These ancient wonders are well worth a visit, even in troubled times.
Morgan Brennan
http://travel.yahoo.com/p-interests-39274939
1. Petra, Jordan
Country: Jordan
Civilization: the Nabataeans
Inhabited: sixth century B.C.
This rose-colored city carved from cliffs garnered fame in the West thanks to the 1980s blockbuster Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.
2. Chichen Itza, Mexico
Country: Mexico
Civilization: the Mayans
Inhabited: 600 to 1000 A.D.
Site of one of Mesoamerica's largest ball courts, this royal city is located near a massive underground cenote, or sinkhole, where the bodies of human sacrifices were dropped.
3. Derinkuyu Underground City, Turkey
Country: Turkey
Civilization: possibly the Phrygians
Inhabited: Approximately eighth century B.C.to 10th century A.D.
This underground network has more than 10 floors and room for up to 50,000 people, plus livestock. It is rumored to have been a hideout for early Christians escaping Roman persecution.
4. Machu Picchu, Peru
Country: Peru
Civilization: the Incas
Inhabited: 15th and 16th centuries A.D.
Conquistadors carrying small pox wiped out the inhabitants of this royal mountaintop fortress, but the Lost City of the Incas was never actually discovered by the Spanish--in fact, it wasn't discovered until 1911.
5. Angkor, Cambodia
Country: Cambodia
Civilization: the Khmer Empire
Inhabited: ninth century to 15th century A.D.
More than a thousand temples, including Angkor Wat, populate this long-time Khmer capital. It declined after a successful attack by invaders from what is now Thailand.
6. Pre-Roman Carthage, Tunisia
Country: Tunisia
Civilization: the Phoenicians
Inhabited: 650 to 146 B.C.
Carthage was home to the Roman Empire's arch-nemesis, Hannibal. It was burned and the earth salted during the final Punic War.
7. Pompeii, Italy
Country: Italy
Civilization: the Roman Empire
Inhabited: seventh/sixth century B.C. to 79 A.D.
Pompeii was a cultural center and vacation destination for Roman high society until it was destroyed in 79 A.D. by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. Left behind are naturally ash-encased mummies.
8. Memphis, Egypt
Country: Egypt
Civilization: the Ancient Egyptians
Inhabited: third millennium B.C. to seventh century A.D.
Located at the mouth of the Nile delta, Memphis thrived for centures as a center of trade, commerce, religion and royalty. Foreign invasions, including one by Alexander the Great, let to its demise.
9. Teotihuacan, Mexico
Country: Mexico
Civilization: possibly the Totonac people
Inhabited: 100 B.C. to 250 A.D.
This city, the founders of which remain a mystery, is home to some of the largest pyramids in pre-Columbian America. It inspired several major empires, those of the Zapotec and Mayans.
10. Mosque City of Bagerhat, Bangladesh
Country: Bangladesh
Civilization: Khan Jahan Ali
Inhabited: 15th century A.D.
The city formerly known as Khalifatabad was founded by a Turkish general. It boasts more than 50 Islamic monuments and the Sixty Pillar Mosque, constructed with 60 pillars and 80 domes.
Showing posts with label Peru. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Peru. Show all posts
Thursday, May 5, 2011
Wednesday, July 14, 2010
Peru to expel British 'Tarzan agitator' Paul McAuley
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jul/02/peru-evicts-british-missionary-paul-mcauley
Peru to expel British 'Tarzan agitator' Paul McAuley
Missionary told to leave after helping Amazon tribes resist incursion of oil, gas and mining firms into the rainforest
Rory Carroll, Latin America correspondent guardian.co.uk, Friday 2 July 2010
Last year, Rory Carroll travelled to the Peruvian Amazon to meet Paul McAuley and learn about his campaign
Peru has ordered the expulsion of a British missionary who was dubbed a "Tarzan agitator" for helping Amazon tribes to resist the incursion of oil, gas and mining companies into the rainforest.
The government has told Brother Paul McAuley, who runs an civil association in the jungle town of Iquitos and promotes indigenous rights, to leave Peru within seven days and never return.
The interior ministry revoked his residency permit on the grounds he has participated in political activities "such as protest marches and other acts against the Peruvian state which constitute a breach of public order".
The expulsion would mark an abrupt end to the campaigning of a Briton revered by indigenous groups and reviled by the authorities and sections of Peru's media, which in addition to "Tarzan" has branded him a "white terrorist" and "incendiary gringo priest".
McAuley said he would fight the expulsion. "I am heading to my office now to see if it's possible to appeal. I'm not sure what's going to happen," he told the Guardian today. "I received the order yesterday so I've got six days left."
