The Atef Crown- Ancient Egypt-Photos

The earliest depiction of the Atef Crown dates to the reign of Sahure (5th Dynasty). It consists of a central element, similar in shape to the White Crown, which is woven from plant stems and flanked by two ostrich feathers. Generally worn on top of a wig adorned with the simple circlet and horns, it may, from the New Kingdom onward, also have disks and uraei. The meaning of the word atef, which occurs from the Coffin Texts on, is disputed. It may mean "his might" or "his terror", but scholars are not sure of even this. The crown is associated particularly with the gods Osiris and Heryshef, the latter embodying the united gods Re and Osiris, the rulers of the sky and netherworld, day and night. According to chapter 175 of the Book of Going Forth by Day (the Book of the Dead), it is bestowed by the sun god. The atef can also be worn by Horus and Re in their various forms. From the time of Tuthmosis III on, the ished-fruit, from the mythic tree that stands on the horizon at sunrise, can replace the solar disk normally surmounting the atef. This symbolism of solar renewal, and related fertility, appears to complement that of the nemes headdress. The triple atef, Egyptian hmhm (The Roaring One), occurs first under Akhenaten and may have replaced the traditional atef during the Amarna period. Common in representations of the solar child emerging from the lotus flower in the morning, it may identify the king with the sun god at sunrise.

Peru unveils 4,000 year old temple,oldest Mural in the Americas

Archaeologists work at the clay temple Ventarron in the northern city of Lambayeque, November 10, 2007. (Ignacio Alva/Handout/Reuters)



The new discovery filled with murals has been discovered on the north coast.

The ancient temple inside a larger ruin in the Lambayeque valley is home to what is believed to be one of the oldest murals of its kind in the Americas.

Paul Chapman reports.
Special Thanks to Stanaxe:
stanaxe has left a new comment on your post "Toltec Pyramid of the Warriors": Hi Floyd have you seen on yahoo news the article on temples of Peru Posted by stanaxe to
Floyds Ancient Wonders at November 12, 2007 8:52 AM

Toltec Pyramid of the Warriors

The Toltecs (or Toltec or Tolteca) were a Pre-Columbian Native American people who dominated much of central Mexico between the 10th and 12th century AD. Their language, Nahuatl, was also spoken by the Aztecs.

They originated as a militaristic nomadic people, and they or their ancestors may have sacked the city of Teotihuacan (ca. 750). After they established a more settled existence, the Toltec fused the many small states in Central Mexico into an empire ruled from their capital, Tula (also known as Tollan, or Tolan). They were accomplished temple builders. Their influence spread through much of Mesoamerica in the Post-Classic era of Mesoamerican chronology. The Toltec influence on the Post-Classic Maya of Yucatan is heavy, especially evident at the city of Chichen Itza. Their pottery has been found as far south as Costa Rica.
Some writers have alleged that the Toltecs introduced the cult of Quetzalcoatl, the plumed serpent. This is certainly not so, as this deity was commonly depicted throughout Mesoamerica for centuries earlier, going back to Olmec times. In Toltec (and later Aztec) mythology Quetzalcoatl was a rival of Tezcatlipoca, the first deity who is known to have demanded human hearts as sacrifice. Thus the Toltecs seem to have introduced the habit of mass human sacrifice as later practiced by the Aztecs.
The Toltec empire is believed to have been destroyed around 1200 AD by the nomadic warriors of the Chichimecs. The ruling family of the Aztecs claimed to descend from Toltec ancestry via the sacred city of Colhuacan.

Early humans ate seafood at beach parties

Homo sapiens ate mussels, made stone blades and used pigments earlier than anyone thought.

For early humans, one of the first displays of modern behaviour was a sort of beach party and seafood feast along the coast of South Africa, scientists say.

Artefacts found in a cave on coastal cliffs overlooking the Indian Ocean suggest that people 164,000 years ago led much more sophisticated lives than anyone thought.

Scientists say these early humans would have cooked mussels and other shellfish, used red pigment perhaps as body paint and made small stone blades that could be used at the tip of a spear.

The earliest previous evidence for people using marine resources and coastal habitats was from 125,000 years ago, say the scientists who publish their findings today in the journal Nature.

And the previous earliest evidence for tools like the small, thin stone blades found at the site dates to 70,000 years ago, the researchers say."We do not have human fossils from this site, but they were very likely modern humans indigenous to South Africa," says Professor Curtis Marean, the Arizona State University anthropologist who led the study.He notes that our species Homo sapiens probably emerged between 200,000 and 150,000 years ago in Africa.The world was in a glacial period from 195,000 to 125,000 years ago, with much of Africa in cold and dry conditions that may have prompted early humans to find new food sources and expand from inland to the coast, the researchers say.Marean says the findings support the idea that on the far southern shore of Africa a small population of modern humans endured this glacial period by expanding their diet to include shellfish, harnessing new technologies, and by using symbolism in their social relations.It may be that this was "the progenitor population" for all modern people, Marean says.Habitation of coastlines is of great interest to scientists wondering about the later spread of modern humans out of Africa.

