CIVILIZATION 9,000 YEARS AGO

Conjectural image of daily life in Catal Huyuk

Does a Long-Lost Turkish Metropolis Qualify for the Oldest-City Award?

BY PETER KING

Thanks to modern techniques of accurate dating, the list of candidates for ‘First City’ on earth, at least as far as conventional archaeology is concerned, has thinned considerably in recent years. At various times in history, though, several cities have pressed claims for the distinction.

For some decades Ur of the Chaldees, the powerful capital of Sumer, which included a large part of ancient Mesopotamia, was at the top of the list. Under the direction of archaeologist Leonard Woolley, excavation during the period between the two World Wars culminated in the finding of 16 royal tombs. In these were gold artifacts, copper daggers, lapis lazuli jewelry, chariots and oxen and the bodies of dozens of courtiers who had committed suicide so as to accompany their royal masters into the next world, many of them holding musical instruments.

Jerusalem had a big advantage with its claim to the title—frequent mentions in the Bible, the Torah and the Egyptian Execration Texts (written in 1900 B.C.). The earliest traces of human settlement in Jerusalem are from the Early Bronze Age, about 3,000 B.C. Excavations south of the Temple Mount have revealed a human settlement, and near the Goon Spring, the foundations of a great stone wall have been uncovered. The Old Testament refers to Melchizedek as ‘King of Jerusalem’ and tells of his meetings with Abraham, the Hebrew prophet. According to the Bible, control of the city passed through various tribes and coalitions until a relative stability was reached when David, who had united the kingdoms of Israel and Judah, established Jerusalem as the capital of the Jewish kingdom. He was succeeded by King Solomon who enlarged the city and built his temple.

A period of intense archaeological activity at the early part of the twentieth century brought a further contender for the coveted title of ‘the oldest city in the world.’ This was Damascus in Syria where excavations on the outskirts indicated that it had been inhabited as early as 8,000 B.C. although it was probably not ‘a city’ in those days but rather a number of unconnected groups of dwellings.

An expedition excavating south of Damascus in 1950 proved that an urban center existed in the 4th century B.C., just southeast of the city we know today. Archaeological attempts continue to determine more closely when, during the period from 8,000 B.C. to 400 B.C., the first ‘city’ arose.

Pottery has been turned up pre-dating the latter date, and also found were the remains of a highly advanced irrigation system which had been improved and extended by successive rulers throughout the ensuing centuries. Damascus first came under Western control when the armies of Alexander the Great captured it in 323 B.C.. The history of the city from that time on became a list of foreign conquerors. From the Persians, it passed to the Mamelukes, the Mongols, to the Greeks and then the Romans. The city was taken by Muslim soldiers in A.D. 635 and has remained in Muslim custody ever since.

In 1961, another British archaeologist, James Mellaart, began digging at a site containing large mounds on a plateau in Central Anatolia in what today is Turkey. It was not an impressive sight, a pitted, gullied area amid a rolling plain of wheatfields. But Mellaart was confident that the mounds concealed settlements abandoned even before the beginning of the Bronze Age, and his confidence was soon justified. A settlement dated at 5400 B.C. was discovered—and the work continued at an increased pace, the archaeologists electrified by the uncovering of a time that pre-dated any discovery yet made. To their amazement, still another settlement beneath it was unearthed, dating from an even earlier period.

Further excavation revealed yet another city beneath that and the extraordinary series of discoveries continued until no less than thirteen levels, each representing an earlier city, were exposed! The earliest of these dated back to 6800 B.C.

James Mellaart continued his work for four years, until 1965. Legal problems intervened then, concerning his publication of drawings of Bronze Age artifacts which later disappeared—the now infamous ‘Dorak Affair.’ The site lay idle until September in 1993 when digging re-commenced under the leadership of Ian Hodder and a team from the University of Cambridge.

Hodder’s team undertook a completely different and more thorough approach. Whereas Mellaart had excavated two hundred buildings in four seasons, Hodder spent an entire season unearthing only one building. Today, barely one acre out of a 32-acre site has been excavated.

Nevertheless, even though new research from India may cast doubt on the proposition, most conventional archaeologists are currently convinced that the spot is in fact the mother city of civilized life on earth, the ancestress of all cities and the center of the first great prehistoric civilization. The amount of knowledge gathered from the two periods of excavation has been enormous and it seems to give us a glimpse of just what life was like at the dawn of modern mankind’s sojourn on earth, long before recorded history— as far back as nine thousand years ago.

The inhabitants of earth’s first city were apparently aware of their precarious location. A landscape painting on the wall of a shrine in Catal Huyuk shows that they knew of the twin volcanoes less than a hundred miles away from their city. The painting depicts smoke rising. At least they were able to take advantage of previous eruptions as indicated by the many ax heads, knife blades, scrapers and other tools and weapons made from obsidian, the volcanic glass spewed out by volcanic action, which were found at the site.

This complex settlement seems to have had a population of close to 10,000 at its peak. This figure must have varied but was in all likelihood never less than 5,000 throughout most of the duration of Catal Huyuk’s period of activity which had a number of intriguing variations.

The top layers of the mound, that is, those containing the most recent buildings, are dated to 5,600 B.C.. The city was mysteriously and suddenly abandoned at about this time and a new city, designated Catal Huyuk West was founded several miles away across the Carsamba Cay River. The most likely reason for the desertion would seem to have been volcanic eruption from Hasan Dag, the nearby twin-coned volcano, but the argument has been raised that in this case, the new city would surely have been located further away.

Catal Huyuk West was apparently occupied for about 700 years, then it too, was abandoned, again for no obvious reason. About 4,900 B.C., the entire region was deserted, again without explanation. The oldest layer has been dated to before 6,500 B.C. and it is thought that the site was occupied for several hundred years at the least before that and possibly even several millennia. Consequently, the full duration of Catal Huyuk’s existence can be said to stretch approximately from 7,000 B.C. to 4,900 B.C.

The denizens of Catal Huyuk lived in houses built of mud-brick and although huddled together, there were no streets. The houses were accessed through holes in the ceilings and ladders to the floor. The holes served for ventilation and the expulsion of cooking fumes. A main room was used for cooking and daily activities, though in good weather the roofs were used for many activities including community relations. Raised platforms were built along the walls of the rooms for sleeping, sitting and working. All these surfaces were plastered smooth and timbered beams reinforced the roof. Many niches were built into the walls which were plastered and whitened with gesso and frequently decorated with paintings. A separate storage room adjoined.

Although the houses were crowded together to form the entire ‘city,’ they were built into groups separated by small spaces and strung around a central, larger area that served as a meeting place. No defensive walls have been excavated, so that there must have been no fear of attack by more aggressive tribes, although the exterior houses had a thicker wall on the outside, perhaps for insulation against temperature extremes.

The people of Catal Huyuk were skilled in agriculture, and the domestication of animals and their skills increased through the centuries. Their nutritional needs were supplied by barley and wheat as well as ‘triticum,’ a hardy variety of wheat common in the Near East, while the growing of peas, almonds, pistachios and fruit as well as the raising of sheep and cattle were all pursued. Hunting for food was another major activity.

Very little trash was found by the archaeologists, which was taken to mean that the rooms were kept surprisingly clean. Rubbish heaps were located some distance away from the houses. In addition to the dwellings, larger buildings that served as sanctuaries have been identified. This conclusion was reached by studying decorations on the walls, many in relief. A great number are modeled in plaster and show bulls’ heads. Many contain the horns of actual aurochs, the ancestor of the bull, and seem clearly related to the animal that formed the basis of the cult on the island of Crete in the Bronze Age.

In Catal Huyuk, the people buried their dead inside the city. Human remains have been found in pits under the floors of houses. The bodies were wrapped in mats made of reeds or laying in baskets. In some graves, the bones were not all connected and it is supposed that the bodies were exposed in the open air for some time after death before the bones were collected for burial. In a procedure depicted on wall paintings the bodies had been de-fleshed by vultures. Occasional decapitated bodies have been turned up and the corresponding heads have been found in other parts of the city where they may have been used in a religious ritual. In some instances, skulls covered over with plaster have had faces painted on them in ochre to resemble human faces—a practice common in other Neolithic sites found in Syria and Palestine.

