Tutankhamen was really a Daddy

Two still-born babies found in the tomb of Egyptian Pharaoh Tutankhamen are the “Boy king’s” twin daughters, anatomists have claimed.
A team from Liverpool University in Britain, led by Professor Robert Connolly, has based its conclusion on preliminary tests carried out on the mummified remains of the two fetuses in Egypt.

“The two fetuses in the tomb of Tutankhamen could be twins, despite their very different size and thus fit better as a single pregnancy for his young wife (Ankhesenamun).This increases the likelihood of them being his children.

“I studied one of the mummies, the larger one, back in 1979, determined the blood group data from this baby mummy and compared it with my 1939 blood grouping of Tutankhamen.

The results confirmed that this larger fetus could indeed be the daughter of Tutankhamen. Now we believe they are twins and they were both his children, “Connolly was quoted by the Times as saying.

The fetus have been stored at the Faculty of Medicine in Cairo University since the archeologists Howard Carter discovered them in the teenage kings tomb on the west bank of Luxor in 1922.

Egyptologists have long debated whether they were his children of if they were placed in the tomb with the symbolic purpose of allowing the famous Pharaoh to live on as newborns in the afterlife.

The answer to this hereditary puzzle is closer because the tow fetuses are to undergo CT scan and DNA testing to determine possible diseases and their relation to Tutankhamen. The smaller fetus is about five months in gestational age and the larger fetus is estimated to be between seven and nine months. The results of the remaining tests are due in December.

It is a very exciting finding which will not only paint a more detailed picture of this famous young king’s life and death, it will also tell us more about his lineage”, Connolly said.

According to Rosalie David, of the University of Manchester’s Faculty of Life Sciences, Tutankhamen is such an important figure in Egyptology. He was a fascinating character whose tomb and indeed body has given us so much information about life in Ancient Egypt, and it seems that he will continue to do so for some time yet.

Da Vinci copied China’s Art

Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings of machines are uncannily similar to Chinese originals and were undoubtedly derived from them, a British amateur historian says in a newly published book.

Gavin Menzies sparked headlines across the globe in 2002 with claim that Chinese sailors reached America 70 years before Christopher Columbus.

Now he says a Chinese fleet brought encyclopedias of technology undiscovered by the West to Italy in 1434, laying the foundation for the engineering marvels such as flying machines later drawn by Italian polymath Leonardo.” Everything known to the Chinese by the year 1430 was brought to Venice,” said Menzies, a retired royal navy submarine commander, in an interview at his London home.

From Venice, a Chinese ambassador went to Florence and presented the material to Pope Eugenius IV, Menzies says.

If accepted, the claim would force an “agonizing reappraisal of the Eurocentric view of history”, Menzies says in his book “1434: The year a Magnificent Chinese Fleet Sailed To Italy and Ignited The Renaissance”.

The 70 year old sold more than a million copies of his first book, “1421”, which argued Chinese sailors mapped the world in the early 1400s before abandoning global seafaring.

His theories are dismissed as nonsense by many academics – Menzies says Chinese fleets reached Australia and New Zealand as well as America before European explorers – but have gained an international following among readers.

In his latest book – published in the USA in June and this month in UK – Menzies says four ship from the same Chinese expeditions reached Venice, bringing with them world maps, astronomical charts and encyclopedias far in advance of anything available in Europe at the time.

To support his argument, Menzies publishes drawings of weapons, mills and pumps from a 1313 Chinese agricultural treaties, the Nung Shu, and from other pre-1430 Chinese books, next to apparently similar illustrations by Leonardo, Di Giorgio and Taccola.

Euthanasia petitioner Embraces Life

Two years back, Seema Sood wished death and had even petitioned the Presidents to allow her euthanasia. But hope triumphed over despair and today, walking nonetheless after a knee replacement surgery, the Bits Pilani gold medalist is ready for life once again.

The turnaround has been both spectacular and miraculous for the 37 year old, who could not move her limbs for 15 harrowing years after a crippling attack of rheumatoid arthritis.

“I regret the letter to the president,” she says. “Everything was so dark for me earlier, but I am excited about my mobility now and I am confident I will improve.

Walking for the first time after 1993 Seema, a resident of Palampur, has another regret: that she spent the most productive years of her life in bed when her twin masters degree in Engineering and IT could have taken her place. When she won the gold medal, she had already been attacked by the disease and was on steroids.

The Himachal govt. and the Bits alumni have come forward. Seema has been granted funds for joint replacement surgeries on her knees, hips, elbows and shoulders.

Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children won Booker

Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children looks set to win the Best of Booker prize in the ultimate accolade for an author whose post-colonial prose on independent India has transfixed a generation, enabled the empire to write a back and won a slew of awards.

The Best of Booker award, to be presented at the London literary festival in July, will celebrate the 40th anniversary of the prize. It will be the first time a winner has been chosen from a shortlist by public vote.

In Rushdie, who is up against five other shortlist authors ranging from the towering J.M Coetzee to Nadine Gordimer, who were to win, it would make Midnight’s Children the greatest Booker-Prize-winning novel of all time. It would be the third time Rushdie has been honored by the Booker for the same novel, having won the actual prize in 1981 and receiving the Booker of Bookers in 1993, when the Prize marked its 25th anniversary.
Interestingly, VS Naipaul has been left off the shortlist despite winning the Nobel Prize for literature.

It is seen to be measure of Rushdie’s triumph that he heads a heavyweight shortlist that notably fails to feature of some 20th century’s foremost writers, including Iris Murdoch, Kingsley Amis and William Golding. The shortlist is seen to have a distinctly post-colonial tinge with five linked to Empire, not least JG Farell’s 1973 novel The Siege of Krishnapur, which is set in 1850s India.

The shortlist also includes Gordimer’s The Conservationist, Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda, Pat Barker’s The Ghost Road and Coetzee’s Disgrace.

But it is Rushdie’s inclusion on the shortlist that has excited the most interest with the reliable indicator of Public mood - the British bookmaker – installing him as the favorite, with Barker, Carey, Coetzee, Gordmer and Farell following in that order with ever-longer odds. The judges who drew up the shortlist from some of the most revered Booker-winning novels of the last 40 years, said Rushdie was a natural for this ultimate honor because he won the original prize “for what his fans or detractors would think of as his best book…it has an ebullience and a brilliance.”

But the shortlist has not been universally well received with some critics complaining that it is heavy with novels that are now literary history and fails to include recent popular winning titles such as Yann Martel’s Life of Pi.