Living on the coastProfessor Sally McBrearty of the University of Connecticut and Professor Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum in London say these findings "provide strong evidence that early humans displayed key elements of modern behaviour" 164,000 years ago.

The scientists say they found shellfish, including brown mussels, at the site. The presence of a type of barnacle that grows on the skin of whales indicates these people also may have scavenged whale corpses that washed ashore.

Shellfish were among the last additions to the human diet before the debut of domesticated plants and animals, Marean says.Early hunter-gatherer relatives of modern humans for millions of years dined on only land plants and animals, the scientists say.

"It is likely that shellfish was a critical food resource for the survival of this population during this long dry time period, when terrestrial food resources were likely less productive," Marean says.

Olmec Civilization- Photos

The Olmec heartland is an area on the south coast of the Gulf of Mexico coastal plain of southern Veracruz and Tabasco, is thus called because of the concentration of a large number of Olmec monuments as well as the greatest Olmec sites.
The area is about 125 miles long and 50 miles wide (200 by 80 km), with the Coatzalcoalcos River system running through the middle.
These sites include San Lorenzo Tenochtitlán, Laguna de los Cerros, Tres Zapotes, and La Venta is one of the greatest of the Olmec sites.
La Venta is dated to between 1200 BCE through 400 BCE which places the major development of the city in the Middle Formative Period.
Located on an island in a coastal swamp overlooking the then-active Río Palma river, the city of La Venta probably controlled a region between the Mezcalapa and Coatzacoalcos rivers.
The site itself is about 18 miles inland with the island consisting of slightly more than 2 square miles of dry land.
The main part of the site is a complex of clay constructions stretched out for 12 miles in a North-South direction, although the site is 8° West of true North.
The entire southern end of the site is covered by a petroleum refinery, and has been largely demolished, making excavations difficult or impossible. Many of the site's monuments are now on display in the archaeological museum and park in the city of Villahermosa, Tabasco.

The Olmec heartland is characterized by swampy lowlands punctuated by low hill ridges and volcanoes. The Tuxtla Mountains rise sharply in the north, along the Bay of Campeche. Here the Olmecs constructed permanent city-temple complexes at several locations, among them San Lorenzo Tenochtitlán, La Venta, Tres Zapotes, Laguna de los Cerros, and La Mojarra.
They also had great influence beyond the heartland: from Chalcatzingo, far to the west in the highlands of Mexico, to Izapa, on the Pacific coast near what is now Guatemala, Olmec goods have been found throughout Mesoamerica during this period.

The Olmec domain extended from the Tuxtlas mountains in the west to the lowlands of the Chontalpa in the east, a region with significant variations in geology and ecology. Over 170 Olmec monuments have been found within the area, and eighty percent of those occur at the three largest Olmec centers, La Venta, Tabasco (38%), San Lorenzo Tenochtitlan, Veracruz (30%), and Laguna de los Cerros, Veracruz (12%).

