Tomb of Final Incan Emperor Believed Found

Funereal stones mark the site of the possible tomb.

The long-sought tomb of the final Inca emperor may have been located. "This is an absolutely important find for the history of Ecuador's archeology and for the (Andean) region," said Patrimony Minister Maria Fernanda Espinosa, speaking of the ruins found by Ecuadoran historian Tamara Estupinan.

According to the AFP news agency:

It was back in June 2010 that Estupinan, now a researcher with the French Institute for Andean Studies (IFEA), found what she describes as an "Inca archeological site" high on the Andes' eastern flank amid plunging canyons. Nearby are a small local farm and a facility for raising fighting cocks. 

But in the area called Sigchos, about 45 miles south of Quito, up on a hill dotted with brush, there is more -- much more: she found a complex of walls, aqueducts and stonework that lie inside the Machay rural retreat. Machay means burial in the Quechua language. 

"This is a late imperial design Inca monument that leads to several rectangular rooms that were built with cut polished stone set around a trapezoidal plaza," Estupinan explained to AFP. 

This year Ecuador's state Cultural Patrimony Institute will start work on a promising archeological site, and Estupinan will be front and center to raise the curtain on a massive complex sprawling over a ridge at 1,020 meters.

The Inca empire, in the 1400s and early 1500s, spanned much of South America's Andean region. The emperor Atahualpa was the last of his dynasty. During the Spanish conquest he was captured, pressed into Christianity, and then the Spanish executed him by strangulation. After his death in 1533, the Incan empire began to fall apart.

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Is Leather Bible Really the Gospel of Barnabas?

The leather Bible now resides in Ankara, awaiting examination.

A leather, handwritten Bible believed to be 1,500 years old may be the much-debated Gospel of Barnabas, some researchers believe. According to Turkish media reports last week, the Bible was seized from a gang smuggling artifacts in southern Turkey in 2010.

Media reports said the copy of Bible in Ankara may be a copy of the Gospel of Barnabas, which Muslims claim is an original gospel that was later suppressed. The oldest copies of this gospel date back to the 16th century and are written in Italian and Spanish.

According to Today’s Zaman.com:

The Gospel of Barnabas contradicts the canonical New Testament account of Jesus and his ministry but has strong parallels with the Islamic view of Jesus. Much of its content and themes parallel Islamic ideas, and it includes a prediction by Jesus of the Prophet Muhammad coming to earth. 

Ömer Faruk Harman, a theology professor, said the Gospel of Barnabas treats Jesus as a human being and prophet not a God, rejects the trinity and crucifixion of Jesus and includes a prediction about Prophet Muhammad’s coming to Earth. 

Aydoğan Vatandaş, a Today’s Zaman journalist and author who has written two books on the Gospel of Barnabas, said there is no clue that the Bible mentioned in the Turkish press dates back to 1,500 years ago, but he said it is sure that the Gospel of Barnabas had been written in the Aramaic language and Syriac alphabet. “There is only one Gospel that exactly matches this definition: the ‘Gospel of Barnabas’ that was found in a cave in Uludere in Hakkari [now of Şırnak] in the early 1980s by villagers.”

Scientific examinations are hoped to reveal whether the Bible in Ankara is the Gospel of Barnabas.

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British Teams Finds Source of Sheba's Treasure

Sheba presenting her treasures to Solomon, artist unknown.

British archaeologists digging in northern Ethiopia have unearthed what may be the source of gold the biblical Queen of Sheba presented to King Solomon. The ruler of Sheba ~ modern-day Ethiopia and Yemen ~ is said to have traveled to Jerusalem about 3,000 years ago with vast quantities of gold to give to King Solomon.

Archaeologist Louise Schofield, former British Museum curator, who headed the excavation on the high Gheralta plateau in northern Ethiopia, said: "One of the things I've always loved about archaeology is the way it can tie up with legends and myths. The fact that we might have the Queen of Sheba's mines is extraordinary."

According to Biblical Archaeology magazine:

Although little is known about her, the queen's image inspired medieval Christian mystical works in which she embodied divine wisdom, as well as Turkish and Persian paintings, Handel's oratorio Solomon, and Hollywood films. Her story is still told across Africa and Arabia, and the Ethiopian tales are immortalised in the holy book the Kebra Nagast. 

Hers is said to be one of the world's oldest love stories. The Bible says she visited Solomon to test his wisdom by asking him several riddles. Legend has it that he wooed her, and that descendants of their child, Menelik – son of the wise – became the kings of Abyssinia.

 Among the evidence was a 20-foot stone stele carved with a sun and crescent moon, the "calling card of the land of Sheba," Schofield said. "I crawled beneath the stone – wary of a 9-foot cobra I was warned lives here – and came face to face with an inscription in Sabaean, the language that the Queen of Sheba would have spoken."

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Brazilian Geoglyphs Point to Urban Centers

Deforestation that has stripped the Amazon region since the 1970s continues to expose a long-hidden secret underneath the thick growth of the rain forest – flawlessly designed geometric earthwork shapes hundreds of yards in diameter.