One tribe offered to hide him in its forest village and a Peruvian woman offered to marry him so he could get a visa. "The support has been extraordinary but I'm going to fight this legally. I'm not going to stay if I'm not allowed," said McAuley.
The 62-year-old, a lay member of the Catholic De La Salle teaching order, is a high-profile opponent of government efforts to parcel up three-quarters of Peru's rainforest for oil, gas and ethanol.
Peru is home to 70m hectares of Amazon, second only to Brazil. Deals worth billions of dollars have brought in helicopters, barges and pipelines and raised expectations of being a net oil exporter.
"Peru's government are clearly determined to brook no opposition to their plans to carve up the Amazon. The government has already initiated a campaign of persecution against indigenous leaders. Now it appears to be going after their allies," said David Hill of the advocacy group Survival International.The interior ministry did not immediately respond to request for comment.
The Portsmouth-born McAuley has travelled the Amazon helping indigenous activists to protest the incursions and set up a civil association, Red Ambiental Loretana, in the humid rivertown of Iquitos in Loreto, a northern region bordering Ecuador. He travels on a scooter and by boat.
The missionary was awarded an MBE for setting up a school in Peru's capital, Lima. Had he not already given it away some years ago he said he would have sent it back to the Queen to protest British companies' involvement in the Amazon. He has embraced elements of Amazonian spiritual belief based on the concept of energy.
Clashes between police and activists in Bagua last year, which McAuley was not involved in, cost dozens of lives and rocked President Alan Garcia's government.
Environmental and indigenous groups expressed outrage at the expulsion order and some promised vigorous protests. "The reaction has been tremendous, everybody across the region is full of indignation," said McAuley.
Julia Urrunaga, a policy adviser to the Environmental Investigation Agency, said an indigenous champion was being persecuted for challening big corporations. "I feel totally ashamed as a Peruvian and extremely sad to lose someone who has so positively affected the lives of people here."
The advocacy group Amazon Watch said McAuley had been under investigation for years but had refused to be intimidated. "The probable impact of the expulsion - certainly intended by the Peruvian state - is to create a chilling effect on international support of ongoing local indigenous struggles for their rights."
Peru to expel British 'Tarzan agitator' Paul McAuley
Missionary told to leave after helping Amazon tribes resist incursion of oil, gas and mining firms into the rainforest
Rory Carroll, Latin America correspondent guardian.co.uk, Friday 2 July 2010
Last year, Rory Carroll travelled to the Peruvian Amazon to meet Paul McAuley and learn about his campaign
Peru has ordered the expulsion of a British missionary who was dubbed a "Tarzan agitator" for helping Amazon tribes to resist the incursion of oil, gas and mining companies into the rainforest.
The government has told Brother Paul McAuley, who runs an civil association in the jungle town of Iquitos and promotes indigenous rights, to leave Peru within seven days and never return.
The interior ministry revoked his residency permit on the grounds he has participated in political activities "such as protest marches and other acts against the Peruvian state which constitute a breach of public order".
The expulsion would mark an abrupt end to the campaigning of a Briton revered by indigenous groups and reviled by the authorities and sections of Peru's media, which in addition to "Tarzan" has branded him a "white terrorist" and "incendiary gringo priest".
McAuley said he would fight the expulsion. "I am heading to my office now to see if it's possible to appeal. I'm not sure what's going to happen," he told the Guardian today. "I received the order yesterday so I've got six days left."
One tribe offered to hide him in its forest village and a Peruvian woman offered to marry him so he could get a visa. "The support has been extraordinary but I'm going to fight this legally. I'm not going to stay if I'm not allowed," said McAuley.
The 62-year-old, a lay member of the Catholic De La Salle teaching order, is a high-profile opponent of government efforts to parcel up three-quarters of Peru's rainforest for oil, gas and ethanol.
Peru is home to 70m hectares of Amazon, second only to Brazil. Deals worth billions of dollars have brought in helicopters, barges and pipelines and raised expectations of being a net oil exporter.
"Peru's government are clearly determined to brook no opposition to their plans to carve up the Amazon. The government has already initiated a campaign of persecution against indigenous leaders. Now it appears to be going after their allies," said David Hill of the advocacy group Survival International.The interior ministry did not immediately respond to request for comment.
The Portsmouth-born McAuley has travelled the Amazon helping indigenous activists to protest the incursions and set up a civil association, Red Ambiental Loretana, in the humid rivertown of Iquitos in Loreto, a northern region bordering Ecuador. He travels on a scooter and by boat.
The missionary was awarded an MBE for setting up a school in Peru's capital, Lima. Had he not already given it away some years ago he said he would have sent it back to the Queen to protest British companies' involvement in the Amazon. He has embraced elements of Amazonian spiritual belief based on the concept of energy.
