A dose of weird

"Seven Queens wear Seven Rings as the Seven Stars in Heaven."

This is a rhyme that popped into my head last summer. Originally, the rhyme was:

"Seven Rings... Seven Kings... Seven Stars under Heaven."

It was a fragment. Just like trying to remember an old song or something that you heard once and could only pick out some of the information.

I wrote it in my journal and basically forgot about it.

Until today.

While watching a NatGeo program on the Nebra Sky Disk, I saw something that got my attention (aside from the fact that it's a as-yet unexplained artifact); a seven-dot cluster that was used to help identify the other markings on the disk. The seven-dot cluster was used in the ancient world to identify the Pleiades star cluster.

I leaned up from my computer chair and tried to rattle off the rhyme as I remember it. However, this time I said "Seven Queens" rather than "Seven Kings." I knew that it was one of the two and reached up to find the journal entry. In the program, an astronomer commented that Pleiades was also called the "Seven Sisters" and the whole thing seemed to fall into place.

The Pleiades cluster actually has thousands of stars in it, but we can usually only see seven of them.

When I looked up the cluster to read more about it, I saw the cluster of stars and immediately saw a pattern in the arrangement of the brightest of the stars; a crook.

I have associated the Crook as a symbol representing a quest or the search for knowledge. The crook (as either the crook and flail or the crozier) is also seen everyday as a modern question mark. When I saw the arrangement of the stars as a crook, my curiosity was aroused a bit more.

Unfortunately, the discovery of a possible connection between my interest in symbology, ancient astronomy and a rhyme from last summer has left me with even more questions.

FOLLOW UP:

I cross-referenced the cultural identity of the Seven Sisters cluster against Mayan Astronomy. Since the Maya were one of the most well-documented Astronomers (Mayan Astonomy, 2012, etc.) The Maya watched Tianquizli (Pleiades) closely to ensure that the world wouldn't end. They watched for the signs of the apocalypse and that demons of darkness would descend to the earth and devour the world of man.

Someone's been busy...

Today, like other Tuesdays, is a day that Josh and I get out of the house for a while and try and do something adventuresome. It does not always work since we're trying to keep it cheap so we're usually just traveling to local parks, lakes and the like.

Today we went out to Turkey Creek Lake on the west side of Portsmouth and went creek-walking.

As soon as we showed up to the park, there was something that was different about the place. Large stones that had been part of the hillside since I was a kid had slid down and altered the landscape and the creek had altered its course. As my eyes followed up the length of the creek I was surprised to find that someone had been busy.

Stacked stone sculptures and monuments are as ancient as any human civilization. A rock might point out a boundary or barrier between one area and another. Circles of stones (some as large as those creating the stone circle of Stone Henge) are ancient symbols dividing the ground within the circle and the ground outside the circle as separate; perhaps as simple as the difference between the mundane world and the spiritual world.

Stacked stone monuments, such as the structure above, were commonly found across the European landscape as markers for everything from trails, burials, environmental dangers, etc. They require only time and patience to build since there is no mortar and creek stones are fairly plentiful if you just hunt around for them.

The thing that I find most disturbing about the discover and construction of this stone monument is that =I= didn't do it.

Given the time and inclination, this would have been something that I could have and probably would have built. I didn't think that there were people in this quaint corner of Ohio who would even contemplate the idea of creating a stacked-stone monument. Anyone can stack stones to create a small dam in a creek but it takes patience to collect the stone and stack them so that the shape is maintained.

Near the monument was yet another piece of construction - something that I found rather curious.
A few feet from the monument, someone had stacked and piled stone, sticks and leaves in what I can only best describe as a spiral. This picture doesn't quite capture the design that well, but if you look below there is a close up of the various layers of the form.

The dead sticks are piled at the center of the spiral and then, as it expands, the channel is filled with leaves that are only slightly wilted. I would surmise that this structure (or at least the leaves) were harvested and piled over the weekend since they haven't completely wilted.

So then I thought:

Who would have created two ancient symbols of stone; the monument and the spiral?

I have my own theories as to who -could- make such things but not necessarily if they would or not.

Again,

Someone's been busy.

Bedside Archaeology

Archaeologists often identify people by the objects found along side them in their graves. However, I was wondering what someone could tell about me if they were to examine the contents of my bed-side table.

So the question evolved into: What's beside your bed?

1. Field Book
2. Coffee Cup full of Pens
3. Lamp
4. Cellphone (and charger)
5. Laptop (and charger)
6. Dictionary of the Supernatural (Published in the 70's)
7. Introduction to Watercolors (Borders bargain books)
8. A small, cast-iron pipkin (think mini-cauldron)
9. Bottle of Water
10. A sleepy cat named Rusty (he decided to sprawl himself across the top)
11. The history and truth of the Unicorn* (A faux 'journal' with illustrations and some awesome calligraphy)
12. Marine K-Bar knife with sheath
13. Stack of blank note-cards

New Structure Discovered

From Yahoo News:

After five years of research, archaeologists have confirmed that a 30-meter-high building is buried in the vast mausoleum of Emperor Qinshihuang near the former capital, Xian, in the northwestern province of Shaanxi, Xinhua news agency said on Sunday.

