Babel News Network

Early in the 1900s Hanns Vischer, a Swiss who worked for the British Colonial Service in Nigeria, heard stories of the “deadly road” across the eastern Sahara desert from northern Nigeria to the Mediterranean coast at Tripoli. The route, used for centuries by slave traders, is almost unknown today – travelers who make the crossing now favour a more westerly road route to northern Niger. In 1906, Vischer completed the route from Tripoli south to Lake Chad, and described his travels in a book published in 1910, “Across the Sahara” — including accounts of the torrid heat, and threats from tribal raiding parties.

“I had entered (the Sahara) frivolously, like a fool,” Vischer wrote. “I left it as one stunned, crushed by the deadly majesty I had seen too closely.”

In 2002, explorer and camel campaigner John Hare followed Vischer’s route from south to north. The image above is from the National Geographic story of his trip and links to a high res PDF of the map. Interviews and video about Hare’s journey can be found at NPR.

“… when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul’s.”

T.B. Macaulay (1840)

But who their mingled feelings shall pursue
When London’s faded glories rise to view?
The mighty city, which by every road,
In floods of people poured itself abroad;
Ungirt by walls, irregularly great,
No jealous drawbridge, and no closing gate;
Whose merchants (such the state which commerce brings)
Sent forth their mandates to dependent kings;
Streets, where the turban’d Moslem, bearded Jew,
And woolly Afric, met the brown Hindu;
Where through each vein spontaneous plenty flowed,
Where Wealth enjoyed, and Charity bestowed.
Pensive and thoughtful shall the wanderers greet
Each splendid square, and still, untrodden street;
Or of some crumbling turret, mined by time,
The broken stairs with perilous step shall climb,
Thence stretch their view the wide horizon round,
By scattered hamlets trace its ancient bound,

And, choked no more with fleets, fair Thames survey
Through reeds and sedge pursue his idle way.

Anna Laetitia Aikin [Barbauld]
Eighteen Hundred and Eleven (1812)

The Antikythera Mechanism turns out to be a complex mechanical planetarium – accurate enough to predict eclipses. The operator could dial in a date and determine the location of sun, moon and five planets. It uses an astronomical model settled by Apollonius. Not bad for something like 200 BC. It seems there may have been workshops in Greece (and/or Hellenistic Egypt) churning out these and other highly technical machines — such as those described a century later by Hero of Alexandria. This one may have been intended as a gift for Julius Caeser – if only because it dates from that time, and was found in the remains of a Roman shipwreck on the Greek coast.

See 50 centuries of warfare in 90 Flash-filled seconds. All the big names are here, but they have to take over the Levant/Palestine region to qualify, so the Babylonians don’t appear until very late, by which time they were the Neo-Babylonians. Nice work from Maps Of War, and thanks to Euan at Puna.Net for finding it. No soundtrack as far as I can tell. I’ve sized it to fit on my page, a bigger version is here.

Just four kilometres from the site of the discovery of Lucy, in Ethiopia’s Afar region, fossil hunters have found the remains of an A. afarensis child dubbed “Lucy’s Baby.” The skeleton, thought to be that of a three-year-old girl, is the oldest and most complete hominin fossil yet found.

It has taken researchers five years to separate much of the fossil from the sandstone block in which it was found. The skeleton consists of an almost complete skull, the entire torso and parts of the arms and legs. Her discoverers think she may have been killed in a flood 3.3 million years ago.

The new fossil reinforces the theory that Australopithecus afarensis lived at least part of its time in the trees, although the lower body is adapted for walking upright. She has long curved fingers, and slanting shoulder sockets similar to those of a climbing ape like a gorilla. The skull is complete enough that researchers have been able to identify the balance organs of the inner ear, which also seem more ape-like than human. The human sense of balance is adapted not just for walking upright, but also for running distances on two legs – something that apes can’t do.

A group of divers from Poland have located the wreck of the Kreigsmarineschiff Graf Zeppelin on the floor of the Baltic Sea. The ship, the only German aircraft carrier ever built, went AWOL at the end of World War II. It had been scuttled by its crew in August 1945 but was salvaged by Soviet forces, who used it to lug captured factory equipment back to Russia, and later for target practice.

The Polish divers were taking depth soundings, looking for potential oil sites on the sea floor, when they detected the 260 metre-long ship sitting in 250 metres of water near the Bay of Gdansk. The area is littered with the wrecks of warships.

“Seeing Angkor Wat bathed in the eerie surreal light of the eclipse led me to experiment with new techniques to attempt to capture the spiritual beauty of Angkor. Standard photography techniques could not convey the dreamy, otherworldly essence of the site so I turned to other alternatives and eventually found that the images resulting from using infrared film rendered the subjects most closely to my personal vision of them. These prints combine the impressionistic, moody effects of infrared film with a subtle sepia tone to achieve this effect.”

Photographer John McDermott’s IR images of Asia seem to me to show the ruins and pagodas in a sort of dream time, rather than on the day they were shot – the visitors to this pagoda in Myanmar are faded, almost like ghosts, but the ancient gold dome shines like new. I love how the IR film blackens the blue sky, which reminds me of the solar eclipses I’ve seen.

Divers with an archaeological expedition to the sunken Egyptian city of Alexandria viewing a statue of the god Hapi, in the ruins of the Temple of Heracles. The expedition was led by Frenchman Franck Goddio, who has spent more than 10 years exploring the underwater city. Artifacts from the site are on display in Berlin. More photographs at Spiegel Online.

Over the years, Goddio and his team have used hot-air balloons to extract algae-encrusted sphinxes from the waters of the Mediterranean and cranes to lift steles and decaying door hinges, coated with barnacles, from the ancient site.

The artifacts pulled to the surface are the remains of the most astonishing city of the ancient world — a city dubbed the Pearl of the Mediterranean with a population of almost 600,000. It was a magnificent world as much as it was a setting for bloody royal dramas. The lighthouse of Alexandria, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, rose 130 meters (426 feet) into the sky, its wood fires, amplified by mirrors, shining far out into the Mediterranean. In the first century B.C., the writer Diodor raved about Alexandria, whose “beauty, size and riches far surpassed those of all other cities.” The city’s diverse population included Jews and Egyptians, Gallic mercenaries, Nubians and Persians.

At Bldg Blog, a photo article about this traditional style of mosques in West Africa and an interview with the photographer Sebastian Schutyser, who has spent four years documenting these buildings.

The project “began in 1998,” Schutyser explains: “For several months I traveled from village to village by bicycle and ‘pirogue’, navigating with IGN 1:200.000 maps. The inaccessibility of the area made me realize why this hadn’t been done before.”

“In the dream, I was led by a girl clad in black dress to a mysterious stone palace, where I found lots of important scriptures, a chest of precious treasures, and a stele for Zhuge Kongming. Legend has it that Zhuge Kongming once launched a crusade nearby. I believe what I dreamed is true.”

From China Daily, thanks to the Anomalist and the Athanasius Kircher Society.