Original post : http://www.epicmoron.com
Posted : December 2013
Author : The admin
The James ossuary is a 2,000-year old chalk box which was
used for containing dead bones. Carved into one side of the box there is an
Aramaic inscription that reads, “Ya’akov bar-Yosef akhui diYeshua” (English
translation: “James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus”). The inscription is very
significant for adherents of Christianity because, if genuine, it might provide
archaeological evidence of Jesus of Nazareth. For a 90-year period, from 20 B.C. to A.D. 70, the Jewish
burial custom was to place the body in a cave for a year or so and then
retrieve the bones and put them in a bone box - ossuary - that could then be placed
in a niche in the family tomb. Several hundred such boxes from that era have been found,
215 of which have inscriptions. Only two boxes mention a brother.
The box was originally tested in Israel by scientists at the Geological
Survey Group, who judged it to be about 2,000 years old. But the inscription
divides the believers and the non-believers due to the Israeli Antiquities
Authority, which determined in 2003 that the inscriptions were forged at a much
later date. Also, statistical analyses of ancient names suggest that in
contemporary Jerusalem,
there would be 1.71 people named Ya’akov (James) with a father Yosef (Joseph)
and a brother named Yeshua (Jesus). According to the James ossuary’s owner, an Israeli engineer
and antiquities collector named Oded Golan, the box came from the Silwan area
in the Kidron Valley,
southeast of the Temple Mount, in Jerusalem.
Golan purchased the artifact from a Jerusalem-based dealer in the 1970s. In December 2004, the James ossuary’s owner was charged with
44 counts of forgery, fraud, and deception, including forgery of the Ossuary
inscription. In 2012, Golan was acquitted of the forgery charges but convicted
of illegal trading in antiquities. He was also fined 30,000 shekels and
sentenced to one month in jail for minor non-forgery charges related to the
trial. The judge said that this acquittal “does not mean that the inscription on
the ossuary is authentic or that it was written 2,000 years ago.”
Jehoash Inscription: A Legitimate Tablet which Describes
Renovations of King Solomon’s Temple?
The Jehoash Inscription is the name of a controversial
artifact rumored to have surfaced in the construction site or in the Muslim
cemetery near the Temple Mount of Jerusalem.
Chiseled in ancient Hebrew and dated to the ninth century BCE, the tablet
describes renovations of the First Temple, which is said to have been built by
King Solomon, that were ordered by Jehoash, son of King Ahaziah of Judah. It
corresponds to the account in II Kings 12:1-17, in which the king laments the
state of the temple and commands that money which the priests collect from the
people be used to fix it up. While some scholars support the antiquity of the patina,
which in turn strengthens the contention that the inscription is authentic, the
scientific commission appointed by the Israeli Minister of Culture to study the
Jehoash tablet concluded that various mistakes in the spelling and the mixture
of different alphabets indicated that this was a modern forgery. The stone was
typical of western Cyprus
and areas further west. Patina over the chiseled letters was different from
that on the back of the stone and could easily be wiped off the stone by hand. In a press conference in Jerusalem on June 18, 2003, the Israel
Antiquities Authority commission declared the inscription a modern forgery.
The Israel
state confiscated the sandstone artifact, charging collector Oded Golan (yes
man, the same antiquities collector who is the James ossuary’s owner) with
forging it and other antiquities and dealing in them. The court didn’t actually rule in 2012 whether the tablet,
ossuary, and various other artifacts were genuine or not, just that the state
hadn’t proven that they were fake, and therefore Golan couldn’t be charged with
dealing in fake antiquities. Despite the court’s ruling, the state refused to
return the tablet to Golan and petitioned to bring the lawsuit to the Supreme
Court, which has now had its say. On October 17, 2013, a panel of three
justices rejected the state’s argument 2-1, and ordered that the tablet be
restored to Golan.
Shroud of Turin:
The Real Face of the Son of God?
