Ancient World Review

How Effective Was The English Longbow?

"The English Longbow, or Welsh Longbow was the AK-47 of its day; reliable and powerful, with a quick rate of fire and exceptional range. This weapon would earn its fame from the Hundred Years’ War fought between England and France, in battles such as Crecy (1346), Poitiers (1356) and Agincourt (1415)." Source: Archery Historian.

"Although the Welsh were the first to make tactical use of the Longbow, there is evidence of its use in Neolithic times [see below]. A bow dating to approximately 2600 B.C. was discovered in Somerset, yet ironically none survive from the period of its dominance (c. 1250–1450 AD)."

Note: Back in 2012, Science Daily reported that researchers had discovered "the oldest Neolithic bow in Europe at La Draga Neolithic site in Banyoles [a city in Catalonia, Spain]." Dating back to 5400 - 5200 BC, the complete bow is 108 cm [~42 inches] long. Whether it qualifies as a longbow is another question. Loosely speaking, the long in longbow means that the bow is"roughly equal to the height of the user," so if this was a longbow its owner must have been around four feet tall.

According toWikipedia, "the earliest known example of a longbow was found in 1991 in the Ötztal Alps with a natural mummy known as Ötzi. His bow was made from yew and was 1.82 metres (72 in) long; the body has been dated to around 3,300 BC and another bow made from yew was found within some peat in Somerset, England dated to 2700–2600 BC. Forty longbows have been discovered in a peat bog at Nydam in Denmark which date from the 4th century AD."

What To Do With Notre Dame?

"Modernists, after all, have done far more damage in the long run to the urban fabric of Europe than even the Second World War did; and it stands to reason that they, the modernists, would not want anything to escape their attentions for long, lest anything remain intact to shame by painful comparison their own wretched efforts." Source: TakiMag.

Related: Keep the modernists away from the Notre Dame restoration.

The Ancient Georgian Kingdom Of Colchis

Documentary from 2008. Part Two here.

"Colchis was a region in the Southern Caucasus that appeared in the story of Jason and the Golden Fleece, in Greek mythology. It was on the area where modern-day Georgia is now located." Source: Greek Mythology.

"According to the Greek mythology, Colchis was a fabulously wealthy land situated on the mysterious periphery of the heroic world. Here in the sacred grove of the war god Ares, King Aeëtes hung the Golden Fleece until it was seized by Jason and the Argonauts. Colchis was also the land where the mythological Prometheus was punished by being chained to a mountain while an eagle ate at his liver for revealing to humanity the secret of fire." Source: Wikipedia.

Colchis was also said to be the homeland of Medea, a sorceress and priestess of Hecate, the goddess of "crossroads, entrance-ways, light, magic, witchcraft, knowledge of herbs and poisonous plants, ghosts, necromancy and sorcery." (Wikipedia) The daughter of King Aeetes, Medea is one of the most notorious women in Greek mythology. According to the play by Euripedes, she was a witch who married Jason and later killed their children after he abandoned her.

Scientists Discover Footprints Of Humans Crawling Through Cave In Italy 14,000 Years Ago

"About 14,000 years ago, a party of five barefoot people — two adults, one preteen and two children — walked and even crawled through a dark passageway in a cave, according to a new study that analyzed the hand- and footprints these individuals left behind." Source: Live Science.

 

"To light their way, these late Stone Age people likely burned bundles of pine (Pinus) sticks, which archaeologists also found in the cave, known as Grotta della Bàsura, in northern Italy."

The Genetic History Of Ice Age Europe

"Analyses of ancient DNA from prehistoric humans paint a picture of dramatic population change in Europe from 45,000 to 7,000 years ago, according to a new study led by Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator David Reich at Harvard Medical School."  Source: Howard Hughes Medical Institute (2016)

"The new genetic data, published May 2, 2016 in Nature, reveal two big changes in prehistoric human populations that are closely linked to the end of the last Ice Age around 19,000 years ago. As the ice sheet retreated, Europe was repopulated by prehistoric humans from southwest Europe (e.g., Spain). Then, in a second event about 14,000 years ago, populations from the southeast (e.g., Turkey, Greece) spread into Europe, displacing the first group of humans."

Ancient DNA Suggests That Some Northern Europeans Got Their Languages From Siberia

Video from 2011. Animation showing the spread of Uralic-speaking peoples through Asia into western Europe.

"Most Europeans descend from a combination of European hunter-gatherers, Anatolian early farmers, and Steppe herders. But only European speakers of Uralic languages like Estonian and Finnish also have DNA from ancient Siberians. Now, with the help of ancient DNA samples, researchers suggest that these languages may have arrived from Siberia by the beginning of the Iron Age, about 2,500 years ago, rather than evolving in Northern Europe." Source: Science Daily.

How Notre Dame Cathedral Might Be "Redesigned And Rebuilt," I.E. Destroyed

"Top French design bureau Vincent Callebaut Architectures has gone viral with its plans to replace the roof of the medieval cathedral with a glass shell filled with solar panels." Source: RT.

"Underneath will be a 'sustainable' farm capable of producing 21 tons of fruit and vegetables each year, to be given out for free to the homeless. Not coincidentally perhaps, this is at least the third eco-garden proposal that has been made public, while the vast majority of the submitted designs for the planned reconstruction feature a glass roof."

Comment: All I can say is that I hope whoever is making the decisions here keeps these modern architects away from the cathedral.

Meanwhile, we haven't heard anything at all about what caused the fire that did so much damage to this fantastic historical monument. According to the last reports I read, investigators were focusing on "short circuits and cigarettes," but that was several weeks ago. The fire seems to have vanished from the news completely, which isn't too surprising, I guess. We live in a time when major disasters come and go as if they never happened.

