3,000-year old monumental gate unearthed in Turkey

reply to post by emaildogs


yeah it really wasnt your post that is annoying me so I apologize if I responded poorly

Dating in archeology is a fairly accurate science, and they have several methods to date an object or site; this Web site has a good overview of these:

Dating Techniques in Archaeology (MESACC.edu)

This particular find came from a Neo-Hittite kingdom that had been conquered by the Assyrians, they know when the city fell to them, in 738 BCE, when the lion and the citadel it decorated were paved over for their own religious center. After the Hittite empire fell apart several of these little kingdoms tried to carry on with the same traditions and artistic stylings until the got clobbered by the Assyrians. C'est la vie...

Interesting about those "lion sphinx" statues. Somehow it sounds similar to what I saw in China and Okinawa where many of the people there put a pair of "lion dog" statues one either side of a building entrance.

Any chance of a possible connection of the Hittites with East Asians?

reply to post by survival

No... this stone has been in existence just as long as any other stone. You can't use carbon dating to determine when it was worked into a shape. If I'm not mistaken, carbon dating only applies to organic matter, like wood, skeletons, cloth, etc.

You have to admit it's amazingly well preserved, ironic that the Assyrians thought they were destroying it, instead they encapsulated it and preserved it for future generations to find.

[atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/images/member/bf6ba17e37b0.jpg[/atsimg]

reply to post by TomServo


Carbon dating is definitely useless but optical dating is perfect for this.

Optical dating was invented in 1984 in the physics department at Simon Fraser University, British Columbia, Canada, by David Huntley and colleagues. It was quickly used by Martin Aitken’s laboratory in Oxford, England, but it was many years before it was adopted elsewhere. Now there are numerous laboratories around the world, though most are in Europe. In 1994 the principles behind Optical dating (and thermoluminescence dating) were extended to include surfaces last seen by the sun before buried, of carved rock types from ancient monuments and artifacts, made of granite, basalt and sandstone, and this has proved possible. The initiator of ancient buildings luminescence dating Prof. Ioannis Liritzis has shown this in several cases of various monuments.

Source

Some mineral grains (e.g., quartz, feldspars, flint, pyroclastic glass) behave as natural radiation dosimeters when buried, storing as trapped electrons (at grain-defect sites) a portion of the energy deposited by background nuclear and cosmic radiations. Both the last exposure to daylight and the last heating event can be dated (but not for the same sample). Daylight empties light-sensitive electron traps; heating empties all electron traps. After burial, ionizing radiations repopulate emptied traps at a nearly constant rate. In the laboratory, traps are again emptied by either heating or intense illumination. The resulting electron-hole recombination (e.g., at grain impurity ions) produces luminescence (TL or OSL). The longer the burial time (the sample's “age”), the larger the number of trapped electrons and the greater the intensity of luminescence. To translate this luminescence into an age in calendar years, two independent tasks are performed: known artificial doses of nuclear radiation (from calibrated radiation sources) are applied to subsamples to scale the signal, yielding an “equivalent dose” or DE value (having units of grays or Gy); and the burial dose rate DR (GY/year) is derived from measured radioactivity in portions of the sample grains and the surrounding sediments. Then the age A = DE/DR, independent of any other chronometric technique.

Source

reply to post by davidchin

Any chance of a possible connection of the Hittites with East Asians?

yes, definitely, scholars suggest they were a mixture of eastern Huns (Skythian) and Tungus

although it is a complex issue

see the attached source, you have to scroll down a bit to the relevant information

The term Hittite in Cuneiform (the earliest form of writing invented by the Sumerians) appears as Khittae* representing a once powerful nation from the Far East known as the Khitai, also in Hebrew as Khettai, and has been preserved through the centuries in the more familiar term, Cathay.
....The evidence strongly suggests that Ham's grandsons, Heth (Hittites/Cathay) and Sin (Sinites/China), are the ancestors of Mongoloid peoples.