Human Sacrifices At Massive Pyramid Along Great Wall Change Archaeologists' View Of Early China

A 4,300-year-old city, which has a massive step pyramid that is at least 230 feet (70 meters) high and spans 59 acres (24 hectares) at its base, has been excavated in China, archaeologists reported in the August issue of the journal Antiquity.

The pyramid was decorated with eye symbols and "anthropomorphic," or part-human, part-animal faces. Those figures "may have endowed the stepped pyramid with special religious power and further strengthened the general visual impression on its large audience," the archaeologists wrote in the article. 

For five centuries, a city flourished around the pyramid. At one time, the city encompassed an area of 988 acres (400 hectares), making it one of the largest in the world, the archaeologists wrote. Today, the ruins of the city are called "Shimao," but its name in ancient times is unknown.

The pyramid contains 11 steps, each of which was lined with stone. On the topmost step, there "were extensive palaces built of rammed earth, with wooden pillars and roofing tiles, a gigantic water reservoir, and domestic remains related to daily life," the researchers wrote.

The city's rulers lived in these palaces, and art and craft production were carried out nearby. "Evidence so far suggests that the stepped pyramid complex functioned not only as a residential space for ruling Shimao elites, but also as a space for artisanal or industrial craft production," the archaeologists wrote.

A series of stone walls with ramparts and gates was built around the pyramid and the city. "At the entrance to the stepped pyramid were sophisticated bulwarks [defensive walls] whose design suggests that they were intended to provide both defense and highly restricted access," the archaeologists wrote.

A sacrificial pit of human skulls discovered at Shimao. The people sacrificed may have been captives captured in war. This photo was first published in 2016 in an article in the Chinese language journal Kaogu yu wenwu.

Credit: Photo courtesy Zhouyong Sun and Jing Shao

The remains of numerous human sacrifices have been discovered at Shimao. "In the outer gateway of the eastern gate on the outer rampart alone, six pits containing decapitated human heads have been found," the archaeologists wrote.

Some of the victims may be from another archaeological site called Zhukaigou, which is located to the north of Shimao, and the people of Shimao may have conquered the neighboring site. "Morphological analysis of the human remains suggests that the victims may have been related to the residents of Zhukaigou, which could further suggest that they were taken to Shimao as captives during the expansion of the Shimao polity," the study said.

Additionally, jade artifacts were inserted into spaces between the blocks in all of Shimao's structures. "The jade objects and human sacrifice may have imbued the very walls of Shimao with ritual and religious potency," the archaeologists wrote.

While archaeologists have known about Shimao for many years, it was once thought to be part of the Great Wall of China, a section of which is located nearby. It wasn't until excavations were carried out in recent years that archaeologists realized that Shimao is far older than the Great Wall, which was built between 2,700 and 400 years ago.

The team of archaeologists that wrote the article includes Li Jaang, a professor at the School of History at Zhengzhou University; Zhouyong Sun and Jing Shao, who are both archaeologists at the Shaanxi Provincial Institute of Archaeology; and Min Li, an anthropology professor at UCLA.

Human Sacrifices At Massive Pyramid Along Great Wall Change Archaeologists' View Of Early China

Ancient Humans Lived in China 2.1 Million Years Ago

For hundreds of thousands of years, small bands of ancient humans ranged across a sandy, hilly grassland. They survived on the mammals around them—perhaps hunting them, perhaps scavenging for their carcasses—and their tools were rudimentary, razor-sharp blades formed from chipped stone. They lived in fear of the big cats and large predators that stalked their children.

And they were isolated. They likely rarely encountered other creatures who looked like them, beyond the 25 or 50 with whom they lived.

This was the strange existence of early-human ancestors on the savannah. It’s a classic scene—the image of hunter-gatherers roaming grasslands is just as at home in a biology textbook as it was in 2001: A Space Odyssey. But according to new research, this scene did not play out only in Africa.

Our ancient ancestors lived in China, too.

Ancient humans appear to have reached northwestern China about 2.1 million years ago, and they lived there for hundreds of thousands of years, according to a new study published Wednesday in Nature. It suggests that hominins migrated out of Africa much earlier, and spread much farther east, than once thought.

The earliest ancient-human presence is  Homo erectus fossil found in a cave Petralona, Greece. This newly discovered community of early humans lived roughly 250,000 years earlier than that group, and did so 3,500 miles to the east.

“We need to rethink when hominins first left Africa,” said Robin Dennell, an archeologist at the University of Sheffield and one of the authors of the paper. “We have shown that the earliest evidence from outside Africa is at least 2.1 million years old, and therefore 250,000 years—or 10,000 generations—older than Dmanisi in Georgia.”

“It’s so old that the earliest members of our own genus, the genus Homo, may have migrated out of Africa,” said Michael Petraglia, a professor of anthropology at the Max Planck Institute who was not involved in the new study. These creatures would have likely been Homo erectus; or possibly even Homo habilis, the first ancient primate to be called Homo.

Petraglia emphasized that the discovery also changes our understanding of Ice Age China. “They’ve added on something like 400,000 years of prehistory [in East Asia]—and it’s not every day you get to do that,” he told me. “Some of the oldest sites in China were previously only 1.6 or 1.7 million years old. They’re now saying the oldest sites are 2.1 million years old.