Alceu Ranzi, a Brazilian scholar who discovered a number of squares, octagons, circles, rectangles and ovals that make up the land carvings, said these geoglyphs found on deforested land were as significant as the famous Nazca lines in Peru.

According to the New York Times:

“What impressed me the most about these geoglyphs was their geometric precision, and how they emerged from forest we had all been taught was untouched except by a few nomadic tribes,” said Mr. Ranzi, a paleontologist who first saw the geoglyphs in the 1970s and, years later, surveyed them by plane. 

For some scholars of human history in Amazonia, the geoglyphs in the Brazilian state of Acre and other archaeological sites suggest that the forests of the western Amazon, previously considered uninhabitable for sophisticated societies partly because of the quality of their soils, may not have been as “Edenic” as some environmentalists contend.

Instead of being pristine forests, barely inhabited by people, parts of the Amazon may have been home for centuries to large populations numbering well into the thousands and living in dozens of towns connected by road networks, explains the American writer Charles C. Mann.

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Photo shows exposed Brazilian geoglyphs.

Genetics Link Native Americans to Ancient Siberians

Tor overlooking an expanse of the Bering Land Bridge.

Recent genetic studies are confirming what scientists have long suspected about the origins of Native Americans ~ their genetic source is in Asia, specifically a mountainous area in southern Siberia known as the Altai region.

The new studies are from the University of Pennsylvania and the Institute of Cytology and Genetics in Novosibirsk, Russia. Researchers say the natives of Altai probably migrated across the Bering Land Bridge to North America.

Altai is located at the four corners of what is today China, Russia, Mongolia, and Kazakhstan. Says research leader Theodore Schurr of the University of Pennsylvania: "It is a key area because it's a place that people have been coming and going for thousands and thousands of years. Our goal in working in this area was to better define what those founding lineages or sister lineages are to Native American populations."

The team analyzed the genetics in both mitochondrial DNA and Y chromosome DNA, comparing samples to those that had previously been collected from individuals in southern Siberia, East Asia, Central Asia, Mongolia, and a number of different Native American groups. 

"We find forms of haplogroups C and D in southern Altaians and D in northern Altaians that look like some of the founder types that arose in North America, although the northern Altaians appeared more distantly related to Native Americans" says Schurr. 

Researchers have concluded that the Altaian lineage diverged genetically from the Native American lineage about 13,000 to 14,000 years ago. This correlates with current theories that support the migration of peoples into the Americas from Siberia between roughly 15,000 and 20,000 years ago.

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Skeletal Remains Found of Pre-Incan Mass Sacrifice

Several of the skeletons of willing sacrificial victims.

More than a hundred skeletons believed to be remains of victims of a ritual mass sacrifice have been discovered in a pit next to the ancient Huaca Las Ventanas pyramid in northern Peru. The pyramid is part of the pre-Incan Sicán site, the capital of the Lambayeque people—also known as the Sicán—who ruled Peru's northern coast from about A.D. 900 to 1100.

According to National Geographic:

Perhaps more than a hundred bodies—buried nude and some of them headless—lie in the newfound pit, according to Haagen Klaus, a bioarchaeologist at Utah Valley University in Orem who is studying the finds. 

The bodies are almost all adult males, with the exception of two children, each accompanied by what appears to be an adult woman. 

Despite the huge mass burial, the Sicán were not warmongers, Klaus stressed. Instead the Sicán culture used an economy based on trade to build an empire that, at its peak around A.D. 1000, spanned thousands of miles across what is now Ecuador and Peru.

All the dead in the newfound pit were likely willing participants from local communities engaged in a ritual that celebrated death so that "new life could emerge in the world," Klaus said in an email to National Geographic News."Sicán was holy ground, and only the most sanctified of religious rituals involving ancestors appear to have taken place there. Mass ritual sacrifice appears to be the most likely interpretation" of the discovery.”

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Satyr Masks from Wine Ceremonies Recovered

Two masks dating to 1 A.D. and found in a grave during excavations in the central Anatolian Necropolis site may shed light on ancient culture.

Anadolu University Archaeology Professor Taciser Sivas said the masks were the most beautiful historical findings of the year. 

“The masks were broken, but we have repaired the broken pieces,” she explained. “There are horns of a mythical figure on one of the masks, symbolizing a satyr [a half-human and half-goat god]. The other is bigger and white, with black and red hair.”

Sivas said the masks symbolized abundance and plentitude at wine-harvest ceremonies and were still being produced through the end of the Roman period. 

“Masks were used during religious ceremonies,” she added. “It is very significant the masks were found in Şarhöyük, as Eskişehir became the capital of Turkish world culture.”

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Persistent Drought Ended City of Angkor

Bayon temple at Angkor, constructed in the 12th century.

The ancient city of Angkor likely collapsed due to failure to battle drought, scientists find.

First established in the 9th century, Angkor was capital of the Khmer Empire, the major player in southeast Asia for nearly five centuries. It stretched over more than 385 square miles ~ the most extensive urban complex in the preindustrial world.

Suggested causes for the fall of the Khmer Empire in the late 14th to early 15th centuries have included war and exploitation of the land. Recent evidence suggests that prolonged droughts might have been linked to the decline of Angkor. For instance, tree rings from Vietnam suggest the region experienced long spans of drought interspersed with heavy rainfall.

