Tibet is now synonymous with Buddhism. But till 7th century AD, the religion of Tibet was Bön. This religion which was rooted in Shamanistic practices also has a founder similar to Buddha. His name was Yungdrung Bön and he too left the palace to be a monk. Now archaeological excavations have discovered artifacts from that era.

In Ngari, Southwest China’s Tibet Autonomous Region, archaeologists investigated the ruins of the mysterious “Silver Castle,” and discovered fantastic statues of Bon gods, which belonged to a religion prevalent on the roof of the world a millennium ago. The ancient city, known as the “Silver Castle of Qionglong (today’s Zhada, Ngari),” was in Tibetan legends the capital of Zhangzhung Kingdom.

It fell into oblivion in the 10th century when the Guge Kingdom was founded and Tibetans converted from the Bon religion to Buddhism. It had been forgotten until archaeologists discovered its ruins in the 1920s. Since the investigation kicked off this June, archaeologists have been reporting amazing finds on the ruins, which lie on the northern bank of the Xiangquan (Langqen Zangbo) River and covers an area of 130,000 square metres.

“Lying before us is a magnificent castle boasting buzzing lives a millennium ago, with well-planned residential areas, ritual and public buildings, defence walls and even secret underground tunnels,” said archaeologist Huo Wei from Sichuan University. Porcelain shreds and iron tools were unearthed along with statues of Bon gods. One of them, painted in green and gold, have two faces – one on the front and one on the back. “It’s only an investigation. We’ll never know what the ground is hiding from us until an excavation begins,” said Huo. [Ancient Tibetan city]

Robert Sarmast claims that Atlantis has been found. It is not the first time that Atlantis has been discovered. It has been discovered before in Brazil, Haiti, Mexico, Atlantic Ocean, Santorini, Portugal etc.
Now people are already contesting Robert Sarmast’s claim.

But German physicist Christian Huebscher said he had identified the phenomenon as 100,000 year-old volcanoes that spewed mud.
Huebscher, of the Hamburg Centre for Marine and Atmospheric Sciences, is quoted in Wednesday’s edition of the newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung as saying he and two Dutch colleagues had sailed in a boat to the same area at which Sarmast claimed to have located Atlantis and made their findings.
Sarmast’s team claims to have found man-made structures located about one mile (some 1.5 kilometres) below sea level and 50 miles (80 kilometres) off the southeast coast of Cyprus. [German physicist disputes Atlantis discovery claim by American]

The other day I was watching the documentary, In the Footsteps of Alexander and the host Michael Wood walks to Kabul Museum, which is just a building under lock and key. There was one guard with an AK-47 kinda gun and all the artifacts were locked in the basement.
But now the Afghans want to restore their heritage back and they are asking the British to return their 2000 year old Dead Sea Scrolls of Buddhism from the British Library.

The Kharosti Scrolls would be a hugely prestigious centerpiece for the new museum. The 60 fragments of text written in the ancient script Kharosti on birch bark are considered by Buddhist scholars as comparable in historical importance to the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Between the 2nd and 7th centuries AD, Hadda was one of the holiest sites in Buddhism drawing pilgrims from all over India and China. The scrolls are the earliest known Buddhist scripts and were produced by monks in the extraordinary civilisation of Gandhara, a synthesis of Indian and Greek culture spread to Asia by the followers of Alexander the Great.
The civilisation flourished at the time of the Roman Empire in what is now the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. [Afghanistan wants its ‘Dead Sea Scrolls of Buddhism’ back from UK]

Last year this time a 1000 year old ship was discovered in Kerala. This year we have another ship discovered, but this one about 3000 years old in Israel and belongs to the era of King David and Solomon.

The remains, which have been carbon-dated to the ninth century B.C., include a huge stone anchor believed to be the largest ever unearthed. The wreckage is lying under a few inches of sand off the Mediterranean coast in shallow waters, and has yet to be examined extensively.

If the remains are indeed 3,000 years old, it would be the first archaeological artifact ever found from the era of the first kings of Israel, with the possible exception of several huge stones at the base of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.

Named for Dorus, son of the Greek sea god Poseidon, the hillside city was a major port for both conquerors and traders and is mentioned in the first Book of Kings. At its peak, the port had 200,000 residents.

“In King Solomon’s time, this was the major port for the Israelite kingdom,” said ancient boat specialist Yaacov Kahanov of Haifa University. “The island here off the coast is still called Taphath, after Solomon’s daughter.” [Archaeologist hopes 3,000-year-old wood is from ancient ship]

According to oral tradition Jews established trading contacts with Kerala during the time of Solomon. There are other traditions which claim that Jews came to Kerala during the time of King Nebuchadnezar of Babylon in 500 BC, the time of Buddha. But according to Romila Thapar in her book Early India, the Jews came to India in the tenth and eleventh century AD.

