American Revolution Video

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The Mayan Ball Game Webquest

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Sokushinbutsu: Self Mummification

From

Scattered throughout Northern Japan around the Yamagata Prefecture are two dozen mummified Japanese monks known as Sokushinbutsu, who caused their own deaths in a way that resulted in their mummification. The practice was first pioneered by a priest named Kuukai over 1000 years ago at the temple complex of Mount Koya, in Wakayama prefecture. Kuukai was founder of the Shingon sect of Buddhism, which is the sect that came up with the idea of enlightenment through physical punishment. A successful mummification took upwards of ten years. It is believed that many hundreds of monks tried, but only between 16 and 24 such mummifications have been discovered to date.

The elaborate process started with 1,000 days of eating a special diet consisting only of nuts and seeds, while taking part in a regimen of rigorous physical activity that stripped them of their body fat. They then ate only bark and roots for another thousand days and began drinking a poisonous tea made from the sap of the Urushi tree, normally used to lacquer bowls.

This caused vomiting and a rapid loss of bodily fluids, and most importantly, it made the body too poisonous to be eaten by maggots. Finally, a self-mummifying monk would lock himself in a stone tomb barely larger than his body, where he would not move from the lotus position. His only connection to the outside world was an air tube and a bell. Each day he rang a bell to let those outside know that he was still alive.

When the bell stopped ringing, the tube was removed and the tomb sealed. After the tomb was sealed, the other monks in the temple would wait another 1,000 days, and open the tomb to see if the mummification was successful. If the monk had been successfully mummified, they were immediately seen as a Buddha and put in the temple for viewing. Usually, though, there was just a decomposed body.

The mummies also possess the accessories they had prior to death. However, their eyes have been removed. Even so, they are considered able to see into the souls of the living and be able to perceive reality perfectly.

The practice is now outlawed by the government of Japan and not practiced today by any Buddhist sect.

Unlocking Scrolls Preserved in Eruption of Vesuvius, Using X-Ray Beams

By NICHOLAS WADEJAN. 20, 2015
Researchers have found a key that may unlock the only library of classical antiquity to survive along with its documents, raising at least a possibility of recovering vanished works of ancient Greek and Roman authors such as the lost books of Livy’s history of Rome.

The library is that of a villa in Herculaneum, a town that was destroyed in A.D. 79 by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius that obliterated nearby Pompeii. Though Pompeii was engulfed by lava, a mix of superhot gases and ash swept over Herculaneum, preserving the documents in a grand villa that probably belonged to the family of Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus, the father-in-law of Julius Caesar.

Though the hot gases did not burn the many papyrus rolls in the villa’s library, they turned them into cylinders of carbonized plant material. Many attempts have been made to unroll the carbonized scrolls since they were excavated in 1752.

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But all were highly destructive, and scholars eventually decided to leave the scrolls alone in the hope that better methods would be invented. More than 300 scrolls survive more or less intact, with many more fragments.

The archaeological excavations of Herculaneum in the villa dei Papiri, Italy. Credit Splash News, via Corbis Researchers led by Vito Mocella, of the Institute for Microelectronics and Microsystems in Naples, Italy, now say that for the first time, they can read letters inside the scrolls without unrolling them. Using a laserlike beam of X-rays from the European Synchrotron in Grenoble, France, they were able to pick up the very slight contrast between the carbonized papyrus fibers and the ancient ink, soot-based and also made of carbon.

The contrast has allowed them to recognize individual Greek letters from the interior of the roll, Dr. Mocella’s team reported on Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications. “At least we know there are techniques able to read inside the papyri, finally,” Dr. Mocella said in an interview. His team is considering several ways to refine the power of their technique.

“If the technology is perfected, it will be a real leap forward,” said Richard Janko, a classical scholar at the University of Michigan who has translated some of the few scrolls that can be read.

The research team look upon the Herculaneum Scrolls during a sample installation. Credit J. Delattre

The Mocella team’s work is the second recent advance in reading the Herculaneum scrolls. In 2009, Brent Seales, a computer scientist at the University of Kentucky, succeeded in delineating the physical structure of a Herculaneum scroll by X-ray-computed tomography, a process similar to a CT scan. The layers of papyrus wound up inside the scroll are highly ruffled and irregular because the hot gases liberated all the water from the fibers as well as carbonizing them.

