print could belong to anyone who touched the painting, but he asserts it is da Vinci's.

"Only the artist himself would use his thumb to pick up that drip of paint," he said.

Adding to the mounting evidence is the inscription on the back of the painting. The handwritten "pinxit mea" — Latin for "I painted" — reads upside down and right to left in writing identical to da Vinci's.

"Leonardo had no reason to identify himself as the artist of the self-portrait," Bershad said. "He knows who he was."

Bershad is continuing to work on tracing the roots of the priceless painting that was once so dirty people were thinking of throwing it out.

The Gazette

So sorry for slacking

2010-05-26T14:54:00.000-07:00

I haven't posted anything in about 2 weeks, my apologies!

I'll post 3 or 4 articles today and try to get back into posting 1 a day (except weekends).

Egyptian blue found in Romanesque altarpiece

2010-05-06T12:00:00.000-07:00

A team of researchers from the University of Barcelona (UB) has discovered remains of Egyptian blue in a Romanesque altarpiece in the church of Sant Pere de Terrassa (Barcelona). This blue pigment was used from the days of ancient Egypt until the end of the Roman Empire, but was not made after this time. So how could it turn up in a 12th Century church?

Egyptian blue or Pompeian blue was a pigment frequently used by the ancient Egyptians and Romans to decorate objects and murals. Following the fall of the Western Roman Empire (476 AD), this pigment fell out of use and was no longer made. But a team of Catalan scientists has now found it in the altarpiece of the 12th Century Romanesque church of Sant Pere de Terrassa (Barcelona). The results of this research have just been published in the journal Archaeometry.

"We carried out a systematic study of the pigments used in the altarpiece during restoration work on the church, and we could show that most of them were fairly local and 'poor' – earth, whites from lime, blacks from smoke – and we were completely unprepared for Egyptian blue to turn up", Mario Vendrell, co-author of the study and a geologist from the UB's Grup Patrimoni research group, told SINC.

The researcher says the preliminary chemical and microscopic study made them suspect that the samples taken were of Egyptian blue. To confirm their suspicions, they analysed them at the Daresbury SRS Laboratory in the United Kingdom, where they used X-ray diffraction techniques with synchrotron radiation. It will be possible to carry out these tests in Spain once the ALBA Synchrotron Light Facility at Cerdanyola del Vallés (Barcelona) comes into operation.

"The results show without any shadow of a doubt that the pigment is Egyptian blue", says Vendrell, who says it could not be any other kind of blue pigment used in Romanesque murals, such as azurite, lapis lazuli or aerinite, "which in any case came from far-off lands and were difficult to get hold of for a frontier economy, as the Kingdom Aragon was between the 11th and 15th Centuries".

A possible solution to the mystery

The geologist also says there is no evidence that people in Medieval times had knowledge of how to manufacture this pigment, which is made of copper silicate and calcium: "In fact it has never been found in any mural from the era".

"The most likely hypothesis is that the builders of the church happened upon a 'ball' of Egyptian blue from the Roman period and decided to use it in the paintings on the stone altarpiece", Vendrell explains.

The set of monuments made up by the churches of Sant Pere, Sant Miquel and Santa María de Terrassa are built upon ancient Iberian and Roman settlements, and the much-prized blue pigment could have remained hidden underground for many centuries. "But only a little of it, because this substance couldn't be replaced – once the ball was all used up the blue was gone", concludes Vendrell.

EurekAlert!

Picasso painting fetches record $106m at auction

2010-05-06T11:58:00.000-07:00

A Pablo Picasso painting has set a new record for the most expensive art work sold at auction, fetching $106m (£70m).

The Spanish artist's 1932 picture Nude, Green Leaves and Bust was sold at Christie's auction house in New York.

It had belonged to the late Los Angeles collectors Frances and Sidney Brody since the 1950s.

The winning bid was made by an unnamed telephone bidder. It breaks the record held by Giacometti's Walking Man I, which sold in February for $104.3m.

Another work by Picasso, Garcon a la Pipe, had previously held the record when it sold for $104.1m in 2004.

Nude, Green Leaves and Bust had been expected to sell for $70m-$90m.

The Brodys bought the painting in the 1950s

The record-breaking sum, which includes Christie's commission, is being taken as a sign that the art market has recovered from the global financial crisis.

"The Brodys bought it in the 50s. It was only exhibited once in 1961," said Conor Jordan, the head of Christie's impressionist department.

"When we got into Brody's house in November it was quite an experience," he was quoted as saying by AFP news agency.

BBC News

HEADLESS STATUE OF ANCIENT EGYPTIAN KING‎ UNEARTHED

2010-05-06T11:54:00.001-07:00

A headless granite statue of a Ptolemaic king has emerged from the ruins of an ancient Egyptian limestone temple believed to be the burial site of Queen Cleopatra and her lover Mark Antony.

According to a statement issued on Tuesday by the Supreme Council of Antiquities, the sculpture was unearthed at Taposiris Magna, a site some 30 miles from the port city of Alexandria, by an Egyptian-Dominican team searching for the tomb of the doomed lovers.

More than 2,000 years old, the statue represents the traditional shape of an ancient Egyptian pharaoh wearing collar and kilt.

“Even though the head is missing, this is one of the most beautiful statues from the Ptolemaic period. I think it portrays Ptolemy IV, the pharaoh who constructed temple,” Dr. Zahi Hawass, chief of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, told Discovery News.

The team, led by Dr. Hawass in collaboration with the Dominican archaeologist Kathleen Martinez, also discovered the temple’s original gate on its western side.

The entrance of the building, which was dedicated to Osiris, the Egyptian god of the underworld, was made up of a series of limestone foundation stones. One of the stones showed traces that a sphinx statue once stood upon it.

“This means that there was a sphinx avenue similar to those of the pharaonic era outside and inside the temple,” Hawass said.

The Egyptian-Dominican team spent the past five years trying to locate the last resting place of Cleopatra and Mark Antony, the Roman general who became Cleopatra’s lover and had three children with her.
The couple supposedly committed suicide after their combined forces were defeated by Roman Emperor Octavian in the Battle of Actium more than two millennia ago.

While excavating the site --a radar survey of the temple has identified three spots where a burial chamber might lie deep underground -- the archaeologists have unearthed several significant artifacts. These include a number of headless royal statues, which may have been subjected to destruction during the Byzantine and Christian eras, a collection of heads featuring Queen Cleopatra, and 24 metal coins bearing Cleopatra’s profile.

Behind the crumbling temple, a necropolis was also discovered, containing many Graeco-Roman style mummies. Early investigations, said Hawass, show that the mummies were buried with their faces turned toward the temple, which means that a significant royal personality could be buried inside the temple.

“All these findings are leading us to the discovery of the tomb of Cleopatra. They show that something important is waiting for us inside the temple,” Hawass said.

Discovery News

Viking necklace in the dark for 1,150 years

2010-05-01T12:37:00.000-07:00

A TEAM of archaeologists are scratching their heads over the 'bizarre' discovery of a 1,150-year-old Viking necklace in a Burren Cave.

It is the largest Viking necklace discovered in Ireland and is said to be "relatively rare in the Viking world".

Dr Marion Dowd of Sligo IT is leading the excavation of Glencurran Cave in the Burren National Park, which she yesterday described as a 'treasure trove' for archaeologists.

The necklace was one of the major items discovered in the dig funded by the Department of the Environment and the Royal Irish Academy and is described as a 'stunning piece of jewellery' by Dr Dowd.

Dr Dowd said yesterday: "The necklace is the largest Viking necklace to have been found in Ireland. Normally, Viking necklaces that have been found have five to six glass beads, but this has 71 glass beads covered with gold foil."

A leading expert on Irish cave archaeology, Dr Dowd said: "It is really is bizarre how this necklace from a high status Viking came to be in a cave in the Burren. There is no parallel for it in Ireland and it is puzzling on a number of fronts."

"The necklace would have been imported into Ireland from Scandinavia in the late 9th and early 10th century. Small numbers of these beads have been found with Viking burials at Kilmainham, Dublin, but nothing like the number found in Glencurran Cave.

"Such necklaces were worn by high status Viking women that they might denote a woman's cultural and religious affiliations. These were certainly prestigious items."

Dr Dowd said that the Vikings never settled in the Burren and speculated that the necklace -- dating from the mid 9th century -- could have been the result of a trade with Vikings from Limerick and Gaelic chieftains in the Burren.

The cave is located in a remote site in the Burren National Park and according to Dr Dowd "has been the site of important archaeological discoveries since 2004". Dr Dowd said that the cave has been excavated in 2004, '08 and '09 and that she hopes to return next summer.

Among the discoveries were the skeletal remains of a two to four-year-old child that were placed in the cave in the Bronze Age, about 3,500 years ago. A 10,000-year-old bear shoulder bone has also been discovered.

Independent.ie

Anglo-Saxon treasures revealed by Parker Library website

2010-04-30T12:35:00.000-07:00

One of the most important collections of Anglo-Saxon manuscripts – for centuries kept at Corpus Christi College – has been entirely digitised, making it the first research library to have every page of its collection captured.

The Parker Library was entrusted to the College in 1574 by Matthew Parker, Archbishop of Canterbury under Queen Elizabeth from 1559 until his death in 1575, and one of the primary architects of the English Reformation.

From today, the Library's treasures have been made available online to anyone with access to the Internet at http://parkerweb.stanford.edu.

Within newly constructed vaults, the Parker Library holds more than 550 manuscripts including the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the earliest history written in English, and the sixth-century St Augustine Gospels - used at the enthronement of the Archbishops at Canterbury.

The ninth-century Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is thought to have been commissioned by Alfred the Great as he pushed for greater use of the language through his educational reforms. The Chronicle is the principal and original source of English history during the Dark Ages. There are various versions, but the Parker Chronicle, known as the A-version, is the oldest manuscript surviving. It is a detailed record of events in English history, year by year, until 892 AD. Additions to the manuscript include events such as the Battle of Hastings.

The St Augustine Gospels may have been brought from Rome by St Augustine in 597 on his first mission to convert the English. In 1982 it took the place of honour between Pope John Paul II and Archbishop Robert Runcie during the first papal visit to England since the Reformation.

Donnelley Fellow Librarian Christopher de Hamel said: "It is the oldest illustrated Latin Gospel Book in existence. It has been in England longer than any other book. The Archbishops of Canterbury still take their oath of office on it. As a symbol of religion, history and literacy, it is one of the most evocative books in Christendom.

"The Library also includes everything from monastic books from the early Dark Ages to autograph letters from Anne Boleyn, Martin Luther, and the bill for burning Cranmer in 1556."

As well as a free website service for the public, a comprehensive licensed access service exists for institutions and experts around the world who wish to study the manuscripts in the greatest possible detail.

Between them, teams from the College, University Library and Stanford University in the US, digitised almost 200,000 separate pages.

John Hatcher, who oversaw the project, said: "The four-year digitisation and research project has been a triumph of collaboration between Corpus Christi, Cambridge University Library and Stanford University in the United States."

Stanford University Library built and hosts the user-friendly, multi-functional Parker Library website. The US institution also provides electronic storage for images used in the web application.

Other jewels of Parker's collection include the Corpus Glossary (MS 144), one of the earliest witnesses to the English language. Written in the first half of the ninth century, the celebrated alphabetical dictionary includes definitions of well over 2,000 words in Anglo-Saxon, including ones still recognisable today, such as herring and hazel. It remains one of the most important surviving records for the origins of the English language.

Elsewhere, anyone with an interest in art history would be well served in studying the pages of the Bury Bible. Dating from c. 1135, it is one of the greatest illuminated manuscripts and among the most famous books in the Parker Library. It is believed to have been produced by Master Hugo, one of the earliest documented professional artists in England whose works have survived to the present day.

The project, funded by almost $6m from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, will allow scholars, researchers and anyone interested in Anglo-Saxon, later medieval and Reformation history, theology and literature, to gain almost complete access to one of the world's most important collections. A new reading room has been built under the Library, along with an alarmed vault for the manuscripts. Tours are also to begin later this year.

University of Cambridge

Excavations near Reading show evidence of Boudicca

2010-04-29T01:48:00.000-07:00

Evidence found at the Roman site of Silchester could mean it was the site of one of Boudicca's battles.

Professor Michael Fulford said that 13 years of excavations at Calleva had revealed evidence of the first gridded Iron Age town in Britain.

The site also bears the scars of possible early Roman military occupation, and evidence of later, widespread burning and destruction.

This suggests the site could have been destroyed at the hands of Boudicca.

Queen Boudicca waged war against the Romans in Britain from 60 AD after the Romans decided to rule the Iceni directly and confiscated the property of the leading tribesmen.

Boudicca's warriors successfully defeated the Roman Ninth Legion and destroyed the capital of Roman Britain, then at Colchester. They went on to destroy London and Verulamium (St Albans).

Thousands were killed. Finally, Boudicca was defeated by a Roman army led by Paulinus. Many Britons were killed and Boudicca is thought to have poisoned herself to avoid capture.

The site of the battle, and of Boudicca's death, are unknown.

Professor Fulford said that in excavations at Silchester they had found evidence of a major military occupation at Calleva (now called Silchester) in 40 AD, then destruction between 60 and 80 AD, including wells that were filled in at this time and burned buildings.

"The settlement is completely wiped out somewhere between 60 AD and 80 AD, and it starts again in 70 AD," he said.
Although Calleva is not mentioned in historical sources concerning Boudicca, it is known that she waged war at St Albans and London, just 50 mile away.

"Winchester became an important military location for the Romans and so was Silchester," said Professor Fulford, urging more people interested in Roman history to learn about the site.

"There's more to see at Silchester than there is at Winchester."

{BBC}

Roman sculptures withdrawn from auction amid fears they are stolen

2010-04-28T22:45:00.000-07:00

Four Roman sculptures are to be withdrawn from auction tomorrow amid claims that they were stolen from archaeological sites overseas.

Photographs seized by police suggested that the sculptures – funerary busts and a marble statue of a youth from the second century AD – were illicitly excavated, archaeologists told the Guardian.

A spokesman for Bonhams auctioneers said: "Whenever a serious question is raised about an item's provenance we withdraw it from sale pending an internal investigation. We take rigorous care to ensure that we only sell items that have a clear provenance."

Dr David Gill, reader in Mediterranean archaeology at Swansea University, said that the four antiquities bore soil traces that indicated they were excavated during illegal digs. Images in the Bonhams auction catalogue show the same sculptures cleaned and restored.

Archaeologists remain concerned about illegal trading of antiquities and some believe insufficient checks are carried out into their provenance.

Lord Renfrew, the eminent Cambridge archaeologist, warned that "such sales are maintaining London's reputation as a clearing house for looted antiquities".

Gill said the withdrawal was the latest in a series of such incidents in London.

Christos Tsirogiannis, a researcher at Cambridge University and formerly an archaeologist with the Greek ministry of culture, uncovered the evidence suggesting that the sculptures had been illegally excavated. They had been moderately valued, at about £40,000, but he is concerned about the impact of illicit excavations.

He said: "The destruction leaves objects out of context. Even if [an object] is a masterpiece, our duty is to give people history." It is a view shared by most archaeologists.

Since 2003, it has been a criminal offence to deal in "tainted cultural objects", punishable by up to seven years in prison. Renfrew called for auction houses to identify the vendors of antiquities. "That would be a step towards clarifying the problem," he said.

The style of the Roman busts suggests they are of eastern Mediterranean origin and were possibly dug up in Syria or northern Greece. The marble statue probably originates from Italy, archaeologists said.

The Bonhams spokesman said that the firm sends its catalogues for scrutiny to the Art Loss Register – a computerised database – to ensure that only items with clear provenance are sold. "If they raise issues, we also withdraw items," he said.However, Dr Gill said that the Art Loss Register only dealt with stolen items, and not antiquities that may have come from illegal excavations.

{The Guardian}

‘Degenerate Art’ Database Shows 21,000 Works Seized by Nazis

2010-04-23T10:31:00.001-07:00

April 21 (Bloomberg) -- Berlin’s Free University will today go live with an Internet database documenting the fate of more than 21,000 artworks condemned as “degenerate” by the Nazis and seized from German museums in 1937.

The Web site, the result of eight years of research by art historians at the university, includes works by Franz Marc, Emil Nolde, Otto Dix, Marc Chagall, Max Beckmann, Wassily Kandinsky and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. It gives details of the museums they were seized from and their current location, in cases where it is known and where the work wasn’t destroyed.

“We are hoping that this will yield more information about the fate of some of the art, perhaps from private collections and archives,” Meike Hoffmann, one of the scholars involved in the project, told a news conference in Berlin yesterday. “We also want to draw attention to and document the wonderful collections of modern art the German museums had in the 1930s.”

As well as looting hundreds of thousands of artworks from private Jewish collectors, the Nazis seized thousands of modern works from German museums. Their aim was to rid the museums of art they saw as contrary to Aryan ideals, and instead promote regime-approved artists such as the sculptor Arno Breker.

In 1937, Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels staged the exhibition “Degenerate Art,” which first opened in Munich, where it attracted more than 2 million people before moving on to other German and Austrian cities. Paintings were hung crowded together, some with no frames, alongside racist slogans denigrating the artists for “insulting German womanhood” and revealing “sick minds.”

Restitution Claims

The museums who owned the art before World War II have no legal recourse to claim the works because a Nazi law allowing their seizure without compensation has never been repealed. Still, some works in the database were owned by private collectors who had loaned them to museums and whose heirs are still trying to get them restituted.

One such example is Paul Klee’s “Sumpflegende” (Swamp Legend), which was seized from Hanover’s Provinzialmuseum. The mayor of Munich, which acquired the painting in 1982, has until now refused to return it to the heirs of the prewar owner, Sophie Lissitzky-Kueppers.