The research was led by Zhaoyu Zhu, an archeologist and climatologist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Zhu and his team have spent the past 13 years excavating a unique site on China’s Loess Plateau, a rare spot protected from erosion and glaciation, and continually buried in wind-blown sand over the past several million years.

While the new paper identifies a human presence, the researchers have not yet found any early-human fossils at the site. They have unearthed a wealth of early stone tools left behind by our ancestors, buried under many layers of solidified sand. These artifacts are mostly chipped flakes of stone, a type of primitive blade created by smashing two river-smoothed cobbles together. Hominins in Africa are known to have used this technology during the same period.

Claiming an ancient-human presence from a bunch of stone flakes could prove controversial among some researchers, who only feel confident dating an ancient-human presence when they find the remains of an early human, like teeth, a jaw bone, or ancient DNA.

But both the paper’s authors and outside experts told me they felt comfortable asserting that ancient humans lived on this site.

“It comes down to two general points,” said John Kappelman, a professor of anthropology and geology at the University of Texas at Austin who was not connected to the research. First, the stone tools “look like they were produced by humans,” he told me. They also show evidence of manufacture and maintenance. Some flakes have an almost serrated edge, suggesting that their creator smashed them against a cobble multiple times in order to improve them. Others “appear to show resharpening or sharpening,” he said, meaning their users attended to their tools and tried to improve them.

Second, the flakes are the most substantial feature found in this geological layer. “These are the largest pieces of stones—either the flakes themselves or the cores from which flakes were removed—in a very fine-grained sedimentary sequence,” Kappelman said. This supports the idea that they have a human, not a natural geological, origin.

Dennell, one of the authors of the paper, agreed. “Very importantly here, there are no geological processes that could have flaked these stones. The Loess Plateau is a stone free landscape—it is basically an enormous deposit of wind-blown dust, deposited year upon year by the winter monsoonal winds for the last 2.5 million years,” he told me in an email.

“Hominin remains are incredibly scarce,” he continued. “Their skeletons are very fragile, preservation is very rare, and they were not very common. In contrast, a single hominin can generate thousands of stone tools in a lifetime. Additionally, fossils will never indicate the first actual appearance of an animal—the first recorded appearance is always later than the first actual appearance, no matter whether it’s a hominin or a hippopotamus.”

“As an archaeologist, I have always found it strange that some refuse to accept artifacts unless found with hominin remains when the antiquity of humankind was first established in the early 19th century from stone artifacts in France and Britain, and not from skeletal evidence,” Dennell added.

Petraglia, the Max Planck professor who was not connected to the study, told me that the paper’s findings were “very strong.”

“I think it’s excellent,” he said. “I’m very excited about the work. It’s such a major finding, and it changes a lot of our views about the migration of early humans out of Africa, and when they got into Asia.”

But the study’s importance relies on another claim, too: that the authors know the stones are 2.1 million years old. To reach this conclusion, researchers deployed a technique known as paleomagnetism.

Paleomagnetism relies on a simple planetary fact: The Earth’s magnetic field seems to reverse every 800,000 years. As rocks harden, they record the planet’s magnetic field in their structure: Lava now cooling on the surface of Hawaii, for instance, will retain the Earth’s current North Pole–facing orientation for millions of years. Researchers can sample the surface of a vertical rock face and track these changes in magnetic polarity, matching the reversals they detect with well-dated reversal events recorded elsewhere in the world. The Loess Plateau rock turned out to align to two reversals captured elsewhere in the world, including one switch, 2.1 million years ago, first observed on distant Reunion Island.

Over the past decade, a more cosmopolitan notion of human evolution has emerged. Homo sapiens do not seem to have been the only advanced hominin to stalk the Earth, and they did not evolve in a single spot in Africa. (My colleague Ed Yong recently detailed an aspect of this idea.) Instead, Homo sapiens shared Earth with at least two other types of ancient human: Neanderthals, who occupied much of Eurasia; and the more mysterious Denisovans, who may have ranged throughout Southeast Asia.

But this new find suggests that some early humans ranged much of the Earth well before that late date. “This is way earlier than Neanderthals—way, way earlier,” Petraglia told me.

The finding suggests that ancient humans migrated out of Africa many times, though these migrations were not always successful, he argued. “Some populations got all the way over to eastern Asia, but we have to imagine that these were small, sort of hunting-and-gathering populations. And while they may have mated across East Asia, it doesn’t mean they survived for a long period of time. Some populations might have become isolated, and some might have become extinct.”

These migrations may even have predated the worst of the modern Ice Ages. While the Earth endured some large swings in temperature about 2 million years ago, the mighty, continent-churning glaciations of the past million years had yet to parade down from the North Pole.

The Loess Plateau likely alternated between arid steppe and moist grassland every 40,000 years. Tools also appear to grow more scarce in the site during these cold and dry intervals, suggesting that ancient humans could only adapt so much to life out of the tropics. And it’s worth noting that the new study does not claim that hominins have continuously inhabited Asia for the past 2 million years.