To learn about how the Khmer managed their water, scientists analyzed a 6-foot-long core sample of sediment taken from the southwest corner of the largest Khmer reservoir, the West Baray, which could hold 1.87 billion cubic feet of water, more than 20 times the amount of stone making up the Great Pyramid of Giza.

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Nebuchadnezzar Shows Up on Babel Stele

Carving of Nebuchadnezzar is clearly visible on the right.

A team of scholars has discovered what might be the oldest representation of the biblical Tower of Babel. The inscription was carved between 604 and 562 BC on a black stone named the Tower of Babel stele.

The Tower of Babel stele stands out as one of "the stars in the firmament of the book," according to Andrew George, a professor of Babylonian at the University of London. The spectacular stone monument clearly shows the Tower and King Nebuchadnezzar II, who ruled Babylon some 2,500 years ago.

Credited with the destruction of the temple of Solomon in 586 BCE, Nebuchadnezzar II was also responsible for sending the Jews into exile, according to the Bible. The first Babylonian king to rule Egypt, he is also famous for building the legendary Hanging Gardens, one of the 7 wonders of the ancient world, and many temples all over Babylonia.

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World's Oldest Astrology Board Discovered

Representation of Cancer on the ivory board.

Researchers exploring a Croatian cave have discovered a 2,000-year-old astrology board, believed to be the oldest such astrologer’s tool ever found. Surviving portions include 30 ivory fragments engraved with the zodiac signs for Cancer, Gemini and Pisces.

According to LiveScience.com:

"This is probably older than any other known example," according to Alexander Jones, a professor at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University. "It's also older than any of the written-down horoscopes that we have from the Greco-Roman world ~ we have a lot of horoscopes that are written down as a kind of document on papyrus or on a wall but none of them as old as this."

Archaeologists are uncertain of the board’s origins. Astrology originated in Babylon around 2,400 years ago. Around 2,100 years ago, it spread to the eastern Mediterranean, becoming popular in Egypt, which at the time was under the control of a dynasty of Greek kings.

"It gets modified very much into what we think of as the Greek style of astrology, which is essentially the modern style of astrology," Jones said. "The Greek style is the foundation of astrology that goes through the Middle Ages and into modern Europe, modern India (and) so on."

Radiocarbon dating shows that the ivory used to create the zodiac images dates back around 2,200 years ago, shortly before the appearance of this new form of astrology.

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Click here for more photos of the board and cave.

Croatian cave where researchers found the board.

More Details Emerge on Cahokia Settlement

Layout of Cahokia on the west bank of the Mississippi River.

Bit by bit, more information is being discovered related to the massive Native American mound settlement called Cahokia in western Illinois. 

According to an article in Science:

A millennium ago, this strategic spot along the Mississippi River was an affluent neighborhood of Native Americans, set amid the largest concentration of people and monumental architecture north of what is now Mexico. 

Back then, hundreds of well-thatched rectangular houses, carefully aligned along the cardinal directions, stood here, overshadowed by dozens of enormous earthen mounds flanked by large ceremonial plazas. … Cahokia proper was the only pre-Columbian city north of the Rio Grande, and it was large even by European and Mesoamerican standards of the day, drawing immigrants from hundreds of kilometers around to live, work, and participate in mass ceremonies.

Recent excavations have uncovered evidence of more than 500 thatched houses and workshops where residents created goods. Cahokia may have expanded out into a primitive metropolitan area that served as residence to tens of thousands of Native Americans, researchers believe.

Click here for an Atlantic article.

Click here for a London Daily Mail article and video.

Deforestation Brought on Mayan Demise

Mayan ruins at Palenque, with regrown forests.

Severe deforestation the Mayans inflicted on their own environment hastened the end of their civilization in the 8^th and 9^th centuries, according to new research.

The deforestation in Central America contributed to drought, and researchers have long suspected that drought contributed to the end of Mayan society, along with internal conflicts and overpopulation.

According to LiveScience.com and MSNBC:

Using new reconstructions of vegetation stretching back 2,000 years, NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies climatologist Benjamin Cook and colleagues found that forest-clearing by Mayan farmers worsened drought conditions in the area. 

When the Mayans cleared forests, they exposed land surface with a higher albedo, or reflectivity, than the dark-green forest canopy. This land surface reflected energy back into the atmosphere rather than absorbing it, lessening the amount of energy on the land surface available to do things like convect water vapor to form clouds and thus rain. The result was a decline in precipitation by 10 percent to 20 percent. 

With less rain, the soil dried out, so any extra energy went to warming the surface rather than evaporating water. The result was a rise in surface temperature by 0.9 degrees Fahrenheit (0.5 degrees Celsius). The lack of rainfall and boost in heat would have been bad news for a society whose survival depended on their farmlands.

European invaders after 1492 destroyed the Mayan population by up to 90 percent in areas, and the result was a regrowth of forest as human pressures were reduced. Cave records confirm the pattern of drying during deforested periods and more precipitation when forests bounced back.

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