Andreas Hueneke, the founder of the Free University project, began researching the fate of “degenerate” artworks almost 40 years ago from the files of Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry. Yet only the first part of the inventory of seized works was available, covering museums from Aachen to Greifswald. The second part -- Hagen to Zwickau -- resurfaced only in the late 1990s in London, where a complete inventory had been bequeathed to the Victoria & Albert Museum.

The Free University plans to open an English version of the Web site in the coming weeks. The site’s address is: Here

{Bloomberg}

Hoard of 2,000-Year-Old Bronze Coins Found in Desert Oasis

2010-04-23T10:28:00.000-07:00

CAIRO — Archaeologists unearthed 383 bronze coins dating back to King Ptolemy III who ruled Egypt in the 3rd century B.C. and was an ancestor of the famed Cleopatra, Egypt's antiquities authority announced Wednesday.

The statement said one side of the coins were inscribed with hybrid Greek-Egyptian god Amun-Zeus, while the other side showed an eagle and the words Ptolemy and king in Greek.

Founded by one of Alexander the Great's generals, the Ptolemaic Dynasty ruled Egypt for some 300 years, fusing Greek and ancient Egyptian cultures.

The coins were found north of Qarun lake in Fayoum Oasis 50 miles southwest of Cairo.

Other artifacts were unearthed in the area included three necklaces made of ostrich egg shell dated back to the 4th millennium B.C. and a pot of kohl eyeliner from the Ottoman Empire.

{Fox News}

'Ancient IKEA building’ discovered by Italian archaeologists

2010-04-23T10:24:00.000-07:00

Italian archaeologists have found the ruins of a 6th-century BC Greek temple-like structure in southern Italy that came with detailed assembly instructions and is being called an “ancient IKEA building”.

Massimo Osanna, head of archaeology at Basilica University, said that the team working at Torre Satriano near Potenza in what was once Magna Graecia had unearthed a sloping roof with red and black decorations, with “masculine” and “feminine” components inscribed with detailed directions on how they slotted together.

Professor Christopher Smith, director of the British School at Rome, said that the discovery was “the clearest example yet found of mason’s marks of the time. It looks as if someone was instructing others how to mass-produce components and put them together in this way”” he told The Times.

Professor Osanna suggested that a “fashion for all things Greek” among the indigenous population had led an enterprising builder to produce “affordable DIY structures” modelled on classical Greek buildings. The terracotta roof filtered rainwater down the decorative panels, known as cymatiums, with projections to protect the wall below.

He added: “So far around a hundred inscribed fragments have been recovered, with masculine ordinal numbers on the cymatiums and feminine ones on the friezes”. He said the result was “a kind of instruction booklet”.

“The characteristics of these inscriptions indicate they date back to around the 6th century BC, which tallies with the architectural evidence suggested by the decoration,” Professor Osanna said.

He said that the decorative features were remarkably similar to those on another structure unearthed at Braida di Vaglio nearby: “The similarity in the use of these decorations indicates the same origin” he said. “Possibly the same mould was used”.

Magna Graecia — Latin for “Greater Greece” — was a coastal area colonised by Greek settlers who traded with enclaves such as Lucania, of which modern Potenza was part.

Greek colonisation left much of southern Italy with an Hellenic inheritance, including architecture and culture and even language. A minority in Calabria and Apulia still speaks a dialect known as Griko.

{Times.co.uk}
Second article about Greek instructions: {Telegraph.co.uk}

Aleppo, Syria, to Undergo Historical Restoration

2010-04-22T10:15:00.001-07:00

In this ancient fortress city in northern Syria, one of the world’s oldest continuously inhabited settlements, an ambitious restoration project is near completion in the Old City. Bloomberg is reporting that a master plan for development has been laid out for the next 15 years.

The most spectacular renewal is the Citadel castle: Workers cleared its deep moat, cleaned its formidable walls and removed tons of rubble. The work is backed by the Aga Khan Trust for Culture, whose goal is to revitalize run-down communities and monuments.

Syria remains on the U.S. State Department list of terrorism sponsors, but new visa-free travel to and from Turkey has made Aleppo a way station.

The Mansouriya Palace boutique hotel, a combination of two houses set around a courtyard decorated by a rectangular pool and an orange tree, provides a preview of tourism in old Aleppo. Its nine rooms are done in styles reflecting parts of the city’s history, among them Greco-Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman and Hittite.

{NY Times}

Macedonia: Archaeologists Unearth Early Roman Sculpture Fragments at Stobi Site

2010-04-20T11:16:00.000-07:00

Archaeologists unearthed a sculpture fragments of a man’s head and a small torso dating from to the Early Roman period during recent excavations of the ancient Stobi site in central Macedonia.

The discoveries, found at the temple building which has been undergoing archaeological excavations, are rare and important, as they will shed light on the life of people during that period, archaeologist Silvana Blahzevska, Director of the National Institution Stobi, explained, cited by the Vecer newspaper.

“The way the hair and the face of the found head were made, as well as the appearance of the remaining part of the sculpture, suggest that it was of an emperor or an important citizen who lived in the first century,” Blazhevka stated.

Archaeologists expect that the find will help them learn more about the temple which has been continuously robbed since antiquity – about whom it was dedicated to and when it was constructed.

According to Blazhevska, so far there was no detailed information on the temple, whose roof was entirely destroyed and whose floor was covered with rubble from different time periods. Since a Russian coin from 1863 was found at the site, according to the arcaheologist, the temple was thought to have been fully plundered, but now, fortunately, it turns out that the first floor has not been touched.

The excavations at the ancient site of Stobi are being carried out by a team of 65 archaeologists and 400 workers.

Director of the Cultural Heritage Protection Office Pasko Kuzman told the publication that many other archaeological sites, in addition to Stobi, will continue to be excavated this year, while Minister of Culture Elizabeta Kancheska – Milevska said that work at the site will continue as long as the weather conditions allow.

The ancient town of Stobi, which developed from a Paeonian settlement established in the Archaic period, is located on the main road that leads from the Danube to the Aegean Sea and is considered by many to be the most famous archaeological site in the Republic of Macedonia.

{Balkan Travellers}

A Timeline of Sexy Defined Through the Ages

2010-04-13T15:40:00.000-07:00

Renaissance: From the 1400s to the early 16th century
Body Type: The ideal Renaissance woman was more voluptuous then any other time in history.

Victorian Era: From 1837 to 1901 (named after Britain’s Queen Victoria)
Body Type: Unlike Renaissance women, Victorian women were very body conscious.

The Roaring 20s: The era that brought us Coco Chanel, shorter hemlines, and flappers.
Body Type: The 1920s was a decade when women didn’t want to look like women at all.

The 1930s to 1950s: Hollywood’s Golden Age
Body Type: As they became more body conscious, women started to pay attention to what they ate.

The 1950s: A Step Back to Conservative
Body Type: The desired shape in the mid-century was the hourglass figure popularized by movie stars like Marilyn Monroe and Grace Kelly.

The 1960s: The era that brought us hippies, Twiggy, and bell-bottoms
Body Type: Mimicking the popular skinny models of the day, like Twiggy, women became obsessed with being rail thin.

The 1970s: It’s all about the Farrah Fawcett hair
Body Type: The 60s forever changed the way women viewed their bodies.

The 1980s: The decade of big hair and The Material Girl
Body Type: The aerobics exercise craze of the 80s further emphasized fitness for women.

The 1990s: The era that brought us Beverly Hills, 90210 and Saved by the Bell
Body Type: Models like Kate Moss further perpetuated standards of extreme thinness.

The New Millennium (2000 to present): An era of choice and expression
Body Type: Although we’re currently in an age where women have more choice than ever before, women are still expected to live up to an impossibly thin body shape.

{Read in detail and see pictures in the Full Story} at StyleCaster

Labourer’s spade strikes treasure

2010-04-13T15:36:00.000-07:00

A labourer’s spade struck an earthen pot at a road construction site in a remote Jorhat village last evening and out spilled silver coins dating back to the Ahom era.

Although most of the coins were damaged, the authorities of the Jorhat museum managed to recover a few in mint condition this morning.

“The coins are from King Gaurinath Singha’s era. The name of the king is inscribed on few of such coins,” museum officer Gautam Bordoloi said.

The Ahoms ruled Assam from 1227 to 1826, with Singha’s reign extending from 1780 to 1796.

Bordoloi said the labourers claimed that several coins had got lost as the pot broke under the impact of the spade.

They were engaged in the road construction under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act project at Number 2 Brahmin gaon in Kenduguri.

“The colour of the coins has also turned darkish, making it difficult to distinguish them from the soil,” he said.

Museum authorities, however, believe that some coins were taken away by the labourers.

“Our men have sealed the area and are carrying out a search in case there are more such pots containing coins,” the museum official said.

He is now trying to coax the labourers to return the valuable coins. “We cannot force them if they decline to accept they had taken a few coins and we are trying to make them understand that if at all they had taken a few coins they should return those,” Bordoloi said.

This is not the first time that coins dating back to the Ahom era were discovered in Jorhat, the last capital of the 600-year-old Ahom rule.

A few years back, similar coins were recovered from Kakodonga tea estate, located along the Jorhat district’s border with Golaghat.

Bordoloi said Jorhat, Sivasagar and Golaghat districts — then undivided Sivasagar district — are a treasure trove for items dating back to the Ahom era.

Jorhat museum, he said, has a large collection of such items, including sculptures, manuscripts, masks and coins.

The archaeology department has been carrying out excavation at various places, mostly in Golaghat district, over the years in search of such valuable items. “Several such items were found in the Sarupathar, Deopani areas in Golagat district during such excavations,” Bordoloi said.

There were unconfirmed reports of a large number of coins being found in the historic Raja Maidam area in Jorhat district a few years back by a person while on a construction project.

{The Telegraph}

La Bella Principessa: a £100m Leonardo, or a copy?

2010-04-12T11:29:00.000-07:00

'Picture kept in a drawer 'is £100m da Vinci’.” That’s how the article in The Sunday Times on July 27, 2008 breathlessly reported the incredible story of how the Paris-based American dealer Peter Silverman discovered a lost masterpiece by Leonardo da Vinci.

Visiting a friend in Switzerland, he opened a drawer and found himself looking at an unframed drawing of a young girl in profile, wearing Renaissance costume. Executed in ink and coloured chalks on a sheet of vellum measuring 330mmx39mm, it was laid down on an oak board. When Silverman asked who the artist was, his friend didn’t know – he’d bought it on a whim because it was “a nice pretty thing”. Then, Silverman told a reporter: “My heart started to beat a million times a minute. I immediately thought this could be a Florentine artist. The idea of Leonardo came to me in a flash.” So rare is it to discover an unknown drawing by the Renaissance master that Silverman admitted: “I saw it, but I didn’t dare speak the L-word.”

Silverman’s discovery made a thrilling story, but it was a complete fabrication, and the first of several versions of the story he told. In fact, New York art dealer Kate Ganz acquired the drawing at Christie’s in 1998 for $21,850 catalogued as “19th century, possibly German” and she sold it, with the same attribution and for the same amount, nine years later to Silverman. During the time she owned it, the many museum curators, museum directors, conservators and collectors who saw it in her gallery all concurred that the drawing could not be more than 100 years old. As for the “L-word” Mr Silverman dared not utter, when he saw the picture at Ganz’s gallery in January 2007 it was described on the label as “obviously based on a number of paintings by Leonardo da Vinci”.

Ganz (to whom I was married 30 years ago) told me that when she read about Silverman’s “discovery” in The New York Times, she simply faxed a copy of the original invoice to the paper, proving she had sold the drawing to him. The Times then ran a correction.

The saga might have ended there, with Silverman exposed as a fantasist. But last month the issue was reopened by the publication of La Bella Principessa, a book by Professor Martin Kemp, strongly supporting the idea of Leonardo’s authorship. Kemp is emeritus Professor of Art History at Oxford, and a recognised expert on Leonardo’s scientific work. The book’s co-author Pascal Cotte claims to have used technology to prove the work’s authenticity, and its preface is written by Nicholas Turner, former curator of drawings at the British Museum and the Getty, now a freelance art consultant.

A campaign is under way to publicise what Kemp is calling “the most important rediscovered work by the artist in over a century”. As part of the promotional drive, the drawing is being shown to the public for the first time – not, as you might expect, in a museum in Paris, New York or London – but in a conference centre in Gothenburg, Sweden. Watching the opening on YouTube is like watching the circus come to town. The picture arrives in an armoured van under police escort. Flashbulbs pop. A man who is handcuffed to a metal briefcase opens it with a theatrical flourish and then produces the drawing that Silverman (or the “Swiss collector” he still claims owns the work) is now saying is worth $150?million.

As a non-specialist, my opinion of the drawing’s status is irrelevant. My concern after reading Kemp’s book is not with its conclusions, but with the methods Kemp uses to present his case. Although purporting to be a work of scholarship, his book has none of the balanced analysis you would expect from such an acclaimed historian. For La Bella Principessa, as he called the girl in the study, is not art history – it is advocacy. The author, who says he has “no doubts at all” about the drawing’s authorship, sets out to sell us his point of view.

In his preface, Turner affirms the attribution and cites the favourable endorsements of several scholars, including Carlo Pedretti, Armand Hammer chair in Leonardo Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. But at no point do Turner and Kemp acknowledge any of the strong counter-arguments that have been voiced by the many scholars and curators specialising in 15th-century Italian art, who not only reject the attribution utterly, but have said this to the authors in no uncertain terms.

Among the reasons Kemp and Cotte give for accepting the work, the most significant are as follows. The drawing is on a sheet of vellum which carbon-14 tests date to between 1440 and 1650. The direction of the hatching (parallel lines used to render uniform shadow) shows that the artist was left-handed, as was Leonardo. The Renaissance-style garment is said to be accurately rendered, while several later interventions by other hands suggest the sheet has age.

Cotte has performed a scan of the sheet using a “multi-spectral infrared camera” to reveal a palm print and “partial” fingerprint (the tip of an index finger) in the top left corner of the drawing. Montreal-based “forensic art specialist” Peter Paul Biro then analysed the prints and concluded that they compare favourably to those found on Leonardo’s unfinished painting St Jerome in the Vatican.

Against all this, Kemp’s opponents point out that of the 4,000 or so surviving drawings by Leonardo, not a single one is on vellum. But vellum is a material a copyist might well use – because sizeable sheets of monastic vellum of the correct age are easy to come by, whereas blank sheets of paper made during Leonardo’s lifetime are not.

Nor does the observation that a left-handed artist drew the portrait convince the sceptics. According to Pietro C Marani, Italy’s most distinguished Leonardo scholar, who oversaw the restoration of The Last Supper : “The fact that one is looking at a drawing by a left-handed artist does not carry any weight: there exist copies of drawings by Leonardo made by imitators which present this particular characteristic – by, Francesco Melzi, for example, as Kenneth Clark and others have already written.”

Likewise, a copyist could easily arrive at the sitter’s costume by studying any Milanese 15th-century portrait. Even the drawing’s obvious antiquity has drawn fire from one museum director, who asked not to be named. He believes the drawing is not even 19th century, and thinks it is “a screaming 20th-century fake”, made up out of a “compilation of obviously Leonardesque elements that is not even close to Leonardo himself”. For this well-known connoisseur of Italian painting and sculpture, the damage and repairs are suspicious, for, although apparent to the naked eye, they are not so extensive that they make the picture unappealing or unsaleable – as it would be, for example, if the repairs disfigured the face.

Although 90 of the book’s 190 pages are given over to the complex (and to the layman, barely intelligible) analysis of X-rays, scans, infra-red emission images and so forth, Kemp says that the fingerprints provide “no conclusive evidence either way” . So why bother? An obviously genuine drawing rarely requires such extended scientific analysis – much more important for assessing its status is connoisseurship, which entails detailed comparisons with universally accepted drawings by the same artist. But to make his argument, Kemp reproduces only six of a possible 600 ravishing drawings (not counting notebook jottings) by Leonardo. And the drawings chosen for comparison are uniformly weak. This reader was left feeling that Kemp is dealing from a stacked deck.

Likewise, Kemp only cites evidence produced by commercial laboratories chosen by those who support the attribution to Leonardo – including the testimony of Biro, who once used fingerprint evidence to authenticate what turned out to be a fake Jackson Pollock. Nowhere in this book could I find any reference to independent analysis by disinterested museum professionals. And yet it exists. For example, Kemp must be aware that Klaus Schröder, director of the Albertina Museum in Vienna, refused to exhibit the drawing, telling the American publication Art News: “We are not convinced that it is an authentic drawing by Leonardo. It was examined by our own research centre, our curators, our restoration department, and the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts. No one is convinced it is a Leonardo.”

Among those who vehemently reject Kemp’s attribution are Everett Fahy, who is the John Pope-Hennessy chairman of the Department of European Paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Carmen C Bambach, curator of drawings and prints at the Met, organiser of the exhibition Leonardo da Vinci, Master Draftsman and author of a major study of the drawings of Leonardo, soon to be published by Yale University Press.

Marani, who examined the drawing in Paris, says: “I have not found this drawing to be compatible either in technique or in style with Leonardo.” Specifically, he is worried by the vellum support, the firmness of the stroke, the “abundant” presence of monotonously drawn details, the coloured pigments on cheeks, mouth and flesh and the absence of crackle (craquelure). All these, he told me, “indicate without any doubt that here one is looking at, at least judging from these details, 19th-century materials… I must therefore agree with Carmen Bambach, Everett Fahy, Nicholas Penny and Martin Clayton that this cannot be in any way considered an authentic drawing by Leonardo”.

Sometimes silence is more damning than words. One scholar mentioned by Marani is Martin Clayton, keeper of drawings in the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle. Clayton, who was curator of the Leonardo exhibition at the Queen’s Gallery in 2003, knows the master’s hand as well as anyone. Having seen a high-resolution photograph of La Bella Principessa, he has not endorsed Kemp’s attribution. Neither has Nicholas Penny, the director of the National Gallery, who has seen the same photographs. When I asked if the gallery would like to include the drawing in its forthcoming Leonardo exhibition, he replied dryly: “We have not asked to borrow it.”

