June 27, 2007
Now, though, this ignored mummy has been identified as Queen Hatshepsut -- whose successor tried to erase all trace of her 15 year reign over the Valley of the Nile.
The British archaeologist Howard Carter discovered Hatshepsut's tomb while excavating at the Valley of the Kings in 1902. When he properly explored the tomb in 1920, two years before his famous discovery of King Tutankhamun's tomb, Mr Carter found two sarcophagi, one for Hatshepsut and the second for her father, but both were empty.Speculation about the riddle has, for years, focused on a separate tomb now known as KV60, which Mr Carter found and opened in the spring of 1903.
Inside he found coffins of mummified geese, which he removed, and the partially disturbed and decaying coffins of two women lying side by side. One bore the inscription of Sitre-In, Hatshepsut's wet nurse, the other was anonymous.
As the tomb was not royal it received little attention until the Egyptologist Donald Ryan reopened it in 1989. The sarcophagus marked with the name of the wet nurse was taken to Cairo museum, and the second unnamed sarcophagus remained behind.
Mr Hawass decided to re-investigate the mystery surrounding Hatshepsut for a television special to be aired by the Discovery network and his team removed the second sarcophagus to Cairo for a CT scan.
"That is the only mummy I have removed from the Valley of the Kings," he said.
The scan revealed that this mummy was an obese woman between the ages of 45 and 60 who had bad teeth. She also suffered from cancer, evidence of which can be seen in the pelvic region and the spine.
In search of more clues, Mr Hawass suggested a CT scanner be used to examine artefacts associated with the queen. One of those was a small wooden box that bore the cartouche, or royal seal, of Hatshepsut and contained a liver.
Embalmers typically eviscerated the dead before embalming them but preserved the organs in jars and boxes.
The CT scan also revealed a tooth in the box. Mr Hawass called in a dentist, Galal El-Beheri from Cairo University, who studied the scans of the tooth and of several female mummies.
"Not only was the fat lady from KV-60 missing a tooth but the hole left behind and the type of tooth that was missing were an exact match for the loose one in the box," Mr Hawass said.
The exact dimensions of teeth are unique to each mouth. The molar tooth in the box fits within a fraction of a millimetre with the space of the missing molar in the mouth of the mummy. The minuscule difference could be due to erosion of the gums after the tooth was extracted.
This is utterly incredible -- and shows how there is still so much to be learned about ancient civilizations through the work of archaeologists. This will be one to share with my students this fall.
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June 25, 2007
Charles W. Lindberg, one of the U.S. Marines who raised the first American flag over Iwo Jima during World War II, has died. He was 86.Lindberg died Sunday at Fairview Southdale hospital in the Minneapolis suburb of Edina, said John Pose, director of the Morris Nilsen Funeral Home in Richfield, which is handling Lindberg's funeral.
Lindberg spent decades explaining that it was his patrol, not the one captured in the famous Associated Press photograph by Joe Rosenthal, that raised the first flag as U.S. forces fought to take the Japanese island.
In the late morning of Feb. 23, 1945, Lindberg fired his flame-thrower into enemy pillboxes at the base of Mount Suribachi and then joined five other Marines fighting their way to the top. He was awarded the Silver Star for bravery.
"Two of our men found this big, long pipe there," he said in an interview with The Associated Press in 2003. "We tied the flag to it, took it to the highest spot we could find and we raised it.
"Down below, the troops started to cheer, the ship's whistles went off, it was just something that you would never forget," he said. "It didn't last too long, because the enemy started coming out of the caves."
Lindberg is the last of the survivors of that flag-raising. May he rest in peace, and may his service to this country never be forgotten.
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June 16, 2007
But the related story is fascinating.
Salvagers discovered thousands of pearls Friday in a small, lead box they said they found while searching for the wreckage of the 17th-century Spanish galleon Santa Margarita.Divers from Blue Water Ventures of Key West said they found the sealed box, measuring 3.5 inches by 5.5 inches, along with a gold bar, eight gold chains and hundreds of other artifacts earlier this week.
They were apparently buried beneath the ocean floor in approximately 18 feet of water about 40 miles west of Key West.
``There are several thousand pearls starting from an eighth of an inch to three-quarters of an inch,'' said Duncan Mathewson, marine archaeologist and partner in Blue Water Ventures.
James Sinclair, archaeologist and conservator consulting with Mel Fisher's Treasures, Blue Water's joint-venture partners, said the pearls are very rare because of their antiquity and condition.
Sinclair said pearls don't normally survive the ocean water once they are out of the oyster that makes them.
``In this instance, we had a lead box and the silt that had sifted into the box from the site of the Margarita, which preserved the pearls in a fairly pristine state,'' he said.
Four century old pearls preserved on the sea bed. That is amazing. And to find them loose, not in a setting, is even more amazing.
And to think they were found in a box smaller than a Kleenex box -- that is just stunning.
I wonder how much they will go for on the open market when the company starts selling to collectors?
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Read the newly published The Reagan Diaries if you want a true insight into the mind of the nation's 40th president.The diaries — written daily from 1981 until President Ronald Reagan left office in 1989 — reveal him to be much more involved in the nitty gritty of national and world affairs than many White House reporters thought. He had often been portrayed as a detached "chairman of the board" kind of president.
