Thousands of bones were unearthed at the Vatican

Insider Jul. 22, 2019

VATICAN CITY (AP) — A genetics expert retained by the family of a girl who went missing in 1983 said Saturday that a cavernous underground space near a Vatican cemetery holds thousands of bones that appear to be from dozens of individuals, both "adult and non-adult." 

The expert, Giorgio Portera, said the "enormous" size of the collection under the Teutonic College was revealed when Vatican-appointed experts began cataloging the remains, which were discovered last week .

"We didn't expect such an enormous number" of bones and other remains which "had been thrown into a cavity," Portera said. "We want to know why and how" the bones ended up there.

Fragments were also found, complicating the forensic experts' work, he said.

Portera is working on behalf of the family of Emanuela Orlandi, a Vatican citizen who vanished at age 15 after she left her family's Vatican City apartment for a music lesson in Rome. What became of her is one of Italy's most enduring mysteries.

Some have theorized the girl was kidnapped in an unsuccessful ransom bid to win freedom for the Turkish gunman who shot and wounded Pope John Paul II in St. Peter's Square in 1981.

A Vatican statement Saturday made no mention of the number of remains in the newly discovered space near the Teutonic Cemetery but said the forensic work would resume on July 27. 

Orlandi's family previously received an anonymous tip to search near the 19th century tombs of two German princesses in the tiny graveyard.

Ancient Roman theater found in northern Israel may have been used for religious ceremonies

Daniel K. Eisenbud 10 January 2017

A Roman amphitheater discovered during an excavation by the University of Haifa at Hippos, a site overlooking the Sea of Galilee, may support the hypothesis that the facility was used for religious ceremonies instead of entertainment.

Hippos, which is situated on a prominent hill some two kilometers east of the Sea of Galilee within Sussita National Park, is operated by the Israel Nature and Parks Authority.  

According to the University of Haifa’s Dr. Michael Eisenberg, who heads the Hippos Excavations Project, the digs outside the city over the past few years “are falling into place like in a detective story.”

“First, we found a mask of Pan, then the monumental gate leading to what we began to assume was a large public compound, a sanctuary,” he said this week at an annual research conference at the school’s Zinman Institute of Archeology. “And now, this year, we find a public bathhouse and theater in the same location – both facilities that in the Roman period could be associated with the god of medicine Asclepius, or with gods of nature, such as Dionysus and Pan.”

During the Roman period, Hippos was an important city in the Golan Heights, and the area east of the Sea of Galilee, or Lake Kinneret. Over the past two years, researchers from the university’s Institute of Archeology have repeatedly been surprised by the unexpected findings uncovered outside the city’s walls.

However, one feature that was missing in the excavated city, until now, was the theater – a public building capable of accommodating thousands of people, which served as the venue for the popular public shows.     JPost

Columbus, the Indians, and Human Progress excerpted from a People's History of the United States

By Howard Zinn

Arawak men and women, naked, tawny, and full of wonder, emerged from their villages onto the island's beaches and swam out to get a closer look at the strange big boat. When Columbus and his sailors came ashore, carrying swords, speaking oddly, the Arawaks ran to greet them, brought them food, water, gifts. He later wrote of this in his log:

"They... brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many other things, which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawks' bells. They willingly traded everything they owned.... They were well-built, with good bodies and handsome features.... They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They have no iron. Their spears are made of cane.... They would make fine servants.... With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want."

These Arawaks of the Bahama Islands were much like Indians on the mainland, who were remarkable (European observers were to say again and again) for their hospitality, their belief in sharing. These traits did not stand out in the Europe of the Renaissance, dominated as it was by the religion of popes, the government of kings, the frenzy for money that marked Western civilization and its first messenger to the Americas, Christopher Columbus.

Columbus wrote:

"As soon as I arrived in the Indies, on the first Island which I found, I took some of the natives by force in order that they might learn and might give me information of whatever there is in these parts."

The information that Columbus wanted most was: Where is the gold?

****

The Indians, Columbus reported, "are so naive and so free with their possessions that no one who has not witnessed them would believe it. When you ask for something they have, they never say no. To the contrary, they offer to share with anyone...." He concluded his report by asking for a little help from their Majesties, and in return he would bring them from his next voyage "as much gold as they need . . . and as many slaves as they ask." He was full of religious talk: "Thus the eternal God, our Lord, gives victory to those who follow His way over apparent impossibilities."