Several scholars I spoke to were particularly critical of the book’s use of conjecture to build Kemp’s case, beginning with the title, La Bella Principessa. Without producing a shred of internal or external evidence to support the supposition, he suggests that “by process of elimination” the young woman in the portrait is Bianca Sforza, the teenage daughter of the Duke of Milan. In fact, no portraits of this child, who died aged 13 or 14, are known to exist.

But even supposing the drawing does show Bianca, critics ask how it is possible that not a single document records the existence of such a masterpiece. Leonardo was the most famous artist of the day, and Bianca the daughter of one of the most powerful rulers in Italy. Would there not be some record of the commission or of payment – a line in a Sforza inventory, perhaps, or a mention in Giorgio Vasari’s biography of Leonardo? This is the kind of drawing that, if real, would have been coveted and copied throughout Europe from the moment it was made. Yet La Bella Principessa has no provenance before the 20th century. Several scholars I spoke to told me they believe it is simply not possible that such a work could have been unrecognised for 500 years.

Genuine drawings need to be studied and discussed over time, so that scholars can reach a consensus on their status. I don’t doubt that Prof Kemp’s belief in Leonardo’s authorship is sincere. But he is wrong to think he can prove this by steamrolling the public into accepting his attribution.

{Telegraph.co.uk}

Feds load up more artifacts in Blanding

2010-04-08T09:42:00.000-07:00

Federal agents, curators and archaeologists went to Blanding on Wednesday to collect relics surrendered by four defendants indicted last summer after a 2 1/2-year investigation into illegal artifacts-trafficking across the Four Corners region.

A spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney's Office in Utah said Dale Lyman, Ray Lyman, Nick Laws and Aubry Patterson, all Blanding residents facing multiple felony charges, gave up their collections after talking with their lawyers.

All were arrested June 10 in a coordinated raid that netted 24 defendants. Two others were charged later. Laws, Patterson and Dale Lyman are scheduled for plea-change hearings April 23 before U.S. Magistrate Judge Samuel Alba in Moab.
Ray Lyman, 73, charged with a single felony, is scheduled for a May 19 trial before U.S. District Judge Dee Benson in Salt Lake City.

Patterson, 57, facing six felony counts, in 2007, allegedly told an undercover operative working for the FBI that although he didn't like to dig up ancient burial mounds, if he found one, he couldn't help but do so.

"Patterson stated that he dug up two guys accidentally," a search-warrant affidavit says, "and he stated he had been looking for bowls, not guys. Patterson stated he dug them both up, and neither of them had anything on them."

Patterson was one of only two defendants -- of the 26 Utah, Colorado and New Mexico residents indicted in the Four Corners investigation -- to be booked into jail. Patterson was considered a threat, according to law enforcement, because he told the undercover operative that if government agents caught him, he would have to shoot them because he would rather die than go to prison.

The other jailed defendant was Moab resident Tammy Shumway, 40, who had an outstanding drug-offense warrant. Shumway has pleaded guilty to artifact trafficking and awaits sentencing.

The affidavit also says Patterson sold the undercover source several pieces of ancient tribal pottery and agreed to allow the operative to create false papers showing the items came from private land when they really came from Long Point Canyon, which lies within an area administered by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management.

Patterson said he regularly sold items to Vern Crites, a Durango, Colo., antiquities dealer who faces multiple felonies in the same investigation, court documents say. Crites already has relinquished artifacts he collected from prehistoric pueblos. He is scheduled for trial June 28 before Benson.

Charges accuse Laws, 31, of breaking two federal antiquities-protection laws and stealing government property. The three counts stem from the alleged sale of prehistoric tribal artifacts stolen from public and tribal lands in San Juan County.
A search-warrant affidavit says that, in 2008, Laws sold the undercover source prehistoric tribal artifacts, including pottery, a knife, a crystal prayer stick, a pendant and a black-on-white pottery bowl.

Court documents say that, in 2007, Dale Lyman, 76, told the undercover source he had artifacts others excavated from several ruins left by ancestors of Indian tribes now living in the Southwest. When the operative asked Lyman whose site the others were digging, Lyman allegedly responded, "Uncle Sam's."

Court papers say Lyman also sold the source, for $1,200, a Clovis point -- a stone weapon from more than 13,000 years ago -- the defendant said he found in the San Juan River. The area is on tribal and public land.

During the 2 1/2-year probe, the undercover operative wore an audiovisual recorder to capture evidence and conversations that agents also monitored in real time. The operative was Ted Gardiner, a former business executive and antiquities dealer who shot himself to death March 1 in his Salt Lake County home.

Two defendants in the case also have committed suicide: Blanding physician James Redd and New Mexico resident Steven Shrader.

{The Salt Lake Tribune}

Tantalizing sampling of Ubaid artifacts, including painted pot fragments, uncovered in Tell Zeidan

2010-04-06T10:42:00.000-07:00

RICH DISCOVERIES American and Syrian investigators at the site known as Tell Zeidan have already uncovered a tantalizing sampling of Ubaid artifacts, including painted pot fragments. The site could yield discoveries for decades.

Archaeologists have embarked on excavations in northern Syria expected to widen and deepen understanding of a prehistoric culture in Mesopotamia that set the stage for the rise of the world’s first cities and states and the invention of writing.

In two seasons of preliminary surveying and digging at the site known as Tell Zeidan, American and Syrian investigators have already uncovered a tantalizing sampling of artifacts from what had been a robust pre-urban settlement on the upper Euphrates River. People occupied the site for two millenniums, until 4000 B.C. — a little-known but fateful period of human cultural evolution.

Scholars of antiquity say that Zeidan should reveal insights into life in a time called the Ubaid period, 5500 to 4000 B.C. In those poorly studied centuries, irrigation agriculture became widespread, long-distance trade grew in influence socially and economically, powerful political leaders came to the fore and communities gradually divided into social classes of wealthy elites and poorer commoners.

Gil Stein, director of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, a leader of the excavations at Zeidan, said the site’s northern location promised to enrich knowledge of the Ubaid culture’s influence far from where the first urban centers eventually flourished in the lower Tigris and Euphrates Valley. The new explorations, he said, are planned to be the most comprehensive yet at a large Ubaid settlement, possibly yielding discoveries for decades.

“I figure I’m going to be working there till I retire,” said Dr. Stein, who is 54.

There are several reasons for excitement over the Zeidan excavations. Warfare and ensuing unstable conditions have locked archaeologists out of Iraq and its prime sites of Mesopotamian antiquity. So they have redoubled research in the upper river valleys, across the border in Syria and southern Turkey. And Zeidan is readily accessible. Having never been built upon by subsequent cultures, it is free of any overburden of ruins to thwart excavators.

Above all, a driving ambition of archaeologists always is to dig beneath the known past for more than glimpses of the little known.

For almost two centuries, the glory went to expeditions unearthing the houses and temples, granaries and workshops of earliest urban centers like Uruk, seat of the legendary Gilgamesh, and the later splendors of Ur and Nineveh. The challenge was to decipher the clay tablets of a literate civilization with beginnings in what is known as the Uruk period, 4000 to 3200 B.C.

Uruk remains overshadowed the traces of Ubaid cultures, the region’s earliest known complex society. Only a handful of ruins — at Ubaid, Eridu and Oueili in southern Mesopotamia and Tepe Gawra, in the north near Mosul, Iraq — had produced at best a sketchy picture of these older cultures. A few Ubaid sites in northern Syria were either too small to be revealing or virtually inaccessible under other ruins.

A decade ago, Richard L. Zettler, a University of Pennsylvania archaeologist with extensive experience in Syria, said, “Our real focus now should not be on the Uruk period, but the Ubaid.”

Last week, Dr. Zettler, who is not associated with the Chicago team but has visited the site, said that Zeidan preserves artifacts over a long sequence of Ubaid culture at a junction of major trade routes. “We should see the transition as the Ubaid spread from the south up to farming regions in the north,” he said.

Guillermo Algaze, an anthropologist at the University of California, San Diego, and an authority on early urbanism in the Middle East not involved in new research, said recently that Zeidan “has the potential to revolutionize current interpretations of how civilization in the Near East came about.”

Tell Zeidan is a two-hour drive southeast of Aleppo and three miles from the modern town of Raqqa. Muhammad Sarhan, a curator of the Raqqa Museum, is co-director, with Dr. Stein, of the excavations, formally known as the Joint Syrian-American Archaeological Research Project at Tell Zeidan.

The site consists of three large mounds on the east bank of the Balikh River, just north of its confluence with the Euphrates. The mounds, the tallest being 50 feet high, enclose ruins of a lower town. Buried remains and a scattering of ceramics on the surface extend over an area of 31 acres, which makes this probably larger than any other known Ubaid community.

{Full Story [Pages 1-2]} at New York Times

NEW WRITTEN LANGUAGE OF ANCIENT SCOTLAND DISCOVERED

2010-03-31T18:12:00.000-07:00

A Pictish Carving

A new written language, belonging to the early Pict society of Scotland, has just been identified.

Stylized rock engravings have been found on hundreds of Pictish Stones.

If the writing can be deciphered, it would provide a unique insight into early Scottish history.

The ancestors of modern Scottish people left behind mysterious, carved stones that new research has just determined contain the written language of the Picts, an Iron Age society that existed in Scotland from 300 to 843.

The highly stylized rock engravings, found on what are known as the Pictish Stones, had once been thought to be rock art or tied to heraldry. The new study, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society A, instead concludes that the engravings represent the long lost language of the Picts, a confederation of Celtic tribes that lived in modern-day eastern and northern Scotland.

"We know that the Picts had a spoken language to complement the writing of the symbols, as Bede (a monk and historian who died in 735) writes that there are four languages in Britain in this time: British, Pictish, Scottish and English," lead author Rob Lee told Discovery News.

"We know that the three other languages were -- and are -- complex spoken languages, so there is every indication that Pictish was also a complex spoken language," added Lee, a professor in the School of Biosciences at the University of Exeter.

He and colleagues Philip Jonathan and Pauline Ziman analyzed the engravings, found on the few hundred known Pictish Stones. The researchers used a mathematical process known as Shannon entropy to study the order, direction, randomness and other characteristics of each engraving.

The resulting data was compared with that for numerous written languages, such as Egyptian hieroglyphs, Chinese texts and written Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Old Norse, Ancient Irish, Old Irish and Old Welsh. While the Pictish Stone engravings did not match any of these, they displayed characteristics of writing based on a spoken language.

Lee explained that writing comes in two basic forms: lexigraphic writing that is based on speech and semasiography, which is not based on speech.

"Lexigraphic writing contains symbols that represent parts of speech, such as words, or sounds like syllables or letters, and tends to be written in a linear or directional manner mimicking the flow of speech," he said. "In semasiography, the symbols do not represent speech -- such as the cartoon symbols used to show you how to build a flat pack piece of furniture -- and generally do not come in a linear manner."

Although Lee and his team have not yet deciphered the Pictish language, some of the symbols provide intriguing clues. One symbol looks like a dog's head, for example, while others look like horses, trumpets, mirrors, combs, stags, weapons and crosses.

The later Pictish Stones also contain images, like Celtic knots, similar to those found in the Book of Kells and other early works from nearby regions. These more decorative looking images frame what Lee and his team believe is the written Pictish language.

"It is unclear at the moment whether the imagery, such as the knots, form any part of the communication," Lee said. He believes the stones also contain semasiographic symbols, such as a picture of riders and horn blowers next to hunting dogs on what is called the Hilton of Cadboll stone. Yet another stone shows what appears to be a battle scene.

Paul Bouissac, a University of Toronto professor who is one of the world's leading experts on signs and symbols, told Discovery News that he agrees "it is more than plausible that the Pictish symbols are examples of a script, in the sense that they encoded some information, which also had a spoken form."

What is known about a writing system, however, "does not amount to deciphering this putative script," Bouissac added.

"We will have to wait for the discovery of what would be the Pictish equivalent of the Rosetta Stone, which made possible the cracking of the Egyptian hieroglyphic code," he said. "This may or may not ever happen."

{Watch a video} at Discovery News

Rare manuscripts to be auctioned

2010-03-29T17:20:00.000-07:00

A prayerbook which belonged to King Francois I of France is among the sale highlights.

A collection of manuscripts previously owned by kings, bishops and members of the aristocracy is expected to fetch up to £16m when it is sold at auction.

Prayerbooks belonging to King Francois I of France and Elizabeth de Bohun, great-grandmother of King Henry V, are part of the collection.

Christie's said the [anonymous collector] had spent three decades amassing the handwritten books, which feature illustrations and decorations painted in brilliant colours and gold.

The Arcana Collection: Exceptional Illuminated Manuscripts And Incunabula is thought to be the most valuable of its kind ever to be offered at auction.

Highlights include A Book Of Hours - a prayerbook intended for the private use of King Francois I of France, which is expected to fetch up to £500,000, and a 13th Century manuscript Bible produced in Italy, which has a pre-sale estimate of £2.5m - £3.5m.

A 13th Century Bible is expected to fetch up to £3.5m

Ms Ford said: "This is a truly exceptional collection... They are masterpieces of medieval and Renaissance art, many commissioned by important patrons.

"Books Of Hours are among the most personal artworks. Used for private devotion, they were also intended to reflect the wealth and status of the owner and leading artists and craftsmen were engaged in their creation.

"The Arcana collection offers the best examples of their type, ranging from Books Of Hours to works of literature and on the natural world.

"The beauty of the page is often complemented by the importance of the text, exceptional, original condition, and interesting, even highly distinguished, subsequent ownership."

The manuscripts will go on public display from 3-7 July, alongside Christie's auction of Old Masters and 19th Century Art.
The collection of 48 lots will go under the hammer on 7 July.

{BBC News}

Drawings believed to be those that Adolf Hitler submitted in a failed attempt to gain entry into the Vienna Academy of Art are to be auctioned.

2010-03-26T09:12:00.000-07:00

Drawings believed to be those that Adolf Hitler submitted in a failed attempt to gain entry into the Vienna Academy of Art are to be auctioned.

And a distinguished emeritus dean of art has studied them and said that today they would be considered only up to "moderate GCSE standard."

Some have speculated that Hitler's rejection from art college helped shape his character in later years.

He believed that it was a Jewish professor who had rejected his application to study at the academy.

The works consist of nudes, human figures, various objects and landscapes including buildings.

Most are dated 1908 - the year he was rejected by the academy for the second time and was not even permitted to sit the exam - and some are dated a year later that were added to his portfolio.

Hitler moved to Vienna as a young man in 1905 and lived a bohemian life, making small amounts of money by selling pictures he copied from postcards.

At one point he ended up in a hostel for the homeless and later he claimed it was in Vienna where the fires of his anti-Semitism were ignited.

Michael Liversidge, Emeritus Dean of Arts at Bristol University, where he has taught art history since 1970 and was head of department for 21 years, has studied the pictures.

He said: "Of course, remembering the Hitler diaries which turned out to be turkeys, one has to be careful though these do look authentic and presumably have been checked out as to their provenance.

"They look quite typical of an aspiring student hoping to get into art school - tentative and not very certain about his perspective when he's using pencil and pen, making basic errors by getting the top and the bottom of a candlestick wrong in relation to each other and so on.

"And he doesn't yet have much in the way of technical skill, but it's not so bad that one can't imagine him learning - especially when he's bolder with the charcoal or black chalk.

"But there's no latent genius here, and not much beyond a moderate GCSE. Probably if the artist was at school today you wouldn't encourage him to keep the subject up at A Level.

"So if they are part of a portfolio submitted with an application to study at a major European art academy, the selectors were right to reject him - they just don't suggest he was more than pretty marginal and mediocre for a potential art school entrant then or now.

"If they are what he sent in he definitely wouldn't have been worth interviewing for a place.

"Now, of course, they have an altogether different historical interest for us, but sadly that isn't one that has anything to do with art."

Richard Westwood-Brookes, who is selling the archive, said: "We know Hitler was twice turned down by the Vienna Academy of Art.

"The second time in 1908 he wasn't even invited to take the exam. These works make up a collection that he would have submitted.

"They are the type of pictures that a student would produce to show a range of techniques.

"Of course it is possible that Hitler's rejection from the Vienna Academy of Art was something that helped shape his character and turn him into the monster he became.

"It's the first time the pictures have come to light and can be seen by the general public.

"The vendor is an artist based on the continent and has had them for many, many years."

The 12 pictures are expected to sell for up to £6,000 each.

The sale at Mullock's auction house in Ludlow, Shropshire, takes place on April 16.

Telegraph.co.uk

Ancient theatre under the Acropolis to be restored

2010-03-25T16:09:00.000-07:00

A ruined theatre under the Acropolis, believed to be the birthplace of modern theatre, is to be partially restored.

The restoration of the Theatre of Dionysos will include extending and modernising surviving stone seats, but no new performances are planned there.

Works by playwrights such as Euripides and Sophocles premiered at the open air theatre more than 2,500 years ago.

"It is here that the masterpieces of ancient drama were first performed," said architect Constantinos Boletis.

The 6m euro (£5.4m) project is expected to be completed by 2015.

Theatre first emerged as an artform in Athens in 6th Century BC, at a competition for playwrights held during the annual festival of Dionysos.

Standing on the southern slopes of the Acropolis Hill, the theatre is "of immense historic significance," said Mr Boletis.

Originally a terrace where spectators sat on the ground above the circular stage, the theatre was rebuilt in limestone and marble during the 4th Century BC and could seat up to 15,000 spectators.

A small section of the seating area will be rebuilt using a combination of original stone and modern materials.

"The programme will have a major impact on the overall aspect of the monument," said Mr Boletis, but added that plans to host new musical and theatrical performances at the venue were "abandoned in the mid 1970s".

