Tuesday, March 4, 2014
Arkaim: Russia’s Stonehenge and a Puzzle of the Ancient World
Everyone’s heard of Stonehenge. You could probably venture into the Amazonian jungle and seek out an untouched tribe of hunter-gatherers, spend months gaining their trust and learning their language, fighting off dysentery while you’re at it, and when their chief finally makes you an honorary member of their society, against the emphatic advice of his shaman, you could ask them if they’ve heard of Stonehenge, and the answer would probably be: yes.
Some might say that’s overstating the matter a touch, but the point stands. The sarsen stone
s of Wiltshire are famous; they’ve made their way into popular culture the world over. Though, would it surprise you to know that Stonehenge isn’t the only megalithic stone circle in the world? Probably not, but most don’t realise that there are somewhere on the order of 5000 stone circles around the world. Some exist as collections of circles, like the Senegambian circles in Gambia, Senegal, which are counted as one circle in the global list, but which actually consists of more than 1000 individual monuments covering an area of 15,000 square miles.
Great Britain boasts a large number of these Neolithic sites, but they don’t have a monopoly on henges, as they’re called over there. One of their neighbours actually has quite a few as well.
Standing alongside such geological oddities as Russia’s Manpupuner stone pillars, or the Seven Sleeping Giants, some of the most interesting Neolithic monuments stand within the borders of the former Soviet Union.
Arkaim is one of those sites. Arkaim, or Аркаим in Russian, is considered by some to be the most important and enigmatic archaeological site in northern Europe. The site is wrapped in controversy and is sometimes referred to as Russia’s Stonehenge. It sits on the outskirts of the Chelyabinsk oblast in the southern Urals, just north of the Kazakhstan border. Though it’s not a stone circle in the way that Stonehenge is a stone circle.
Arkaim is the remnants of an ancient settlement, which is basically a village that was fortified by two large stone circular walls. The settlement covers an area of some 220,000sq-ft and consists of two circles of dwellings separated by a street, with a central community square in the center. The site was discovered (rediscovered?) in 1987 by a team of Russian archaeologists, and a wave of excitement washed through the world of archaeology. The site and associated artefacts have been dated to the 17th century BCE and it’s generally agreed that it was built somewhere between 4000-5000 years ago, which puts it in the same age bracket as Stonehenge.
Arkaim has another name, one that’s not exactly kosher. It’s called Swastika City, or alternately Mandala City. It has this name for a couple reasons, firstly, if one uses their imagination, the layout of the dwellings around the central square almost looks like it’s in the shape of a swastika. As we all know the swastika is the misappropriated sign of the Nazis and of the so-called Aryan race, and which has been adopted by modern white-supremacy groups. The second reason is that the settlement is thought to have been of the Sintashta culture, which is an Indo-Iranian race (actually a language identity) of the ancient Eurasian Steppe, or in common terms, the Aryan race. So, as you can see, there are those who would like to assert that Arkaim is in fact the birthplace of the superior white race of humans, though few in mainstream science see any value in that line of reasoning.
The site holds more interesting secrets than just its association to a politically incorrect aspect of our culture however.
It has been of great interest to archaeoastronomers, and therein lies the reason for its association with Stonehenge. It’s long been known that Stonehenge has and was built with astronomical observation in mind. In fact it’s technically called an observatory. Stonehenge allowed for, and possibly may still allow for observations of 10 astronomical phenomena using 22 elements, whereas some archaeoastronomers claim that Arkaim allows for observations of 18 phenomena using 30 elements. This essentially means that certain events in the sky could be observed and tracked by using the site in particular ways and from different positions, and that Arkaim offered more observable events than Stonehenge.
Arkaim as it exists today
It would seem that Arkaim is an even better astronomical observatory than its namesake. According to Russian archaeologist K.K. Bystrushkin Stonehenge offers an observational accuracy of 10-arc minutes to a degree, whereas Arkaim offers
Midnight Movies: The Weight Of Mountains..
Plate tectonics anyone? Both beautiful and informative. How mountains are formed...
Just watch it, it will calm and transform you and make you a little bit better.
Monday, March 3, 2014
Human Rights Advocates Blast Hillary Clinton
 |
| Tom Sizemore claims, “Bill And Hillary both have separate romantic lives" |
Clinton has been praised for her role in negotiating U.S. asylum for Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng, and she received the Lantos Foundation Human Rights award for her proclamations on women’s rights and her “pioneering work on Internet freedom.”
However, activists at the Geneva Summit on Human Rights and Democracy, hosted last week by United Nations watchdog group UN Watch, gave a very different assessment of the former secretary of state, telling the Washington Free Beacon that she was silent and passive on some of the most pressing human rights issues during her tenure at the State Department.
Naghmeh Abedini, the wife of an American Christian pastor who has been imprisoned in Iran since the summer of 2012, said the State Department under Clinton all but ignored her husband’s case, and did not take an active role until Secretary of State John Kerry took over last year.
“For Hillary Clinton to have been completely silent, and not have done anything when
Hurley’s Ex-Lover Caught On Bombshell Audio Recording Revealing Bill Clinton’s White House Sex Romps Behind Wife Hillary’s Back
As Hillary Clinton prepares to run for President in 2016, RadarOnline.com has uncovered bombshell new information that could torpedo her White House dreams: The philandering husband of the former United States Secretary of State, ex-President Bill Clinton, carried on a torrid year-long love affair with British supermodel Elizabeth Hurley behind White House walls.That’s the explosive revelation dropped by the man who says he arranged the secret tryst, actor Tom Sizemore.
In a blockbuster exclusive, Radar has unearthed a secret audio recording during which the Hollywood actor, who had his own three-year sexual liaison with Hurley, recounts how the famously-frisky ex-President once sent a plane to fly Hurley to Washington D.C., where he bedded her in the White House — while First Lady Hillary was in the very next room!
On the tape, recorded in January of this year and provided to Radar and GLOBE in a joint investigation, 52-year-old Sizemore boasts to two pals about how he arranged the pair’s first rendezvous.
According to the Black Hawk Down star, it all began during a 1998 White House screening of Saving Private Ryan, when President Clinton pulled Sizemore aside from the crowd of A-listers that included Tom Hanks, Matt Damon, Ed Burns and Dennis Farina.
The premiere of the film was four years after Hurley was catapulted into the limelight after wearing that Versace dress to the premiere of ex-boyfriend Hugh Grant’s film Four Weddings And A Funeral.
Sizemore claims that Clinton asked if he wanted to see the Lincoln Bedroom and after shaking his Secret Service detail, the pervy President quickly made his move!
“We walk in,” Sizemore says on the tape, when suddenly Clinton, then in his second-term of office, asked point-blank, “Did you go with Liz Hurley for four years? Do you still see her?”
When Sizemore confirmed they had dated but were no longer together, he says the President asked for her number.
Stunned at the suggestion, Sizemore admitted to being somewhat hesitant to dole out the digits, but claims Clinton insisted: “Give it to me. You dumb mother*****r, I’m the Commander-in-Chief of the United States of America. The buck stops here. Give me the damn number.”
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)