Is the investigation still in progress? Who knows? If this follows the usual pattern, we'll get some throwaway official announcement a couple months from now and that will be the end of it. We can be sure of one thing, though. If the investigators find evidence that the fire was set deliberately, we'll never hear about it.

Note: "French officials are warning people near Notre Dame Cathedral that lead contamination is high in the closed-off plazas and streets surrounding it." Source: Live Science.

"The reason? Building practices reaching back thousands of years. The medieval structure and its later additions — including the famous spire — contained lead, which fell to the ground during the fire that broke out on April 15.

The Battle Of Tours & The Modern Islamification Of Europe

Charles Martel's victory over the Moors/Saracens at the Battle of Tours, one of the most critical battles in the history of the West, "rescued our ancestors of Britain and our neighbors of Gaul from the civil and religious yoke of the Koran," according to Gibbon. The importance of this battle can't be overestimated.

"Few battles are remembered over 1000 years after they are fought, but an exception is the battle of Poitiers [another name for the battle of Tours] in 732, where Charles Martel turned back a Muslim raid that, had it been allowed to continue, might have led to the conquest of Gaul." -- Fighting Techniques of the Medieval World, p. 19. Note: this battle of Poitiers shouldn't be confused with the battle of Poitiers that took place during the Hundred Years' War.

The battle of Tours checked the Muslims' advances into western Europe after they had carried out a long series of destructive incursions into north Africa, Spain, the Near East, and eastern Europe. In 719 AD, the forces of al-Hurr al-Thaqafi captured the southern French city of Narbonne, but were subsequently defeated by Duke Eudo of Aquitaine:

"The Muslims withdrew only to return in two years with a far larger army, which defeated Eudo and pursued him as far as Tours, the major religious center. In 732, between the towns of Tours and Poitiers, the two armies [the western forces now under the command of Charles Martel] faced one another for seven days without fighting," according to A History of the Middle Ages, by John M. Riddle (p. 147). The Muslims ran out of patience and attacked first, but "could not penetrate the Franks' lines." By nightfall, the Muslims withdrew.

If Martel hadn't defeated the Moors, western Europe would probably be Muslim today, but everything that goes around comes around and it's starting to look like the sacrifices those Frankish soldiers made were all in vain. Europe has degenerated to the point where its corrupt leaders are now welcoming the Muslims with open arms and European liberals are cheering them as they pour into their countries.

Video from 2015.

I wonder what Martel would have said if he'd known that huge crowds of Muslims would be praying in the streets of modern Paris, blocking traffic in a passive statement of political power with the full cooperation of the authorities? Would he have bothered to fight the Saracens if he'd known that modern Europeans would simply invite the Muslims into their countries, all in the name of "diversity" and "multiculturalism?"

Video from 2010.

1,283 years after the battle of Tours, the Muslims are achieving through immigration what they couldn't achieve through warfare in the Middle Ages. The Islamification of Europe is happening at an incredible rate. It was already well advanced before the latest "refugee crisis," which may turn out to be the modern equivalent of the Germanic tribes pouring into the Roman Empire.

Video from 2015.

The "barbarians" who overran Rome had a lot in common with the Romans, however. Islam is a foreign and hostile religion, totally incompatible with western civilization. If something doesn't happen soon, Europe is finished, assuming that it isn't too late already. Betrayed by their own leaders, demoralized by the poison of Cultural Marxism, the decaying welfare states of western Europe seem to be committing cultural suicide. Are we witnessing the birth of the future state of Eurabia? Don't think it can't happen, because it is happening.

Charles Martel had it easy. He only had to stop a military invasion. The current crisis is something completely different.

How Yersinia Pestis Evolved To Cause Pneumonic Plague

Pneumonic plague, a particularly nasty form of the disease, spreads very quickly. Untreated, it has a mortality rate of almost 100 percent, according to Wikipedia, and "[s]ome hypothesize that the pneumonic version of the plague was mainly responsible for the Black Death that resulted in approximately 50 million deaths in the 1300s."

Report from 2017.

There are three different strains of the plague and it's possible that they were all involved in the Black Death along with several other diseases:

"Many scholars arguing for Y. pestis as the major agent of the pandemic suggest that its extent and symptoms can be explained by a combination of bubonic plague with other diseases, including typhus, smallpox and respiratory infections. In addition to the bubonic infection, others point to additional septicemic (a type of 'blood poisoning') and pneumonic (an airborne plague that attacks the lungs before the rest of the body) forms of the plague, which lengthen the duration of outbreaks throughout the seasons and help account for its high mortality rate and additional recorded symptoms."

Beowulf The Work Of A Single Author?

Video from 2014.

"Beowulf, the epic poem of derring-do and monsters, was composed by a single author, research suggests, pouring cold water on the idea it was stitched together from two poems." Source: The Guardian.

Based on a computer analysis of "small features of the text," this research "suggests – although cannot conclusively prove – that it was the work of a single poet, the researchers say.

"...But mysteries remain – not least the identity of the Beowulf author. 'The most that can be inferred from the language of the poem is that the author probably spoke the Mercian dialect and probably lived during the first half of the eighth century,' said Madison Krieger, co-author of the study from Harvard University."

Note: According to Wikipedia, "The Beowulf manuscript was transcribed from an original by two scribes, one of whom wrote the prose at the beginning of the manuscript and the first 1939 lines before breaking off in mid sentence. The first scribe made a point of carefully regularizing the spelling of the original document by using the common West Saxon language and by avoiding any archaic or dialectical features. The second scribe, who wrote the remainder, with a difference in handwriting noticeable after line 1939, seems to have written more vigorously and with less interest. As a result, the second scribe's script retains more archaic dialectic features which allow modern scholars to ascribe the poem a cultural context."