{BBC News}

Unique Archaeology Site Discovered During Metro Construction in Bulgaria’s Capital

2010-03-24T10:02:00.000-07:00

A medieval church was stumbled upon by accident on Monday during the construction of the second metro line in downtown Sofia.

Construction work was frozen temporarily, until a special experts commission – appointed by culture minister Vezhdi Rashidov, inspects the site and comes up with measures that would allow construction to proceed while preserving the finds.

Rashidov, along with Sofia’s Chief Architect Petar Dikov, inspected the site on Tuesday, under the guidance of archaeologist Snezhana Goryanova from the National Archaeology Institute.

The new findings, located right next to the TZUM department store, include the remains of a church with preserved murals dating back to the twelfth century, the remains of early medieval buildings dating to the fifth and sixth centuries and several medieval graves.

Stating he was impressed with the discoveries, Rashidov said that the authorities have to do whatever is needed in order to preserve them.

According to Goryanova, a temporary shelter must be constructed in order to preserve the finds.

There are, according to archaeologist Mario Ivanov, two ways to preserve the discoveries – either by taking them out of the site and placing them in a museum, or by keeping them on their original spot and putting the metro line deeper below them.

Construction of the second metro line is going to continue only after a decision has been made on what to do with the finds, Sofia’s chief architect Dikov said and promised to comply with the recommendations of the experts of the Ministry of Culture and the Archaeological Institute.

This is the latest archaeological find in downtown Sofia, which is rich in remains from Antiquity to the Middle Ages. Just a stone’s throw away, near the Presidency and Sheraton Hotel, stands the Early Christian red-brick rotunda of St. George [in the opening photograph], which dates to the fourth century and is considered the oldest preserved building in Sofia.

As BalkanTravellers.com reported last year, another project intends to display under glass the remains of the fourth-century palace of Emperor Constantine the Great, currently located underneath Sofia’s Sheraton Hotel.

{The Balkan Travellers}

Anglo-Saxon treasure to remain in local UK museums

2010-03-23T15:24:00.000-07:00

LONDON – A fundraising campaign to keep a huge collection of Anglo-Saxon gold in the area where it was unearthed has raised enough money for the treasure hoard to be kept in two central England museums.

Government trusts and the public chipped in to meet the 3.3 million pound ($4.9 million) purchase price.

The Staffordshire Hoard — the largest find of Anglo-Saxon gold ever recorded — will reside in museums in Birmingham and Stoke-on-Trent in England's West Midlands, near where the collection was found.

An amateur treasure-hunter searching a farmer's field with a metal detector unearthed the unprecedented archaeological find of 1,500 pieces of Anglo-Saxon gold and precious stones in July. The treasure trove is thought to date from the seventh century.

{Source of the Story} at Yahoo! News

Ambassadors' artworks give insight into the diplomatic pecking order

2010-03-22T18:16:00.000-07:00

If Britain's ambassadors ever wonder where they are in the diplomatic pecking order, they only need to look at the walls.

While masterpieces adorn the ambassadors' residences in countries like America, China, Germany and France, diplomats in South Korea, Qatar, Kenya and Albania have cheaper and less prestigious pictures.

The Government claims the difference is a mere accident, the result of discussion between diplomats and experts about what art is most appropriate for each country.

But one former ambassador, who served in the central Asian country of Uzbekistan, has expressed the frustration of trying – and failing – to improve the quality of the art in his residence to make it more relevant for his guests.

Details of new art purchased by the Government Art Collection (GAC) would, on the face of it, seem to back him up.

Expensive works on loan to ambassadorial residences from the Government Art Collection (GAC) include The Minister's Ming Tombs, Peking, an oil painting by the renowned artist Sir Stanley Spencer.

It was bought for £32,250.24 for the ambassador's residence in Beijing in June 2008, where it was hung the following month during the Olympics.

Shaman, an attractive oil painting of moonlight through trees by Elizabeth Magill, one of Britain's leading painters, was bought by the GAC in 2008 for £29,962.50 and hangs at the ambassador's residence in Berlin.

Dignitaries visiting Britain's representative to the UN in New York can see one of Andy Warhol's iconic screen-prints of the Queen.

Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom, bought from Christie's in October 2008 for £19,406.25, has hung at the residence in New York since February 2009, when the UN post was held by Sir John Sawers, now the chief of MI6.

Diplomatic residences in Paris are also decorated with artwork by Darren Almond, the Turner Prize-nominated artist and Victor Pasmore, the pioneer of British abstract art.

In contrast, the ambassador's residence in Seoul is decorated with East-West, an abstract print featuring random blue and black lines which cost the GAC a mere £528.76.

The walls of the High Commissioner's residence in Nairobi are decorated with Untitled, another abstract print with yellow squares, bought for £793.12, and 101 Drawings, an £850 print featuring a series of indiscernible scribbles.

The GAC website states: "We work closely with Government staff in selecting works of art. Various factors are taken into account, including appropriateness of subject matter, suitability of medium, and the availability of works of art.

"Where possible we draw out cultural or historic connections between a work and the department or country in which it is displayed."

The Danish may therefore be puzzled by the subject matter and cultural significance of the artworks on display at the ambassador's residence in Copenhagen.

Adonia and Lotosland, two photographs which cost £940 each, appear to be images of limp lettuce leaves and breadcrumbs.
The ambassador's residence in Tirana hosts a print entitled Twyford Down, an area near Winchester, Hants, which was the subject of a controversial road bypass scheme in the 1990s.

The print, which cost £1,228, features a series of multicoloured discs rising from the earth.

The walls at the ambassador's residence in Doha are decorated with Village, Sandstorm and Interstitial Infestation, three drawings featuring what are perhaps best described as colourful splodges.

Craig Murray, the former ambassador to Uzbekistan, said: "When I went as ambassador to Tashkent, I inherited awful pictures, including several undistinguished abstract paintings and a couple of modern, unpleasant seascapes, which in the world's only double landlocked country seemed singularly inappropriate.

"When you become an ambassador, the briefing pack you're given includes the Government Art Collection catalogue and a form for you to fill if you want to request new works. I asked to change a few and I was not asking for anything expensive, I was just attempting to get something less horrible to look at.

"I received a very stern reply saying that it cost a lot of money to ship anything to Tashkent, that there was no budget for Tashkent, and therefore I couldn't change any of my pictures at all and I was stuck with them."

The GAC has approximately 13,600 works of art, which it supplies for official Government buildings, as well as embassies and consulates abroad.

The collection acquires and commissions new art with the advice and guidance of its advisory committee, which is chaired by the broadcaster Julia Somerville and includes Nicholas Penny, the director of the National Gallery, Mick Elliot, the Department for Culture Media and Sport (DCMS)'s director of culture and Iwona Blazwick, the director of the Whitechapel Gallery.

A DCMS spokesman, said: "Pieces from the GAC are found in nearly every country in the world. But with limited resources for purchasing and transporting work, we necessarily have to make tough choices on where particular works can be allocated.
"Generally the GAC follows Foreign Office advice by giving priority to the larger and more high-profile embassies where the art can best be showcased to the UK's advantage."

{See Source and more pictures} at Telegraph.co.uk

Christen Købke at the National Gallery

2010-03-18T12:25:00.000-07:00

A View from Dosseringen near the Sortedam Lake Looking towards Nørrebro, Christian Købke, 1838

The 19th-century painter Christen Købke is little known outside his native Denmark, but his luminous canvases deserve a worldwide reputation.

Købke is to 19th-century Danish painting what his contemporary Hans Christian Andersen is to Danish literature.

The subject [of the above painting] is simplicity itself. Two women are shown standing at the end of a short wooden pier late on a summer afternoon. In the dying light they watch the progress of a rowing boat as it moves over a body of water flushed with delicate tones of mauve and violet. The oarsman caught in mid-stroke; a gentle breeze ruffling the lake’s surface; a listless flag stirring on a pole: for a single second the world holds its breath.

The view is so direct that it feels like a snapshot. But it is hard to miss the picture’s rigorous formal structure, the almost mathematical precision in the way Købke placed the flagpole just off centre to divide the composition vertically in two and then extended the line of the horizon by merging it with the horizontal line formed by the railing of the pier. Everywhere you look, mass is balanced against void.

This done, Købke uses interval and repetition in much the same way a composer uses musical notes: notice the repeated verticals on the pier, and how the diagonal supports under the pier rhyme both with the angle of the flag and with the oar at the left. This invisible underlying geometry creates the sense of deep peace and stability.

As you walk through this show you realise that Købke is a painter of details: fungus growing on a stone wall, spider webs still wet with dew on an old wooden fence, a stork on a roof, a convict’s shackled leg. No detail in any picture, however minute, was put there arbitrarily. Some convey information about the setting or the time of day, others add to the work’s aesthetic perfection.

In an otherwise conventional view of Fredericksburg Castle, for instance, the structure and its reflection in the moat are shown in the hour just before sunset. Why? So that the roseate tones of the Renaissance palace will be set off to perfection by a sky irradiated with pinks and purples.

Købke was born in Copenhagen in 1810, the son of a master baker. He grew up just outside the city’s walls in a fortified military garrison called the Citadel. When he entered the Royal Danish Academy at the age of 11, the school was one of the largest and most progressive national academies in Europe. His teacher, CW Eckersberg, encouraged his students to work directly from nature by painting out of doors.

He told them to look at the world through their own eyes, not through the prism of the Old Masters.

Even so, Købke would also have become familiar with the Dutch 17th-century landscapes in the Royal Collection, which had opened to the public in 1824. As with the Dutch Old Masters, there is nothing picturesque or exotic about the motifs Købke chose to paint. His landscapes show scenes of everyday life. In them, he engages with the world around him, not in history
or myth.

The “lake” was actually a man-made reservoir on the outskirts of Copenhagen. In the middle distance, a glimpse of another pier and flagpole tells us that the ladies in the foreground have close neighbours. In fact, the picture was painted at the bottom of the garden of Købke’s suburban villa. To paint it, he had only to walk a few steps from his studio.

But under the mundane motif are suggestions of deeper meanings. As a devout Christian, Købke found in the most ordinary view of nature a reflection of God’s perfect plan. It was the painter’s task to reveal this perfection through the clarity and precision of his painting technique. But this dimension of his work is understated, low-key.

Likewise, the Danish flag here gently alludes to a resurgence of national pride in the years that followed Denmark’s humiliation by the British during the Napoleonic Wars. That catastrophe and the country’s subsequent bankruptcy are subtly reflected in Købke’s art. Except for two years (when he reluctantly visited Italy), Købke spent most of his short life in Copenhagen. Just as at this period the German-speaking upper classes in Denmark began to speak Danish, so Købke devoted most of his life to painting not the Coliseum or the Roman Forum, but familiar sights in and around the city of his birth.

The red drawbridge we see in his view outside the North Gate of the Citadel in 1834, for example, is the one he walked across every day. It was the gateway to the Citadel, the area of the city Nelson targeted during the bombardment, and in Købke’s time a dark, unpleasant place which was ridden with typhoid and notorious for its lawlessness and squalor.

Købke alludes to none of that. By standing to the left of the gates, he directs our eye not to the drawbridge in the distance, but to the four little boys fishing from the bridge on a sunny day in high summer.

Once again he uses the geometry of the architecture to suggest timelessness and stability. He then evokes the transience of the present moment by brutally cropping the tiny figure of the lady crossing the bridge. Wonderfully painted shadows and lights playing over the crumbling brickwork remind us that time is passing even as we look.

What we notice in Købke’s work is the unorthodox compositions painted in a limited range of colours and tones. But his contemporaries didn’t see this. To them, his pictures looked utterly unremarkable. The distances between many of the views of Copenhagen seen in this show – the first devoted to Købke outside his native Denmark – could be covered on foot in a few minutes, and were so familiar that many of his contemporaries couldn’t understand why he had bothered to paint them.

This is true of his portraits as well, for he only painted his intimate circle of fellow artists, friends and family. Because they aren’t commissioned portraits, it feels as though he catches the sitters off their guard. What makes his portrait of his second cousin, a baker, so unusual in 19th-century art is that the sitter didn’t bother to change out of his work clothes – or, for that matter, to do up his flies.

When Købke died at the age of 37 he left more than 300 pictures. The 48 on show in London are among the very best. If you don’t know his work, you are in for the surprise of your life when the show opens to the public tomorrow .

{Read the full Review} at Telegraph.co.uk
Review by: Richard Dorment for Telegraph.co.uk
Edited for RttA by Zelzega

Christie's puts record price tag on "key" Picasso

2010-03-17T10:58:00.000-07:00

The Absinthe Drinker, Picasso, 1903

Christie's has put a record price tag on an important Picasso painting from his celebrated Blue Period that will be offered for sale in London in June.

"Portrait of Angel Fernandez de Soto (The Absinthe Drinker)," dated 1903, is expected to fetch 30-40 million pounds ($45-60 million), the highest pre-sale estimate for any work of art offered at auction in Europe.

The June 23 auction follows a February sale at rival Sotheby's where a Giacometti sculpture went under the hammer for $104.3 million, just beating the previous record for another Picasso that sold for $104.2 million in New York in 2004.

Wednesday's announcement of the June sale underlines growing confidence in the art market after a sharp contraction during the financial crisis.

The Picasso, featuring a seated man with a glass of absinthe and a pipe, the smoke curling upwards, is being offered by composer Andrew Lloyd Webber, and the proceeds will go to his foundation which promotes arts and culture in Britain.

The same work was originally offered for auction at Christie's in November 2006, but it was withdrawn at the 11th hour after an individual challenged its true ownership and said it was effectively stolen from his family by the Nazis.

"This challenge has since been resolved by agreement and the claimants have withdrawn all claims to the painting, leaving the Foundation free to sell the work," Christie's said in a statement.

"This is one of the most important works of art to be offered at auction in decades," [Jussi Pylkkanen] said.

Christie's called it "the very embodiment of Blue Period aesthetic, rendered in bold, loose, swirling brush strokes that recall El Greco and trumpet Picasso's virtuosity."

{Full Story} at Reuters

Rediscovered Van Gogh exhibited

2010-03-16T11:19:00.000-07:00

A painting of a windmill recently identified as a Van Gogh has gone on display at a Dutch museum.

Experts at Amsterdam's Van Gogh Museum concluded Le Blute-fin Mill was painted by the Dutch artist in 1886.

The brightly-coloured painting, which depicts people around a Parisian mill has gone on show at the Museum de Fundatie, in Zwolle.

Ralph Keuning, director of the Fundatie museum, rediscovered the painting in 2007 and it was later authenticated.

He said: "The painting is a little a-typical for Van Gogh because of the many people appearing on it but also very typical because of the prominent role for the mill."

The painting was bought 35 years ago by Dirk Hannema, the founder of the museum.

At the time, he said he believed it was an "absolute certainty" that the painting was the work of the artist, but he had been discredited since he bought a Vermeer in 1937 that later was shown to be a forgery.

"Finally, he has been proven right," said Mr Keuning.

Mr Hannema displayed Le Blute-fin Mill at his home until he died in 1984, when it disappeared in the museum depot, only to resurface briefly in 1993 and again in 2007.

Louis van Tilborgh, curator of research at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, said the painting was unusual for the 19th century artist.

It depicts Parisians climbing wooden stairs to a windmill in the Montmartre district.

But he added that other elements of the the work, with its bright colours lathered roughly on the canvas, was typical of Van Gogh's style at the time he was living in Paris.

The canvas bore the stamp of an art store he was known to visit, and used pigments that were common in other works.

He said: "You can link it to certain works of Van Gogh in that period, but not that many of them."

Le Blute-fin Mill is on show at the museum until 4 July alongside other similar works by the painter.

{Source} at BBC.co.uk

German 'Venus' may be oldest yet

2010-03-15T18:13:00.000-07:00

A remarkable ivory carving is arguably the oldest sculpture of a human figure yet found, scientists say.

The distorted object, which portrays a woman with huge breasts, big buttocks and exaggerated genitals, is thought to be at least 35,000 years old.

The 6cm-tall figurine, reported in the journal Nature, is the latest find to come from Hohle Fels Cave in Germany.

Previous discoveries have included exquisite carvings of animals, and an object that could be a stone "sex toy".

Professor Nicholas Conard, from the department of Early Prehistory and Quaternary Ecology, at Tübingen University, said is was understandable that many would also view the new discovery in a pornographic light, but he cautioned against jumping too quickly to a particular interpretation.

"We project our ideas of today on to this image from 40,000 years ago," he told the BBC.

"I think there are good reasons to emphasise sexual interpretations, but we really don't know whether it is coming from a more male or a more female perspective. We don't know very much about how the artefact was used."

The Venus of Hohle Fels was found in six fragments in September 2008. It is still missing its left arm and shoulder, but researchers are hopeful these will emerge in future excavations of the cave's sediments.

The figurine does not have a head. Rather, it has a carefully carved ring located off-centre above its broad shoulders.

The polished nature of the ring suggests the Venus was probably suspended as a pendant.

The hands have precisely carved fingers, with five digits clearly visible on the left hand and four on the right hand.

The pronounced breasts, buttocks and genitals familiar in later Venuses are usually interpreted to be expressions of fertility.

The Venus shows no signs of having been covered with pigments. It is, though, marked by a series of cut lines.

The artefact is presumed to have been made by modern humans (Homo sapiens) even though Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis) were still present in Europe at this time.

"We find all kinds of things in our caves - musical instruments, all kinds of ornaments, mythical representations of lion-men, not to mention all the different stone tools, bone tools, ivory tools, [and] antler tools. But we have no human bones that really tell us one way or the other who made these artefacts. I assume they were made by modern humans," said Professor Conard.

The Hohle Fels object is of an age where radiocarbon dating techniques become somewhat uncertain. Scientists say, however, that it is unquestionably older than previous finds associated with, for example, European Gravettian culture.

