Ephraimite Forum-55
Date: 29/April/08 24th Nissan 5768
Contents:
1. Archaeology: Brit-Am Version of Explorator 11.1
2. Prof. Paul Eidelberg: Churchill, the Jews, and the Arabs
3. Archaeology: More Prehistoric Man Frauds Uncovered in Germany

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1. Archaeology: Brit-Am Version of Explorator 11.1
From: David Meadows <rogueclassicist@gmail.com>
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explorator 11.1                              April 27, 2008
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ANCIENT NEAR EAST AND EGYPT
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The Egyptian 'concrete' theory is making the rounds again:

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/04/23/mideast/pyramid.php
http://www.boston.com/news/science/articles/2008/04/22/a_new_angle_on_pyramids/

Interesting theory about product 'branding' in ancient Mesopotamia:

http://www.newkerala.com/one.php?action=fullnews&id=53037
http://tinyurl.com/6b6rm8

The annual 'they-still-speak-aramaic' article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/22/world/middleeast/22aramaic.html

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ANCIENT GREECE AND ROME (AND CLASSICS)
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All about Alexander the Great:

http://macedoniaonline.eu/content/view/1124/2/

Review of a couple of books on women in ancient Rome:

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article3713243.ece

... and some recent books on Herodotus:

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2008/04/28/080428crbo_books_mendelsohn

Review of Simon Armitage, *The Odyssey*:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/27/books/review/Parker-t.html

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EUROPE AND THE UK (+ Ireland)
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An Anglo-Saxon mound in Sherwood Forest:

http://tinyurl.com/3lu6mu

Rethinking the claim that the Saxons imposed 'apartheid' on
Britain:

http://tinyurl.com/5lajur (New Scientist)

More coverage of the Druid burial:

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/2/story.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=10505841

Archaeology in Europe Blog:

http://www.archaeology.eu.com/weblog/index.html
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NORTH AMERICA
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On the significance of dog burials in the souther U.S.:

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/04/080423-dog-burials.html


What a five-year-old dug up in grandma's garden:

http://www.wickedlocal.com/littleton/news/x317099158

An 18th century log road from Annapolis:

http://www.newswise.com/articles/view/540078/
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/04/080423180059.htm

Archaeologists were unable to find the remains of one of the
early figures in the Mormon Church:

http://www.nwanews.com/adg/News/223614/
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OTHER ITEMS OF INTEREST
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An abstract/overviewish thing on the Odyssey Marine thing:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/04/07/080407fa_fact_colapinto

The world's oldest living tree is in Sweden:

http://www.info.umu.se/NYHETER/PressmeddelandeEng.aspx?id=3061

... and what about that Indiana Jones guy?:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89724552


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DIG DIARIES/BLOGS
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Tel Dan:

http://teldan.wordpress.com/

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EXHIBITIONS, AUCTIONS, AND MUSEUM-RELATED
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Homer:

http://deseretnews.com/article/1,5143,695273665,00.html


Recovered Nazi Art:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/27/nyregion/nyregionspecial2/27brucect.html
(nice slide show)

There is need of a museum at Troy:

http://www.turkishdailynews.com.tr/article.php?enewsid=102407

Latest on the Lewis Chessmen:

http://news.scotsman.com/uk/Stalemate-for-Lewis-chessmen.4004998.jp

A Turner is coming to auction:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/25/arts/25arts-TURNERLANDSC_BRF.htm

A French Crown jewel returns to France:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/23/arts/design/23arts-FRENCHJEWELH_BRF.html


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PERFORMANCES AND THEATRE-RELATED
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Israel in Egypt:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/27/nyregion/nyregionspecial2/27spotwe.html

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2. Prof. Paul Eidelberg: Churchill, the Jews, and the Arabs

From: eidelberg@foundation1.org

Since anti-Semitism is sweeping cross England and Europe, I want to read some passages from England's greatest statesman, Winston Churchill, who, more than any other man, saved England Europe from Nazi tyranny.

I propose to read passages from Churchill's official biographer Sir Martin Gilbert, whose recent book, Churchill & the Jews (2007) is fascinating.

Before I begin, I want to point out that Churchill was first and foremost a British statesman, and his duties as a British statesmen must be taken into account in any assessment one makes of his attitude toward Jews and Palestine.

Despite the anti-Zionist attitude of many of his Conservative Party colleagues, Churchill was steadfast in his support of the Jews, as Gilbert thoroughly documents.  Churchill was a life-long friend of Chaim Weismann, who, with David Ben-Gurion, regarded him as a champion of the Jewish cause.  Of course, Churchill could not ignore Arab claims and pressure if only because millions of Muslims lived under British rule.  Nevertheless, he opposed the 1939 White Paper, which curtailed Jewish immigration to Palestine when Jews were trying to escape Nazi Germany.

