The complicated marriage between Prince Charles and Princess Diana was messy from the beginning, thanks to a very “archaic requirement of virginity” for a royal bride.

That’s what Tina Brown, author of The Palace Papers, believes set their nuptials off on the wrong foot from the very start.

According to the author, in a new interview with The Cut, trying to find a proper candidate who fits that requirement was like trying to find the “Loch Ness monster.” That meant the love of Charles’ life, Camilla, was completely out of the question.

“Camilla understood that the achingly archaic requirement of virginity in a royal bride was a deal-breaker in her relationship with Charles,” Brown writes in The Palace Papers. That meant the search was on for a bride for Prince Charles, which wasn’t an easy task in modern society.

Even years into their relationship, Prince William reportedly didn't know if Kate Middleton was the one he wanted to spend his life with. https://t.co/Z3MZmiw2aR

— SheKnows (@SheKnows) April 28, 2022

“Finding an intact woman in her late twenties amongst his contemporaries might have seemed easy from the Queen Mother’s point of view, but in the freewheeling sexual mores of seventies London society, it was about as likely as a sighting of the Loch Ness monster,” the excerpt reads, “No wonder he wound up marrying the twenty-year-old ingénue Lady Diana Spencer.”

Brown also adds that the palace’s strict stipulations in choosing a virgin bride would “prove lethal to his future happiness” — he wanted to settle down with Camilla.

What’s astonishing is that one archaic rule for marriage set decades’ worth of trauma into motion for the entire royal family. It resulted in headlines that continue to taunt the palace, and as Camilla rises to Queen Consort in the future, it reminds everyone of what happened in the past.

Even as casual British royal family observers, there’s still so much we don’t know about what happens in the House of Windsor.

2022 is poised to be a memorable year for the royal family. But with historic highs come lows and pitfalls. Royal biographer Tina Brown takes readers from the troubling years following Princess Diana’s death, to the rift between Princes William and Harry, the scandals of Prince Andrew, and Queen Elizabeth’s steady resolve through it all in The Palace Papers: Inside the House of Windsor — the Truth and the Turmoil. Brown’s book features new, intimate details about the royal family, and contemplates how the House of Windsor moves into a new era.

A stone statuette more than 4,500 years old depicting the face of an ancient goddess was discovered in the southern Gaza Strip, archaeological authorities in the Palestinian enclave announced Monday.

Carved out of limestone and 22 centimeters long, the 2500 B.C. statuette was found by a farmer working his land in Khan Younis, according to the ministry of tourism and antiquities for Hamas, the Islamist movement that rules Gaza.

“The statue represents the Canaanite goddess Anat,” Jamal Abu Reda, who is in charge of antiquities at the ministry, said in a statement.

Anat, one of the best-known Canaanite deities, was the goddess of love and war.

It was uncovered on what was an important “overland trade route for several civilizations” that lived in what is now the Gaza Strip, Abu Reda said.

“We found it by chance. It was muddy and we washed it with water,” farmer Nidal Abu Eid told BBC News. “We realized that it was a precious thing, but we didn’t know it was of such great archaeological value.”

The find was the latest in Gaza, where tourism at archaeological sites is limited due to an Israeli blockade imposed since the militant group Hamas took over the enclave in 2007.

In February, workers at a construction site in northern Gaza discovered 31 Roman-era tombs dating to the first century A.D.

Israel and Egypt, which shares a border with Gaza, tightly restrict the flow of people in and out of the impoverished territory, which is home to about 2.3 million Palestinians.  

In January, Hamas reopened the remains of a fifth-century Byzantine church following a years-long restoration effort backed by foreign donors.

Also this week, antiquities authorities in Egypt said archaeologists unearthed the ruins of a temple for the ancient Greek god Zeus in the Sinai Peninsula. The Tourism and Antiquities Ministry said in a statement the temple ruins were found in the Tell el-Farma archaeological site in the northwestern corner of Sinai.

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Original Article: Farmer finds 4,500-year-old statuette while working his land (msn.com)

Cambridge University researchers analysed more than 2,000 skeletons and found elites ate no more meat than other social groups.

One study also suggested peasants occasionally hosted lavish meat feasts for their rulers.

Researchers said the findings overturned major assumptions about early medieval English history.