It seems that there were no social classes in Catul Huyuk. Men and women apparently had equal status and contributed equally. No dwellings have been found to date that would suggest they had belonged to priests or lords or kings.

Excavations in 2004 and 2005 revealed a surprising number of female figurines and this has been interpreted by some as suggesting that Catal Huyuk was the source of the Great Mother Goddess religion—the universal faith of Europe, the Near East and the Far East. The concepts of fertility and fecundity are prominent in Neolithic cults where life was precious despite being cheap and short. Female figurines far outnumber those of males and are carefully shaped and well formed. Several of the locations where these have been excavated are believed by James Mellaart to have been used as shrines. One interesting exception was a small statue of a Mother Goddess flanked by two lions and, as this was found in a grain bin, the theory is that she was intended to be a protector of the vital food supply. Of course artifacts indicating the worship of a mother goddess and probably predating Catul Huyuk have been found throughout Europe.

The Catul Huyuk figurines were carved from a variety of materials including marble, alabaster, limestone, schist, clay, basalt and calcite. Obsidian tools were employed—the production of which was a specialty of the artisans of Catal Huyuk and which they traded widely.

Catal Huyuk appears to have been not only the first city but the hub of a network of smaller cities, all combined in a trading union that extended over hundreds of miles. At various times of the year, the walls of Catal Huyuk were painted in bright colors, tents and stock yards were erected, craft shops exhibited their wares, entertainers danced, juggled, offered magic acts and tricks of legerdemain. Traders came to obtain the prized obsidian and in turn offered seashells from the Mediterranean and flint from Syria. Marriage exchanges did a brisk business, and religious services and rituals were held.

Catal Huyuk was a bustling place on these occasions and was, some believe, the largest concentration of humans on planet Earth. No World Fair could have been as well supported.

So until further exploration reveals another candidate, perhaps in India, Catal Huyuk will be regarded by orthodox archaeology as the first city on earth; and while obvious differences exist, the people and practices of Catal Huyuk, nine thousand years ago, appear to be not that different from our own.

LINK

WHAT HAPPENED TO THE MAYAS

Ruined cornice of a giant wall at El Mirador

Mayan pyramid at Uxmal

Hollywood Aside, What Do We Really Know About the Sudden Disappearance of Central America’s Mystery People?

BY FRANK JOSEPH

Director Mel Gibson’s new movie Apacalypto purports to be a fictional story set in the time of the Mayas, though the film’s ending— showing Spanish ships arriving off the Mexican coast—seems to place the tale in the time of the Aztecs, long after the Mayan civilization had vanished from the scene. And as strange and disturbing as the movie is, the real enigma of the Central American Mayas may be even stranger and more disturbing than fiction could ever convey. The Great Mystery of the Maya is: Why did their civilization suddenly shut down? And what became of them? These two questions have bedeviled archaeologists since the 19th century, and have remained unanswered even with the late 20th century translation of Mayan hieroglyphs.

 

After more than a thousand years of building city-states across Yucatan, the Maya abandoned them, never to return. But they left behind no evidence of plague, famine, or war to explain their disappearance. To be sure, their faulty agricultural system resulted in wide-spread hunger, even starvation. And the once idyllic image of the Maya as humane astronomer-priests more interested in celestial matters than murderous militarists bent on conquest was dispelled when their temple inscriptions were translated. They do indeed reveal a race of genius mathematicians, colorful artists and urban builders, but with a darker streak of inter-city fighting and human sacrifice. Some scholars conclude that this disappointing penchant for bloodshed rendered society no longer livable.

 

But the translations also show that warfare was part and parcel of the Maya world for the length and breadth of their history. They reveal that Maya society was in a virtually constant state of war punctuated by episodes of treaty-brokered peace during which opposing sides contracted new alliances and rearmed themselves for renewed conflict. Campaigns fought at the close of Maya greatness were neither more nor less bloody nor far-flung than those waged since its beginning. True, Yucatan experienced bouts of mass starvation due to poor agrarian practices. But these, too, were endemic to Maya agriculture from the start. In fact, crop production throughout Middle America was bountiful at the time civilization there winked out.

 

Neither incessant warfare nor failed crops can adequately explain why a vast population spread across the entire Yucatan Peninsula and beyond, north into Mexico and south into Central America, abruptly ceased to function, if only because the Mayas never exercised any central authority over these extensive areas. Shortly before A.D. 900, their cities everywhere were abandoned in concert, as though some kind of a call or order went out to terminate their society. When an entire culture suddenly ceases to be, the comprehensive, decisive event invariably leaves behind clear, abundant evidence of its overwhelming impact. The collapse of civilization in the Indus Valley graphically appears in the mass graves of its people slaughtered by invading Aryan hordes. The fall of Homer’s Ilios is clearly outlined in the stratum of burnt material at Hissarlik’s Troy VIIb level, on the Aegean cost of Turkey. The nuclear scars left by USAF bombers at Hiroshima and Nagasaki will be still clearly visible for centuries to come. But nothing of the kind appears anywhere within the Mayas’ former sphere of influence. Even their preserved remains show no extraordinary indications of disease, famine or warfare.

 

As their way of life evidenced little or no sign of development, progress or change from first day to last, so nothing suggests social decline leading to a fall, nor any event horizon that definitively brought their history to an abrupt close. Why, then, did they shut down their still-prosperous cities and abandon their country after more than a millennium of unrelieved greatness?

 

Only one cause can account for the Mayas’ mass-evacuation, in unison, of every city-state across the Yucatan and beyond. But to grasp its identity and universal power, something of the Mayas’ origins and mentality must be first understood.

 

Mainstream scholars believe the Maya arose during a Formative Period around 200 B.C., followed by population increase and social coalescence in an Early Classic Period. Ceremonial cities and pyramid-building sprouted with the Classic Period, reaching their florescence before A.D. 900 in the Late Classic. The professionals are unable to explain exactly why simple hunter-gatherers, after uncounted millennia of preliterate existence, suddenly decided to become hieroglyph- literate, pyramid-building Maya astronomers and mathematicians. Archaeologists can only guess that 3rd century B.C. tribes may have reached a certain population density, from which organized society possibly emerged as a matter of course. This baseless assumption is a hard pill for any rational person to swallow, and smacks of 18th century scholars who believed mice were formed from corner cobwebs. More importantly, it ignores the Mayas’ obvious inheritance from their predecessors.

 

The Olmecs built America’s first civilization, beginning in the Veracruz area of northeastern Mexico, along the Atlantic coast, but eventually spread into what would later become the Maya lands, as far south as El Salvador. They introduced pyramid construction, hieroglyphs (recently discovered), city-planning, sculpture, medicine, irrigation, and all the other arts of civilized arts associated with Mesoamerica. While their earlier culture differed stylistically from the Maya, material and chronological connections are nonetheless obvious. The Olmecs went extinct around 400 B.C., and while this date pre-dates the Mayas’ Formative Period by two hundred years, the archaeologists themselves appear to have miscalculated.

 

In 1978, they were shocked to learn that the Mayas’ largest ceremonial city was built centuries before such complexes were supposed to have arisen. Located in the north of the modern department of El Petén, in Guatemala, El Mirador, “The Look-Out,” flourished from about the 10th Century B.C., reaching its height from the 3rd Century B.C. to the 2nd century A.D., with a peak population of perhaps 80,000 people. None of this, according to the experts, was supposed to have appeared until Classic, even Late Classic Times, many hundreds of years later.

 

El Mirador covers some ten square miles, and features a large, low, artificial platform topped with a set of three step-pyramids. One, nicknamed El Tigre, stands 180 feet high. But its companion, La Danta, is greater by fifty feet, making it the tallest structure the Maya ever built, this allegedly from the first day of their history, if not before. The sprawling platform on which it was perched is a base covering 74,000 feet of ground. Most of the structures at El Mirador were originally faced with beautifully cut stone covered by large, stucco murals depicting the gods and goddesses of the Maya, all here fully fleshed out in the otherworldly identities familiar to mythologists.