Those three major Olmec centers are spaced from east to west across the domain so that each center could exploit, control, and provide a distinct set of natural resources valuable to the overall Olmec economy. La Venta, the eastern center, is near the rich estuaries of the coast, and also could have provided cacao, rubber, and salt. San Lorenzo, at the center of the Olmec domain, controlled the vast flood plain area of Coatzacoalcos basin and riverline trade routes.
Laguna de los Cerros, adjacent to the Tuxtlas mountains, is positioned near important sources of basalt, a stone needed to manufacture manos, metates, and monuments. Perhaps marriage alliances between Olmec centers helped maintain such an exchange network.
History
Until the early 1900's, the Maya civilization was considered to be the parent culture in Mesoamerica from which all other societies sprouted. There have been many Mayan sculptures and carvings found in the region, so all other carvings were also considered to be that of the Maya. One difference in the carving is that some carvings of large heads had faces with more African looking features than many of the other Mayan works.
There was also evidence of a half-jaguar half-man beast, which also did not fit in with other Mayan finds. It wasn't until 1929, when Marshall H Saville, the Director of the Museum of American Indian in New York, classified these new works as an entirely new culture not of Mayan heritage. He named this culture Olmec, which means the "rubber people" in Nahuatl, the language of the Mexica ("Aztec") people. It was the Aztec name for the people who lived in this area at the much later time of Aztec dominance. Ancient Mesoamericans, spanning from ancient Olmecs to Aztecs, extracted latex from Castilla elastica, a type of rubber tree in the area. The juice of a local vine, Ipomoea alba, was then mixed with this latex to create rubber as early as 1600 BC.
It is not known what name the ancient Olmec used for themselves. Later Mesoamerican accounts seem to refer to the ancient Olmec as "Tamoanchan".
The oldest Olmec site originated at its base in San Lorenzo, Tenochtitlan, where distinctively Olmec features begin to emerge around 1150 BC. The rise of civilization here was probably assisted by the local ecology of well watered rich alluvial soil, encouraging high maize production. This ecology may be compared to that of other ancient civilizations: Mesopotamia and the Nile River Valley.
At its height, this village had a population of less than 1,000 people. The inhabitants were farmers and fishermen who also did a small amount of hunting. The major crops were maize, beans, and squash. The fishing season coincided with the flooding of the river. The men would catch fish in landlocked ponds after the flooding of the river subsided. Along with fish, the Olmec would catch turtles for their main source of protein. If the fishing was slow and the turtle hunting was not going well, the Olmec would substitute domesticated dog and turkey meat in their diet.
It is speculated that the dense population concentration at San Lorenzo encouraged the rise of an elite class that eventually ensured Olmec dominance and provided the social basis for the production of the symbolic and sophisticated luxury artifacts that define Olmec culture.
Evidence of materials in San Lorenzo that must have come from distant locations suggests that early Olmec elites had access to an extensive trading network in Central America. This wwa most likely be protected by some sort of military system.
It is not known with any clarity what happened to this culture. Their main center at San Lorenzo, was all but abandoned around 900 BC, and La Venta became the main city. Environmental changes may have been responsible for this move, with certain important rivers changing course. However, there is also some evidence suggestive of an invasion and destruction of Olmec artifacts around this time.
Around 400 BC, La Venta also came to an end, although the importance of the ceremonial complexes apparently outlasted the Olmec state or culture. Within a few hundred years of the abandonment of their last cities, successor cultures had become firmly established in their former lands, most notably the Maya to the east, the Zapotec to the southwest, and the Teotihuacan culture to the west.
Olmec Center
The great Olmec centers that soon developed at La Venta, San Lorenzo, and Laguna de los Cerros, and the smaller centers such as Tres Zapotes, were not simply vacant religious sites, but dynamic settlements that included artisans and farmers, as well as religious specialists and the rulers.
The Olmec architecture at San Lorenzo, for example, includes both public-ceremonial buildings, elite residences, and the houses of commoners. Olmec public-ceremonial buildings were most typically earthen platform mounds, some of which had larger house-like structures built upon them.
At La Venta we can see that after 900 BC such platform mounds were arranged around large plaza areas and include a new type of architecture, a tall pyramid mound.
An important feature at the Olmec centers were drainage systems consisiting of a buried network of stone drain lines, long U-shaped rectangular blocks of basalt laid end to end and covered with capstones. Research at San Lorenzo suggests those systems were actually aqueducts used to provide drinking water to the different areas of the settlement. Some of the aqueduct stones, such as San Lorenzo Monument 52, were also monuments, indicating that the aqueduct system had a sacred character as well.
Ball Games
The word "Olmec" also refers to the rubber balls used for their ancient ball game. Early modern explorers applied the name "Olmec" to the rediscovered ruins and art from this area before it was understood that these had been already abandoned more than a thousand years before the time of the people the Aztecs knew as the Olmec.
Rubber ball games have great antiquity throughout the Americas, and the recent discovery of several rubber balls at the Olmec site of El Manati, near San Lorenzo, confirms that the game was played by the Olmec. Archaeologists working at La Venta twenty years ago discovered what they hypothesized were the remains of a ball court there, and it is possible that such ball courts were also part of the architecture at Olmec centers.
The Olmec were perhaps the originators of the Mesoamerican ballgame, prevalent among later cultures of the region and used for recreational and religious purposes. They were playing ball before anyone else has been documented doing so.

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November 2007 Winners- Floyds Best Bloggers Award

Glitter Graphics - GlitterLive.com

In The Blogosphere there are Bloggers that shine a little brighter, always helping others, using kind voices to enrich this Beautiful World we share. Each of these Winners deserves to be applauded by their peers! Thank All of You for Your Amazing contributions to the International Blogging Community!

And the Winners for November 2007 Are:

From MyBlogLog

TNT-Computer TNT (Tips and Tricks)

JJL-Nature Shows and Dreams

Renato d'Oxaguia

oylinki-News, Tips and Information Blog

PetLvr-Battling Depression

From BlogCatalog:

Sn0wTigressJ0-The Laidback Buddhist

purpleladycentre - ART FROM THE HEART

luckyme -Pick Your Potion

urikalish -Urikalization

LadyBanana-Lady Banana

From Blogging to Fame

Deborah Petersen-Life in the Fast Lane

KIM BARKER-laketrees

I have Saved the Best for Last! You have to see this to believe it!:

GREG LUNGER-
Cosmic Photo Art

Congratulations to all the Winners!