Cambridge University bioarchaeologist Sam Leggett drew her conclusions after analysing chemical signatures of diets preserved in the bones of 2,023 people buried in England from the 5th to 11th Centuries.

She then cross-referenced these with evidence for social status such as grave goods, body position and grave orientation and found no correlation between social status and high protein diets.

The findings surprised Cambridge University historian Tom Lambert, because so many medieval texts and historical studies suggested that Anglo-Saxon elites did eat large quantities of meat.

The pair worked together to decipher royal food lists and discovered similar patterns of servings – like a modest amount of bread, a huge amount of meat, a decent but not excessive quantity of ale, and no mention of vegetables, although some probably were served.

Mr Lambert said: “The scale and proportions of these food lists strongly suggests that they were provisions for occasional grand feasts, and not general food supplies sustaining royal households on a daily basis.”

Dr Leggett said: “I’ve found no evidence of people eating anything like this much animal protein on a regular basis.

“If they were, we would find isotopic evidence of excess protein and signs of diseases like gout from the bones. But we’re just not finding that.

“The isotopic evidence suggests that diets in this period were much more similar across social groups than we’ve been led to believe.

“We should imagine a wide range of people livening up bread with small quantities of meat and cheese, or eating pottages of leeks and whole grains with a little meat thrown in.”

The researchers believe that even royals would have eaten a cereal-based diet and that these occasional feasts – examples of which have been excavated in East Anglia – would have been a treat for them too.

“Historians generally assume that medieval feasts were exclusively for elites,” said Mr Lambert.

“But these food lists show that even if you allow for huge appetites, 300 or more people must have attended.

“That means that a lot of ordinary farmers must have been there, and this has big political implications.”

He added: “We’re looking at kings travelling to massive barbecues hosted by free peasants, people who owned their own farms and sometimes slaves to work on them.

“You could compare it to a modern presidential campaign dinner in the US. This was a crucial form of political engagement.”

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Original Article: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-cambridgeshire-61178452

Portugals first real serial killer, something to be proud of? I don’t know. This guy definitely made some history.

Diogo Alves was a serial killer and robber who was born in Spain and raised in Portugal. Between 1836 and 1840, he was responsible for the deaths of seventy persons.

He lived and committed those crimes in the Águas Livres Aqueduct area. Therefore he received the nickname: The Aqueduct Murderer.

In 1841, he was sentenced to death and went to be hung on February 19th.

When he was killed, his head got separated from his body and preserved in a jar and is currently put on as a tourist attraction in Lisbon at their university of Medicine.

What Did He Do?

You might be wondering what he exactly did to receive the death sentence? Well, it wasn’t pretty: as a kid, he moved to Lisbon to work as a servant in the aristocratic mansions of the Portuguese capital.

Not long after, young Alves understood that a life of crime was more lucrative in terms of making money.

In 1836, he arranged for himself to be transported to a residence on the ‘Aqueduto das guas Livres’, where he would labor.

Although many of the workers who traveled long and far to reach the city were no more than humble farmers who had come to Lisbon to sell their harvests, Alves singled them out for attack.

Awaiting their return home, he tracked them down along the Aqueduct after dusk and forced them to hand over their hard-earned money to him.

Afterward, Alves would hurl them over the side of the 213-foot-tall tower, sending them plummeting to their deaths below ground level. He did this around 70 times in that period.

To avoid capture, Alves assembled a gang of bandits who murdered four people inside the house of a local doctor before being apprehended.

Why Would You Keep A Serial Killer’s Head?

It was widely held at the time of Alves’ execution that the form of one’s head was responsible for certain mental or behavioral qualities.

He was so dismembered from his already deceased corpse and placed in a glass jar, where it has remained ever since, properly preserved for everyone to behold.

Because of so little written evidence, if any, of the research on Alves has survived, little is known about the outcome of the investigation.

And now it’s a tourist attraction, so if you’re interested — check it out.

More Famous Heads

When you think Alves was the only head they ever kept you’re wrong: a second skull, that of Francisco Mattos Lobo, who killed a family of four before tossing their dog out of a window, was inspected barely one year after Alves’ death.

That one is kept in a jar, very close to Alves’ head.

