CAIRO, Egypt (Reuters) -- An Egyptian scholar based in London, England, has been delighting Arab audiences with his inquiries into the recondite world of medieval Muslims who wrote about ancient Egypt and had some insights into hieroglyphic writing.
Among Western scholars, who have led the field of Egyptology since Napoleon's 1798 campaign and Jean-Francois Champollion's groundbreaking work on hieroglyphics in the 1820s, the conventional wisdom has been that Arabs and Muslims dismissed ancient Egypt as an irrelevant pagan civilization.
The important observations here are: 1) "Three Arab scholars between them correctly identified about 10 of the several dozen hieroglyphs that they thought made up a phonetic alphabet..." and 2) "the Arab scholars grasped two of the basic principles -- that some signs represented sounds while others were determinatives, signs that conveyed the concept of the word pictorially."
While significant from a historical point of view, it's still a bit of a footnote since these insights didn't lead anywhere useful. Still, it highlights how advanced Islamic civilization was at that point especially compared with Europe.
Library of classics at your fingertips
STUDENTS at Manchester University no longer need to thumb through dusty texts when reading classics of English literature.
They don't even have to visit the library, for the university has made every book published in English between 1453 and 1800 available online.
I tried to find an actual link to these works, but Man U was taking forever to come up. Will try to verify this, though I suspect it may only be available for ManU students and possibly to affilicated academics elsewhere (i.e., not publically available).
More on looting Stopping the Archaeological Plunder
Last spring, an armed Guatemalan gang brutalized a woman to make her give up the location of a valuable Mayan monument in the Petén rain forest so they could steal it. Then something remarkable happened. A group of local elders reported the crime to Arthur Demarest, an archaeology professor at Vanderbilt University, who alerted Guatemala’s federal police, the Servícios de Investigación Criminal. Six months later, government agents arrested 10 members of the gang, many with suspected connections to organized crime, and returned the monument to its home in Cancuén, which thrived during the Mayan Classic Period. “The S.I.C. agents and the Q´eqchi´ people are risking their lives to protect that site,” Demarest says.
In the face of widespread archaeological theft around the world, the events in Guatemala point to part of the solution: getting local citizens involved. To help do this, Demarest has partnered with the National Geographic Society to help make tourism at Cancuén an integral part of the economy. He has also enlisted a Washington, D.C.–based humanitarian organization, Counterpart International, to set up medical clinics and provide clean water, solar energy, and legal help. As a result, the Q´eqchi´ Mayans have become protective of their archaeological heritage.
Taking the plunge to find ancient shipwrecks off Greece
For a while, it looked like Greece was toast as the Persian invasion fleet sailed out of the northern Aegean Sea toward Athens.
But as the armada attempted to round Mount Athos, the Greek historian Herodotus recounts, "a violent north wind sprang up, against which nothing could contend, and handled a large number of the ships with much rudeness, shattering them and driving them aground upon Athos. 'Tis said the number of the ships destroyed was little short of three hundred, and the men who perished were more than 20,000. For the sea about Athos abounds in monsters beyond all others."
And so it was that the first Persian attempt to conquer Greece, in 492 B.C., with a combined sea-and-land attack, got no farther than Macedonia. And King Darius' next effort, two years later, would be thwarted by the Greeks at the Battle of Marathon.
Not entirely by coincidence, as Athens prepares to host the Olympics this summer, an international team of scientists will be scanning and diving the waters off Athos in a bid to find the remains of at least one of those 2,500-year-old shipwrecks.
Deep-water archaeology is the next frontier. The bottom of the Mediterannean will turn out to be a treasure trove of remains. Even more significant will be the Black Sea. The bulk of the bottom of the Black Sea is totally anoxic, meaning ships -- and their cargo (and crew?) -- ought to be nearly perfectly preserved. Several intact vessels have already been found. This will turn out to be far more significant than all the tombs of Egypt in terms of elucidating our understanding of the past in general in this entire region.