It was a long walk through a hilly landscape mottled with green where bristly bushes wormed their way between brown boulders. There was nary a soul in sight but every so often, the clear sound of a goatherd calling to a stray member of his herd came wafting through the air, followed sometimes by a line of goats crossing our path, nosing and grazing their way through the scrub. It was an idyllic scene and I was almost loath to reach our destination. Almost, but not quite, for at our destination lay one of the country’s oldest written records.

We were in Palkigundu, near the town of Koppal, on the trail of an inscription of Emperor Ashoka, one of the world’s most remarkable rulers.

Despite the arrows painted on some rocks that pointed out the way, it took a few wrong turns, some backtracking, and the help of a goatherd, before we finally stood at the base of two huge boulders, the pair topped with a flat-shaped rock forming a canopy over both. It was this rock canopy that had given rise to the name Palkigundu, meaning palanquin rock, for the two boulders bore the rock canopy like a palanquin. Steep, roughly-laid steps led us to the top of the pair of boulders, and then at last, we stood in front of a message that had been incised onto the rock some time in 258 BC.

The inscription itself was barely visible and it took us a few moments to distinguish it from the natural patterns in the rock. Gazing at the 2,300-year-old writing, I thought about how quite possibly, people elsewhere might at that very moment be reading the same message of peace that I was, for the exact same edict is found in 17 places in India. In fact, the most recent one was discovered just a year ago. Earlier in the day, we had been to see the closest of these other sites, which is actually just 2.5 km away from Palkigundu, east of Koppal, at Gavimath....

After surviving perhaps 400 years in the sand and surf off the North Carolina coast, the 12-ton remains of a shipwreck are making their final port-of-call.

What could be the oldest wreck ever found on the North Carolina coast was loaded onto the back of a truck Monday for a 90-mile trip to the Graveyard of the Atlantic Museum in Hatteras.

Salvaged from the pounding surf in April, the wreck has rested under the shade of an oak tree near the Currituck Beach Lighthouse for the past three months.

But the massive beams have shrunk a little and cracked in the hot, dry weather. Experts plan to place the wreck on a concrete slab next to the museum and soak the 17-by- 37-foot remains in hopes of arresting the deterioration....

Faulkner speaks! Fifty years after he spent two years as writer in residence at the University of Virginia, the school has posted online recordings of the two addresses, the dozen readings, and the 1,400 questions that students, faculty, and interested townspeople of Charlottesville, Va., posed to the author. For Faulkner fans, these 28 hours of talking and reading are Christmas in July.

Apart from brief stints in New Orleans, New York City, and Europe, Faulkner lived in only two places, Oxford, Miss., and Charlottesville, Va. He must have liked college towns. In Oxford, where he grew up and lived for most of his 64 years, he was mostly taken for granted, ignored, or joked about. Count No ’Count was his local nickname. In Charlottesville, he was treated like royalty, and that, combined with the facts that his daughter lived there and that he loved the local hunting scene (pink jackets, bugling, and riding to hounds), surely influenced his wish, cut short by his death, to move to Charlottesville permanently. Given the warm reception he got there, so audible on these recordings, it’s easy to see why....

Franz Kafka wanted all his manuscripts to be burned after his death, but his friend Max Brod disregarded the request, seeding a complex legal battle over thousands of manuscripts that has the literary world agog. That legal tussle takes a new twist today as four safety deposit boxes in a Zurich bank containing the manuscripts are opened.

The boxes are believed to contain thousands of manuscripts by Kafka and Brod, including letters, journals, sketches and drawings, some of which have never been published and could provide literary detetectives an insight into one of the 20th century's greatest writers.

The move in Zurich follows similar action at two Tel Aviv banks, which were ordered by an Israeli tribunal to extract Kafka's works from their vaults.

Yards Brewing Co.'s Ales of the Revolution are beers with a history chaser. The Philadelphia microbrewery, which opened in 1995 in a building the size of a toolshed and now occupies a former skateboard rink, has attempted to replicate the brews our Colonial forefathers would have downed while talking sedition in wayside taverns.

General Washington's Tavern Porter takes its cue from a home-brew recipe, preserved in the New York Public Library, that Washington jotted down while he was serving in the Continental Army. It calls for fermenting a "small beer" from molasses, evidently a more common ingredient than barley in that era.

