USS Nautilus enters New York harbor after making the first trans-polar voyage under the Arctic ice, 1958
Not my normal history reblog but this is a historic image.
Ancient Greece Art – Cycladic Sculptures in the Greek Islands
Cycladic sculptures are thousands of years old and yet look eerily modern. A face with no facial features, except the nose, is not exactly how we think of ancient Greek art. Cycladic art came to prominence during the twentieth century. Unfortunately that started a period of looting, which destroyed the possibility of putting the sculptures in any kind of location or archeological context. To this day we know very little about Cycladic art.
The Greek islands of the Cyclades are located to the South East of Greece and to the North of Crete in the Aegean Sea. There are more than two hundred islands approximating a circle around the most significant island Delos, the birthplace of Apollo, Greek God of music and light from Greek mythology and of Artemis, the huntress. The Greek name for the Cyclades is Kyklades, an obvious reference to a circle.
During the period between 3200 and 2000 B.C. the small Cycladic islands in the Aegean became home to a flourishing culture. The most prominent craft in Cycladic culture was stone-cutting, especially marble sculpture. The abundance of high quality white marble on the islands encouraged its use for the creation of a wide range of artifacts. Among these, Cycladic Figurines are the most distinctive Cycladic creation because of the style, the great numbers in which they are found, and the significance they held for their owners. The majority of Cycladic Figurines show women, nude with the arms folded over the belly and the long feet, soles sloping downwards. We do not know whether they were meant to show mortals or deities, but probably symbolized the worship of the ‘Mother Goddess’. In this case, the figurines may have been conceived as representations of the Goddess, or companions to her. Many figurines have been discovered in relation to burials as the Cycladic civilization flourished and burials became more elaborate to reflect status.
Ancient Mayan reliefs from the ball court in Chichén Itzá.
Photo taken by Luis Miguel Bugallo Sánchez
The Great Fire of Rome
One of the mysteries that still boggle the mind of the historians is the Great Fire of Rome (Latin: Magnum Incendium Romae) which was an urban fire that occurred beginning 18 July AD 64. During the night of July 18th, the great fire of Rome breaks out and destroys much of the city while many blame the Roman Emperor Nero for this disaster.
At least five separate stories circulated regarding Nero and the fire:
- Motivated by a desire to destroy the city, Nero secretly sent out men pretending to be drunk to set fire to the city. Nero watched from his palace on the Palatine Hill singing and playing the lyre (according to Cassius Dio he sang the “Sack of Ilium”)
- Motivated by an insane whim, Nero quite openly sent out men to set fire to the city. Nero watched from the Tower of Maecenas on the Esquiline Hill singing and playing the lyre.
- Nero sent out men to set fire to the city. Nero sang and played his lyre from a private stage.
- The fire was an accident. Nero was in Antium.
- The fire was caused by Christians.
Although popular legend holds that Emperor Nero fiddled while the city burned, this account is wrong on several accounts: he was actually 35 miles away in Antium when the fire broke out. In fact, he let his palace be used as a shelter. But it might have been that Nero did not like the aesthetics of the city?
He did use the devastation of the fire in order to change much of it and institute new building codes throughout the city. Nero also used the fire to clamp down on the growing influence of Christians in Rome. He arrested, tortured and executed hundreds of Christians on the pretext that they had something to do with the fire.
Now, according to Tacitus, the fire spread quickly and burned for six days. The fire began in the slums of a district south of the legendary Palatine Hill. The area’s homes burned very quickly and the fire spread north, fueled by high winds. During the chaos of the fire, there were reports of heavy looting. The fire ended up raging out of control for nearly three days. Hundreds of people died in the fire and many thousands were left homeless.
Only four of the fourteen districts of Rome escaped the fire; three districts were completely destroyed and the other seven suffered serious damage. The only other contemporaneous historian to mention the fire was Pliny the Elder, who wrote about it in passing. Other historians who lived through the period (including Dio Chrysostom, Plutarch and Epictetus) make no mention of it.
The only other account on the size of fire is an interpolation in a forged Christian letter from Seneca to Paul: “A hundred and thirty-two houses and four blocks (insulae) have been burnt in six days; the seventh brought a pause”. This account implies less than a tenth of the city was burnt. Rome contained about 1,700 private houses and 47,000 insulae or tenement block.
Modern scholars tend to agree with Tacitus and believe that Nero probably did not cause the fire. But they only TEND to agree that PROBABLY he did not cause the fire. But then, who did? Scholars also note that the fire started just two days after a full moon, a time that, it is presumed, would not have been chosen by arsonists who would not have wished to be observed… So, no way in finding who the culprit was…
- Source: Wikipedia ~ Books: Annals, by Tacitus ~ Roman History, by Cassius Dio
It Is Mathematically Impossible That We Are Alone In Our Galaxy
I wrote about a recent report that brought out the fact that there are at least 100 billion x 170 billion planets in the known universe - and then later I wrote about what it may mean about our search for co-inhabitants in the universe.
Now I read in the Economist about a new unpublished study that reveals that our Galaxy - not the universe, and there are 170 billion galaxies - should have been colonized by now. The Economist reviews an unpublished paper by Thomas Hair and Andrew Hedman that profoundly reaffirms the conundrum that is the Fermi Paradox, an observational problem that is sometimes referred to as the Great Silence.
What’s fascinating about the Hair and Hedman paper is that they are not cosmologists or astro-biologists, but rather mathematicians—and it is through the lens of number-cruching that they sought an answer to the question of how long it would take a civilization to colonize its local region given a specific set of parameters. And their findings are disturbing: No matter how they reworked the numbers, they came to the same conclusion:
The Galaxy should be colonized by now:
A spectrum of complex organic compounds from the European Space Agency’s Infrared Space Observatory is superimposed on an image of the Orion nebula (above) - where these compounds were found - suggesting that complex compounds can be synthesized in space even when no life forms are present.
…
The Master Game - Robert Bauval
Robert Bauval discusses the historical blueprint of sacred cities and other topics from his new book, The Master Game, co-authored by Graham Hancock.