Because of Columbus's exaggerated report and promises, his second expedition was given seventeen ships and more than twelve hundred men. The aim was clear: slaves and gold. They went from island to island in the Caribbean, taking Indians as captives. But as word spread of the Europeans' intent they found more and more empty villages. On Haiti, they found that the sailors left behind at Fort Navidad had been killed in a battle with the Indians, after they had roamed the island in gangs looking for gold, taking women and children as slaves for sex and labor.

Now, from his base on Haiti, Columbus sent expedition after expedition into the interior. They found no gold fields, but had to fill up the ships returning to Spain with some kind of dividend. In the year 1495, they went on a great slave raid, rounded up fifteen hundred Arawak men, women, and children, put them in pens guarded by Spaniards and dogs, then picked the five hundred best specimens to load onto ships. Of those five hundred, two hundred died en route. The rest arrived alive in Spain and were put up for sale by the archdeacon of the town, who reported that, although the slaves were "naked as the day they were born," they showed "no more embarrassment than animals." Columbus later wrote: "Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity go on sending all the slaves that can be sold."

But too many of the slaves died in captivity. And so Columbus, desperate to pay back dividends to those who had invested, had to make good his promise to fill the ships with gold. In the province of Cicao on Haiti, where he and his men imagined huge gold fields to exist, they ordered all persons fourteen years or older to collect a certain quantity of gold every three months. When they brought it, they were given copper tokens to hang around their necks. Indians found without a copper token had their hands cut off and bled to death.

The Indians had been given an impossible task. The only gold around was bits of dust garnered from the streams. So they fled, were hunted down with dogs, and were killed.

Trying to put together an army of resistance, the Arawaks faced Spaniards who had armor, muskets, swords, horses. When the Spaniards took prisoners they hanged them or burned them to death. Among the Arawaks, mass suicides began, with cassava poison. Infants were killed to save them from the Spaniards. In two years, through murder, mutilation, or suicide, half of the 250,000 Indians on Haiti were dead.

When it became clear that there was no gold left, the Indians were taken as slave labor on huge estates, known later as encomiendas. They were worked at a ferocious pace, and died by the thousands. By the year 1515, there were perhaps fifty thousand Indians left. By 1550, there were five hundred. A report of the year 1650 shows none of the original Arawaks or their descendants left on the island.

The chief source-and, on many matters the only source-of in formation about what happened on the islands after Columbus came is Bartolome de las Casas, who, as a young priest, participated in the conquest of Cuba. For a time he owned a plantation on which Indian slaves worked, but he gave that up and became a vehement critic of Spanish cruelty.

*****

In Book Two of his History of the Indies, Las Casas (who at first urged replacing Indians by black slaves, thinking they were stronger and would survive, but later relented when he saw the effects on blacks) tells about the treatment of the Indians by the Spaniards. It is a unique account and deserves to be quoted at length:

"Endless testimonies . . . prove the mild and pacific temperament of the natives.... But our work was to exasperate, ravage, kill, mangle and destroy; small wonder, then, if they tried to kill one of us now and then.... The admiral, it is true, was blind as those who came after him, and he was so anxious to please the King that he committed irreparable crimes against the Indians..."

Las Casas tells how the Spaniards "grew more conceited every day" and after a while refused to walk any distance. They "rode the backs of Indians if they were in a hurry" or were carried on hammocks by Indians running in relays. "In this case they also had Indians carry large leaves to shade them from the sun and others to fan them with goose wings."

Total control led to total cruelty. The Spaniards "thought nothing of knifing Indians by tens and twenties and of cutting slices off them to test the sharpness of their blades." Las Casas tells how "two of these so-called Christians met two Indian boys one day, each carrying a parrot; they took the parrots and for fun beheaded the boys."

