Tea at Trianon: Ancient Anatolian Burials

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Wednesday, April 29, 2020

Ancient Anatolian Burials

From Ancient Origins:

An archaeologist researching in Turkey has discovered ancient homes containing their owners’ bones. Inhabited between 7500 BC and 5700 BC, Çatalhöyük was an important Neolithic and Chalcolithic proto-city settlement overlooking the Konya Plain, southeast of the present-day city of Konya (ancient Iconium) in Turkey. An archaeologist from Szczecin in Poland has now discovered that some of the residents may have been buried within the confines of their own homes in shallow graves covered with plaster. Interestingly, evidence suggests some of the graves had been reopened to remove body parts to make room for new corpses.

This discovery comes after a major 2015 archaeological project photographed the ancient site with unmanned aerial vehicles, and Dr Hodder told Hurriyet Daily News his team had performed “low altitude aerial photographic surveys” and produced a 3D digital map of the landscape of Çatalhöyük and its environs, providing further understanding of the site’s relationship with other Neolithic settlements in the Konya Plain. (Read more.)