These typically date from between 22,000 and 27,000 years ago, with the most famous item probably being the Venus of Willendorf which was discovered in 1908.

Professor Conard has described many of the extraordinary finds at Hohle Fels.

He says the Venus is perhaps the earliest example of figurative art worldwide.

"There's one site in northern Italy - Fumane - that has some very schematic, monochrome red depictions that are certainly figurative art, although it's often difficult to work out what's being depicted," he said.

"They're of comparable age; we don't have enough resolution to say which is older. It is entirely plausible that the female figurine from Hohle Fels is the oldest figurative art anywhere."

Claims have been made for figurines that are much older - even hundreds of thousands of years old. The Berekhat Ram figure from Israel and the Tan-Tan figure from Morocco, for example, have been presented as the work of Homo erectus.

But many sceptical researchers believe these items, although they may have been used by more ancient species, are really accidents of nature; they are objects that have been moulded into human form through chance geological processes.

{See more pictures} at BBC.co.uk

Syrian Archaeologists: Roman and Byzantine Graveyards Unearthed near Damascus

2010-03-15T10:39:00.000-07:00

Syrian archaeologists working for Damascus Countryside Governorate has announced the unearthing of 5 archaeological graveyards in old Darya City near Damascus, dating back to the 3rd and 4th Century AD.

The discovered graveyards, mostly dating back to the roman and byzantine era, contain tens of skulls, Mahmoud Hamoud, Damascus Countryside archaeology director told local news and media.

Hamoud disclosed that some other findings were also found as part of burial materials, including clay and glass tools, bracelets, rings, ring-bells, beads, eardrops, made of bronze, iron, glass, wood, and precious stones, as well as eardrops made of gold.

Earlier, Damascus Countryside Archaeology Directorate announced the finding of a basalt-built mass graveyard in 'Ashrafiat Sihnaya', dating back to same period, with several skulls and other burial materials, made of glass, wood, and metal.

{Read the Full Story} at Global Arab Network

Early Czech Coins Exhibition At National Museum

2010-03-11T10:08:00.000-08:00

A collection of early Czech silver coins found in the Czech Republic is exhibited at the National Museum in Prague. Many of these coins were discovered during reconstruction works at Prague Castle.

The exhibition is named “Unique Bohemian and Moravian Silver Treasures from around the Year 1000”. It is open for public at the New Building of the Prague’s National Museum that is located near Wenceslas Square. It will be held until May 9, 2010.

The exhibition’s curator Luboš Polanský commented: “They are treasures from the beginnings of Czech minting. The era we’re talking about is from the middle of the 10th century to the first third of the 11th century. We have the oldest Czech coin of all, which was made in the Prague mint around the year 960 under Duke Boleslav II, who in those days ruled a great Czech empire from the deep forest in the border area to today’s Ukraine.”

Mr. Polanský explained: “They are very rare. They are some of the oldest copies of Bavarian and Schwabian coins. And one of the most valuable is similar to the coins of the English king Ethelred II and to one of the first coins of the Hungarian king Stephen I.”

Silver coins put on display at the Prague’s National Museum exhibition were most likely never present in pockets or purses of common people. Almost certainly, they were used by rich merchants in their deals and also they could be used by slave traders, because there one of the main slave traffic routs went through.

Source at Czech-netz.com

Venice Doge’s palace restoration reveals new colours

2010-03-10T17:37:00.000-08:00

The gothic palace in St Mark’s Square housed the city’s top official, the Doge, when Venice was the capital of an independent and powerful republic.

During the work on what was the Doge’s private church, water infiltration was repaired and cleaners brought to light traces of gold plating, coloured marble and paint which originally decorated the whole palace.

{Full Story} at Telegraph.co.uk

Giotto frescoes exposed under ultraviolet light

2010-03-09T14:05:00.000-08:00

Frescoes painted by Giotto, the 14th Century Italian master, have been brought to life with the use of ultraviolet technology.

Restorers discovered that under ultraviolet light, long-lost colour and detail was revealed.

The frescoes date from 1320 and decorate the walls of the Peruzzi Chapel in Florence's Santa Croce church.

…In the course of the project, they found that by shining ultraviolet light on the paintings they were able to see much more than was visible to the naked eye.

The frescoes are thought to have been admired by Michelangelo and are said to have influenced his work nearly 200 years later.

The paintings were covered in whitewash in the 18th century and then underwent a brutal restoration in 1840, when the whitewash was removed with the aid of steel wool scrubbers and solvents. The work left the masterpieces faded, scratched and washed out.

{Full Story} at Telegraph.co.uk

Mysterious snake appears in painting of Queen Elizabeth I

2010-03-08T15:03:00.000-08:00

The serpent was depicted being clasped in the Tudor monarch's fingers in the original version of the work - but it was painted over at the last minute and replaced with a more decorative bunch of roses.

Deterioration over time has meant the snake has revealed itself once more, with its outline now visible on the surface.

The gallery suggested the snake's removal may have been due to the ambiguity of the emblem.

An artist's impression has been created of what the snake could have looked like, with infra-red technology revealing the changes in the initial design.

{Full Story} at Telegraph.co.uk

PRINCE'S PALACE FOUND IN VOLCANIC CRATER

2010-03-07T15:23:00.000-08:00

The remains of what might have been the residence of the Etruscan prince Sextus Tarquinius, son of the last legendary king of Rome Tarquinius Superbus (Tarquin the Proud), have been found on the slopes of an extinct volcanic crater about 12 miles from Rome, Italian archaeologists have announced.

The palace was discovered on the site of the ancient acropolis of Gabii, where, according to legend, Rome's mythical founders, Romulus and Remus, were educated. The building dates to the sixth century B.C and boasts the highest intact walls from the period ever found in Italy, standing at around 6.56 feet high.

"The dig has shown that the richly decorated monumental roof was dismantled, and the building filled with rubble. This has been a blessing, since it has allowed the palace to remain virtually intact," archaeologist Marco Fabbri of Rome's Tor Vergata University, told Discovery News.

{Full Story} at Discovery News.

Huge head of pharaoh unearthed in Egypt

2010-03-06T15:19:00.000-08:00

The 3,000-year-old head of Amenhotep III - grandfather of Tutankhamun - was dug out of the ruins of the pharaoh's mortuary temple.

Experts say it is the best preserved example of the king's face ever found.

The 2.5m (8ft) head is part of a larger statue, most of which was found several years ago.

Antiquities officials say the statue is to be reconstructed.

{Full Story} at BBC.co.uk

Pieces Of Rare Biblical Manuscript Reunited

2010-03-05T15:17:00.000-08:00

Two parts of an ancient biblical manuscript separated across centuries and continents were reunited for the first time in a joint display Friday, thanks to an accidental discovery that is helping illuminate a dark period in the history of the Hebrew Bible.

The 1,300-year-old fragments, which are among only a handful of Hebrew biblical manuscripts known to have survived the era in which they were written, existed separately and with their relationship unknown, until a news photograph of one's public unveiling in 2007 caught the attention of the scholars who would eventually link them.

Together, they make up the text of the Song of the Sea, sung by jubilant Israelites after fleeing slavery in Egypt and witnessing the destruction of the pharaoh's armies in the Red Sea.

{Full Story} at Huffington Post

Middle Ages Fortifications Unearthed At Prague Castle

2010-03-04T15:14:00.000-08:00

As Jana Marikova-Kubkova of Archaeological Institute of the Academy of Science informed CZK while excavation works in Prague Castle Czech archeologists uncoverd fragments of a 9th century moat, a rampart dated back to the 10th-11th centuries and an unique illustration of that period's Castle buildings.

This one of a kind depiction was found on the lowest level of the stonework. As Ms. Marikova-Kubkova said, "this is the first find of this type in Prague." The surprising finding was made on the final stage of excavation works in the premises to the south of the passage from the second to the third courtyards.

{Full Story} at Czech-netz.com

Hellenistic coins dating back Alexander the Great's era found in northern Syria

2010-03-03T15:09:00.000-08:00

Reports indicate that a collection of Hellenistic coins dating back to the era of Alexander the Great in northern Syria have been found by a local man.

According to a report in Global Arab Network, a local man found the coins near Najm Castle in the Manbej area in Aleppo governorate, as he was preparing his land for construction, uncovering a bronze box that contained around 250 coins.

He promptly delivered the coins to the authorities who in turn delivered them to Aleppo Department of Archaeology and Museum.

Yousef Kanjo, the director of archaeological excavations at Aleppo Department of Archaeology and Museum, said that the box contained two groups of silver Hellenistic coins: 137 tetra drachma (four drachmas) coins and 115 drachma coins.

One side of the tetra drachma coins depicts Alexander the Great, while the other side depicts the Greek god Zeus sitting on a throne with an eagle on his outstretched right arm.

34 of these coins bear the inscription "King Alexander" in Greek, while 81 coins bear the inscription "Alexander" and 22 coins bear "King Phillip."

The drachma coins bear the same images as the tetra drachma, with "Alexander" inscribed on 100 of them and "Philip" on 15 of them.

{Full Story} at One India

Michelangelo's Dream: what was on his mind

2010-03-02T12:07:00.000-08:00

The Dream, Michelangelo, c. 1533

The first of the questions presented by The Dream is: for whom was it made? The most popular theory says the recipient was a young Roman nobleman named Tommaso de’ Cavalieri who was, without much question, the love of Michelangelo’s life. Almost immediately, more questions begin to crowd in: what were the terms of this love and how was it expressed? The two men first met in Rome in the winter of 1532 when Michelangelo was 57, and de’ Cavalieri was, according to rather vague documentation, between 12 and 21.

Over subsequent years, the artist bombarded this youth with letters and poems. Both reveal a different Michelangelo – vulnerable, suffering, and capable of tenderness – to the fearsome figure often seen by his contemporaries. A year after that first meeting Michelangelo wrote to de’ Cavalieri that “while my memory of you lasts I am unable to feel either weariness or fear of death”. In sonnets he declared, punning on the other’s name: “I remain the prisoner of an armed cavalier.”

Michelangelo also sent de’ Cavalieri drawings, ostensibly with the aim of encouraging him to study the art of draughtsmanship himself. These included Ganymede, The Fall of Phaeton and Tityus (which will all be at the Courtauld) and perhaps more, including The Dream, though this is not certain. Finished with minute care in black or red chalk, they were not, like so many of Michelangelo’s works on paper, studies for some other project, but finished works in themselves which scholars have since dubbed “presentation drawings”.

{Full Story} at Telegraph.co.uk

Superman's debut comic book sells for $1m

2010-02-26T17:36:00.000-08:00

A 1938 edition of Action Comics No. 1, widely considered the Holy Grail of comic books, was sold from a private seller to a private buyer, neither of whom released their names.

The issue features Superman lifting a car on its cover and originally cost 10 cents.

The transaction was conducted by the auction site ComicConnect.com. Stephen Fishler, co-owner of the site and its sister dealership, Metropolis Collectibles, orchestrated the sale.

"It is still a little stunning to see 'a comic book' and '$1 million' in the same sentence," Mr Fishler said. "There's only one time a collectible hits the $1 million threshold."

{Full Story at Source}

Unearthing the riches of Ur in war-ravaged Iraq

2010-02-24T12:42:00.000-08:00

In the early 1900s, American archaeologist Charles Leonard Woolley made some stunning finds when he unearthed 16 tombs of Ur's elite.

Inside he found some of the greatest treasures of antiquity, including a golden dagger encrusted with lapis lazuli, an intricately carved golden statue of a ram caught in a thicket, a lyre decorated with a bull's head and the gold headdress of a Sumerian queen.

Those treasures have been compared to the riches from the tomb of the Egyptian boy-king, Tutankhamun, but they excite archaeologists even more because the graves at Ur are more than 1,000 years older.

Archaeologically, the most astonishing find of Ur has been a remarkably well-preserved stepped platform, or ziggurat, which dates back to the third millennium BC, when it was part of a temple complex that served as the administrative centre of the Sumerian capital.

To date, hardly 20 percent of the site has been excavated, mainly by American and British archaeologists.

"Some archaeologists estimate it will take more than 30 years to dig out the entire city," said Moussin, surveying the site. Ur lies near a US air base just outside the southern city of Nasiriyah, a major battle ground of the American invasion.

"It is certain that much more material remains to be discovered," said Steve Tinney, professor of Assyriology at the University of Pennsylvania which, together with the British Museum, sponsored Woolley's excavations between 1922 and 1934.
Ur of the Chaldees, as it is mentioned in the Bible, was one of the great urban centres of the Sumerian civilisation of southern Iraq and remained an important city until its conquest by Alexander the Great a few centuries before Christ.

{Full Story at Yahoo! News}

Caravaggio's madness 'caused by lead poisoning'

2010-02-24T12:33:00.000-08:00

The Supper at Emmaus, Caravaggio, 1601

Caravaggio was renowned for his hot temper, heavy drinking and violent temperament and was forced to go on the run in 1606 after killing a man in a tavern brawl, a crime for which he was condemned to death by Pope Paul V.

He died in July 1610 at the age of 39, with mystery surrounding the circumstances of his death ever since.

It has been suggested he contracted syphilis or even that he was assassinated but anthropologists from the universities of Pisa, Ravenna and Bologna are studying other theories – that he contracted malaria while travelling in Italy or that he suffered from lead poisoning.

"Lead poisoning accentuates traits like aggressive and nervous behaviour, which Caravaggio displayed during his life," said Silvano Vinceti, the team leader.
"Painters in the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries used these paints all the time and often suffered serious health problems as a result."

Francisco de Goya and Vincent van Gogh are both thought to have suffered from lead poisoning.

The attempt to establish how and where Caravaggio died coincides with the 400th anniversary of his death, which is being celebrated with major exhibitions in Italy, including a collection of 24 of his best known works which went on display in Rome at the weekend.

{Full Story at Telegraph.co.uk}

Gossips and Rambles has a new name

2010-02-23T12:15:00.000-08:00

So I decided to change Gossips and Rambles to Rambling through the Ages - a play on Gardner's Art through the Ages, my favorite Art History/Appreciation book.

The new posts will be related to art - both old and new, fine art and other - anything related to art (yes even comic books ^_^).

I'm leaving my old posts up in the archives.

Enjoy.

Happy 2010

2010-01-03T21:27:00.000-08:00

So I haven't posted on Gossips and Rambles since November. I've been more active on Haphazard Reviews. I thought about doing a "what happened in 2009" post as 2009 was a busy year, but pretty much everyone does that. So I shall now usher in the New Year with an addicting song that you can't resist. Behold "Golden Age of Video" by Ricardo Autobahn. How many movies do you recognize?

Happy 2010, may this year be your greatest yet!

Who is the better man? Methinks it's not us.

2009-11-18T12:00:00.000-08:00

People try to argue with me that modern man is superior to ancient man even though their buildings stand the test of time and ours don’t. They try to argue that our buildings have functionality and aren’t meant to last for centuries; but that is a silly statement because the ancients also built for functionality and I highly doubt they were thinking of 2000 years into the future. The Greeks were into mathematics, they built their buildings for their eyes and for their functions, it just so happens that those buildings stood the test of time. All buildings had purposes, so functionality isn’t a very good reason.

People also try to argue that it’s cost, ok I’ll go with that, but does cost mean sacrificing precision? I understand that things cost differently, and different materials are used, but what of paper-thin precision? The Incas built with stone, the cuts were so precise that you cannot fit a piece of paper between the stones. The stone buildings and foundations have lasted for hundreds and/or thousands of years through countless earthquakes without even a scratch, yet the modern buildings built on top fall in the slightest shake. Maybe you’ll argue that it’s because they can’t afford to build state-of-the-art buildings and that’s why they collapse, but to me that seems like a cop-out answer.

When I look at ancient buildings from around the world versus modern buildings, it is a bit difficult to compare. The ancients had style, had precision, had long lasting results. We have glass…that blinds you…on the freeway…causing accidents. WOO! Nothing to scream superiority like a death trap!

People will always continue to argue with me and quite frankly I’m going to have to turn a deaf ear to them. I feel that the Dark Ages royally screwed us over and at the very best we’re equal to the ancients (though I still think we highly underestimate what they were capable of simple because we can’t find the magic trash that would prove otherwise).

I understand wanting to limit the costs (having no money makes you understand the value of a dollar), but does that mean you have to sacrifice quality? I see apartment buildings falling apart after only 20 years because they were thrown up without a care. I read about drains collapsing and giant sinkholes because the concrete or brick wasn't strong enough, where is the quality? I, personally, would rather spend more up front and have less maintenance then to be constantly spending money maintaining something. Perhaps they do it on purpose to keep people employed.

Sometimes, well most of the time, the human race frustrates me, and although I love my technology, I almost wish we would go back to sticks and stones.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I belong in another time.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
** A store where I used to work, the owner would spend far too much money doing cheap repairs on the equipment because she didn't want to fork over the money for a new item, yet in the long run she would have saved MORE money buying the new item versus all the money spent in repairs that were bupkis. This is one reason why I would rather buy a new item then continue to repair the beyond-help broken item. If something like a cooler requires a repair every month or more, just buy a new one. Repairs should not be that frequent.

Kim Kardashian is NOT a role model!

2009-11-02T13:21:00.001-08:00

You might say "how can you claim who to idolize and who not to idolize when you follow Holly Madison and Bridget Marquardt on Twitter?", well my answer is "yes I do follow them, but I don't idolize them, I don't look up to them, I don't aspire to BE them" and this is the difference.

Holly Madison posted a link to Kim Kardashian's website because Kim posted pictures from Halloween, she was Jasmine from Aladdin; and as expected of Kim Kardashian, she was 95% skin and 5% clothes - honestly, why does she even bother getting dressed? Under her pictures were, per usual, comments of fans and this is the part that baffles and enrages me. Many of the comments are, thankfully, telling her she looks trashy or slutty or other things along those lines. I love those people for speaking honestly, 99% of the comments (even the ones saying she looks trashy/slutty) tell her how beautiful she is, apparently looking like a porn star = beautiful.

