After analyzing the elements of the Ancient Egyptian belief system, Egyptologist Bassam El Shammaa comes up with a very unorthodox view that would shake the established Egyptology and most likely, trigger a swarm of fresh debates on the origins of the monuments at Giza. Pointing out the dualist essence of the Ancient Egyptian cosmology, El Shammaa argues the very likely existence of a “Second Sphinx” on the Giza plateau, next to the one we know as The Great Sphinx.
“Whenever we have to deal with the solar cult, we should speak of one lion and one lioness facing each other, posing parallel to each other or sitting in a back-to-back position,” says El Shammaa. He draws our attention to the Egyptian creation myth, where the almighty Atum gives birth to his son Shu and his daughter Tefnut, in the form of a lion and lioness. He also points out that the Dream Stela, carved by Thutmosis IV and found between the paws of the giant statue, clearly depicted two sphinxes.
Then what happened to Tefnut, the “female guard” of the Giza Plateau? El Shammaa believes a lightning struck the Lioness millenia ago and destroyed it.
“The Endeavor Satellite released by Nasa over the Pyramids Plateau confirmed the finding. But it makes a lot of sense that lightening could have damaged the Sphinx because the statue was often depicted wearing a double metal crown that must have conducted the shock to the neck,” stated El Shammaa.
The Pyramids of Giza predate the magical utterances recovered at Saqqara but the lion deities are predynastic and the building of the pyramids must have been inspired by those mythological figures which had always appeared in duo.
An interesting feature, clipped from The Daily Star.
A thorough analysis of Ancient Egyptian history and examination of archaeological evidence indicate that there were two sphinxes on the Pyramids Plateau, an Egyptian researcher argues.
Egyptologist Bassam El Shammaa believes that the famed half-lion, half-man statue was an Egyptian deity that was erected next to another sphinx, which has since vanished without a trace. This contradicts what many have believed for centuries — that a single colossal statue functioned as a guard to the Pyramids.
The idea of two sphinxes is more in line with ancient Egyptian beliefs, which were mainly based on duality, the researcher said. He cited Ancient Egyptian records and mythology saying that lightening had destroyed part of the Sphinx. This may have been a reference to the second sphinx which was eliminated after a curse by the chief Egyptian deity.
Discover Magazine published a detailed “hurricane map”, which was drawn by using some 150 years data. As it is clearly seen on it, the worst hit regions are at Eastern Asia, not the U.S. coast. But unless there appears a huge hurricane, shaking some U.S. cities, mainstream media does not give a damn. Hurricanes can only make headlines when and if they hit the U.S. coast; otherwise, they are just a simple item in the pile of “weather statistics” for the experts. Who cares what happens to Asians, after all?
If you think the U.S. East Coast has it bad, check out the western Pacific.
The skies of September can bring the wrath of the Atlantic hurricane season. Some years are worse than others, but if all the storms of the past century and a half were to hit at once, this is where they’d be. University of California at Berkeley physics grad student Robert Rohde used all available data from government sources to map 150 years’ worth of hurricane tracks through September 2005.
While the climate denialists who call themselves “scientists” keep on nay saying, things going worse around the Mediterranean. Summer holiday in Turkey has been passing with the fears for “lack of water” since the shadow of a serious drought fell on the country. Big cities like Ankara, Istanbul and Izmir feel the threat of a water problem that has been appearing on the horizon, while Ankara has the most serious conditions with almost empty dams. The news story below was clipped from EarthTimes and tells about another recent report that showed the effects of the climate disaster in Eastern Mediterranean. The big picture does not look very bright.
Drought conditions are mainly to blame for the loss of half of Turkey’s 650,000 acres of wetland during the last four decades, a report said.
Today’s Zaman reported Wednesday that environmental data shows that during the last 40 years, Turkey has lost massive amounts of its available wetlands to a number of factors including drought and construction efforts.