 

Dating the site prior to the presumed origin of Maya civilization are the remains of a wall that perhaps enclosed the entire location: the stones that went into its construction were reused from even earlier structures. El Mirador sits at the center of a series of ancient sacbeob, or raised, stone, pedestrian causeways, one stretching to another Maya ceremonial center at Nakbe, almost ten miles away. El Mirador’s age well overlaps the last few centuries of the Olmec, and its already advanced, even matchless construction affirm that the Maya not only inherited that earlier culture, but were, in fact, latter-day Olmecs, who carried on and developed the civilizing mission begun by their predecessors.

 

El Mirador is little known in the outside world, perhaps because its mere existence threatens to overturn the neat chronologies established by mainstream archaeologists. Indeed, the Maya themselves had nothing whatsoever to do with such academic timetables. As universally acknowledged mathematicians of unparalleled greatness, their understanding of their own beginnings is certainly worth more than the scientific guesswork of modern scholars. The Maya were, in fact, very exact, as they were in all things mathematical, concerning the precise moment of their coming into the world. In short, they believed their civilization was born on 12 August, 3113 B.C.

 

While archaeologists dismiss this date as impossibly contrary to modern understanding of Maya chronology, it coincides remarkably well with Olmec origins around 3000 B.C. Until the 1950s, the Olmec were believed to go back no earlier than two thousand, five hundred years ago. With the advent of radio-carbon techniques, however, a period circa 1200 B.C. became more acceptable, until improved testing pushed it back another three centuries. Most recently, research at the Olmec site of Jalapa revealed a late 4th millennium B.C. date, as confirmed by Dr. Pablo Bush-Romero, head of the National Archaeology Department for the Mexican government. It seems, then, that the Mayas were an outgrowth of Olmec culture, as they themselves suggest in their national birthday of 3113 B.C.

 

Like their predecessors, they worshiped numerous deities. But one mythic figure dominated their vast pantheon of gods and goddesses, nature-spirits and chthonic demons. The Mayas’ supreme being was Time. They realized that it created everything throughout the universe, destroyed everything, and restored everything in new forms. And the Great Omnipotence made its will known in the progress of celestial movement. Hence, the Mayas’ mastery of astronomy. Through attentive, accurate observation of the heavens, they learned what God expected of them. By putting themselves in accord with his celestial commandments, as expressed in the progress of the heavenly bodies, they fulfilled his plan for mankind, they believed. That was the spiritual basis for designing the Maya calendar. It came to absolutely rule their lives, and was consulted in all matters of state, as well as personal affairs. Marriages were contracted, children conceived, food eaten, burials conducted, wars waged, journeys undertaken, professions assigned, kings crowned, captives sacrificed— every human activity, high or low, was religiously regulated under the tyranny of time.

 

The lives not only of the Mayas, but of the high cultures that preceded and followed them, were absolutely overshadowed by this temporal god. The later Aztecs inherited his will in the form of the Tonalpohualli, a ritual calendar astrology, known as Tonalonamatl, used to plot the horoscopes of each member of the empire. The Tonalpouque were yet other priests who determined good and evil days. Merchants, sailors, traders and couriers could not begin their travels until the Tonalpouque had discovered the proper “One Serpent,” or Fortunate Day.

 

As the calendar had brought Mesoamerican civilization into existence at the end of the 4th millennium B.C., so it would ring down the curtain on the high culture of the Mayas at the proper moment. Their organic almanac was an abstract mechanism of intermeshing cycles strictly coinciding with the celestial patterns they observed. As the final Long Count ground to a halt, it signaled the end every Maya must obey. That moment arrived with the last gasp of the 9th century, when its universal recognition signaled a simultaneous evacuation of all ceremonial centers, including El Mirador.

 

Most of the Maya henceforward melded into the cultures of other, lesser peoples, losing forever their former identity and scientific greatness. A relative few traveled north, where they built the famous shining structures of Chichen Itza and Tulum.

 

Another contingent pushed beyond Yucatan and into the Gulf of Mexico, voyaging far up the Mississippi River into what is today known as western Illinois. There, across from Missouri’s “Gateway to the West,” the modern city of St. Louis, another, far older metropolis arose near the east bank of the Big Muddy.

 

Today, Cahokia is an archaeological park featuring the largest prehistoric earthwork in North America above the Rio Grande. Referred to as “Monks’ Mound” for the French Trappist monks who briefly occupied its one hundred-foot summit in the late 18th century before they went mad, its base of fourteen square acres is slightly larger than that of Egypt’s Great Pyramid, and comprises more than one million cubic feet of soil. During the zenith of the city’s far-flung influence one thousand years ago, its population topped thirty thousand residents. Surrounding the ceremonial center was a twenty-foot-tall stockade of plastered lime defended by hundreds of watch-towers more than four miles in circumference, and manned by a veritable legion of sentries.

 

Although conventional archaeologists are loathe to admit it, they cannot deny Cahokia’s unmistakably Maya features. If Monks’ Mound had been discovered in Yucatan instead of Illinois, they would have found it indistinguishable from any of the other step-pyramids raised by Mesoamerican construction engineers. True, none of the Maya temple platforms were made of earth, but ancient architects were no different than their modern counterparts, in that both were/are forced to build with the materials at hand; the area chosen for Cahokia has no limestone for quarrying.

 

In addition to striking, physical resemblances between Monks’ Mound and Maya pyramid design is something scholars call “Woodhenge.” One fifth of a mile from the great earthwork stands this formation of tall, red, cedar posts arranged in a circle. At its center, an observer sighted each one of the posts along the horizon to determine a wealth of celestial information—from the solstices and rising of the moon at its most northerly point (where it appears largest in the sky) to positions of specific constellations, with special emphasis on the Pleiades and Orion. This astronomical expertise was unique in the American Middle West and wholly unlike Plains Indian cosmology, but identical to the high science achieved by the Mayas.

 

As though to clinch the connection with southerly origins, Cahokia arose suddenly, without precedent, around A.D. 900, the same moment the Mayas abandoned their civilization in Yucatan. It seems clear they reestablished it in our country according to the will of Time, their chief deity.

 

But what became of the neo-Mayas after they re-created their culture in Illinois? That is yet another story.

Greyhawk and Environs

THE THIRD REICH AND THE HOLLOW EARTH

The first full endorsement of the Hollow Earth idea came in April 1942 in the middle of the European struggles for control of the western world. At the height of the conflict, when the Third Reich was placing maximum effort into driving off the advancing allies, Goering Himmler and Adolf Hitler enthusiastically launched an expedition to the island of Rugen. The expedition party consisted of many of Germany's finest scientists who were tasked with locating the race of demi-gods who lived inside the globe and convincing them to help the Nazi party eliminate the allied armies. In Hitler's instructions, the group would easily gain the cooperation of the hidden lords of the underworld once they illustrated the Germans as the divine race who most deserved dominance on the surface. Hitler and Himmler both felt it vital to contact the inner race before the allies who would eventually find the inner world as well.

In April, 1942, Nazi Germany sent out an expedition composed of its most visionary scientists to seek a military vantage point in the "Hollow Earth." Although the safari of leading scientists left at a time when the Third Reich was putting maximum effort in their drive against the Allies, Goering, Himmler, and Hitler enthusiastically endorsed the project. 

The Fuehrer had long been convinced that Earth was concave and that man lived on the inside of the globe. According to theory advanced by the Nazi scientists, if the Third Reich were to position their most astute radar experts in the proper geometric area, they would be able to determine the position of the British Fleet and the Allied bomber squadrons, because the concave curvature of the globe would enable infrared rays to accomplish long-distance monitoring. 

