With thanks to the MailOnline 18.1.09:

For 2,000 years, this enormous fortune lay undisturbed in the ground where it had been left as a gift to the gods. The 824 gold coins were minted by the deeply-religious Iceni tribe, made famous by the warrior queen Boadicea. They have been dated to some time between 40BC and 15AD and are worth up to £250,000 at today’s values. That sum is likely to be split between the metal- detecting enthusiast who found the coins and the owner of the land he was working on.

The Iceni made regular offerings to the gods by leaving valuable goods in rivers or sacred groves. They would also bury their treasure when under threat.  But it seems unlikely that these coins were buried for safekeeping, and then forgotten, because they were simply too valuable. Instead they would probably have been a gift to the gods  -  and one worth the equivalent of £1 million in Boudicea’s day.

The Iron Age coins  -  stored in a pottery jar  -  were recovered in October from a field near Wickham Market in Suffolk.

Jude Plouviez, of the county’s archaeological service, said: ‘It’s an exciting find. The discovery is important because it highlights the probable political, economic and religious importance of an area.It certainly suggests there was a significant settlement nearby. As far as we understand, it was occupied by wealthy tribes or sub-tribes.’  Excavations were carried out at the site after the metal-detecting enthusiast, who does not wish to be identified, reported the find. The exact location has not been made public to stop it being raided by treasure hunters.

Peter Dean, Greater Suffolk Coroner, has been informed and will hold an inquest to rule whether the hoard should be declared ‘treasure’.

If it is, a valuation committee will determine how much the coins are worth so that they can be sold to a museum. The proceeds will then go the finder and the landowner. Collectors would pay around £300 for each of the coins, or staters.

It is the largest hoard of Iron Age gold coins unearthed in Britain since 1849, when a farm worker found between 800 and 2,000 in a field near Milton Keynes.

The Iceni lived in timber roundhouses with thatched roofs and walls of wattle and daub.

Most families grew their own food and made their own clothes but the wealthiest bought wine and other luxuries including jewellery and animal furs from Gaul and Italy.

Boadicea took her own life in 61AD after an abortive uprising against the Romans who had invaded 18 years earlier.

Apparently the game of chess did not begin in India!

It may have evolved into its modern form there in about 600AD, but the game was known in many forms for millenia.
This chess board was found in Crete and dates to about 1600BC, and the game can still be played and indeed, a sort of version is still being played in the Mediterranean today.

I was interested to note that someone else had tracked the origins of some chess terms back to Crete!

The Labyrinth of Minos was created by Daedalus, who was imprisoned by the king. The Labrys is a double headed axe whose ritual purpose has always been to ‘kill the king’, the sole aim of chess! The ancient tradition of the ‘sacred king‘ who was married to the goddess and ritually slaughtered by the labrys, may be programmed into the game of chess.

The Phoenician goddess Car represents the ‘spiral force’, a lunar goddess traversing the heavens. The Egyptian god traversing the solar route, another ‘spiral force’ was depicted in a game board called Mehen. It maybe that a similar game board represented Car’s nightly journey.

It is true that the ancient knowledge was lost to the West for a long time, but it was not lost to the Arabs or the East.

The tradition that chess originated in India may not be the whole truth.

It is certainly true that a lot of ancient knowledge travelled to India along the trade routes from Arabia, and it is also true that such knowledge was treasured and not supressed, but that does not mean that it was fully understood.

Even if it was fully understood, it may still have been ‘just a game’ for the uninitiated, guarding secrets for the mystics and those in the know.

Did the Indians have any such early board games before 600AD?

The Celts used to play a board game called ‘Wooden Wisdom‘, and that must have been before the current era.

I suspect it is the historians committing their old mistake of interpreting the oldest written record as the first human instance, ignoring as usual all of the millenia of unrecorded human history.

A gold and silver chess board was reputedly kept by Gwenddoleu as one of the Thirteen Treasures of Britain.

Back to our pagan roots!

In Druidic times, the 1st May was a fertility festival where the goddess of sexuality and fertility would be celebrated, firstly by everyone dancing around a May Pole (her traditional symbol) and then disappearing into the ‘greenwood’ to undergo nuptials. Midsummer’s day also became a time of similar nuptial ritual. Nine months later, the children of the Green Man would appear, as so many English surnames testify, see the phone directory under Greenwood and Robinson etc (see below) and many more.

As the Christian Church took over, these rituals were subsumed into myth, as ever.

Thus the ‘fairy’ Green Man becomes Robin of the Greenwood, the ‘Queen of the May’ (every village virgin) becomes Maid Marion, and the Druid becomes ‘the Abbott of Unreason’ or Friar Tuck.

I wonder how many people today attend May Pole dances, or understand the significance of Morris Dancers? Honoring ‘Mary the Gypsy’ or ‘Mary Jacob’, designated the May Queen and serves by her ‘Merrow Men’ is a true survival of our Pagan past.

We all know that Christianity hijacked the most revered and favourite figures and festivals from our ancestors when they ‘took over’.

