Madame Butterfly

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  6. Posted · Edited by Madame Butterfly

    1421: The Year China Discovered America by Gavin Menzies

     

     

    It was also a special on PBS, you may want to see if you can get a copy through them or at the rental store.

     

     

    Just reading how they made their boats, the knowledge and planning......very much makes you wonder if some ancient explorers had these maps when THEY discovered the "new world" :wink2:

  7. Posted

    Turin Shroud 'confirmed as fake'

    From correspondents in Paris

    June 22, 2005

    From: Agence France-Presse

     

    Spooky nonetheless ... an X-ray image of the shroud / File A FRENCH magazine has said it had carried out experiments that proved the Shroud of Turin, believed by some Christians to be their religion's holiest relic, was a fraud.

     

    "A medieval technique helped us to make a Shroud," Science & Vie (Science and Life) said in its July issue.

    The Shroud is claimed by its defenders to be the cloth in which the body of Jesus Christ was wrapped after his crucifixion.

     

    It bears the faint image of a blood-covered man with holes in his hand and wounds in his body and head, the apparent result of being crucified, stabbed by a Roman spear and forced to wear a crown of thorns.

     

    In 1988, scientists carried out carbon-14 dating of the delicate linen cloth and concluded that the material was made some time between 1260 and 1390. Their study prompted the then archbishop of Turin, where the Shroud is stored, to admit that the garment was a hoax. But the debate sharply revived in January this year.

     

    Drawing on a method previously used by sceptics to attack authenticity claims about the Shroud, the magazine got an artist to do a bas-relief - a sculpture that stands out from the surrounding background - of a Christ-like face.

     

    A scientist then laid out a damp linen sheet over the bas-relief and let it dry, so that the thin cloth was moulded onto the face.

     

    Using cotton wool, he then carefully dabbed ferric oxide, mixed with gelatine, onto the cloth to make blood-like marks. When the cloth was turned inside-out, the reversed marks resulted in the famous image of the crucified Christ.

     

    Gelatine, an animal by-product rich in collagen, was frequently used by Middle Age painters as a fixative to bind pigments to canvas or wood.

     

    The imprinted image turned out to be wash-resistant, impervious to temperatures of 250 C (482 F) and was undamaged by exposure to a range of harsh chemicals, including bisulphite which, without the help of the gelatine, would normally have degraded ferric oxide to the compound ferrous oxide.

     

    The experiments, said the magazine, answer several claims made by the pro-Shroud camp, which says the marks could not have been painted onto the cloth.

  10. Posted

    SINGAPORE Did Chinese sailors really discover America before Columbus? A new exhibition sets the scene, presenting new evidence that lends support to the assumptions made in "1421: The Year China Discovered America" by Gavin Menzies.

     

    "1421: The Year China Sailed the World," in Singapore in a special tent near the Esplanade (until Sept. 11), is primarily a celebration of Admiral Zheng He's seven maritime expeditions between 1405 and 1423. With a fleet of 317 ships and 28,000 men, Zheng He is generally acknowledged as one of the great naval explorers, but how far he actually went remains a matter of dispute.

     

    With original artifacts, videos and interactive exhibits, "1421" aims to take visitors through Zheng He's life story, setting the historical and economic context of his voyages. Against this factual background, Menzies's theories are presented, along with new evidence, mainly maps, backing his claims.

     

    The exhibition starts in Hunnan (China) in 1382, with a narrative space giving some background on Zheng He's youth. Zheng, a Chinese Muslim, was captured as a child in wartime by the Ming army and made a eunuch to serve at court. He became a scholar and a trusted adviser to the third Ming emperor, Zhu Di, who sent him on a mission to "proceed all the way to the ends of the earth to collect tribute from the barbarians beyond the seas."

     

    When the giant fleet returned in 1423, however, the emperor had fallen. With that change of leadership, China began a policy of isolationism that would last hundreds of years. The large ships were left to rot at their moorings, and most of the records of the great journeys were destroyed (though some argue the records still exist).

     

    A lattice maze in the exhibition takes visitors through the internal turmoil dominating the early part of the Ming dynasty. In the main room, five giant masts and sails mark the admiral's first five voyages, each depicting the destination while highlighting important historical facts such as the trade of spices and teas and life on board the ships.

     

    With 600 years of sailing experience, the Chinese had already developed many tools useful to sailing over great distances - like magnetized compasses and watertight bulkhead compartments of a kind the West would have to wait hundreds of years for. Importantly, Zheng He's ships, known as junks, included on-board vegetable patches, growing soybeans in tubes all year to provide protein and vitamin C, guarding sailors against scurvy.

