Tuesday, March 4, 2014

astro picture for the day/ sea people's updated information


Image credit: NASA, ESA
Acknowledgements: Ming Sun (UAH), and Serge Meunier

And here's the weird astronomy picture for the day!  Never seen any galaxy picture like this!  This beats all the interacting galaxy pictures.  Apparently, this galaxy is too close to a neighboring galactic cluster, and the combined gravitation is ripping it to shreds!    This is almost scary!

- thought for the day extra,

"
Question: Who Were the Sea People?
Answer: The situation regarding the identification of the Sea Peoples is more complicated than you might realize. The major problem is that we only have sketchy written records of their attacks on the established cultures of Egypt and the Near East, and these give only a vague idea of where they came from. Also, as the name suggests, they were a group of distinct peoples of diverse origins, not a single culture. Archaeologists have put some pieces of the puzzle together, but there are still some big gaps in our knowledge of them which will never be filled.The Egyptians originally coined the name "Peoples of the Sea" for the foreign contingents that the Libyans brought in to support their attack on Egypt in c. 1220 BC during the reign of Pharaoh Merneptah [see New Kingdom: 19th Dynasty]. In the records of that war, five Sea Peoples are named: the Shardana, Teresh, Lukka, Shekelesh and Ekwesh, and are collectively referred to as "northerners coming from all lands". The evidence for their exact origins is extremely sparse, but archaeologists specializing in this period have proposed the following: The Shardana may have originated in northern Syria, but later moved to Cyprus and probably eventually ended up as the Sardinians. The Teresh and Lukka were probably from western Anatolia, and may correspond to the ancestors of the later Lydians and Lycians, respectively. However, the Teresh may also have been the people later known to the Greeks as the Tyrsenoi, i.e., the Etruscans, and already familiar to the Hittites as the Taruisa, which latter is suspiciously similar to the Greek Troia. I won't speculate on how this fits in with the Aeneas legend.The Shekelesh may correspond to the Sikels of Sicily. The Ekwesh have been identified with the Ahhiyawa of Hittite records, who were almost certainly Achaean Greeks colonizing the western coast of Anatolia, as well as the Aegean Islands, etc.In Egyptian records of the second wave of Sea Peoples attacks in c. 1186 BC, during the reign of Pharaoh Rameses III, the Shardana, Teresh, and Shekelesh are still considered to be a menace, but new names also appear: the Denyen, Tjeker, Weshesh and Peleset. An inscription mentions that they "made a conspiracy in their islands", but these may have only been temporary bases, not their actual homelands.The Denyen probably originally came from northern Syria (perhaps where the Shardana had once lived), and the Tjeker from the Troad (i.e., the area around Troy) (possibly via Cyprus). Alternatively, some have associated the Denyen with the Danaoi of the Iliad, and even the tribe of Dan in Israel.Little is known about the Weshesh, though even here there is a tenuous link to Troy. As you may know, the Greeks sometimes referred to the city of Troy as Ilios, but this may have evolved from the Hittite name for the region, Wilusa, via the intermediate form Wilios. If the people called Weshesh by the Egyptians were indeed the Wilusans, as has been speculated, then they may have included some genuine Trojans, though this is an extremely tenuous association.Finally, of course, the Peleset eventually became the Philistines and gave their name to Palestine, but they too probably originated somewhere in Anatolia.In summary then, five of the nine named "Sea Peoples" - the Teresh, Lukka, Tjeker, Weshesh and Peleset - can plausibly be linked to Anatolia (albeit somewhat inconclusively), with the Tjeker, Teresh and Weshesh being possibly linked to the vicinity of Troy itself, though nothing can be proven and there's still much controversy about the exact locations of ancient states in that region, let alone the ethnic identity of the inhabitants. Of the other four Sea Peoples, the Ekwesh are probably the Achaean Greeks, and the Denyen may be the Danaoi (though probably aren't), while the Shekelesh are the Sicilians and the Shardana were probably living in Cyprus at the time, but later became the Sardinians.Thus, both sides in the Trojan War may be represented among the Sea Peoples, but the impossibility of obtaining precise dates for the fall of Troy and the raids of the Sea Peoples makes it difficult to work out exactly how they are connected."

