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Nahal Mishmar
Nahal Mishmar (Hebrew:נחל משמר) or Wadi Mahras (Arabic:مَحْرَس) is a small seasonal stream in the Judean Desert in Israel. A hoard of rare Chalcolithic artifacts (the Nahal Mishmar hoard) was discovered in a cave near the stream bed which was dubbed the "Treasure Cave". Geography The valley or wadi of Nahal Mishmar begins in the Hebron hills, running east towards the Dead Sea. Its western part is shallow, at an altitude of approximately 270 m above sea level, and it proceeds to fall more than 300 meters into the Jordan Rift Valley before emptying into the Dead Sea, over . Nahal Mishmar runs north of the Tze'elim Stream, between Ein Gedi and Masada. Access is from Highway 90 (Israel–Palestine), Highway 90. Archaeology In 1961, Israeli archaeologist Pessah Bar-Adon discovered a hoard of Chalcolithic artifacts in a cave on the northern side of Nahal Mishmar, known since as the Treasure Cave. The hoard consisted of 442 decorated objects made of copper and bronze (42 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hebrew
Hebrew (; ; ) is a Northwest Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family. Historically, it is one of the spoken languages of the Israelites and their longest-surviving descendants, the Jews and Samaritans. It was largely preserved throughout history as the main liturgical language of Judaism (since the Second Temple period) and Samaritanism. Hebrew is the only Canaanite language still spoken today, and serves as the only truly successful example of a dead language that has been revived. It is also one of only two Northwest Semitic languages still in use, with the other being Aramaic. The earliest examples of written Paleo-Hebrew date back to the 10th century BCE. Nearly all of the Hebrew Bible is written in Biblical Hebrew, with much of its present form in the dialect that scholars believe flourished around the 6th century BCE, during the time of the Babylonian captivity. For this reason, Hebrew has been referred to by Jews as '' Lashon Hakodesh'' (, ) since an ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pessah Bar-Adon
Pessah Bar-Adon (Hebrew: פסח בר-אדון; b. 1907, d. 1985) was a Polish-born Israeli archaeologist and writer. Early life Born Pessah Panitsch in Kolno, Poland, to a Zionist, Haredi family, he was educated in a Jewish orthodox school and in Yeshivas. He immigrated to Israel in 1925. While working in housing and road construction to support himself, he studied for a degree in Middle Eastern studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Career For a period, he lived amongst Bedouins near Amman, Bet She'an, and Kuneitra in order to learn their lifestyle. Part of his motivation for this endeavor was to understand why many of the ancient Kings of Israel were originally shepherds. During this period he wore traditional Bedouin clothing and went by the name Aziz Effendi. During the 1929 Palestine riots and the 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine, he was an active member of the Haganah Jerusalem. Later he also took part in the Aliyah Bet. In 1932 he participated in one o ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Timna Valley
The Timna Valley (תִּמְנָע, ) is located in southern Israel in the southwestern Arava/Arabah, approximately north of the Gulf of Aqaba and the city of Eilat. The area is rich in copper ore and has been mined since the 5th millennium BCE. There is controversy whether the mines were active during the biblical united Kingdom of Israel and its second ruler, King Solomon. A large section of the valley, containing ancient remnants of copper mining and ancient worship, is encompassed in a recreation park. Ramon Airport is located near the entrance to the Timna Valley. History Copper mining Copper has been mined in the area since the 6th or 5th millennium BCE. Archaeological excavation indicates that the copper mines in Timna Valley were probably part of the Kingdom of Edom and worked by the Edomites, described as biblical foes of the Israelites, during the 10th century BCE, the period of biblical King Solomon. Mining continued by the Israelites and Nabataeans through to ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Punon
