Shame on Spain!

To intentionally destroy archaeological treasures without giving scholars time to fully examine and study them is an act of barbarism! To do so TO BUILD A PARKING LOT is a move that shocks the conscience.

THE archeologists could barely hide their excitement. Beneath the main square of Ecija, a small town in southern Spain, they had unearthed an astounding treasure trove of Roman history.

They discovered a well-preserved Roman forum, bath house, gymnasium and temple as well as dozens of private homes and hundreds of mosaics and statues — one of them considered to be among the finest found.

But now the bulldozers have moved in. The last vestiges of the lost city known as Colonia Augusta Firma Astigi — one of the great cities of the Roman world — have been destroyed to build an underground municipal car park.

Now i'll grant you that Europe is full of Roman ruins, but this city is one o some importance.

The Roman city has proved to be one of the biggest in the ancient world. Its estimated 30,000 citizens dominated the olive oil industry. Terracotta urns from Ecija have been discovered as far away as Britain and Rome.

The region produced three Roman emperors — Trajan, Theodosius and Hadrian — and the research has shown that Ecija was almost as important in the Roman world as Cordoba and Seville.

The socialist governmetn of the town offers this appalling justification for their actions.

The socialist council says that had it not dug up the main square, Plaza de Espana, to build the car park in 1998, the remains would never have been found. But it insists the town must press ahead with the new car park.

In other words, since it was not discovered until the preparations to build began, it obviously couldn't be as important as 299 parking spaces.

“Nonsense,” says the town’s chief archeologist, Antonio Fernandez Ugalde, director of the municipal museum. “For some reason, the politicians here think it is more important to park their own cars. It simply does not make sense.”

But despite opposition from numerous other archeological groups and the Spanish Royal Academy of Art, there is now no possibility of restoring the 2,000-year-old Roman town.

The most exquisite discovery was a statue, known as the Wounded Amazon, modelled on an ancient Greek goddess of war. Only three other such statues are known to exist. The one in Ecija is in by far the best condition with some of its original decorative paint intact.

So much history -- destroyed in the name of commercial development. What the Islamists do not destroy of Western Culture, we will destroy ourselves.

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More accurately, did Thutmose III have better relations with his step-mother, Queen Hatshepsut, than has been traditionally believed by students of Egyptian history?

This find certainly raises the possibility that everything we have been taught about the issue of their relationship has been incorrect.

A team of French and Egyptian archeologists have discovered two sets of nine solid gold cartouches bearing the name of Thotmusis III (who ruled from 1479-1425 BC) near the pharaoh's stepmother Queen Hatshepsut's temple in Luxor, 700 kilometres south of Cairo.

"These cartouches... which have the names of Hatshepsut and Thotmusis III have been found near Hatshepsut's obelisk which proves that the obelisk was erected by both rulers," said Zahi Hawass, Secretary General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities.

Thotmusis III, who was Hatshepsut's stepson and co-ruler after the death of his father Thotmusis II in 1479 BC, was widely regarded as having had strained relations with the queen. Thotmusis III was a child when his father died and the rule of the kindgom was initially put in the hands of Hatsheput.

Until the latest discovery, Egyptologists believed that Thotmusis III destroyed Hatshepsut's statues out of jealousy upon her death in 1458 BC, particularly the ones in Hatshepsut's temple in el Deir el Bahary in the southern city of Luxor.

"This goes against earlier views that Thotmusis III tried to hide Hatshepsut's obelisk when he took over as ruler and that he worked to erase any traces left by the queen," Hawass said.

The new discoveries will be taken to the Luxor Museum to be put on display.

That is one of the things about a field like Egyptology -- beneath the next grain of sand might be the piece of evidence that overthrows all that we thought we knew!

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Bigger and more ravenous than T-Rex.

And it isn't called MichaelMooreasaurous.

A new dinosaur species, one of the largest known carnivorous dinosaurs, has emerged from the red sandstone of Patagonia, in Argentina, where reptilian giants seem to have thrived 100 million years ago.

Paleontologists reported yesterday that they had found the fossils of seven to nine individuals of a species they are naming Mapusaurus roseae.

An analysis of the bones showed that an adult exceeded 40 feet in length, which the discoverers said was slightly larger than specimens of both its close relative, Giganotosaurus, and Tyrannosaurus rex. Some scientists think that a Spinosaurus species from North Africa is the largest meat-eating dinosaur, but that is still debated.

The discovery was made in sediments of a 100-million-year-old water channel at a site 15 miles south of Plaza Huincul, Argentina. It was reported at a news conference in Plaza Huincul and described in the French journal Geodiversitas.

Rodolfo A. Coria of the Carmen Funes Museum in Plaza Huincul and Philip J. Currie of the University of Alberta in Edmonton, co-leaders of the excavations, said they found hundreds of Mapusaurus bones in the sediments. Nearly all of the bones were scattered, and not in their original skeletal arrangements.

The description sounds pretty fierce -- but would it be able to compete with the film-maker in a buffet line?

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That is one option noted by the NY Times in an article today on the ancient city. It makes for interesting reading for the archaeologically inclined – even though it includes the all-important anti-American slant for which the formerly great paper is now known.

In this ancient city, it is hard to tell what are ruins and what's just ruined.

Crumbling brick buildings, some 2,500 years old, look like smashed sand castles at the beach.

Famous sites, like the Tower of Babel and the Hanging Gardens, are swallowed up by river reeds.

Signs of military occupation are everywhere, including trenches, bullet casings, shiny coils of razor wire and blast walls stamped, "This side Scud protection."
Babylon, the mud-brick city with the million-dollar name, has paid the price of war. It has been ransacked, looted, torn up, paved over, neglected and roughly occupied. Archaeologists said American soldiers even used soil thick with priceless artifacts to stuff sandbags.

But Iraqi leaders and United Nations officials are not giving up on it. They are working assiduously to restore Babylon, home to one of the Seven Wonders of the World, and turn it into a cultural center and possibly even an Iraqi theme park.

Funny, though, how the article glosses over the extent of Saddam’s rape of the site during his years in power. I guess they wouldn’t want to offend their lefty-readers by suggesting that their hero was a bad guy.

Posted by: Greg at 10:07 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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That is one option noted by the NY Times in an article today on the ancient city. It makes for interesting reading for the archaeologically inclined – even though it includes the all-important anti-American slant for which the formerly great paper is now known.

In this ancient city, it is hard to tell what are ruins and what's just ruined.

Crumbling brick buildings, some 2,500 years old, look like smashed sand castles at the beach.

Famous sites, like the Tower of Babel and the Hanging Gardens, are swallowed up by river reeds.

Signs of military occupation are everywhere, including trenches, bullet casings, shiny coils of razor wire and blast walls stamped, "This side Scud protection."
Babylon, the mud-brick city with the million-dollar name, has paid the price of war. It has been ransacked, looted, torn up, paved over, neglected and roughly occupied. Archaeologists said American soldiers even used soil thick with priceless artifacts to stuff sandbags.

But Iraqi leaders and United Nations officials are not giving up on it. They are working assiduously to restore Babylon, home to one of the Seven Wonders of the World, and turn it into a cultural center and possibly even an Iraqi theme park.

Funny, though, how the article glosses over the extent of SaddamÂ’s rape of the site during his years in power. I guess they wouldnÂ’t want to offend their lefty-readers by suggesting that their hero was a bad guy.

Posted by: Greg at 10:07 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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