Yards President Tom Kehoe compromised, beginning with a base rich in dark, heavily roasted malts, then adding four pounds per barrel of baking molasses during the second fermentation. The sugar-rich molasses kicks up the alcohol to 7 percent by volume, but enough residual sweetness remains in the beer to balance the sharper, coffeelike flavors....

As a young conservator, fresh from graduate school, Mark S. Tucker found himself facing a humbling task.

In 1980, he joined the conservation department of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and was thrown into preparations for the large retrospective of Thomas Eakins' work the museum would be mounting in 1982.

That's when he first encountered Eakins' 1875 masterpiece, The Gross Clinic, owned at the time by Jefferson Medical College.

"I did a very, very minor treatment on it," Tucker said the other day. "It had surface grime on it and I removed that. So I had my nose up close to the painting at a very early point."

Even then, he sensed that a more extensive treatment might someday be warranted. That day has come....

Archaeologists in Peru have unearthed the remains of what is believed to have been a high-ranking official of the Sican culture who lived about 1,200 years ago.

A team co-led by Peruvian archaeologist Carlos del Carpio found the tomb, along with many burial artifacts, about 1,500 meters west of the Lord of Sican's tomb in Huaca Las Ventanas archaeological site, near the Pomac Forest Historical Sanctuary, in the northern Lambayeque region.

According to Peruvian daily El Comercio, the ancient nobleman was buried in lotus posture (sitting with his legs half-crossed) and the finds included a winged eye mask, a ceremonial knife and a metal cup....

A well-preserved tomb believed to be the final resting place of an ancient Mayan king has been discovered in Guatemala, scientists announced last week.

The 1,600-year-old tomb was discovered on May 29 beneath the El Diablo pyramid in the city of El Zotz. It is packed with of carvings, ceramics, textiles, and the bones of six children, who might have been sacrificed at the time of the king's death.

However, much more work is needed before the scientists can piece together all the clues about the tomb's owner.

"We still have a great deal of work to do," said Stephen Houston an archaeologist at Brown University in Rhode Island. "We've only been out of the field for a few weeks, and we're still catching our breath after a very difficult, technical excavation. Royal tombs are hugely dense with information and require years of study to understand."

Tomb discovery

Before making the actual discovery, Houston said the team thought "something odd" was happening in the deposit where they were digging. They knew a small temple had been built in front of a sprawling structure dedicated to the sun god, an emblem of Maya rulership.

"When we sunk a pit into the small chamber of the temple, we hit almost immediately a series of 'caches' — blood-red bowls containing human fingers and teeth, all wrapped in some kind of organic substance that left an impression in the plaster. We then dug through layer after layer of flat stones, alternating with mud, which probably is what kept the tomb so intact and airtight."...

Abraham Lincoln dwarfed other presidents in tourism to federally run sites in 2009, thanks in part to celebrations tied to the bicentennial of his birth.

According to figures collected by the National Park Service , nearly 6.8 million people visited sites associated with Lincoln last year, including his memorial on the National Mall, Ford's Theatre and childhood homes in Kentucky, Indiana and Illinois.

By contrast, 2.7 million people visited two sites associated with Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Also high on the list were Founding Fathers Thomas Jefferson, George Washington and John Adams....

A star-studded group of history advocates trying to secure an original copy of "Canada's birth certificate" is drawing some inspiration for the patriation project from Australia, where former prime minister Bob Hawke led a controversial — and somewhat underhanded — battle with British archives for his country's founding document 20 years ago.

Canada's former national archivist, Ian Wilson, doesn't expect to precisely emulate the Australian example in the quest he's leading — along with renowned historian Jack Granatstein and bestselling author Charlotte Gray — to liberate the 1867 British North America Act for Canada from a musty storeroom in the British public records office.

That, he says, would involve arranging a loan from the United Kingdom to display the historic artifact for a special occasion — then refusing to give it back afterward.

"It was lent to them in 1988 for a bicentennial exhibit," Wilson says with a chuckle, "and it sounds like they didn't return it."...

For the first time in more than a century, one of the counterfeit bank notes proven to be in the sequence passed by Billy the Kid and his gang has found its way back to Lincoln County.

U.S. Marshal Historian Dave Turk of Washington, D.C., and retired Federal Criminal Investigator Steve Sederwall of Capitan began the hunt to find the sample of the counterfeit bank notes passed by the Kid. They knew that at least one would have been preserved after the trials were over that convicted the ring of the crime.

What they found was contrary to, and more than, what is currently recorded.