Two comments that jumped out at me and made me write this blog were:

"you make me want to sit in a corner and cry! you are so f*cking beautiful i love you so much, i would faint if i met you, when you were inches infront of me i was crying! you are absolutely gorgeous and i look up to you ;) KEEEEEP IT DASHING!"

"Wow Kimmy You Chose Well This Year!...You Look AMAZING!!
I Love You So Much & Im So Thankful Because I Couldnt Wish For A Better Hero/Idol/Inspiration/RoleModel Than You!
Thankyou Kimmy xo
I Love You Lots Like Jelly Tots Forever & Always x x x x"

Uh…what? What type of person truly is inspired by someone like Kim Kardashian? What kind of pathetic life does a person have to have to idolize someone who is famous for being in a sex tape with a football player.

Her face is fake, her boobs are fake, her voice is annoyingly squeaky, her family is trashy, and she's as much of a model as Paris Hilton. The Playboy bunnies are classier than Kim Kardashian.

Whatever happened to good role models, role models that were actually worth looking up to and modeling your behavior after. We have one that I can think of right now, Emma Watson - she's set for life with the Harry Potter movies and yet she's going to Brown University to get an education.

Girls should be looking to Emma not Kim for inspiration.

Words fail to explain how flabbergasted I am that people would see Kim Kardashian as anything inspirational. I suppose those who look up to her also aspire to be strippers or porn stars.

The United States used to be classy, even if it was only in the media images, what ever happened to that classiness? Even the scandals were classy! Now the sluts and the gold-diggers are being idolized as heros, girls are aspiring to make sex tapes with celebrities and Halloween costumes consist of maybe 1 ft of fabric.

Bring back the class America, stop idolizing trash.

How the dinosaurs Really died

2009-10-27T23:40:00.001-07:00

Do you scare easily? Do you have phobias?

2009-10-22T15:02:00.000-07:00

Do you have a phobia? Do you know what a phobia is? A phobia is "an anxiety disorder characterized by extreme and irrational fear of simple things or social situations"ª, everyone fears something, but to what degree?

I've spent the last several years (probably about 10 by now) trying to get scared from movies, mazes, haunts, etc and nothing ever scares me. Sure sometimes I get a bit anxious, and of course I jump when something pops out, but that's just a reaction and not really fear. I'm still searching for a movie to scare me, but that I think is an endless journey.

Sharp objects make me anxious. Needles, knives, bees, wasps, anything that painfully pricks the skin, but I can deal with those. I avoid the insects, I'm careful with knives, and I look away when the Red Cross is sticking my arm. I'm very careful when sewing, I use thimbles too! I have an irrational fear that knives will randomly stab me, so I'm always turning them away from me, but it isn't enough to prohibit what I'm doing. I wouldn't really call it a phobia, I can still use knives.

The other day I had the realization of what truly scares me, things that I can truthfully say are phobias.

My entire life I have feared Ferris Wheels, I've tried to go on them - caged ones, open ones, large, small - it doesn't matter, they're all the same. I've always had the fear that the cart would tip backwards and I would fall out (I was a very skinny kid), now I'm big enough that my legs are pinned into the seat, it's impossible for me to fall out, but the sensation is still there. The final straw that made me decide that I'll never get over the fear was a few years ago. My friend Erin begged me to go on the Ferris Wheel at DCA, the huge menacing Ferris wheel. She wanted to go on the free swinging ones, not the stationary ones, I knew it was a bad idea but figured we're in a cage, I can't fall out...wrong…well I didn't fall out obviously, but it was nonetheless traumatizing. We had gotten 3/4 around the wheel when it stopped to change out passengers, when the wheel stopped we slid and I saw sky then water, sky, water, sky, water - my life flashed before my eyes. I nearly cried.

After that I never went on Ferris Wheels ever again, I hate passing the one at the Irvine Spectrum - standing there - taunting me. I've learned to just avoid Ferris Wheels, they aren't a necessity and nothing requires me to have to go on them, so I can avoid that fear by simple avoiding them.

But there was an incident the other day, the one that made me have my realization. Boomer was outside barking so I decided to go see what he was barking about. I figured that he was barking at a bunny on the hill or something, well as I rounded the corner there was a RAT! a huge disgusting gray rat! Boomer was playing with it and inevitably killed it. I screamed at Boomer to get away from it, he wouldn't listen to me, I had to go near the rat to grab Boomer's collar to drag him into the house and away from the rat. I began shaking horrifically, I nearly dropped my phone trying to send a text to Sean, and I felt my knees were going to give out from under me. I began crying uncontrollably and couldn't think straight. I felt like something was crawling all over me, it was horrible. When it was obvious that the rat was dead, I couldn't even clean it up, I had to take Boomer out for a long walk and wait for Sean to get home. I can't even go near a dead rat.

This incident made me realize what fear was, what I was searching for in the thrill of movies I instead received from real life. The rat had me beyond terrified. It's been 2 or 3 days now and I'm still paranoid.

I feel that I have about four true phobias and countless anxieties. Obviously rats and Ferris Wheels along with heights and enclosed spaces. Don't believe me? Just ask my sister about our adventures at Blarney Castle, she can tell you.

Do you have any phobias?

Designers…STFU

2009-10-17T13:36:00.000-07:00

So I just finished watching Bang for your Buck on HGTV. Basically the show sends a real estate agent and a designer to evaluate 1 room in 3 houses that cost the same to renovate and then decide who got the most bang for their buck. The episode I watched was 3 Washington D.C. homes who redid their basements for $90,000. Overall the episode was good, the basements were incredible! But what irks me is what was said at the end of the episode. (Oh btw, the house that "won" was the house that would get 100% return on their investment, kudos!)

One of the houses had a built in aquarium. The homeowners loved it, the husband was saying at the end of the day he likes to sit and watch the fish, it's very relaxing, and if they eventually sell their home, they can wall up the hole with sheetrock (it isn't difficult to do). The "experts" said that it was over-personalized and therefore reduced the value. ………(>_>) (<.<) /facepalm
Unless that family was selling their house RIGHT NOW, I should hope their house is personal! It's their freakin' home! I would question a house that was staged 24/7. Do the people have no personality? If a family is going to live in a house for 10, 20, 30+ years, I should hope they have it personalized. I understand that you want things to be neutral if you're going to sell, but why should your house always be staged to sell? This seriously irked me. The family lives there, they should have the things they want.

One of the other homes had a large bathroom with stand-alone shower and jacuzzi tub. The "experts" complained that there was no guest bedroom to go with that bathroom. Why should the guests get to enjoy the awesome bathroom?! It's the homeowners who bought it! I would think that such a bathroom is perfect in the basement because it's generally darker and more quiet in the basement - a perfect escape from the world.

There was something else that irked me, but now I can't think of what it was. It wasn't too much, just /facepalm worthy.

The over-personalization complaint irked me the most. They were basically criticizing the homeowners for having personality. If an "expert" ever came into my home and complained about the video game posters, I'd bitch them out right then and there. It is my home, I will have art that *I* want. When it comes time to sell, I will put neutral art up, but as long as I'm living there, I will have the art that I want.

Don't praise the Duggars

2009-10-14T11:08:00.000-07:00

The Duggars, oh the Duggars…Duggars, Duggars, Duggars…what to say about them… Quite frankly I can't think of anything nice to say about them. They're lunatics, Michelle doesn't know how to not be pregnant, and people need to stop praising them.

I have seen people praising the Duggars on Twitter, on TLC.com, and on other sites because they aren't "receiving government aid" meaning they aren't on welfare, they aren't receiving food stamps, they don't participate in W.I.C., etc, but did you know they don't pay taxes? Yup, they went and declared their house a church which means they don't pay housing taxes. Michelle and Jim-Bob love to talk about how they drive "old" cars, Jim-Bob has said in interviews "We've always driven older vehicles; we've never bought a new vehicle." They claim to be debt free, but of course if you didn't have to pay taxes, you'd probably be debt free too. Michelle claims "[I've] gone to garage sales and bought shoes for a dollar. We probably spend less on clothing than what a family of four would spend. We spend a lot of money on food — $3,000 a month on food and diapers and that type of stuff." Well this would explain why they always look dumpy, yet they have several Blackberries and top-of-the-line bluetooth earpieces. They claim to live a modest life, yet they have fancy cellphones and like 10 top-of-the-line washers/dryers.

Oh, and in addition to the whole not paying taxes, don't forget all the free stuff they get from having their show 18 Kids and Counting. If they want something, TLC will buy it. Remember when TLC was actually educational? Well that's for another blog. I recently saw an episode of Say Yes to the Dress and the Duggars happened to be on this episode. Michelle wanted a dress for renewing their vows on their anniversary. Conveniently she wanted the dress in 3 weeks - wanted it to hide her belly, and cover up cause she's "modest". This of course means customizing a dress, most custom dresses require months if not a full year, and she wants it in 3 weeks, and of course, they comply. Why? Because TLC who airs both shows says so. If I tried to pull that stunt, Kleinfeld Bridal (the store the show follows) would laugh and tell me no, OR they would charge me an additional $10,000+ (probably more), but for the Duggars…no problem. /facepalm
And the real kicker…Michelle asked the wedding dress consultant to wait outside cause she's so "modest", yet she stares up her daughter-in-laws vagina during birth? what?

I could go on for days about my distaste for the Duggars, but I'll end it with this. The Duggars make their kids sign up on a sheet for alone time with mom & dad. I would die if my parents did that. Their reasoning for naming all their kids with J names is the most idiotic reason ever "We didn't know if the next kid would be the last and we didn't want them to feel left out". I highly doubt the kid would care (I'd think they'd want a different letter name to stand out!) The oldest Duggar kid recently got married and his wife Anna just gave birth to Baby #1 (I really hope they stop at like 2 or 3). A bouncy baby girl named Mackynzie (not the greatest name, but hey at least it isn't a J name).

Finally, Michelle is pregnant with Baby #19 due in March. She's asking for baby names on TLC.com, I left a comment of baby names:
Girl: Jezebel; Boy: Judas (yes I really did leave that comment).

To the Duggars: STOP HAVING BABIES, don't make me list everything wrong with your children, that list will take days. Even your own families think you're crazy. JUST STOP ALREADY.

And for those who have been under a rock:
Jim-Bob and Michelle have created the spawns:
Joshua, Jana, John-David, Jill, Jessa, Jinger, Joseph, Josiah, Joy-Anna, Jedidiah, Jeremiah, Jason, James, Justin, Jackson, Johannah, Jennifer, Jordyn-Grace.

Jezebel or Judas are perfect names! They start with J, they're Biblical names. What more do you need?

Source of finance quotes: http://www.newsvine.com/_news/2008/12/01/2166679-the-duggars-how-they-live-debt-free

The Asylum

2009-10-13T15:50:00.000-07:00

The Asylum (home entertainments) is a film company that makes B-movies. They have made such awesomely bad movies that I feel they deserve the title "Epically bad". These movies typically have low budgets which means cheesy special effects. The scripts are usually laughable and entertaining, and the outrageousness of their movies makes you want to watch more. They love to make mockbusters which are listed below.

Major release	Mockbuster (Asylum's release)	Year	\|
War of the Worlds	H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds^[1]	2005
The Exorcism of Emily Rose	Exorcism: The Possession of Gail Bowers	2005
King Kong	King of the Lost World^[1]	2005
The Hills Have Eyes (2006)	Hillside Cannibals	2006
The Da Vinci Code	The Da Vinci Treasure^[1]^[2]^[3]	2006
Pirates of the Caribbean	Pirates of Treasure Island^[3]	2006
Snakes on a Plane	Snakes on a Train^[1]^[3]	2006
When a Stranger Calls	When a Killer Calls	2006
Underworld Evolution	Bram Stoker's Dracula's Curse	2006
Halloween	Halloween Night	2006
Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem	AVH: Alien vs Hunter^[1]^[2]	2007
Primeval (film)	Super Croc	2007
Transformers	Transmorphers^[1]^[2]	2007
I Am Legend	I Am Ωmega^[3]	2007
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull	Allan Quatermain and the Temple of Skulls^[3]	2008
High School Musical 3: Senior Year	Sunday School Musical^[20]	2008
Journey to the Center of the Earth (2008 film)	Journey To The Center Of The Earth	2008
Cloverfield	Monster	2008
The Fast and the Furious (film series)	Street Racer	2008
Death Race	Death Racers^[21]	2008
The Day the Earth Stood Still	The Day the Earth Stopped^[7]	2008
10 000 B.C.	100 Million BC	2008
Terminator Salvation	The Terminators^[22]	2009
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen	Transmorphers: Fall of Man^[23]	2009
Land of the Lost (film)	The Land That Time Forgot (2009 film)	2009
The 40-Year-Old Virgin	18 Year Old Virgin	2009

Here is the list of all the movies, the ones with √ are the ones that I've seen and the ones with * are the ones I plan on renting soon. There are a few repeats due to Distributor vs Production

