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Syria's Stonehenge: Neolithic stone circles, alignments and possible tombs discovered
(The Independent) For Dr. Robert Mason, an archaeologist with the Royal Ontario Museum, it all began with a walk last summer. Mason conducts work at the Deir Mar Musa al-Habashi monastery, out in the Syrian Desert. Finds from the monastery, which is still in use today by monks, date mainly to the medieval period and include some beautiful frescoes.
Dr. Mason explains that he “went for a walk” into the eastern perimeter of the site - an area that hasn’t been explored by archaeologists. What he discovered is an ancient landscape of stone circles, stone alignments and what appear to be corbelled roof tombs. From stone tools found at the site, it’s likely that the features date to some point in the Middle East’s Neolithic Period – a broad stretch of time between roughly 8500 BC – 4300 BC. It is thought that in Western Europe megalithic construction involving the use of stone only dates back as far as ca. 4500 BC. This means that the Syrian site could well be older than anything seen in Europe.
At a recent colloquium in Toronto, Canada, Mason described his shock at discovering the apparent tombs, stone circles and stone alignments: “I was standing up there thinking, oh dear me, I’ve wandered onto Salisbury Plain,”
At the southern end of the landscape there are three apparent tombs. They are about eight metres in diameter and each of them “actually has a chamber in the middle”. The roof is corbelled which suggests that beneath them is “something you would want to seal in.” Each of these corbelled structures had a stone circle beside it, which is about two meters in diameter. Dr. Mason cautioned that the team did not have the chance to do more than survey the area, so it’s still possible that these corbelled structures could have a purpose other than burial. More work also needs to be done to get a precise date of construction.
Dr. Mason set out to look for more stone circles and chambered structures. This time he brought a monk with him, from the monastery: “Lurking around in the hills above a Syrian military base with a digital camera in one hand and a GPS unit in the other is the sort of thing that makes you want to have a monk in your presence,” he explained.
The two of them went to a rock outcrop – a place that would have been a good source of flint in ancient times – where he found the remains of several corbelled structures. In the valley below they found another corbelled structure with a stone circle right beside it.
The monk who travelled with him sensed that this high outcrop would have been of great importance to the people who lived here. “This is a high place” he told Mason. As Mason gazed at the landscape, from the height of the outcrop, he saw stone lines, also known as alignments, going off in different directions. Dr. Mason has a strong background in geology, and knew immediately that these could not be natural features. “I know what rocks look like, where they belong - these rocks don’t belong in that.”
One of stone lines was “very bizarre,” snaking its way up a hill. Mason followed the line and found that it led to the “biggest complex of tombs of all.” This particular stone structure has three chambers and was probably the burial place for “the most important person.” In the front of the tomb are the remains of a stone circle. Dr. Mason can’t confirm for sure that this was used as a tomb, until further archaeological work takes place. The lithics the team found in the landscape are also quite unusual – they don’t seem to be made from local material. Mason explained that local flint is white or dark red, but the material they found is “very good quality brown chert.”
The Neolithic period is a time period when people in the Middle East were beginning to grow crops and adopt farming. They didn’t live in settlements larger than a village. There were no cities in the Middle East or anywhere else in the world.
Professor Edward Banning is a University of Toronto anthropology professor and Neolithic period expert, and has done extensive fieldwork in the Middle East, including Jordan. He said that we need to be careful about drawing conclusions before more fieldwork is done. “Virtually all the burials that archaeologists have ever discovered from Neolithic sites in that part of the world come from inside settlements – in fact even below floors and houses,” he said. If the corbelled structures are confirmed as burial structures, then this site will represent something new. “It’s possible that this landscape that Dr. Mason has identified could be an example of off-site burial practices in the Neolithic which would be very interesting.”
This would help settle a mystery that archaeologists have long faced. Banning said that while burials have been found in Neolithic settlements, “Those burials are not high enough in number to account for the number of people who must have died in those settlements. So a number of us for many years have assumed that there must have been off-site mortuary practices of some kind.”
