(The Vishnu temple at Angkor Wat – Photograph by Srijith)

The Khemer kingdom of Cambodia,  known for the construction of magnificent temples like Angkor Wat, had a domain that extended from south Vietnam to Yunan China in the North and westward till the Bay of Bengal. The city’s economy was based on rice and a network of reservoirs, canals and bridges were  built to move people and goods.

The Khemer engineers  changed the direction of rivers for growing rice. The water system had canals in the North that funneled water into the city center and then from the city center a series of distributor canals sent water to the southern region.

The general reason mentioned for the demise of this kingdom is an attack by the Thais in 1431. But now scientists think that the demise happened much before, due to the evils of urban societies, like ecological failure and infrastructure breakdown. Now there are more discoveries on what happened to the Khemer kingdom.

A ground sensing radar provided by NASA has revealed new information about the Khemer kingdom. We now know that it was larger than present day Philadelphia and Phoenix, but with much less population. This radar has also identified new man-made ponds and long lost temples in this  preindustrial low-density complex centered around the Angkor Wat temple.

There is more evidence that the fall of this civilization might have been due to over exploitation of land.

“Our research shows that Angkor was certainly extensive enough, and that land-use was certainly intensive enough, to have impacted profoundly on the regional ecology,” Evans told LiveScience.

Angkor was surrounded by a vast expanse of rice fields that would have required extensive forest clearance. Over time, the intense farming could have led to serious ecological problems, including those associated with deforestation, overpopulation, topsoil degradation and erosion.

The consequence of overexploiting the environment isn’t the only lesson Angkor’s fate has for modern society, Evans said. Angkor required a massive infrastructural network of canals and roads to keep it running.

“This increasingly complex elaborate system would have been very difficult and expensive to maintain,” Evans said. “This is obviously something to bear in mind, considering that many cities in our contemporary world are expansive, low-density urban sprawls as Angkor appears to have been.” [Urban Sprawl May Have Doomed Cambodia’s Angkor Wat]

In South Eastern Iran, near the city of Jiroft,
archaeologists
uncovered the remains of a large wealthy city some time back. This city
which would have existed around the time of the Harappan civilization was more
than 2 square kilometers and was dominated by a large fortress for protecting
the town.

In one of the tombs, there were burial chambers in which beads and other
precious materials were scattered around. Lapis and turquoise beads, chlorite
and copper vessels were found indicating that the residents were affluent.
While pottery from one site was dated 4000 B.C.E, researchers found a bustling
metropolis nearby dated 2550 – 2400 B.C.E.The affluence of the residents of
this site came from trade. Archaeologists have found lapis from Afghanistan,
shells from Pakistan, vessels from Indus and game boards from Ur in this city.

In the ancient globalized world merchandise from one part of the world used to
be available in another part thanks to these trading posts on the way. Thus if
someone in Mesopotamia or Indus wanted copper from Oman he could get it. If a
housewife in Central Asia wanted an Omani pot to crack on her husband’s head it
would be available in the market. Indus and Mesopotamian seals have been found
in Turkmenistan along with Iranian goods.

The different cities excavated have revealed that they all did not have a
monolithic culture, but they had their own individuality with their own pottery
styles and art.
Three
tablets discovered in the cities had unique iconography and there is debate
on if it was really a writing system.Unlike the ancient civilizations, the one
around Jiroft is not around a river or near the ocean and so it is believed that
bullock carts and camels were used in the over land trade route.

Previously only the civilizations around the Tigris and Euphrates, Nile
and the Indus were mentioned as ancient civilizations.
While Mesopotamia is usually called the cradle of civilization, the
discovery of places like the ancient cities near Jiroft has led to an
expanded
view of the origin of civilization. According to the new view, many
urban centers existed along the arc from Iraq to India and these trading
communities  adopted the technologies, architectures and ideas from other
civilizations.

Remember what happens when Asterix and Obelix meet the Roman Army? While the soldiers go flying up, their sandals remain on the ground. Recently a foot print made by one of those Roman hobnailed sandals, immortalized by Goscinny and Uderzo, have been found in a wall surrounding the city of Sussita in Northern Israel.