Clashes between police and activists in Bagua last year, which McAuley was not involved in, cost dozens of lives and rocked President Alan Garcia's government.
Environmental and indigenous groups expressed outrage at the expulsion order and some promised vigorous protests. "The reaction has been tremendous, everybody across the region is full of indignation," said McAuley.
Julia Urrunaga, a policy adviser to the Environmental Investigation Agency, said an indigenous champion was being persecuted for challening big corporations. "I feel totally ashamed as a Peruvian and extremely sad to lose someone who has so positively affected the lives of people here."
The advocacy group Amazon Watch said McAuley had been under investigation for years but had refused to be intimidated. "The probable impact of the expulsion - certainly intended by the Peruvian state - is to create a chilling effect on international support of ongoing local indigenous struggles for their rights."
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
Ancient city linked to the Cloud People of Peru
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1091550/Ancient-city-discovered-deep-Amazonian-rainforest-linked-legendary-white-skinned-Cloud-People-Peru.htmlAncient city discovered deep in Amazonian rainforest linked to the legendary white-skinned Cloud People of Peru
By Daily Mail Reporter
04th December 2008
A lost city discovered deep in the Amazon rainforest could unlock the secrets of a legendary tribe.Little is known about the Cloud People of Peru, an ancient, white-skinned civilisation wiped out by disease and war in the 16th century.
But now archaeologists have uncovered a fortified citadel in a remote mountainous area of Peru known for its isolated natural beauty.
It is thought this settlement may finally help historians unlock the secrets of the 'white warriors of the clouds'.
The tribe had white skin and blonde hair - features which intrigue historians, as there is no known European ancestry in the region, where most inhabitants are darker skinned.
The citadel is tucked away in one of the most far-flung areas of the Amazon. It sits at the edge of a chasm which the tribe may have used as a lookout to spy on enemies.
The main encampment is made up of circular stone houses overgrown by jungle over 12 acres, according to archaeologist Benedict Goicochea Perez.
Rock paintings cover some of the fortifications and next to the dwellings are platforms believed to have been used to grind seeds and plants for food and medicine.
The Cloud People once commanded a vast kingdom stretching across the Andes to the fringes of Peru's northern Amazon jungle, before it was conquered by the Incas.
Named because they lived in rainforests filled with cloud-like mist, the tribe later sided with the Spanish-colonialists to defeat the Incas.
But they were killed by epidemics of European diseases, such as measles and smallpox.
Much of their way of life, dating back to the ninth century, was also destroyed by pillaging, leaving little for archaeologists to examine.
Remains have been found before but scientists have high hopes of the latest find, made by an expedition to the Jamalca district in Peru's Utcubamba province, about 500 miles north-east of the capital, Lima.
Until recently, much of what was known about the lost civilisation was from Inca legends.
Even the name they called themselves is unknown. The term Chachapoyas, or 'Cloud People', was given to them by the Incas.
Their culture is best known for the Kuellap fortress on the top of a mountain in Utcubamba, which can only be compared in scale to the Incas' Machu Picchu retreat, built hundreds of years later.
Two years ago, archaeologists found an underground burial vault inside a cave with five mummies, two intact with skin and hair.
Chachapoyas chronicler Pedro Cieza de Leon wrote of the tribe: 'They are the whitest and most handsome of all the people that I have seen, and their wives were so beautiful that because of their gentleness, many of them deserved to be the Incas' wives and to also be taken to the Sun Temple.
'The women and their husbands always dressed in woollen clothes and in their heads they wear their llautos [a woollen turban], which are a sign they wear to be known everywhere.'
The Chachapoyas' territory was located in the northern regions of the Andes in present-day Peru.
It encompassed the triangular region formed by the confluence of the Maranon and Utcubamba rivers, in the zone of Bagua, up to the basin of the Abiseo river.
The Maranon's size and the mountainous terrain meant the region was relatively isolated.
Sunday, March 2, 2008
Ancient ceremonial plaza found in Peru
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080227/ap_on_sc/peru_ancient_plaza
Ancient ceremonial plaza found in Peru
By ANDREW WHALEN, Associated Press Writer
Tue Feb 26, 2008
A team of German and Peruvian archaeologists say they have discovered the oldest known monument in Peru: a 5,500-year-old ceremonial plaza near Peru's north-central coast.
Carbon dating of material from the site revealed it was built between 3500 B.C. and 3000 B.C., Peter Fuchs, a German archaeologist who headed the excavation team, told The Associated Press by telephone Monday.
The discovery is further evidence that civilization thrived in Peru at the same time as it did in what is now the Middle East and South Asia, said Ruth Shady, a prominent Peruvian archaeologist who led the team that discovered the ancient city of Caral in 2001. Shady serves as a senior adviser to Peru's National Culture Institute and was not involved in the project.