Dr. Mason goes a step further. He says that this site “sounds like Western Europe” and he wonders if this could be an early example of the stone landscapes seen at places like Stonehenge. Dr. Julian Siggers of the Royal Ontario Museum, another Neolithic specialist, pointed out that it has been argued that agriculture spread from the Near East to Europe. This find creates a question - could these stone landscapes have travelled with them? “It’s such an important hypothesis if it’s right that it’s worth telling people about now,” said Mason. “We’ve found something that’s never been found in the Middle East before.”
Professor Banning is sceptical about this idea. He said that stone structures are found throughout the world, pointing to the dolmens found in East Asia. He claims that people in Western Europe could have developed the techniques independently of the people who built the landscape near the Deir Mar Musa al-Habashi monastery. Prof. Banning also said that Mason’s site may not be entirely unique in the Near and Middle East. He said that archaeologists have detected, via satellite photos, what appear to be cairns and stone circles in other areas, including the deserts of Jordan and Israel. However, he admits that most of these things have not received a lot of archaeological investigation. That situation is about to change. Dr. Mason plans to return to the Deir Mar Musa al-Habashi site this summer with a team of Neolithic experts. The results of their investigations may well put Britain’s Stonehenge in the shade.
Earth Raised up Its Magnetic Shield Early, Protecting Water and Emerging Life.
Here we are drinking coffee and tweeting and otherwise going about our lives, generally not giving much thought to the protection that the Earth’s magnetic field affords us from the solar wind. But that magnetic field is crucial for our existence. Now, new findings in Science say that this protective shield originated even 200 million years earlier than scientists had previously thought, perhaps protecting the planet’s water from evaporating away and aiding the rise of life on the early Earth.
To know about the planet’s magnetic field three and a half billion years ago, you need iron, which records not only the direction but also the strength of the magnetic field when it forms. In South Africa, study leader John Tarduno and his team found quartz with iron tucked inside that had remained unchanged in all those years. Using a specially designed magnetometer and improved lab techniques, the team detected a magnetic signal in 3.45-billion-year-old rocks that was between 50 and 70 percent the strength of the present-day field, Tarduno says [Science News]. Three years ago he made a similar find in rocks 3.2 billion years old; thus, this find pushes back the Earth’s magnetic field at least another 200 million years.
Still, you or I wouldn’t find the Earth of that era to be terribly hospitable. In the sun’s more turbulent youth, it likely spun faster and unleashed a greater barrage of radiation. Not only was the Earth’s magnetic field strength quite a bit less than it is today, but also the magnetopause—the furthest extent of the field, where it meets the incoming solar wind—stretched only half as far out from the planet as it does today. With the magnetopause so close to Earth, the planet would not have been totally shielded from the solar wind and may have lost much of its water early on, the researchers say [Scientific American].
Pushing the existence of Earth’s magnetic field back further into the planet’s history helps fill in the picture of how life arose, the researchers argue, and it also has implications for those hunting extraterrestrial life. Life as we know it, they say, requires not only liquid water, but also the right magnetic field strength for that water to last over the long term, says Tarduno. Mars may be dry today because it lost its magnetic field early on, he adds [Science News].
There’s a lot left to learn about the protective layer that makes our lives possible. For a separate study this week in Geophysical Research Letters, another team ran simulations of the activity in the Earth’s core and concluded that they could predict a flip in the field’s polarity—which has happened now and then during the planet’s history—with no more warning than a few decades. Some models suggest that a flip would be completed in a year or two, but if, as others predict, it lasted decades or longer we would be left exposed to space radiation. This could short-circuit satellites, pose a risk to aircraft passengers and play havoc with electrical equipment on the ground [New Scientist].
Massive head of pharaoh unearthed in Egypt
(Associated Press) Archaeologists have unearthed a massive red granite head of one Egypt's most famous pharaohs who ruled nearly 3,400 years ago, the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities announced Sunday. The head of Amenhotep III, which alone is about the height of a person, was dug out of the ruins of the pharaoh's mortuary temple in the southern city of Luxor.
