M.J. Rose

More very, very old book news:

Two pages from Samuel Ward’s translation for part of the King James Bible. An American professor who came upon the manuscript last fall at Cambridge says it is the earliest known draft for the King James translation, which appeared in 1611. Credit Master and Fellows of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge; Maria Anna Rogers (Photo)

Earliest Known Draft of King James Bible Is Found, Scholar Says
By JENNIFER SCHUESSLER

“The King James Bible is the most widely read work in English literature, a masterpiece of translation whose stately cadences and transcendent phrases have long been seen, even by secular readers, as having emerged from a kind of collective divine inspiration.

But now, in an unassuming notebook held in an archive at the University of Cambridge, an American scholar has found what he says is an important new clue to the earthly processes behind that masterpiece: the earliest known draft, and the only one definitively written in the hand of one of the roughly four dozen translators who worked on it.

The notebook, which dates from 1604 to 1608, was discovered by Jeffrey Alan Miller, an assistant professor of English at Montclair State University in New Jersey, who announced his research on Wednesday in an article in The Times Literary Supplement…”

For the rest, click here.

An incredible new discovery! What else is hidden on our planet that we have yet to see? How old are these earthworks? Who made them and why? Were they used for solar observation? Were they meant to be seen from space?

So many questions…

Author Graham Hancock insists that these ancient sites indicate that the earth was inhabited by an ancient, advanced, and globetrotting civilization (his new book goes in-depth on this subject.)

One of the enormous earthwork configurations photographed from space is known as the Ushtogaysky Square, named after the nearest village in Kazakhstan. Credit DigitalGlobe, via NASA

NASA Adds to Evidence of Mysterious Ancient Earthworks
By RALPH BLUMENTHAL (NYTimes)

High in the skies over Kazakhstan, space-age technology has revealed an ancient mystery on the ground.

Satellite pictures of a remote and treeless northern steppe reveal colossal earthworks — geometric figures of squares, crosses, lines and rings the size of several football fields, recognizable only from the air and the oldest estimated at 8,000 years old.

The largest, near a Neolithic settlement, is a giant square of 101 raised mounds, its opposite corners connected by a diagonal cross, covering more terrain than the Great Pyramid of Cheops. Another is a kind of three-limbed swastika, its arms ending in zigzags bent counterclockwise.

Described last year at an archaeology conference in Istanbul as unique and previously unstudied, the earthworks, in the Turgai region of northern Kazakhstan, number at least 260 — mounds, trenches and ramparts — arrayed in five basic shapes….”

Click here for the rest, and more photos.

Tonight’s the night to curl up by the light of jack o’lanterns and watch something scary.

Happy Halloween to our mysterious readers –

Jack Nicholson in the movie THE SHINING (1980).

“In 1980, Stanley Kubrick shot The Shining, the classic horror film based on Stephen King’s novel. During production, the director allowed his daughter Vivian, then 17 years old, to shoot a documentary called Making The Shining, which lets you spend 33 minutes being a fly on the wall. The film originally aired on the BBC and gave British audiences the chance to see Jack Nicholson revving himself up to act, and Shelley Duvall collapsing in the hallway from stress and fatigue. Minutes later, we watch Mr. Kubrick exert some directorial force on the actress, and we understand her predicament all the more.”

Click here to watch the complete documentary.