Hidden History: Lost Civilizations, Secret Knowledge, and Ancient Mysteries by Brian Haughton (beginner reading books for adults txt) 📕

skies in the autumn, showing that it was time to start bringing in the harvest, and disappeared in the spring, indicating the time for planting crops. This evidence for the importance of the disc in connection with prehistoric agriculture may mean that the (third) golden arc underneath the crescent moon and golden disc represents a harvest sickle.

Others have suggested that the disc actually represents the daytime sky and that the unexplained arc depicts a rainbow. But the majority of researchers believe this third arc to be a sun ship. There are depictions of a disc in a ship from Bronze Age Scandinavia, and a Danish artifact dating to the 15th or 14th century B.C., the Trundholm Sun Chariot, depicting a horse drawing the sun in a chariot. But the main source of the symbol and the

ancient belief that a ship carried the sun across the night sky from the Western to Eastern horizon is Egypt. Their belief was that Rah, the Sun God and their most potent deity, journeyed through the night sky on a ship in order that in the morning, at sunrise, he could be reborn. If the golden arc at the bottom of the Nebra Disk does in fact represent a sun ship traveling across the night sky, then it will be the first evidence of such a belief in central Europe.

There is further proof of prehistoric celestial knowledge in the area, a mere 15 miles distant from where the Nebra Disc was discovered. Lying in a wheat field near the town of Goseck, and first identified from aerial photographs, is the remains of what is thought to be Europe's oldest observatory. Germany's Stonehenge, as it has become known, consists of a huge a huge circle, 246 feet in diameter, and was built by the earliest farming communities in the area around 4900 B.C. Originally, the site consisted of four concentric circles, a mound, a ditch, and two wooden palisades about the height of a person. Within the palisades were three sets of gates, facing southeast, southwest, and north, respectively. The two southern gates marked the sunrise and sunset at the winter solstice. At the the winter solstice, watchers at the center of the circles would have witnessed the sun rise and set through the southeast and southwest gates. It is surely safe to assume that if these southern gates marked the sunrise and sunset at the winter and summer solstice, then the inhabitants of Goseck were able to accurately determine the course of the sun in its journey across the sky. In fact, the angle between the two solstice gates in the Goseck circle corresponds with the angle between the gilded arcs on the rim of the Nebra Disk. Although the Nebra Disk was created 2,400 years later than the Goseck site, Professor Wolfhard Schlosser believes there may be some connection between the two in the astronomical knowledge they both display. Schlosser has even suggested that the details on the disc were based on previous astrological observations, possibly made at the primitive observatory at Goseck.

In late 2004, the Nebra Disc became enmeshed in controversy. German archaeologist Professor Peter Schauer, of Regensburg University, claimed that the disc was a modern fake, and any idea that it was a Bronze Age map of the heavens was "a piece of fantasy." Professor Schauer stated that the supposedly Bronze Age green patina on the artifact had probably been artificially created in a workshop "using acid, urine, and a blowtorch" and was not ancient at all. The holes around the edge of the disc, he insisted, were too perfect to be ancient, and must have been made by a relatively modern machine. His own conclusion was that the object was a 19th century Siberian Shaman's drum. However, it later emerged that Schauer had never studied the artifact himself prior to making his claim, nor did he publish any of his theories in a peer-reviewed journal. But Schauer's objections still shocked the German archaeological community and raised some important questions about the authenticity of the disc. The first was that, because of the circumstances of its discovery, the Nebra Disc had no secure archaeological context. Thus, it was extremely difficult to date

accurately, especially as there was nothing similar with which to compare it. The dating that was done on the object depended upon the typological dating of the Bronze Age weapons that had been offered for sale with it, and were supposed to be from the same site. These axes and swords were dated to the middle of the second millennium B.C.

Solid evidence for the antiquity of the disc was provided by the Halle Institute for Archaeological Research in Germany. The Institute submitted the artifact to an exhaustive series of tests that confirm its authenticity. For example, the copper used on the disc has been traced to a Bronze Age mine in the Austrian Alps. Tests also discovered that a practically unique mixture of hard crystal malachite covers the artifact. In addition to this, microphotography of the corrosion on the disc has also produced images that proved that it was a genuinely ancient artifact, and could not be have been produced as a fake.

The latest examinations of the disc, by a group of German scholars in early 2006, came to the conclusion that it was indeed genuine, and had functioned as a complex astronomical clock for the synchronization of solar and lunar calendars. The Nebra Sky Disc is thus the earliest known guide to the heavens, and certainly, along with the Goseck site, the first examples of detailed astronomical knowledge in Europe. But perhaps that is not the end of the story. Wolfhard Schlosser believes, intriguingly, that the disc (currently valued at $11.2 million) was one of a pair, and that the other is still out there waiting to be found.

Noah's Ark and the Great. Flood

A painting by the American artist Edward Hicks (1780-1849) showing Noah's Ark.

The story of Noah's Ark and the great flood is found