Source: IMDB.com

Distributor - filmography

Sex Pot (2009) (V) ... Distributor (2009) (worldwide) (DVD)
√ Transmorphers: Fall of Man (2009) (V) ... Distributor (2009) (USA) (DVD)
√ Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus (2009) (V) ... Distributor (2009) (USA) (DVD)
* The Terminators (2009) (V) ... Distributor (2009) (USA) (DVD)
* Countdown: Jerusalem (2009) (V) ... Distributor (2009) (worldwide) (DVD)
The Day the Earth Stopped (2008) (V) ... Distributor (2008) (USA) (DVD)
Street Racer (2008) (V) ... Distributor (2008) (worldwide) (theatrical)
100 Million BC (2008) (V) ... Distributor (2008) (worldwide) (all media)
Allan Quatermain and the Temple of Skulls (2008) (V) ... Distributor (2008) (worldwide) (all media)
War of the Worlds 2: The Next Wave (2008) (V) ... Distributor (2008) (worldwide) (theatrical)
* 2012 Doomsday (2008) (V) ... Distributor (2008) (worldwide) (all media)
Monster (2008) (V) ... Distributor (2008) (worldwide) (theatrical)
I Am Omega (2007) (V) ... Distributor (2007) (worldwide) (all media)
666: The Beast (2007) (V) ... Distributor (2007) (worldwide) (all media)
30,000 Leagues Under the Sea (2007) (V) ... Distributor (2007) (worldwide) (all media)
Universal Soldiers (2007) ... Distributor (2007) (worldwide) (all media)
Invasion of the Pod People (2007) (V) ... Distributor (2007) (worldwide) (all media), Distributor (2007) (worldwide) (theatrical)
* Transmorphers (2007) (V) ... Distributor (2007) (worldwide) (all media)
The Apocalypse (2007) ... Distributor (2007) (worldwide) (all media)
Supercroc (2007) ... Distributor (2007) (worldwide) (all media)
The Hitchhiker (2007) ... Distributor (2007) (worldwide) (all media)
Freakshow (2007) ... Distributor (2007) (USA) (DVD)
Dragon (2006/II) ... Distributor (2006) (worldwide) (all media)
The 9/11 Commission Report (2006) ... Distributor (2006) (worldwide) (all media)
Snakes on a Train (2006) (V) ... Distributor (2006) (worldwide) (all media)
Night of the Dead: Leben Tod (2006) (V) ... Distributor (2006) (worldwide) (all media)
Pirates of Treasure Island (2006) ... Distributor (2006) (worldwide) (all media)
The Da Vinci Treasure (2006) ... Distributor (2006) (USA) (DVD), Distributor (2006) (worldwide) (all media)
Hillside Cannibals (2006) (V) ... Distributor (2006) (worldwide) (all media)
When a Killer Calls (2006) ... Distributor (2006-2007) (worldwide) (all media)
King of the Lost World (2005) ... Distributor (2005) (worldwide) (all media)
Frankenstein Reborn (2005) ... Distributor (2005) (worldwide) (all media)
War of the Worlds (2005) (V) ... Distributor (2005) (worldwide) (all media)
El kuervo (2005) ... Distributor (2005) (USA) (DVD)
Jolly Roger: Massacre at Cutter's Cove (2005) ... Distributor (2005-2007) (worldwide) (all media)
One Among Us (2005) ... Distributor (2005) (worldwide) (DVD), Distributor (2005) (worldwide) (theatrical), Distributor (2006) (worldwide) (all media)
Legion of the Dead (2005) ... Distributor (2005) (worldwide) (all media)
Way of the Vampire (2005) ... Distributor (2005) (worldwide) (all media)
Alien Abduction (2005) ... Distributor (2005) (worldwide) (all media)
Intermedio (2005) ... Distributor (2005) (worldwide) (all media)
Death Valley: The Revenge of Bloody Bill (2004) ... Distributor (2004) (worldwide) (all media)
Human Nature (2004) (V) ... Distributor (2004) (USA) (DVD)
Evil Eyes (2004) ... Distributor (2004) (worldwide)
Pandora Machine (2004) (V) ... Distributor (USA)
Salome (2004) ... Distributor (2004) (USA) (video)
Death 4 Told (2004) ... Distributor (2005) (USA) (DVD)
Heads Are Gonna Roll (2004) (V) ... Distributor (2004) (USA) (DVD)
Dark Queen (2004) ... Distributor (2004) (USA) (DVD)
Detour (2003) (V) ... Distributor (????-????) (non-USA)
Speed Demon (2003) ... Distributor (USA)
Leeches! (2003) (V) ... Distributor (USA)
King of the Ants (2003/I) ... Distributor
How It All Went Down (2003) ... Distributor (????-????) (USA)
Insight of Evil (2003) ... Distributor (2004) (USA) (DVD), Distributor (2004) (USA) (VHS)
Dot (2002) ... Distributor (USA)
Angels Crest (2002) ... Distributor
Chaos (2002/I) ... Distributor (worldwide)
The Source (2002) ... Distributor
Made in Canada, Volume 1: Best of the CFC (2002) (V) ... Distributor
Making a Killing (2002) ... Distributor (worldwide)
Killers 2: The Beast (2002) (V) ... Distributor
Feedback (2002) ... Distributor (2002) (worldwide)
Until Death (2002) ... Distributor (2003) (USA)
Smash Cuts!: Super Sci-Fi Short Fest (2001) (V) ... Distributor (USA)
Aionios foititis (2001) ... Distributor (USA)
Dei seung chui keung (2001) ... Distributor (USA)
Londinium (2001) ... Distributor (USA)
Fish in a Barrel (2001) ... Distributor (worldwide)
Ghetto Rhapsody (2001) (V) ... Distributor
The Sea Wolf (2001) ... Distributor
The Theory of the Leisure Class (2001) ... Distributor (worldwide)
Dumped (2000) (V) ... Distributor
Love Disease (2000) ... Distributor
Party Crasher: My Bloody Birthday (2000) ... Distributor (USA) (video)
Shades of Darkness (2000) ... Distributor
Middlemen (2000) ... Distributor (USA)
All the Wrong Places (2000) ... Distributor (USA)
Blood (2000) ... Distributor (USA)
Future Murder (2000) ... Distributor
Overnight Sensation (2000) ... Distributor (worldwide)
The Martini Shot (2000/I) ... Distributor
Calling Bobcat (2000) ... Distributor
Vinyl (2000) ... Distributor (Canada)
Mic and the Claw (2000) ... Distributor
Flooding (2000) ... Distributor (worldwide)
Scalpers (2000) ... Distributor
101 Ways (The Things a Girl Will Do to Keep Her Volvo) (2000) ... Distributor (USA)
Let's Talk (2000) ... Distributor
Road to Flin Flon (2000) ... Distributor
Rock the Boat (2000) (TV) ... Distributor
The Bingo Robbers (2000) ... Distributor (USA)
The Exchange (2000) ... Distributor
The Night Watchman (2000) (V) ... Distributor (2001) (USA) (video)
Too Much Sex (2000) ... Distributor (Canada)
You Are Here* (2000) ... Distributor
Johnny (1999) ... Distributor (USA)
Money Buys Happiness (1999) ... Distributor
Henry Hill (1999) ... Distributor (USA)
The Big Split (1999) ... Distributor (USA)
The Woman Chaser (1999) ... Distributor (USA)
Natural Selection (1999) ... Distributor (non-USA)
Sweet Thing (1999) ... Distributor
Envy (1999) ... Distributor (worldwide)
Jimmy Zip (1999) ... Distributor
Another Planet (1999) ... Distributor (1999-????)
Random Acts of Violence (1999) ... Distributor (worldwide)
Rudy Blue (1999) ... Distributor
Zhong hua ying xiong (1999) ... Distributor
The Eden Myth (1999) ... Distributor
Tequila Body Shots (1999) ... Distributor (1999-????) (worldwide)
Bellyfruit (1999) ... Distributor (USA)
Macbeth in Manhattan (1999) ... Distributor
The Pornographer (1999) ... Distributor
The Distraction (1999) ... Distributor
Born to Lose (1999) ... Distributor (Canada)
Dill Scallion (1999) ... Distributor
Chicks, Man (1999) ... Distributor
Chillicothe (1999) ... Distributor
Dead Pet (1999) (V) ... Distributor (worldwide)
Equinox Knocks (1999) ... Distributor
Heater (1999) ... Distributor (USA)
Late Night Sessions (1999) ... Distributor
My Sweet Killer (1999) ... Distributor (worldwide)
Nice Guys Sleep Alone (1999) ... Distributor
Shafted! (1999) ... Distributor
Sparkle (1999) ... Distributor (USA)
The Widower (1999) ... Distributor (Canada)
Dante's View (1998) ... Distributor
Pep Squad (1998) ... Distributor
Drylongso (1998) ... Distributor
The Vigil (1998) ... Distributor (worldwide)
Snapped (1998) ... Distributor (USA)
Social Intercourse (1998) ... Distributor
Soundman (1998) ... Distributor
Fung wan: Hung ba tin ha (1998) ... Distributor
Getting Personal (1998) ... Distributor (USA)
Yellow (1998) ... Distributor (USA)
1999 (1998) ... Distributor (1998) (worldwide) (all media)
Stuart Bliss (1998) ... Distributor
Green (1998) ... Distributor (worldwide)
Anarchy TV (1998) ... Distributor
Wrestling with Alligators (1998) ... Distributor (USA)
Art House (1998) ... Distributor
Inconceivable (1998) ... Distributor
I, Zombie: The Chronicles of Pain (1998) ... Distributor (non-USA)
Next Time (1998) ... Distributor (worldwide)
The Farmhouse (1998) ... Distributor
So This Is Romance? (1997) ... Distributor (USA)
The Big Empty (1997) ... Distributor (worldwide)
Barbecue: A Love Story (1997) ... Distributor (2001) (USA) (VHS)
Sleepy Heads (1997) ... Distributor
Sudden Manhattan (1997) ... Distributor (USA)
Little Shots of Happiness (1997) ... Distributor
Killers (1997) ... Distributor (non-USA)
Barnone (1997) ... Distributor (Canada)
Horsey (1997) ... Distributor (USA)
Long Time Since (1997) ... Distributor (USA)
Mr. Vincent (1997) ... Distributor (USA)
Night Orchid (1997) ... Distributor
One Take (1997) ... Distributor (USA)
Pitch (1997) ... Distributor (worldwide)
Raven's Ridge (1997) ... Distributor
Red Meat (1997) ... Distributor (USA)
Scratch the Surface (1997) ... Distributor
St. Patrick's Day (1997) ... Distributor
The Others (1997) ... Distributor
Ratchet (1996) ... Distributor (USA)
Trouble (1996) ... Distributor (Canada)
The Man Next Door (1996) (TV) ... Distributor
American Beer (1996) ... Distributor (USA)
Close Up (1996) ... Distributor
Dogs: The Rise and Fall of an All-Girl Bookie Joint (1996) ... Distributor (1997) (USA)
Joe & Joe (1996) ... Distributor (USA)
Loser (1996) ... Distributor (worldwide)
The Scottish Tale (1996) ... Distributor
Burnzy's Last Call (1995) ... Distributor (USA)
Pure Race (1995) ... Distributor
Criminal (1994) ... Distributor (USA)
Impolite (1992) ... Distributor
Rock and Roll Fantasy (1992) ... Distributor (worldwide)

Filmography as: Distributor, Production Company, Miscellaneous Company

Production Company - filmography

* 2012: Supernova (2009) (V) ... Production Company
* Megafault (2009) (V) ... Production Company
* Haunting of Winchester House (2009) (V) ... Production Company
Sex Pot (2009) (V) ... Production Company
The Land That Time Forgot (2009) (V) ... Production Company
√ Transmorphers: Fall of Man (2009) (V) ... Production Company
√ Dragonquest (2009) (V) ... Production Company
* Countdown: Jerusalem (2009) (V) ... Production Company
18 Year Old Virgin (2009) (V) ... Production Company
* Merlin and the War of the Dragons (2008) (V) ... Production Company
Death Racers (2008) (V) ... Production Company
Journey to the Center of the Earth (2008) (V) ... Production Company
Street Racer (2008) (V) ... Production Company
Allan Quatermain and the Temple of Skulls (2008) (V) ... Production Company
666: The Beast (2007) (V) ... Production Company
Universal Soldiers (2007) ... Production Company
Invasion of the Pod People (2007) (V) ... Production Company
* Transmorphers (2007) (V) ... Production Company
The Apocalypse (2007) ... Production Company
Supercroc (2007) ... Production Company
The Hitchhiker (2007) ... Production Company
Freakshow (2007) ... Production Company
Dragon (2006/II) ... Production Company
Halloween Night (2006) (V) ... Production Company
The 9/11 Commission Report (2006) ... Production Company
Snakes on a Train (2006) (V) ... Production Company
Pirates of Treasure Island (2006) ... Production Company
666: The Child (2006) (V) ... Production Company (presents)
The Da Vinci Treasure (2006) ... Production Company
Hillside Cannibals (2006) (V) ... Production Company
When a Killer Calls (2006) ... Production Company
Exorcism: The Possession of Gail Bowers (2006) ... Production Company
King of the Lost World (2005) ... Production Company
Shapeshifter (2005) ... Production Company
Dead Men Walking (2005) ... Production Company
The Beast of Bray Road (2005) ... Production Company
Frankenstein Reborn (2005) ... Production Company
Jolly Roger: Massacre at Cutter's Cove (2005) ... Production Company
Legion of the Dead (2005) ... Production Company
Way of the Vampire (2005) ... Production Company
Alien Abduction (2005) ... Production Company
Intermedio (2005) ... Production Company
Death Valley: The Revenge of Bloody Bill (2004) ... Production Company
Evil Eyes (2004) ... Production Company
King of the Ants (2003/I) ... Production Company
Scarecrow Slayer (2003) (V) ... Production Company
Scarecrow (2002) (V) ... Production Company
Killers 2: The Beast (2002) (V) ... Production Company
Until Death (2002) ... Production Company
Max Knight: Ultra Spy (2000) (TV) ... Production Company
Wildflower (1999) ... Production Company (associate)
Killers (1997) ... Production Company

Transmorphers: Fall of Man is said to be better than Transformers 2 (according to Spoony [begins about the 8:30 mark {at about the 10 minute mark is when he says it's better}]) and it was quite entertaining. At one point in the movie there are 7 people on a mission - the 3 main characters, the mayor, and 3 random people (a black guy, a hispanic guy, and a girl). As they're walking toward their mission there is suddenly only 6 of them. Where'd the black guy go? They make no mention of him, he's just not there anymore. wtf? lol

DragonQuest - the graphics are low budget television quality, the CGi is poor and the backgrounds are cheap. The main girl looked like a prostitute and the most of the acting was over the top. The main guy was very good looking and the bad guy was Brian Thompson, you'll probably recognize him from such 4-stars as Mortal Kombat and X-Files. This movie was awesome!

Everyone talks about how ah-mazing Megashark vs Giant Octopus is, however I have some hang ups about it. This movie is not so much about Megashark and Giant Octopus as it is about a cheesy love story, but the moments with the giant beasts make up for the cheesy love story. This movie would've been the greatest movie in existence had there been more of the Megashark and the Giant Octopus.

If you want cheap entertainment that will give you a laugh or leave you mildly entertained, check out movies by The Asylum. They're B-movies at their finest.

Are we the first?

2009-10-13T15:49:00.000-07:00

So I'm never going to get around to making a video for a variety of reasons. I'm going to do my best to write out my thoughts and I hope that it comes across as clear.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Are we the first? According to Andrew Tomas…WE ARE NOT THE FIRST (^_~). Andrew Tomas was an Australian "UFO Pioneer" who, in 1971, wrote the book We are not the First. He traveled the world researching ancient to modern phenomena and put forth the question: Did humans develop from their own will and intelligence? or was there help from an extraterrestrial source? This is where my own opinion begins.

I intended to read this book for a good laugh. I thought it would be alien conspiracies and nutty conclusions, but in actuality it's a very well written book. This book never really throws ALIENS in your face, more of implications - 1 sentence here, 1 sentence there - it isn't until the end that he really starts to get into the idea of aliens. Let me now provide to you the first page from the book.

India–where age-old documents describe with dreadful detail an atomic war.

Babylon–where the electric battery was known and used.

Ancient Greece–where robots were depicted and elaborate computers employed.

Africa–where paintings reveal intriguing and puzzling human-like creatures.

From all these places and many others

the legend of a mysterious

bringer of life and knowledge

has been handed down over the millenia.

We can no longer dismiss

this universal legend as mere myth!
We can no longer deny
the mounting evidence that

WE ARE NOT THE FIRST

Babylon, Rome, Egypt, Greece, Tibet, China, and more all have mysterious beginnings and rather advanced ancient civilizations. How did these civilization begin? Did they have help?

One thing that has always irritated me is that people often underestimate the advanced ways of the ancient cultures. I've seen the Babylon batteries and steam mechanics on the History Channel and on Discovery Channel. Did you know that ancient Rome had coin operated water spouts? People often say that we're at our most advanced now, but are we? They say that the ancient cultures were primitive because they built with stone instead of steel, but how do we know there was no steel? Because there's no evidence of it? Everything that present day man knows about the past is what we find in trash and in records; there is countless things we still don't know.

Since these ancient cultures were actually quite advanced (the mayan stonework is so precise you can't slip a piece of paper between the stones, and during earthquakes the mayan stonework stays in place while the "modern" buildings built on top collapse) one has to question, where did they learn such precision? Today, the great age of modern man, doesn't have such precision and we have computers! Did they have help?

Now I'm not saying yes we had help from aliens, I don't know if aliens have ever been to Earth. I do believe there are aliens out there - why should Earth be the only planet with life in the entire universe? I don't know if the other life-forms are advanced, for all I know they could be giant jelllyfish, but I do believe there is other life out there.

Tomas' book consists of an Introduction, Conclusion and 22 chapters of evidence. He talks about everything from the Babylon batteries to the robots of Rome to flying men in Tibet; apparently there was a time long ago when men supposedly mastered the art of anti-gravitation. Alchemy, rockets, and maps of the world (the whole world, not just the known world at the time) are all researched and presented as evidence in this book. After reading this book, I have to ask myself, how is there so much coincidence? What are the ancients hiding from us? What was lost to time?

Every culture has an origins story, many of them are eerily similar; I often wonder if Atlantis existed. Ancient drawings depict aircraft - from chariots to dragons to winged gods and angels. "The Chinese poet Chu Yuan (third century BC) wrote of his flight in a jade chariot at a high altitude over the Gobi Desert toward the snow-capped Kun Lun Mountains in the west. He accurately described how the aircraft was unaffected by the winds and dust of the Gobi, and how he conducted an aerial survey." (Tomas, 109)

In We are not the First, Tomas lists several stories from China of helicopters and flying chariots. There is Sanskrit texts describing how to build and pilot airships (Tomas, 109) and apparently "Air battles and raids were evidently not uncommon in an unknown chapter of history" (Tomas, 110). Many cultures believe in gods who descend from the sky, even in Christianity we have angels with majestic wings. One has to wonder, is it all imagination or were there actual beings descending from the sky? Angels or Aliens the stories had to come from somewhere.

So I ask you, did aliens lay out the blueprints of human civilization or are we a special breed that cycles our technology? We have these golden ages of civilization and technology, lose it all to greedy power, and learn it anew. How did these cycles start? Did we have help? Are we the first?

ooooo Swish

2009-08-12T00:01:00.000-07:00

I never get tired of this video. The 1930s prediction of what women would dress like in the Year 2000. It's actually not that far off.

Skirts are rare nowadays though still around, and we have air

conditioning. Though men don't have phones strapped to their

chests, we do have cell phones, and you gotta love the fannypack

utility belt. The shoes are actually very much in style right now in

the year 2009.

…and candies for cuties. I love this video.

Låt den rätte komma in

2009-08-08T17:33:00.000-07:00

I heard through the grapevine that Låt den rätte komma in (Let the Right One In) was already being remade even though it only came out in 2008. Let the Right One In is a Swedish violent drama (some call it horror, but it didn’t particularly seem like a horror movie). Per usual, Hollywood feels the need to Americanize foreign horror movies. The remake re-titled Let Me In is due out in 2010, a mere 2 years after the original Swedish film was released.

Let the Right One In is about a 12-year-old boy, Oskar, who is bullied at school. A strange 12-year-old girl, Eli, moves in next door, and you learn fairly quickly her secret – she’s a vampire. Throughout the movie you watch the two children’s friendship blossom as they change throughout the movie. I’m leaving the summary vague, you can find out a clearer summary at IMDB.com, but I favor actually watching the movie, it’s worth watching. It’s best in Swedish, but if you are against subtitles, it’s also dubbed.

Now you might ask “why does it matter if they’re Americanizing it?” and my answer is this: Have you ever seen a successful Americanization of movie? Foreign movies have a distinction to them based on culture; these cultures are what make the movies so fantastic. Why do you think Asian Horror movies are so amazing? It’s due to the long-standing beliefs about spirits in those cultures, and those long-standing beliefs do not translate cross-culturally. Some, when Americanizing foreign films, try to keep the movie set in the location that the original film took place, it still fails miserably due to the fact that it’s still just an American in a foreign place – if anything, it makes it more obvious that the actor is acting.

Let the Right One In is based on a book of the same title released in 2004. The Americanization of the movie may go back to the book and add scenes that were left out, though they’ll probably just copy the movie, it is still in pre-production so we’ll have to wait to find out. Knowing America, they’ll most likely make it gorier, make it more obnoxious, and have it set in the wrong time.

Let the Right One In takes place in 1980s Sweden in the winter. It might not seem like that big of a deal, but the cold winter actually plays a vital role in conversations and certain scenarios. Where will they place the remake? In Canada? In Minnesota? Where is it cold enough to be as cold as Sweden? I know currently, based on the information at IMDB, that Oskar is now Owen (Owen is such a god-awful name, why couldn’t they leave it as Oscar?) and Eli is now Abby, boring; could they not leave the name Elly? Based on the names Owen and Abby, I suspect it’ll be a Midwest movie…..boring.

Speaking of the 1980s, will this remake keep it in the 80s as the book had placed it, or will it try to modernize the movie? There are references in the movie about the Russians, and taking place during the Cold War, those comments have a purpose. Will they alter those comments? If the movie takes place in the New World, they would have to, they can alter it slightly by adding in a “World News” perspective, but will they? or will they completely ignore it?

The cast is still being created, it is rumored but not confirmed that Chloe Moretz is going to play Abby. Chloe played Chelsea Lutz in Amityville Horror (2005), she resembles Lina Leandersson in appearance, but her acting is mediocre. She doesn’t stand out in my mind as memorable.