The Shroud of Turin is a length of linen cloth bearing the
image of the face and body of a bearded man who appears to have suffered
physical trauma in a manner consistent with crucifixion. There is no consensus
yet on exactly how the image was created, but it is believed by some that the
14ft-long linen cloth was used to bury Christ’s body when he was lifted down
from the cross after being crucified 2,000 years ago, despite radiocarbon
dating placing its origins in the Medieval period. The image is much clearer in a black-and-white negative than
in its natural sepia color. The negative image was first observed in 1898 on
the reverse photographic plate of amateur photographer Secondo Pia, who was
allowed to photograph it while it was being exhibited in the Turin Cathedral.
The shroud is kept in the royal chapel of the Cathedral of Saint John the
Baptist in Turin, northern Italy. The origins of the shroud and its image are the subject of
intense debate among theologians, historians, and researchers. Scientific and
popular publications have presented diverse arguments for both authenticity and
possible methods of forgery. A variety of scientific theories regarding the
shroud have since been proposed, based on disciplines ranging from chemistry to
biology and medical forensics to optical image analysis.
In 1978, a detailed examination carried out by a team of
American scientists found no reliable evidence of how the image was produced.
In 1988, a radiocarbon dating test was performed on small samples of the
shroud. The laboratories at the University
of Oxford, the University of Arizona,
and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology concurred that the samples they
tested dated from the Middle Ages, between 1260 and 1390. In March 2013, experiments conducted by scientists at the University of Padua
(Italy)
dated the shroud to ancient times, a few centuries before and after the life of
Christ. The tests dated the age of the shroud to be between 300 BC and 400AD,
but with an error margin of 400 years due to the unknown influences of
temperature and humidity on the samples during their lives. The Catholic Church has neither formally endorsed nor
rejected the shroud, but in 1958 Pope Pius XII approved of the image in
association with the devotion to the Holy Face of Jesus. More recently, Pope
Francis and his predecessor Pope Benedict XVI have both described the Shroud of
Turin as “an icon.” As well as can be expected, the shroud continues to remain
one of the most studied and controversial archaeological objects in human
history.
Talpiot Tomb: The Lost Tomb of Jesus Christ and His Family?
The Talpiot Tomb is a rock-cut tomb discovered in 1980 in
the East Talpiot neighborhood, five kilometers south of the Old City in
East Jerusalem (Israel).
The archaeological team determined it to be from the Second Temple
period, which lasted from about 538 BC to AD 70. It is also assumed that a tomb
of this type would have belonged to a wealthy Jewish family. The tomb was discovered by construction workers who were
laying the foundations for an apartment complex when preparatory demolition
work accidentally uncovered the tomb’s entrance. Construction of the apartment
buildings was completed in 1982. Due to the fact that some children got into
the tomb and played inside, the authorities sealed the entrance for safety
reasons. In 2005, a team led by biblical historian James Tabor, who
is professor and chair of religious studies at the University of North
Carolina, and the controversial filmmaker Simcha
Jacobovici, opened the tomb again and claimed to find a 2,000-year-old
engraving on an ossuary, which they say depicts Jesus’ resurrection. The
limestone burial box contained human bones and an inscription that has been
interpreted as “Yeshua bar Yehosef” (“Jesus, son of Joseph”).