This is because they could not extinguish the people’s love of the Old Ways.

The Green Man is a universal symbol from our ancient past and as such he links us to peoples all along the Silk Road and to times so distant, there were no countries, races, religions or cultures.

As such, this nature spirit goes beyond divisions and links us all together, especially at this time of year when he traditionally comes in the dark deep of the year to remind us that spring is just around the corner and to keep our spirits high.

He comes again at Beltane (spring) and transforms into Lugh (light) at the summer solstice, to reappear at the Samhain autumn festivities of harvest and Halloween, festivities which predate bonfire night by millenia and link to the root with Diwali to show our common heritage around the world.

The Green Man symbolises so many different aspects of our relationship to nature, I wonder if it is time for us to acknowledge this old friend?

What better icon could we have for our new Green Age?

With thanks to MSNBC and By Joseph Nasr via Reuters

JERUSALEM – Scientists in Israel are taking digital photographs of the Dead Sea Scrolls with the aim of making the 2,000-year-old documents available to the public and researchers on the Internet.

Israel Antiquities Authority, the custodian of the scrolls that shed light on the life of Jews and early Christians at the time of Jesus, said on Wednesday it would take more than two years to complete the project.

For many years after Bedouin shepherds first came upon the scrolls in caves near the Dead Sea in 1947, only a small number of scholars were allowed to view the fragments. But access has since been widened and they were published in their entirety seven years ago.

Using powerful cameras and lights that emit no damaging heat or ultraviolet beams, scientists in Israel have been able to decipher sections and letters in the scrolls invisible to the naked eye.

The scrolls, most of them on parchment, are the oldest copies of the Hebrew Bible and include secular text dating from the third century BC to the first century AD.

A team of specialists has taken 4,000 pictures of some 9,000 fragments that make up the scrolls, which number 900 in total. A few large pieces of scroll are on permanent display at the Israel Museum.

“We are able to see the scrolls in such detail that no one has before,” said Simon Tanner, a digital expert from King’s College London, who is in charge of data collection.

Scientists hope the advanced imaging technology will also help them better preserve the scrolls by detecting any deterioration caused by humidity and heat.

I have just stumbledupon this fabulous site with loads of pictures of ancient lost cities.

This photographic collection is awesome and must have taken a great deal of collecting. Do take some time to visit this site and look around.

There is a brief explanation of each site and lots of pictures. The sites range from well known places such as Abu Simbel, to lesser known places like Sanchi, and little known cities, for example Lothal.

This World just gets more interesting!

With thanks to National Geographic Christine Dell’Amore National Geographic News August 14 2008:

Dinosaur hunters have stumbled across the largest and oldest Stone Age cemetery in the Sahara desert. Paleontologist Paul Sereno and his team were scouring the rocks between harsh dunes in northern Niger in 2000 when they stumbled across the graveyard, on the shores of a long-gone lake.

The scientists eventually uncovered 200 burials of two vastly different cultures that span five thousand years—the first time such a site has been found in one place.

Called Gobero, the area is a uniquely preserved record of human habitation and burials from the Kiffian (7700 to 6200 B.C.) and the Tenerian (5200 to 2500 B.C.) cultures, says a new study led by Sereno of the University of Chicago.

The “watershed” find also offers a new window into how these tribes lived and buried their dead during the extreme Holocene period, when a grassy Sahara dried up in the world’s largest desert.

Coming across such a site “sends a tingle up your spine,” said Sereno, a National Geographic explorer-in-residence. (The National Geographic Society owns National Geographic News.)

“You’re not looking at [dinosaurs], you’re looking at your own species.”

One of the most striking discoveries was what the research team calls the “Stone Age Embrace”: A woman, possibly a mother, and two children laid to rest holding hands, arms outstretched toward each other, on a bed of flowers.

Sereno and colleagues have also made several dinosaur discoveries in the region, including the bizarre cow-like dino Nigersaurus and the bus-size SuperCroc.

Continue reading and see the video on National Geographic.

I must recommend Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Trilogy Quicksilver, The Confusion and The System of the World! Wow!

If I could write like this I would feel truly blessed.

What a sweet way to learn history!

Thank you Mr Stephenson!

John Philip Cohane wrote a classic book The Key which unfortunately is not available on amazon but can be obtained as my link indicates.

This fascinating book shows how language can be used to unlock the riddle of our past, like DNA strands can unlock our genetic structure.

Well worth a read!

Daughters of Fire by Barbara Erskine

This wonderful novel lights up the Celtic World in great brilliance.

It is a great story and also great history. It is well researched and takes into account all the recent archaeology and also the current arguments, fights and debates in modern historical and archaeological academia. Very clever indeed!

Celtic history has come a long way in the last two decades. This book illuminates all the dark corners and finally dispels all the prejudice and character assassination that has gone on for the last two thousand years, including some very dubious histories written by British historians who hero worshiped the Romans above all and who were embarrassed to know their ancestors couldn’t mix concrete! How useful such prejudicial beliefs were in the forging of the British Empire and in conquering all those naked savages and Barbarians!

