Just read this very interesting article - it's about how ancient Roman glass makers ground up silver and gold to the size of 50 nano-meters in diameter (less than 1000th the size of a grain of table salt) to produce a goblet that appears green when lit from the front...
Ancient Civilizations
Did Muslims Discover America in 999 AD?
Short answer: No. Longer answer: Jason Colavito’s post: Did Ibn Farrukh Discover America in 999 CE? (CE is the “non-Christian” abbreviation commonly used in academic convention in place of “A.D.”). As usual, Jason has done a great job...
Sweet Assyriology Resources Online
The Ancient World Online (AWOL) blog recently posted about updates made to the CDLI (Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative) wiki site, now hosted at the University of Oxford. The CDLI wiki is a terrific website for Assyriology. By way of examples, you can find helpful...
Ancient Chronology Critiques: Not Always PaleoBabble
I used to be really into ancient chronology (Near East, biblical). The chronology of the ancient Near East prior to 1000 BC and its basis has genuine uncertainties. Consequently, this is one area where alternative theorists have some real contributions to make. While...
Easter Island, Gobekli Tepe, and Robert Schoch
Kudos are once again in order for Jason Colavito’s seemingly boundless enthusiasm for exposing poor thinking (having a PhD doesn’t mean someone thinks well … boy could I tell stories). Anyway, Jason recently wrote the two essays that follow. They are...
Antikythera Mechanism Report
Thanks go to Charles Jones at Ancient World Online for posting this “pre-print” article, “ The Cosmos in the Antikythera Mechanism ” (due to the size, it is best to right-click and “Save File As”; you will also have to re-size the...
Did the Chinese Discover America?
It shouldn’t surprise you that PaleoBabble doesn’t let political correctness get in the way of scholarship. Some readers may recall the furor a few years ago caused by the announcement that someone had produced a hands down case that the Chinese really...
Antikythera Mechanism Rebuilt – Replica Works Perfectly
This is pretty cool. So what does this ancient machine do? “In short, Antikythera’s user interface is deceptively simple, operated by a simple knob on the side. This conceals the intricacy within, amounting to a complex mathematical model, tracking the...
Recent Scholarly Article on Antikythera Mechanism
The major scientific journal Nature published an article on the famous Antikythera Mechanism in 2006. You can access the article as a PDF file here. For a bibliography on the mechanism, check out this page at the very cool website devoted to it. Editor's note:...