The find also raises questions about what prompted "civilizations to form throughout the planet at more or less the same time," Shady said.
The circular, sunken plaza, built of stones and adobe, is part of the Sechin Bajo archaeological complex in Andes foothills, 206 miles northwest of Lima, where Fuchs and fellow German archaeologist Renate Patzschke have been working since 1992.
It predates similar monuments and plazas found in Caral, which nonetheless remains the oldest known city in the Americas dating back to 2627 B.C.
The plaza served as a social and ritual space where ancient peoples celebrated their "thoughts about the world, their place within it, and images of their world and themselves," Fuchs said.
In an adjacent structure, built around 1800 B.C., Fuchs' team uncovered a 3,600-year-old adobe frieze — six feet tall — depicting the iconic image of a human sacrificer "standing with open arms, holding a ritual knife in one hand and a human head in the other," Fuchs said.
The mythic image was also found in the celebrated Moche Lords of Sipan tombs, discovered on Peru's northern coast in the late 1980s.
Walter Alva, the Peruvian archaeologist who uncovered the Lords of Sipan tombs, said the plaza found in Fuchs' dig was probably utilized by an advanced civilization with economic stability, a necessary condition to construct such a ceremonial site.
The excavation was the fourth in a series of digs at the Sechin Bajo complex that Fuchs and Patzschke began on behalf of the University of Berlin in 1992. Deutsche Forschung Gemeinschaft, a German state agency created to sponsor scientific investigations, has financed the most recent three digs.
The find "shows the world that in America too, human beings of the New World had the same capacity to create civilization as those in the Old World," Shady said.
Her discovery, Caral, made headlines in 2001 when researchers carbon-dated material from the city back to 2627 B.C., proving that a complex urban center in the Americas thrived as a contemporary to ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt — 1,500 years earlier than previously believed.
___
Associated Press Writer Leslie Josephs contributed to this report.
Ancient ceremonial plaza found in Peru
By ANDREW WHALEN, Associated Press Writer
Tue Feb 26, 2008
A team of German and Peruvian archaeologists say they have discovered the oldest known monument in Peru: a 5,500-year-old ceremonial plaza near Peru's north-central coast.
Carbon dating of material from the site revealed it was built between 3500 B.C. and 3000 B.C., Peter Fuchs, a German archaeologist who headed the excavation team, told The Associated Press by telephone Monday.
The discovery is further evidence that civilization thrived in Peru at the same time as it did in what is now the Middle East and South Asia, said Ruth Shady, a prominent Peruvian archaeologist who led the team that discovered the ancient city of Caral in 2001. Shady serves as a senior adviser to Peru's National Culture Institute and was not involved in the project.
The find also raises questions about what prompted "civilizations to form throughout the planet at more or less the same time," Shady said.
The circular, sunken plaza, built of stones and adobe, is part of the Sechin Bajo archaeological complex in Andes foothills, 206 miles northwest of Lima, where Fuchs and fellow German archaeologist Renate Patzschke have been working since 1992.
It predates similar monuments and plazas found in Caral, which nonetheless remains the oldest known city in the Americas dating back to 2627 B.C.
The plaza served as a social and ritual space where ancient peoples celebrated their "thoughts about the world, their place within it, and images of their world and themselves," Fuchs said.
In an adjacent structure, built around 1800 B.C., Fuchs' team uncovered a 3,600-year-old adobe frieze — six feet tall — depicting the iconic image of a human sacrificer "standing with open arms, holding a ritual knife in one hand and a human head in the other," Fuchs said.
The mythic image was also found in the celebrated Moche Lords of Sipan tombs, discovered on Peru's northern coast in the late 1980s.
Walter Alva, the Peruvian archaeologist who uncovered the Lords of Sipan tombs, said the plaza found in Fuchs' dig was probably utilized by an advanced civilization with economic stability, a necessary condition to construct such a ceremonial site.
The excavation was the fourth in a series of digs at the Sechin Bajo complex that Fuchs and Patzschke began on behalf of the University of Berlin in 1992. Deutsche Forschung Gemeinschaft, a German state agency created to sponsor scientific investigations, has financed the most recent three digs.
The find "shows the world that in America too, human beings of the New World had the same capacity to create civilization as those in the Old World," Shady said.
Her discovery, Caral, made headlines in 2001 when researchers carbon-dated material from the city back to 2627 B.C., proving that a complex urban center in the Americas thrived as a contemporary to ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt — 1,500 years earlier than previously believed.
___
Associated Press Writer Leslie Josephs contributed to this report.
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