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August 30, 2009
Rounding up this week's universe
Zoltar Predicts the Jan Xena vs. Shira Odds
The Shira Chess Challenge, September 5-7, 2009 online - Check into the blog for place and times of these matches and the names under which Shira and JanXena will be playing their fund raising tourney. Feel free to step right up and help out with Shira's most worthy cause. Zoltar Speaks!
(Ed. Note) Jan Xena has been working out and clobbered me badly on that wee tiny chessgame she snuck from her purse while we were 35,000 feet in the air, winging it back from Las Vegas. I blame bitty pieces and bad lighting for having spent half the game convinced a black bishop was actually a pawn. I hate bitty chess boards! Now comes this!
World Smallest Chess Set The UK's Times paper reports on what might possibly be the world's smallest chess set. It measures just 3.5mm x 2.5mm. Russian microminiaturist Vladimir Aniskin created this amazing item and you can also see more of his work via his website.
World's Smallest Handmade Chess Set November 18, 2006 marked a day that would go down in the history books. It was on this date in Srivilliputtur, Tamil Nadu, India that M. Manikandan created the world’s smallest handmade chess set.
It seems these two now have fearsome new competition emerging from the halls of nano science
Pentacene Molecules - (pictured above) For the first time, IBM researchers in Zurich, Switzerland, have taken a 3D image of an individual molecule. Using an atomic force microscope, the researchers constructed a "force map" of pentacene, an organic molecule just 1.4 nanometers long. (see also: this BBC article)
Mind-Reading Tech May Not Be Far Off At the World Science Festival this week, indications that brain scanners may soon uncover your private thoughts... Does not bode well for chess and other "strategy" games methinks...see also this Guardian article
A Poetic Mystery via the Ouija Board August 21st, 2009 "On April 18, 1949, J. B. Rhine wrote the following in a letter to Mrs. Goodrich C. White, the wife of the president of Emory University: (What was in the letter? .... I'll never tell!)
Death Calculator Predicts Your Odds of Kicking the Bucket By LiveScience Staff posted: 26 August 2009 - A new web site claims to give the odds on you dying next year, or for whatever period you select, based on a few simple questions. (Umm ... "Live" Science... Really?)
But, what if we don't actually "die"...
Thangka is a religious art that Buddhists use to represent gods, goddesses, mandalas and historical figures.
Mind Games - John Lennon music video in Central Park, N.Y.C. - "We're playing those mind games together, Pushing barriers, planting seeds..."
Math Games - Fair Dice Ed Pegg Jr., May 16, 2005 "The Chance Element" in thousands of indoor games is introduced by a variety of simple random-number generators. The most popular of such devices, ever since the time of ancient Egypt, have been cubical dice.
The Coin Flip: A Fundamentally Unfair Proposition? Sunday, March 29, 2009 Have you ever flipped a coin as a way of deciding something with another person? The answer is probably yes. And you probably did so assuming you were getting a fair deal, because, as everybody knows, a coin is equally likely to show heads or tails after a single flip—unless it's been shaved or weighted or has a week-old smear of coffee on its underbelly.
Phantom chess is a computer-powered chess set which has the ability to move the pieces automatically. This chess set gets it name related to phantom is simply because of it moves all the pieces by itself after a button has been tapped. When someone looks at it from afar... Spooky video shows the set in operation...
Carl Sagan (not Zoltar) Tells All: video - World famous astronomer and astrophysicist, the great Carl Sagan, explains the 4th dimension.
Deviant Art A fine collection of original works dealing with those tricky multi-dimensional subjects...
Four Dimensional Cube Rotation -- Short video
4d Animation - Short video
Magnetic Dice Cube - Short video
Hypercube - Rotation and more...
Polyhedral Dice
Website of Arjan Verweij Passionate about collecting diceVerweij's most unusual Chinese dice
Verweij's Ramala divination dice
Ramala Dice and Cryptex? - A quick video segment showing the "Inner mechanism" - taken from the da Vinci Code movie.