Kappelman, the University of Texas professor, took a more robust view of this ancient-human community. He noted that different types of australopithecus—a hominin that briefly shared Africa with Homo habilis for 500,000 years—lived for millions of years without ever appearing to leave Africa. But 2.1 million years ago, as the first fossils from our genus, Homo, appear—scientists suddenly find evidence of an ancient-human presence across much of the Old World.

“What this paper suggests is: Boom! You get this dispersal, all the way across what was then the known Earth. The pieces were being filled in there very early on,” Kappelman told me. “It’s the kind of thing where, if we saw this for some other species, it would be remarkable.”

He could recall only one other mammal that moved into a new territory and immediately dispersed across it: ancient horses. “They originated in North America, then migrated into the Old World about 11 million years ago. And then, boom, it’s like gangbusters. They’re everywhere,” he said.

Ancient humans might have gone through a similar expansion, even before they gained all the traits that define a modern Homo sapiens. We just have less evidence of this explosion: Since ancient humans were carnivores, they never would have been as abundant as horses, which are lower on the food chain.

“The world is overrun with people today,” Kappelman said. “There was a period in time when it wasn’t.” The challenge is trying to piece together how humans went from scarce to ubiquitous. “What was it about their behavior? Because we don’t see australopithecus going out, even though they are around at the same time. We just don’t find other hominins in Eurasia until the rise of Homo.”

Ancient Humans Lived in China 2.1 Million Years Ago

Ancient Chinese monument being used as climbing wall by visitors

Officials promise to take action after tourists risk damaging structure and put their own safety at risk

Photo: Handout

An ancient high stone wall in northern China risks being damaged by visitors who have turned it into a popular climbing spot.

Photos recently surfaced online showing several adult and child tourists climbing the 60-metre Zhengding city wall near Shijiazhuang, Hebei province, without any safety equipment or protective gear.

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A county heritage preservation official told Beijing Youth Daily on Wednesday that tourists were already discouraged from climbing the wall, and better protection measures would be taken in future.

Climbing the wall is strictly forbidden, according to signs displayed nearby.

In photos circulated online, children can be seen climbing up the bare bricks while their parents watch below.

Adult climbers are also shown climbing up to a height of around 6 to 7 metres.

Web users warned of the safety risks, as well as expressing concerns it would damage the centuries-old monument.

Photo: Handout

“I don’t get why the parents are just standing there watching their kids climb so high, aren’t they afraid the child might fall off?” asked one commenter on microblogging site Weibo.

“They will only be scared off from doing it once someone dies from a fall,” posted another user.

Tourists started climbing the wall in larger numbers after it was renovated in July, according to the county heritage official.

No tourists have been fined yet, but recent measures taken to discourage climbing have been successful.

“As far as I know, no tourists have fallen down from climbing the wall, and now you rarely see them climbing,” he said.

Zhengding County’s Tourism Bureau confirmed to the paper that climbing the wall was not allowed, warning signs were in place and that tourists’ behaviour at the site was already being monitored by patrols.

The wall was originally built during the Eastern Jin dynasty (AD 265-420), replaced with stone bricks in the age of the Northern Zhou dynasty (557-581) and extended to 12km during the Ming dynasty (1386-1664).

It is currently under consideration to be added to the list of Unesco World Heritage sites.

Ancient Chinese monument being used as climbing wall by visitors

This ancient mind trick can vastly improve your memory

An Arthur Conan Doyle's detective novel A Study in Scarlet (1887) we learn that Sherlock Holmes used the most effective memory system known: a memory palace. Although imagined memory palaces are still used by memory champions and the few who practice the memory arts, they are best known from Greco-Roman times when great orators, including Cicero, used them to ensure their rhetoric was smooth, detailed, and flawless. The physical memory palace, usually a streetscape or building interior, would become so familiar to the orator that it was always available to them in their imagination. By "placing" one piece of information in each site, they could mentally stroll through their memory palace, location by location, drawing out each portion of the speech in the required order without missing any element.

Received opinion is that this method of loci, as the technique is also known, dates to before Simonides of Ceos (c. 556-468 BCE), who is often credited as the inventor. However there is ample circumstantial evidence that indigenous cultures the world over have been using it for far longer than that. There is a continuous record dating back at least 40,000 years for Australian Aboriginal cultures. Their songlines, along with Native American pilgrimage trails, Pacific Islanders' ceremonial roads, and the ceque system of the Inca at Cusco all exhibit exactly the same pattern as the memory palaces described by Cicero. At each sacred location along these paths, elders would sing, dance, or tell a story, all making the information associated with the location more memorable.

The memory skills of indigenous elders exceed anything reported for the ancient Greeks. Research with the Native American Navajo people, for example, shows that they memorize a classification of more than 700 insects along with identification, habitats, and behavior. And that's just insects. A fully initiated indigenous elder would be able to relate stories equivalent to a field guide for all the birds, mammals, reptiles, fish, and hundreds of insects within their environment.

Another study shows that the Hanunoo people of the Philippines were able to identify 1,625 plants, many of which were unknown to Western science at the time. Add to that knowledge of astronomy, timekeeping, navigation, legal and ethical guidelines, weather and seasons, complex genealogies and belief systems, and you have a vast encyclopedia stored in an interwoven memorized web: a web that is tied to a real or imagined memory palace.

