Podcast with Brothers of the Serpent on YouTube With special guest, Daisy-dog
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The hazard from fragmenting comets Last month, Bill Napier (co-creator of the coherent catastrophism theory, with Victor Clube) published his latest paper (MNRAS, vol. 488, p 1822-1827) on the impact hazard from disintegrating comets in the inner solar system. His focus is on a large 100 km comet in an Encke-like orbit. It is a sophisticated work that extends his earlier estimates, this time by combining explicit orbital simulations with a calibrated model of comet fragmentation (published by de Sisto et al. in 2009). His aim, like mine in Prehistory Decoded, is to estimate the hazard to Earth from the kind of comet thought to have become trapped in our inner system a few tens of thousands of years ago. We know, pretty much, that this happened because of the massive zodiacal dust cloud and correlated fragments that remain in orbit. He concludes that we can expect one or two impact collisions over the last 20,000 years, or so, with energy over 6000 Mt, and that this energy wil...
Gobekli Tepe is huge! This is for the benefit of those that haven't yet seen the subsurface radar scan of Gobekli Tepe. The above image is from Deitrich et al., Antiquity vol. 86 (2012), freely available on the internet. The little portion of Gobekli Tepe so far excavated corresponds to the detailed portion of the map, bottom right, which includes the main circular enclosures A to D. As you can see, even Enclosure D, the oldest and largest enclosure yet uncovered, corresponding to the uppermost green circle is small relative to some of the remaining structures. The structure right in the middle of the plot looks especially interesting - being nearly twice the diameter of enclosure D. Considering the progression of these structures - they seem to get larger as they get older - perhaps this central enclosure is the 'heart' of Gobekli Tepe, and will reveal a great deal more about its function and purpose. But some of the other structures remaining in the ground al...
Zodiacal dating the Gundestrup Cauldron Interior of Panel A of the Gundestrup Cauldron, image from Wikipedia The Gundestrup Cauldron is a fantastic piece of large, intricate silverware, weighing around 7 kilos. It was found in a Danish bog in 1891, but its manufacture is thought to date to the first few centuries BC, or perhaps slightly after. It is formed from several panels displaying mythological scenes, including many animals and humanoid faces. The main panel that concerns us is the interior of Panel A, shown above. This particular panel is very similar to the Pashupati Seal, which features in Prehistory Decoded (shown below). Pressing from the Pashupati Seal, Mohenjo-Daro, India, image from Wikipedia. The Pashupati Seal possibly shows an early version of Shiva, known as Rudra, an Indian horned god, surrounded by animals. The zodiacal date of this seal is given in Prehistory Decoded as around 1950 BC, to within a few hundred years, which agrees with i...
Zodiacal dating the Burghead Bulls A Pictish (Burghead) bull symbol stone in the National Museum of Scotland The Pictish bull symbol has had a hard time justifying itself. Jackson (in The Symbol Stones of Scotland) claims it is not a Pictish symbol at all, because it never occurs in a pair - which is his definition of a Pictish symbol. Cummins (in The Picts and their Symbols) makes no mention of bull symbols at all. This is despite around 30 'individual' bull symbols being found at Burghead that have the same style as all the other Pictish symbols. Only 6 of these symbols have survived (one is in the National Museum of Scotland - see above). Burghead is the site of an ancient Pictish fort, thought to be the oldest and largest Pictish site of all. While radiocarbon evidence suggests the ancient fort dates back to the 5th century BC, much older iron age and even bronze age finds have been uncovered nearby, indicating the area was occupied from a very early time. Apar...
A fishy tale Image : http://www.tourisme-vezere.com/fr/fiche/Grotte-et-gouffre-Dordogne-Perigord/Abri-du-Poisson/PCUAQU024FS0000O Of course, we are familiar with the fish symbol representing Pisces. But at Gobekli Tepe, and later throughout the Near East, Pisces is represented by the tall bending bird - which probably eventually became the Egyptian god Thoth. So when and where did the switch for Pisces from tall bending bird to fish happen? The earliest potential Pisces-fish symbol might be the carved salmon in the L'Abri du Poisson cave, France (BTW, Don's maps is a simply brilliant resource for Palaeolithic art - how he found the time to visit all these sites, I'll never know). Unfortunately, this fish carving can't be radiocarbon dated, so we can't know whether it corresponds to Pisces or not. But given that we have proven that animal symbols in Palaeolithic art do generally represent constellations, and given the undoubted effort and expertise that ha...
Equivalence of Mithraic Tauroctony and Cippus of Horus scenes Mithraic Tauroctony (Roman, circa 0 AD, left) and Cippus of Horus scene (Egyptian, New Dynasty, 1st millennium BC and earlier) The Mithraic Tauroctony scene (above left) has fascinated scholars for hundreds of years (see here ). The origin of Mithraism and the meaning of its symbolism has proven to be a tricky problem. Early ideas centred on its origin in Persia in the 2nd or 3rd millennium BC, because of the dress-code of Mithras and because bull-slaying is a known theme of Persian Zoroastrianism (the primordial bull is slain by Ahriman, who perhaps becomes Mithras in ancient Rome). However, more recently the astronomical interpretation of David Ulansey, an American Professor of comparative mythology at Princeton, has gained favour. He interprets the scene as a change of age, from the age of Taurus into the age of Aries. Therefore, the scene displays knowledge of precession of the equinoxes. Familiar symbols suppor...
Decoding Pictish symbols This work is now peer-reviewed and published here . Image from Aberdeenshire.gov.uk/leisure-sport-and-culture/archaeology/sites-to-visit/pictish-symbol-stones/ The Picts lived in Scotland in the 1st millennium AD, and probably before. It is generally thought that the Romans named them after the paint they wore, and they built Hadrian's Wall to protect their lands to the south from them. The Picts are famous for their symbols, which they carved into megalithic pillars. To date, these symbols have remained a mystery, although several people have provided potential interpretations. One of the most well-known is due to Jackson who interpreted them as family crests - he describes his theory in detail in his 1984 book 'The Symbol Stones of Scotland'. In my view, they are instead practically the same system of zodiacal and astronomical symbols we have found across Europe and the Near East, from Palaeolithic caves to Gobekli Tepe, Ca...