Ancient Mysteries

Zusatztext “CHOCK-FULL OF FUN-FACTS! HELPFUL MAPS! AND DIAGRAMS! this lively reference work is an excellent companion volume to Thorpe and James’ popular Ancient Inventions .” –Archaeology Odyssey Informationen zum Autor Peter James and Nick Thorpe Klappentext For centuries! philosophers! scientists! and charlatans have attempted to decipher the baffling mysteries of our past! from Stonehenge to the lost continent of Atlantis. Today! however! DNA testing! radiocarbon dating! and other cutting-edge investigative tools! together with a healthy dose of common sense! are guiding us closer to the truth. Now historian Peter James and archaeologist Nick Thorpe tackle these age-old conundrums! presenting the latest information from the scientific community-and the most startling challenges to traditional explanations of mysteries such as: • The rise and fall of the Maya • A lost cache of Dead Sea Scrolls • The curse of Tutankhamun • The devastation of Sodom and Gomorrah • The Nazca Lines and the Vinland Map • The existence of Robin Hood These true mystery stories twist and turn like a good whodunit! as James and Thorpe present the evidence for and against the expert theories! shedding new light on humankind's age-old struggle to make sense of the past. Ancient Mysteries will entertain and enlighten! delight the curious and inform the serious. LOST LANDS AND CATASTROPHES INTRODUCTION On July 16, 1994, a small fragmenting comet known as Shoemaker-Levy began ripping through the atmosphere of the planet Jupiter, causing explosions of almost unimaginable intensity. As the second fragment fell there was a blast equivalent to 250 million tons of TNT—several times more powerful than all the world’s nuclear arsenals put together. When the third chunk of the comet struck it created a hole in Jupiter’s atmosphere the size of the Earth. The full extent of the damage that Shoemaker-Levy inflicted on Jupiter is still being assessed, though one thing is already perfectly clear: the long-cherished scientific belief that comets are harmless and cannot crash into planets has been dispelled forever. The question immediately arises—could a comet, or cometary fragment, crash into the Earth? Or has it already done so? In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in the days before Darwin, scientists freely speculated about such matters, wondering whether a comet might have been responsible for the Great Flood described in the Bible. While theologians were happy to accept that the Flood was caused by God directly, scientists were busy researching possible physical mechanisms. Some, including the great Edmond Halley (who gave his name to the famous comet), looked beyond the Earth for a trigger. In 1694 he proposed, in a paper to the Royal Society, that Noah’s Flood was caused by the collision between the Earth and a comet, which landed in the Caspian Sea and drenched the surrounding lands with water. Others speculated that a watery comet was responsible. From the standpoint of pre-Darwinian science, belief in a Great Flood was entirely reasonable, as such an event seemed to explain many of the world’s greatest historical enigmas. The rocks that scientists were beginning to examine were full of the fossilized remains of millions of extinct plants and creatures, and a catastrophic flood could account for why these life-forms no longer existed and why their remains had been trapped and preserved in sedimentary rock. It seemed natural, then, to borrow an explanation from the Bible, which told of the deluge in the time of Noah. Assuming that there had been a real Flood also provided an economical explanation for why there are so many similar legends around the world. Such quaint ideas went completely out of fashion in the early nineteenth century. The relatively new science of geology was maturing, and the naive view that all the ...

Product details

• Authors: Peter James, Nicholas Thorpe, Nick Thorpe
• Publisher: Ballantine
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 30.10.2001
• EAN: 9780345434883
• ISBN: 978-0-345-43488-3
• No. of pages: 672
• Dimensions: 185 mm x 233 mm x 34 mm
• Subjects: Education and learning > Schoolbooks, general education schools; Non-fiction book