[science, history] Discoveries in Unusual Places
A Bizarre Find in Egyptian Desert Caves
http://cnn.netscape.cnn.com/news/package.jsp?floc=ns-tos-toda-h-02&name=fte/desertcaves/desertcaves
Ancient ships have been found in caves at the edge of the Egyptian desert. Yes, ships. In caves. In the desert! They are considered the oldest remains of seafaring ships in the world and also contain the cargo boxes they once hauled.
The cache was found in an area called Wadi Gawasis along a sand-covered bluff near the Red Sea by a team led by Florida State University anthropology professor Cheryl Ward. Wadi Gawasis is located about 13 miles south of the modern Egyptian city of Port Safaga.
The find suggests that ancient Egyptians sailed nearly 1,000 miles on rough waters to get treasures from a place they called God's Land, or Punt. The wooden planks found in the manmade caves are about 4,000 years old, making them the world's most ancient ship timbers. Shipworms that had tunneled into the planks indicated the ships had weathered a long voyage of a few months, likely to the fabled southern Red Sea trading center of Punt, a place referenced in hieroglyphics on empty cargo boxes found in the caves.
"The archaeological site is like a mothballed military base, and the artifacts there tell a story of some of the best organized administrators the world has ever seen," Ward, an expert on ancient shipbuilding, explained in a news release announcing the findings. "It's a site that has kept its secrets for 40 centuries."
Scholars have long known that Egyptians traveled to Punt, but they have debated its exact location and whether the Egyptians reached Punt by land or by sea. Some had thought the ancient Egyptians did not have the naval technology to travel long distances by sea, but the findings at the Wadi Gawasis confirm that Egyptians sailed a 2,000-mile round trip voyage to Punt, putting it in what is today Ethiopia or Yemen, Ward said.
The six rock-cut caves were used by the ancient Egyptians as work and storage rooms to protect their equipment from the harsh desert weather conditions. Along with timber and cargo boxes, the archaeologists found large stone anchors, shards of storage jars and more than 80 perfectly preserved coils of rope in the caves that had been sealed off until the next expedition--one that obviously never came. The team also found a stela, or limestone tablet, of Pharaoh Amenemhat III, who ruled between 1844-1797 B.C., inscribed with all five of his royal names. This discovery provided further evidence that the items date to Egypt's Middle Kingdom period.
The findings will be published in an upcoming issue of the International Journal of Nautical Archaeology.
Look What They Found In This Church
http://cnn.netscape.cnn.com/news/package.jsp?name=news/edgarallanpoe/edgarallanpoe&floc=wn-ns
How much is an autograph worth? Twenty thousand dollars if it's Edgar Allan Poe's. And that has made an Episcopal church in Milwaukee very happy.
A letter bearing the swirling black signature of Edgar Allan Poe--emboldened by an underline with a hook at the end--was found last year in a very cluttered walk-in safe in an Episcopal church in Milwaukee. Poe, who is viewed as the godfather of horror writers, is most famous for "The Raven" and "The Telltale Heart." No one even knew the treasure was there until Paul Haubrich, a member of St. Paul's Episcopal Church for 25 years, stumbled upon it one day after he volunteered to clean out the safe. "I was absolutely stunned when I saw the letter," Haubrich told The Associated Press. "It's in great shape, done on very high-quality paper that, when folded up, creates its own envelope." It is dated Feb. 12, 1840 and is addressed to "J.C. Passmore Esqr."
J.C. Passmore once lived in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and while he was there submitted some articles for publication to Burton's Gentleman's Magazine in Philadelphia. The assistant editor of Burton's Gentleman's Magazine was one Edgar Allan Poe. The letter bearing the famous author's signature was the bane of all writers: A rejection.
Poe tells Mr. Passmore that, alas, the magazine could not publish his articles even though they did sound interesting because there was no money. The owner of the magazine was so distraught that the publication was losing money, he told Poe to stop paying contributors.
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel quotes from the letter Poe wrote to Passmore: He says he has no doubt that the proposed articles "would prove of high interest...but we are forced, at present, for many reasons, to decline allowing compensation, except in very rare cases, where the name of the writer is well known. We cannot hope, of course, that you will send us your communications gratis..."
