A Seed Saver's Garden

flowerbug said:

there's rather large sections of Africa and the Middle East that used to be more hospitable to life that are now pretty barren. this is mostly due to poor animal husbandry combined with land use practices which allow the topsoil to be washed or blown away. because it can happen so gradually many peoples just didn't know what was going on. this has also happened to much of any of the ancient empires (Rome, Greek, Egyptian...) and is happening to much of the agricultural lands of the USoA.

well anyways, due to how long they've been available as a food crop they probably originated in the Middle East or Egypt.

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Pulsegleaner said:

The Abydos Helicopter is something different, and is now considered definitively a mistake. Someone engraved one hieroglyphic on a temple wall, covered it over, engraved another one, and then some of the cover flaked off revealing part of the original. The combination looks a bit like a helicopter (just like the one below it, that has had the same thing happen, looks a little like some sort of flying car/hydrofoil.) It's a bit like the Dendera Lights, which a lot of people thought looked like people using gigantic lightbulbs and some sort of generator, but is now assumed to simply be a mix of very common Egyptian motifs (snakes, Lotus Flowers etc.)

The Saqqara Bird (I got the place mixed up) is a little wooden statue of a falcon (more or less) with oddly straight wings and a flat tail with a notch in it. It already looks a lot like a toy areophane, and it files like one when thrown (if you stick another piece of wood into the slot in the tail for stabilizing, which believers think just got lost on the original. )

I've already mentioned that Araucaria chickens seem to have been in Peru before Europeans got there (which indicates possible earlier contact, probably from China). There's an engraving on a Mayan temple that looks a little like an elephant (of course, it also looks a bit like a tapir, which are local to the area, a Chinese book from around the 1500's that seems to show maize (which hadn't gotten to China, yet according to most researcher's) Egyptian mummies that have tested positive for tobacco and cocaine (though it is just as possible those were simply contaminated by the 19th century people who handled them), a Roman ship in an area of Brazil known as the Bay of Jars (due to being filled with amphorae) a roman statue head found in Mexico (possibly related to the ship, ship wrecks, head washes ashore someone picks it up, and it gets traded north. Similar to how the Maine Penny go traded down to Maine from Newfoundland where some Viking left it.) Some claims of Middle Eastern coins being found in Australia, and Roman ones in Japan (that IS verified, we know the coins are Roman we just don't know when, or how, the got to Japan. Direct contact between Rome and Japan seems unlikely.) And there is a carving on one of the walls of Angkor Wat that seems to show either a moa or a cassowary (probably the latter, since it is known they were sometimes brought from New Guinea up to Malaysia, and could have gotten to Thailand from there.
There is also some evidence that the Phoenicians may have made it to New Guinea, and that the legend of the phoenix is actually related to a trade in skins of birds of paradise. One of the brightest and commonest ones looks has two sprays of red-orange feathers under its wings, and does a hopping dance while mating, so it does look a bit like a bird dancing in flames. And the common way to prepared the skins for shipping at the time was to encase them in resin and then cover that with burned banana leaves which creates an egg shaped parcel (the Phoenix taking the ashes of it's predecessor/old body, making an egg out of them, and depositing it at the Temple of the Sun.)

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heirloomgal said:

Yes, this is what I found, the Saqqara bird. Coincidentally, I was talking with a friend today and she mentioned the mummies and the cocaine, she had heard of that too. So much interesting stuff to check out! I need to look up this Maine Penny, I've never heard of this story! I will check out these other historical puzzles you mention. Last night I watched a short clip of a pyramid, more or less, in Mexico called the Temple of the Feathered Serpent and beneath it they discovered a greta deal of mercury, clearly intentionally put there. Looks like mercury, though dangerous in many ways, is also very powerful for certain purposes. Lead as well. Mysteries yet to be revealed, but I certainly think it points to the fact there is so much we don't know.

In terms of cultural contact, here in Canada, there is an official narrative of who the original inhabitants were, despite the fact that I think the oldest recorded settlements belong to the Vikings. Then there is also the Dorset people, who seemed to stick around longer and supposedly pre-date Vikings, and it was thought in academia that these were Proto-Inuit, but now the cultural artifcats prove they were not, they appear to be Norse people. So there's all kinds of surprises out there.

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Pulsegleaner said:

The mercury was apparently down there for the same reason there's supposed to be a whole pool of it in the tomb of Chi Shi Huang Di (the guy with the terra cotta warriors; first Emperor of China). They used it as a symbol of the waters of the cosmos. The area under the Pyramid of the Feathered Serpent was a model of the universe, they think.

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ducks4you said:

"For reasons" is our family motto.
We answer "because", "for reasons."
Nobody questions it.

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heirloomgal said:

Cockatrices, spooky creatures. Gotta new motto?

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Pulsegleaner said:

Back to growing things
Alas, when I went to look at it around 11:00 AM this morning, the jacketed seedling had totally dried up and the top had fallen off. What makes this extra odd is that, when I had last looked at it, around 9:00 it not only looked fine, but looked like the jacket was no longer giving it trouble, since the first leaf was just begging to poke out between the seed leaves. I have no idea what happened in those two hours. That was a find seed, and the only one of it I found, so I guess I'll have to wait until I find another bag of senna with another one.

I have also decided that, since it is being unusually warm at the moment, it's probably OK to start moving seedlings for cool weather plants into the cold frame to harden off. While I was going over them, I took a pic of the leaves of those tiny peas I am trying, to show the plants as well are extra small (those leaves are not going to get any bigger than that)
View attachment 64269

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