If you are a winner, copy the Blue Ribbon to your site and Link it to this Post!

Judges:
You have been hand picked as the Cream of the Crop by:

Floyd Craig and William Thomas

Previous Winners From BumpZee Are:
malawika
parisukat
sidewinder
KiwiPulse
Johblogs
Previous Winners From MyBlogLog are:
Imhar
cooper
carolynloveman
Texas_Jam
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whydowork
MissladybugNeoAuteur
Previous Winners From BlogCatalog Are:
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coreyirwin
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Previous Winners (Sept. 2007):

Previous Winners From BumpZee Are:

hotdogman
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zublizainordin

MorganLighter

ndpthepoetress

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RennyBA

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Tut's Face Displayed for First Time

Zahi Hawass, secretary general of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities (center), joins workers around the stone sarcophagus of King Tutankhamun in the boy pharaoh's underground tomb near Luxor, Egypt, on November 4, 2007. Tut's mummy was moved on Sunday from the coffin inside his burial chamber to a high-tech glass display case about 30 feet (9 meters) away in the tomb's antechamber. (Watch video.) The transfer marks the first time the famous mummy has gone on public display, a move that is expected to increase tourist visits to Egypt's famed Valley of the Kings. (Read the full story.) The new display will also help preserve the ancient body, which experts say had been deteriorating rapidly because of exposure to heat and humidity.

The Aztecs

Aztec Pyramid of the Sun

The Aztecs, or more properly, the Mexicas, for whom the later Republic of Mexico was named, were a Mesoamerican people of central Mexico in the 14th, 15th and 16th centuries. They were a civilization with a rich mythology and cultural heritage. Their capital was Tenochtitlan, built on raised islets in Lake Texcoco – the site of modern-day Mexico City. The Aztec empire produced the biggest demographic explosion in Mesoamerica: the population grew from an estimated 10 million to 15 million.

Ancient Egyptian Jewelry-Photos

The Egyptians wore regular clothes but always wore elaborate jewelry. The personal jewelry was worn for ornamention and to show how wealthy the person was. Some of the jewelry included earrings, bracelets, anklets, rings, and beaded necklaces. The gems the Egyptians put in the jewelry were garnet, onyx, turquoise, amethyst, and lapis lazuli. They also added copper, gold, and shells. Egyptians also wore necklaces of colorful beads and amulets. They thought that wearing jewelry brought good luck.

Jewelry was extremely popular throughout the history of the Egyptian nation. Excavations of tombs have shown that queens of Egypt were almost always buried with a multitude of jewelry to be used in the afterlife. The amount of jewelry worn by an individual often indicated their social position and level of wealth. Jeweled collars, such as the one depicted on the Nefertiti costume of the statue uncovered and now on display in Berlin, were very popular and usually made of very brightly colored gems. The clothing of Nefertiti was not displayed on the statue, save the headdress; however it is quite easy to imagine that her dress was just as elaborate and bejeweled. Rings, anklets and bracelets were also part of the normal ancient Egypt fashion. Earrings, even in ancient Egypt, were common among wealthy women.
Even the poor, who could not afford much, attempted to adorn themselves with as much jewelry as was possible. While not nearly as expensive, the jewelry of the commoner was usually very brightly colored and was constructed of materials such as pottery.

Jewels of a princess

Jewels of a princess
New Kingdom, Dynasty 18, 1570-1320 B.C.
Gold, carnelian, lapis lazuli, turquoise, and other semi-precious stones, from Thebes
This is an extraordinary collection of original jewelry, some examples of which most certainly belonged to a princess who lived during the early years of Dynasty 18. The taller, cylindrical bracelets are remarkable because their beads are still strung on the original, thin gold wire. One assumes that these jewels were placed on the princess' mummy for the symbolic value of the materials from which they were made. The gold and red stones would associate her with the sun and those of blue and green would equate her with the plant world. Just as the sun rose each day and just as plants sprouted anew with each successive season, so too, it was thought that the princess would be resurrected in the Hereafter.
Photo courtesy of Roemer und Pelizaeus Museum

Fossilized Spider, 50 Million Years Old, Clear As Life

A 50-million-year-old fossilised spider has been brought back to life in stunning 3D by a scientist at The University of Manchester.
In a paper published in the Zootaxa journal, Dr David Penney and co-authors from Ghent University in Belgium report on the use of a technique called ‘Very High Resolution X-Ray Computed Tomography’ (VHR-CT) to ‘digitally dissect’ tiny fossils and reveal the preservation of internal organs.
Dr Penney, from The School of Earth, Atmospheric and Environmental Sciences (SEAES), specialises in studying spiders trapped and preserved in amber tens of millions of years ago.
The male spider studied in his latest paper is a new species named Cenotextricella simoni. It is around 53-million years old and was found preserved in amber.