Altogether, ten limestone ossuaries were found, with six of
them bearing epigraphs, although only four of them were recognized as such in
the field. The archaeological team determined the ossuaries to be of little
note, and delivered them to the Rockefeller
Museum for analysis and
storage. In addition, three skulls and crushed bones were found on the floor of
the tomb, indicating that the tomb had been disturbed in antiquity. Their
footage was incorporated into the 2007 documentary The Lost Tomb of Jesus, in
which the authors claimed that the Talpiot Tomb was the burial place of Jesus
of Nazareth, as well as several other figures from the New Testament. Of
course, this claim was disputed by many archaeologists and theologians, as well
as language and biblical scholars. Analysis of mitochondrial DNA that was performed by Lakehead
University on the remains found in the ossuary marked “Jesus son of Joseph” and
the one marked “Mariamne” or “Mary” (who some claim to be Mary Magdalene) found
that the two occupants were not blood relations on their mother’s side. Based
on these tests, the makers of the documentary suggest that “Jesus” and
“Mariamne” were probably married “because otherwise they would not have been
buried together in a family tomb,” but the remains were not dated using
radiocarbon to further sustain this supposition. Neither was any announced DNA
testing performed on the others ossuaries to see if any familial relation
existed there. Additionally, scholars argue the DNA tests only prove that they
did not have the same mother and they could easily have been father/daughter,
half brother/sister, cousins, or any number of possibilities that do not
include a matrilineage line.
Piri Reis Map: An Actual Copy of Christopher Columbus’ World
Map?
The Piri Reis map was discovered serendipitously on October
9, 1929 through the philological work of German theologian Gustav Adolf
Deissmann, who had been commissioned by the Turkish Ministry of Education to
catalogue the Topkapı
Palace library’s
non-Islamic items. The discovery caused an international sensation, as it
represented the only then known copy of a world map of Christopher Columbus
(1451–1506), and it was the only 16th-century map that showed South America in
its proper longitudinal position in relation to Africa.
Its creator, Piri Reis, was one of the most important cartographers in his era
and one of the most famous admirals in the Ottoman maritime history. Some analyses assert that the map is an azimuthal
equidistant projection centered on Cairo, but a
1998 analysis by Steven Dutch of the University
of Wisconsin Green Bay
shows a better fit with a point near the intersection of the present-day prime
meridian and the equator. There are extensive notes in Turkish around the edges
of the map, as well as some interior detail which is mostly inaccurate and
fanciful.
A more sober analysis was published by Gregory McIntosh, a
historian of cartography, who examined the map in depth. He was able to find
sources for much of the map in Columbus’
writings. Certain peculiarities (such as the appearance of the Virgin Islands
in two locations) are attributed to the use of multiple maps as sources; others
(such as the errors in North American geography) he traced to the continued
confusion of the area with East Asia. As far
as the accuracy of the depiction of the supposed Antarctic coast is concerned,
there are two conspicuous errors. First, it is shown hundreds of miles north of
its proper location; second, the Drake Passage is completely missing, with the Antarctic Peninsula presumably conflated with the
Argentine coast. The identification of this area of the map with the frigid
Antarctic coast is also difficult to reconcile with the notes on the map which
describe the region as having a warm climate. Also, in 1513 Cape
Horn had not yet been discovered, and Ferdinand Magellan’s voyage of
circumnavigation was not to set sail for another six years. It is unclear
whether the map maker saw South America itself
as part of the unknown southern lands (as shown in the Atlas Miller) or whether
(as the Dutch thought) he drew what was then known of the coast with
substantial distortion. In any case, serious scholarship holds that there is no
reason to believe that the map is the product of genuine knowledge of the
Antarctic coast. The Piri Reis map is currently located in the Library of the
Topkapı Palace
in Istanbul, Turkey, but is not usually on
display to the public.
Baghdad Battery:
Galvanic Cells for Electroplating Gold onto Silver Objects?
The Baghdad Battery is the common name for a number of
artifacts created in Mesopotamia during the early centuries AD of the Persian
Empire period, and were probably discovered between 1936 and 1938 in the village of Khuyut Rabbou’a,
near Baghdad, Iraq. The vessels showed signs of
corrosion, and early tests revealed that an acidic agent, such as vinegar or wine,
had been present. In 1940, Wilhelm König, the German director of the National
Museum of Iraq, published a paper speculating that they may have been galvanic
cells, perhaps used for electroplating gold onto silver objects. This interpretation
is far from receiving widespread acceptance, but it continues to be considered
as at least a hypothetical possibility by some scientists and believers in
extraterrestrial visitation and advocates of pseudoarchaeology theories. König thought that the objects might date to the Parthian
period (between 250 BC and AD 224). However, according to St. John Simpson of
the Near Eastern department of the British
Museum, their original
excavation and context were not recorded well, so evidence for this date range
is very weak.