Cultures without writing are referred to as "non-literate," but their identity should not be associated with what they don't do, but rather with what they do from necessity when there is no writing to record their knowledge. Cultures without writing employ the most intriguing range of memory technologies often linked under the academic term "primary orality," including song, dance, rhyme and rhythm, and story and mythology. Physical memory devices, though, are less often included in this list. The most universal of these is the landscape itself.

Australian Aboriginal memory palaces are spread across the land, structured by sung pathways referred to as songlines. The songlines of the Yanyuwa people from Carpentaria in Australia's far north have been recorded over 800 kilometers. A songline is a sequence of locations, that might, for example, include the rocks that provide the best materials for tools, to a significant tree or a waterhole. They are far more than a navigation aid. At each location, a song or story, dance or ceremony is performed that will always be associated with that particular location, physically and in memory. A songline, then, provides a table of contents to the entire knowledge system, one that can be traversed in memory as well as physically.

Enmeshed with the vitalized landscape, some indigenous cultures also use the skyscape as a memory device; the stories of the characters associated with the stars, planets, and dark spaces recall invaluable practical knowledge such as seasonal variations, navigation, timekeeping, and much of the ethical framework for their culture. The stories associated with the location in the sky or across the landscape provide a grounded structure to add ever more complexity with levels of initiation. Typically, only a fully initiated elder would know and understand the entire knowledge system of the community. By keeping critical information sacred and restricted, the so-called "Chinese whispers effect" could be avoided, protecting information from corruption.

Rock art and decorated posts are also familiar aids to indigenous memory, but far less known is the range of portable memory devices. Incised stones and boards, collections of objects in bags, bark paintings, birchbark scrolls, decorations on skins, and the knotted cords of the Inca khipu have all been used to aid the recall of memorized information. The food-carrying dish used by Australian Aboriginal cultures, the coolamon, can be incised on the back, providing a sophisticated mnemonic device without adding anything more to the load to be carried when moving around their landscape. Similarly, the tjuringa, a stone or wooden object up to a meter long decorated with abstract motifs, is a highly restricted device for Aboriginal men. As the owner of the coolamon or the elder with his tjuringa touched each marking, he or she would recall the appropriate story or sing the related song.

This is very similar to the way the Luba people of West Africa use a well-documented memory board known as a lukasa. Previous researchers have claimed that the "men of memory" of the Mbudye society would spend years learning a vast corpus of stories, dances, and songs associated with the bead and shells attached to a piece of carved wood.

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My initial attitude when I read this was complete skepticism. It was surely claiming far too much for such a simple device. So I made one. I grabbed a piece of wood and glued some beads and shells on it and started encoding the 412 birds of my state: their scientific family names, identification, habitats, and behavior. It worked a treat. I no longer doubt the research. Though simple, this is an incredibly powerful memory tool. Inspired by my success with the lukasa, I have also created songlines for more than a kilometer around my home. I have a location on my walk for each of the 244 countries and dependent territories in the world. I walk through them from the most populous in China to little Pitcairn Island. I also walk through time from 4,500 million years ago until the present, nodding to the dinosaurs, meeting our hominid ancestors, and greeting numerous characters from history. My memory has been hugely expanded by using this ancient mnemonic technique.

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It is the structure of the human brain that dictates the memory methods that work so effectively right across human societies. It is our dependence on writing that has eroded this skill. We can, if we choose to, implement these techniques alongside our current educational methods. I have taught schoolchildren to sing their science and to create memory trails right around the school grounds, with excellent results. We can and should learn from the intellectual achievements of indigenous cultures by adapting their techniques to contemporary life. But when we do this, we should acknowledge the source. These memory techniques are far older than our Western civilization, and they are far more effective than the crude rote techniques that replaced them.

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This ancient mind trick can vastly improve your memory

Shanghai's historic temple on the move

Future visitors to Shanghai's famous Jade Buddha might wonder why its main hall wasn't where they left it last time they visited. That's because Shanghai is relocating it 30 meters north and a meter higher to make way for more visitors -- a process we hope they don't try applying to the Great Wall or Forbidden City. Preparations for the move began this past Saturday.

Part of a renovation campaign that began in 2014, the Mahavira Hall's relocation will be completed in about two weeks. How are they going about such a feat? Engineers have already excavated the building and elevated it onto tracks, which they plan to side it along like a senior citizen on a stairlift.

Afterwards it will be placed on a new foundation. Keeping the artifacts intact during the move will be the trickiest part. Here's hoping none of the Buddha statues get dropped like a bad 'habit.'

According to Master Jue Xing, abbot of the Jade Buddha Temple and vice president of the Buddhist Association of China, "moving the hall will create more space between buildings and reduce the risks of a stampede as the temple is usually tightly packed."

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Shanghai's historic temple on the move

Ancient dog festival celebrates legend of heaven-sent canine in China

Members of the Miao people celebrate tradition that their ancestors were saved from death by a heaven-sent animal.

Dog festivals in China often involve eating the meat of the animals, but on Saturday villagers in the country’s southwest took part in a very different tradition when they strapped a dog onto a sedan chair and shouldered it over rice paddies as a god.

Villagers from the ethnic Miao people in Jianhe county, Guizhou, have worshipped dogs for centuries.

