Tag: middle

The strangest things archaeologists have found on the ancient Silk Roads

(video link) One of the greatest civilizations of the ancient world wasn’t contained in a nation or a city. It was a series of trade routes that crisscrossed Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and the Swahili Coast of Africa, and dubbed the “Silk Road” by modern explorers. For centuries, these routes passed through wealthy cities whose vibrant cultures were hybrids of Eastern and Western culture, joined by the spirit of trade and knowledge exchange. The Silk Road civilization thrived because it had no borders. In this episode of Ancient People Did Stuff , we talk about some of the more unusual discoveries that archaeologists have made at excavation sites along the ancient Silk Roads. One of the great medieval cities of the Silk Road was Samarkand, located today in Uzbekistan. Its people were called Sogdians, and their language was the lingua franca of the Silk Road during roughly the 4 th through the 8 th centuries. And yet one of the only remaining examples we have of written Sogdian is in an angry letter that an abandoned wife sent to her husband, which was lost in a mailbag and found over a millennium later. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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The strangest things archaeologists have found on the ancient Silk Roads

Holy Cow: Dubai Police Have a Freaking Hoverbike

Remember how Dubai’s police department uses a fleet of supercars as their cruisers? Now the flashy force has added another head-turning vehicle: A Scorpion 3 hoverbike built by Russian company Hoversurf . According to Autoblog , …The police force aims to deploy its latest toy as a first-responder vehicle in hard-to-reach places, such as the middle of a traffic jam. Conveyed to a staging point, the Scorpion’s 660-pound cargo capacity could carry an officer to a choke-point scene with aid before a Mercedes G-wagen or Bugatti Veyron could get through. The hoverbike also does standard drone duty with a range of up to six kilometers. I’d love to see these here in New York City. Alas, this is the NYPD’s latest vehicle.

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Holy Cow: Dubai Police Have a Freaking Hoverbike

Unexpected Viking toilet discovery leads to controversy

Museum Southeast Denmark Archaeologists excavating at an ancient Viking settlement in southeast Denmark thought they were dealing with a typical country town from the Middle Ages. Then a single toilet changed everything. Museum of Southeastern Denmark archaeology researcher Anna Beck was digging up what she thought was a semi-subterranean workshop, only to find that she was knee-deep in… yeah, you guessed it. She’d found a layer of medieval poop. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Unexpected Viking toilet discovery leads to controversy

For 4,500 years, Stone Age humans returned to this mysterious cave

45,000 years ago, in an area that is now part of Ethiopia, humans found a roomy cave at the base of a limestone cliff and turned it into a special kind of workshop. Inside, they built up a cache of over 40 kilograms of reddish stones high in iron oxide. Using a variety of tools, they ground the stones into different colored powders: deep reds, glowing yellows, rose grays. Then they treated the powder by heating it or mixing it with other ingredients to create the world’s first paint. For at least 4,500 years, people returned to this cave, known today as Porc-Epic, covering its walls in symbols and inking their bodies and clothes. Some anthropologists call it the first artist’s workshop. Now, a new study in PLoS One suggests that the cave offers us a new way to understand cultural continuity in the Middle Stone Age, when humans were first becoming sophisticated toolmakers and artisans. Paleoscientists Daniela Eugenia Rosso, Francesco d’Errico, and Alain Queffelec have sorted through the 4,213 pieces of ochre found in the cave, analyzing the layers of history they represent. They argue that Porc-Epic is a rare continuous record of how humans pass on knowledge and rituals across dozens of generations. Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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For 4,500 years, Stone Age humans returned to this mysterious cave

Amazon is buying the ‘Amazon of the Middle East’

Amazon wants to be a one-stop shop for the entire world, but has struggled to get a foothold in the Middle East. After months of deliberations , the company has finally purchased Souq.com, the “Amazon of the Middle East.” Russ Grandinetti, Amazon VP, says that the deal is a no-brainer, since both sites “share the same DNA, ” adding that the pair will now “work hard to provide the best possible service” in the region. The price hasn’t been disclosed, but rumors from the back-end of 2016 claimed that Souq’s founders were looking for a cool $1 billion. TechCrunch believes that the price was haggled down during negotiations, and thinks that the final fee was closer to $650 million. For that chunk of change, Amazon will now have a strong presence in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the UAE with plenty of the knotty issues of doing business in the Middle East already fixed. For example, credit cards aren’t ubiquitous in the area, so Souq developed a prepayment card where users top up in retail stores before ordering goods online. There’s also no unified logistics platform in many locations, or addresses, so Souq had to build a network of local couriers who knows where people live. There’s no word on if Amazon will look to rebrand Souq with its own logo, although it’s not that likely given its normal procedure. After all, Zappos, Twitch, and IMDb aren’t called Amazon Shoes, Amazon Game Videos or Amazon Movie Database for nothing. Then again, the fact that the site is gaining a foothold in a new region, there may be a temptation to bring everything under the classic brand. Source: Amazon (BusinessWire)

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Amazon is buying the ‘Amazon of the Middle East’

This hard drive will self destruct. Data-wiping malware targets Europe

Enlarge (credit: William Warby ) Shamoon—the mysterious disk wiper that popped up out nowhere in 2012 and took out more than 35,000 computers in a Saudi Arabian-owned gas company before disappearing—is back. Its new, meaner design has been unleashed three time since November. What’s more, a new wiper developed in the same style as Shamoon has been discovered targeting a petroleum company in Europe, where wipers used in the Middle East have not previously been seen. Researchers from Moscow-based antivirus provider Kaspersky Lab have dubbed the new wiper “StoneDrill.” They found it while they were researching the trio of Shamoon attacks, which occurred on two dates in November and one date in late January. The refurbished Shamoon 2.0 added new tools and techniques, including less reliance on outside command-and-control servers, a fully functional ransomware module, and new 32-bit and 64-bit components. StoneDrill, meanwhile, features an impressive ability to evade detection by, among other things, forgoing the use of disk drivers during installation. To accomplish this, it injects a wiping module into the computer memory associated with the user’s preferred browser. StoneDrill also includes backdoor functions that are used for espionage purposes. Kaspersky researchers found four command-and-control panels that the attackers used to steal data from an unknown number of targets. Besides sharing code similarities with Shamoon, StoneDrill also reuses code used in an espionage campaign dubbed “NewsBeef,” which targeted organizations around the world. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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This hard drive will self destruct. Data-wiping malware targets Europe