M.J. Rose

Welcome to the digital age – where people are tossing their book collections in the garbage, keeping their precious family photos on hard drives, and storing all of their music in the “cloud”. We are presently dooming ourselves to a ‘digital dark age’ of such immense and tragic proportions that the burning of the Library at Alexandria is a trifle in comparison. Perhaps you’ve noticed that the floppy disks you used just a few years ago are no longer usable? All of those files, lost. Digital media itself may endure the years, but the players with which you access that media changes with the wind…

Are you panicking yet?

Perhaps we need to take on the “Renaissance preoccupation” with lost intellectual treasures?

Engraving from the Dell’Historia Naturale (1599) showing Naples apothecary Ferrante Imperato’s cabinet of curiosities, the first pictorial representation of such a collection

LOST LIBRARIES

…”In the latter half of the 17th century the English polymath Thomas Browne wrote Musaeum Clausum, an imagined inventory of ‘remarkable books, antiquities, pictures and rarities of several kinds, scarce or never seen by any man now living’. Claire Preston explores Browne’s extraordinary catalogue amid the wider context of a Renaissance preoccupation with lost intellectual treasures…”

See more here at the Public Domain Review.

…”The purpose and origin of the hoard remains a mystery…”

6,000-year-old crown found in Dead Sea cave revealed

(by April Holloway – Ancient Origins)

“The world’s oldest crown, which was famously discovered in 1961 as part of the Nahal Mishar Hoard, along with numerous other treasured artefacts, are to be revealed in New York University’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World as part of the ‘Masters of Fire: Copper Age Art from Israel’ exhibit.

The ancient crown dates back to the Copper Age between 4000–3500 BC, and is just one out of more than 400 artefacts that were recovered in a cave in the Judean Desert near the Dead Sea more than half a century ago. The crown is shaped like a thick ring and features vultures and doors protruding from the top. It is believed that it played a part in burial ceremonies for people of importance at the time…”

See more here.

In a universe teeming with earth-like habitable planets, have you ever wondered why we have not yet been visited by extraterrestrials? The theory of Biocentrism attempts to explain many things in our universe in a way that makes beautiful sense, and this is one of them. (If you think we have been visited, this video will also intrigue you…)