The data from the Nature Association, the Ministry of the Environment and Forestry and the World Wide Fund for Nature’s Turkish Branch, also shows that the loss of the wetlands has directly impacted the nation’s bird species.
“We are witnessing the same patterns in Turkey as in other parts of the world,” the group told the Turkish newspaper. “First the birds leave the region and then the people go too.”
Another interesting story from today’s Discovery: A “hidden” ocean current in the Tasman Sea could be one of the key factors of our planet’s climate, according to Australian scientists. Ken Ridgway says the newly discovered current connects the world’s oceans and this link could play an important role on regulating Earth’s climate.Of course there are objections and controversies as usual. Discovery report says:
Other experts agree that the Tasman Outflow exists, but are not convinced it plays a very significant role globally, primarily because it doesn’t appear to carry that much water or much heat or salinity variation — essential for driving the thermohaline circulation — into the Indian Ocean.
Aug. 21, 2007 — Australian climate scientists have located a deep-ocean current in the Tasman Sea that may play a big role in connecting the world’s oceans, and therefore regulating Earth’s climate.
The newfound Tasman Outflow is part of the “super-gyre” ocean current pathway which helps connect the Indian, South Atlantic and South Pacific oceans and is part of the global heat conveyor belt known as the thermohaline circulation. It’s not certain, however, just how big a player the Tasman Outflow is.
“It’s another link between the Pacific and Indian Ocean,” said Ken Ridgway of the Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO). “The other is through Indonesia.” Ridgway and his colleagues report on the Tasman Outflow in the August issue of Geophysical Journal Letters.
First, I prefer to use “climate change”, instead of “global warming”, because I believe what has been happening to our planet since late 1990’s is beyond “warming” or cooling”: It’s the collapse of well known weather patterns.
Second, I avoid making a statement that would point at “human activities” as the only cause of this climatological chaos. Our industries, our CO2 emissions, deforestation and pollution all contribute to this nightmare but the ancient records show there is much more than that. Cutting the emissions, being enviromental friendly and stopping the pollution are our duties as the inhabitants of this planet but these are far from being enough to stop the climate change we are experiencing.
Okay, after these necessary statements, let’s see the results of a new study based upon the analysis of the weather data: Hurricanes, cyclones and all tropical storms are becoming more and more violent (and costly) to our civilization, with the help of the climate change and its effects. The following story was clipped from Discovery’s web site:
Aug. 22, 2007 — If Earth is running a fever, then hurricanes like Dean and Katrina are her febrile seizures. As the rise in global temperature has accelerated over the last century, these tempestuous spasms have become more frequent and violent.
Each new spinning storm is also finding ever more victims populating its coastal targets — whether it be Mississippi or Madagascar, Kingston or Connecticut — and more ways to trigger trouble thousands of miles inland by way of an ever-more interdependent, globalized economy.
Climatologists and hurricane scientists now have little doubt there is a connection between hurricanes and global warming. Some of the strongest evidence comes from 100 years of records on Atlantic hurricanes — the most complete archive of its kind for any ocean basin. That record shows hurricanes have been increasing in a stepwise fashion since 1900.
A very exciting discovery in Egypt: Human footprints that go back about 2 million years or even more. Some scholars said, the footprints could even go back more than 3 million years, which makes them the “oldest traces of humans” on the planet. The story below is from the BBC, clipped by JohnWaterman at Clipmarks web site.
Archaeologists in Egypt say they have discovered what might be the oldest human footprint ever found
The outline was found imprinted in mud, which has since turned to stone, at Siwa oasis in the western desert.
“This could go back about two million years,” antiquities council chief Zahi Hawass was quoted by Reuters as saying. However Khaled Saad, director of pre-history at the council, said it could be older still, and pre-date Ethiopia’s 3m-year-old skeleton, Lucy.
Lucy, discovered in 1974 in Hadar, Ethiopia, is an extinct Australopithecus afarensis hominid estimated to be 3.2 million years old.