The Stations of the Exodus are the locations visited by the Israelites following their exodus from Egypt, according to the Hebrew Bible. In the itinerary given in Numbers 33, forty-two stations are listed, although this list differs slightly from the narrative account of the journey found in Exodus and Deuteronomy. Biblical commentators like St Jerome in his ''Epistle to Fabiola'', Bede (''Letter to Acca: "De Mansionibus Filiorum Israhel"'') and St Peter Damian discussed the Stations according to the Hebrew meanings of their names. Dante modeled the 42 chapters of his ''Vita Nuova'' on them. Sources According to the documentary hypothesis, the list of the Stations was originally a distinct and separate source text. Proponents of this hypothesis believe that the redactor, in combining the Torah's sources, used parts of the Stations list to fill out awkward joins between the main sources. However, a slightly variant version of the list appears in full at Numbers 33, and severa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Metropolitan Museum
The Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York City, colloquially "the Met", is the largest art museum in the Americas. Its permanent collection contains over two million works, divided among 17 curatorial departments. The main building at 1000 Fifth Avenue, along the Museum Mile on the eastern edge of Central Park on Manhattan's Upper East Side, is by area one of the world's largest art museums. The first portion of the approximately building was built in 1880. A much smaller second location, The Cloisters at Fort Tryon Park in Upper Manhattan, contains an extensive collection of art, architecture, and artifacts from medieval Europe. The Metropolitan Museum of Art was founded in 1870 with its mission to bring art and art education to the American people. The museum's permanent collection consists of works of art from classical antiquity and ancient Egypt, paintings, and sculptures from nearly all the European masters, and an extensive collection of American and mod ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Carbon-14 Dating
Radiocarbon dating (also referred to as carbon dating or carbon-14 dating) is a method for determining the age of an object containing organic material by using the properties of radiocarbon, a radioactive isotope of carbon. The method was developed in the late 1940s at the University of Chicago by Willard Libby. It is based on the fact that radiocarbon () is constantly being created in the Earth's atmosphere by the interaction of cosmic rays with atmospheric nitrogen. The resulting combines with atmospheric oxygen to form radioactive carbon dioxide, which is incorporated into plants by photosynthesis; animals then acquire by eating the plants. When the animal or plant dies, it stops exchanging carbon with its environment, and thereafter the amount of it contains begins to decrease as the undergoes radioactive decay. Measuring the amount of in a sample from a dead plant or animal, such as a piece of wood or a fragment of bone, provides information that can be used to calcu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lost-wax Process
Lost-wax casting (also called "investment casting", "precision casting", or ''cire perdue'' which has been adopted into English from the French, ) is the process by which a duplicate metal sculpture (often silver, gold, brass, or bronze) is cast from an original sculpture. Intricate works can be achieved by this method. The oldest known examples of this technique are approximately 6,500-year-old (4550–4450 BC) and attributed to gold artefacts found at Bulgaria's Varna Necropolis. A copper amulet from Mehrgarh, Indus Valley civilization, in Pakistan, is dated to circa 4,000 BC. Cast copper objects, found in the Nahal Mishmar hoard in southern Israel, which belong to the Chalcolithic period (4500–3500 BC), are estimated, from carbon-14 dating, to date to circa 3500 BC. In Other examples from somewhat later periods are from Mesopotamia in the third millennium BC. Lost-wax casting was widespread in Europe until the 18th century, when a piece-moulding process came to predo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Blood
Blood is a body fluid in the circulatory system of humans and other vertebrates that delivers necessary substances such as nutrients and oxygen to the cells, and transports metabolic waste products away from those same cells. Blood in the circulatory system is also known as ''peripheral blood'', and the blood cells it carries, ''peripheral blood cells''. Blood is composed of blood cells suspended in blood plasma. Plasma, which constitutes 55% of blood fluid, is mostly water (92% by volume), and contains proteins, glucose, mineral ions, hormones, carbon dioxide (plasma being the main medium for excretory product transportation), and blood cells themselves. Albumin is the main protein in plasma, and it functions to regulate the colloidal osmotic pressure of blood. The blood cells are mainly red blood cells (also called RBCs or erythrocytes), white blood cells (also called WBCs or leukocytes) and platelets (also called thrombocytes). The most abundant cells in vertebrate blo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Wadi Feynan