The city of Sussita is located east of lake Kinneret, which is more famous by the biblical name, Sea of Galilee. It was around the Sea of Galilee where Jesus preached, recruited four of his apostles and the Sermon on the Mount was given on a hill overlooking the lake. The city was destroyed in 749 CE by an earthquake.

There is no precise date for the foot print, but it is believed to have been made when Romans ruled the region, such as during the time of Jesus. In fact, this is not the first such foot print as well; that credit goes to the one found in Hadrian’s wall in Britain.

There are two theories for the origins of this foot print.The region around Israel was an outpost of the Roman empire and most of the construction projects were run by the cities themselves and not the Roman imperial system. One theory says that legionaries or former legionnaires would have participated in the construction of the wall. We don’t know if the legionary groaned, “Join the army they said. It is a man’s world they said!”.

The second theory says that the sandal owner could have been someone who left active service and never returned his military equipment. The basis of this theory is an inscription by two residents of the city of Sussita who had left Roman military service.

Professor Zemaryali Tarzi believes that hidden in Bamiyan is a
third
reclining Buddha and for the past six years he has been
searching for it. This Buddha has not been seen by many and was mentioned once
by Huen Tsang and no one else. So far there has been no evidence of the Buddha,
but archaeology in that area has revealed some information about the people who
built the statues.

What he has found are the remnants of the culture that built the Buddhas – one
of the most lavish and powerful kingdoms of ancient Central Asia.

Recently Tarzi’s colleague, archaeologist Mickaël Rakotozonia, stood in a
steady drizzle, surrounded by mud-brick houses, and gestured to two ancient
towers almost lost amid the jigsaw of earthen walls here.

Between these two towers, he speculated, might have been a gate into the
Kingdom City of Bamiyan, home to the creators of the two stone Buddhas carved
from a nearby cliff some 1,500 years ago and destroyed by the Taliban.

But the Buddhas are only the most obvious example of this country’s ancient
riches.

“My new discoveries have put old discoveries in the background,” says Tarzi.

He and Mr. Rakotozonia will continue searching for the Buddhist’s Kingdom City
this summer and autumn and the team will perhaps also begin excavating test
pits near Shar-e Gholghola, the citadel capital of the Ghorid Empire, which
followed the Buddhists.

The white hill city, encrusted with the ruins of centuries past, was destroyed
in the 13th century when Genghis Khan conquered Bamiyan. According to legend,
he was so furious that his son was killed in the siege that he killed even the
mice of the city, leading to the name Shar-e Gholghola, which means the City
of Screams.

To the north, archaeologists are excavating the city of Balkh, supposed
birthplace of the prophet Zoroaster and location of Alexander’s marriage to
Roxana in 327
BC.[In
Afghanistan, 900-foot Sleeping Buddha eludes archaeologists]

When news came out that  United States would ask for help from India for the war in Iraq, there was massive opposition in the country. The politicians did not want our soldiers to be sacrificial victims in a war we opposed. A new story suggests that there could have been sacrificial victims from India in Iraq, but about 4600 years back.

Excavations done at Ur in Iraq in the 1920s and 1930s retrieved some skulls which were 4600 years old. These skulls were found in what is called ‘Great Death Pit’ which had the bodies of 74 sacrificial victims and royal retainers.

According to one story, these women adorned with ornaments walked to the tomb, drank poison and lay down to die to join a king in his afterlife. The debate now is not on whether they were sacrificial victims, but on how they were killed. CAT scans are being done now to see if the women were killed above the ground and then mummified.

Another theory that is getting tested alongside is if the victims were bought from the Indus Valley Civilization. For this the enamel from the teeth of the sacrificial victims would be compared to the remains found in Indus Valley.

Ancient Sumerians and Akkadians relied heavily on imports since the land was not rich in natural resources. Indian merchants of that era, finding a niche market, exported goods to Mesopotamia and Harappan seals have been found various Mesopotamian sites dating to 2400 BCE.

Still it is not clear why Indian women would be sacrificed for a Sumerian King.

If you are looking for information on how the Egyptian pyramids were built, there is information on the location of the quarries, tools used to cut the stone, how the stone was transported and how the foundation was leveled. If you want to know how the stones were lifted to the height of the pyramids, there is not much help from historical accounts. 

