3 evidences against Evolution and Abiogenesis
- From: Jong Kim <apostle.of.oms@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 22 Oct 2009 10:11:06 -0700
On 22 Oct 2009 RetroProphet <RetroProphet_member@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Was our oldest ancestor a proton-powered rock?
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20427306.200-was-our-oldest-ancestor-a-protonpowered-rock.html?full=true
Rock On!
Tower of Babel?s foundations photo of 1973, where is it?
(Not paying Mr. Gerster for it)
Cure for cancer was found before 1931
Israel did cross the Red Sea on foot
(...)
Location of the Ark of Noah
(...)
Added on October 21, 2009:
Daunting, dazzling - and doomed
(...)
Jonathan Jones
The Guardian, Tuesday 11 November 2008
(...)
The story of the Tower of Babel (...) the British Museum's show
reveals it is a true story. The real Tower of Babel is the first thing
you see as you enter the show - or rather you see its footprint.
In an aerial photograph taken by Georg Gerster in 1973,
the dark square mark of the tower's foundations, and that of
the staircase that ascended it, can be seen in bright dust near the
fertile Euphrates. This is the site of the ancient city of Babylon
in Iraq. That black square was left by a huge ziggurat, a tower
whose width diminishes as it rises, invented by the architects of
ancient Mesopotamia. The Bible even gets the material right:
it was built of fired bricks. You can see one on display marked with
the name of Nebuchadnezzar, who ruled Babylon in the sixth century BC.
His Babylon was a place to inspire dreams, a daunting, dazzling city.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2008/nov/11/art
http://mini-site.louvre.fr/babylone/EN/html/1.4.11.html
BABYLON
Babylon from Antiquity to the Late Middle Ages -
From the 16th to the 19th Century -Focus: Modern-era Travelers and Archaeological Excavations at Babylon
Travelers rediscover Babylon
Babylon remained an emblematic name in Western tradition, but
knowledge of the location of the site where it had blossomed?and where
its ruins survived?was lost. The Arabs and Jews of Iraq, however,
preserved this knowledge.
Two Jewish travelers, Benjamin of Tudela (who returned to Spain in
1173) and Petahia of Regensburg (who visited the site prior to 1187)
were the first to deliver accounts in the high Middle Ages. But the
scorpions and snakes inhabiting the ruins kept the former at a
respectful distance from the sinister site of Nebuchadnezzar II?s
palace, while the latter was more drawn to relics ascribed to the
prophet Daniel.
From the last quarter of the sixteenth century onward, many accountswere published by voyagers who had traveled Mesopotamian routes for
commercial, diplomatic, or scientific reasons, or simply from a desire
to see the world. But Babylon was off the main track; instead,
travelers usually took a route passing near the ruins of the ziggurat
at Aqar Quf, which they mistakenly identified as the tower of Babel,
an error that became widely accepted, and was reinforced by the spread
of humanist culture that led to the identification of Baghdad as (New)
Babylon. The nearby existence of the ruins of a great ancient city, an
old bridge, and a seasonal branch of the Euphrates that, flowing from
Fallujah joined the Tigris at Baghdad, seemed to confirm it all.
Pietro della Valle re-established the truth in 1616. He visited Tell
Babil, which he identified as the tower of Babel (we now know that
that it was Nabuchadnezzar?s so-called ?Summer Palace?). Although
disappointed by the small size of the ruins, he studied them in a
scientific spirit that was already highly modern, and he had two
paintings done (subsequently used by Athanasius Kircher for his Turris
Babel). Valle was the first traveler to Mesopotamia to take a
professional artist with him, expressly hired to record the
archaeological sites and monuments visited. The constant historical
considerations informing Valle?s meticulous study were in no way
inferior to his refined observations, which could already be described
as archaeological. Employing the survival and evolution of place-names
to provide evidence that the site was ancient Babylon, he applied
modern principles of linguistics to show the correspondence between
Babel/Babil in Arabic and Babylon in Greek.
Cartographical knowledge concerning the site of Babylon in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries did not differ from written
accounts; indeed, maps by the great cartographers of the sixteenth
century consistently and uniformly confused Babylon with Baghdad and
the Euphrates with the Tigris. Seventeenth century maps, however,
displayed decisive progress in showing Mesopotamian topography and
hydrography. It was Guillaume de l?Isle (died 1726), who permanently
established the accurate relationship between Baghdad, Al-Hillah, and
Babylon. Once established, the bases of modern cartographic
representation were pursued by Jean Bourguignon d?Anville, whose
observations were published in 1779 in a book devoted to the Tigris
and Euphrates, in which he compared ancient sources, Oriental sources,
travelers? accounts, and modern cartographers? work, to which he
contributed a detailed geographic map.