The leader of the expedition that discovered the head described it as the best preserved sculpture of Amenhotep III's face found to date. "Other statues have always had something broken: the tip of the nose, the face is eroded," said Dr. Hourig Sourouzian, who has led the led the Egyptian-European expedition at the site since 1999. "But here, from the tip of the crown to the chin, it is so beautifully carved and polished, nothing is broken."
The head is part of a larger statue found several years ago, along with the parts of the body, the back slab, and the ceremonial beard which Souruzian says will soon be connected with the head. Amenhotep III, who was the grandfather of the famed boy-pharaoh Tutankhamun, ruled from 1387-1348 B.C. at the height of Egypt's New Kingdom and presided over a vast empire stretching from Nubia in the south to Syria in the north.
Sourouzian said the pharaoh was famous for leading Egypt at the peak of its ancient civilization, when peace and luxury were prevalent throughout the kingdom. Craftsmen were also honing their artistic techniques during the period, which may explain the symmetrical features of the unearthed head. "But he may have looked exactly as this statue and he may have been a very beautiful, very handsome man," Sourouzian told the Associated Press.
Amenhotep III's massive mortuary temple was largely destroyed, possibly by floods, and little remains of its walls. The expedition, however, has unearthed a wealth of artifacts and statuary in the buried ruins, including two statues of Amenhotep made of black granite found in March.
Levitating magnet may yield new approach to clean energy
(PhysOrg.com) -- A new experiment that reproduces the magnetic fields of the Earth and other planets has yielded its first significant results. The findings confirm that its unique approach has some potential to be developed as a new way of creating a power-producing plant based on nuclear fusion -- the process that generates the sun's prodigious output of energy.
Fusion has been a cherished goal of physicists and energy researchers for more than 50 years. That's because it offers the possibility of nearly endless supplies of energy with no carbon emissions and far less radioactive waste than that produced by today's nuclear plants, which are based on fission, the splitting of atoms (the opposite of fusion, which involves fusing two atoms together). But developing a fusion reactor that produces a net output of energy has proved to be more challenging than initially thought.
The new results come from an experimental device on the MIT campus, inspired by observations from space made by satellites. Called the Levitated Dipole Experiment, or LDX, a joint project of MIT and Columbia University, it uses a half-ton donut-shaped magnet about the size and shape of a large truck tire, made of superconducting wire coiled inside a stainless steel vessel. This magnet is suspended by a powerful electromagnetic field, and is used to control the motion of the 10-million-degree-hot electrically charged gas, or plasma, contained within its 16-foot-diameter outer chamber.
The results, published this week in the journal Nature Physics, confirm the counter-intuitive prediction that inside the device's magnetic chamber, random turbulence causes the plasma to become more densely concentrated — a crucial step to getting atoms to fuse together — instead of becoming more spread out, as usually happens with turbulence. This "turbulent pinching" of the plasma has been observed in the way plasmas in space interact with the Earth's and Jupiter's magnetic fields, but has never before been recreated in the laboratory.
Most experiments in fusion around the world use one of two methods: tokamaks, which use a collection of coiled magnets surrounding a donut-shaped chamber to confine the plasma, or inertial fusion, using high-powered lasers to blast a tiny pellet of fuel at the device's center. But LDX takes a different approach. "It's the first experiment of its kind," says MIT senior scientist Jay Kesner, MIT's physics research group leader for LDX, who co-directs the project with Michael E. Mauel, professor of applied physics at Columbia University's Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science.
The results of the experiment show that this approach "could produce an alternative path to fusion," Kesner says, though more research will be needed to determine whether it would be practical. For example, though the researchers have measured the plasma's high density, new equipment still needs to be installed to measure its temperature, and ultimately a much larger version would have to be built and tested.