     

    Along with examples of spices and other goods that the fleet would have brought back to China, the visitors can find ancient artifacts like unusual animal-shaped money from Malacca (Malaysia) made of tin, which the Chinese produced as currency when their copper coins ran out. Shaped in the form of animals like crocodiles, turtles and chickens, these coins were exclusive to Malacca but have been found in shipwrecks throughout Asia.

     

    Arguing that the Chinese had reached America 70 years before Columbus, Menzies's book caused a stir when it was published in 2002. "Columbus had a map of America, de Gama had a map showing India and Captain Cook had a map showing Australia, and it's not my saying; it's the explorers saying it," the retired British Royal Navy submarine commanding officer said in an interview. "None of the great European explorers actually discovered anything new. The whole world was charted before they set sail. So somebody before them had done it, and that was the basis of the book," he said.

     

    Since then, the Web site he created to centralize evidence to substantiate his book has received more than 100,000 e-mails from people across the globe coming forward with "massive evidence" corroborating his claims, Menzies said. "It's no longer about my book. It's really a collective work."

     

    Menzies, who is planning to revise his book by 2007 in light of the latest evidence, now believes that Zheng He was not the first to sail to America. "One of the mistakes I made in my book was to say that Zheng He did everything. He had a legacy. Most of the world had already been mapped by Kublai Khan's fleet," he said.

     

    The exhibition shows copies of Kublai Khan's maps, recently found at the U.S. Library of Congress by an academic. The documents clearly show North America. Menzies said he believes the maps, which are currently being carbon-dated, are from the late 13th century.

     

     

    The exhibition also presents copies of Korean maps from the collection of Charlotte Rees, which she inherited from her father, a third-generation missionary born in China. Rees's maps date from the 16th century, but they are believed to be replicas of Chinese maps dating to 2200 B.C. Menzies believes Zheng would have known of these maps and hence how to reach the Americas - although he had to improve the charts, which contained longitudinal errors.

     

    According to Menzies, recent evidence has been found of what are believed to be wrecked Chinese junks in Florida, South Carolina, New York and Canada. More compellingly, Menzies says, a new archaeological site in Nova Scotia at Cape Dauphin, discovered by the Canadian architect Paul Chiasson and represented by photos at the exhibition, indicates an early Chinese settlement.

     

    Chiasson, in an e-mail interview, said, "The position of the wall on the side of the hill (not the summit), the layout of the wall across the hilly topography and the relationship of a small settlement located within the wall to the overall enclosure all point away from a European origin and appeared to point to a Chinese origin."

     

    While some archaeologists argue that the settlement could be Viking, Chiasson disagrees, pointing out that the nearest and largest evidence of any Viking settlement in the area is more than 700 kilometers to the north and that the Vikings were building much smaller outposts than the one discovered.

     

    The site has just been surveyed by Cedric Bells, who has also worked on a New Zealand site believed to have Chinese junks. Bells has found canals, smelters, mines, Buddhist tombs, Islamic graves, barracks, all pointing to a very large settlement, Menzies said. "This site is unquestionably Chinese and unquestionably pre-European. I actually believe it's quite possible it was started by Kublai Khan and then further developed by Zheng He."

     

    Carbon extracted from one of the mines is now being carbon-dated, and there are plans to request permission from the Canadian government for DNA testing and carbon-dating to be made on the bones found in graves.

     

    The new evidence is likely to generate as much controversy as the book. Tan Ta Sen, president of the International Zhen He Society, believes the evidence shown in the exhibition is "opening doors" but needs to be further substantiated.

     

    "The book is very interesting, but you still need more evidence," Tan argued. "We [the society] don't regard it as an historical book, but as a narrative one. I want to see more proof. But at least Menzies has started something, and people could find more evidence

  11. Posted

    After 2,600 years, the world gains a fourth poem by Sappho

     

    John Ezard

    Friday June 24, 2005

    The Guardian

     

     

     

    A newly found poem by Sappho, acknowledged as one of the greatest poets of Greek classical antiquity and seen by some as the finest of any era, is published for the first time today.

    Written more than 2,600 years ago, the 101 words of verse deal with a theme timeless in both art and soap operas; the stirrings of an ageing body towards the nimbleness, youth and love it once knew.

     

    The poem is the rarest of discoveries. Sappho's pre-eminent reputation as an artist of lyricism and love is based on only three complete poems, 63 complete single lines and up to 264 fragments.

     

     

    These are all that have survived of the writings of a woman who the Greek philosopher Plato said should be honoured not merely as a great lyric poet but as one of the Muses, the goddesses who inspire all art.

