Science Mysteries
Archeology
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We arrived at El Kab on the 1st of December, and within four days had cleared out several of the uninscribed tombs in the famous hill, and had made them into a most comfortable house. Nothing in Egypt makes so pleasant a dwelling as a rock-tomb.
The remains of pueblo architecture are found scattered over thousands of square miles of the arid region of the southwestern plateaus. This vast area includes the drainage of the Rio Pecos on the east and that of the Colorado on the west, and extends from central Utah on the north beyond the limits of the United States southward, in which direction its boundaries are still undefined.
The Pueblo of Zuni is situated in Western New Mexico on the Rio Zuni, a tributary of the Little Colorado River. The Zuni have resided in this region for several centuries. The peculiar geologic and geographic character of the country surrounding them, as well as its aridity, furnishes ample sources from which a barbarous people would derive legendary and mythologic history. A brief reference to these features is necessary to understand more fully the religious phases of Zuni child life.
The ancient Chinese records tell of a "Place of Ten Suns," where "Ten Suns rose and shone together"
The earliest knowledge of the existence of the sedentary Indians in New Mexico and Arizona reached Europe by way of Mexico proper; but it is very doubtful whether or not the aborigines of Mexico had any positive information to impart about countries lying north of the present State of Queretaro.
EARLY in the month of July 1861 I was enabled, by the kind permission of my friend David Balfour, Esq. of Balfour and Trenaby, to put in execution a scheme long contemplated, but from various circumstances unavoidably delayed, the excavation of some of the great tumuli in the neighbourhood of the Stones of Stennes, or Ring of Brogar.
To the best of my knowledge, the theme of European Troglodytes has remained hitherto undealt with, though occasional mention has been made of those on the Loire. It has been taken for granted that cave-dwellers belonged to a remote past in civilised Europe; but they are only now being expelled in Nottinghamshire and Shropshire, by the interference of sanitary officers.
The author of this volume explains in her preface how she came to be led beyond her special field of research into a comparative study of the early civilizations of the Old World; and how she traced the origin of the swastika, in Mexico, to an astronomical source and, in all countries alike, found its use as a sacred symbol accompanied by evidences of a certain phase of culture based on pole-star worship, and the recognition of the fixed laws of nature, which found expression in the ideal of celestial kingdoms or states organized on a set numerical plan and regulated by the apparent revolutions of circumpolar constellations.
"Science has a foundation, and so has religion; let them unite their foundations, and the basis will be broader, and they will be two compartments of one great fabric reared to the glory of God.
Short studies into Stonehenge and other British stone circles.
The origin of the Semitic Deluge story.
The history of monsters forms an interesting division in the annals of mankind, and I should like in conclusion to call attention to the persistency of this belief down to the threshhold almost of our own days. Among the Romans up to the latest period the old law of either burning the monsters or of throwing them into the sea was generally carried out.
Reading through the reprints of the Hidden World series has been an incredible experience. Originating in Amazing Stories back in the 1940s, the Shaver Mystery has had a long run, much longer than any TV show or comic book superhero.
I have been reading stories by Richard Shaver for many a blue, hollow earth moon. In fact, at the age of 14 I was already a fan of Shaver's. Otherwise, why would I have written my first book on the subject of Shaver and his demented dero? Gray Barker published my initial humble work. The Shaver Mystery and the Inner Earth is still in print as Subterranean Worlds Inside Earth.
I discovered Ray Palmer's science fiction magazine, Other Worlds, in 1954, when the science fiction field was collapsing around our ears and poor old Other Worlds was a weak-kneed shadow of its former self.