The Buddha did not want people to worship his image and so early representations of him were symbolic like his feet or a tree. But then as his teachings became Buddhism and spread out of India, many forms of art started appearing in various styles.

China’s attraction to the outside world went beyond art. I have shown in several studies that Buddhism spread over much of eastern Iran, as demonstrated by archaeology, place names and the imprint it left on Persian literature – idealized beauty was celebrated by the poets of early Islamic Iran, using explicitly Buddhist images and references to Buddhist shrines.
If the evidence of sculpture is anything to go by, it took three centuries for Buddhism to establish itself. The earliest dated Buddha image cast in bronze, now in the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, is dated 338 A.D. Bronzes of the fourth century are scarce. Comparative abundance in the fifth century suggests a change in pace. Extraordinary bronzes were being cast by the end of the century, particularly in the northeastern provinces of Shaanxi and Hebei, at the heart of the territory long controlled by the Xianbei, Leidy remarks.
It may one day be possible to plot the route followed by Buddhist iconography first defined in present-day Afghanistan through Tajikistan into Chinese Turkistan up to Dunhuang, the Buddhist cave complex that retains to this day its Sogdian name “Throang(a),” adapted to Chinese pronunciation. This resulted in the first truly great works of Chinese Buddhist sculpture. A standing gilt bronze of the Buddha Shakyamuni from Mancheng in Hebei, dated 475, and a seated Buddha from Togeton, Hohhot, cq by Souren in Inner Mongolia, have smiles of radiant certainty, each with a nuance

Afghanistan, the land of confluence of Greek, Persian, Buddhist and Islamic cultures is a goldmine for Archaeologists. Years of war have destroyed many of the symbols of its cultural heritage, but now efforts are on to discover things which are underground.

Afghanistan was a crossroads for the major powers of the ancient and modern world. Cyrus the Great of Persia founded Bagram. Alexander the Great founded a town in his own honor near the edge of the Registan Desert, now called Kandahar. Alexander lived in Bagram (Cyrus’ Kapissa) for two years and married Roxanne, a young woman from the area west of modern Mazar-I Sharif. Ghengis Khan would later ravage the country, purposefully destroying the elaborate waterworks which lined the Helmand River. Those waterworks have still not been rebuilt more than a millennium later, but their remains are extant.

Afghanistan’s past is part of the world’s cultural treasure. This land was the limit of Alexander’s Hellenistic empire. These mountains and valleys are where London and Moscow played “the great game” for control of central and south Asia. Here Babur built lavish gardens, splendid shrines and magnificent Islamic schools and mosques, some of which still sparkle in the brilliant sunshine.[Afghan Archaeology on Road to Recovery]

A research team of the Kannada Research Institute of Karnatak University has discovered what could be a 2,000-year-old Buddhist site at Tunnur in Chitapur taluk of Gulbarga district.
During the excavation, archaeologists recovered priceless artefacts and terracotta items revealing the influence of Buddhism in the region. According to Dr. Shadaksharaiah, the research team found artefacts dating back to many centuries and most of the sculptural panels found were scattered in a radius of about 1 km.
Some of the panels recovered included one depicting Mandoka Jataka story, Dharmachakra, a piece of stupa fence, and two types of memorial stones. In the Mandoka Jataka story panel the figures of a queen, Amatya, pattada horse, and pattada elephant are clearly visible, and the panel is quite similar to the one recovered from Hampi in Bellary district.
Research scholars during the course of their work found two distinct memorials. One of them belonged to the king and the royal members and another to the common people. In the former, there are figures of a horse, servants of the royal family, and king and queen seated and holding goblets.
Some of the memorials bear labels with inscriptions in Brahmi script and Prakrit language. One of them reads: “Valavasa Papalana Kanhasa.” Kanhasa means Krishna. [Sun Network via India India Archaeology]

bq. VADODARA: Jains in Khambhat taluka of Anand were overjoyed when around 65 idols temple were unearthed at a construction site in the town. Inscriptions on them suggested that they were over 900 years old. While, the first statue was unearthed on Sunday, many more structures, including idols of Jain deity Ambica Devi, were unearthed on Monday at the site where a mamlatdar office is being built. Senior community members believed excavation might uncover a Jain temple belonging to Tirthtankar Nemnath Swami.
bq. Officials have taken the idols in custody and are awaiting a team of archaeologists. “The structures include that of temple ‘Parikar’ and ‘Gaadi’. The year inscribed on the plaques range from 1001 to 1130 of the Hindu calendar. This puts the structures at over 900 years old. Also, the idol of Ambica Devi is usually found in temples of Nemnath Swa-mi. “Many Jain traders had settled when Khambhat was a major trading hub. Most of the temples were developed in that period. Hence, even rarest of idols like those of sapphire and nilam are found here.” Senior community members have urged the government to hand over the place to the community.” It is a great matter of faith for us. [“Times of India”:http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/cms.dll/html/uncomp/articleshow?msid=769571]

In the sixth century AD, a new kingdom emerged in mainland South-East Asia. Based in Cambodia, it absorbed the Funan kingdom established by the brahmin Kaundinya and emerged as the Khemer kingdom of Angkor. Their kings chose names ending in -varman like the Pallava kings of Kanchi and constructed one of the largest Hindu temples outside India.