According to a legend passed down from its first settlers, a dog led them to a sacred water source and saved them from dying of thirst.

Water shortages are common in some areas of Guizhou due to the region’s karst landscape, characterised by soluble rocks that mean little water remains on the surface.

The community’s ancestors held an annual ritual to celebrate the what they believed was a heaven-sent miracle. Later it became known as taigoujie, or the dog-lifting festival.

The chosen dog is dressed in a tailor-made shirt and then put in a wooden chair that is carried on freshly cut bamboo poles.

A shaman carrying a black sceptre leads the convoy, in which people sing along to the beat of drums.

Participants throw mud at each other as a prayer to the god for peace, health and prosperity.

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Ancient dog festival celebrates legend of heaven-sent canine in China

Athens to honor China-Greece ancient innovations

Herakleidon museum warmed up for an upcoming exhibition of ancient Chinese technology, by this week unveiling: The “Voyage: Greek shipbuilding and seafaring” in Athens.

“Seafaring has formed the Greeks’ character. The spirit of Ulysses still exists in Greeks today. Shipping was and still remains their basic activity. The sea and shipping in particular offer Greeks wealth, vision and a future,” said Eleni Nomikou, the museum’s director.

“Greek ships did not carry only products, but also knowledge and culture throughout our history. Thanks to these vessels Greeks travelled the world, enriched their knowledge and used it to create on this land and give birth to the Greek civilization.”

A total of 35 handmade wooden models of vessels, complemented with works of art, maps, drawings and video projections narrate the history of Greek seafaring from prehistoric times to the middle of the 20th century.

The model of a vessel of the Minoan civilization which flourished from 2600 to 1100 BC, was built based on a mural unearthed on Santorini Island, while for the replica of the early 19th century frigate “Hellas” Maras went through naval architectural designs of her sister ship, the US Navy’s frigate USS Hudson.

The frigate “Hellas” was built in the US, arrived in Greece in 1826 and played a decisive role in the last years of the War of Independence against the Turks.

As the “Voyage” exhibition is set to travel to Cyprus and the US, Herakleidon Museum is getting ready to welcome a remarkable exhibition of the technological and scientific achievements of the ancient Chinese civilization.

“The museum has signed a significant agreement with Beijing’s China Museum of Science and Technology (CSTM) for the exchange of two exhibitions of ancient technology,” Nomikou said.

“Ancient Greek technology will travel to China in October this year, while ancient Chinese technology will be presented in Herakleidon Museum in less than a month. It will stay here for about eight months giving the opportunity to not only Athenians, to see the achievements of Chinese people from antiquity to today in the fields of technology and science.”

The deal was sealed as the two countries celebrate in 2017 the China-Greece Cultural Exchanges and Cultural Industry Cooperation Year as part of efforts to further enhance bilateral ties.

“The two great ancient civilizations, the Chinese and Greek, meet each other through their differences. It is so exciting when one discovers how two different civilizations, two different ways of thinking which progressed in parallel and did not meet essentially in antiquity, how through all this show man’s effort to create and develop when facing the same issues,” Nomikou said.

The exhibition will also include a section on Chinese seafaring. “We will see their efforts in shipbuilding, how different were their vessels compared to the ships constructed by other people and how close they were regarding the key point: Man’s thirst to travel. This is eventually the common element we see regardless of the different ways and techniques used,” said Nomikou.

AGREEMENT OF COLLABORATION BETWEEN THE MUSEUM HERAKLEIDON AND THE CHINA SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY MUSEUM

EXCHANGE OF EXHIBITIONS OF ANCIENT SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY IN 2017

The Museum Herakleidon is honored and delighted to announce its official collaboration with the China Science and Technology Museum (CSTM) of Beijing, with the objective of organizing and exchanging exhibitions, in parallel, in 2017, which has been declared the Year of Greek-Chinese Friendship.

Beginning in September 2017 and continuing through January 2018, the Museum Herakleidon will host, in its two buildings in Thissio (16 Herakleidon Str. and 37 Ap. Pavlou Str.), the exhibition of the CSTM “Ancient Chinese Science and Technology”, while beginning in October 2017 and running through March 2018, the Museum Herakleidon will present, at the China Science and Technology Museum in Beijing, the exhibition “EUREKA. Science, Art and Technology of the Ancient Greeks”, in collaboration with the Association for the Study of Ancient Greek Technology and Mr. Theodosis P. Tasios, professor emeritus of the School of Civil Engineering of the National Technical University of Athens, as scientific consultant.

The joint goal of the two museums is the strengthening of the relations of the two nations by getting to know and promoting each other’s important cultural heritage.

The China Science and Technology Museum, the most comprehensive museum of science and technology in China, opened in 1988. It is a large-scale science popularization facility for the implementation of the national strategy of invigorating the country through science and education, and for the enhancement of the scientific literacy of the general public through interactive exhibitions, science popularization activities and educational programs. The footprint of the museum is 48,000 m2, with a total area of 102,000 m2, covering an important part of the park “Olympic Green”, which was created for the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, to highlight its motto “Green Olympics, Scientific Olympics and Olympics of Humanity”. It comprises five main thematic exhibitions (Science Paradise, The Glory of China, Science, Technology and Life, Explorations and Discoveries, Challenges and the Future). There is also a temporary exhibition area, as well as four special-effect theatres, lecture halls, a number of laboratories and classrooms and other facilities. Composed of numerous building block-like concrete blocks that articulate with each other, the structure of the museum is made to look like a Lu Ban lock or “magic cube”, to symbolize science as an endless process of “unlocking” and “discovering” secrets.