    On hearing one of Sappho's poems sung, the sixth century BC Greek ruler Solon, a contemporary of hers, asked for someone to teach him the song "because I want to learn it and die".

     

    The poem which is now her fourth to survive had a tortuous and not unromantic discovery. It was found in the cartonnage of an Egyptian mummy, the flexible layer of fibre or papyrus which was moulded while wet into a plaster-like surface around the irregular parts of a mummified wrapped body, so that motifs could be painted on.

     

    Last year two scholars, Michael Gronewald and Robert Daniel, announced that a recovered papyrus in the archives of Cologne University had been identified as part of a roll containing poems by Sappho.

     

    Researchers realised that parts of one poem corresponded with fragments found in 1922 in one of the great treasure troves of modern classical scholarship - the ancient rubbish tips of the Egyptian town of Oxyrhynchus.

     

    The completed jigsaw is today published in an 1,500- word article with commentary and translation in the Times Literary Supplement by Martin West, emeritus fellow of All Souls, Oxford, a renowned translator of Greek lyric poetry, described by the British Academy as "on any reckoning the most brilliant and productive Greek scholar of his generation".

     

    Sappho - writing on the isle of Lesbos, apparently for a court of younger women - is treated as the patron saint of love between women. She has become "a litterateurs' Lorelei, a feminist icon, a scholars' maypole", writes Dr West.

     

    Ostensibly at least, the craving in the final image of the new poem is for love from young men - with a cautionary note. Tithonus was a youth so beautiful that the dawn-goddess took him as husband. At her request Zeus granted him immortality. But she forgot to ask for eternal youth.

     

    So Tithonus grew old and feeble, having eventually to be shut in his room "where he chatters away endlessly but barely has the strength to move", Dr West says.

  12. Posted

    Revealed: our friends the Romans did not invade Britain after all

    Astonishing new archaeological finds reveal they were already our countrymen 50 years before Claudius spun his way into the history books. Steve Bloomfield reports

    26 June 2005

     

     

    The history of Britain will have to be rewritten. The AD43 Roman invasion never happened - and was simply a piece of sophisticated political spin by a weak Emperor Claudius.

     

    A series of astonishing archaeological findings of Roman military equipment, to be revealed this week, will prove that the Romans had already arrived decades earlier - and that they had been welcomed with open arms by ancient Britons.

     

    The discovery of swords, helmets and armour in Chichester, Sussex, dates back to a period between the late first century BC and the early first century AD- almost 50 years before the supposed invasion. Archaeologists who have studied the finds believe it will turn conventional Roman history taught in schools on its head. "It is like discovering that the Second World War started in 1938," said Dr David Rudkin, a Roman expert leading the work.

     

    The discoveries in Sussex will be revealed on Saturday during a Time Team special on Channel 4 analysing the Roman invasion. Tony Robinson, presenter of Time Team, said: "One of the frustrating things with history is that things become set in stone. We all believe it to be true. It is great to challenge some of the most commonly accepted pieces of our history."

     

    Dr Francis Pryor, president of the Council for British Archaeology, said it would prove controversial. "It turns the conventional view taught in all the textbooks on its head," he said. "It is going to cause lively debate among Roman specialists."

     

    The AD43 Roman invasion is one of the best-known events in British history. More than 40,000 Roman soldiers are believed to have landed in Richborough, Kent, before carving their way through the English countryside.

     

    The evidence unearthed in Sussex overturns this theory. Archaeologists now believe that the Romans arrived up to 50 years earlier in Chichester. They were welcomed as liberators, overthrowing a series of tyrannical tribal kings who had been terrorising clans across southern England.

     

    Sussex and Hampshire became part of the Roman Empire 50 years before the invasion that historians have always believed was the birth of Roman Britain.

     

    The findings and their implications will be published by Dr Rudkin later this year. The discoveries have centred on Fishbourne Roman Palace in Sussex. Artefacts found there in a V-shaped ditch include part of a copper alloy sword scabbard fitting that archaeologists have dated to the period between the late first century BC and early first century AD.

     

    Dr Miles Russell, a senior archaeologist at Bournemouth University who has studied the evidence, said: "All this talk of the Romans arriving in AD43 is just wrong. We get so fixated on the idea of a single invasion. It is far more piecemeal. In Sussex and Hampshire they were in togas and speaking Latin five decades before everyone else."

     

    According to Dr Russell, it was in Emperor Claudius's interest to "spin" the invasion of AD43 as a great triumph against strong opposition. Claudius had become emperor two years earlier but his position following the death of Caligula was tenuous. A bold military adventure to expand the empire would tighten Claudius's grip in Rome and prove his credentials as a strong leader.