The Mocella team’s method visualizes letters free floating inside the scroll, but each letter will need to be assigned to its correct place on Dr. Seales’s surface before the letters can form words. Dr. Seales and Dr. Mocella worked with Herculaneum scrolls acquired by Napoleon in 1802 and belonging to the Institut de France in Paris.

“This is absolutely a major step forward,” Dr. Seales said of the Mocella report. “These guys are focused on showing the imagery with best contrast. But to really read the papyrus, you need to untangle its surface, which is the active area of my work.”

The Herculaneum Papyrus scroll. Credit D. Delattre/Bibliothèque de l'Institut de France

Classical scholars are particularly interested in the physicists’ progress because of the chance of uncovering lost works of Latin and Greek literature. Piso’s grand villa — which is the model for the Getty Villa, part of the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles — is thought to have probably contained a large and wide-ranging library, much of which may still exist in unexcavated portions of the building.

“It would have been odd for a villa of this sort not to have had a major library,” Dr. Janko said. “So this technology, when perfected, does open the way to rediscovering a lot more ancient literature.”

The scrolls that have been opened pertain mostly to Greek philosophy and contain several works by Epicurus and his adherent Philodemus. But the library may also have had a Latin section. This could contain some of the many lost works of Roman history and literature. Even the texts of known works would be of great interest.

“For a scholar, it would be wonderful to have a manuscript of Virgil written in his lifetime, because what we have are medieval manuscripts which have suffered many changes at the hands of copyists,” said David Sider, a professor of classics at New York University.

West Africa Web Quest

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Test and Projects

Remember students have their projects due next week.

5th Grade is due on Thursday, 1/15/15.

6th Grade is due Monday, 1/12/15.

6th Grade will also have a test on Tuesday 1/13/15.

Africa Study Guide

Paul Revere's Time Capsule

Some pretty cool pictures from the Time Capsule recently opened.

Two ancient tombs discovered in Egypt

Al Arabiya News
Sunday, 4 January 2015

Two ancient tombs were discovered in Egypt on Sunday, with one representing a symbolic burial site of the god Osiris while another is claimed to be a previously unknown pharaonic tomb.

The paper said Osiris’ tomb was found complete with multiple shafts and chambers at Al-Gorna necropolis on Luxor’s west bank, Ahram Online reported.

Antiquities Minister Mamdouh Eldamaty, speaking to the daily, hailed the discovery as important as the tomb was a small version of the design of the Osirion found in Abydos in the Upper Egypt city of Sohag.

The tomb, which consists of a large hall supported with five pillars, can be dated to the 25th Dynasty, the daily quoted Abdel Hakim Karar, head of Antiquities of Upper Egypt, as saying.

The paper quoted María Milagros Álvarez Sosa, head of the mission, as saying that part of the tomb was initially discovered by archaeologist Philippe Virey in the 1880s and that some attempts were made to sketch out the main structure in the 20th century.

Osiris was a pivotal god to the ancient Egyptians and was usually identified as the god of the afterlife, the underworld and the dead.
Tomb of unknown queen found

Meanwhile, Czech archaeologists have unearthed the tomb of a previously unknown queen believed to have been the wife of Pharaoh Neferefre who ruled 4,500 years ago, Agence France-Presse reported officials as saying on Sunday.

The tomb was discovered in Abu Sir, an Old Kingdom necropolis southwest of Cairo where there are several pyramids dedicated to pharaohs of the Fifth Dynasty, including Neferefre.

The name of his wife had not been known before the find, Antiquities Minister Mamdouh al-Damaty said in a statement.

He identified her as Khentakawess, saying that for the “first time we have discovered the name of this queen who had been unknown before the discovery of her tomb.”

That would make her Khentakawess III, as two previous queens with the same name have already been identified.

Her name and rank had been inscribed on the inner walls of the tomb, probably by the builders, Damaty said.

“This discovery will help us shed light on certain unknown aspects of the Fifth Dynasty, which along with the Fourth Dynasty, witnessed the construction of the first pyramids,” he added.

Miroslav Barta, who heads the Czech Institute of Egyptology mission who made the discovery, said the tomb was found in Neferefre’s funeral complex.

“This makes us believe that the queen was his wife,” Barta said, according to the statement.

An official at the antiquities ministry said the tomb dated from the middle of the Fifth Dynasty (2994-2345 BC).

Archaeologists also found around 30 utensils, 24 made of limestone and four of copper, the statement added.

(With AFP)
Last Update: Sunday, 4 January 2015 KSA 21:07 - GMT 18:07