Egypt Announces Find of Ancient Cat Goddess Temple
HAMZA HENDAWI writes in the AP via Yahoo News:
CAIRO — Archaeologists have unearthed a 2,000-year-old temple that may have been dedicated to the ancient Egyptian cat goddess, Bastet, the Supreme Council of Antiquities said Tuesday. The ruins of the Ptolemaic-era temple were discovered by Egyptian archaeologists in the heart of the Mediterranean port city of Alexandria, founded by Alexander the Great in the 4th century B.C.
The city was the seat of the Greek-speaking Ptolemaic Dynasty, which ruled over Egypt for 300 years until the suicide of Queen Cleopatra. The statement said the temple was thought to belong to Queen Berenice, wife of King Ptolemy III who ruled Egypt in the 3rd century B.C.
Mohammed Abdel-Maqsood, the Egyptian archaeologist who led the excavation team, said the discovery may be the first trace of the long-sought location of Alexandria’s royal quarter. The large number of statues depicting Bastet found in the ruins, he said,…
What Happened to Our Larger-Brained Hominid Ancestors?
Gary Lynch and Richard Granger write on Discover:
The following text is an excerpt from the book Big Brain by Gary Lynch and Richard Granger, and it represents their own theory about the Boskops. The theory is a controversial one; see, for instance, paleoanthropologist John Hawks’ much different take.
In the autumn of 1913, two farmers were arguing about hominid skull fragments they had uncovered while digging a drainage ditch. The location was Boskop, a small town about 200 miles inland from the east coast of South Africa.
These Afrikaner farmers, to their lasting credit, had the presence of mind to notice that there was something distinctly odd about the bones. They brought the find to Frederick W. FitzSimons, director of the Port Elizabeth Museum, in a small town at the tip of South Africa. The scientific community of South Africa was small, and before long the skull came to the attention of S. H.…
Tomb of Legendary General Cao Cao Unearthed in Central China
Posted on China View:
BEIJING — The tomb of Cao Cao, a renowned warlord and politician in the third century, was unearthed in Anyang City of central China’s Henan Province, archaeologists said Sunday.
Cao Cao (155–220 A.D.), who built the strongest and most prosperous state during the Three Kingdom period (208–280 A.D.), is remembered for his outstanding military and political talents. Cao Cao is also known for his poems that reflected his strong character. Some of the poems are included in China’s middle school textbooks.
Three ancient corpses, one man and two women, were found in the two-chamber tomb in Xigaoxue village of Anyang. The man was found to have died in his sixties, which coincides the age of Cao Cao when he died, Liu Qingzhu, director of the academic committee of Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, told a press conference in Beijing.
More than 250 articles, made of gold, silver, pottery and etc, were…
Supercrocs Ate Dinosaurs, Ruled the Sahara
Sounds like a bad B-Movie (oh look it actually is a B-movie). Fun stuff. Christine Dell’Amore writes on National Geographic:
A “saber-toothed cat in armor” and a pancake-shaped predator are among the strange crocodile cousins whose bones have been found beneath the windswept dunes of the Sahara, archaeologists say.
The diverse menagerie of reptiles ruled Gondwana — a landmass that later broke up into the southern continents— about a hundred million years ago, during the Cretaceous period.
“There’s an entire croc world brewing in Africa that we really had only an inkling about before,” said Paul Sereno, a paleontologist at the University of Chicago and leader of a new study.
“We knew about SuperCroc, the titan of all crocs, but we didn’t have quite an idea of what existed in the shadows of the Cretaceous,” he said.
More on National Geographic
Vanished Persian Army Finally Found?
From Rossella Lorenzi at MSNBC:
“The remains of a mighty Persian army said to have drowned in the sands of the western Egyptian desert 2,500 years ago might have been finally located, solving one of archaeology’s biggest outstanding mysteries, according to Italian researchers.”