Las Vegas Slots Game video short - cryptex of the digital age
Atlanta Rhythm Section - Do It Or Die music video
"Life is a gamble all along
Winners are losers who keep rollin' on
So go on and roll the dice, you only live twice
Do it or die"Dice Collector's Dice Related Music Videos
A generous assortment of styles and musical eras for your eyes and ears ...Moon Gate A quick goddesschess video take on moon lore... Fly me through the Moon...
Bellagio Fountains - video Frank Sinatra Fly Me To The Moon
Odie and the Wonder Dogs of ancient games From The Goddesschess Blog - Sunday, August 30, 2009: Terracotta figurine of begging dog from Harrappa - highly suggestive of a game piece... Odie Dog The Video! (Odie didn't fare well with water hazards. As a stray, he tumbled into Georgia's swimming pool one night and had to be rescued from drowning. Now a happy - if hyper - fixture in the Albert home, Odie has bucked the odds and won a new life!)
A Sub-Saharan Conundrum: German Archaeologists Labor to Solve Mystery of the Nok By Matthias Schulz - Some 2,500 years ago, a mysterious culture emerged in Nigeria. The Nok people left behind bizarre terracotta statues -- and little else. German archaeologists are now looking for more clues to explain this obscure culture.
Chessongs
Old and Not so Old!Suffern Chess Club Trivia
Chess References in Rock/Pop Songs...Well Worth repeating here - to which we toss in a helping of videos and a few new salad bar selections...
Fly By Night – Rush (”It’s time I was King, not just one more pawn...”)
I’ve Seen All Good People – Yes (”Make the white Queen run so fast, she hasn’t got time to make you a wife...”)Human Hands – Elvis Costello (”With the kings and queens of the dance hall crazeCheckmate in three moves in your heyday, But the girls don`t listen to your line anymore...”)
Solitaire – Suzanne Vega (”You and your fate in a kind of check-mate, only you are your only competition...”)
Knight Moves - Suzanne Vega - ("Watch while the queen, In one false move, Turns herself into a pawn...")
#1 Zero’ – Audioslave (”… I’ll be your king, I’ll be your pawn, I will build you a pedastal and put you on it …”)
Heros - David Bowie - ("I will be king, And you You will be queen, Though nothing will Drive them away, We can beat them Just for one day, We can be Heroes Just for one day...")MC Hammer "You Can't Touch This" (well, yes you can - but only if you say "j'adoube" and use "The Force") Darth Vader & Co Dancing to da funky beat...
August 9, 2009
Mid-Summer is the silly season...
Please do not adjust your simulacra!
The history of chess is like succotash salad
- everyone has a different recipe...I think we all have a vegetable that scarred us as a child... (lol!) A recipe for some good summer eating...
Suffering succotash! Maybe some cartoon shows also made a lasting impression... Looney Tunes: More questions and answers...
So who's Suffern and WHY? Well, as we see things at goddesschess, one good url deserves another... We appreciate The Suffern Chess Blog's recent citation and as Ben Franklin would say,
"The Game of Chess is not merely an idle amusement... several very valuable qualities of the mind, useful in the course of human life, are to be acquired and strenghtened by it, so as to become habits ready on all occasions for life is a kind of Chess, in which we have points to gain, and competition or adversaries to contend with, and in which there is a vast variety of good and ill events, that are, in some degree, the effect of prudence, or want of it. By playing at Chess then, we may learn:
First, Foresight...Second, Circumspection...
Third, Caution...
And lastly, We learn by Chess the habit of not being discouraged by present bad appearances in the state of our affairs the habit of hoping for a favorable chance, and that of persevering in the secrets of resources."
Suffern succotash! New York State's Suffern Chess Club delivers Ben, goddesschess, a bunch of chessongs and Sting all in one gulp! A modern day punk rock /new wave icon, Sting has also fostered many interests outside of the world of music over the years. Interestingly enough, he has played many games with Garry Kasparov over the years. It turns out that he initially met him through a mutual friend. Sting used to live next to Kasparov’s lawyer and was eventually introduced.
That's quite a big salad already.
Dare we add to it?
Silly question...Beginning with the artist's own website...
...to which we add some "grainy" video (but the sound is delightful!) croutons for the eyes and ears...
