M.J. Rose

Iconic (and mysterious) corpse, Rosalio Lombardo, AKA the jewel of the Palermo catacombs…

Via Curiosity.com,

This Mummified Two-Year-Old Appears to Blink Every Day
Written by Reuben Westmaas

“Down in the catacombs of Sicily, you can visit the incredibly well preserved body of a two-year-old who died in 1920. And that’s not the spooky part. The spooky part is the fact that if you stand there long enough, you’ll see her eyes open and close.

Meet “Sleeping Beauty”

Rosalia Lombardo led a short, strange life. The daughter of a city official from Palermo, Italy, she was only two years old when she died of pneumonia. Her father, Mario Lombardo, took it about as well as you’d expect. In his grief, he contacted the legendary embalmer Alfredo Salafia to preserve his little girl in perpetuity. And if you dispute the existence of legendary embalmers, ask yourself: how many other embalmers do you know of that have their own Wikipedia page?”…

Click here for the full story, and scroll down the page for a great video (this video is actually the highlight of this whole piece. It’s from the series, Ask a Mortician, here).

Each one of these wonderments defies belief. And as far as the first one on the list goes, not only are the black boxes of the Serapeum amazingly advanced looking, but how on earth did they get them in there? 70 tons along with a lid of 30 tons!

From Megalithic Marvels,

12 Photographs Mainstream Archaeology Does Not Want You to See

“Conventional archaeology propagates the notion that the further we look back into history, the more archaic the civilizations we see and the more inferior their methods of construction. Yet all over the world are ancient anomalies and megalithic marvels constructed with a lost high technology that confound today’s experts, defy our greatest modern engineering and tell us a different version of history.

1. The Black Boxes of the Serapeum

Located in the area known as Saqqara, the Serapeum is one of the most enigmatic ancient sites in all of Egypt. Lost under the sands of time, this labyrinth was discovered in 1850 which hides 25 granite black boxes crafted with laser like precision. Each box weighs approximately 70 tons along with a lid of 30 tons cut from the same piece of stone. Each box was found empty and thus their purpose remains a mystery. It is estimated that these 100 ton stone boxes would need at least 2000 men to transport them. However, with the tunnels being only 2 feet wider than the boxes themselves, there would not have been nearly enough space inside for such a vast army to lower and transport these boxes to their resting places. 1 The Egyptians would have had to use torches to see inside the pitch black tunnels, yet there is no evidence of smoke markings from flame light on the low tunnel ceilings. The stone was quarried in Aswan about 1000 kilometers away. The official statement from Egyptologists is that these boxes were made during the late dynastic period as burial places for sacred bulls, but it would have been impossible for the dynastic Egyptians to do so with softer bronze tools. The very crude hieroglyphic carvings on the outside of 3 of the boxes were most likely made thousands of years later by the Egyptians who found them in SITU (Notice how advanced the much older box appears compared with its enclosure)…”

For the other 11, click here.

This is pretty much one of our dreams come true. JUST IMAGINE WHAT’S INSIDE?

Also, one of our favorites, Kathlyn M. Cooney, an Associate Professor of Ancient Egyptian Art & Architecture at the University of California Los Angeles, is quoted — and she cautions that since archeology is destructive, it is best to be patient regarding this discovery…

From Gizmodo

by George Dvorsky

Stunned Scientists Detect Suspected Hidden Chamber Within Great Pyramid of Giza

Khufu’s Pyramid 3D cut aerial view. The fuzzy white dots represent the location of the newly discovered void. (Image: ScanPyramids Mission)

“Though they were constructed nearly 5,000 years ago, the Great Pyramids of Egypt are still packed with secrets. Using a technique that leverages the power of cosmic rays, scientists have confirmed the presence of a large empty space within Khufu’s pyramid—a void that’s signaling the presence of a possible hidden chamber.

It’s tempting to think that all the great archaeological discoveries from ancient Egypt have already been made, but new research published today in Nature shows there’s still plenty for us to uncover.

An investigation into the internal structure of Khufu’s pyramid—the largest pyramid in Giza—has revealed the presence of a large and inaccessible “void” within the structure. The researchers who led the study, Mehdi Tayoubi from the HIP Institute in France and Kunihiro Morishima from Nagoya University in Japan, won’t go so far as to say the cavity is a hidden chamber, but they’re reasonably convinced the internal feature is a deliberate architectural feature of the pyramid. As to what’s inside is anyone’s guess, but the presence of artifacts and funeral items are not out of the question, according to Egyptologists.

The discovery was made possible through the unlikely intersection of archaeology and particle physics. By making meticulous measurements of muons—elementary particles that rain down on Earth from deep space and are capable of traveling through solid objects—researchers were able to characterize the densities within the pyramid, revealing the presence of an empty space that measures at least 100 feet (30 meters) in length…”

For the rest, click here.