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Viggen

Triumviri
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Posts posted by Viggen


  1. pretty interesting article,

    and can  we assume that the ancients had much more practice and were even better than the tester today?

     

    The results of the experiments done on these lead bullets were published in National Geographic. Several copies of the bullets, both the solid and holed versions, were made and given to a trained slinger for testing. The solid lead bullets were found to hit speeds up to 100 miles per hour (160 kph) when in flight and could hit targets smaller than a human from 390 feet (130 yards) away.

    They also had the same stopping power as a modern-day .44 magnum. The bullets with holes were not as powerful but produced "a weird banshee-like wail", which Nicholson believes was used to try to terrify the enemy.

    ...via Blasting News


  2. The Roman Empire And The Silk Road by Raoul McLoughlin seeks to describe a situation that existed for a few hundred years in the past. Trade routes across Asia and the societies that interacted along it. He writes in an engaging style without sensationalist questioning. Everything is derived from ancient sources in a factual manner. In most cases, the study of Roman history remains focused on that empire's interior and periphery, but McLoughlin places SPQR in context, in relation to the world around it, and demonstrates convincingly how important how important these contacts were to keeping the Roman Empire economically viable. The emphasis is on one product - silk. It might seem a little myopic but the point is that silk was a hugely valuable and desirable commodity. The Chinese paid their troops in bales of it. Once the Romans discovered this wonder material from a far off land they craved it as a fashion necessity, as a practical material, and as a status symbol...

    ...continue to the full review of  Roman Empire And The Silk Road by Raoul McLoughlin


  3. ...did the

    On 16.6.2005 at 9:46 PM, Lacertus said:

    Northern peoples used deep pits for preservation harvest. Their depth was approximately 6 feet. The pit inside was covered with a layer of clay which was allowed to dry. The bottom of the pit was filled with dry sand and coniferous boards were laid over it. Grain was filled up by layers. each The layer of grain was spaced with a layer of coniferous branches. The needle possesses antibacterial action and the harvest could store a few years. The layers enabled to keep air and grain could "breathe". Above the pit was covered with a rough fabric or a leather and closed tightly by boards and branches.

    It is considered that such way kept completely the harvest up to 10 years. There was preserved nothing so long usually.

    ...from when on did they had cats? Must have been paradise for mice....


  4. Professor Peter T. Struck’s Divination and Human Nature takes the reader on a guided tour of ancient philosophers (Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, and the Neoplatonist Iamblichus) and their opinions regarding “natural” divination, as opposed to “technical” divination such as the reading of entrails, described as “the application of…logic to empirically gathered external signs” (p 16). The purpose of natural divination varies, but its nature remains strikingly similar among the philosophers examined: “the immediate apperception of something without the intervention of any reasoning process,” (p 20) knowledge which “arrives to us by ways other than self-conscious, goal-directed inferential chains of thought” (p 31), “an epiphenomenon of human anatomy and cognition (p 177), or, simply put, “intuition.”

    ...continue to the full review of Divination and Human Nature by Peter T. Struck


  5. The new special exhibition at the Papyrus Museum at the Austrian National Library tells of the long journeys made by knowledge: antique papyri and mediaeval manuscripts document the often arduous but exciting routes that texts have travelled over many centuries.

    The exhibits paint an impressive picture of how knowledge was recorded, conveyed and shared before the invention of printing. Passed on and preserved across linguistic and religious borders, some of these ancient texts ultimately became integral parts of our own educational canon so that they are still very relevant today...

    via Papyrus Museum Austria


  6. Mithraism May Become a Bit Less Mysterious with New Temple Discovery in Turkey. Excavations ongoing since 2013 at Zerzevan Castle in Turkey’s Diyarbakir Province have turned up secret passages leading to an underground Christian church and shelter that could hold up to 400 people.  A story in the Turkish online newspaper Daily Sabah says the most recent work at the castle has found the temple to Mithras, whose ancient religion was supplanted by Christianity.  Zerzevan Castle is about 55,200 square meters (594,000 square feet) and has walls 12 to 15 meters tall (39.37 to 49.2 feet tall). The watch tower is 21 meters (69 feet) tall. The walls stretch for 1,200 meters (3,937 feet). The huge complex includes a church building (aboveground), ruins of homes, buildings for administrators, and storage facilities for weapons and grain. The castle also has tombs and water channels cut into the rock...

    ...via Ancient Origins


  7. The garden of a large ancient house in Pompeii was home to stunning paintings depicting the Nile river flowing among green, lush landscapes. These artworks could shed light on the way the Romans viewed the ancient Egyptian culture, and how they integrated it into their own.  In a study now published online in the American Journal of Archaeology, researcher Caitlin Barrett shows that these "Nilotic scenes" give the Pompeian house a more cosmopolitan feel. They transform it into a microcosm of the Roman civilisation – which at the time had spread all around the Mediterranean, all the way to Egypt...

    ...via IB Times

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