GPB presents "Sting's 'Songs from the Labyrinth"
Sting's "Songs from the Labyrinth: Part 3
"This piece is from John Dowland and is taken from The Third book of Ayres and is named "The Lowest Trees Have Tops". Beautiful lyrics, wonderful lute part, Dowland at is best. Thank you Sting for bringing to light the work of this fantastic composer."For goddesschess succotash, please try to visualize "Edward Scissorhands" preparing a salad...
including one very special ingredient
- all but lost ..."The nine men's morris is fill'd up with mud,
And the quaint mazes in the wanton green
For lack of tread are indistinguishable."Now in an apparent state of online peril: The Daunce of Nine-Men's-Morris and the Boundaries Between Worlds by Tracy Boyd © 2004. So - goddesschess to the rescue! We tempt our readers with this leafy excerpt, while calling attention to its new home - in the great salad bowl we call Chessquest...
"Sword dances and morris dances are sympathetic magic to help the sun on its rounds, specially in Spring. Dancing around an object encloses it in a magic circle, both protecting and strengthening the object. . . . Troy, or labyrinth dances were probably apotropaic as well as giving strength to the object at the centre, or, when there was a maiden at the centre as was often the case, the attainment of the object and the centre both represented a goal, either of initiation or regaining Paradise."
Paradise is eternally being lost and found.
"Misplaced" might be a better term...Alice in Wonderland Movie Trailer - Video (What else?) If you can get past the short plug for (yuk!) "Wolfenstein"... Ho! and La! The ultimate chess movie will magically appear on your immediate horizon! Coming March 5th 2010
To further whet your appetite for Mr. Burton, Mr. Depp and Alice ...
Geekologie - More hatters! This kinky tour de farce humourosly (and with occasional mild profanity) presents the strangest things... including a link to...
3D Chess Adds Dimension To The Game "Tired of playing plain old chess? 3-way chess just not cutting it for you anymore? How about some 3-D chess? ... Anyway, this 3D chessboard was designed by Ji Lee and bears an unstriking resemblance to Star Trek Tri-Dimensional Chess."
Curiouser and curiouser... Geeks go forth with more jests and Retro Sci Fi Games. This site presents a beautiful collection with cool commentary...
"So, what will our intrepid space patrolmen do to stave off boredom during those long tedious space flights (I mean, other than the old stand-bys)? Yeah, I know: playing video games and surfing the interplanetary internet for naughty pictures.
But what if you were limited to 1950's-era retro science fiction? Well, you'd play games, of course. Intellectual games similar to chess for intellectual crew, and gambling games for those less intellectual. For "intellectual", read "Abstract Strategy Game". Though some of the classic games will still exist, I'm sure there will be some more futuristic entertainment."
Andrew Looney: "Science Fiction shows have often attempted to depict the "Chess of the Future." Consider Mr. Spock's 3-D chess set, or the Next Generation's use of Terrace as a futuristic-looking chess-style game. Even that holographic battle - chess game seen in the first Star Wars movie (the game which C-3PO was advised to "let the Wookie win") was played with soldier-like pieces on a grid-style board."
"From the manga Hikaru no Go. (Pictured above) This manga singlehandedly revitalized the interest of Japanese teenagers in the game of Go."
Old Hat, Old School Disney - Alice meets the Mad Hatter and the March Hare in a tea party. "A very merry unbirthday to you."
March Hares? New Alice? March 5th? An old calendar of eartly events leads to March 4th and the Feast of Ra in His Barge at Heliopolis (a kind of tea party - without the tea... though it probably wasn't much missed...)
Caesar's Salad People in Raunch Dressing?
High Tea? Naaa... it's Carnival, a festival in honor of the goddess of joy, imagination, and creativity, and a dance of sex hormones. Photo Credit: "So yuh going to Carnival"
Herodotus' "The Histories" [4] is replete with references to the borrowings that Greece owes to Kamit: "It was the Egyptians who originated, and taught the Greeks to use ceremonial meetings, processions, and processional offerings: a fact which can be inferred from the obvious antiquity of such ceremonies in Egypt, compared with Greece, where they have been only recently introduced." (Book II, para. 58)
Which leads us further down the ancient salad bar to...