When the Nazi exponents of the Hollow Earth hypothesis sent the expedition to the island of Rugen, they had complete confidence in their pseudo-scientific vision. Those nearest the Fuehrer shared his belief that such a coup as discovering the entrance to the Inner World would convince the Masters who lived there that the Nazis were truly deserving of mixing their blood in the hybridization of a master race. 

An important element in the Nazi mythos was the belief that representatives of a powerful, underground secret race emerged from time to time to walk among Homo sapiens. Hitler's frenzied desire to breed a select race of Nordic types was inspired by his obsessive hope that it should be the Germanic peoples who would be chosen above all other humans to interbreed with the subterranean supermen in the mutation of a new race of heroes, demigods, and god men.

#

Hitler's Nazis were convinced that they were destined to rule the world, and they came to this warped conclusion through the acceptance of many occult beliefs and practices, including
astrology, the prophecies of Nostradamus, and the hollow/inverted Earth theory... hohlweltlehre. Because they suspected that our surface is on the interior of a concave Earth, Hitler sent an expedition in April of 1942, including Dr. Heinz Fischer and powerful telescopic cameras, to the Baltic island of Rugen to spy on the British fleet. Fischer did so not by aiming his cameras across the waters, but by pointing them up to peer across the atmosphere to the Atlantic Ocean. The expedition was a failure, of course. Fischer's cameras saw nothing but sky, and the British fleet remained safe.

When the Nazi exponents of the Hollow Earth hypothesis sent the expedition to the island of Rugen, they had complete confidence in their pseudo-scientific vision. Those nearest the Fuehrer shared his belief that such a coup as discovering the entrance to the Inner World would convince the Masters who lived there that the Nazis were truly deserving of mixing their blood in the hybridization of a master race.

An important element in the Nazi mythos was the belief that representatives of a powerful, underground secret race emerged from time to time to walk among Homo sapiens. Hitler's frenzied desire to breed a select race of Nordic types was inspired by his obsessive hope that it should be the Germanic peoples who would be chosen above all other humans to interbreed with the subterranean supermen in the mutation of a new race of heroes, demigods, and god men.

LINK

EDGAR CAYCE’S LEMURIA

This version of “Lemuria at its full extent” is published by the Theosophical Society

Atlantis Was Not the Only Lost Continent He Discussed

BY FRANK JOSEPH

Of our era’s alleged “psychics,” one name stands out among the rest. Edgar Cayce’s status as a genuine “seer” not only survived his mid-20th century death into the next Millennium, but has grown considerably beyond his lifetime reputation. The cause is not difficult to understand. His forty years of subconscious health pronouncements form a body of recorded medical information sought out by sufferers from around the world, as effective countermeasures to invasive, surgical procedures. His reputation as a healing intuitive aside, the far fewer utterances he made about Lemuria are not, as skeptics might expect, statements of wild fantasy, but remarkably consistent, and well within the scope of archaeology and geology. More valuably, they shed new light on the people, spirituality and destiny of Mu otherwise unavailable from conventional sources. Whether or not we give any credence to psychics, renowned or otherwise, his characterization of Lemurian persons and events is surprisingly credible and illuminating if viewed through the lens of neither preconceived belief nor unbelief.

Born 1877, in Kentucky, Cayce was known as “the Sleeping Prophet,” because he offered cures while in a deep trance. Until his death in Virginia, sixty eight years later, Cayce dictated thousands of “life-readings” allegedly obtained from a kind of spiritual record he claimed to be able to read while experiencing an altered state of consciousness. His formal education was meager, and points of reference were for him more spiritual than historical or academic. His grasp of the world was often biblical, not scholastic. It seems clear, then, that considerations of a sunken civilization were beyond the scope of his rural background, his fundamentally Christian worldview, and even his interests. Nonetheless, he inexplicably began talking about sunken cities one day during the course of giving his medical advice after nearly twenty years without mentioning a lost civilization. Awake, he knew virtually nothing about Atlantis and less concerning Lemuria. Yet, their sudden appearance among the “life-readings” was entirely in keeping with his therapeutic counsels.

During the early 1920s, in the course of listing and describing the root causes for various, inexplicable ailments afflicting his clients, Cayce stated that these apparently baseless health problems were the subconscious residue of negative behavior carried over from previous lives in Atlantis, a very long time ago. Unresolved at the time of its cataclysmic destruction, their “bad karma” carried over millennia of incarnations, inflicting each one, into the present lifetime, as guilt complexes, resulting in so-called “psychosomatic” conditions — actually, physical reflexes or reactions to spiritual pain, hence their suffering from incarnation to incarnation. “There can be no physical healing,” Cayce often repeated, “without spiritual healing, because the soul is the seat of our being.”

For more than twenty years after first startling his clients with their former lives in the sunken capital, Cayce went on to discuss Atlantis in many hundreds of “life-readings,” while far less frequently mentioning Mu or Lemuria. When asked why, he responded that the Atlanteans had be haved very badly, accumulating enormous karmic debt that needed to be set right over the course of numerous reincarnations. The virtuous Lemurians, spiritually solvent (for the most part) to the end, incurred less soul-debt, and were subsequently freer from the soul-cleansing round of birth-death-rebirth.

America’s renowned medical intuitive often mentioned Atlantis during his altered states of consciousness. But his description of the lost civilization was less for historical purposes than to provide a setting for pastlife behavior. According to Edgar Cayce, important ethical decisions acted upon in the ancient past contributed over subsequent reincarnations of a particular soul to its development, down to the present time. He believed that the predicaments or circumstances of the persons who sought his counsel during the early 20th century sometimes found their karmic roots in prehistory. Cayce was chiefly interested in Atlantis only insofar as it helped shed light on the spiritual condition of his clients. And since the Atlanteans were supposed to have been a morally challenged people, most of his “life-readings” concerned men and women who long ago dwelt in the doomed oceanic kingdom.

He found far fewer with Lemurian backgrounds, because the Pacific Motherland missed the materialism and wars which characterized its Atlantic counterpart, hence the substantially less karmic debt of its more peaceful inhabitants. What he did say about Lemuria, however, illuminated the lost realm from a truly unique perspective. Beyond any “psychic” or “karmic” considerations, Cayce’s readings about Mu or Lemuria are self-evidently plausible, because they often contain information that made little or no sense at the time they were made, but have been since confirmed in many instances by subsequent discoveries in geology and archaeology.

A case in point was his description of a forgotten civilization he claimed flourished in what is now the Gobi Desert many thousands of years ago when it was created by “those from the land of Mu” (1273-1 M.40 10/16/36). Living conditions then were utterly unlike the hostile environment for which the region is infamous, Cayce said, and began to rapidly deteriorate to its presently uninhabitable status immediately following the Great Flood. Recalling the Lemurian Garden of Eden, he spoke of “the first appearances of the Adamic influence that came to Asia and the Near East through “that now known as the Gobi land” (1210-1M.54 6/29/36).

When Cayce made these statements during the mid- 1930s, few people knew what he was talking about. One who did was James Churchward, whose several volumes about the Pacific Motherland had been recently published. In his first book, “The Lost Continent of Mu,” he declared, “at the time of the Uighur Empire, the Gobi Desert was an exceedingly fertile area of land. The Uighur was the principal colonial empire belonging to Mu at the time of the biblical “flood, which destroyed its eastern half. Eventually, the Uighurs extended themselves into Europe around the western and northern shores of the Caspian Sea, as related in a very old Hindu record. From there, they continued on through Central Europe ...”

During the lifetimes of Cayce and Churchward, and long after their deaths, both men were almost universally ridiculed by professional geologists and archaeologists for such statements. The Gobi Desert was generally believed to have always been an immense wasteland, never the “exceedingly fertile area” portrayed by the psychic and the colonel. Scanty records referred to a 12th century Uighur “kingdom” of sorts in Inner Asia, but nothing earlier. Today’s Uighurs are a sedentary people whose social organization revolves around village life in northwestern China, where they subsist on kaoliang, a kind of sorghum. “There seems to be little direct connection between the medieval people and those now bearing the name,” according to Rudy Evermann, a specialist in the history of the Gobi Desert. A Uighur impact on Europe appeared ludicrous and a crazy reversal of European influences on the Orient deemed incontrovertible by scholars.