Kesner cautions that the kind of fuel cycle planned for other types of fusion reactors such as tokamaks, which use a mixture of two forms of "heavy" hydrogen called deuterium and tritium, should be easier to achieve and will likely be the first to go into operation. The deuterium-deuterium fusion planned for devices based on the LDX design, if they ever become practical, would likely make this "a second-generation approach," he says.
When operating, the huge LDX magnet is supported by the magnetic field from an electromagnet overhead, which is controlled continuously by a computer based on precision monitoring of its position using eight laser beams and detectors. The position of the half-ton magnet, which carries a current of one million amperes (compared to a typical home's total capacity of 200 amperes) can be maintained this way to within half a millimeter. A cone-shaped support with springs is positioned under the magnet to catch it safely if anything goes wrong with the control system.
Levitation is crucial because the magnetic field used to confine the plasma would be disturbed by any objects in its way, such as any supports used to hold the magnet in place. In the experimental runs, they recreated the same conditions with and without the support system in place, and confirmed that the confinement of the plasma was dramatically increased in the levitated mode, with the supports removed. With the magnet levitated, the central peak of plasma density developed within a few hundredths of a second, and closely resembled those observed in planetary magnetospheres (such as the magnetic fields surrounding Earth and Jupiter).
Summarizing the difference between the two approaches, Kesner explains that in a tokamak, the hot plasma is confined inside a huge magnet, but in the LDX the magnet is inside the plasma. The whole concept, he says, was inspired by observations of planetary magnetospheres made by interplanetary spacecraft. In turn, he says, for planetary research the experiments in LDX can yield "a lot more subtle detail than you can get by launching satellites, and more cheaply."
The MIT and Columbia scientists say that if the turbulence-induced density enhancement exhibited by the LDX could be scaled up to larger devices, it might enable them to recreate the conditions necessary to sustain fusion reactions, and thus may point the way toward abundant and sustainable production of fusion energy.
"Fusion energy could provide a long-term solution to the planet's energy needs without contributing to global warming," says Columbia's Mauel.
The LDX project, led by Mauel and Kesner and funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, has been through more than 10 years of design, construction and testing, and produced its first experimental results in its levitated configuration last year, which are being reported in the analysis published this week. Dr. Darren Garnier of Columbia University, who directs LDX experimental operations, last month received the Rose Award for Excellence in Fusion Engineering for his work on LDX. A newly installed microwave interferometer array, developed by MIT graduate student Alex Boxer PhD '09, was used to make the precision measurements of the plasma concentrations that were used to observe the turbulent pinch.
"LDX is one of the most novel fusion plasma physics experiments underway today," says Stewart Prager, director of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. Because of the unique geometry of the system, he says, "theoretical predictions indicate that the confinement of energy might be very favorable" for producing practical fusion power, but the theory needs to be confirmed in practice. "For these benefits to be realized, the somewhat bold theoretical predictions must be realized experimentally," he says.
Archaeological Findings Highlight Syria Role in Human Civilization
The archaeological discoveries of the excavation expeditions working at 17 archaeological sites in Aleppo city (north Syria) contribute to highlighting Aleppo's role in the human civilization during various eras. Chairman of the Ruins Excavation Section in Aleppo Ruins and Museums Department Youssef Kanjo pointed out that the Syrian-Japanese joint expedition working in Didarieh Cave, northern Aleppo, unearthed lots of stony tools dating back to the Yabroudi civilization. He added that excavation works included the part returned to the Musterian Civilization, as hundreds of flint and bony tools were used by the Neanderthal Man, to whom the Musterian Civilization belongs.
The Lebanese-Syrian expedition working in al-Nabi Huri, in Ephreen area, discovered the city's fence during the Byzantinean and Islamic eras. Kengo pointed out that the Syrian-Polish expedition working in Tel al-Qaramil, north Aleppo, discovered a circular bridge and number of circular adjoining houses and tombs dating back to the Bronze era. The Syrian-French joint expedition working in Qinesreen site, South Aleppo accomplished an archaeological survey for the site and documented all the Islamic and classical ruins in the archaeological village of al-Aeis in preparation to start the excavation works in the Islamic castle. The excavation works uncovered a Factory for glass manufacturing, Kenjo went on.