Karnak - an old staging ground for "Moeris Dancing" - a la king? Perhaps...
Some serious religion - (Lest we forget, Dr. Calvo's two Chessays on "Gnostic Chess" point out some common roots)
Religion Comes From Ancient Astrology and Sun Worship 1 of 3 A series of videos that will probably stir some controversy - perhaps anger - although the set pieces line up in compelling fashion
The Origin of Tarot Cards from www.TheEnchantedWorld.com Where did tarot cards come from? How do they work? This video based on Amy Zerner and Monte Farber's "Enchanted Tarot" tells you all you need to know about the tarot's history and mystery.
Senet anyone? Let's not play games - with history ... Stewart Culin would smile - perhaps very approvingly - upon Douglas A. White & Amy Hsiao's reconstruction... H.J.R. Murray would probably just scowl and point wordlessly to his own "theory".
A review of the White-Hsiao Senet-Tarot In author Douglas A. White’s first Tarot deck, the Ancient Egyptian Senet Tarot, he has linked the tarot with the oracles of the Ancient Egyptians, in particular the Game of Senet. This game was played on a game board of thirty squares, each representing a deity, “like a portable temple” and the movement of the pieces “represented the progress of a person through life and the lessons to be learned along the way”.
Medhananda The Ancient Egyptian Senet Game: The Game of Archetypes An intercultural source beyond reproach? This book examines the ancient game board of the Egyptian pharaohs with its thirty symbols. Medhananda found that each of these "houses" or symbols corresponds to a psychological force-field, to an archetype within us. The reader is invited to explore these force-fields in order to discover the many ways of being, to become more conscious of the multifaceted self. Many parts of the ancient hieroglyphic "Great Senet Text" are translated and interpreted by the author....
SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT!
On August 19th goddesschess will once again convene a meeting of its partnership under Las Vegas skies - so no weekly site update will occur on the 16th. A ritual airflight and special birthday celebration are planned ...
Elsewhere and when in space-time
(where we are "never late" for any important date...)August 19th The Egyptian Festival Calendar marks - The Procession of Heru to Neith. However, since that time, on that day in history...many other events occurred ...
August 19, 1951 - The Main Event: Bill Veeck (Browns) sends Eddie Gaedel, a 3'7" midget, to pinch-hit...
Wearing number 1/8, the pint-sized Gaedel was allowed to hit. Pitcher Bob Cain couldn't stop laughing. Catcher Bob Swift went down on both knees rather than his usual crouch. And Gaedel, under strict orders not to take the bat off his shoulder, walked on four pitches. Gaedel took a couple of bows on his way down to first, then was replaced by pinch-runner Jim Delsing. And, with that, Number 1/8's major league career was over.
August 19, 1951 in History - Born: John Deacon, British pop guitarist, Queen- "Somebody to Love" Great video of one of the greatest songs ever composedAugust 19, 1398 in History - Born: Inigo Lopez, Spain, marques de Santillana. The Comedieta de Ponza is a Dantesque dream-dialogue, in octave stanzas (de arte mayor), founded on the disastrous sea-fight off Ponza in 1425, when the kings of Aragon and Navarre and the Infante Enrique were taken prisoners by the Genoese.
From luciolepress: a translation of de Santillana's
Serranilla
From Calatrava as I took my way
At holy Mary's shrine to kneel and pray,
And sleep upon my eyelids heavy lay,
There where the ground was very rough and wild,
I lost my path and met a peasant child:
From Finojosa, with the herds around her,
There in the fields I found her.Upon a meadow green with tender grass,
With other rustic cowherds, lad and lass,
So sweet a thing to see I watched her pass:
My eyes could scarce believe that they found her,
There with the herds around her.I do not think that roses in the Spring
Are half so lovely in their fashioning:
My heart must needs avow this secret thing,
That had I known her first as then I found her,
From Finojosa, with the herds around her,
I had not strayed so far her face to see
That it might rob me of my liberty.I questioned her, to know what she might say:
"Has she of Finojosa passed this way?"
She smiled and answered me: "In vain you sue,
Full well my heart discerns the hope in you:
But she of whom you speak, and have not found her.