Wadi Feynan or Wadi Faynan ( ar, وادي فينان) is a major wadi (seasonal river valley) and region in southern Jordan, on the border between Tafilah Governorate and Aqaba and Ma'an Governorates. It originates in the southern Jordanian Highlands with the confluence of Wadi Dana and Wadi Ghuweyr, and drains into the Dead Sea via Wadi Araba. Historically, the area had the largest copper deposits in the Southern Levant, which were intensively exploited from the Chalcolithic (4500–3100 BCE) through to the Mamluk period (1250–1516 CE). It also has a number of significant early prehistoric sites. Part of the wadi is included in the Dana Biosphere Reserve. The Royal Society for the Conservation of Nature (RSCN) opened the first of its eco hotels, the Feynan Ecolodge, there in 2005. Archaeological sites * Barqa al-Hetiye * Khirbat Faynan * Khirbat en-Nahas * Wadi Faynan 16 Excavations Archaeological sites in Faynan have been extensively excavated by the Edom Lowlands R ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Copper
Copper is a chemical element with the symbol Cu (from la, cuprum) and atomic number 29. It is a soft, malleable, and ductile metal with very high thermal and electrical conductivity. A freshly exposed surface of pure copper has a pinkish-orange color. Copper is used as a conductor of heat and electricity, as a building material, and as a constituent of various metal alloys, such as sterling silver used in jewelry, cupronickel used to make marine hardware and coins, and constantan used in strain gauges and thermocouples for temperature measurement. Copper is one of the few metals that can occur in nature in a directly usable metallic form ( native metals). This led to very early human use in several regions, from circa 8000 BC. Thousands of years later, it was the first metal to be smelted from sulfide ores, circa 5000 BC; the first metal to be cast into a shape in a mold, c. 4000 BC; and the first metal to be purposely alloyed with another metal, tin, to create ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ghassulian Culture
Ghassulian refers to a culture and an archaeological stage dating to the Middle and Late Chalcolithic Period in the Southern Levant (c. 4400 – c. 3500 BC). Its type-site, Teleilat Ghassul (Teleilat el-Ghassul, Tulaylat al-Ghassul), is located in the eastern Jordan Valley near the northern edge of the Dead Sea, in modern Jordan. It was excavated in 1929-1938 and in 1959–1960, by the Jesuits. Basil Hennessy dug at the site in 1967 and in 1975–1977, and Stephen Bourke in 1994–1999. The Ghassulian stage was characterized by small hamlet settlements of mixed farming peoples, who had immigrated from the north and settled in the southern Levant - today's Jordan, Israel and Palestinian territories. People of the Beersheba culture (a Ghassulian subculture) lived in underground dwellings, a unique phenomenon in the archaeological history of the region, or in trapezoidal houses of mud-brick. Those were often built partially underground (on top of collapsed underground dwellings ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Israel Museum
The Israel Museum ( he, מוזיאון ישראל, ''Muze'on Yisrael'') is an art and archaeological museum in Jerusalem. It was established in 1965 as Israel's largest and foremost cultural institution, and one of the world’s leading encyclopaedic museums. It is situated on a hill in the Givat Ram neighborhood of Jerusalem, adjacent to the Bible Lands Museum, the Knesset, the Israeli Supreme Court, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Its holdings include the world's most comprehensive collections of the archaeology of the Holy Land, and Jewish art and life, as well as significant and extensive holdings in the fine arts, the latter encompassing eleven separate departments: Israeli Art, European Art, Modern Art, Contemporary Art, Prints and Drawings, Photography, Design and Architecture, Asian Art, African Art, Oceanic Art, and Arts of the Americas. Among the unique objects on display are the Venus of Berekhat Ram, the interior of a 1736 Zedek ve Shalom synagogue from Sur ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