In March 1920, Churchill wrote an article saying: "We owe to the Jews, a system of ethics which, even if it were entirely separated from the supernatural, would be incomparably the most precious possession of mankind, worth in fact the fruits of all other wisdom and learning put together" (p. 38).

Elsewhere he said: "Some people like the Jews, and some do not. But no thoughtful man can deny that they are, beyond any question, the most formidable and the most remarkable race which has ever appeared in the world."

Here is what he told the House of Commons about his visit to in Palestine, in 1921:

Anyone who has seen the work of the Jewish colonies which have been established during the last twenty or thirty years in Palestine will be struck by the enormous productive results which they had achieved.

 He described how he had driven from

the most inhospitable soil, surrounded on every side by barrenness and the most miserable form of cultivation, into a fertile and thriving country estate, where the scanty soil gave place to good crops and good cultivation, and then to vineyards and finally to the most beautiful, luxurious orange groves. All created in twenty or thirty years by the exertions of the Jewish community who live there, (p. 65)

In 1929, armed Arabs attacked and murdered 133 unarmed Jews.  In Jerusalem, four thousand Jews were driven from their homes.  Churchill, then visiting the United States, was asked by reporters whether this killing of Jews and destruction of Jewish property would affect Britain's pledge to allow continued Jewish immigration.  Churchill replied, the Arabs had no reason to be against the Jews. 

 "The Jews [he explained] have developed the country, grown orchards and grain fields out of the desert, built schools and great buildings, constructed irrigation projects and water power houses and have made Palestine a much better place in which to live than it was before they came a few years ago.  The Arabs are much better off now. To Jewish enterprise the Arab owes nearly everything he has.  Fanaticism and a sort of envy have driven the Arab to violence." (pp. 91-92)

On March 12, 1937, the year after the beginning of the Arab uprising in Palestine, Churchill was called to give evidence to the Peel Commission.  He was asked more than 100 questions since he was the author of the 1922 White Paper that enabled 300,000 Jews to enter Palestine.

Asked whether this influx of Jews constituted a harsh injustice to the Palestinian Arabs, he replied:  "Why is there harsh injustice done if people come in and make a livelihood for more and make the desert into palm groves and orange groves?  Why is it injustice because there is more work and wealth for everybody.  There is no injustice.  The injustice is when those who live in the country leave it to be a desert for thousands of years" (p. 113).

He rejected the contention that the Jews in Palestine constituted a foreign race.  He pointed out it was the Arabs who had been the outsiders, the conquerors.  "The [Jewish] population of Palestine," he said, "was much greater when it was a Roman province. When the Mohammedan upset occurred in world history and the great hordes of Islam swept over these places, they  smashed it all up.  You have seen the terraces on the hills which used to be cultivated, [but] which under Arab rule have remained a desert" (pp. 115-116).

Churchill was asked whether the Arabs were right in saying the entry of the Jewish Home in Palestine prevented them from having self-governing institutions.  He replied that "the Mandate limited the development of Arab self-governing institutions as long as they do not accept the spirit of the Balfour Declaration. The moment they accept that spirit, with all the pledges of their civil liberties, the question falls to the ground. [But the Arabs] resist and they do not want it."  Churchill then added: "If I were an Arab I should not like it, but it is for the good of the world that [Palestine] should be cultivated, and it will never be cultivated by the Arabs" (pp, 117-118).   (Consistent with the Balfour Declaration, Churchill said civil liberties and made no mention of national rights.)
 
One Peel Commission member complained that the Jewish Agency, set up in 1930, has its representative in London, whereas the Arabs feel they are left in the cold. Churchill replied: "It is a question of which civilization you prefer." (p. 119).

Peel said Britain "might have some compunction if she felt she was downing the Arabs year after year when they wanted to remain in their own country."  Gilbert comments that Churchill rejected this line of reasoning, and allowed himself to be drawn into a more contentious discussion.  He quotes Churchill:

I do not admit that the dog in the manger has the final right to the manger, even though he may have lain there for a very long time.  I do not admit that right.  I do not admit, for instance, that that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia.  I do not admit that a wrong has been done to those people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race, or, at any rate, a more worldly-wise race, to put it that way, has come in and taken their place. (p.120).
 
Churchill had no high opinion of Islam.  In 1899, when he was in the British Army fighting Sudanese Muslims, Churchill wrote:

How dreadful are the curses which Islam lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. The effects are apparent in many countries, improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live. A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement the next of its dignity and sanctity.

Churchill added:

The fact that in Islamic law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property, either as a child, a wife, or a concubine, must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men. Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities, but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Islam is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science, the science against which it had vainly struggled, the civilization of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilization of ancient Rome (pp. 53-54, emphasis added).

