What Makes People Tick?

Yom HaShoah How do you remember a tragedy some seventy years ago when you see it happening all over again, all around you and all around the world? How do you tell your children that those bad and evil people who murdered so many last century are not dead and gone as we once thought but still here, just wearing different faces, shouting different slogans? How do you honour your family members, the ones still here who lived through it and the ones long gone, murdered or gassed or shot or simply left to rot, how do you remember them without the promise, always, of Never Again? How do you tell your children, your neighbours, your ancestors and future generations? How do you explain to them that despite the horror and the knowledge and the pain, it is happening again? In Brussels (Belgium) where three innocents were murdered at a museum. In Paris (France) where four were murdered at a kosher store. In Copenhagen (Denmark) where a man was killed outside a party. In Amsterdam (Nethe...

The world today is a mess. By that I mean that humans have made it into a mess. War and disease in Africa, rape and murder in the Middle East, social and economic upheavals in the west. People hate, murder, rape, abuse, lie to, threaten, torture and mistreat others. When it comes to looking at the world as a whole (not on a local or community level), I believe it is fair to say that we don't help each other, we don't think of the whole world as one family of humanity and we often treat other people as if they were less than us or beneath us. Even though we have thousands of years of history to learn from, it seems we just keep repeating the same mistakes. Even though we can do a quick online search to read works by authors such as Homer and Hippocrates, it seems we can't learn from them. Even though we can read about campaigns of Roman leaders who lived more than 2000 years ago, it seems we can't learn from them. Events in the past few months have shown me that we ...

The Biblical Archaeology Society reported on the 15th August 2014 that new research has found that the ancient Egyptians began mummifying their dead much longer ago than previously thought. About fifteen hundred years earlier to be exact. Reading the article inspired me to learn some more about Egyptian mummies and the mummification process. The British Museum's website explains that "the earliest ancient Egyptians buried their dead in small pits in the desert. The heat and dryness of the sand dehydrated the bodies quickly, creating lifelike and natural 'mummies'." ( Mummification , Ancient Egypt | The British Museum) The Ancient History Encyclopedia explains that although unintentional mummification happened as far back as prehistoric times, mummification as a purposeful and ritualistic process started around 2600 B.C.E. It was a long and expensive procedure which is why mummification was first reserved solely for Pharaohs whose mummies were placed in opulen...

Check out this very cool vid of Europe's shifting borders over the past 1000 years. Video here at Loiter.co The rise and fall of Hitler's Germany and of the Soviet Union look especially spectacular! Hope y'all enjoy!

According to an 09 August 2013 article by CNN, part of a sphinx statue has been found in northern Israel. The find is important for many reasons, not least because it is the only piece of Egyptian sculpture found anywhere in the Levant. As the article reports, excavations at Tel Hazor in northern Israel first began in the 1950s. The capital city of Canaan some 4,000 years ago, Tel Hazor is conveniently located on the route connecting Egypt to Babylon. Some quotes from Mystery surrounds Egyptian sphinx unearthed in Israel which you can read at the CNN website : "Inexplicably buried far from Egypt, the paws of a sphinx statue, resting on its base, have been unearthed with an inscription in hieroglyphs naming King Mycerinus. The pharaoh ruled in 2500 BC and oversaw the construction of one of the three Giza pyramids, where he was enshrined.  "This is of extreme importance from many points of view, since it is the only sphinx of this king known in the world -- even in Egyp...

This blog has featured posts about Gobekli Tepe in Turkey before. As ancient locations go, this is one of the most fascinating sites in the entire world! While we don't browse the web daily looking for news on all topics that interest us, today's article falls right smack in the 'interesting news' category! Owen Jarus writes for NBC News: "Ancient blades made of volcanic rock that were discovered at what may be the world's oldest temple suggest that the site in Turkey was the hub of a pilgrimage  that attracted a cosmopolitan group of people some 11,000 years ago.  The researchers matched up about 130 of the blades, which would have been used as tools, with their source volcanoes, finding people would have come from far and wide to congregate at the ancient temple site, Gobekli Tepe, in southern Turkey. The blades are made of obsidian, a volcanic glass rich with silica, which forms when lava cools quickly." Source :   'World's Oldest temple...