Her heart is free, no thought of love has bound her,
Here with the herds around her."Inigo Lopez de Mendoza, Marques de Santillana
August 2 , 2009
Powerful Pawns - Wizards, Elfs and Idiots
The Power of Intercultural Myths and the Silly Games Historians Play
Hobbit Chess "I have always disliked the weakness of pawns in chess, and their common use as gambits. They deserve better! So I would like to suggest this modest variation: replace the pawns with "superpawns" or what I like to call hobbits. These sturdy little fellows can move one space orthogonally forwards, sideways, or backwards, and take one space diagonally forwards or backwards. You will think twice about sacrificing a hobbit."
Not Gandalf - but close The "Many Worlds" of - Giordano Bruno, born Filippo Bruno (1548 – February 17, 1600), was an Italian philosopher, mathematician, astronomer, and occultist best known as a proponent of heliocentrism and the infinity of the universe. His cosmological theories went beyond the Copernican model in identifying the sun as just one of an infinite number of independently moving heavenly bodies. He was burned at the stake by secular authorities in 1600 after the Roman Inquisition found him guilty of heresy.
111 and Bilbo Baggins' Birthday...
Voice of Bilbo: "Its mine, my own, my precious!"
Gandalf: "Riddles in the Dark." [The smoke from Gandalf's pipe drifts up, obscuring his face. Frodo is heard entering Bag End.]
Frodo: "Bilbo! Bilbo!" [Frodo opens the door and sees the Ring on the floor. He stoops to pick it up.]
Gandalf: "My precious."
Precious Chess - Many countries lay claim but the secret of its origins remains a sealed mystery. Who cast the One Ring? Who owns it now? Current attempts to provide a definitive answer are still not entirely satisfactory. The ring is still at large.
The Hobbit & Lord of the Rings Chess Sets
“The Hobbit” Set Construction Pictures By John - July 20, 2009 - 07:36 America/Montreal
'Hobbit' joins human family tree Chris Stringer holds a cast of the 18,000-year-old hominid LB1 Scientists have discovered a new and tiny species of human that lived in Indonesia at the same time our own ancestors were colonising the world.
Little people - Big games - White Lies?
Counters and dice for senet game in the collection of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts Author(s) KHODJASH S. I. ; The game of senet (a kind of backgammon) was popular in Egypt since the Pre-Dynastic period through the Roman period. From the New Kingdom period on the game bore ritual meaning, as the papyri imply (including the Book ofthe Dead). The Pushkin Museum possesses 11 faience counters: cone-shaped ones with a bulge on the top, round-shaped with flat bases, those in a form of a palm-like capitel turned upside-down, of a captive and of god Bes head. One of them bears the cartouche of pharaoh Amenhotep III (Neb-Ma'at-Re). The collection also includes 8 cube-shaped playing dice made of faience and bone, each one bearing numbers from one to six.
Bes is a very unusual god. He does not appear to be Egyptian at all, but where he does come from his largely unknown. He resembles gods found in central and southern Africa, and his function is very much like that of the Fool Shaman.
Bes (also spelt as Bisu) was an Egyptian deity worshipped in the later periods of dynastic history as a protector of households and in particular mothers and children. In time he would be regarded as the defender of everything good and the enemy of all that is bad.
Iran Necklace with the head of the Egyptian god Bes, Achaemenid; 6th–4th century B.C Gold; L. 14 1/8 in. (85.9 cm) Dodge Fund, 1965 (65.169)
Bes in Cyprus The Egyptian dwarf god Bes makes his first appearance in Cyprus in the Late Bronze Age in representations that are evidently directly inspired by Egypt. In the Iron Age (from 1050 BC) other demons and gods of foreign origin were introduced, and the Cypriots were inclined to confuse the various types so that 'Bes' often borrows features characteristic of others. Cypriot Besappears to have had an apotropaic function: serving as a means to ward off evil.
