January 2020 News Headlines
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UPDATE January 01 2020 - Helen and I are happy to report that our Web Editor, John, has now recovered from a nasty bout of flu, but will not be continuing to edit The Morien Institute website in 2020. Thank you to everyone who sent in good wishes for John's speedy recovery.
As Helen and I are working in Frankfurt, and cannot get reliable cluster access to The Morien Institute servers, we are unabale to update the news pages ourselves and Pierrôt has the same problems in Carnac, Brittany. However, Picti in Orkney has found a work around and will do her best to add to John's brilliant editorial achievements over the past 23 years.
The news we can put up will be much reduced from that in previous years, but please do keep sending in alerts about news stories so Picti can make it as good as possible - Polly
"The Antikythera Mechanism Research Project" Cardiff/Athens Universites (Cymru/Greece)
[In October 1900, Captain Dimitrious Kondos was leading a team of sponge divers near the the island of Antikythera off the coast of Greece. They noticed a shipwreck about 180 feet below the surface and began to investigate. Amongst the artifacts that they brought up was a coral-encrusted piece of metal that later archaeologists found was some sort of gear wheel.
The rest of the artifacts, along with the shape of the boat, suggested a date around 2000 years ago, which made the find one of the most anomalous that had ever been recovered from the Greek seas. It became known as The Antikythera Mechanism.
In 2006 the journal "Nature" published a letter, and another paper about the mechanism was published in 2008, detailing the findings of Prof. Mike G. Edmunds of Cardiff University. Using high-resolution X-ray tomography to study the fragments of the anomalous Antikythera Mechanism, they found that it was in fact a bronze mechanical analog computer that could be used to calculate the astronomical positions and various cycles of the Moon - as seen from the Earth: - Ed]
"In this provocative collaboration from two Egyptology outsiders, Robert M. Schoch, Ph.D., and Robert Bauval combine their decades of research to show how the Sphinx is thousands of years older than the conventional Egyptological timeline and was built by a long forgotten pre-Pharaonic civilization.