So how did a letter written in Pennsylvania end up hidden deep inside a cluttered, walk-in safe in a Wisconsin church? The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports the twisted tale: J.C. Passmore must not have been content writing freelance articles for magazines that rejected his work. So he became an Episcopal priest and served as rector of St. Luke's Episcopal Church in Racine, Wisconsin. The first Episcopal bishop of Wisconsin, the Right Rev. Jackson Kemper, wrote to the Rev. J.C. Passmore, as bishops do with priests in their dioceses who are under their pastoral care. Those letters, along with the one from Edgar Allan Poe, were placed together in an envelope by Eric Passmore, an attorney who died in 1979. Eric Passmore was not only a descendant of J.C. Passmore, but also of Bishop Kemper. Eric Passmore was a longtime member of St. Paul's. The letters came to rest in the safe of the historic church, which was founded in 1838. There they sat until early 2002.
And so we come to the end our tale, which unlike many of Edgar Allan Poe's stories isn't tragic or frightening at all. The letter was auctioned at Christie's in New York in April 2003 and fetched a handsome $20,000 for the church, which will be placed in a special music fund established some time ago by the Passmore family. The letter was purchased anonymously by someone who deals in rare books.
Eerie Cold War shelter uncovered under Brooklyn Bridge
http://cnn.netscape.cnn.com/news/story.jsp?idq=/ff/story/7000/20060321/1210000002.htm
03/21/2006 11:56
NEW YORK (AFP) - A routine structural inspection of New York's landmark Brooklyn Bridge has unearthed a forgotten Cold War-era stockpile of survival rations to be used in the event of a nuclear attack.
The cache of water drums, medical supplies, paper blankets, drugs and several hundred thousand calorie-packed crackers was found inside a vault in the bridge's masonry foundations, the New York Times said Tuesday.
The find, made last Wednesday, is especially significant because many of the supplies were packaged in boxes stamped with two evocative years in Cold War history: 1957, which saw the launch of the Soviet Sputnik satellite, and 1962, when the Cuban missile crisis brought the world to the brink of nuclear war.
John Lewis Gaddis, a historian at Yale University who specialises in the Cold War, said US civil defence agencies were building fallout shelters all over the country in the 1950s and stocking them with survival provisions.
"Most of these have been dismantled; the crackers got mouldy a very long time ago," Gaddis told the Times. "It's kind of unusual to find one fully intact -- one that is rediscovered, almost in an archaeological sense. I don't know of a recent example of that."
The city's transportation department, which controls the Brooklyn Bridge, has moved to secure the site pending a decision on what to do with the find.
And the health department was called in to handle the drugs, which included supplies of Dextran for treating shock.
"We find stuff all the time," said Transport Commissioner Iris Weinshall. "But what's sort of eerie about this is that this is a bridge that thousands of people go over each day.
"They walk over it, cars go over it, and this stuff was just sitting there," Weinshall said.
Eye-Popping Find in Katrina-Gutted Home
http://channels.netscape.com/whatsnew/default.jsp?story=20060321-1312
Trista Wright, a student at Armstrong Atlantic State University, is having a spring break she will never forget. Along with hundreds of college students from several states, Wright traveled to hard-hit New Orleans to help clean up during her week off from college classes. She hit pay dirt instead, finding more than $30,000 hidden in the wall of a home damaged by Hurricane Katrina.
The Associated Press reports that Wright found the cash along with some unusual papers among moldy plaster board and debris. "I started raking it out of the air conditioner vent. I thought it was garbage, and I was going to shovel it up, but I bent down to pick it up, and it was a stack of $100 bills, and then more and more kept coming," the 19-year-old said Tuesday on CNN. It added up to more than $30,000.
Wright notified the organizers of their church mission, who in turn told the St. Bernard Parish Sheriff's Office about the astonishing find. That led the police to the woman who owned the house, who was reportedly speechless upon hearing the news. (She has asked that she not be identified.) Police admitted it is not uncommon to find weapons or medications hidden in the walls of homes, but this is the first time such a large sum of money was found. The homeowner suspects the money belonged to her late father, who did not trust banks after growing up during the Depression. The house has been in the family for generations.