The temples of Angkor, built from 879 – 1191AD, when the Khmer civilization was at the height of its development, represent one of humankind’s most astonishing and enduring architectural achievements. From the great citadel of Angkor, the kings of the Khmer empire ruled over a vast domain that reached from what is now southern Vietnam to Yunan, China and from Vietnam westward to the Bay of Bengal. The structures one sees at Angkor today, more than 100 temples in all, are the surviving religious remains of a grand social and administrative metropolis whose other buildings – palaces, public buildings, and houses – were all built of wood and are long since decayed and gone.

The City of Angkor was also magnificient

They learned the metropolitan area extended far beyond Angkor Thom, the 700-year-old walled city that houses Angkor Wat. Angkor was home to about 750,000 people and covered some 1,000 square kilometers (385 square miles) $(O m(Buch larger than any other preindustrial development and similar to the shape and size of modern cities, Fletcher said.
“It’s like a Los Angeles. It’s not like Hong Kong,” he said. “Lots and lots of open space, big gaps around the houses, huge freeways, which are the canals in this case.” The city’s economy was based on rice, and rice paddies spread along dozens of canals, at least one up to 20 kilometers (12 miles) long. A network of reservoirs, canals, and bridges was created to move people and goods and to ensure there was enough water to grow rice. Angkor engineers even changed the direction that some rivers flowed in what essentially was “a human-built landscape for growing rice,” Fletcher said.

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. They think it is important to study these reasons as it can provide lessons in dealing with problems many urban societies are facing today.

Fletcher, a professor at the University of Sydney, theorizes that population pressures and water woes made it harder to trade and communicate. People began migrating south toward the area around what is now Phnom Penh, where subsequent capitals were set up.
The growing population also forced people to venture into the nearby Kulen hills to cut down trees for fuel and to clear land for growing rice. That would have resulted in rain runoff carrying sediment down into the canal network, Evans said. “Anything that happened to that water management system would have had a great deal of consequence for all of the people,” he said. [ENN]

In another report from Cambodia, India has promised to donate $5.5 million for the restoration of the Ta Prohm temple at the Angkor Wat site.

The Ta Prohm is a magnificent temple-monastery complex built in the South Indian architectural style that once housed nearly 13,000 monks and other attendants. Angkor Wat is the largest temple area in the world..
Ta Prohm has been left by archaeologists in its original jungle-covered state, some of its walls cracked apart by tree roots, making it an exotic subject for photographers and a popular destination for tourists. It was built by one of the greatest Khmer Kings, Jayavarman VII, who also built Angkor Thom as his capital and the Bayon as his state temple where a mix of Buddhist and Hindu deities were worshipped. [Big News Network]

Srijith has great photographs of Angkor Wat and Ta Prohm

“The excavations at Adi Badri”:https://varnam.org/archives/000195.html in Haryana revealed a 300 AD Kushan site. “Excavations in Dholavira”:https://varnam.org/archives/000328.html in Kutch revealed one the world’s oldest stadiums and sign boards. These are two sites along the path of the mythical Saraswati river. These excavations would have revealed more about our past, and answered questions like: “Were the Harappans the Vedic people”:https://varnam.org/archives/000291.html ? Some eminent historians had already “opposed these excavations”:https://varnam.org/archives/000042.html as it was seen as an attempt to push the antiquity of Indian Civilization. But now there are indications that “The Saraswati Heritage Project” will be scrapped.
bq. A pet project of the then culture minister Jagmohan, officials now indicate that it would be certainly axed. Yet, those involved with the Rs 4.98-crore project feel if this is done, it would be grossly unfair and a setback to archaeology and academics. “The Saraswati Heritage Project was not part of any saffronisation progr-amme,” clarifies R S Bisht, project director and former joint DG of ASI.
bq. Instead, Bisht claims that the project is aimed at “settling the issues of different schools of thought” on the existence of the Saraswati. He says it is entirely based on scientific principles with stress on inter-disciplinary archaeological research in which the help of prestigious institutions like IITs and the Birbal Sahni Institution is being taken.
bq. So far, excavation has already been undertaken in 10 places � Adi Badri, Thanesar, Sandhauli, Bhirrana, Hansi (all in Haryana), Baror, Tarkhanwala Dhera, Chak 86 (all in Rajasthan), Dholavira and Juni Karan in Gujarat. The project’s action taken report claims that during the excavation, remains from the pre-Harappan, Harappan and even medieval times have been discovered. [“Times of India”:http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/761548.cms]