Einstein

There’s more. Einstein’s brain is kept. In 1955, after his death, his brain was taken out of his skull (without the family’s permission) by a Princeton Hospital doctor.

They wanted to examine his brain to find out why he was so intelligent. But until today, there hasn’t been any conclusion about that.

Would you want to keep a head of loved ones in a jar?

Christians across the world gather today, Good Friday, to commemorate the passion — the Biblical story of Jesus Christ’s crucifixion. Jesus’ date remains the source of much debate, though it is widely accepted that it fell on a Friday on or near the Jewish festival of Passover, sometime between 30 and 33 AD.

Jesus and his disciples gathered on what is now known as Maundy Thursday for the Last Supper, where he told them that one of them would betray him.

Lo and behold, Judas Iscariot revealed Jesus’ location the very next day, telling Roman soldiers where he was in exchange for 30 pieces of silver.

Each of the New Testament’s Gospels — Matthew, Mark, Luke and John — give a detailed account of Jesus’ final days.

After his arrest, he faced an initial trial with the Jewish body of the Sanhedrin, before facing a second at the court of Pontius Pilate, Roman governor of Judea at the time.

Though Pilate did not believe Jesus’ crimes warranted capital punishment, he was influenced by the gathered crowds, and handed Jesus over to be crucified.

The historical record of Pilate is very limited, though he is believed to have held office between 26 and 36 AD.

While archaeologists and historians have disputed his existence for many years, a limited number of tantalising clues have emerged to seemingly confirm his existence.

Tom Meyer, a professor of Bible studies at Shasta College and Graduate School in California, revealed one of these clues can be found at an impressive fort built by the infamous King Herod.

Speaking to Express.co.uk last year, he said: “More archaeological evidence has come to light demonstrating the existence of one of the key villains in the account of the crucifixion of Jesus: Pontius Pilate, the governor of the Roman province of Judea.

Fragment of a stone monument with the mention of Pontius Pilate near Herod’s palace/ (Image: GETTY)

“A copper alloy ring that was used as a seal was first discovered in 1969 by Israeli archaeologist Gideon Foerster at one of the fortresses of Herod the Great, the Herodium — eight miles south of Jerusalem.

“This finger ring has proven upon further inspection to also bear the name of none other than Pontius Pilate.”

Prof Meyer added: “Seals were used by most classes of society and were often pressed onto wet clay documents instead of soft wax because clay hardens and maintains its shape when heated while wax just melts.

“In the ancient near east, seals were often engraved with the name of the owner and could function as a legal signature.”

Prof Meyer explained that, while one of the letters is damaged, the ring clearly has a Greek inscription that reads ΠΙΛΑΤΟ (PILATO) or Pontius Pilate.

The name Pilatus is a rare one, and would likely have been associated with Pilate.

However, given the cheap material it is made from, it is unlikely that Pilate would have owned it.

It has been suggested that the ring might have belonged to another individual named Pilate, or that it belonged to someone who worked for the Roman governor.

A coin depicting an olive wreath from Pontius Pilate’s reign. (Image: GETTY)

The first evidence of Pilate’s existence was found in 1961 on an inscribed slab of limestone in Caesarea Maritima — modern-day Israel.

The slab stated that Pilate was the Roman governor of Judea under the reign of Emperor Tiberius, and that he was in charge during the time Jesus is thought to have been crucified.

Ancient texts relating to Pilate’s governance have also been found in Rome.

While the Gospels have portrayed Pilate as a ruler who could be easily influenced by public opinion, it has been suggested that he was in fact a heartless ruler.

Numerous other accused criminals met a similar fate to Jesus when Pilate was in charge.

Philo of Alexandria, a Jewish philosopher, wrote in 50AD that Pilate’s reign was troubled by “briberies, insults, robberies, outrages and wanton injuries, executions without trial, constantly repeated, ceaseless and supremely grievous cruelty”.

Pilate has become something of a reviled figure ever since, having famously “washed his hands” of Jesus, handing him over to be crucified. The Bible says it took Jesus six hours to die on the cross.

Two days later, women went to the tomb to pray but found it open and an angel there telling them that Jesus was alive.

More and more people saw him alive, some questioning if it was really him until he showed them his wounds.

He later rose up to Heaven to be with God, telling his disciples that God would be with them in his absence.