Pawon mandiram, 2 km. east of Borobodur, Central Java, Indonesia. Mandiram for Kuvera. Many dwarves are depicted pouring riches over the entrance Pot-bellied dwarfs (gan.a) a seated anthropomorph Nandi with a pot-belly. Nandi is a member of S’iva’s gan.a (army)
Pot-bellied dwarfs (gan.a) are shown carrying the architrave of western gate of Sanchi stupa. An anthropomorphic murti of Nandi together with Ganes’a appears in Nanjangud mandiram, a representation of the marriage of S’iva and Parvati. Representation of Ganes’a and Nandi in comparable s’ilpa is indicative of both Ganes’a and Nandi being part of S’iva gan.a and hence, nandis’vara may be taken as a representation of Kubera, a yaksha.
A bauddha text refers to Vishnu as a yaksha (loc. cit. in the lecture by Sadashiv Gorashkar).In the Durga mandiram at Aihole, there is a murthi of S’iva shown with a Nandi and also a dwarf representing gan.a, on the side, relating the vaahana to Kubera as the dwarf
Smiths were manufacturers of tools, and also weapons and hence responsible for supporting the soldiers carrying weapons to defend their communities. Tools made by smiths created a veritable revolution in civilizational history.
Who first engaged in alchemy, created the metals’ age, sought the veins of iron, learnt about the characteristics of minerals through experience, tempered the blades in oil 50 or 60 times and used many alloys of copper to make tools? Little people.Little people did work in the mines and smithies. Historical traditions across cultures associate dwarfs and elves with mining and smithy. Kubera and yaksha are the little people, the dwarfs who were involved in smithy, working with minerals, metals, alloys and furnaces, as demonstrated by the decipherment of Kubera’s navanidhi. An early center of iron manufacture seems to have been Ganga river basin, Illyria and Thrace. The little people are found as inspired, experimenting, itinerant explorers, naanaa des’eeya as many bharatiya epigraphs proclaim, they are like the gypsies. Maybe, they were the proto-gypsies.
Yaksha Satavahana, Pitalkhora, Maharashtra at National Museum, Delhi. c. 1st cent. BCE. Wears a five-stranded yajnopavitam, bracelets on wrists and shoulders, a necklace and two headbands of rudraksha beads and carries a basket of (perhaps, artisan tools) on his head. A yaksha is a dwarf.
Rama used Kubera's magic chariot to transport himself with his wife back to his kingdom in Ayodhya. After that the fantastic contraption was back in the hands of the dwarf god who again began going about his usual business of consolidating the wealth of the worlds.
Maori Bes In physical stature most groups were about the same height as Maori, but there was one widely dispersed group described as being considerably smaller (white pygmies) with fine, childlike features, white-golden hair and large watery blue-green eyes.
Maori used umbrella terms like Patu-paiarehe, Turehu and Pakepakeha as names for these earlier inhabitants, but each Maori tribe developed their own regional names, such as Ngati Kura, Ngati Korakorako and Ngati Turehu
In Tahiti, Hawaii and other regions of Polynesia the Bes statue representations tended to retain the high hat of Bes, as seen in these Egyptian depiction's. Priests of those regions continued to wear the high hats as a symbol of office.
"Sadly, many hundreds of older New Zealand history books, written by on-the-spot witnesses of significant events, or based upon extensive interviews with 19th century & earlier Maori tohungas, etc., are now labelled “Eurocentric- Ethnocentric” and conveniently discounted as unreliable without any rational justification. In the past thirty years or so the dismal works of approved-only, politically-aligned or politically-correct authors have supplanted the comprehensive works of yesteryear. Much subject-matter related to our unravelling New Zealand history or archaeology is now considered unmentionable and not for general public consumption. Scholarship in fields of history, archaeology or physical-anthropology has plummeted to being little more than thinly disguised propaganda."