The most commonly accepted theory is that ramps along with levering was used to move the blocks, but archaeological evidence shows only small ramps which definitely could have been used for constructing the pyramid. Even though there is no evidence, it has been accepted that only a large straight external ramp can be used for constructing something of that size.

French Architect Jean-Pierre Houdin has concluded, after an eight year study, that the tomb of Khufu was built using a ramp that spirals around the pyramid’s interior.

Houdin’s theory posits that a long, straight ramp was used to build the first 129 feet (39 meters) of the pyramid and the internal ramp was used to complete construction.

Drawings from a 1986 survey of the pyramid show a “spiral anomaly” inside that conforms exactly to this theory, he said. [Great Pyramid Built Inside Out, French Architect Says]

Greek writer Herodotus wrote about the pyramids, 2000 years after it was constructed. So did Diodorus Siculus and both of them gave two different techniques which boil down to levering and ramping. People do not think Jean-Pierre Houdin’s theory as outlandish, but still he was denied permission to test his theory.

If  Jean-Pierre Houdin investigates how Raja Raja Chola built the Big Temple at Tanjore, for which he had to move more stones than the pyramid at Giza, he will find that external ramps were used.

Note: Image shows how a large straight external ramp is used.

In 1990, Israeli archaeologist Amos Kloner discovered a tomb in the Jerusalem suburb of Talpiot during the construction boom. This tomb had ten ossuaries and six of them had inscriptions related to the Gospels. No one thought much about it till  Film Maker Simcha Jacobovici (of the Exodus Decoded fame) and producer James Cameron (of Titanic) decided to investigate this and two years of their effort was shown on Sunday in the Discovery Channel documentary, The Lost Tomb of Jesus.

In the documentary, they make the claim that this tomb, was the tomb of Jesus and his family. It is not any Jesus, but the one known as Jesus of Nazereth. The tomb, according to the film makers  has markings which says Jesus, son of Joseph, Maria, Mariamene, Matthew, Judas, son of Jesus, and Jose. These are common names of that era and the Kloner thinks that it is a coincidence that the names are similar to the protagonists in the New Testament. Simcha Jacobovici thinks otherwise.

He got motivated to do this story after working on the story of another ossuary which had the inscription, “James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus.” This was later found to be a fake. During his investigation he came across the ossuaries which had the names of Jesus and others and he was astonished by it.

The filmmaker rests his case on four main points. First, he says, recent Biblical scholarship argues that Mary Magdalene’s real name was Mariamene, a common first-century derivative of Miriam. Second, DNA tests show that microscopic human remains scraped from the Jesus box and the Mariamene box are not related, at least not matrilineally, leaving open the possibility that the two humans whose bones were once in those boxes were married. Third, the patina on the Talpiot ossuaries—that is, the mineral crust accumulated over centuries—matches that of the James box. This “discovery,” if provable, is complicated but critical to Jacobovici’s argument: the match means, he says, that the James ossuary originally lay in the Talpiot cave, thus answering questions about the James box’s provenance. It also increases the probability that the tomb belongs to the Holy Family. Jesus had four brothers, according to the Gospel of Mark; two of their names—Joseph (or Jose) and James—were found in the Talpiot tomb.[Raiders of the Lost Tomb ]

Continue reading “The Tomb of Jesus” →

Sometimes civilizations die due to climate change. Sometimes civilizations arise due to climate change. According to research by Geologist Anil Gupta of IIT Kharagpur declining monsoons could have caused the decline of the Indus Valley Civilization and now it turns out that the Tang dynasty of China and the Mayans were also bought down by shifts in monsoon cycle.

The records show that around the time that these civilizations went into decline, they experienced stronger than average winds in the winter and weaker summer monsoon rains. These weak rains would have reduced crop yields.

The Mayan civilisation and Tang dynasty were contemporary and there is a striking similarity between the Chinese and Latin American climate data. These include a general shift towards a drier climate around AD 750 and three very dry periods between then and AD 910, the last of which coincides with both the Maya and the Tang collapse. [Collapse of civilisations linked to monsoon changes]