Allow me to conclude by saying, would that Israel had a mere fraction of a Churchill at the helm

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3. Archaeology: More Prehistoric Man Frauds Uncovered in Germany
 http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2005/feb/19/science.sciencenews
History of modern man unravels as German scholar is exposed as fraud

Extracts:
Flamboyant anthropologist falsified dating of key discoveries
Luke Harding in Berlin
The Guardian,
Saturday February 19 2005

It appeared to be one of archaeology's most sensational finds. The skull fragment discovered in a peat bog near Hamburg was more than 36,000 years old - and was the vital missing link between modern humans and Neanderthals.

This, at least, is what Professor Reiner Protsch von Zieten - a distinguished, cigar-smoking German anthropologist - told his scientific colleagues, to global acclaim, after being invited to date the extremely rare skull.

However, the professor's 30-year-old academic career has now ended in disgrace after the revelation that he systematically falsified the dates on this and numerous other "stone age" relics.

Yesterday his university in Frankfurt announced the professor had been forced to retire because of numerous "falsehoods and manipulations". According to experts, his deceptions may mean an entire tranche of the history of man's development will have to be rewritten.

"Anthropology is going to have to completely revise its picture of modern man between 40,000 and 10,000 years ago," said Thomas Terberger, the archaeologist who discovered the hoax. "Prof Protsch's work appeared to prove that anatomically modern humans and Neanderthals had co-existed, and perhaps even had children together. This now appears to be rubbish."

The scandal only came to light when Prof Protsch was caught trying to sell his department's entire chimpanzee skull collection to the United States.

An inquiry later established that he had also passed off fake fossils as real ones and had plagiarised other scientists' work.

His discovery appeared to show that Neanderthals had spread much further north than was previously known.

At the same time, German police began investigating the professor for fraud, following allegations that he had tried to sell the university's 278 chimpanzee skulls for $70,000 to a US dealer.

Why, though, had he done it?

"If you find a skull that's more than 30,000 years old it's a sensation. If you find three of them people notice you. It's good for your career," Prof Terberger said. "At the end of the day it was about ambition."

Other details of the professor's life also appeared to crumble under scrutiny. Before he disappeared from the university's campus last year, Prof Protsch told his students he had examined Hitler's and Eva Braun's bones.

He also boasted of having flats in New York, Florida and California, where, he claimed, he hung out with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Steffi Graf. Even the professor's aristocratic title, "von Zieten", appears to be bogus.

Far from being the descendant of a dashing general in the hussars, the professor was the son of a Nazi MP, Wilhelm Protsch, Der Spiegel magazine revealed last October.

The university is investigating how thousands of documents lodged in the anthropology department relating to the Nazis' gruesome scientific experiments in the 1930s were mysteriously shredded, allegedly under the professor's instructions.

They also discovered that some of the 12,000 skeletons stored in the department's "bone cellar" were missing their heads, apparently sold to friends of the professor in the US and sympathetic dentists.

Yesterday the university admitted that it should have discovered the professor's fabrications far earlier. But it pointed out that, like all public servants in Germany, the high-profile anthropologist was virtually impossible to sack, and had also proved difficult to pin down.

"He was perfect at being evasive," Prof Brandt said yesterday. "He would switch from saying 'it isn't really clear' to giving diffuse statements.

"I'm not a psychologist so I can't say why he did it. But my guess is that when he came back from the States 30 years ago he realised he wasn't up to the job of being a professor. So he started inventing things. It rapidly became a habit.'


Missing links and planted stone age finds

Piltdown Man
The most infamous of all scientific frauds was unearthed in 1912 in a Sussex gravel pit. With its huge human-like braincase and ape-like jaw, the Piltdown Man "fossil" was named Eoanthropus dawsoni after Charles Dawson, the solicitor and amateur archaeologist who discovered it. For 40 years Piltdown Man was heralded as the missing link between humans and their primate ancestors. But in 1953 scientists concluded it was a forgery. Radiocarbon dating showed the human skull was just 600 years old, while the jawbone was that of an orang-utan. The entire package of fossil fragments found at Piltdown - which included a prehistoric cricket bat - had been planted.

The devil's archaeologist
Japanese archaeologist Shinichi Fujimura was so prolific at uncovering prehistoric artefacts he earned the nickname "God's hands". At site after site, Fujimura discovered stoneware and relics that pushed back the limits of Japan's known history. The researcher and his stone age finds drew international attention and rewrote text books. In November 2000 the spell was broken when a newspaper printed pictures of Fujimura digging holes and burying objects that he later dug up and announced as major finds. "I was tempted by the devil. I don't know how I can apologise for what I did," he said.

Piltdown Turkey
The supposed fossil of Archaeoraptor, which was to become known as the "Piltdown turkey", came to light in 1999 when National Geographic magazine published an account of its discovery. It seemed to show another missing link - this time between birds and dinosaurs. Archaeoraptor appeared to be the remains of a large feathered bird with the tail of a dinosaur. The fossil was smuggled out of China and sold to a private collector in the US for ?51,000. Experts were suspicious and closer examination showed the specimen to be a "composite" - two fossils stuck together with strong glue.

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