The Cellar

The old fermenting cellar at O'Malley's Irish Pub Pictures, Images and Photos

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Permalink Reply by s <3 on August 2, 2009 at 1:22pm

Sumerian Tablets

the rest of videos are on youtube

Permalink Reply by melody on August 23, 2009 at 6:18pm

Good day.

I thought maybe you would enjoy this article. I love to learn about people and culture:

The Maya kings of Copán were not interested in moving mountains. They preferred to build their own, like the pyramid now known as Temple 16. Rising 100 feet above the city's Great Plaza, it is the highest point among a group of holy buildings that archaeologists have dubbed "the Acropolis." Inside an excavation tunnel deep beneath the pyramid's surface, the face of the sun-king scowls at me from the wall of his temple. The city's ancient rulers built their temples--one on top of the next--to suit the needs of the moment. The moment I am visiting occurred shortly after A.D. 540 when the first of four temples was built around a small plaza at the top of the Acropolis.

The sun-king's face adorns the first floor of Rosalila, a temple that was once painted a brilliant, bloody shade of red. His image wears a headdress of red, yellow, and green plumage--the feathers of a quetzal and a macaw--and curving lines in his eyes associate him with depictions of the sun god. The Maya words for each of these sculptural elements spells his name, K'inich Yax K'uk' Mo', which translates as "Sun-Eyed Resplendent Quetzal Macaw," the first king of Copán. Forty-three feet below the floor of the temple, the sun-king's tomb was found inside one of the first buildings to be constructed on the Acropolis. Beginning around A.D. 426, the time that K'inich Yax K'uk' Mo' came to power, Temple 16 underwent seven major phases of construction, as well as dozens of smaller renovations and additions. The last phase took place in A.D. 775 shortly before the city, which encompassed 520 acres and held a population of about 28,000 people at its peak, was largely abandoned.

Ricardo Agurcia, the director of a research and sustainable tourism organization called the Copán Association, discovered Rosalila in 1989. Copán lies in north-central Honduras at what was the southern edge of the Maya region. Finding Rosalila revolutionized what was known of the city's early history and the Maya's southern frontier. Now he has uncovered an adjacent temple called Oropéndola, and discovered the king who was laid to rest beneath it.

Agurcia invited me here to see the finds, and we have stopped at Rosalila for a little orientation in Maya iconography. The building facade soars three stories into the darkness overhead. Standing in the narrow space separating the temple from the tunnel wall, I see another face staring from the second floor. Agurcia tells me it is the mountain monster, Witz, symbolizing the temple's role as a ceremonial mountain. The Maya understood mountains to be powerful places; they believed the rain god stored water in them and the caves that penetrated them were portals to the underworld. Rosalila was buried around A.D. 700. The temple was coated with white plaster, which Agurcia interprets as a symbolic embalming of the building. Construction fill was carefully placed against the temple preserving it almost perfectly.

The rest can be found here: http://www.archaeology.org/0909/maya_copan/

The sun transports information to earth through DNA of living matter. :)

Permalink Reply by s <3 on August 23, 2009 at 8:24pm

That is really interesting, I am going to find out more, thanks for posting melody :)

Permalink Reply by s <3 on August 26, 2009 at 4:16pm