Indus Valley Civilization.

There are six pages of post titles in this blog about this topic and you can access them by putting “Indus Valley Civilization” into the Search Bar. There are many open questions about the reasons the IVC collapsed, ranging from invasion to dried up rivers, but most of them have dealt with the water supply from the various rivers that flowed abundantly during the Neolithic Pluvial and ended with the 4.2 Kiloyear Event. As those rivers began to dry up, the civilization would experience emigration to places with more abundant water for irrigation and just about everything we consider good. Who prefers a desert over a well-watered homeland? The following Nov 21, 2018 article in Ancient Origins builds upon the hypothesis that aridification drove the IVC inhabitants south and east in search of better conditions. Did Climate Change Cause the Demise of the Ancient Indus Valley Civilization?  As with all Ancient Origins articles, please make sure to click every link in the article e.g. the link to the core Woods Hole article Climate Change Likely Caused Migration, Demise of Ancient Indus Valley Civilization and its links. See what you would have missed? If you don’t investigate the links in both articles (and mine), you miss many more new horizons for your thoughts.

Otzi the Iceman.

Post 126. Forensics on Otzi the Iceman’s Murder!  gives you background on Otzi. I think the recreation of his face is awful, and given the guy’s awesome trek until his murder, I think I’d cast a 45-year-old Clint Eastwood for the part. Everybody has a bad hair day, but give Otzi a break, he just got murdered! They date him to 5,300 years ago, 3,300 BC, right after the novel I’m writing set in 3,800 BC and prior to my Raising Up Pharaoh novels set around 3,200 BC. You could get a haircut and shave from a trusty wife or barber using an obsidian blade. Do you think all the Egyptians and Mesopotamians were bald? Obsidian blades can be sharper than any metal blade and are still used in some modern surgeries. So, give Otzi a haircut like Clint Eastwood. They knew a lot about Otzi when I wrote the prior post, but now archaeological sleuths have determined: Moss Reveals New Route For Otzi’s Death Walk. As with all Ancient Origins articles, much of the story is in the links, and this is no exception, so don’t overlook those links! You have heard me sing paeans to the fantastic progress of forensic tools being applied to archaeology, so follow the links and see how they piece together this latest evidence.

Tall el Hamman in Jordan = Sodom?

Post 195. Tall el-Hammam Excavation: Sodom & Gomorrah was my introduction to this excavation last year. A few years ago, an archaeologist friend tipped me off that something big was being excavated northeast of the Dead Sea. A good-sized city with satellite cities around it went dormant for hundreds of years between 3,000 and 4,000 years ago after what appears to have been a massive blast that created ceramic shards (Trinitite) out of clay jars. I have since been following the dig. As it turns out, so has Ancient Origins and they published on November 18, 2018 ‘Fire and Brimstone’ that Destroyed Biblical Sodom Matches Findings of Cosmic Catastrophe 3,700 Years Ago. This was published before I subscribed to Ancient Origins and that’s why I missed it. Five years earlier, April 19, 2013, Ancient Origins had published Sodom & Gomorrah – Scientific Evidence but I knew nothing about these developments. Excuse me for saying “Wow!” Glad my friend tipped me off, but Ancient Origins once again proves to me the value of my subscription (reasonable but not cheap). I have been receiving monthly updates to this dig since I was tipped off. The site now has its own Wikipedia page (updated October 26, 2019): Tall el-Hammam. As I look into this further I encountered a paper dated November 18, 2018, and presented to ASOR (American Society of Oriental Research) at their annual meeting that year in Colorado: The 3.7 kya BP Middle Ghor Event: Catastrophic Termination of a Bronze Age Civilization. Here is a 47-minute video of guest speaker Dr. Steven Collins presenting October 14 2018 to Calvary Chapel, Costa Mesa, California: Sodom: Discovery of a Lost City.

Thanks for visiting,

R. E. J. Burke