* Astronomy

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RE: Ancient manuscripts

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As witch-hunting fever swept Europe in the 16th century, an exuberant dog and a suspicious vicar nearly had Margaret Simons, a housewife, burnt at the stake.
The dog had barked at the vicars son, who drew a knife and chased it home. The next day the boy fell ill and his father at once suspected the dogs owner of possessing evil powers. He had Mrs Simons, of Kent, tried for witchcraft, but she escaped death because the jury could not agree on her guilt.
Her case, and others like it, are highlighted in a rare book published in 1584, a copy of which was found recently in the attic of a house in Nottinghamshire. The author, Reginald Scott, an engineer and surveyor who became the MP for New Romney, took a remarkably enlightened view of witchcraft in an era of ignorance and superstition: he argued that it simply didnt exist.
The volume is expected to fetch at least £5,000 when it is auctioned by Bonhams in London next week.

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An eight-centimetre-square piece of the 1087-year-old Aleppo Codex will be given to a representative of the Ben Zvi Institute in Jerusalem on Thursday, following 18 years during which Israeli scholars tried to retrieve it from businessman Sam Sabbagh.
Sabbagh salvaged the fragment from a burning synagogue in Aleppo, Syria in 1947.
Inscribed on both sides, it is one of the lost fragments of the codex, a copy of the Bible written in 920 C.E. in Tiberias by the scribe Shlomo Ben Buya'a. The fragment Sabbagh had bears verses of Exodus chapter 8, including the words of Moses to Pharaoh: "Let my people go, that they may serve me..."

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Russian scholars have set about translating relic birchbark manuscripts into English, the Novgorod Museum Reserve informs. The translated texts will be posted on the already existing web site www.gramoty.ru.

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Processus Contra Templarios

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Ancient manuscripts

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Egyptian archaeologists have found rare medical and astronomical manuscripts at the countrys National Library (also known as Dar al-Kotob).
A senior official at Alexandria Library said the ancient documents were just laying forgotten in the Dar al-Kotob archives for many years, but were then technically rediscovered due to the efforts of the Centre for Documentation of Cultural and Natural Heritage (CULTNAT).

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For centuries, the Dead Sea Scrolls remained unread, keeping their secrets about the earliest years of Christianity.
Even after their discovery in caves by the Dead Sea in 1947, many scrolls were too brittle to be read without destroying them.
Now research at the School of Optometry and Vision Sciences could provide the key to unlocking those secrets.
The Head of School, Professor Tim Wess, has been working with Diamond Light Source a new scientific facility in Oxfordshire and developed techniques to read the written words without unrolling the fragile documents.
The Diamond machine is the size of five football pitches and fires electrons at close to the speed of light to generate what is known as synchrotron light, in the form of X-rays, ultraviolet and infrared beams. The X-rays generated can be 100 billion times brighter than a standard laboratory X-ray tube.

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Author, Vivian Hunter-Hindrew claims in her well researched, ground breaking new book, " The Sibyls: The First Prophetess' of Mami (Wata)", that for 6,000 years, Africa was ruled by a powerful order of matriarchs known throughout the ancient world as "Sibyls." Hindrew contends that the Sibyls produced the world's first prophetic oracles, prophetess' and prophets.
Believed to be the actual priestesses of Isis,' Hunter-Hindrew asserts that the Sibyls were known as "Pythoness," because their oracle source was a mighty ancestral python that "spoke" prophecy to them during trance possession. "It was the Sibyls who built and worked the powerful oracles in the African Egyptian colonies of ancient Greece, Rome, Turkey, Israel, Syria and Babylon."
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The pastor of a prison outreach ministry recently visited a St. Petersburg church with what may be part of the most significant archaeological find for people of the Christian, Jewish and Islamic faiths.
The Rev. Thom Miller of Special Visit Ministry exhibited a small collection of religious antiquities, including what he said were two fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls, at the Suncoast Cathedral on Wednesday for a group of church members and the media.

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