"To see that woman's face when we told her about the money, that's the kind of positive story that makes all the hard work worthwhile," the Rev. Warren Jones Jr. of New Salem Baptist Church in the Ninth Ward, told AP. "She said it was a miracle. And when you think about it, it was."
http://cnn.netscape.cnn.com/news/package.jsp?floc=ns-tos-toda-h-02&name=fte/desertcaves/desertcaves
Ancient ships have been found in caves at the edge of the Egyptian desert. Yes, ships. In caves. In the desert! They are considered the oldest remains of seafaring ships in the world and also contain the cargo boxes they once hauled.
The cache was found in an area called Wadi Gawasis along a sand-covered bluff near the Red Sea by a team led by Florida State University anthropology professor Cheryl Ward. Wadi Gawasis is located about 13 miles south of the modern Egyptian city of Port Safaga.
The find suggests that ancient Egyptians sailed nearly 1,000 miles on rough waters to get treasures from a place they called God's Land, or Punt. The wooden planks found in the manmade caves are about 4,000 years old, making them the world's most ancient ship timbers. Shipworms that had tunneled into the planks indicated the ships had weathered a long voyage of a few months, likely to the fabled southern Red Sea trading center of Punt, a place referenced in hieroglyphics on empty cargo boxes found in the caves.
"The archaeological site is like a mothballed military base, and the artifacts there tell a story of some of the best organized administrators the world has ever seen," Ward, an expert on ancient shipbuilding, explained in a news release announcing the findings. "It's a site that has kept its secrets for 40 centuries."
Scholars have long known that Egyptians traveled to Punt, but they have debated its exact location and whether the Egyptians reached Punt by land or by sea. Some had thought the ancient Egyptians did not have the naval technology to travel long distances by sea, but the findings at the Wadi Gawasis confirm that Egyptians sailed a 2,000-mile round trip voyage to Punt, putting it in what is today Ethiopia or Yemen, Ward said.
The six rock-cut caves were used by the ancient Egyptians as work and storage rooms to protect their equipment from the harsh desert weather conditions. Along with timber and cargo boxes, the archaeologists found large stone anchors, shards of storage jars and more than 80 perfectly preserved coils of rope in the caves that had been sealed off until the next expedition--one that obviously never came. The team also found a stela, or limestone tablet, of Pharaoh Amenemhat III, who ruled between 1844-1797 B.C., inscribed with all five of his royal names. This discovery provided further evidence that the items date to Egypt's Middle Kingdom period.
The findings will be published in an upcoming issue of the International Journal of Nautical Archaeology.
Look What They Found In This Church
http://cnn.netscape.cnn.com/news/package.jsp?name=news/edgarallanpoe/edgarallanpoe&floc=wn-ns
How much is an autograph worth? Twenty thousand dollars if it's Edgar Allan Poe's. And that has made an Episcopal church in Milwaukee very happy.
A letter bearing the swirling black signature of Edgar Allan Poe--emboldened by an underline with a hook at the end--was found last year in a very cluttered walk-in safe in an Episcopal church in Milwaukee. Poe, who is viewed as the godfather of horror writers, is most famous for "The Raven" and "The Telltale Heart." No one even knew the treasure was there until Paul Haubrich, a member of St. Paul's Episcopal Church for 25 years, stumbled upon it one day after he volunteered to clean out the safe. "I was absolutely stunned when I saw the letter," Haubrich told The Associated Press. "It's in great shape, done on very high-quality paper that, when folded up, creates its own envelope." It is dated Feb. 12, 1840 and is addressed to "J.C. Passmore Esqr."
J.C. Passmore once lived in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and while he was there submitted some articles for publication to Burton's Gentleman's Magazine in Philadelphia. The assistant editor of Burton's Gentleman's Magazine was one Edgar Allan Poe. The letter bearing the famous author's signature was the bane of all writers: A rejection.
Poe tells Mr. Passmore that, alas, the magazine could not publish his articles even though they did sound interesting because there was no money. The owner of the magazine was so distraught that the publication was losing money, he told Poe to stop paying contributors.
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel quotes from the letter Poe wrote to Passmore: He says he has no doubt that the proposed articles "would prove of high interest...but we are forced, at present, for many reasons, to decline allowing compensation, except in very rare cases, where the name of the writer is well known. We cannot hope, of course, that you will send us your communications gratis..."