I don’t really know what else to say, I’m disappointed that the Swedish version has only been out for about a year and it’s already being jumped on for a remake due out next year. The names are boring, it will most like be gorier, more graphic, and dumb-downed significantly. If Matt Reeves follows the book without too many significant changes, perhaps the movie can survive, but I expect it to fail.

STOP REMAKING FOREIGN FILMS.

Meggings? o.o

2009-08-08T13:57:00.000-07:00

Overheard via Sephora on Twitter, there seems to be a new trend of Meggings, and no, Sephora does not approve. What are Meggings? They're Leggings for men.

Just like leggings for women, they are a silly trend. What is it with men making their pants tighter and tighter? Do they not realize that they are cutting off circulation to vital regions?

It seems that this trend is popular in New York, Paris, Tokyo, and London. Thankfully to my knowledge it hasn't hit Los Angeles yet. It's bad enough we have to deal with female leggings on wannabe Barbie Dolls and girls who stretch leggings past their stretching point.

Stay away meggings, stay away.

Source

What makes a bad movie become an awesomely bad movie

2009-07-28T15:48:00.001-07:00

Through the power of Netflix’s $8.99 deal, I have the power to rent any movie of my desire. Since I frequently send back the movies and it only takes about 2 days to get the next movie (with the exception of weekends), the cost of the movies average to about 50¢ - $2 a movie. This in turn makes me want to rent bad movies, movies that only an idiot would pay $10+ to watch in a theater.

I've had Netflix for a few months now; I believe it was February that I signed up for it, and in this time, I have rented a lot of bad movies. Some of these movies (such as Red Mist) were just plain bad, while other movies (Doomsday, Megashark vs Giant Octopus) have been awesomely bad - so bad that you can't help but love them, and it made me think, what makes a bad movie become an awesomely bad movie?

When I rented Red Mist I was expecting an awesomely bad horror movie, an unconscious man uses psychic powers to control others and uses to murder - this sounds awesomely bad, but in reality it was just boring. It was almost like Grey's Anatomy meets MTV with Paris Hilton style drama. The murder scenes were mediocre if you even saw them at all, and there was barely any character development. I thought to myself, well maybe the director and actors knew it wasn't very good and simply made it for money, but I watched the Special Features and was quite shocked. The main actress talked about how deep her character was and how excited she was to make it. Did she see something that I missed? The number 1 rule for acting is to convey a message/emotion/action to the audience; I, the audience, did not receive said message. What is it that the actors see that they believe a movie is amazing? Whatever it is, it's being missed by the audience.

Boring movies like this are made constantly, some go to the big theaters; others go straight to DVD or become made-for-TV movies. Why do they keep creating these bad movies? Do they not realize that they’re sinkholes? Do they honestly believe this movie will be extraordinary until the box office sales tell them otherwise? Even then, they often continue to make bad movies *cough* Uwe Boll *cough*.

In the midst of all these bad movies, some movies go beyond just being bad; they are so outrageous that they actually become funny. Death Race 2000, Doomsday, Megashark vs Giant Octopus, and Zombie Holocaust are just a few of the movies that have gone that extra step and entered into the Awesomely Bad category. What separates these movies from the just bad ones? Movies like Doomsday go in knowing that they’re going to be bad, they up the antics knowing full well that people are going to react with “WTF THIS IS AWESOME”, and quite frankly they succeeded.

Is it lack of budget, time in history (often the awesomely bad movies are from the 1970s and 1980s), or a combination of both? Is it that the awesomely bad movies often have well known actors? What makes a bad movie into an awesomely bad one?

Cheesy effects that often come along with the older movies (hey they were state of the art! – low budget state of the art…), over-the-top acting, and an even bigger over-the-top script aid the bad movies in becoming awesomely bad movies, but is it a combination of the three or is there something else? I’ve seen plenty of bad movies that have over-the-top scripts, over-the-top acting, or just bad effects – I have DragonQuest coming in a few weeks which seems to have the bad TV-quality effects, but they’re just bad movies. What is it that pushes them into being awesomely bad?

Tell me your opinion.

P.S. Awesomely bad movies tend to be Horror or Action, does this play a part along with the other things listed above?

Scentsy, the wickless candle

2009-07-18T22:57:00.000-07:00

Scentsy is a company that sells scented wax that is melted via light bulb. It acts like a scented candle in that the wax melts and releases a scent; it is much safer than candles as it has no flame. No flame = no worries, if you happen to fall asleep, you don’t have to worry about your house burning down. Scentsy is sold through a consultant that puts on home parties, much like Avon. This is brilliant in that friends can get together and go nuts smelling scents, discussing, and enjoying the variety in an informal social gathering.

At first I didn’t think much of it, it was a cool concept, but how would it work in my life? I live with 3 boys, a cat, and a dog – not exactly good for hot wax, but I am now addicted to it. The wax is made from edible paraffin wax (such as what is sprayed on apples to make them shine), so if you have animals or children and they get into the wax, it won’t do them harm; it’ll probably taste disgusting though.

The wax can be burned in holders that come in a variety of shapes and sizes. My sister has the Roma holder – a beautiful burgundy holder, and Treasure Chest holder (I told her to pick that one!) – a dark blue/black chest with gold decoration. Both of these holders are tabletop holders; they sit decoratively on tables, shelves, and counters. I chose to go with the Rust-color nightlight, a smaller version with decorative holes that has a 360º rotation to fit in nearly any plug. What is nice is not only do these ceramic holders melt the wax; each one has holes that allow for light to create mood lighting in the room.

They have a large variety of scents, everything from food to perfume to leather and wood. I have tried a few and look forward to trying more. Let’s discuss the ones I’ve tried:

Irish Cream – is a delicious scent that smells exactly like Bailey’s Irish Cream. It makes me crave Bailey’s (but don’t worry, I’ve been good). My roommates have commented that it makes them crave pumpkin pie and coffee. The sweetness is addicting; it can, however, become overwhelmingly sweet, you can’t help but become hungry smelling it. This scent is nice because it lingers in the air, even after you have stopped burning it. The other day I burned it for a few hours in the early afternoon and turned it off about 4 hours before my roommates got home. When they got home they commented that the kitchen (where I keep the holder) smelled liked maple syrup, 4 hours later and the sweetness was still quite evident. This one easily fills a 1350 sq ft house.

Wasabi and Ginger – is a softer scent. It is still quite strong for those sensitive to scents, but for me, it was quite nice. I didn’t notice it as much as Irish Cream, it leaves a nice freshness in the air. I recommend this one if you have boys in house as it’s a more masculine scent, and I hear that males love food scents. This one fills about half my house with this pleasant scent.

Orchid Sake – is far too perfume-y. The Orchid is rather strong and pierces my nose in the most unpleasant ways. If you adore sharp flowery scents, you might like this one, but I felt it was too much too soon. This one gave me a headache.

Sheer Saffron – lives up to its name. A sheer scent that goes almost unnoticed; Sheer Saffron lives the room feeling fresh and delicious. The one downfall is that I start to crave saffron rice, but is that such a crime? I look forward to purchasing more of this scent. Those sensitive to scents can probably handle this one, as it is sheer.

Oxford – is a cedar scent. I haven’t burned this one yet. It is extremely strong in the package that makes me curious if it is strong while burning. I adore the smell of cedar as it brings back many fond memories, but I wonder if this one will be too strong. I will burn it later this week and find out.

Other scents I smelled:

Lucky in Love – is a girly scent. If you love Love Spell by Victoria’s Secret, you’ll love Lucky in Love. A mix of citrus and flowers, and maybe some berries – this scent is as girly as one can get.

Verbena Berry – is a delicious berry scent. Similar to Blackberries or Raspberries, Verbena Berry is a yummy scent that is quite girly. I bought the car freshener, but I seem to have misplaced it L. The potential downfall to this is that you’ll be eating tons of berries. Is that so bad?

Leather – shocked me. I had missed it while smelling all the scents and when hearing others discuss it, I went back. It smells exactly like polish. If you wish for your home to smell like polish then you’ll adore this scent, but quite frankly, I found it horrific. It painfully pierces the nose and is…well…I don’t know who would like such a scent.

Red Delicious – smells exactly like the apples. A delicious flurry of apple orchard floods your senses and sets your stomach into go mode. Only buy this one if you can keep a constant supply of Red Delicious apples on hand because this scent is surely to make you crave them.

These are just a few of the hundreds of scents they have, and their scents are always changing. They categorize them beautifully into sections such as Bakery, Seasons, Fruits & Flowers, Nature, Romance, and more. You can purchase the scents in blocks (little cubes that fit nicely into the holders), bricks (gianormous blocks), car fresheners, and sprays. They often have deals, so be sure to read the whole catalog.

If you’re interested be sure to check out the website or I can get you into contact with my consultant (a personal friend of my sister).

Scentsy—the original wickless and flameless candle company!

Edit: I finally got around to burning my sample of Oxford and it's surprisingly not strong, I'm not sure if its due to the sample size or if it's simple not a strong scent. It really is quite nice.

Broadview formerly known as Brinks

2009-07-13T17:18:00.000-07:00

I'm sure by now you've seen at least one Brinks Home Security system commercial. You may like or, like me, you find them incredibly stupid and annoying. Earlier today I saw, what I assume, is their latest commercial. In this commercial a guy (dressed in black of course) spies through the gate watching a woman and her child playing in their backyard. He continues to watch as they go inside to have lunch and that is when he, per usual, kicks down the front door, setting off the alarm. This of course (per Brinks formula) causes him to run away, the phone rings and its Brinks (now named Broadview) on the phone asking if they're ok. The woman says “someone tried to break in”, Brinks responds with “I'm sending help now” and the world is safe yet again.

Really Brinks? Would an alarm really stop a rapist?

There is another Brinks commercial that shows a woman on a computer, she hears the front door trying to open and assumes its her daughter. As she starts to walk down the stairs, her daughter comes from her bedroom and the mother is like “what time did you get home?” when suddenly the door busts open! The alarm goes off and the burglar runs off. This is an acceptable commercial as the burglar may or may not have realized that people were home/awake in which the alarm and seeing the two women would make him run. However, this commercial is also silly in that he stands there for several seconds, face exposed, giving the women a perfect picture for a description for the cops.

Returning to the rape scenario, there is yet another Brinks commercial that shows two, note that – TWO, men “hiding” in the bushes watching a woman working out. They proceed to break a window which sets off the alarm and causes them to run.

Would they really run? I mean seriously, two large men and one little woman? If they're there to do bad things, would they simply run away? or would they do their thing and get out before the cops get there? or would they take her hostage, make her answer the phone, claim everything is ok, and then do their thing?

Don't forget about the commercial where they watch the husband leave, even saying hello to him, and watch the wife go back in the house, to which they immediately break down the front door in a blaze of loud glory (I'm assuming the husband wasn't even to the end of the street yet). Really? Do these intruders not plan their attacks?

I highly doubt that an alarm would scare them away so easily. Wouldn't they at least take a souvenir?

These commercial are annoyingly exaggerated:

The burglars/rapists always have their faces exposed
The “victim” always encounters the intruder
The intruder runs after standing just long enough for the victim to take a mental snapshot of the face
The intruder goes running down the street in plain sight
Brinks is always to the rescue and the cops are there in an instant taking names and sketches

I hate Brinks.

Why do people fail?

2009-07-07T00:30:00.001-07:00

So patrolling [or is it trolling? (^_~)] around the internet, I found a reoccurring theme of people being high and mighty. Leaving comments on YouTube or joining in the discussions on OhNoTheyDidnt (ONTD), I've found that people jump on my and other people's comments and proceed to A) name call, B) insult other than name calling, or C) criticize and nitpick, but during this process of criticizing, nitpicking, and insulting, they fail to miss the point of the original comment and go off on tangents that have nothing to do with the original comments. They also like to create new scenarios that, of course, have nothing to do with the original comment, and they like to insert words into the statement trying to prove a non-exist point that has nothing to do with the original comment.

For example:

on ONTD there was an article that "Little People" want to ban the term "Midget" from TV. The poster asked if we, the members, thought midget was offensive, and if so, is it as offensive as a racial slur. Of course there were mixed opens and my comment (I apologize if you find this offensive, but honestly "Little People" is more offensive, IMO) was:

I love the word midget and I'm not going to stop using it. The Little Couple is adorable. Tootsie Roll calls their little ones Midgees, no one gets mad at that. So no, Midget is not offensive.

Midget = Midgee = delicioiusness

So this person responds that it is in fact offensive and that Little People are allowed to say it, but non-Little People are not allowed; this in turn starts a war between the person responding to me and a 3rd person (mind you, I am not a part of this war). They bicker back and forth and at one point, the person originally responding to me says:

…since this thread's [Original Poster] mentioned something about someone calling their kids "Midgees" and I assumed the person in question was a little person. Therefore if a little person wants to call their kids that, that's their business, but that shouldn't make the OP feel alright with calling any little person a midget. Even if "Tootsie Roll" is not a little person, OP probably shouldn't feel this way.

This is a prime example of someone spouting from their high horse and not actually reading my comment, they saw my comment, they glanced my comment, but they didn't READ my comment. (mind you it took them 9 comments before they even referenced my comment and even then they missed the point completely).

For those who don't know (I've never met a person who didn't), Tootsie Roll is Tootsie Roll Industries, the creator and maker of Tootsie Rolls, Tootsie Pops, Dots, Charleston Chews, and other beloved candies. They have been around for 113 years.

People should really get off their high horses and pay attention to the comments they are responding to. Remember, if you're going to criticize someone, make sure your facts are correct and orderly. Make sure that you stay on point, it helps to quote the original comment (if there is room), and don't go off on tangents.

Do you have any stories of people trying to be better than you and missing the point?

ETA: It seems that people feel the need to brag about their superiority and make you feel the fool. In order to do so, they have to create non-existent meanings/wrong interpretations so that they can have justification for their rant, but in doing so, they themselves become the fools. So why do they keep doing it?

As a side note: I find it hilarious that people leave comments on iJustine (YouTube)'s videos complaining that she makes money on her videos. They feel the need to remind the other viewers of this on nearly every video, why? Are they jealous that she figured out how to make money on her videos before they did? Telling me that she makes money on her videos doesn't deter me away from the videos, it only makes me want to watch them more.

Do Dinosaurs still exist?

2009-07-06T22:27:00.000-07:00

Another episode of MonsterQuest went to Papua New Guinea in search of a mythical Demon Flyer. This demon flyer is said to have a wingspan of 20 meters (65.62 feet) and is bioluminescent. The unanimous description is that it is giant and birdlike with leathery skin, sharp teeth, and a crest on top of its head. This description told by the natives, sounds exactly like a Pterosaur (also known as Pterodactyl). Do dinosaurs still exist?

I had a book back in the 1980s that talked about dinosaurs. At the end of the book, it described a long-necked dinosaur that lived in the Amazon forest. I’ve heard from other sources that a long-necked water dinosaur (much like the Loch Ness Monster) is seen by natives in the Amazon, is it the wild imaginations of the natives or is there really something there? Long-necked water beasts in the Amazon, flying pterosaurs in Papua New Guinea, do dinosaurs really exist in these lost lands?

I am really curious and hope that someday they do find physical evidence, is it possible that dinosaurs did not go completely extinct 65 million years ago. Did small populations survive in these tropical regions?

What are your opinions?

Tasmanian Tiger on MonsterQuest

2009-07-06T22:07:00.000-07:00

Today on the History channel was a MonsterQuest marathon. I began watching the 4pm episode while doing laundry and it was an interesting episode. Typically MonsterQuest covers crypto-zoology - the study/hunt for unknown animals, such as Bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster, Hogzilla, and others. This particular episode, however, focused on the Tasmanian Tiger (also called Tasmanian Wolf). What makes this episode different is that the Tasmanian tiger is known to have existed, it was said to have gone extinct when the one in captivity died in 1936.

A little background information, Tasmanian Aboriginals regarded the Tasmanian tiger as a spirit deity and feared it/worshipped it. White Settlers arrived in the 1800s and set up farms across the northern region of Tasmania, setting up livestock (sheep, cows, etc) along with their crops. Needless to say, the tigers began to kill the sheep, as they were easy food sources. The farmers grew angry and demanded relief. The government placed a reward of 1 pound (approx $738 today) for each tiger killed; as a result, the last known wild tiger was killed in 1933 (approx). The last known living specimen died in captivity in 1936 (film of this tiger still exists today).

The fact that this animal is said to be extinct for 73 years is the reason why MonsterQuest dedicated an episode to it. You see, people have claimed to see Tasmanian tigers in the wild! The MonsterQuest team set up various motion sensor cameras and used other equipment in hopes of catching one on film. They may have caught the glimpse of one in the bushes, and they may have found a paw print. I hope that the Tasmanian tiger does still exist in a remote unpopulated portion of the island.

There was a doctor in this episode of MonsterQuest who is trying to clone a Tasmanian tiger from some 100 years old DNA, the DNA is fragmented, but apparently one can reconstruct it using Tasmanian devil DNA and slightly altering it. I’m slightly excited about this, as it could potentially be the rebirth of a species; however, there are concerns. If he can clone a Tasmanian tiger (which he himself said he “hopes to do in his lifetime” meaning that he’s not even sure if he can make the clone) will it forever be in captivity? The doctor also stated that he hopes that if there are successful clones, he wants to release them back into the wild; this is where I have the biggest issues. If the Tasmanian tiger is indeed extinct, the ecosystem has adjusted itself to continue without the species; to reintroduce the species is to disrupt the ecosystem and that can be just as bad as running a species into extinction. If the Tasmanian tiger does still exist, to reintroduce a captive species into wild ones is certain death.

I think I might look into the Tasmanian tiger some more, I hope it does still exist.

I found this article online: http://www.firewalkeronline.com/2008/05/tasmanian-tiger-comeback.html