The Indians' attempts to defend themselves failed. And when they ran off into the hills they were found and killed. So, Las Casas reports. "they suffered and died in the mines and other labors in desperate silence, knowing not a soul in the world to whom they could tun for help." He describes their work in the mines:

"... mountains are stripped from top to bottom and bottom to top a thousand times; they dig, split rocks, move stones, and carry dirt on their backs to wash it in the rivers, while those who wash gold stay in the water all the time with their backs bent so constantly it breaks them; and when water invades the mines, the most arduous task of all is to dry the mines by scooping up pansful of water and throwing it up outside....

After each six or eight months' work in the mines, which was the time required of each crew to dig enough gold for melting, up to a third of the men died. While the men were sent many miles away to the mines, the wives remained to work the soil, forced into the excruciating job of digging and making thousands of hills for cassava plants.

Thus husbands and wives were together only once every eight or ten months and when they met they were so exhausted and depressed on both sides . . . they ceased to procreate. As for the newly born, they died early because their mothers, overworked and famished, had no milk to nurse them, and for this reason, while I was in Cuba, 7000 children died in three months. Some mothers even drowned their babies from sheer desperation.... In this way, husbands died in the mines, wives died at work, and children died from lack of milk . . . and in a short time this land which was so great, so powerful and fertile ... was depopulated.... My eyes have seen these acts so foreign to human nature, and now I tremble as I write...."

When he arrived on Hispaniola in 1508, Las Casas says, "there were 60,000 people living on this island, including the Indians; so that from 1494 to 1508, over three million people had perished from war, slavery, and the mines. Who in future generations will believe this? I myself writing it as a knowledgeable eyewitness can hardly believe it...."

Thus began the history, five hundred years ago, of the European invasion of the Indian settlements in the Americas. That beginning, when you read Las Casas-even if his figures are exaggerations (were there 3 million Indians to begin with, as he says, or less than a million, as some historians have calculated, or 8 million as others now believe?) is conquest, slavery, death. When we read the history books given to children in the United States, it all starts with heroic adventure-there is no bloodshed-and Columbus Day is a celebration.

*****

The treatment of heroes (Columbus) and their victims (the Arawaks) the quiet acceptance of conquest and murder in the name of progress-is only one aspect of a certain approach to history, in which the past is told from the point of view of governments, conquerors, diplomats, leaders. It is as if they, like Columbus, deserve universal acceptance, as if they-the Founding Fathers, Jackson, Lincoln, Wilson, Roosevelt, Kennedy, the leading members of Congress, the famous Justices of the Supreme Court-represent the nation as a whole. The pretense is that there really is such a thing as "the United States," subject to occasional conflicts and quarrels, but fundamentally a community of people with common interests. It is as if there really is a "national interest" represented in the Constitution, in territorial expansion, in the laws passed by Congress, the decisions of the courts, the development of capitalism, the culture of education and the mass media.

"History is the memory of states," wrote Henry Kissinger in his first book, A World Restored, in which he proceeded to tell the history of nineteenth-century Europe from the viewpoint of the leaders of Austria and England, ignoring the millions who suffered from those states men's policies. From his standpoint, the "peace" that Europe had before the French Revolution was "restored" by the diplomacy of a few national leaders.

But for factory workers in England, farmers in France, colored people in Asia and Africa, women and children everywhere except in the upper classes, it was a world of conquest, violence, hunger, exploitation-a world not restored but disintegrated.

*****

When the Pilgrims came to New England they too were coming not to vacant land but to territory inhabited by tribes of Indians. The governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, John Winthrop, created the excuse to take Indian land by declaring the area legally a "vacuum." The Indians, he said, had not "subdued" the land, and therefore had only a "natural" right to it, but not a "civil right." A "natural right" did not have legal standing.

The Puritans also appealed to the Bible, Psalms 2:8: "Ask of me, and I shall give thee, the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession." And to justify their use of force to take the land, they cited Romans 13:2: "Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation."

*****

The Indian population of 10 million that lived north of Mexico when Columbus came would ultimately be reduced to less than a million. Huge numbers of Indians would die from diseases introduced by the whites. A Dutch traveler in New Netherland wrote in 1656 that "the Indians . . . affirm, that before the arrival of the Christians, and before the smallpox broke out amongst them, they were ten times as numerous as they now are, and that their population had been melted down by this disease, whereof nine-tenths of them have died." When the English first settled Martha's Vineyard in 1642, the Wampanoags there numbered perhaps three thousand. There were no wars on that island, but by 1764, only 313 Indians were left there. Similarly, Block Island Indians numbered perhaps 1,200 to 1,500 in 1662, and by 1774 were reduced to fifty-one.