In the latter half of the eighteenth century, France was a pioneer in
historical and archaeological research into ancient Oriental sites,
Babylon in particular. Joseph de Beauchamp, astronomer, scientist, and
papal assistant in 1782, explored Babylon and other archaeological
sites by questioning nearby residents and watching excavations done by
local peasants to salvage ancient fired bricks. He learned that ?by
digging up the earth, they found a chamber that had a wall where a cow
was formed from glazed bricks? which might shed some further light on
the ancient religion of Chaldea.? Beauchamp was the first the make a
connection between the cuneiform lettering on Babylonian bricks and
the monumental writing in Persepolis.
At that point, a growing interest in antiquities, history, and
linguistics opened the way to the early archaeological explorations,
begun by the English at the start of the nineteenth century and
pursued after 1850 by Paul Emile Botta, which brought to light the
grandeur of the Assyrian civilization.
The English and French in Babylon in the 19th century
In 1801 a large stone tablet arrived in London. It had been dispatched
by Sir Harford Jones Bridges, the East India Company agent in Baghdad,
who donated it to the company museum. From that moment onward, the
British became seriously interested in Babylon. Claudius James Rich
began a brilliant career as a diplomatic when assigned to Baghdad in
1808; in 1811 he visited Babylon and drew up the first accurate
topographic map of the site. In subsequent years he undertook minor
excavations and found a series of archaeological items that he sent
back to England, notably the Nabonidus stela (BM 90837) but also
inscribed bricks, clay tablets, and cylinder seals bearing
inscriptions. He published his discoveries in 1815 as _Memoir on the
Ruins of Babylon_, followed in 1818 by _Second Memoir on Babylon_.
Rich died early, aged just thirty-five, and his collection was bought
by the British Museum.
Sir Robert Ker Porter visited Babylon in 1818. He painted the ruins
there, as well as the ones at Borsippa, located not far away (and
thought by many to be the site of the tower of Babel). In 1822,
Ker Porter published a highly popular illustrated volume of his
_Travels in Georgia, Persia, Armenia, Ancient Babylonia_.
Carl Bellino, whom Ker Porter hired as a guide at Babylon, was none
other than Claudius Rich?s young German secretary. In a letter dated
1819, Rich described Bellino as an extremely zealous young man always
at work in his office, unwilling to be coaxed into getting some
exercise?but that is how Bellino became a living encyclopedia,
acquiring a thorough mastery of the art of copying inscriptions. His
copies, published in books by Rich, Ker Porter, and Grotefend, were
remarkably accurate, something all the more surprising in that
cuneiform writing had not yet been deciphered at that time.
Captain Robert Mignan carried out digs on two occasions in the 1830s.
In 1850, Austin Henry Layard found many late tombs and a whole series
of artifacts, including bowls bearing Aramaic inscriptions and a few
fragments of glazed bricks from Nabuchadnezzar?s palace; the
significance of those fragments would nevertheless remain an enigma
for several decades. Layard dispatched the pieces he found to the
British Museum, but soon gave up his search; compared to his
spectacular finds in Assyria, Babylon produced few pieces worthy of
interest.
The objects discovered by early archaeologists wound up in the British
Museum?s Department of Antiquities, where Samuel Birch was assistant
keeper. In 1860, when a Department of Oriental Antiquities was
founded, Birch was named keeper, assisted by George Smith, Theophilus
Pinches, and Wallis Budge, all of whom would contribute to the
advancement of knowledge in this field.
In 1879, Hormuzd Rassam, from a Christian Chaldean family in Mosul,
began digging in Babylon once more, in order to save what tablets he
could, since the site was subject to looting. He had learned the trade
from Layard, with whom he worked. In Babylon Rassam found the Cyrus
cylinder (BM 90920) and many tablets that now help us to understand
everyday life in the ancient city. Rassam was the first to draw up the
plan of a classic Babylonian temple, namely the temple to the god Nabu
in Borsippa.
In 1851, a French expedition led by Fulgence Fresnel, backed by
epigraph-specialist Jules Oppert and architect Félix Thomas, was stuck
for long months in Baghdad (after an interminable voyage to get
there), until it was safe to travel to Babylon. Although the outcome
of the expedition was disappointing, the site of ancient Babylon was
finally identified and established once and for all. Texts in hand,
the expedition proved that the Kasr was the famous Palace of Wonders
described by Herodotus and Ctesias; it had exhumed texts and a
peerless collection of glazed bricks that vanished, alas, in a
shipwreck in 1855. It was left to Oppert, as a prelude to his own
glorious career, to present the results of the expedition in the form
of an atlas, illustrated by a few etchings by Thomas, of a body of
epigraphic documents and an account of the voyage.