“It could be the most important discovery in Egypt,” Mr Hawass said.
Until now the earliest evidence of human activity found in Egypt, most famous for the era of the pharaohs, dates from about 200,000 years ago.
Finally it begins to become clear why WordPress.com was blocked in Turkey on Friday, 17th of August. According to a letter that was sent to Matt Mullenweg of WordPress, the attorneys of a Turkish radical Islamist who is considered as the “advocate of creationism in Islamic world”, Adnan Oktar (a.k.a. Harun Yahya) applied to the Turkish courts and demanded a block for a blog on WordPress.com, which “contained slanders” to both Oktar and his “colleagues”. Matt put the entire letter on his blog yesterday and asked: “I’m curious, particularly among our Turkish community, what do you think we should do about this? How should we respond?”
For those readers of The Omega Blog who liked the story about Caral I posted the other day, I’m adding some videos here that they may find interesting. The first one is a ten minutes documentary, featuring the discovery in Peru. It also includes a short interview with Ruth Shady, the Peruvian archaeologist who unearthed Caral. Unfortunately the video clip doesn’t have the entire documentary and ends at 9:48
The ban was lifted and WordPress.com blogs are accesible from Turkey again, via Telekom’s DNS servers. Still there is not an official statement and all I could find was this comment on Matt’s (WordPress.com founder) blog, posted by a Turkish user. According to rumours, an officer from the Army was spreading critical information using his blog on WordPress.com and “some inexperienced technical employee” at Turk Telekom blocked the whole WordPress domain, “instead of just banning that blog”, when the court’s written order arrived. Let’s wait for monday, for further explanations.
the issue is about some government officer (military related) spreading some information. This critical situation led to a fast court order and the district attorney issued a written order to TTNet, the main Internet and ADSL service provider of Turkey. They had to obey this legal order but some inexperienced technical employee blocked the whole wordpress.com domain in the DNS servers which led to this mess. In a few minutes a techical middle manager realized the situation and took required action. Within a few hours the wordpress.com domain was available (except the problematic blog which is still being blocked due to legal orders). The inexperienced employee is about to leave the job.
If you want to understand the total “climate change” process and its strong effects on lands and sea, you need to go to the depths of the ocean and check how the warm water circulations react to the sudden changes at global temperatures. A group of climate scientists from the UK have been doing this for a few years and the first results of their researches do not give us a bright picture.
Early in 2004, researchers National Oceanography Center at Southampton deployed 19 sets of instruments during a voyage across the Atlantic at 26.5 degrees North, from the north-western coast of Africa to the Bahamas. Scientists at US, installed further moorings on the western side of the ocean. These instruments measure flow, salinity, temperature and water pressure. After leaving the installments one year in the ocean, the scientists collected the data and inspected the variation at warm water movements, particularly of the Gulf Stream. The story below was clipped from the BBC:
The Atlantic circulation brings warm water to Europe, keeping the continent 4-6C warmer than it would be otherwise.
As the water reaches the cold Arctic, it sinks, returning southwards deeper in the ocean.
Some computer models of climate change predict this Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, of which the Gulf Stream is the best-known component, could weaken severely or even stop completely as global temperatures rise, a scenario taken to extremes in the Hollywood movie The Day After Tomorrow.
Last year the same UK-led team published evidence that the circulation may have weakened by about 30% over half a century.
The key for scientists, then, has been to measure and understand how the circulation varies naturally
and its first results show that the circulation varies substantially, by a factor of eight, even during a single year.
While the climate denialists who call themselves “scientists” keep on nay saying, things going worse around the Mediterranean. Summer holiday in Turkey has been passing with the fears for “lack of water” since the shadow of a serious drought fell on the country. Big cities like Ankara, Istanbul and Izmir feel the threat of a water problem that has been appearing on the horizon, while Ankara has the most serious conditions with almost empty dams. The news story below was clipped from 