Behind the English invasion of North America, behind their massacre of Indians, their deception, their brutality, was that special powerful drive born in civilizations based on private property. It was a morally ambiguous drive; the need for space, for land, was a real human need. But in conditions of scarcity, in a barbarous epoch of history ruled by competition, this human need was transformed into the murder of whole peoples.                  Third World Traveler

2,500-year-old seal from First Temple period unearthed in Jerusalem

By DANIEL K. EISENBUD  03/07/2016 13:01

Who was Elihana bat Gael? An exceptional woman during Jerusalem’s First Temple period some 2,500 years ago, according to the Antiquities Authority.

A rare seal bearing her name was recently unearthed in a large ancient building during excavations carried out in the Givati parking lot at the City of David in the Jerusalem Walls National Park, the authority announced on Monday.

Inscribed in ancient Hebrew letters on the seal, made of semiprecious stone, appears the mirror-writing of “to Elihana bat Gael,” along with the name of her father.

Another seal, belonging to a man named “Sa’aryahu ben Shabenyahu,” was found nearby.

The second seal was also in mirror-writing, and bears the inscription “to Sa’aryahu ben Shabenyahu.” The name Sa’aryahu appears on a sherd from Arad, and apparently means “The Lord, which was revealed in a storm” (Job 38).

“Finding seals that bear names from the time of the First Temple is hardly a commonplace occurrence, and finding a seal that belonged to a woman is an even rarer phenomenon,” the authority said.

Indeed, according to the authority’s excavation directors, “The owner of the seal was notable compared to other women of the First Temple period: She had legal status, which allowed her to conduct business and possess property.”

The rare bounty was discovered inside a structure built of well-preserved ashlars following nine years of excavation at the site outside the Old City’s walls by the authority, in cooperation with the Israel Nature and Parks Authority and the City of David Foundation.

The authority’s excavation directors, Dr. Doron Ben- Ami, Yana Tchekhanovets and Salome Cohen, said they believe the ancient building once served as an administrative center.

“Personal seals, such as those of Elihana and Sa’aryahu, were used for signing documents, and were frequently inlaid as part of a ring that was worn by the owner,” the archeologists said in a joint statement.

“In antiquity, they designated the identity, genealogy and status of the owner of the seal.”

According to Dr. Haggai Misgav of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, seals that belonged to women represent a very small proportion of all the seals that have been discovered to date.

“This is because of the generally inferior economic status of women, apart from extraordinary instances such as this,” Misgav said. “Indeed, the name Elihana does not appear in the Bible, and there is no other information regarding the identity of the woman, but the fact that she possessed a seal demonstrates her high social status.”

Most of the women’s seals known from this period, Misgav said, bear the names of their fathers, rather than that of their husbands.

“Here, as in other cases, this might indicate the relatively elevated status of Elihana, which depended on her original family, and not on her husband’s family,” the researcher stated. “It seems that Elihana maintained her right to property and financial independence even after her marriage, and, therefore, her father’s name was retained. However, we do not have sufficient information about the law in Judah during this period.”

He said the name Eliha is known from a contemporary Ammonite seal, and is the feminine form of the biblical name Eli.

“The script appearing on the seal is remarkably similar to the script on Ammonite seals, and this might indicate the foreign origin of the artisan who carved the seal, and possibly the foreign origin of Elihana, who apparently came from east of the Jordan River,” he said.

Misgav added that the Book of Proverbs (31:13-23) states that an ideal wife is responsible for providing for the needs of her household when her husband is engaged in public and legal affairs at the city gate.

“She seeks wool and flax, and works with willing hands...,” it says. “Her husband is known in the gates, when he sits among the elders of the land.”

“An archive of documents preserved in the Judean Desert from the time of the Second Temple indicates, among other things, the business of Babatha bat Shimon, a female land owner who had legal status,” Misgav said. “But, generally speaking, evidence of legal and financial independence in the Bible and archeology are rare, and it seems that the exception to the rule indeed sheds light on the rule itself.”                Jerusalem Post