The Syrian-Dutch expedition working in Aleppo castle completed the work in the Aramaic Temple and the preparation works for turning the Temple to be a museum. The Syrian-Dutch and American expedition finished its works in Emar Palace, East Aleppo. The expedition restored a part of Bell Temple, dating back to the late Bronze era, using the same material which the Temple was built from. The French expedition working in Samaan Castle continues its excavation works in the main entrance of the church. The expedition discovered a number of buildings, which were used as supermarkets, in addition to an important archaeological Hammam (Bathroom) in the western part of the church dating back to the Byzantine era. The bathroom is distinguished by good condition mosaic floor.
The expedition continues its works in Gha'da Cave site in Manbij to unearth the most oldest mud painting in the world, which was discovered during the previous excavation seasons. The works include the area surrounding the painting in order to understand it. For his part Director of Aleppo Ruins and Museums Department Nadeen Fakish said that the discoveries of the Spanish expedition working in Tel al-Amarinaa in Jarabluse area are dating back to the bronze era. The expedition discovered a factory for manufacturing wine. The Syrian-Danish expedition conducted some surveys at Hulwanji castle on Saghour River. The surveys showed that the castle, which is dating back to the medium Bronze era, was built of adobes and still existed on 3 meters height.
The Belgian expedition continued its excavation works in Tel Ahmar, unearthing a pyramidal archaeological tomb dating back to medium Bronze era (2000 years B.C). The archaeological sites in Aleppo governorate are a main attractive factor for the national and foreign joint excavation expeditions and contribute to highlighting the various civilizations in the city through the ages. (ANA)
Tombs cast light on nation’s origins
Before the time of the three monotheistic religions that now dominate the world, there once ruled different gods with many names, shapes and sizes. Of these, one reigned high above in the sky, casting her holy light on her people – the sun. Inside a small, ancient beehive of a building, a single ray from the sun creeps in through a tiny opening. It is the only light inside. Once it has passed there is only the dark and the damp.__“To the old inhabitants here, the sun brought with it light and life,” says Dr Hasan al Naboodah, a history professor at UAE University. __“So when they died, they wanted to continue to bask in its embrace and to come back to life after their death by making a special opening for the sun god to visit their graves.” He visited the 5,000-year-old tombs in hope of finding links to his own past through the graves of his ancestors.
The entrance of each tomb faces south-east, to catch the sunrise. For those few hours every day, the sun has been the only regular visitor to the tombs through the ages.__Some of the tombs are as much as four metres high, with a space inside about two metres wide. The hard part is getting there. In many cases, the doorways have become blocked by fallen stones, and even in those that have been reconstructed the entrance is a narrow tunnel, less than two metres high and 50cm wide. Visitors have to squeeze sideways to make it to the circular heart of the tomb. More than 500 of these tombs, known as Hafeet graves or Mezyad graves, after the village nearby – have been discovered. They gave their name to the Hafeet period, which dates from 3200BC to 2700BC, the early part of the Bronze Age. __The tombs, built from rough local rocks, were excavated more than 40 years ago along the northern escarpment and eastern slopes of Jebel Hafeet in al Ain.__“This area was once a bustling farmland on the route of a caravan,” said Dr al Naboodah. “So it is very likely there were immigrants and influences from Mesopotamia and the ancient Egyptians that introduced different kinds of gods and deities as well as religious rituals that spread throughout the Arabian peninsula. Similar tombs were discovered in the UAE – in Khatt, Beeh Valley and Qoor Valley in Ras al Khaimah – as well as other parts of the peninsula, such as Bahrain. __The pagan Arabs are believed to have looked upon the sun as a goddess and the moon as a god. __One of the well-known pagan deities inside the Kaaba in pre-Islamic Mecca was the Lat, a goddess related to the sun. In Mesopotamia, the sun god was known as Shamash, similar to the modern Arabic word for sun, shams.