The Museum Herakleidon has been bringing art, education, and culture to the general public since 2004. The inspiration comes from the founders Paul and Anna-Belinda Firos. During the first decade of its operation, the museum focused on the fine arts and organized exhibitions of the works of several important artists (M.C. Escher, Victor Vasarely, Carol Wax, Constantine Xenakis, Toulouse-Lautrec, Edgar Degas, Edvard Munch, Sol LeWitt, et al.). Today the museum has evolved into an interactive center for popularized science. Based on its philosophy of Science, Art, and Mathematics, it provides innovative educational programs for students, teachers and adults, as well as exhibitions of art and popularized science at its two buildings in Thissio (16 Herakleidon Str. and 37 Ap. Pavlou Str.).

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Source/Photography/Bibliography
http://www.wcop.ga
http://www.ancienthellas.eu

http://herakleidon-art.gr

http://www.shanghaidaily.com

Athens to honor China-Greece ancient innovations

A gathering of rare, ancient Malay manuscripts

Even in dim light, the gold leaf and jewel hues of the Taj Al-Salatin gleam.

This 19th-century copy of the 17th-century text, the title of which translates to The Crown Of Kings, has spent years in the collection of the British Library. Now, it has finally returned to the part of the world where it came into being.

The Taj Al-Salatin is one of more than 140 artefacts in the latest exhibition by Singapore’s National Library Board (NLB), Tales Of The Malay World: Manuscripts And Early Books.

The exhibition at the National Library in Singapore will run till February next year.

It is the first to bring together rare manuscripts from the collections of not just the NLB, but also the British Library, the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, and Leiden University Library in the Netherlands.

Exhibition curator Tan Huism hopes the exhibition can raise public awareness not just of the Malay world’s rich literary past, but also of Singapore’s role in it.

“Most people don’t even know Singapore was an important printing hub for the region, that our publishers were entrepreneurs and that we even had copyright laws and lending libraries in the late 19th century.”

Items on display include Sir Stamford Raffles’ copy of the famous genealogical text Sulalat Al-Salatin (Sejarah Melayu), which includes the tale of how Singapore got its name; and Hikayat Abdullah, the 1849 memoir of scholar and translator Munshi Abdullah, the first Malay work published by a local.

A section of the exhibition is devoted to the syair, a rhyming narrative poem that became popular from the end of the 18th century and was at one point the best-selling genre in the Malay world.

Syair on display include Syair Perang Mengkasar, the earliest known example of the form, which relates the spice war between the Dutch East India Company and the state of Makassar, or south Sulawesi, in the 1660s.

Syair were often romantic, such as Syair Sinyor Kosta, in which a Dutch clerk falls in love with a local merchant’s wife and tries to woo her. They were meant to be sung as well as read and the exhibition is accompanied by audio of a woman performing syair.

There are about 10,000 Malay manuscripts that survive in the world today. While their authors are predominantly male, the exhibition does feature the rare female writer, such as 19th-century Riau aristocrat Raja Aisyah, who lived for a time in Singapore.

Visitors can view the manuscript of her debut work, Hikayat Syamsul Anuar, about a princess who finds life in the palace stifling and disguises herself as a man to wander in search of knowledge.

When she ends up in an arranged marriage with a king, she is infuriated and refuses to sleep with her husband, burying herself in her studies instead.

However, she comes to love him after she discovers that he, too, shares her passion for the intellectual.

The exhibition also features films related to some of the manuscripts, such as Hikayat Hang Tuah, about the exploits of legendary warrior Hang Tuah and his friends.

A separate display in the library’s lobby showcases snippets of seven movies by Cathay Keris and Shaw Brothers, along with Malay film magazines. – The Straits Times/Asia News Network/Olivia Ho

Source

www.nlb.gov.sg

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A gathering of rare, ancient Malay manuscripts

300-Foot-Wide Ancient Altar Excavated in China

A 3,000-year-old altar discovered on the Bayanbulak Grasslands in Northwest China's Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region during a scientific survey may represent an ancient prairie culture that once existed in the area, experts announced on Tuesday, according to a Guangming Daily report.

Consisting of three concentric circles created from numerous football-sized stones, the giant ruins are believed by experts to be an ancient altar dedicated to sun worship.

From smallest to largest, the three circles are 50, 71 and 100 meters in diameter, showing a progression ratio roughly equal to the square root of two.

"It's really hard to believe that this is something that happened by chance," Wu Xinhua, head of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region Archaeological Team from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said in the announcement.

"But if it was planned, then the builders most likely had at one time been influenced by Central Plain cultures," said Wu, pointing out that the altar is very similar to altars dating from the same period of time discovered in the Central Plain area along the lower reaches of the Yellow River.