On March 23, 2005, the Discovery Channel program MythBusters
built replicas of the jars to see if it was indeed possible for them to have
been used for electroplating or electrostimulation. Ten hand-made terracotta
jars were fitted to act as batteries. Lemon juice was chosen as the electrolyte
to activate the electrochemical reaction between the copper and iron. Connected
in a series, the batteries produced four volts of electricity. When linked in a
series the cells had sufficient power to electroplate a small token. In March 2012, Professor Elizabeth Stone of Stony Brook
University, an expert on
Iraqi archaeology, said that modern archaeologists do not believe the object
was a “battery.” Skeptical scientists see the electrical experiments as
embodying a key problem with experimental archaeology, saying that such
experiments can only show that something was physically possible, but do not
confirm that it actually occurred. Further, there are many difficulties with
the interpretation of these artifacts as galvanic cells. Lastly, the artifacts strongly resemble another type of
object with a known purpose – storage vessels for sacred scrolls from nearby Seleucia on the Tigris.
Those vessels do not have the outermost clay jar, but are otherwise almost
identical. Since these vessels were exposed to the elements, it is possible
that any papyrus or parchment inside had completely rotted away, perhaps
leaving a trace of slightly acidic organic residue.
Ötzi: A 5,300-Year-Old Man with a Higher Degree of
Neanderthal Ancestry than Modern Europeans?
Ötzi is a well-preserved natural mummy of a man who lived
around 3,300 BCE. It was found on September 19, 1991 by two German tourists
from Nuremberg, Helmut and Erika Simon, at 3,210
metres on the East Ridge
of the Fineilspitze in the Ötztal Alps on the Austrian–Italian border while
they were walking off the path between the mountain passes. Ötzi had several carbon tattoos, including groups of short,
parallel, vertical lines on both sides of the lumbar spine, a cruciform mark
behind the right knee, and various marks around both ankles. Radiological
examination of his bones showed “age-conditioned or strain-induced
degeneration” in these areas, including osteochondrosis and slight spondylosis
in the lumbar spine and wear-and-tear degeneration in the knee and the ankle
joints, in particular. It has been speculated that these tattoos may have been
related to pain relief treatments similar to acupressure or acupuncture. If so,
this is at least 2000 years before their earliest known use in China (c. 1000
BCE). Ötzi’s clothes were sophisticated. He wore a cloak made of
woven grass and a coat, a belt, a pair of leggings, a loincloth, and shoes, all
of which were made of leather from different skins. He also wore a bearskin cap
with a leather chin strap. The shoes were waterproof and wide, seemingly
designed for walking across the snow; they were constructed using bearskin for
the soles, deer hide for the top panels, and netting made of tree bark. Soft
grass went around the foot and inside the shoe, functioning like modern socks.
The coat, belt, leggings, and loincloth were constructed of vertical strips of
leather which were sewn together with sinew. His belt had a pouch sewn to it
that contained a cache of useful items including a scraper, a drill, a flint
flake, a bone awl, and a dried fungus. However, a more recent hypothesis by
British archaeologist Jacqui Wood says that Ötzi’s “shoes” were actually the
upper part of snowshoes. According to this theory, the item currently
interpreted as part of a “backpack” is actually the wood frame and netting of
one snowshoe and animal hide to cover the face.
In May 2012, scientists announced the discovery that Ötzi
still had intact blood cells. These are the oldest blood cells ever identified.