At last, it is dawning on people how educated and civilised our ancestors really were and how old their civilisation really was. Erskine even mentions the startling fact that Pythagoras learnt his stuff from his Druid teachers, something that is obvious from a close study of the Time Lines and from the fact that Stonehenge is full of ‘Pythagorean’ geometry, as are many of the prehistoric stone circles. Indeed, the golden wizard hats detailing the so called Greek Meton cycle was attributable to the Northern European cultures centuries before the Greeks ‘discovered’ it, which clearly demonstrates that Greek knowledge was first and foremost proto Celtic knowledge.

Even democracy, always synonymous with the Greeks, was actually common practice in Indo European tribes across Europe and Asia Minor, and it is well known that common people in the so called ‘Barbarian’ World elected their leaders from candidates put forward for them to vote for, centuries and centuries before our modern era, and this is described in detail by Erskine in her novel.

The Greeks were influenced by the proto Celts because they were part of this ancient intelligence, given credit because they wrote it all down, whereas anything the Celts wrote down, and yes they wrote and spoke Greek, Latin and Celtic, was destroyed by later peoples. Rome valued and appropriated Greek culture which they did not regard as a threat to them, unlike the Celts with their Druids who terrified the Romans!

The Celts and the Greeks were the inheritors of the Beaker People, the Urnfield Culture and their sites at Halstatt and La Tene were very cultured. They were knowledgeable and at peace with the World they lived in. They could not conceptualise the true horror that was Rome and they paid a terrible price, and so did we! There is no reason today why we should keep on paying it, is there? The Romans set out to destroy us utterly because we represented an alternative to their universe that would, could and did really threaten them and their propaganda, and the Roman Church kept this awful tyrany going for far too long.

In this book, the full glory of who and what we were and are and will be again shines forth. It is time for the ancestors and for these truths to be restored to the proper place in history and in the modern mind. It is not acceptable to continue to describe these wonderful people in terms that would shock and horrify if they were applied to others.

The story also describes modern Druidry in clear terms that does justice to ancient and modern practice. The book describes the modern co-operation between the Protestant Church at its finest and the spirituality of the ancient world, as if some fundamental healing is now actually occurring, or is it re-emerging like the Celtic Church? The melding of beliefs described in this story satisfies our heritage as the ancestors themselves determined, before it was rigorously suppressed and destroyed by a Roman Church which does not seem to have any interest in diversity, only in ruthless control. I like especially the way the author outlines most clearly the fact that Druidry is not a religion, it is a way of living in the World, and it co-exists with Christianity in its best and finest form. This is the way forward for our modern world, where all the beliefs of the people are given pride of place and not suppressed by super forms of religion that only know how to control and destroy. The Inquisition can never be forgiven! Far too many people have been slaughtered! They cannot be swept under the carpet of history!

The clever melding of the characters in this novel also shows the close interaction between the past, the future and the present, and clearly describes the beliefs of the ancient Celts. It is the underpinning of modern healing practice. All things must be considered. In homeopathy especially, there is no clear distinction between the Worlds. The term ‘wholistic‘ has not been completely comprehended in the modern World. It is a difficult concept to get across. This book manages to explain it very nicely, and in such a way that by the end of the story, this concept is understandable. Today, modern healers are practicing healing as the ancients understood it, by accepting the melding of the past, the present and the future and in the full understanding that we are more than the sum of our parts. However, just a quick look at Wikipedia’s entry on healing will demonstrate the physicality of modern definitions, which dare not go too close to faith healing in case… well in case people laugh at them and ridicule them, because we all know that science can cure everything, don’t we?

Modern healers attempt to understand how we heal, how we become ill, how we live and how we die. At least we try!! This book illustrates the concepts behind modern healing more clearly than I have ever seen it described before. I would call it Shamanism, and people use that term because, as Barbara Erskine points out so smoothly in her novel, ‘it would not be acceptable in the modern age to be prejudiced against Native American Indian beliefs’ now would it? But they are identical to Celtic belief at heart, so how can you accept one and cast aspersions on the other? That is not very politically correct is it? Shamanism is the basic belief structure of the ancient World from Siberia to Alaska, from Iran to Ireland – why? Because all Proto European belief structure had the same origins, that’s why! And it is millenia old and it spread easily and effortlessly around the Northern hemisphere after the end of the Ice Age 12,000 years ago, across to North America, across Asia, across Europe and Asia Minor. It shares similarities with beliefs across the known World that date back many millenia around the World. It is THE basic belief structure that underpins everything, including our newer ‘religions’, because it emerged with Homo Sapiens Sapiens 60,000 years ago and it is still with us, whispering all around us.

It is time we grew up and look directly into the heart of this remarkable truth and stop piddling around with wars, chemicals and prejudice. We have paid a terrible price for the loss of such ancestors and it is time we grasped this particular nettle with both hands.