In 1962, however, geological opinion was stood on its ear by abundant physical evidence proving that the Gobi region had indeed alternated between extended periods of fertility and aridity over the last few million years. The most recent environmental event-horizons occurred at the close of the Pleistocene Epoch, twelve thousand years before present, and again around the turn of the 4th millennium B.C. As recently as three thousand years ago, shepherds were tending flocks of sheep where today an ocean of sand spreads beyond the horizon. An even greater shock to conventional wisdom occurred in the following decade, when the corpse of a fair-complected, red-haired adult male was found in Central Asia. Almost perfectly intact because he had been naturally mummified by arid conditions of the Takla Makan Desert, the man was dated to nearly ten thousand years ago, millennia before the arrival of the first Chinese.

Nor was he alone. The remains of other, contemporary as well as later white-skinned men, women and children were excavated, more than five hundred alone in the Uighur areas of Ueruemchi and Tarim. Discoveries continued into the early 21st Century, when a cemetery of several hundred more Caucasian mummies was unearthed in the eastern Gobi during summer 2004 by Chinese archaeologists. Investigators were especially struck by the advanced state of attire worn by many of the corpses. They were dressed in beautifully made felt shirts, tailored trousers, elaborate skirts with handsome belts, silk scarves, leather jerkins, and shod with deerskin shoes or slippers.

The profusion and consistently skillful execution of their remarkably well-preserved clothing underscored Churchward’s comments, made fifty years before: “The Uighurs had reached a high state of civilization and culture; they knew astrology, mining, the textile industries (!), architecture, mathematics, agriculture (!), writing, reading, medicine, etc. They were experts in decorative art on silk (!), metals and wood, and they made statues of gold, silver, bronze and clay and this was before the history of Egypt began.” Archaeologists traced some of the Ueruemchi mummy styles and design patterns to Central Europe, again, as Churchward indicated decades earlier.

“The history of the Uighurs,” he stressed in italics, “is the history of the Aryans,” foreshadowing the anomalous discovery of ancient Caucasians in northwestern China, just where Cayce also spoke of an “Adamic” civilization in “the Gobi land.”

Although Cayce’s chronology is uncertain, his brief references to Lemuria are far less ambiguous and more convincing. A case in point is among the first statements he made about the lost Motherland, when he touched on Lemuria only briefly in his lengthy response to a question concerning geographical and geological conditions on Earth at the time homo sapiens-sapiens came into being. “The Andean, or the Pacific coast of South America,” he said, “occupied then the extreme western portion of Lemuria.” Sixty years after he made this statement, California’s Scripps Oceanographic Service published a series of maps revealing the latest discoveries in seafloor research. One such map details and names the Nazca Ridge, a more than two hundred mile long, former land-bridge that once connected the Peruvian coast at Nazca with a sunken archipelago. In 1932, Cayce appears to have identified an underwater feature unknown to science until the 1990s, thereby providing substantive evidence for Lemuria’s former existence.

Ironically, his first mention of the Pacific civilization, nine months after prophetically alluding to the yet-to-be-discovered Nazca Ridge, details the beginning of its demise. He stated that a “portion” of “Lemuria began its disappearance” ten thousand, seven hundred years ago. This time-period coincides remarkably well with the final moments of the last Ice Age, when melting glaciers generated dramatic increases in global sea-level, drowning coastal regions and far-flung lowland territories around the world. Lemuria and its culture continued to survive and prosper long after some territories were lost in the Ice Age Deluge, just as Cayce said. But related archaeological evidence tends to confirm his rough date for this early flood.

Of Lemuria’s demise Cayce said little, save that it took place before the final destruction of Atlantis. He was more concerned with the implications of the Pacific kingdom’s peaceful accomplishments, which continued to shape the reincarnated lives of men and women seeking his spiritual guidance. When asked why his readings of clients with past lives in Atlantis far outnumbered Lemurian reincarnations, he responded by saying that the Atlanteans had incurred much greater karmic debt, owing to their ancient obsession with materialism and its catastrophic outcome. Karma is the consequence of our behavior, he explained. By striving for social balance and individual harmony, the Lemurians largely avoided any need for reincarnation as a means of correcting the consequences of former indiscretions, and went on to fulfill their spiritual destiny in levels of being beyond the earth plain.

CANADIAN TEAM DOCUMENTS ANCIENT SUPERFLOOD

Climate Changes at the End of Last Ice Age Said to Be Result

In 2003 Canadian scientists reported in the journal Science that an ancient ‘superflood’ produced the climate changes accompanying the end of the last ‘ice age’. The flood they say followed the bursting of a massive glacier ice dam.

A team led by University of British Columbia geophysicist Garry Clarke reports that the water body, known as Lake Agassiz, reached a massive 163,000 cubic kilometers in volume—at least double that of the largest contemporary lake, the Caspian Sea—and concludes that its release was “by far the largest known glacial outburst of the past 100,000 years.” The report dates the event at about 8,500 years ago. An analysis of Greenland Ice cores reveals that ocean circulation in the Northern hemisphere was altered for the next 200 years or so, dropping the mean temperature 5°C. Snow accumulation decreased sharply and forest fires became more frequent.

Clarke’s team details how water in the glacial lake, tunneled its way beneath the ice dam, leading to its inevitable disintegration. The study provides further support for ideas put forward by Graham Hancock in his recent book “Underworld.” Hancock explains how vast coastal regions which were above water 11,000 years ago were inundated by catastrophic floods just like those described by the Canadian team. Such areas, Hancock suggests may contain the ruins of civilizations preceding those from recorded history. When those regions have been fully explored, the underwater evidence they provide could finally reveal the true source of thousands of ancient flood accounts from around the world. Recent discoveries in India’s Gulf of Cambay and in the Caribbean could ultimately provide such artifacts, but if not them, there remain many other possibilities. The entire Persian Gulf, for example, was above water before the end of the “ice age” and may hold keys to the origins of Sumer, currently believed by conventional archaeology to be the cradle of civilization.

#

Ancient superflood brought climate chaos

Bob Beale
ABC Science Online
Friday, 15 August 2003

A 'superflood' created by the bursting of a huge lake may have triggered climatic chaos

A catastrophic 'superflood' following the rupture of a massive glacier-dammed lake in Canada at the end of the Ice Age probably plunged the world into centuries of climatic chaos.

That single event was likely responsible for the most dramatic climate change of the last 10,000 years, according to a report by a Canadian team led by Professor Garry Clarke, a geophysicist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, which appears today in the journal Science.

The 'superflood' was enough to alter ocean circulation in the Northern Hemisphere: analysis of ice cores taken in Greenland reveal that for the next 200 years or so, the mean temperature dropped by 5°C, snow accumulation decreased sharply and forest fires became more frequent.

Clarke's team found that the water body, known as Lake Agassiz, reached a massive 163,000 cubic km in volume - at least double that of the largest contemporary lake, the Caspian Sea - and that its release was "by far the largest known glacial outburst of the past 100,000 years".

It was formed after the vast Laurentide Ice Sheet, which at its maximum formed a 3-kilometre-thick dome over Hudson Bay, began disintegrating rapidly about 8,500 years ago.

As the ice sheet retreated north, it left behind a large depressed area of land. This sloped towards the former ice dome and gradually filled with meltwater and run-off from precipitation to become Lake Agassiz.

But icebergs and remnants of the ice sheet dammed the lake, which at its maximum elevation had a natural 'spillway' about 230 m above sea level, the researchers said.

"Modern analogues and the known physics of outburst flooding indicate that tunnelling below the ice is the most probable flood release mechanism," Clarke said.

"Because ice floats on water, thinning ice dams are unstable. Initiation of a flood routed beneath the ice therefore pre-empts the possibility of a flood routed across the ice. Once a subglacial path is established, an ice-walled conduit will tend to grow by melting its walls," he added.