In most bodies that are this old, the blood cells are either shrunken or mere
remnants, but Ötzi’s have the same dimensions as living red blood cells and
resembled a modern-day sample. However, a paper written by paleoanthropologist
John Hawks suggests that Ötzi had a higher degree of Neanderthal ancestry than
modern Europeans. In October 2013, scientists from the Institute
of Legal Medicine at Innsbruck Medical
University analysed the
DNA of over 3,700 Tyrolean male blood donors and found 19 who shared a
particular genetic mutation with the 5,300 year old man, which led them to
identify the link. As if all this were not controversial enough, claims have
been made that Ötzi is cursed. The allegation revolves around the deaths of
several people connected to the discovery, recovery, and subsequent examination
of Ötzi. It is alleged that they have died under mysterious circumstances.
These people include co-discoverer Helmut Simon and Konrad Spindler, who was
the first examiner of the mummy in Austria at a local morgue in 1991.
To date, the deaths of seven people, of which four were the result of some
violence in the form of accidents, have been attributed to the alleged curse.
In reality hundreds of people were involved in the recovery of Ötzi and are
still involved in studying the body and the artifacts found with it. The fact
that a small percentage of them have died over the years has not been shown to
be statistically significant. Since 1998 it has been on display at the South Tyrol Museum of
Archaeology in Bolzano, the capital of South Tyrol.
Cyrus Cylinder: An Iranian Document about the History of the
Ancient Near East, Mesopotamian Kingship, and the Jewish Diaspora?
The Cyrus Cylinder is an ancient clay cylinder on which is
written a declaration in Akkadian cuneiform script in the name of the
Achaemenid king Cyrus the Great. It dates from the 6th century BC and was
discovered by the Assyro-British archaeologist Hormuzd Rassam in March 1879
during a lengthy program of excavations carried out for the British Museum
in the ruins of Babylon in Mesopotamia (modern Iraq).
The Cylinder’s text has traditionally been seen by biblical
scholars as corroborative evidence of Cyrus’ policy of the repatriation of the
Jewish people following their Babylonian captivity (an act that the Book of
Ezra attributes to Cyrus), since the text refers to the restoration of cult
sanctuaries and the repatriation of deported people. This interpretation has
been disputed, as the text identifies only Mesopotamian sanctuaries, and makes
no mention of Jews, Jerusalem, or Judea. The Cylinder has also been called the oldest known
charter or symbol of universal human rights, a view rejected by others as
anachronistic and a misunderstanding of the Cylinder’s generic nature as a typical
statement made by a new monarch at the beginning of his reign. Neil MacGregor,
Director of the British
Museum, has stated that
the cylinder was “the first attempt we know about running a society, a state
with different nationalities and faiths - a new kind of statecraft.” It was
adopted as a national symbol of Iran
by the Imperial State,
which put it on display in Tehran
in 1971 to commemorate 2,500 years of the Iranian monarchy. The Cyrus Cylinder has been displayed in the British Museum since its formal acquisition in
1880.
Skull 5: A New Individual Homo Species?
Skull 5 is the name of a 1.8-million-year-old fossil that
has been described as the first complete adult hominid skull of that degree of
antiquity. The well-preserved skull was discovered in pieces in 2000
and 2005 in Dmanisi, Georgia. According to researchers,
the discovery “provides the first evidence that early Homo comprised adult
individuals with small brains but body mass, stature and limb proportions
reaching the lower range limit of modern variation.” Unlike other Homo fossils, it had a number of primitive
features including a long, apelike face, large teeth, and a tiny braincase
about one-third the size of that of a modern human being. This confirmed that,
contrary to some conjecture, early hominids did not need big brains to make
their way out of Africa. So, the discovery of Skull 5 alongside the remains of four
other hominids at Dmanisi gave the scientists an opportunity to compare and
contrast the physical traits of ancestors that apparently lived at the same
location around the same time.
