From the Toronto Globe and Mail, 9 June, 1999:
ARCHAEOLOGY
Etruscan tombs discovered
ROME. Some 270 Etruscan tombs dating from as early as the ninth century BC have been found at Cerveteri, some 40 kilometres north-west of Rome. Police first came upon tomb raiders three months ago in an area near the coast called Laghetto, which is already known as a zone rich in ancient Etruscan burial sites.
Digs were quickly organized by regional archeological societies to continue the work already begun by the tomb raiders. Ensuing work discovered 200 tombs dating from the ninth and eighth centuries BC.

From the Weekly Telegraph, No. 411, June 9-15, 1999:
Telescopic insights
The Assyrians, and not Galileo, invented the telescope in about 750 BC and used it to observe the stars and develop astrology, a book by an Italian academic claims. Giovanni Pettinato said his theory was based on artefacts kept in the British Museum, including a lens made of rock crystal found by the British archaeologist A H Layard in 1850.

From the Toronto Globe and Mail, 15 June, 1999:
Prehistoric villages uncovered
DAMASCUS. A Franco-Syrian archeological team has discovered a neolithic village dating back 11,000 years on a site in northeastern Syria soon to be flooded by a dam, archeologists said yesterday.
"Several villages have been found, one on top of the other. They contain not only dwellings, but, for the first time, large buildings for communal use," said team leader Danielle Stordeur.

From the Toronto Globe and Mail, 15 June, 1999:
Crumbling monuments
The 2,500-year-old Parthenon temple is in danger of collapse if urgent repairs to the temple's northern flank are not carried out soon, Greek archeologists say. "Restorations carried out a century ago, when techniques were in their infancy, are blamed now for dangerous splits in dozens of the Parthenons 12,575 marble blocks, some weighing 12 tonnes," The Times of London reports. "The culprits are about 15,000 iron spikes inserted in the blocks as reinforcements. No one at the time seemed to realize that the iron would rust and expand, cracking the marble yet more."

COMMENT: Typically, it reminds one of the planning by human minds for a world drawn together under the clamp of iron fisted rulership by the humanist elitist elements in the EU (read "Roman"), and the New World Order (One-World Government) planning. No iron was to be used in building the Tabernacle or Temple. Gold would not rust as does iron!

The arch of King Sapor's great banqueting hall, in Ctesiphon, Iraq, is believed to be the widest and tallest single-span vault of unreinforced brickwork in the world. The structure, built 23 centuries ago and rebuilt 15 centuries ago, is cracking and sinking because of rising groundwater. "It could fall if not immediately rescued," said Abbas Fadhil, the archeologist in charge. United Nations trade sanctions imposed on Iraq after the invasion of Kuwait in 1990 mean there is no money for preservating such structures.
Sources: news services.

From the Toronto Globe and Mail, 22 June, 1999:
Downsizing royalty
Britain: Prince Edward was given the title Earl of Wessex on his wedding day (News, June 21). Harold Brooks-Baker, publishing director of Burke's Peerage, said the decision to make him an earl rather than a duke indicated the prince would play a minor role in public life. (Buckingham Palace says Edward will become Duke of Edinburgh after the death of the Queen and the current duke.)

France: Henri d'Orleans, the Count of Paris and pretender to the French throne, died Saturday at 90. Last July, the count, who ran a rest home outside Paris, celebrated his birthday in the company of other royalty cast aside by history, including the former Empress Farah of Iran and Grand Duchess Maria of Russia. In 1992, the count had a public row with his daughter, 45 year-old Princess Cjamta;. because she urged the family to speak out against the far-right National Front party. Citing a centuries-old law that forbids women from ascending to the throne, the count said she had no right to speak.

Egypt: As an infant, Ahmed Fouad II was king of Egypt, until the country's military abolished the monarchy in 1952. He is now a Parisian businessman with no interest in politics, the Houston Chronicle reports. The royalty left in Egypt are growing old quietly. For instance, 76-year-old Princess Nimet, a cousin of King Farouk, works in a jewelry store.

From the Toronto Globe and Mail, 24 June, 1999:
Mediterranean explorer finds 2,500-year-old shipwrecks
Researchers locate Phoenician cargo vessels near southern Israeli port using the same techniques that helped pinpoint the sunken Titanic. AP and Reuters, Tel Aviv
Using the same techniques he used to locate the Titanic, explorer Robert Ballard said yesterday he has found the oldest known deep-water shipwrecks: a pair of wine-laden ships dragged to the depths of the Mediterranean during a fierce storm more than 2,500 years ago.
The underwater researcher and a team of oceanographers and archeologists, including Harvard University professor Lawrence Stager, spent three weeks locating the vessels off the southern port of Ashkelon in the eastern Mediterranean.
The pair of Phoenician cargo ships were found using an under-water robot and deep-water tracking equipment, Mr. Ballard told reporters.
He said the ocean's deepest waters are capable of suspending history in time. "Human history lost in the high seas is waiting to be discovered," said the former naval officer and oceanographer.
"A lot of history books will be re-written from what we are finding in the deep seas."
The contents of the ships indicate that they set sail from the Phoenician port of Tyre, now a city in Lebanon, about 750 BC. Both vessels were transporting hundreds of amphorae, large ceramic containers filled with wine.
Although the amphorae were found intact, the wine had seeped out and sand had filled them. The ships were headed either for Carthage, in modern-day Tunisia, or Egypt. The vessels are positioned upright about 450 metres deep on the ocean floor, about 50 kilometres off the shore of Israel. The route was not previously known as one used by Phoenician sailors.
The ships are about 18 metres long, Prof. Stager said. "The 18-metre-long ship is the largest pre-Classical ship yet discovered."
He said one ship contained about 400 amphorae and the other held about 350, indicating they were probably carrying about 10 tonnes of wine each.
Mr. Ballard, Prof. Stager and other researchers will spend the next year examining data from the expedition. The artifacts will be studied at Harvard and other institutions in the United States.
The ships are almost perfectly preserved, a result of the cold deep-sea waters and the relative absence of sediment at such depths.
"the great depths that exist in the oceans, the absence of sunlight, the great pressures, seem to preserve history far more than we thought." Mr. Ballard, a U.S. citizen, told a news conference.
The team recovered 15 amphorae from each of the vessels but said they would not raise the wrecks. They declined to divulge the ships' precise location, saying such information could encourage their plunder.
Stone anchors were found, as well as crockery, a wine decanter, and incense stands for offering prayers to the weather gods.
The ships were believed to have been part of a fleet of cargo carriers. They probably went down in a violent storm and each likely carried a crew of six, Prof. Stager said.
He established the age, origin, cargo and probable destination of the ships from studying the amphorae.
"Bob had located the ship and then we were able to actually date the ship by looking at the amphora style, and it came out to a period about 750 to 700 BC," he said. He said wine decanters found on the ships had mushroom-shaped lips that were typically Phoenician.
Phoenicians were a seafaring people who lived along the Levantine coast for about 2,000 years beginning in 2300 BC.
Mr. Ballard, who found the wreck of the Titanic in 1985, mounted the latest expedition, which ended Tuesday night, after a U.S. Navy nuclear-research submarine picked fuzzy images of the two ancient wrecks during an unconnected search of the area two years ago.
The search was sponsored by the National Geographic Society, the U.S. Office of Naval Research and an Israeli archaeological institute.

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