Just when ya think that there are no more mysteries to find out there something jumps out at ya. Perhaps there are still some spooky underground tombs to go explore after all. - T

King Harod's Tomb Discovered

From: Yahoo.com



Herod was the Jewish proxy ruler of the Holy Land under imperial Roman occupation from 37 B.C. His most famous construction project was expanding the Jewish Second Temple in Jerusalem.

Remnants of his extensive building work in Jerusalem are still visible in Jerusalem's Old City, and he undertook major construction projects in Caesaria, Jericho, the hilltop fortress of Masada and elsewhere.

At the excavation site, on the steep, rocky slopes of a cone-shaped hill 2,230 feet high, Netzer's assistant, Yaakov Kalmar, said that an account of Herod's funeral by the first-century historian Josephus Flavius left little doubt that it took place at Herodium. The newly discovered tomb was regal in its opulence.

"We have here all the attributes of a royal funeral," Kalmar said. "We didn't find inscriptions so far... The work is not finished."

The account (of the Massacre of the Innocents), however does not appear in other Gospels, and experts are not convinced of its accuracy, especially the implications of mass infanticide. Some believe the decree applied only to Bethlehem, a small town at the time, where there may have been as few as 15 toddlers.

I once read that: "Archaeology is the enemy of faith." Another writer emphatically stated that "Archaeology is a tool of the devil, used to blur the truths of the bible."

Well, I happen to agree with both - though I doubt the devil has anything to do with Archaeology.

Archaeologists do not look for "Truth"; we look for facts. Truth is a philosophical point of view, not something that can be proven through scientific research. When you begin looking for answers in the archaeological / historical record, you may destroy the faith of some, but I would argue that if their faith is so easily shattered then their problem is not with the researchers but with themselves.

If Archaeology were able to scientifically prove, through ancient records or the lack of a mass grave of infants (or something), that the Massacre of the Innocents did not happen - would this shake Christianity to its foundation? No. Christianity and the Holy Roman Church has existed for near 1600 years and every time science has offered evidence to counter the official doctrine of faith, the religion has learned to adapt its mythology to incorporate the new information.

This is not to say that this adaptation has been smooth. Scientists were tried for herasy for even thinking that the earth was round or that the sun did not revolve around the earth. Anything that challenged the authority of the Church would, at first, be answered with fire and pain. Eventually the message would be supported by others even in the face of the Church's opposition.

Scientists hid their findings in secrets writings (yes, you knew I was going there) in hopes that they could have others confirm their ideas on the natural world without the Church or its agents discovering their attack on religious truth.

I wonder how the Church will fight the idea that the Massacre of the Innocents didn't happen the way the bible might have portrayed it. And if this story is innaccurate - it's just another chink in their mythos that's been punched through.

When I tell people "Always the Quest", I'm sure that there's some force in this world that would rather have people like myself - the Enemies of Faith - be executed for crimes against their religion. Religion and science have been at war since the creation of the Christian faith. Eventually, like with most things, the strength of one will be put against the strength of another and a change will be produced.

We shall wait... and see.

-Tom

The Assos Journals of Francis H. Bacon

The idea of finding a set of journals kept by an Archaeologist is one of those that just tickles the edges of my little black heart. Considering that these early notebooks were considered primary sources for much of the early work done in the field, many researchers studied art to be able to more accurately represent maps, objects, recovered pieces of art and the like within the pages of their journals.

Prior to photography, all that we had was a sketch journal or perhaps some artist's work to capture the likeness of a statue or ruined building.

In its early years, the Archaeological Institute of America sponsored investigations in the American Southwest from 1880 to 1884 and excavations at Assos (Turkey) from 1881 to 1883 and at Cyrene (Libya) and Quirigua (Guatemala) during the early 1900s. Extracts from the journal of Francis H. Bacon, one of the Assos expedition leaders, appeared in the April 1974 issue of ARCHAEOLOGY. Those are republished here, illustrated with a selection of photographs and drawings from his monumental publication of the excavation, Investigations at Assos.

Click here for more of the story.

Prehistoric Romeo & Juliet

I ran across this article on CNN where archaeologists found a pair of lovers in a last embrace somewhere near Verona; the setting for Romeo and Juliet.

Click here to read more about the article.

Buried between 5,000 and 6,000 years ago, the prehistoric pair are believed to have been a man and a woman and are thought to have died young, as their teeth were found intact, said Elena Menotti, the archaeologist who led the dig.

I doubt that they'll be able to find that many details about the pair other than that they're young. They're not even sure if they're male and female.