The diaries show that Reagan had something to say about everything and everybody; his thoughts were often summarized in one handwritten sentence. His notations mixed the profound with the trivial.
Historian Douglas Brinkley, who edited the publication of the diaries, had to toss out chunks to boil the entries down to a 696-page memoir. But no one is short-changed.
Reagan comes across as deeper, funnier, more religious and more humble than he seemed when he was striding across the world stage. He is true to his public persona — foe of communism, tax increases and organized labor — and often the news media.
Now that shocks Thomas, who never took Reagan particularly seriously during his time in the White House. She, like much of the White House press corps, seem to have thought that Reagan was either simple-minded or playing to his audience, not necessarily someone who believed in what he was doing (or, at least, not someone who had given much thought to what he was doing). These diaries dispel that point of view. That leads Thomas to make this obesrvation.
As a reporter having covered him for eight years in the White House, I am sure the press could have done a better job if we had known the real Ronald Reagan.
But that is precisely the problem -- Reagan was right there for the press to see, his public persona very much an expression of the real man. They just didn't want to see, much less know, the real man. That is enough to make one question their coverage of the current president -- and any other leader, especially those of a conservative bent.
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June 09, 2007
You can't really blame Al Gore for not using footnotes in his new book, "The Assault on Reason." It's a sprawling, untidy blast of indignation, and annotating it with footnotes would be like trying to slip rubber bands around a puddle of quicksilver. Still, I'd love to know where he found the scary quote from Abraham Lincoln that he uses on page 88.In a chapter entitled "The Politics of Wealth," Gore argues that the ancient threat to democracy posed by rich people run amok has finally been realized under the man who beat him in the 2000 presidential race. Even Lincoln, Gore says, saw the age of Bush coming in 1864: "I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed."
* * * Writing in 1999 in the Abraham Lincoln Association's newsletter, the great Lincoln historian Thomas F. Schwartz traced the bogus passage to the 1880s, about 20 years after Lincoln's death. One theory is that it first appeared in a pamphlet advertising patent medicines. Opponents of Gilded Age capitalism -- Gore's forerunners -- found the quote so useful that Lincoln's former White House secretaries felt compelled to launch a campaign "denouncing the forgery," Schwartz said. Robert Todd Lincoln, who was the president's only surviving son and himself a wealthy railroad lawyer, called it "an impudent invention" that ascribed to his father views that the former president would never have held.
"I discovered what I think is the true and only source of this supposed quotation," Robert wrote in an unpublished letter, probably tongue-in-cheek. "It originated, I think, at what is called a Spiritualist Séance in a country town in Iowa, a number of years ago, as being a communication by President Lincoln through what is called a Medium." Even bloggers might think twice about trusting such a source.
Well, maybe not left-wing bloggers.
And frankly, I'm shocked that the guy who invented created the Internet (happy now, Dan?) couldn't use it to do a better job fact-checking his book. Makes you wonder how much of the rest of his book is based upon pseudo-sources and lousy research.
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, June 08, 2007
"Now, if Gen. Meade can complete his work so gloriously prosecuted thus far, by the litteral or substantial destruction of Lee's army, the rebellion will be over."
Meade, of course, failed in this task and the Army of Northern Virginia escaped -- leading to nearly two years of additonal warfare.
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June 06, 2007
Thank God for those who fought and died that day (including one member of my wife's family). Thank God for those who fought and lived. And thank God for a loyal media that was not dead-set on undermining the war effort and morale of the American people.
H/T Stop the ACLU, Church & State, The Combat Report
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Forty years after Israel's stunning victory over three Arab armies, the defeat still lingers in the Arab world — so much so, some blame it for everything from a lack of democracy in the region to the rise of religious extremism.On June 5, 1967, Israeli warplanes destroyed 400 aircraft belonging to Egypt,
Syria, Jordan and Iraq — most of them sitting on airport tarmacs. Egypt lost the Sinai Peninsula and Gaza Strip, Syria gave up the Golan Heights, and Jordan relinquished the West Bank and east Jerusalem.Trying to minimize the defeat, Arabs have long called the Six Day War the "naksa," or "setback," but its impact remains a deep wound.
Egyptian columnist Wael Abdel Fattah wrote in the independent weekly Al-Fagr newspaper that Arabs blame the defeat for "everything" — from "price hikes, dictatorship, religious extremism, sectarian strife, even sexual impotence."
The thing is, though, that every single one of the problems that is listed long pre-dated the 1967 war -- lousy economies, totalitarian regimes, the teachings of Islam, the divisions between Sunni and Shiite, and (presumably) lack of sexual prowess among Arab men. It is simply one more example of Arab/Muslim anti-Semitism to blame the Jews for these problems, when they are part and parcel of the failure of Arab/Muslim culture and "civilization" (if you can even call it that over the last several centuries).
Until the Arabs take responsibility for their own destiny, admit that their societies are fundamentally flawed and dominated by a barbaric and backwards theological system that holds them back in the modern world, there is little that can be done to help them -- and strife will continue in the Middle East.
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June 04, 2007
A picture that paints a million words.
More At Malkin, Liberty News, Bill's Bites, Old War Dogs, Gateway Pundit
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