As water tunnelled its way through the ice dam, its rupture became unavoidable. The team said that on the basis of radiocarbon dating, a full torrent was finally unleashed about 8,450 years ago. It took less than a year to discharge.

After the lake water gushed into the Hudson Bay, its freshness altered the strength of ocean circulation, which in turn caused the abrupt climate changes in much of the Northern Hemisphere, the team said.

Geological evidence suggests that this first flood was followed by a smaller one from a lower water level of about 125 m, either because the lake was drained by two successive outbursts or because the first flood drained it to sea level or because the ice-dam reformed and allowed it to partly refill before breaking again.

Either way, once the dam had been permanently breached, the discharge that formerly overflowed to the St Lawrence Valley was routed northward to Hudson Bay.

The researchers argue that understanding the mechanisms underlying past climate change events is increasingly important as people grow more concerned about the magnitude and rate of future climate change.

"Changes in the volume and extent of the ice sheets that once covered much of North America directly influenced the freshwater balance of the North Atlantic and are implicated in many abrupt climate events of the past 100,000 years," the researchers wrote.

"During the last Ice Age, when a kilometres-thick ice sheet covered most of Canada and parts of the northern United States, armadas of icebergs were episodically launched into the North Atlantic. The melting of this freshwater ice and the associated freshening of ocean surface waters are believed to have changed the strength of the oceanic thermohaline circulation, thereby causing abrupt climate changes," they said.

RUSSIAN SCIENTIST MAKES CASE FOR ATLANTIS IN NORTH ATLANTIC

The search for Plato’s Atlantis, says a Russian scientist, should focus on the North Atlantic, but not the usual places.

Geologist Viatcheslav Koudriavtsev has posted on the internet an English translation of his original scientific arguments. Using recent paleoglaciological and geomorphological data, the case is made that Plato should be taken literally because, among other things, his dating for the sinking of Atlantis at roughly 9,500 B.C. corresponds quite well with the end of the last Ice age, a fact which he believes the ancient Greeks had no way of knowing. The changes in Atlantic sea levels associated with the rapid melting of the great northern European ice sheets could indeed account for catastrophic events such as Plato described, says Koudriavtsev. He does not, however, think the drowned continent will be found in such previously suspected locations as the Azores, Canary Islands or Bahamas, but rather off the coasts of Europe and the British Isles in relatively shallow regions which remain yet unexplored, especially the area surrounding an underwater hill called Little Sole Bank on Britain’s Celtic shelf. Koudriavtsev is proposing an underwater survey of the area to search for man-made structures.

Koudriavtsev’s views are supported elsewhere in this issue by two articles. Be sure to read Frank Joseph’s debunking of the popular notion that Plato’s Atlantis was in the Aegean. Also, in this issue, Ralph Ellis argues that British megalithic sites such as Avebury and Stonehenge reveal advanced ancient knowledge of the size and shape of the Earth. A curious fact, not mentioned elsewhere, is that the main axis of Britain’s great ley line system, about which much has been written by John Michell (Atlantis Rising #12) and others runs for hundreds of miles in a perfectly straight line from East Anglia to Land’s End in Cornwall through many ancient shrines. That line—upon which, incidentally, Avebury is situated midway—points toward the area identified by Koudriavtsev.

EXPLORER CLAIMS TO HAVE FOUND LEGENDARY INCAN CITY OF GOLD

Artist’s conception of El Dorado from the Steven Spielberg/Dreamworks animated feature “The Road to El Dorado”

El Dorado, the legendary lost city of the Incas which lured the Spanish conquistadors—and many others since— on fruitless quests deep into the South American jungles, may be lost no more. According to Jacek Palkiewicz, famous for his 1996 discovery of the true source of the Amazon river, El Dorado is located in tunnels and caves at the bottom of a lake near the Peruvian Amazon.

Believed by many to be the final refuge of the Incas as they fled the Spanish with the last of their treasure, the city was called Paititi by the natives. In legends and, most recently in the Spielberg/Dreamworks animated feature The Road to El Dorado, it was purported to possess a waterfall, square lake and buildings studded with gold, silver and precious stones. Palkiewicz believes the city was evangelized by catholic missionaries, but that its location was kept secret by the Vatican to avoid a gold rush and mass hysteria. In October the Polish-Italian Palkiewicz returns to the site with a well financed mission, fully expecting to bring back astonishing news. “We are just a step away from the city,” he told the Discovery News (Discovery. com). We have pinpointed a 1.5-square-mile plateau with a lake and pre-Incan stone buildings totally covered in vegetation. Terrestrial radar confirmed the existence of an underwater labyrinth of caverns and tunnels. An ideal place to hide the Inca treasure the conquerors didn’t succeed in finding.”

#

The last great adventure of our times

EL DORADO, HUNTING AT THE LEGEND

Jesuit manuscript test his existence.

The attempt to move the myth to the frontiers of science

They have motive to be happy Jacek Palkiewicz and Carlo Lenci, the two protagonists of the Project "Paititi 2002", that looks to disclose the mystery of the El Dorado. It's of these days the news of the recovery of a resounding document (Peruana Historia, 1567-1625) in the Roman Archive of the Society of Jesus. The Italian archaeological review "Archeo" has published in world exclusive this exceptional manuscript, from which it results that the Church not only knew about the existence of Paititi, synonymous of the El Dorado, but that also the Pope told the authorization the Jesuit missionaries to evangelize the inhabitants.

Since the most remote times, the man has had a particular attraction for the unknown and the not defined. Technological civilization has not even succeeded in extinguishing the spirit of the exploration and today, as once, in the human being well gladly the myth of the island of the treasure, that stimulates and it attracts its imagination, independently from the age, from the social status or from the place of origin.

So, one of the most fascinating and recurrent dreams in the history of the humanity, the mythical "lost city" Paititi, swallowed by the forest in an inaccessible place of the Amazonas, from almost five centuries it keeps on seducing the imagination. Paititi comes from the quechua word “Paikikin” which means "the same as the other”, which has also been translated as “the same as Cuzco”. In 1681 the Jesuit Fray Lucero wrote that according to the native ones that he met, the lost city is found "beyond forests and mountains, east of Cuzco". The news was confirmed three years later from another monk, Manuele Rodriguez, in the book "Amazonas and El Maranon."

After the sensational recovery of megalithic constructions of Machu Picchu, to the beginning of the 900, the researchers believed that it dealt with the not be found Vilcabamba, last capital of the empire Incas. However in 1965 the American explorer Gene Savoy brought to the light in the zone of Espiritu Pampa, a whole buried city: the true Vilcabamba. To surprise, in the lost shelter, there was no the famous gold, that had to be hidden in 1532 from the Spanish invaders. Only in the 500 the conquistadores brought in country 754 gold tons in admirable manufactured articles or reduced in simple ingots of the actual value of 9 milliard dollars. At least 200 tons they lie in the holds of sunk galleons and a hundred was raided by the pirates. The Amazonian rivers are gold loads; well 13 tons, that is the ten percent of the auriferous production of Peru originates from the alluvial sediments.

The myth of the mysterious lost city Paititi was magnified after sometime, he deformed and it kept on reaping a lot of victims; but to the light of the eternal temptation of the gold, it increased its proselytes. It was a true army of adventurers to look for the incommensurable treasures. Their history is reported in sagas by now epic. Good part of this people has not returned anymore, swallowed by the environment dominated by a extreme climate, from the fierce animals and from the hostile indians.

The western world is rediscovering the mysterious pre-Columbian civilization. Eminent historians as John Hemming, authoritative archaeologists of the caliber of Victor von Hagen and famous writers of novels of success, see Antoine B. Daniel, author of the three recent volumes "Incas" (1 million circulation in Europe), have brought the glorious past to the light of "earth of the Incas", reawakening the attention of a vast public.

To this wave of interest for the shine of the fabulous kingdom it unites the scientific project "Paititi 2002", conducted by Jacek Palkiewicz and Carlo Lenci, that try to tear the secret of the fabulous golden city in the basin of the Rio Madre de Dios in the south-east of Peru. The mission has character multisubject, it unites the historical-geographical search to different aspects: archaeological, anthropological, ethnobotanic, geologic, ethnographyc.

