Little by little, day after day, piracies dwindled as the murderous submarine was mastered and its menace strangled. On the land, the Allies, under the matchless leadership of Marshal Ferdinand Foch and the generous co-operation of Americans, British, French and Italians, under the great Generals Pershing, Haig, Petain and Diaz, wrested the initiative from von Hindenburg and Ludendorf, late in July, 1918. Then, in one hundred and fifteen days of wonderful strategy and the fiercest fighting the world has ever witnessed, Foch and the Allies closed upon the Germanic armies the jaws of a steel trap. A series of brilliant maneuvers dating from the battle of Chateau-Thierry in which the Americans checked the Teutonic rush, resulted in the defeat and rout on all the fronts of the Teutonic commands.
“These, then, are the things we must do, and do well, besides fighting–the things without which mere fighting would be fruitless: 
I particularly appeal to the farmers of the South to plant abundant foodstuffs as well as cotton. They can show their patriotism in no better or more convincing way than by resisting the great temptation of the present price of cotton and helping, helping upon a large scale, to feed the nation and the peoples everywhere who are fighting for their liberties and for our own. The variety of their crops will be the visible measure of their comprehension of their national duty.”
These functions were extended: Control over railroads: to cease within twenty-one months after the proclamation of peace. The War Finance Corporation: to cease to function six months after the war, with further time for liquidation. The Capital Issues Committee: to terminate in six months after the peace proclamation. The Aircraft Board: to end in six months after peace was proclaimed; and the government operation of ships, within five years after the war was officially ended.
The Bible tells us that its’ most fabled monarch, King Solomon, ruled the Holy Land from within the First Temple in Jerusalem. There he sat on a golden throne, surrounded by five hundred golden shields and effigies of golden animals. He dined on golden tableware. He drank from golden goblets.
What exactly was the source of this extravagant cache of wealth? The Old Testament relays that Solomon received a shipment of the precious metal – along with silver, sandalwood, precious stones, ivory, apes and peacocks - every three years from his personal mines in a faraway land named only as Ophir.
With biblical geography vague at best, the supposed location of Ophir remained a mystery for over a millennia, until Portuguese traders in 16th century stumbled upon the abandoned ruins of East Africa’s greatest sub-Saharan civilization, Great Zimbabwe. Thinking the freestanding, artfully constructed temples beyond the capabilities of the native “primitives,” they would go on to make erroneous attributions of the site to the Phoenicians, Greeks and Egyptians. Moslem traders who passed through the area circulated a different rumor: the city in the jungle was, in fact, the true location of King Solomon’s mines.
Surprisingly, that unchecked piece of information failed to circulate widely in Europe until the mid-19th century when a missionary named Merensky returned from Africa and published account claiming he had found the “gold fields of Solomon.” In 1885, the English author H. Rider Haggard cemented the conceptual link between “darkest Africa” and the wise king’s secret depot with King Solomon’s Mines – an adventure tale that also linked the legend with the Ethiopian traditional telling of a supposed sexual relationship between Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. Even today, the Lemba people of Southern Africa claim Semitic heritage – a fact recently confirmed by DNA testing.