Hei-Tiki found in Mexico. It is shown in volume XXXV of The Journal Of The Polynesian Society under the title, Notes and Queries (417) A Mexican Tiki. The Journal Of The Polynesian Society was, through much of the 19th century and throughout the 20th century, a very respected and prestigious scientific periodical
THE DANCE OF BES. Masculine forms of the Maori haka were, without doubt, in the earlier era of the Patu-paiarehe people, dances of Bes, where the performer attempted to encapsulate all of the facial characteristics and physical attributes of the protective little dwarf god.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdMCAV6Yd0Y
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-lrE2JcO44
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BoNmpvkavo&NR=1
Editor's Notes: Egyptian senet pawns - of which Bes is merely one concrete example - are frequently referred to as "ab" or "ibau", which translate as "heart" and "dancers" respectively, but have other depthful connotations. Haka and Heka are, in all probability, referring to a common and important form of apotropaic "magic" encompassing many types of ritual activity involving the Ka of living persons - whereas. iconic depictions of the actual Egyptian god, Heka are virtually identical to Bes - with the exception that he has grown an enormous set of horns - i.e. a promoted pawn or "master magician".Wim van Bimsbergen ("Intercultural Encounters") also points out that North African diviners are typically "disfigured" human beings, which is also a cultic property of the Egyptian Bes. Other iconic aspects of African diviner cults merely reinforce the probablilty of broad scale intercultural diffusion and overlap.
John Coloruso's examination of the Nart Saga also remarks upon the association between knock kneed dwarf heros and the Nart Sana legacy. There is also an excellent possibilty that the character of "Humbaba the terrible" an alleged "forest giant", poses the same identity within the context of the Gilgamesh epic and that a projective distortion intended to buff the hero's image effectively casts Enki as the "little man" when, in effect, they may be one and the same apotropaic entity come face to face in territorial battle.
SO, WELCOME TO THE "DARK AGES".
It has been correctly stated by one observer: 'it's virtually all corporate science now" and information is carefully vetted, seived and sanitised by social engineers before it's deemed suitable for presentation to the masses.It is my firm yet humble opinion that this is exactly what we find in Myron Sampsin's "PAWNS AND PIECES - TOWARDS THE PREHISTORY OF CHESS". THE temptation to fit history, archaeology and anthropology into a coherent, determinanistic, paradigm tends to undercut a forest of cross-cultural data for the sake of a tidy hypothesis. Integration of an Indian "siiga" at the expense of Afro-Egyptian "seega" also shows reluctance to deal with all plausible and even well known Greek sources and attributions equally. Pebbles or people? The Egyptians played with both and imbued them with "life" and lifelike characteristics. Thus it seems a terrible pity that modern history has seen fit to reduce a vast intercultural legacy to a faceless, two-dimensional cipher.
Monbiot asks: ‘Why are the same myths associated with the blacksmiths all over the world?” ["Smith and the Devil" by George Monbiot, an essay published in Country Living Magazine]
"Paved Paradise" AKA Big Yellow Taxi Video: They paved paradise And put up a parking lot With a pink hotel, a boutique And a swinging hot spot.
"Trees continue to be felled and thrown into the pits, to be burnt in the fires in their depths. Saruman walks around in them, watching the iron being smelted and poured into moulds as helmets and more weapons are made.."
Mining, Smelting, and Fuel Once copper smelting developed from pottery-making, the use of wood fuel accelerated. By the time the Bronze Age was well under way, wood was being consumed around the Eastern Mediterranean on a scale that could not possibly be sustained on a long-term basis. Mining, smelting, metal-working, ship-building, pottery-making, and construction industries all had massive appetites for fuel, and almost all domestic fuel was also wood.
Common Themes, East & West: The four elements appear to be the tip of a bigger iceberg. Eco-destruction no doubt accompanied local large scale mining, which may have led to the demonization of smiths in African pastoral culture and elsewhere. In addition to contributing directly to the collapse of several early urban cultures, those weakened by resource attrition (fire wood) most likely found themselves incapable of forging the types and numbers of metal weapons required to defend against better equipped intruders.
"A Tribute To Hinduism" - Editor's Note: This otherwise remarkable site attempts to reverse the flow of DNA evidence leading out of Africa. Evidence of ancient contact between Egypt and India has become increasingly distinct. However factual, I regret that the authors of this page are preoccupied with a brazen attempt to politicize a far more complex anthropological record. Some important facts regarding the syncretic properties of Hinduism have been conveniently omitted and the outcome is unspeakably hegemonic - to the point of insanity...For More Insanity:
Smart Car TossingAugust 9, 2009