Henri-Pacifique Delaporte, assigned to the French consulate in Baghdad
in October 1862, soon undertook a full-scale archaeological excursion
across Mesopotamia. It was a productive one in so far as he discovered
a significant set of Assyrian reliefs at Nimrod and, fortuitously, an
undisturbed Parthian tomb in Babylon, which he described as
?Greco-Babylonian.?
Subsequently, although Babylon no longer drew French archaeologists
for extensive digs, they would occasionally visit the site.
German excavations at Babylon and the ?Babel?Bible dispute?
(Der ?Babel-Bibel-Streit?)
Germany got a rather late start to archaeological exploration of
Mesopotamia. And yet German scholars made a decisive contribution to
the discovery of Mesopotamian civilization, notably in 1802 when G. F.
Grotefend first deciphered cuneiform writing. By 1855 a collection of
Oriental antiquities acquired on the art market was being assembled in
Berlin. The scholarly context was still lacking, however, which
obliged German specialists in cuneiform to work largely in London
until the end of the nineteenth century.
In 1887, at the request of Prussian museums, Robert Koldewey organized
an initial expedition to Mesopotamia in order to locate potential
ruins to excavate. Koldewey?s preference went to Babylon, a site
charged with symbolism; up to that point, no one had risked
undertaking true archaeological excavations because of the scope of
the ruins and the lack of easily identifiable buildings like the ones
in Assyria. But the decision was made, and so Babylon was the site of
digs commissioned by the Berlin museums. The first pick broke ground
on March 26, 1898. There were twenty-four workers to start with,
everyone being housed in tents. With only a few brief interruptions,
digging would continue until March 1917.
No main goal had been established in advance. It was decided that the
expedition, ?in addition to scholarly knowledge that will benefit
Assyriology and art history, should bring back sculptures and other
antiquities for the royal museums in Berlin.? The remains of buildings
that were uncovered were to be documented to serve as the basis of
later publications; particular care was also to be taken with
photographs.
The excavation journals, like the publications, are filled with
references to accounts by Greek authors and to the corresponding
Biblical passage when it came to discussing finds that seemed to defy
all concordance, to the great perplexity of the diggers. The exhumed
buildings did not seem to match the descriptions of ancient authors.
On the other hand, the German excavations attested to the historical
existence of the tower of Babel, and the overall results elicited
surprise and admiration in Europe.
(New German excavations were begun in 1962 by the Baghdad section of
the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut in cooperation with the Iraqi
antiquities administration. The goal was to determine the still-vague
connection between the tower and the surrounding buildings, and to
date the surviving core of the terraced tower. These investigations,
along with a comparison with the Borsippa ziggurat excavated by
Austrian archaeologists, produced complementary research that yielded
a better reconstruction of the tower in 1981?a new model is now on
display at the Vorderasiatisches Museum in Berlin.)
In 1875 English Assyriologist George Smith had published a book
titled, _The Chaldean Account of Genesis, Containing the Description
of the Creation, the Fall of Man, the Deluge, the Tower of Babel,
the Time of the Patriarchs, and Nimrod; Babylonian Fables, and Legends
of the Gods, from the Cuneiform Iinscriptions_. The promise of the
title was a little ambitious: ancient Mesopotamia literature contains
no mention of original sin, no history of the building of the tower,
no Biblical patriarchs or Nimrod. However, the parallel of the deluge
in the _Epic of Gilgamesh_ with the Biblical Flood was itself
sufficiently interesting, an interest that would only grow as
exaggerated links between Babylon and the Bible were asserted.
In 1898, the Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft (DOG, German Oriental
Society) was founded in Berlin. Its primary purpose was to finance and
organize archaeological digs in Mesopotamia. The society?s founders
included not only scholars but also leading business people and
political figures. Kaiser Wilhelm II, himself highly interested in
archaeology, agreed in 1901 to become the society?s Protektor
(Patron), leading to major grants from the empire?s ?available funds?
as well as the Prussian ministry of finance. Excavations, which had
begun in Babylon by 1899, were soon followed by other campaigns,
notably at Ashur.
Each year the DOG organized a formal lecture at the Sing-Akademie in
Berlin, regularly attended by the kaiser. The lecture was designed to
provide benefactors with an assessment of excavations and the major
results of research in a form accessible to the general public, all in
glamorous surroundings. The board of the DOG invited Friedrich
Delitzsch, head of the royal museums? new Near East Department, to
give the annual lecture on January 13, 1902. He chose the title,
?Babel and Bible.? Delitzsch was certainly the most esteemed and
renowned Assyriologist of his day, even beyond specialized circles. He
was convinced that one of the major goals of Mesopotamian archaeology
and Assyriological studies was a better understanding of the Bible; he
was sure that contemporary research represented ?a new era [?] in our
understanding of the Old Testament.? Delitzsch asserted that primal
Semitic monotheism had waned over time, to the benefit of a polytheism
long anchored in Babylonia. He added that the Babylonian elements of
the Bible, such as the tale of the Flood, were part of a secondary,
poorly understood tradition originating out of Babylon, which meant
that ?many Babylonian elements remained attached, via the Bible, to
our religious thought.?