| The ruins themselves told a different story, however. By 1905, archaeologist David Randall-MacIver had dated their construction to the 11th century – a thousand years after Solomon’s time – and deemed them to be of solely African origin. While that classification has severed the | ||||||||||||
| link between kingdom of Great Zimbabwe and Ophir for most, it hasn’t abated the tide of a speculation as to the mines’ true location. In the past century alone, the Timna Valley in southern Israel, the African side of the Red Sea, the coasts of Pakistan or India and Mahd adh Dhahab in Saudi Arabia have all been fingered as potential sites. The latter is the favored modern candidate, due to its proximity to an ancient trade route supplying Jerusalem…and evidence of long abandoned gold mining operation. |
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Tags: 16th century Portuguese Traders, 1885, 1905, 19th century missionary Merensky, 480 - 450 BC - Greek Lion Head Coins, Ancient Egyptians, Ancient Greeks, Ancient History Store, Bible History, darkest Africa, First Temple of Jerusalem, Great Zimbabwe, H. Rider Haggard, Historic Israel on DVD, Holy Land Mystery, Jerusalem history, King Solomon, King Solomon's Mines, Lemba people, Mahd adh Dhahab, Merensky, Minoan Snake Goddess, Moslem traders, Mystery of Ophir, Old Testament mystery, Phoenicians, Queen of Sheba, Red Sea, Sword of King David, Timna Valley
When it comes to historic English writers, one conjures images of Shakespeare, Bacon, Shelly, even Chaucer (for those with a penchant for prolifically pretentious prose), forgetting that some of England’s most historic writings were recorded in the diaries of a less than famous Londoner. Samuel Pepys (1633-1703), son of an English tailor and member of the English parliament, was responsible for some of the most accurate and detailed coverage of London’s great fire and the crowning of Charles II.
Pepys is known for his comments on the plague that was spreading through England at the time. Known as the Black Death, the plague took thousands of lives and resulted in mass grave pits throughout the city. Pepys’ was one of the few on the ground providing descriptions of the deaths and its effect on the people of London.
Christopher Wren rebuilder of London after the fire and architect of Charles II is also noted in Pepys’ diary. Indeed, the coronation of the king is recorded with both detail and opinion by Pepys’. It was the journalist’s nature to record both his life and the life of his city and give his opinion on both.
In the 16th century Italy and Belgium became centers of lace production as their artisans developed a refined form of needlework that would become popular adornment to the wardrobes of the growing bourgeoisie and aristocracy of Western Europe. Lacework developed from the open decorative technique of embroidery and was in its early manifestations called cut-work. As embroidery was used to finish the hems of garments and would add slight flourishes of thread patterning along edges of cloth it allowed needlework to separate itself more and more from the greater garment and evolve into a coveted item in its own right.
Set into the frame, beneath the network of threads, was the quintain (the background fabric) that would be sewn to the network where necessary in accordance with the patterning while any excess quintain would be cut away. These networks of thread would be laid out according to a geometric pattern radiating from a center and would combine open-work with heavily embroidered sections. The other form of lacework that came out of this period was referred to as lacis, patterns coming from a French tradition of working along a gridded network ground and establishing shapes according to compilations of squares on the grid. 
The progress of nations was much more slow in ancient days than now, and these two rival empires - Rome and Carthage - continued their gradual growth and extension, each on its own side of the great sea which divided them, for five hundred years, before they came into collision. At last, however, the collision came. It originated in the following way:
The question, what answer to give to this application, was brought before the Roman senate, and caused them great perplexity. It seemed very inconsistent to take sides with the rebels of Messina, when they had punished so severely those of Rhegium. Still the Romans had been, for a long time, becoming very jealous of the growth and extension of the Carthaginian power. Here was an opportunity of meeting and resisting it. The Sicilian authorities were about calling for direct aid from Carthage to recover the city, and the affair would probably result in establishing a large body of Carthaginian troops within sight of the Italian shore, and at a point where it would be easy for them to make hostile incursions into the Roman territories. In a word, it was a case of what is called political necessity; that is to say, a case in which the interests of one of the parties in a contest were so strong that all considerations of justice, consistency, and honor are to be sacrificed to the promotion of them. Instances of this kind of political necessity occur very frequently in the management of public affairs in all ages of the world.
The contest for Messina was, after all, however, considered by the Romans merely as a pretext, or rather as an occasion, for commencing the struggle which they had long been desirous of entering upon. They evinced their characteristic energy and greatness in the plan which they adopted at the outset. They knew very well that the power of Carthage rested mainly on her command of the seas, and that they could not hope successfully to cope with her till they could meet and conquer her on her own element. In the mean time, however, they had not a single ship and not a single sailor, while the Mediterranean was covered with Carthaginian ships and seamen. Not at all daunted by this prodigious inequality, the Romans resolved to begin at once the work of creating for themselves a naval power.