     

    "Every period of history has its own spin doctors, and Claudius spun the invasion to look strong," Dr Russell said. "But Britain was Roman before Claudius got here."

     

    Julius Caesar first tried to conquer Britain during the Iron Age in 55BC, but storms on the journey from Boulogne, in France, to Dover caused Caesar's two legions to turn back. A force of five legions tried again in May 54BC and landed in Dover before marching towards London, defeating Cassivellaunus the King of Catuvellauni in Hertfordshire. News of an impending rebellion in Gaul caused Caesar to retreat, but not before he had made his mark.

     

    Britain at this stage in history was not one unified country, rather some 25 tribes often at war with each other. Not all tribes joined the coalition to fight Caesar. For example, the Trinovantes appealed to Caesar to protect them from Cassivellaunus who had run a series of raids into their territory.

     

    Dr Francis Pryor said that the findings in Sussex prove that relationships between tribes in southern England and the Romans continued after Caesar's attempted invasion. "The suggestion that they arrived in Chichester makes plenty of sense. We were a pretty fierce force but the Romans had a relatively easy run. This would have been a liberation of a friendly tribe - not an invasion."

     

    Oxford historian Dr Martin Henig, a Roman art specialist, said that the whole of southern England could have been a Roman protectorate for nearly 50 years prior to the AD43 invasion. "There is a possibility that there were actually Roman soldiers based in Britain during the whole period from the end of the first century BC," he said.

     

    Time Team will unveil their findings in a live two-hour special on Saturday evening on Channel 4. It will form part of the biggest ever archaeological examination of Roman Britain running over eight days and involving hundreds of archaeologists at sites across Britain. The series will investigate every aspect of the Romans' rule of Britain, from the supposed invasion to their departure 400 years later.

  18. Posted

    Shark Attack Kills 14-Year-Old Girl in Florida

    Surfer Describes Trying to Save the Teen From Predator

    By BILL KACZOR, AP

     

     

    "I've been here a long time and never seen a shark get that aggressive," surfer Tim Dicus said.

     

     

    DESTIN, Fla. (June 26) - Tim Dicus was surfing when he heard the scream. He turned and saw a girl swimming as fast as she could - and another one face down in a bloody circle of water.

     

    Dicus, 54, paddled over to the wounded 14-year-old girl, who had been swimming on a boogie board about 100 yards offshore.

     

    "Right next to her was the shark, about to come up and attack her again,'' Dicus said. He put the girl on his surf board and the shark - which appeared to be a bull shark about 8 feet long - went after her hand.

     

    "He just followed us right to the beach,'' Dicus said. "He was determined to finish lunch. I hate to put it that way, but that was what he was trying to do.''

     

    The girl was bitten on the thigh, and was taken to a hospital where she was pronounced dead, said Walton County Sheriff's spokeswoman Donna Shank.

     

    Speaking through tears, Wendy Daigle told The Associated Press on Sunday that the victim was her daughter, Jamie. The woman had no other comment. The Gonzales, La., girl was vacationing with friends.

     

    Dicus said he punched the shark on the nose as it tried to attack him. Two other swimmers came with a raft, which they put the girl in and towed to shore.

     

    Jeff White, 49, of Atlanta, said his son was in the raft.

     

    "He said at one point, the shark was underneath them,'' White said. "So they stopped paddling. Somebody distracted the shark and they brought the girl the rest of the way in.''

     

     

     

    White said his son, Chris White, 23, told his father that "she probably may have already been gone before they got her to shore.''

     

    The attack happened near the Camping on the Gulf Holiday Travel Park, about 45 miles east of Pensacola on the Florida Panhandle.

     

    Patrick O'Neill, the campground's general manager, refused to comment.

     

    Authorities closed about 20 miles of beaches to swimming shortly after the attack. It's the height of the summer tourism season along the coast and the beaches were packed with people.

     

    "It was a bad attack,'' said George Burgess, curator of the International Shark Attack File located at University of Florida. "Certainly it was a reasonably large shark.''

     

    Burgess, who was heading to the scene to investigate, said it was the first shark attack of any kind recorded in Walton County.

     

    "It's not a renegade shark looking for humans,'' Burgess said. "Probably it was a one shot deal and it's not likely to attack again.''

     

    Twelve-year-old Robert Goodwin, of St. Louis, Mo., said he was in the gulf during the attack and ordered out of the water. His father, Mark, said the family comes every year and "it was just an eerie feeling to see folks sitting there on the beach'' instead of swimming.

     

    Florida had the largest number of documented shark attacks worldwide in 2003 with 30, according to statistics compiled by the American Elasmobranch Society and the Florida Museum of Natural History. There were 12 attacks off the coast of Florida last year.