The international team (Italy, Peru, Poland, Argentina) has to the shoulders two years of work. The labyrinthine historical searches, the ancient documented unpublished recovered in the General File of Indies in Seville, the recognitions on the place, deep investigations effected by archaeologists and reliable testimonies of native and of missionaries, all of this converges to have a valid base to finally face tangled enigmas of the El Dorado. It's been born a hold collaboration with researchers of the University in Padua, of Trieste and of the Pontifical Universidad Catolica of Lima, as well as the Peruvian Geographical Society. It was important the contribution of the particular satellitar images and of the sophisticated georadar (grounds penetrating radar), to individualize underground artificial structures, those that the American Army has used for the first time in the punitive attack in Afganistan.

The project have support of the Peruvian Government (Ministerial Resolution N° 206-2001-ITINCI/DM of September 13 th 2001) and patronage of the President of Poland Aleksander Kwasniewski.

The last recognition has taken place in the last October; three weeks of fatiguing work in the zone considered the door of access to Paititi. The pluvial forest introduces the usual traps, from the poisonous spiders to the repugnant reptiles, from the wasps to the puma and jaguars. The dense tangle of bushes is nearly an insuperable barrier. On the topographical maps there are still ample white stains which is write "Insufficient Data". The expedition could not count on the collaboration of the natives because they have a sacred terror of the region according to them infested by the spirits of the evil. The march that lasted ten hours a day has been extremely difficult for dizzy precipices in the Andean buttresses. It was necessary to continually open the path and to ford turbulent anonymous rivers.

The unexpected advance of the rainy season has prevented the pursuance of the searches. Some met evidences (amidst petroglifi of Pusharo, pyramids of Pantiacolla and another archaeological sites) preannounce an fascinating hypothesis that enters in the mystery and it grazes the science fiction.

Persecuting from the bad time, from the insects, from wounds and bruises, constantly wet, the leader of the expedition Palkiewicz has decided to interrupt the expedition.

To the light of the new document of the Jesuits the search will take back with more enthusiasm in June 2002.

February 2002

El Dorado, hunting the legend

PC-ONLY RPG/STRATEGY GAME KING ARTHUR.

“And then on the following day they came to Arthur’s court. They seemed like giants, wearing black steel and strange weapons. They were powerful and invincible warriors and people called them the Knights. No one knows who they are. No one knows where they came from.

But they might be Arthur’s only hope to stand against the coming tide of wonders, mayhem and awe.”

NeocoreGames, a fresh and talented game developer team from Hungary would like to announce their new PC-only RPG/Strategy game King Arthur.

Three years in the making, this grandiose storytelling game by NeocoreGames is an innovative mixture of the best gameplay elements from the RPG and strategy games, with a unique and beautiful visual representation.

Players will guide the legendary King Arthur in the game and conquer the warring provinces of Britannia until they unite the realm. Meanwhile, they will recruit the fabled knights of the Round Table and send them to adventures, personally improving them to become the most powerful he­roes of the realm. They will build the majestic Camelot and govern a growing realm, while commandeering spectacular battles where many thousands clash on the field. Every deci­sion they make will determine Arthur’s Morality as a king, creating their own legend – Arthur could a rightful ruler or ruthless monarch; either a Christian or a pagan king.

King Arthur is based on the rich mythology of the Celtic and Anglo-Saxon legends that inspired many artists in the past, from J.R.R. Tolkien to the modern masters of fan­tasy, but at the same time it has a unique and innovative approach to its chosen background.

King Arthur will be released in the first half of 2009 and offers more than 100 hours of gameplay and multiplayer gaming modes for all fans of fantasy and hardcore gamers.

NeocoreGames now offers screenshots and an atmospher­ic in-game trailer.

Stay tuned for more information next week!

NeocoreGames is game developer company founded in 2005 and located in Bu­dapest, capital of Hungary. NeocoreGames itself specialized in software devel­opment for the gaming industry with own titles in the RTS/RPG genre. Today, as one of the most respected Hungarian gaming software developer, NeocoreGames has about 40 employees with high skills in the field of game development.

About the NeocoreGames family of products: Crusaders: Thy Kingdom Come - based on the self-developed, groundbreaking Coretech 3D engine - was the first NeocoreGames title that hit the market in Q1 of 2008, with favourable reviews (GameStar 84%, PCZone 70%, Eurogamer 70%). Since 2005 NeocoreGames has been working on their main title, King Arthur, a revolutionary fantasy wargame which is considered as the next step on the path that started with Crusaders: TKC.

For more information visit www.neocoregames.com

NeocoreGames contact: Zoltan Varga (Sales and Business Relations) Email: z.varga@neocoregames.com

© 2008 NeocoreGames product names mentioned in this document are trade­marks or marks of NeocoreGames and may be registered in certain jurisdictions. Other company, brand, product and service names are for identification pur­poses only and may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders. Data is subject to change without notice.

NeocoreGames and the logo of NeocoreGames are registered trademarks or marks of Neocoregames Ltd. All Rights Reserved.

The press communications of the NeocoreGames product “King Arthur” are maintained by Eastway Media worldwide and local, as a part of IDG Hungary. Eastway Media is the member of the IDG network, Hungary.

The official King Arthur site has been launched:

www.kingarthurthewargame.com

King Arthur press contact:

Tamas Lazarfalvi

Phone: + 36 20 458 537, Email: press@eastwaymedia.hu

Eastway Media Ltd.

T (+36 1) 688 2325, F (+36 1) 688 2326, www.eastwaymedia.hu

H-1047 Budapest, Karolyi Istvan str. 10.

CELESTIAL NAVIGATION

Navigation as we know it today was first practiced by Phoenician and Greek seafarers, beginning after the sixth century BCE. They navigated in the Red Sea and the Mediterranean in much the same way as Arabs, but had the advantage of sailing in an enclosed sea where land is never far off.

The first seaman of whom it is told that he steered by stars was Odysseus. At one stage, as he crossed the sea during his imaginary voyage, night after night he had to keep the stars of the Great Bear on his left hand. This was the method of steering by horizon stars. A star was observed shortly after rising (or before setting) and used as a compass direction. After a while the next rising (or setting) star, with more or less the same amplitude, was used to steer by in the same way and thus the ship was held on the same course without the use of a compass. During daytime the position of the sun was observed and used for orientation. Culmination (when the sun reaches its highest daily position in the sky) indicated the south (or north), while in low latitudes sunrise and sunset pointed to two other major compass directions, east and west. In northern latitudes the polestar, although some degrees off the celestial North Pole, observed in combination with the Great Bear, also indicated the north. South of the equator, experienced seafarers could, at least for a while, still use the Great Bear to locate the north. They also estimated their position with the use of phenomena observed around them, such as the direction and force of prevailing winds. At night zenith stars were indicators for their position relative to the northern and southern shores of the Mediterranean, while the altitude of the polestar and the sun at noon provided an indication of latitude. Knowledge of longitude was based on sailing times between the eastern and western shores of the Mediterranean. The magnetic compass was probably introduced on ships in the Mediterranean by crusaders, during the thirteenth century. Sea charts and sailing directions, still in manuscript, came into use in that area in the fourteenth century and after the art of printing was introduced in Europe a century later, these aids were used more generally.

In the early Middle Ages, Norsemen and Irish monks started to cross the North Atlantic Ocean toward Iceland. Because of the long Arctic summer, stars were of less use to navigation here than in southern latitudes. To estimate the position relative to the track to Iceland, the Shetland Islands and the Faeroes were used as “steppingstones.” These navigators also observed migrating birds, which showed them in what direction land was, and there is mention of Norsemen using ravens taken on board for this purpose. Seamen found that a group of clouds over the horizon indicated still-unseen land. When visible, Norsemen used the polestar for orientation at night, and the sun during daytime. They probably also used these celestial bodies for setting out their courses. The magnetic compass came into use in the north of Europe after it was introduced in the Mediterranean.

