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Tom Cameron

The Ancient Egypt Site - 0 views

www.ancient-egypt.org/index.html

builder egypt hemiunu last minute pyramid research

shared by Tom Cameron on 18 May 08 - Cached
  • James Larwill on 18 May 08
     
    More information about Khufu and the westcar papyrus
Susan Hall

Wired 15.01: Untangling the Mystery of the Inca - 0 views

www.wired.com/...khipu.html

general inca info

shared by Susan Hall on 19 May 08 - Cached
    • Susan Hall
      Susan Hall on 19 May 08
       
      This is a site with some great info on the incas!
    • Susan Hall
      Susan Hall on 19 May 08
       
      THis is a site with some good information on the incas!
  • Some of the knots did survive, though, and for centuries people wondered if the old man had been speaking the truth. Then, in 1923, an anthropologist named Leland Locke provided an answer: The khipu were files. Each knot represented a different number, arranged in a decimal system, and each bundle likely held census data or summarized the contents of storehouses. Roughly a third of the existing khipu don't follow the rules Locke identified, but he speculated that these "anomalous" khipu served some ceremonial or other function. The mystery was considered more or less solved. Then, in the early 1990s, Urton, one of the world's leading Inca scholars, spotted several details that convinced him the khipu contained much more than tallies of llama sales. For example, some knots are tied right over left, others left over right. Urton came to think that this information must signal something. Could the knotted strings also be a form of writing? In 2003, Urton wrote a book outlining his theory, and in 2005 he published a paper in Science that showed how even khipu that follow Locke's rules could include place-names as well as numbers.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Urton knew that these findings were a tiny part of cracking the code and that he needed the help of people with different skills. So, early last year, he and a graduate student, Carrie Brezine, unveiled a computerized khipu database – a vast electronic repository that describes every knot on some 300 khipu in intricate detail. Then Urton and Brezine brought in outside researchers who knew little about anthropology but a lot about mathematics. Led by Belgian cryptographer Jean-Jacques Quisquater, they are now trying to shake meaning from the knots with a variety of pattern-finding algorithms, one based on a tool used to analyze long strings of DNA, the other similar to Google's PageRank algorithm. They've already identified thousands of repeated knot sequences that suggest words or phrases. Now the team is closing in on what might be a writing system so unusual that it remained hidden for centuries in plain sight. If successful, the effort will rank with the deciphering of Egyptian hieroglyphics and will let Urton's team rewrite history. But how do you decipher something when it looks completely unlike any known written language – when you're not even sure it has meaning at all?
  • Susan Hall on 19 May 08
     
    This is a great site with information on the incas
Tom Cameron

BBC - History - Khufu (2609 BC - 2584 BC) - 0 views

www.bbc.co.uk/...khufu.shtml

shared by Tom Cameron on 18 May 08 - Cached
    • Tom Cameron
      Tom Cameron on 18 May 08
       
      WOW THANKS JAMES (Y)
  • James Larwill on 18 May 08
     
    More information on Khnum-Khufwy, a better one then the last one I book marked, Is a more reliable information source, BBC ftw.
David Hilton

Multimodal research - 40 views

Hello everyone I've just been reading through the bookmarks people have saved on diigo over the last week. Well done! The comments and sites people have found have been excellent. It's great to ...

11 ancient history egypt mesoamerica mesopotamia multimodal

started by David Hilton on 20 May 08 1 follow-up, last by David Hilton on 26 May 08
Nathan Kench

Lecture 6: The Athenian Origins of Direct Democracy - 1 views

www.historyguide.org/...lecture6b.html

11 ancient history

shared by Nathan Kench on 14 Aug 08 - Cached
  • Tom Cameron on 14 Aug 08
     
    developed their control over the Peloponnesus, the city-state of Athens controlled the area of the Attic Peninsula, to the east and northeast of Sparta. Athens was similar to other city-states of the period of the Greek Renaissance with two important differences: (1) it was larger both geographically and in terms of its population and (2) those people it conquered were not reduced to servitude - this was the rule at Sparta. So, Athens never faced the problem of trying to control a large population of angry and sometimes violent subjects. This also explains why Sparta had to remain an intensely militaristic state. Around the year 600 B.C., and while Lycurgus was reforming the legal system of the Spartan state, Athens faced a deepening political crisis. Those farmers who supplied the city-state with food could not keep up with demand because the Athenian population had grown too quickly. Farmers began to trade their land to obtain food and quickly went bankrupt as they traded away their last piece of land. The crisis was solved in 594 B.C. when the Athenians gave control over to Solon (c.640-c.559 B.C.), a former high official. In his role as archon, Solon cancelled all agricultural debts and announced that all slaves were free. He also passed constitutional reforms that divided Athenian subjects into four classes based on their annual agricultural production rather than birth. Members of the three highest orders could hold public office. Solon's system excluded all those people who did not own any productive land - women, children, slaves, resident aliens, artisans and merchants. However, with the constitutional reforms of Solon, men from newer and less-established families could work their way up economically and achieve positions of political leadership. Solon did not end the agricultural crisis in Greece and so factional strife remained. In 561, the former military leader Pisistratus (c.600-527 B
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