In October 2013, after eight years of research, Dr. David
Lordkipanidze, a researcher at the Georgian National Museum in Tbilisi and the
lead study author, and his colleagues said that the differences between these
fossils were no more pronounced than those between any given five modern humans
or five chimpanzees. The hominids who left the fossils, they noted, were quite
different from one another but still members of one species. Now it gets controversial, because Dr. Lordkipanidze claimed
that the similarities between the new skull from Georgia and Homo erectus
remains from Java, Indonesia may mean that there was
genetic continuity across large geographic distances. What’s more, the Dmanisi
researchers suggest that the fossil record of what have been considered
different Homo species from this time period, such as Homo Ergaster, Homo
Rudolfensis and Homo Habilis, could actually be variations on a single species,
Homo erectus. In other words, just as people look different from one another
today, so did early hominids look different from one another, and the
dissimilarity of the bones they left behind may have fooled scientists into
thinking that they came from different species. Thus this new theory defies the
current understanding of how early human relatives should be classified. Nonetheless, the anthropology researchers not involved with
the Dmanisi excavation are not in agreement on the idea that this is the same
Homo erectus from both Africa and Asia, or that individual Homo species from
this time period are really all one species, but there was broad recognition
that the new findings were a watershed moment in the study of evolution.
Calico Early Man’s Tools: Artifacts or Geofacts?
The Calico Early Man Site is an archaeological site in an
ancient Pleistocene lake located near Barstow in
San Bernardino County
in the central Mojave Desert of southern California. The lacustrine, fluvial, and alluvial sediments of the
Pleistocene Manix Formation contain remains of numerous Rancholabrean animals
ranging in age from approximately 20,000 years to well in excess of 350,000
years before the present. Fossils recovered from the section include those of a
camel, a horse, a mammoth, a saber-tooth cat, a dire wolf, a short-faced bear,
a coyote, a flamingo, a pelican, an eagle, a swan, geese, a mallard duck, a
ruddy duck, a canvasback duck, a double-crested cormorant, a grebe, a crane, a
seagull, and a stork. The history of this site dates back to 1942, when amateur
archaeologists discovered what they believed to be primitive stone tools in
this area. Fragments were embedded in the sediment of the shoreline of an
ancient Pleistocene Era lake called Lake
Manix. Thousands of rocks that bear a strong resemblance to
prehistoric tools have been found at the site. Scientifically dated to over
200,000 BP, the excavated subsurface objects are many times older than the
traditional date of the first human entry into the Americas, approximately 11,000 BP.
In 1963, Louis Leakey, a British archaeologist and
naturalist whose work was important in establishing human evolutionary
development in Africa, commenced archaeological excavation with Ruth DeEtte
Simpson, an archaeologist from California. Archaeologists have classified this site as a possible stone
tool workshop, quarry, and camp site. Perhaps early nomadic hunters and
gatherers stopped in this area to fashion the tools which they used to survive.
These tools may have included stone knives, scrapers, punches, picks, and
chopping tools, as well as some saw-like tools called denticulates. No human
bones or remains have been found here. The controversy that concerns us centers on whether the
“tools” were made by humans (i.e., artifacts) or through typical geological
processes (i.e. geofacts). The general scientific consensus is that the
subsurface items are geofacts. The archaeologist Jeffrey Goodman who worked at the site
with Leakey had also claimed that the stone artifacts were made by humans.
Goodman has also made controversial statements that the artifacts found at
Calico Hills may be as old as 500,000 years and, if proven, would be the oldest
human artifacts in the world, which would place human origins in the Americas. However,
according to Kenneth Feder, professor of archaeology at Central Connecticut
State University,
the majority of scientists have rejected Goodman’s claims since they were not
supported by even a shred of evidence. Also, in 1973 the geologist Vance Haynes
claimed – after three visits to the site – that the artifacts of Leakey were
formed by stones becoming fractured in an ancient river on the site. Leakey continued to visit the site several times a year and
was connected with the project until his death in 1972.
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