Navigation with specially developed scientific instruments, and tables with astronomical ephemera, dates from the time of the maritime expansion of Portuguese and Spanish navigators, in the fifteenth century. When the Portuguese embarked on their voyages along the west coast of Africa their courses were generally north-south. They found their latitude by observing the polestar at night, and during daytime from the sun’s altitude at noon. For their observations they used the mariner’s astrolabe, a navigating instrument that was developed out of the astronomical astrolabe, probably around 1445.The cross-staff, inspired on the kamal, and used for the same purpose, was introduced at sea about 1515. Beyond the equator, which was reached by 1474, the polestar is no longer visible. Although the Southern Cross had been seen by Portuguese seamen already in 1454, it was found that there was no southern polestar. It was then decided to try to improve the method of finding latitude from the sun’s altitude at noon. As a result the first day-to-day declination tables of the sun were compiled. When Columbus sailed towards America in 1492, he was provided with such tables in manuscript. Columbus was also the first to observe westerly variation. Variation is the angle between the directions of the magnetic and the geographic North Poles, and depending on the place on the earth, it can be easterly, westerly, or zero. As the position of the magnetic pole changes slightly over a year, the variation increases or decreases. It is important that, when setting a course, the value of variation is taken into account.

After the Atlantic Ocean was crossed, and the Indian Ocean in 1497, east-west courses were sailed more frequently, and the necessity to measure longitude was felt. The difference in longitude between two places can be expressed in the difference in time between the two. Columbus tried to find his longitude in the New World from observing a lunar eclipse, which he knew would also occur in Spain. He compared the local time of his observation with the predicted time it would occur in Spain. The effort failed because of the inaccurate prediction through imperfect knowledge of the moon’s motion.

The Nuremberg astronomer Johann Werner, in 1514, was probably the first to suggest that longitude could be determined by measuring lunar distances, the angle between the moon and a fixed star. The moon moves across the sky relatively rapidly. At a given time the angle between the moon and a particular star is the same for every observer who can see them both. The angle between the moon and a number of stars (called the distance) can be calculated ahead for certain dates and times, for a particular (prime) meridian. An observer measuring the angle would compare the result and his local time with the predicted result and time, and the difference between the two times would provide the difference in longitude. Werner’s method is feasible, but at the time it was technically impossible to develop sufficiently accurate instruments and lunar tables. Fernando de Magallanes’s astrologer in 1519 unsuccessfully tried to find the longitude in South America by conjunction of the moon and Jupiter. Failure was blamed on errors in the predicted astronomical ephemera.

Navigators sometimes used the variation of the magnetic compass for estimating their longitude. Because of the apparent relation between longitude and variation, sixteenth-century scholars designed methods of converting variation into longitude. For this to be successful in practice, however, the method requires a vast amount of data on the magnetic variation, which was not available until the eighteenth century, when Dutch navigators estimated their longitude with variation during crossings of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans.

As the attempts to solve the question of longitude at sea failed, the king of Spain, in 1598, offered a reward for anyone who came up with a practical solution. This example was soon followed by the Dutch States-General, the governments of France and Venice, and eventually in 1714 by the British Parliament, which offered £20,000. The result was that a great many inventors claimed these prizes. Among those responding was Galileo Galilei, who suggested that the eclipse and occultation of Jupiter’s satellites could provide a solution, as they are visible at the same instance for every observer. Lunar eclipse observations to determine longitude were done successfully by astronomer Edmond Halley near the Cape of Good Hope in 1719 and on land by Captain James Cook in Canada in 1766. However, to be successful for navigation, eclipse and occultation observations require great accuracy that, due to the movement of a ship, was almost impossible to accomplish at sea.

For the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge (founded 1662) and the Académie Royale des Sciences in Paris (founded 1666), solving the question of how to find longitude at sea was one of the many subjects they engaged. An important step toward this was the founding of the Observatory of Paris in 1667, followed by Greenwich Observatory, near London, in 1675. Both institutions were commissioned to rectify the existing tables of stars in order to find the longitude of places for the use of navigation. Paris Observatory was the first to publish new tables of astronomical data for navigation, such as the daily celestial positions of the sun, moon and planets, and stars, which first appeared in 1678. From 1761 onward the publications also contained lunar tables, which made it possible to find longitude through the aforementioned method of lunar distances. The first accurate lunar tables had been calculated a few years previously by the German mathematician Johann Tobias Mayer. The British astronomer Nevil Maskelyne became the driving force behind the Nautical Almanac, which first appeared for the years 1767–1769 and also contained lunar tables. Another condition for using the lunar distance method was an accurate instrument for measuring the distance. That had been fulfilled in 1731 when John Hadley of London designed the octant (also named Hadley’s quadrant), a double-reflecting-angle measuring instrument far more accurate than the mariner’s astrolabe and cross-staff. About three decades later it was successfully transformed into the sextant, and later adapted as the reflecting circle.

The method of lunar distances (lunars) was soon firmly established as a reliable method to find the longitude at sea. James Cook was among the first to apply it, in New Zealand in 1769, using the Nautical Almanac and a sextant. For many years lunars competed with the method of finding longitude by use of a chronometer. This is a clock that keeps the time on the prime meridian accurately during a voyage, and was developed successfully by the Englishman John Harrison, whose fourth timekeeper was awarded the longitude prize of British Parliament. Until the nineteenth century the astronomical solution by means of lunars and the mechanical method by means of a chronometer were both used at sea. Eventually the chronometer prevailed, because the method to find longitude by that instrument was much simpler than through lunars. An important result of the availability of these methods to find longitude was that sea charts became considerably more accurate.

A clouded sky prevents the taking of a noon observation of the sun, and a weather condition like that can last for days. In the mid-eighteenth century Cornelis Douwes, a teacher of navigation in Amsterdam, developed the first successful method of double altitudes, taken before and after noon. Hence forward latitude could be found without the restriction of the traditional noon observation of the sun. Douwes’s method was improved and remained in use until the nineteenth century, when position line navigation gradually also came into use. This is the name for various methods by which, through an astronomical observation and subsequent calculation and construction in a chart, a ship’s position could be found at almost any time of the day. The first to develop a method by which a single observation of the sun or a star resulted in a position line was the American captain Thomas Sumner, in 1843. The intersection of several “Sumner lines,” taken from stars in different directions, provided a fix. In the 1860s the Sumner method was improved by French astronomers and naval officers, and by then celestial navigation had reached the level at which it remained until long after World War II.

How to Build a Pyramid

The complexities of the Great Pyramid's design and construction could not have been deciphered without the aid of 3-D imaging software. (Dassault Systemes)

How to Build a Pyramid Volume 60 Number 3, May/June 2007

by Bob Brier

Hidden ramps may solve the mystery of the Great Pyramid's construction.

Of the seven wonders of the ancient world, only the Great Pyramid of Giza remains. An estimated 2 million stone blocks weighing an average of 2.5 tons went into its construction. When completed, the 481-foot-tall pyramid was the world's tallest structure, a record it held for more than 3,800 years, when England's Lincoln Cathedral surpassed it by a mere 44 feet.

We know who built the Great Pyramid: the pharaoh Khufu, who ruled Egypt about 2547-2524 B.C. And we know who supervised its construction: Khufu's brother, Hemienu. The pharaoh's right-hand man, Hemienu was "overseer of all construction projects of the king" and his tomb is one of the largest in a cemetery adjacent to the pyramid.

What we don't know is exactly how it was built, a question that has been debated for millennia. The earliest recorded theory was put forward by the Greek historian Herodotus, who visited Egypt around 450 B.C., when the pyramid was already 2,000 years old. He mentions "machines" used to raise the blocks and this is usually taken to mean cranes. Three hundred years later, Diodorus of Sicily wrote, "The construction was effected by mounds" (ramps). Today we have the "space alien" theory--those primitive Egyptians never could have built such a fabulous structure by themselves; extraterrestrials must have helped them.

via How to Build a Pyramid