"History has it that the plates used to print the counterfeit were never found," Sederwall said. "That's not true. There were 22 plates on three different Eastern banks and the illegal bank notes passed in Lincoln County were from a New Bedford bank. This operation was not cowboys with a press in a barn here in Lincoln County. It was organized crime, fine-tuned, clever, very sophisticated and much bigger than recorded by historians."...

Archaeologists say a rock painting in Arnhem Land is the nation's oldest dated picture showing Aboriginal people's first contact with the outside world.

The rock painting is a picture of a sailing boat and it is located at a remote shelter in north-west Arnhem Land.

Archaeologist Paul Tacon says there are telling signs it is a depiction of a Perahu - a boat popular in Indonesia and Malaysia around the 17th century....

More than 300 looted antiquities, estimated to be worth more than EUR15 million, were displayed to the press this morning in Rome, having been repatriated to Italy after they were discovered in a warehouse in Switzerland.

It was a scene slightly reminiscent of a Victorian detective novel, in which the robber and his looted candlesticks is unveiled before an impressed gathering of country house guests.

Only today's unveiling took place inside the Colosseum rather than on the pages of a 19th century novel and while there was no criminal present, there was plenty of loot, which consisted of objects such as Etruscan ceramic vases, bronze statues from Sardinia and frescoes from Pompeii – 337 objects in total.

A investigation, code-named Andromeda, led by the carabinieri and the Swiss authorities, discovered about 20,000 artefacts in the free port of Geneva, stored in warehouses that were associated with an unnamed Japanese dealer....

Smugglers of cultural heritage have looted a Sassanid structure located in the Baghmalek region in northeast Khuzestan Province.

Members of the Baghmalek Cultural Heritage Enthusiasts Society, who recently visited the ruins of site, found shards scattered around the illegal excavations dug by the Smugglers, society director Yunes Shafiei told the Persian service of the Mehr News Agency on Sunday.

The structure, known by the locals as the Dalkhuni Fort, was used by local rulers after the defeat of the Sassanid Empires.

Initial studies show that the shards date back to the Seljuk era, Shafiei said.

Since the fort lies on a hill surrounded by agricultural land, farmers do not welcome experts on cultural heritage who occasionally visit this site, he noted....

Howard Carter spent years documenting the thousands of artefacts from Tutankhamun's tomb. Now, thanks to the efforts of an Oxford archaeologist, this remarkable archive of pictures and notes can be viewed online.

A total of 5,398 objects were found in the tomb, covering every aspect of ancient Egyptian life, from weapons and chariots to musical instruments, clothes, cosmetics and a treasured lock of the royal grandmother's hair. A few, like Tutankhamun's gold burial mask, are instantly recognisable, but many are not well known, even to experts.

A succession of secretaries scanned and transcribed Carter's notes in between other work, then Malek proofread the results at evenings and weekends. Jonathan Moffett, head of IT at the affiliated Ashmolean Museum, built a database that could hold images of the original material as well as transcripts, so the text could be easily searched. In 1995 the team started posting the records in one of the first websites dedicated to Egyptology. They called it Tutankhamun: Anatomy of an Excavation .

More than 15 years later, the internet has been transformed: a Google search for Egyptology now returns more than 3 million results. And Malek's project is almost complete. Around 98% of the material is available, with the last pages to follow within the next three months....

[Simon] Bolivar is the second former leader who's been rudely awakened this year. The body of Cyprus President Tassos Papadopoulos was stolen by grave robbers for a number of weeks, prompting a nation-wide cadaver-hunt . Because of Papadopolous' hardline Cypriot nationalist politics, a political motive was suspected, but it turned out the crooks were just after ransom....

Then there is the perennial debate over Lenin's Tomb in Red Square, which Russian leaders acknowledge "does not quite fit today's realities" but is still too politically sensitive to move....

The installation of a memorial bust of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin in Bedford, Va., next to Western Allied leaders in World War II has ignited a firestorm of controversy and threatened to tear apart the small town 200 miles south of the nation's capital.

Opponents of the bronze sculpture say it has no right to be placed in the National D-Day Memorial next to the busts of Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill because Stalin's murderous rule led to the deaths of at least 20 million people, surpassing even the number of murders under Hitler's bloody reign....

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the tea party have hurled accusations of racism at each other all week, sparking off a media frenzy that has made it difficult at times to keep track of the debate.