Discovered by a Chinese scientific expedition team exploring the section of the ancient Silk Road near the Tianshan Mountains in 2016, the site is believed by experts to represent the ancient Khirigsuur Archaeological Culture - a Bronze Age culture whose relics are often discovered near the Altay Mountains, the Tianshan Mountains and the western part of the Mongolian Plateau.

Moreover, Wu remarked that altar's like the one in Xinjiang might be a precursor to the obo, sacred stone heaps that act as altars in traditional Mongolian religious practices.

“This proves that central plain culture had already long reached the foot of Mount Tianshan, in the Bayanbulak Grassland, the choke point of the Silk Road.”

Sun-worship has been practiced by Chinese people throughout history. Other examples include the sun altar, and the Temple of Heavens and Ritan (the Temple of Sun), built in Beijing hundreds of years ago.

The Silk Road rose to prominence roughly 100 years before the first century during China's Han Dynasty, when it was established by Chinese diplomat Zhang Quian. The road, which lasted until the 15th century, famously spread trade, economy, and culture.

Sun worship was a common practice among many cultures that existed during this period.

"Since ancient times all civilizations on the continent of Eurasia used circle shapes to represent the sun. Mongolian yurts have the same structure as the altar," archaeologist Wu Xinhua commented in the video.

The video shows the inside of a traditional Mongolian yurt. Wu explained that the ceiling's three tresses represent sky, light, and sun worship.

He also noted the similarities to the Temple of Heaven in Beijing, which is characterized by layered, circular floors. The Beijing temple is now regarded as belonging to the Taoist religion, however the time in which it was constructed suggests it was originally used for pre-Taoist heaven and sun worship.

Heaven worship is considered one of China's oldest forms of religion, and mounds were frequently used for elaborate ceremonies and non-human sacrifices. The exact purpose of the sun altar in Xinjiang, however, has yet to be identified. Sun worship was also common among civilizations in Africa and Indo-European regions.

Archaeologists will continue excavating the sun altar in Xinjiang in an effort to uncover more history of the ancient Silk Road.

Source
http://www.globaltimes.cn

http://www.euronews.com
http://www.nationalgeographic.com

300-Foot-Wide Ancient Altar Excavated in China

The Great Wall of China

The Great Wall of China is a series of fortifications made of stone, brick, tamped earth, wood, and other materials, generally built along an east-to-west line across the historical northern borders of China to protect the Chinese states and empires against the raids and invasions of the various nomadic groups of the Eurasian Steppe. 

Several walls were being built as early as the 7th century BC; these, later joined together and made bigger and stronger, are now collectively referred to as the Great Wall. Especially famous is the wall built 220–206 BC by Qin Shi Huang, the first Emperor of China. 

Little of that wall remains. Since then, the Great Wall has on and off been rebuilt, maintained, and enhanced; the majority of the existing wall is from the Ming Dynasty.

Other purposes of the Great Wall have included border controls, allowing the imposition of duties on goods transported along the Silk Road, regulation or encouragement of trade and the control of immigration and emigration. Furthermore, the defensive characteristics of the Great Wall were enhanced by the construction of watch towers, troop barracks, garrison stations, signaling capabilities through the means of smoke or fire, and the fact that the path of the Great Wall also served as a transportation corridor.

The Great Wall of the Qin

The Great Wall of the Han

The Great Wall stretches from Dandong in the east, to Lop Lake in the west, along an arc that roughly delineates the southern edge of Inner Mongolia. A comprehensive archaeological survey, using advanced technologies, has concluded that the Ming walls measure 8,850 km (5,500 mi). This is made up of 6,259 km (3,889 mi) sections of actual wall, 359 km (223 mi) of trenches and 2,232 km (1,387 mi) of natural defensive barriers such as hills and rivers. Another archaeological survey found that the entire wall with all of its branches measure out to be 21,196 km (13,171 mi).

Histrory

The Chinese were already familiar with the techniques of wall-building by the time of the Spring and Autumn period between the 8th and 5th centuries BC.During this time and the subsequent Warring States period, the states of Qin, Wei, Zhao, Qi, Yan, and Zhongshan all constructed extensive fortifications to defend their own borders. Built to withstand the attack of small arms such as swords and spears, these walls were made mostly by stamping earth and gravel between board frames.

King Zheng of Qin conquered the last of his opponents and unified China as the First Emperor of the Qin dynasty ("Qin Shi Huang") in 221 BC. Intending to impose centralized rule and prevent the resurgence of feudal lords, he ordered the destruction of the sections of the walls that divided his empire among the former states. To position the empire against the Xiongnu people from the north, however, he ordered the building of new walls to connect the remaining fortifications along the empire's northern frontier. Transporting the large quantity of materials required for construction was difficult, so builders always tried to use local resources. Stones from the mountains were used over mountain ranges, while rammed earth was used for construction in the plains. There are no surviving historical records indicating the exact length and course of the Qin walls. Most of the ancient walls have eroded away over the centuries, and very few sections remain today. The human cost of the construction is unknown, but it has been estimated by some authors that hundreds of thousands, if not up to a million, workers died building the Qin wall. Later, the Han,the Sui, and the Northern dynasties all repaired, rebuilt, or expanded sections of the Great Wall at great cost to defend themselves against northern invaders. The Tang and Song dynasties did not undertake any significant effort in the region. The Liao, Jin, and Yuan dynasties, who ruled Northern China throughout most of the 10th–13th centuries, constructed defensive walls in the 12th century but those were located much to the north of the Great Wall as we know it, within China's province of Inner Mongolia and in Mongolia itself.