So how did a letter written in Pennsylvania end up hidden deep inside a cluttered, walk-in safe in a Wisconsin church? The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports the twisted tale: J.C. Passmore must not have been content writing freelance articles for magazines that rejected his work. So he became an Episcopal priest and served as rector of St. Luke's Episcopal Church in Racine, Wisconsin. The first Episcopal bishop of Wisconsin, the Right Rev. Jackson Kemper, wrote to the Rev. J.C. Passmore, as bishops do with priests in their dioceses who are under their pastoral care. Those letters, along with the one from Edgar Allan Poe, were placed together in an envelope by Eric Passmore, an attorney who died in 1979. Eric Passmore was not only a descendant of J.C. Passmore, but also of Bishop Kemper. Eric Passmore was a longtime member of St. Paul's. The letters came to rest in the safe of the historic church, which was founded in 1838. There they sat until early 2002.
And so we come to the end our tale, which unlike many of Edgar Allan Poe's stories isn't tragic or frightening at all. The letter was auctioned at Christie's in New York in April 2003 and fetched a handsome $20,000 for the church, which will be placed in a special music fund established some time ago by the Passmore family. The letter was purchased anonymously by someone who deals in rare books.
Eerie Cold War shelter uncovered under Brooklyn Bridge
http://cnn.netscape.cnn.com/news/story.jsp?idq=/ff/story/7000/20060321/1210000002.htm
03/21/2006 11:56
NEW YORK (AFP) - A routine structural inspection of New York's landmark Brooklyn Bridge has unearthed a forgotten Cold War-era stockpile of survival rations to be used in the event of a nuclear attack.
The cache of water drums, medical supplies, paper blankets, drugs and several hundred thousand calorie-packed crackers was found inside a vault in the bridge's masonry foundations, the New York Times said Tuesday.
The find, made last Wednesday, is especially significant because many of the supplies were packaged in boxes stamped with two evocative years in Cold War history: 1957, which saw the launch of the Soviet Sputnik satellite, and 1962, when the Cuban missile crisis brought the world to the brink of nuclear war.
John Lewis Gaddis, a historian at Yale University who specialises in the Cold War, said US civil defence agencies were building fallout shelters all over the country in the 1950s and stocking them with survival provisions.
"Most of these have been dismantled; the crackers got mouldy a very long time ago," Gaddis told the Times. "It's kind of unusual to find one fully intact -- one that is rediscovered, almost in an archaeological sense. I don't know of a recent example of that."
The city's transportation department, which controls the Brooklyn Bridge, has moved to secure the site pending a decision on what to do with the find.
And the health department was called in to handle the drugs, which included supplies of Dextran for treating shock.
"We find stuff all the time," said Transport Commissioner Iris Weinshall. "But what's sort of eerie about this is that this is a bridge that thousands of people go over each day.
"They walk over it, cars go over it, and this stuff was just sitting there," Weinshall said.
Eye-Popping Find in Katrina-Gutted Home
http://channels.netscape.com/whatsnew/default.jsp?story=20060321-1312
Trista Wright, a student at Armstrong Atlantic State University, is having a spring break she will never forget. Along with hundreds of college students from several states, Wright traveled to hard-hit New Orleans to help clean up during her week off from college classes. She hit pay dirt instead, finding more than $30,000 hidden in the wall of a home damaged by Hurricane Katrina.
The Associated Press reports that Wright found the cash along with some unusual papers among moldy plaster board and debris. "I started raking it out of the air conditioner vent. I thought it was garbage, and I was going to shovel it up, but I bent down to pick it up, and it was a stack of $100 bills, and then more and more kept coming," the 19-year-old said Tuesday on CNN. It added up to more than $30,000.
Wright notified the organizers of their church mission, who in turn told the St. Bernard Parish Sheriff's Office about the astonishing find. That led the police to the woman who owned the house, who was reportedly speechless upon hearing the news. (She has asked that she not be identified.) Police admitted it is not uncommon to find weapons or medications hidden in the walls of homes, but this is the first time such a large sum of money was found. The homeowner suspects the money belonged to her late father, who did not trust banks after growing up during the Depression. The house has been in the family for generations.
"To see that woman's face when we told her about the money, that's the kind of positive story that makes all the hard work worthwhile," the Rev. Warren Jones Jr. of New Salem Baptist Church in the Ninth Ward, told AP. "She said it was a miracle. And when you think about it, it was."