Beijing, June 12 (IANS) An unfinished Buddhist scripture dating to around 386 A.D. has been found engraved on a cave wall in China.
Archaeological workers discovered the scripture in northern China’s Hebei province, Xinhua reported.
The scripture - named the Lotus Sutra - was found in a cave in Xiangtangshan region, an official said.
It is believed to have been created during the Northern Dynasties (386 to 581 A.D.), but was not finished, the official said.
‘We’ll probe into the reason why the work was halted,’ he added.
The Xiangtangshan area includes 16 caves and over 450 cliffside sculptures. It came under state protection in 1961. (source)
Textiles and rope fragments found in a Peruvian cave have been dated to around 12,000 years ago, making them the oldest textiles ever found in South America, according to a report in the April issue of Current Anthropology.
The items were found 30 years ago in Guitarrero Cave high in the Andes Mountains. Other artifacts found along with the textiles had been dated to 12,000 ago and even older. However, the textiles themselves had never been dated, and whether they too were that old had been controversial, according to Edward Jolie, an archaeologist at Mercyhurst College (PA) who led this latest research. Read more.
During two brief periods a year, a few select paleontologists, geologists and other specialists receive special permission from the French government to pass through a vault-like door on a cliff above the Ardeche River in southwestern France. Once inside the Chauvet cave, they become members of an exclusive group — those who have witnessed, in three dimensions, the oldest known art in the world.
Discovered in 1994, the 32,000-year-old cave paintings show bears, bison, tigers and horses ranging with life-like movement over wavy limestone walls. To preserve the images, France has strictly limited entry to the cavern. But among those granted access last spring was filmmaker Werner Herzog, who took in a 3-D camera and brought out a 90-minute film that gives viewers entrée to a spectacular place to which they would otherwise never be admitted. Read more.
It was probably more interesting 34,000 years ago. Then, from Paviland cave you would have seen mammoths, rhinos, oryx, vast herds of deer, even the odd sabre-toothed tiger, all roaming across the plain below. Now it’s just water – the Bristol Channel swashing against the jagged rock beneath the cave, Lundy Island in the distance, the coast of south-west England beyond that.
Paviland is only accessible for a couple of hours a day – unless you fancy a tricky climb – so I’ve decided to stay here for 24 hours, sleeping in the cave, sunbathing on the rocks, and wishing I’d brought some board games to play with my companions, local survival expert Andrew Price and photographer Gareth Phillips.
Cave life can be a little on the dull side.
Paviland cave, on the Gower peninsula in South Wales, is a crucial site for tracing the origins of human life in Britain. It was in here, in 1823, that William Buckland, the first professor of geology at Oxford University, excavated the remains of a body that had been smeared with red ochre (naturally occurring iron oxide) and buried with a selection of periwinkle shells and ivory rods. Buckland initially thought the body was that of a customs officer, killed by smugglers. Then he decided it was a Roman prostitute – he wrongly believed the iron-age fort on the hilltop above the cave was Roman. This misidentification gave the headless skeleton its name – “the Red Lady of Paviland” – and it is still called the Red Lady, even though we now know two things Buckland didn’t: the remains are those of a young man, probably in his late 20s, and they were buried 34,000 years ago. Read more.
Berlin - Archaeologists have discovered fragments of one of the world’s oldest sculptures, a lion-faced figurine estimated at 32,000 years old, from the dirt floor of a cave in southern Germany. The ivory figure, along with a tiny figurine known as the Venus of Hohle Fels, marks the foundation of human artistry. Both were created by a Stone Age European culture that historians call Aurignacian. The Aurignacians appear to have been the first modern humans, with handicrafts, social customs and beliefs. They hunted reindeer, woolly rhinoceros, mammoths and other animals. The Lion-Man sculpture, gradually re-assembled in workshops over decades after the fragments were discovered in 1939, is a kind of reverse sphinx: a human body, standing erect, but with the head of a now extinct European cave lion. The head is finely cut, but there is not enough detail left in the body to judge whether this chimera was meant to be male or female. Claus-Joachim Kind, the chief archaeologist at the palaeolithic site near the city of Ulm, said the figure, was probably used by a shamanistic religion. Read more.
The image is eerily familiar: a bearded young man with flowing curly hair. After lying for nearly 2,000 years hidden in a cave in the Holy Land, the fine detail is difficult to determine. But in a certain light it is not difficult to interpret the marks around the figure’s brow as a crown of thorns.
The extraordinary picture of one of the recently discovered hoard of up to 70 lead codices – booklets – found in a cave in the hills overlooking the Sea of Galilee is one reason Bible historians are clamoring to get their hands on the ancient artifacts.
If genuine, this could be the first-ever portrait of Jesus Christ, possibly even created in the lifetime of those who knew him.
The tiny booklet, a little smaller than a modern credit card, is sealed on all sides and has a three-dimensional representation of a human head on both the front and the back. One appears to have a beard and the other is without. Even the maker’s fingerprint can be seen in the lead impression. Beneath both figures is a line of as-yet undeciphered text in an ancient Hebrew script. Read more.
The discovery of a human skull and bones of Prehistoric mega fauna – among them a gomphothere – in a flooded cave in the Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico, has set in motion a multi-disciplinary research project.
The team including cave divers, archaeologists and other specialists, will continue to explore the site in order to further study the remains which could be more than 10,000 years old.
Underwater archaeologist Pilar Luna Erreguerena of the National Institute of Anthropology and History said that after the ancient remains were discovered by three experienced cave divers, a project was formulated for the site known as Hoyo Negro (Black Hole), part of the Aktun-Ha flooded caves system in Quintana Roo. “This may be a very ancient site, so we need to protect it. The materials look to be in a good state of preservation. Besides the skull, we found a large bone that might be a humerus”.
The three cave divers – as part of an initial project started four years ago – swam through a 1200 metre long tunnel up to the entrance of a pool known as Hoyo Negro before descending 60 metres. It was then that they detected a human skull and long bone, extinct mega fauna and bonfire ash. Read more.
If the finding is found to be authentic, it would be constitute the earliest known Christian writings.
The text is in the form of codices written onto credit-card-sized sheets of lead and bound with lead rings.
The fragments of text that have been translated so far and the images and symbols on the “books” indicate that they are Christian.
Many of the 70 books are sealed, leading to speculation that they contain secret writings.
The haul was discovered five years ago after a flash flood exposed two niches inside a cave in remote northern Jordan. Read more.