On publication, that same year, of a printed version of Delitzsch?s
lecture, a public controversy broke out, fueled by countless pamphlets
and newspaper articles. Satire weighed in, and the title page of a
1903 issue (no. 6) of the Lustige Blätter, a satirical review founded
in 1885, pictured a courtroom scene: in the dock, seated, was Moses;
the plaintiff, labeled Delitzsch, pointed to the Ten Commandments and
claimed that Moses hadn?t received them on Mount Sinai but had stolen
them from the royal library in Babylon; the defense lawyer, dressed as
a Protestant minister and perhaps alluding to the conservative
politician and former court chaplain Adolf Stoeker (1835?1909),
pointed to the heavens and claimed he would call a key defense
witness. One year after the first lecture, Delitzsch gave a second
lecture on the same subject, in the same place and once again in the
presence of the kaiser, but this time before a crowd of nearly a
thousand people including the Reich chancellor. The virulent public
discussion that followed placed the emperor in a delicate situation.
As Summus Episcopus (Supreme Bishop) of the Lutheran Church of
Prussia, he had to consider his position in the ecclesiastical
hierarchy. The situation became even trickier when Delitzsch went
beyond the Old Testament and brought the New Testament into the
discussion.
On both right and left, a connection was made between Delitzsch?s
positions and the ones defended by Social Democrats; the kaiser
therefore decided to write a private letter to retired Admiral
Hollmann, the deputy director of the DOG, making clear his differences
with Delitzsch, at least as far as allusions to the New Testament were
concerned; he also accused Delitzsch of ?raising the question of the
Revelation in a highly polemical manner, and having more or less
rejected it, or, more exactly, having claimed he was able to reduce it
to purely human historical facts.? Intended for publication, this
letter was widely discussed and helped to calm things somewhat.
From Delitzsch?s own perspective, the rejection of the Old Testamentacquired anti-Semitic connotations, which would totally dominate
his argument in his 1920 publication, _Die Grosse Täuschung_
(The Great Deception).
During the famous Babel-Bible dispute, Babylon increasingly became a
symbol that no longer had any direct relationship to archaeological
exploration and philologico-historical study of Babylonia and ancient
Mesopotamia in general. Nevertheless, for several years in Germany
it focused public attention on the ancient Near East and its
recent re-discovery, something that had never happened and
would never recur again.
Italian and Iraqi excavations
In September 1974, Iraq?s Department of Antiquities commissioned the
Italian-Iraqi Institute of Archaeological Sciences in Baghdad to make
a preliminary study of a plan to restore and enhance the site of
Babylon. Its main goal was to retard degradation, due to erosion and
the rise of the water table, and also to give greater architectural
legibility to the remains of the ancient city. This study lasted until
1977.
Excavations and prospective digs were carried out from 1987 to 1989 on
questions related to the urban layout, but this campaign was
unfortunately halted due to the outbreak of war.
Most of the Babylon now visible on the site corresponds to the great
Biblical city of the monarchs of the Chaldean dynasty (626?539 BC).
The older levels of Babylon remain almost completely unknown from an
archaeological standpoint. Cuneiform texts tell us little about the
structure of the city and the actual appearance of Babylon?s
monumental buildings. For that reason, a vast research project devoted
to Babylon?s urban sector was launched; it calls for a team of experts
who will notably study the successive phases of occupation and urban
development. The interdisciplinary programs of archaeological analysis
are slated to include a new semiological reading of the cityscape.
Analysis of past and present signs and traces visible on the ground,
based on available documentation, will rest on the tried-and-true
method of interpretative analysis, on satellite imagery,
and on aerial photos taken at different times. The proposed goal
entails identifying the ancient urban strata and their
interrelationships, in order to reveal not only the historical phases
of development of the city in the Neo-Babylonian period but also
older?and more recent?archaeological layers in Babylon. Since
direct on-the-spot study is not currently possible, the archaeological
basis of this semiological interpretation will rest on the
publications of German and Iraqi excavations.
http://apostle091409usbh.wordpress.com/2009/09/13/a-correction-of-the-long-winded-title-of-this-my-blog
1. Noah's ark (Ron Wyatt)
2. Foundations of the tower of Babel (Georg Gerster)
3. The Red Sea site crossed on foot by ancient Israel (Ron Wyatt)
That which is needful has been presented to this newsgroup.
.
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