It's in quotes, but the person I got this from is 1) using some codename like ns5 or something like that, and apparently, he's taking his entire website down; but, at least I put them in quotes!

The quote above indicates to me that the Sea People's who ended the era of the Troy, the Minoans, the Hittites, and heralded the era of the Israelites and Greeks was due to the iron age.  People from Turkey and surrounding areas were learning to make and use iron which would have been a game changer. And, it looks like various people were competing to take over the Levant.


Image credit, Eric H. Cline and Assaf Yasur-Landau

Minoan painting?  Yes, but this one is Tel Kabri of Israel; this painting goes back to like 1100 B.C. Eric H. Cline apparently has found many Minoan art througout the mediterraenean including Egypt.


Another Bull Leaping Fresco from the Palace at Tell el Dab'a, Egypt.  Tell El Dab'a goes back to the Hycsos who invaded and ruled Egypt for a period - from 1720B.C. to 1500 B.C.  The Hyksos conquered by a technology advantage of advanced bow and arrows and chariots.


7 comments:

  1. Hey, I discovered your blog yesterday and I've been reading it all day long! Remarkable work you're doing here.

    The process by which the cluster is violently ripping the guts of the galaxy is a process known as ram pressure stripping.

    xxx

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    Replies
    1. Hi Mariana,

      Just yesterday? I hadn't made any new posts here for awhile; so, I was wondering how long you've been here.

      Ram pressure stripping . . . I'm going to have to check that out; that's new stuff for me!

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    2. Hello Mariana,

      I hadn't got around to looking up ram pressure stripping because I'm reading other stuff; but, I stumbled upon it quite by accident when checking out some of my favorite science news websites, SpaceDaily!

      http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Spiral_galaxy_spills_blood_and_guts_999.html

      I thought ram pressure stripping would have to do with gravity; but, instead it has to do with the x-ray emitting gas of galaxy clusters. This can be hard to understand how remarkable this is! Stars start their furnaces through magnetic fields which are generated by the electric currents generated by friction of the materials; it's more than just matter coming together due to gravity.

      The x-ray gas of galactic cluster is generated by the galactic clusters(I'm stiff not sure why actually!). But, this does bring up something else I've meant to post on this blog . . .

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    3. . . .

      I found this googling quickly, http://pole.uchicago.edu/

      I can't find the name of the particular lecturer I heard this from, so, I'll describe some of what this has found.

      The x-ray gas generated from galactic clusters scatters the light from the cosmic background radiation. So, when looking at the Cosmic Background Radiation, CBR, at close enough resolution(and electromagnetic radiation wavelength), one sees shadows of these galactic clusters. One could in principle find all the galactic clusters in this way!

      When watching this lecture, he shows the CBR which has white spots instead of black shadows as well. These white spots are supergiant black holes!

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    4. The studies from the Southpole Micrometer telescope has confirmed the inflationary theory to more precision(the Cobe satellite of the 1980s famously confirmed the theory before; also, the cobe satellite project was mentioned in Steven Weinberg's "First three minutes" book). The SouthPole telescope also essentially says dark matter is made of subatomic particles(I've forgotten the argument. Actually, the idea of brown dwarfs and so as dark matter was disproved in the 1990s through microgravity lensing studies). And of course has made the distributions of regular matter, dark matter, and dark energy more precise.

      That's all I can remember right now.

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    5. Ope, I just remembered the SZ affect; or, at least, that's what I remembered of it,

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunyaev%E2%80%93Zel'dovich_effect

      The Sunyaev–Zel'dovich effect!

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    6. The southpole microwave telescope is now reporting finding gravitational waves, or b-modes, in the CBR. One more confirmation of the inflationary generalization of the Big Bang theory.

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