“Inside the tombs, pieces of pottery from Mesopotamia were found, so the Mesopotamian influence was great here,” said Dr al Naboodah. __The fragments found are of a style known as Jemdet Nasr, referring to a site near Babylon in Iraq famous for its multicoloured pottery. The finding also helped to substantiate trade links between Mesopotamia and the UAE as far back as 4000 BC.__Although the tombs are hardly easily accessible – even with a 4x4, it can take up to half an hour to reach them across unmarked, rocky roads – they have been plundered by raiders over the ages. “It is a real shame,” said Dr al Naboodah. __“We didn’t find much inside them besides bits of pottery, arrowheads, and beads, no sign of any valuables like gold or any funeral-related items that could tell us more about the story of the tombs and the people buried in it.”__Some bronze objects, vessels made of soapstone and beads of a much later date indicate that the graves may have been re-used in a later period, mainly during the Iron Age (1200BC to 300 BC).
Although some skeletal remains have been found, it is hard to be sure which period they are from as it was common in the Iron Age to reuse old graves. __Most of the graves on the northern side of the mountain have been lost to development, but those on the eastern side are protected and regularly monitored. __Some have been restored to the various stages of construction by the Department of Antiquities and Tourism. Until recently, the area was largely off limits, because it was previously used as a military area and was consequently cluttered with land mines. These, however, have now been cleared in preparation for a resort project.__Until that is complete, two years from now, the tombs stand in seclusion, a testament to a past way of life, and one that is still a mystery.__“There is still so much that we don’t know about our ancestors here,” said Dr al Naboodah. “But slowly, we are finding clues to our past, and how we came to be the way we are today.” (SOURCE: The National)
Newly Discovered Archaeological Sites In India Reveals Ancient Life
Newly discovered archaeological sites in southern and northern India have revealed how people lived before and after the colossal Toba volcanic eruption 74,000 years ago, according to Press Trust of India (PTI) on Tuesday.__The international and multidisciplinary research team, led by Oxford University in collaboration with Indian institutions, has uncovered what it calls 'Pompeii-like excavations' beneath the Toba ash.__The seven-year project examines the environment that humans lived in, their stone tools, as well as the plants and animal bones of the time.__"This suggests that human populations were present in India prior to 74,000 years ago, or about 15,000 years earlier than expected based on some genetic clocks," said project director Michael Petraglia, Senior Research Fellow in the School of Archaeology at the University of Oxford.__The team has concluded that many forms of life survived he super-eruption, contrary to other research which has suggested significant animal extinctions and genetic bottlenecks.__According to the team, a potentially ground-breaking implication of the new work is that the species responsible for making the stone tools in India was Homo sapiens.__Stone tool analysis has revealed that the artefacts consist of cores and flakes, which are classified in India as Middle Palaeolithic and are similar to those made by modern humans in Africa.__"Though we are still searching for human fossils to definitively prove the case, we are encouraged by the technological similarities.__An area of widespread speculation about the Toba super-eruption is that it nearly drove humanity to extinction.__The fact that the Middle Palaeolithic tools of similar styles are found right before and after the Toba super-eruption, suggests that the people who survived the eruption were the same populations, using the same kinds of tools, says Petraglia.__The research agrees with evidence that other human ancestors, such as the Neanderthals in Europe and the small brained Hobbits in Southeastern Asia, continued to survive well after Toba.__Although some scholars have speculated that the Toba volcano led to severe and wholesale environmental destruction, the Oxford-led research in India suggests that a mosaic of ecological settings was present, and some areas experienced a relatively rapid recovery after the volcanic event.__The team has not discovered much bone in Toba ash sites, but in the Billasurgam cave complex in Kurnool, Andhra Pradesh, the researchers have found deposits which they believe range from at least 100,000 years ago to the present.__They contain a wealth of animal bones such as wild cattle, carnivores and monkeys.__They have also identified plant materials in the Toba ash sites and caves, yielding important information about the impact of the Toba super-eruption on the ecological settings. (SOURCE: Bernama)
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