Staff Pick Of The Week

Scythian mummy tomb (Fifth Pazyryk Kurgan), Pazyryk culture 3rd C. BCE. More pictures on my blog, link at bottom.

"The pair were buried alongside nine horses, a huge cache of cannabis and a stash of priceless treasures - including the world's oldest carpet and an ornate carriage.

The man had curly hair and was aged between 55 and 60 when he died, whilst the woman was about ten years younger.

It is believed he was a chieftain or king of the Pazyryk civilisation, which lived in Kazakhstan, Siberia and Mongolia from the 6th to 3rd centuries BC."

...

"The attractive log cabin was a prefabricated construction by the prehistoric Pazyryk culture to house an elite tomb - in which was buried a mummified curly-haired potentate and his younger wife or concubine.

The mound in the Altai Mountains was originally 42 metres in diameter, and this tattooed couple went to the next life alongside nine geldings, saddled and harnessed.

The house itself, recently reconstructed, was not built as a dwelling but nevertheless is seen by archeologists as showing the style of domestic architecture more than two millennia ago.

This structure was the outer of two wooden houses in the large burial mound in the valley of the River Bolshoy Ulagan at an altitude of around 1,600 metres above sea level.

The core of the mound including the ice-preserved bodies of the elite couple had been excavated by Soviet archeologists in 1949, and many of the finds are on on display in the world famous State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg.

As we have previously written, the pair - who owned perhaps the world’s oldest carpets - are currently undergoing an ultra modern medical scan to establish the cause of death, and reconstruct the appearance of the ancient pair, and to study the techniques of mummification in more detail.

Yet in 1949 this fascinating house was left in the permafrost ground - and only retrieved now from the so-called Fifth Pazyryk Barrow, to the excitement of archeologists.

Head of the excavation Dr Nikita Konstantinov from Gorno-Altaisk State University, was full of admiration about the skills of the ancient craftsmen.

‘We took out the log house and reassembled it right next to the mound,’ he said.

‘We made kind of express reconstruction, which made it possible to study the log house in detail.

‘Notches were made on each of its logs - building marks…’.

This was like IKEA instructions today for building their products, telling modern day excavation volunteers how to correctly construct the prehistoric building kit.

The result is seen in the pictures shown here.

‘This log house was first built somewhere away from the mound, then it was dismantled, brought and reassembled in the pit,’ said Dr Konstantinov.

‘Today we build in similar way, using Roman numerals, as a rule.

‘In those times they simply made different numbers of notches.’

The archeological team followed the code left by the ancient craftsmen and reassembled the house without problems.

‘The Pazyryks knitted the corners of the building in a masterly way and chopped the attachment points of these logs.

‘They fitted very cleanly….

‘When we built the log house and began to measure the height, it turned out that the height difference in the angles is only one centimetre.’

In modern constructions, a difference of 7 cm is allowed which showed how skilful were the ancient craftsmen.

He said: ‘This is a funerary structure, but we can say with a high degree of probability that the log cabin was created in the image and likeness of the houses in which the Pazyryks lived."

-taken from siberiantimes and thesun

paganimagevault.blogspot.com

Scythian mummy tomb (Fifth Pazyryk Kurgan), Pazyryk culture 4th-3rd C. BCE

Rabies is an incredibly lethal virus that kills more than 50,000 people globally each year. About 99% of those people who die from rabies were infected by the bite of a dog. This doesn’t mean that dogs are evil, or that they are disgusting, or that they should be eradicated from the planet to prevent the risk of disease transmission to humans. It does mean that we should do everything in our power to promote vaccination efforts, study disease transmission on a local and global scale, and find ways to prevent infected dogs from encountering and biting humans.

Okay, now are you ready to hear my biggest personal biology hot take?

This is pretty much how I feel about ticks carrying Borrelia burgdorferi (the bacteria that causes Lyme disease) and other arthropod disease vectors. Yes, these animals cause unbelievable suffering to humans by inadvertently transmitting disease, but that doesn’t mean they should be portrayed as evil or exterminated entirely from the environment. Ecologists have been speaking for years on how critical these species are within their established trophic webs, and how their removal could have devastating effects to many other organisms including humans. You can still be scared of or grossed out by these animals (very normal response to a potentially dangerous disease vector), but it’s important to understand that the best way for scientists to minimize the risk of these animals is NOT just eliminating them from the environment. No animal is evil or immoral for the ecological niche it fills, and encouraging a more nuanced understanding of these animals can arm us with better ways to minimize their negative impact to humans.

i have a weird appreciation for Baroque artists, in particular Francois Boucher and Peter Paul Rubens, for depicting the human body in lush detail at a time that predates the standards for bodies to be thin and airbrushed with no wrinkles or cellulite

it’s just really interesting to me

so many the things women are taught to hate about their bodies—pudgy bellies, fat rolls, double chins, and cellulite—used to be ideals of beauty shown in depictions of goddesses

I have a folder called Time is a Flat Circle in which I collect evidence of humanity. Here is most of them.

Phoenician Bowls from the Regolini-Galassi Tomb c. 700 BCE? Caere, Italy "The Regolini-Galassi tomb is one of the wealthiest Etruscan family tombs in Caere, an ancient city in Italy approximately 50–60 kilometres (31–37 mi) north-northwest of Rome. The tomb dates to between 680/675-650 BC. Based on the evidence of the tomb's architecture and its contents, it was built by a wealthy family of Caere. The grave goods included with the two decedents included bronze cauldrons and gold jewellery of Etruscan origin in the Oriental style." Source: Grifi, Luigi (1841) (in Italian) Monumenti di Cere antica spiegati colle osservanze del culto di Mitra

Jeweled medici dagger, ca. 1840

Toshiro Mifune as Detective Murakami in Stray Dog (1949) dir. Akira Kurosawa

Domari people (middle eastern romani) of Palestine

(1) A domari tent in Jerusalem near the Damascus Gate, 1920s

(2) A domari street circus in Jerusalem, 1905

(3) Domari dancer and musician in Mandatory Palestine, 1930s

(4) Domari settlement at the north of the Damascus Gate, 1914

(5) Domari musician and dancers in Galilee, 1920s

(6) Domari women and children in a domari settlement in Mandatory Palestine, 1920s

7) Domari woman with seashells in the hand to tell fortune, near the sea of Galilee in Palestine, 1930s

so says the greek chorus

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