Archaeology

Pandemic History: The Great Plague of Justinian in the 500s AD was a Black Death that Shaped the Century before Islam

Research News of the University of Cambridge | – ‘Plague sceptics’ are wrong to underestimate the devastating impact that bubonic plague had in the 6th– 8th centuries CE, argues a new study based on ancient texts and recent genetic discoveries. The same study suggests that bubonic plague may have reached England before its first recorded […]

Archaeology

The U.S. Committed Cliocide (Destruction of History) in Iraq, and even Returning Gilgamesh Can’t Fix it

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The US government has returned 17,000 archeological artifacts to Iraq, many of them over 4,000 years old. This, according to Al Jazeera The objects and tablets were looted from the country during the chaos of the Bush administration’s rule of that country and were smuggled into the U.S., then sold […]

Archaeology

Were Humanity’s Oldest Monumental Religious Sites Erected in NW Saudi Arabia? 1,000 ‘Rectangles’ Older than Stonehenge

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Hugh Thomas and a team of Australian researchers have just published a groundbreaking article in the journal Antiquity describing their research into the mysterious “Rectangles” (mustatīl) dotting Northwest Arabia. This region lies due south of Israel-Palestine and Jordan. Rectangles. h/t ‘Antiquity.’ The Rectangles date from roughly 7,500 years before present, […]

Archaeology

The Catholic Reconquista in Spain outlawed Islam in 1502, but Secret Muslims kept their culture — and Cuisine — Going

The Conversation

By Aleks Pluskowski, Guillermo García-Contreras Ruiz, and Marcos García García | – Granada, in southern Spain’s Andalusia region, was the final remnant of Islamic Iberia known as al-Andalus – a territory that once stretched across most of Spain and Portugal. In 1492, the city fell to the Catholic conquest. In the aftermath, native Andalusians, who […]

Archaeology

40,000 BC: Earth’s magnetic field flipped, causing massive sudden climate change and Extinction of Neanderthals

The Conversation

By Chris Fogwill, Alan Hogg, Chris Turney, and Zoë Thomas | – The world experienced a few centuries of apocalyptic conditions 42,000 years ago, triggered by a reversal of the Earth’s magnetic poles combined with changes in the Sun’s behaviour. That’s the key finding of our new multidisciplinary study, published in Science. This last major […]

Archaeology

Were the Canaanites from Iran? Genomic History Shows that Israelis, Palestinians, Lebanese have Zagros Ancestry

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – There are no races. Human beings are all mixed up, and genomic history demonstrates this principle better than any other approach. So much of Middle Eastern politics depends on a kind of “sleeping beauty” nationalism (in Ernest Gellner’s phrase) in which it is alleged that there was an ancient race […]

Archaeology

Israeli Archeologists find 7th Century Mosque and Evidence of Tolerance in Early Islam at Tiberias

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Israeli archeologists have made two extremely important finds recently that have implications for our image of early Islam. Katia Cytryn-Silverman, an Israeli archeologist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, has concluded that the remains of a mosque in Tiberias, on the western shores of the Sea of Galilee, is seventh […]

Archaeology

Prehistoric Arabia Felix: As Humans exited Africa 120K years ago, they headed into Green Nefud

The Conversation

By Richard Clark-Wilson | – Humanity originated on the African continent at least 300,000 years ago. We know from fossil evidence in southern Greece and the Levant (modern-day Israel) that some early members of our species expanded beyond Africa around 200,000 years ago, and again between 120,000 to 90,000 years ago. They likely travelled through […]

Archaeology

Elon Musk may have been Joking, but the Flaky Theory that Aliens built the Pyramids is Faintly Racist

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Egyptian scientists and archeologists replied in a level-headed but firm way to billionaire Elon Musk’s tweet that aliens built the pyramids. It isn’t clear whether Musk was just joking around, though he sometimes talks about the possibility that advanced aliens are watching us, and thinks it statistically possible that alien […]