The Great Wall concept was revived again under the Ming in the 14th century, and following the Ming army's defeat by the Oirats in the Battle of Tumu. The Ming had failed to gain a clear upper hand over the Mongolian tribes after successive battles, and the long-drawn conflict was taking a toll on the empire. The Ming adopted a new strategy to keep the nomadic tribes out by constructing walls along the northern border of China. Acknowledging the Mongol control established in the Ordos Desert, the wall followed the desert's southern edge instead of incorporating the bend of the Yellow River.

Unlike the earlier fortifications, the Ming construction was stronger and more elaborate due to the use of bricks and stone instead of rammed earth. Up to 25,000 watchtowers are estimated to have been constructed on the wall. As Mongol raids continued periodically over the years, the Ming devoted considerable resources to repair and reinforce the walls. Sections near the Ming capital of Beijing were especially strong. Qi Jiguang between 1567 and 1570 also repaired and reinforced the wall, faced sections of the ram-earth wall with bricks and constructed 1,200 watchtowers from Shanhaiguan Pass to Changping to warn of approaching Mongol raiders. During the 1440s–1460s, the Ming also built a so-called "Liaodong Wall". Similar in function to the Great Wall (whose extension, in a sense, it was), but more basic in construction, the Liaodong Wall enclosed the agricultural heartland of the Liaodong province, protecting it against potential incursions by Jurched-Mongol Oriyanghan from the northwest and the Jianzhou Jurchens from the north. While stones and tiles were used in some parts of the Liaodong Wall, most of it was in fact simply an earth dike with moats on both sides.

Towards the end of the Ming, the Great Wall helped defend the empire against the Manchu invasions that began around 1600. Even after the loss of all of Liaodong, the Ming army held the heavily fortified Shanhai Pass, preventing the Manchus from conquering the Chinese heartland. The Manchus were finally able to cross the Great Wall in 1644, after Beijing had already fallen to Li Zicheng's rebels. Before this time, the Manchus had crossed the Great Wall multiple times to raid, but this time it was for conquest. The gates at Shanhai Pass were opened on May 25 by the commanding Ming general, Wu Sangui, who formed an alliance with the Manchus, hoping to use the Manchus to expel the rebels from Beijing. The Manchus quickly seized Beijing, and eventually defeated both the rebel-founded Shun dynasty and the remaining Ming resistance, establishing the Qing dynasty rule over all of China.

Under Qing rule, China's borders extended beyond the walls and Mongolia was annexed into the empire, so constructions on the Great Wall were discontinued. On the other hand, the so-called Willow Palisade, following a line similar to that of the Ming Liaodong Wall, was constructed by the Qing rulers in Manchuria. Its purpose, however, was not defense but rather migration control.

None of the Europeans who visited Yuan China or Mongolia, such as Marco Polo, Giovanni da Pian del Carpine, William of Rubruck, Giovanni de' Marignolli and Odoric of Pordenone, mentioned the Great Wall.

The North African traveler Ibn Battuta, who also visited China during the Yuan dynasty ca. 1346, had heard about China's Great Wall, possibly before he had arrived in China. He wrote that the wall is "sixty days' travel" from Zeitun (modern Quanzhou) in his travelogue Gift to Those Who Contemplate the Wonders of Cities and the Marvels of Travelling. He associated it with the legend of the wall mentioned in the Qur'an, which Dhul-Qarnayn (commonly associated with Alexander the Great) was said to have erected to protect people near the land of the rising sun from the savages of Gog and Magog. However, Ibn Battuta could find no one who had either seen it or knew of anyone who had seen it, suggesting that although there were remnants of the wall at that time, they weren't significant.

Soon after Europeans reached Ming China by ship in the early 16th century, accounts of the Great Wall started to circulate in Europe, even though no European was to see it for another century. Possibly one of the earliest European descriptions of the wall and of its significance for the defense of the country against the "Tartars" (i.e. Mongols), may be the one contained in João de Barros's 1563 Asia. Other early accounts in Western sources include those of Gaspar da Cruz, Bento de Goes, Matteo Ricci, and Bishop Juan González de Mendoza. In 1559, in his work "A Treatise of China and the Adjoyning Regions," Gaspar da Cruz offers an early discussion of the Great Wall. Perhaps the first recorded instance of a European actually entering China via the Great Wall came in 1605, when the Portuguese Jesuit brother Bento de Góis reached the northwestern Jiayu Pass from India.Early European accounts were mostly modest and empirical, closely mirroring contemporary Chinese understanding of the Wall, although later they slid into hyperbole, including the erroneous but ubiquitous claim that the Ming Walls were the same ones that were built by the First Emperor in the 3rd century BC.

When China opened its borders to foreign merchants and visitors after its defeat in the First and Second Opium Wars, the Great Wall became a main attraction for tourists. The travelogues of the later 19th century further enhanced the reputation and the mythology of the Great Wall, such that in the 20th century, a persistent misconception exists about the Great Wall of China being visible from the Moon or even Mars.

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The Great Wall of China