Yesterday, the fight took a pretty bizarre turn: Tea Party Express leader Mark Williams posted an imaginary letter to President Abraham Lincoln on his personal website that accused the NAACP of being racist for using the word "colored" in its name.

This afternoon, Williams removed the post, saying it's time to "move forward" and end the name calling. He said he "heard from many very sober and thoughtful people who counseled me that my comments were an obstacle to progress and that I missed my intended target."...

Scientists who exhumed the remains of several members of the Medicis, the clan that dominated the Florentine Renaissance, have conclusively dismissed the theory of family murders, solving a more than 400-year-old cold case.

Malaria, not poison as long rumored, killed Francesco I de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, and his second wife, Bianca Cappello, according to research to be published in Transactions of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene.

The couple died a few hours apart in October 1587 after 11 days of agony. Their almost simultaneous deaths led to speculation that they had been murdered....

ARCHAEOLOGISTS have discovered 46 sets of human remains from what is thought to be a late-Roman cemetery during the redevelopment of a derelict pub.

The remains – including complete skeletons – were found during a dig at the site of the Talbot Inn, in Caistor, which is being transformed into a £1.3-million Lincolnshire Co-operative foodstore....

A VIDEO of a Melbourne woman's family singing and dancing along to the Gloria Gaynor hit I Will Survive while on a trip to a Nazi death camp has angered Jews across the globe.

Jane Korman, an artist who lives in Ashwood and is Jewish, posted the video of her 89-year-old father Adolk - who survived the Holocaust - and her three children dancing to the hit inside the Auschwitz death camp in Poland where as many as 1.1 million people were killed during World War II.

Although first displayed at a Monash University gallery in Caulfield last December and published on the online video site YouTube in January, the Dancing Auschwitz video has gone viral over the past few days, racking up more than 200,000 hits....

Officials at Germany's Stasi archive have agreed to release some information showing West Germany's secret service employed former Nazi criminals. But some key data remains under wraps.

It's one of the country's worst-kept secrets. Yet questions still surround the presence of former Nazis and war criminals in West Germany's police, secret service (BND) and politics. Who were those people, what positions did they hold in Nazi Germany and later in post-war West Germany?

Crucial information about the BND's past has long been hidden in the Stasi files - the vast archive of information meticulously gathered by former Communist East Germany's secret police, the Stasi. The aim was to either blackmail Western agents or to discredit its capitalist neighbor to the west.

After reunification some of those documents were made available, but parts of the archives remained locked away for reasons of data privacy.

Continuity between Nazis and West Germany

Recently, the last remaining documents from the Stasi files were released to the public. Journalist Andreas Foerster had requested them as early as the year 2000, but his request was turned down twice. After persisting for years, he was finally granted access....

Amid the horrors of the Holocaust, the atrocities perpetrated by a few brutal women have always stood out, like aberrations of nature.
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There were notorious camp guards like Ilse Koch and Irma Grese. And lesser known killers like Erna Petri, the wife of an SS officer and a mother who was convicted of shooting to death six Jewish children in Nazi-occupied Poland; or Johanna Altvater Zelle, a German secretary accused of child murder in the Volodymyr-Volynskyy ghetto in Nazi-occupied Ukraine.

The Nazi killing machine was undoubtedly a male-dominated affair. But according to new research, the participation of German women in the genocide, as perpetrators, accomplices or passive witnesses, was far greater than previously thought.

The researcher, Wendy Lower, an American historian now living in Munich, has drawn attention to the number of seemingly ordinary German women who willingly went out to the Nazi-occupied eastern territories as part of the war effort, to areas where genocide was openly occurring....

An undiscovered Caravaggio painting may have been found in Rome, according to the Vatican newspaper.

The painting depicts the martyrdom of St Lawrence and belongs to the Jesuits in Rome.

It will now be examined in detail by art historians to find out if it really is the work of the famous Baroque painter.

Italy celebrated the life of the great master over the weekend on the 400th anniversary of Caravaggio's death.

A gallery housing his work and several churches stayed open overnight to mark the anniversary.

An image of the work was published on the front page of the Vatican's L'Osservatore Romano on Saturday.

It shows a semi-naked man, with one arm outstretched as he leans over leaping flames beneath him.

Violent history

But while the Vatican newspaper article points out that the painting is typical of Caravaggio's style - such as the perspective from which the subject is seen - it conceded that no known document mentions St Lawrence in relation to Caravaggio....