belteshazzar

Archive for the ‘about’ Category

This blog has stayed static for way too long with out me tinkering with it (!!) so I thought I would give it a whole new look. The previous theme was great, but the look now is more in keeping with other sites that I have designed under the belteshazzar brand. It has links to the origin of the name, to the city of Babylon where the biblical Daniel was christened with the name. The yellow and blue are from the decorations on the Ishtar Gate. I have designed it to be simple and elegant, hopefully I have pulled it off to some extent. By no means do i profess to be a designer, in fact, i don’t possess any artistic capability. I think that my craft skills peaked in year 1 and since then I’ve been sticking to math and science in the hope that no one would notice that I cant colour within the lines.

Note: The narration to this video should probably be ignored as it is not correct on various points (but it is just a home video after all) but the video itself is good quality.

(Reuters) – A French-funded archaeology team is working on the first excavations in Iraq’s northern Kurdish areas after seven years of conflict, the latest effort to save the country’s treasures from ruin.

Iraq, which the ancient Greeks called Mesopotamia or ‘land between the rivers’ because of the Tigris and Euphrates that flow through it, is regarded by archaeologists as a cradle of civilization.

But historic sites have been neglected and damaged by decades of war, sanctions and looting and Iraqi officials say the country needs millions of dollars to reverse the damage.

Read more here.

I’m kind of new to this whole blogging … I realise that it has been around for a while, and to be honest, I’ve been around the internet for a while as well, but I’ve never thought about blogging. Now that I am able to integrate Google Reader and Wordpress blogging is a much more natural thing for me to do. I share items that I find in google reader and they get picked up in this blog. Google reader of course has this functionality built into it, you could simply follow me straight from Google Reader (as many(?) people do already), but then you would miss out on posts like this, where i just wander aimlessly! Anyway, there was an issue with my feedburner feed, turns out to be pretty silly (as these things usually are) and is now resolved. (It was to do with the way that I has modified my categories – you may note that this post is under the “about” category, and that I’ve set up two other categories, “map” and “3d” … hopefully there will more info on these to come soon, but for now you may like to have a peek at http://map.belteshazzar.com )

Happy easter to everyone! I won’t be posting anything for the next 5 days as I’m going away for a family holiday. I hope that everyone has a relaxing easter long weekend.

It’s been a bit of a slow few days in terms of what has been happening in relation to the ancient world, I’ve been trying to refrain from posting heaps of information about Egypt which is prevalent on the net because of it’s popularity and the number of archaeologists working on various digs (although I understand that the season for digging is either over or coming to an end soon). I thought that I’d post a video of a very well known site that is currently off limits to visitors thanks to recent rain and mud slides … thats right, Machu Picchu. I found this really good BBC video of Michael Palin visiting the ancient site. My understanding is that it is not actually a city, but probably more a summer holiday residence for royalty or the like. I hope you enjoy.

Okay, this is getting a little ridiculous! This is my first blog, my first use of wordpress, but not my first website. My background is programming, I have no design talent what so ever, infact, I don’t believe I possess any, even vague, form of artistic capability. I just can’t work out how this site should look, I’ve changed the theme a few times now. I must stress that I did actually setup the site offline on my own laptop to play around with setting up the theme … but since it has gone live I just haven’t liked certain aspect here and there … and I’ve tweaked the style sheets, tweaked the html, tweaked the images  … and then decided to throw out the entire theme and start from scratch. So what you see now is my latest attempt. I want something clean and elegant, yet with a little sexiness thrown in, I reckon that this theme is the one. I actually installed it a while ago but I didn’t like the floral/planty image that is in the background behind the header, it’s kind of grown on me, maybe i’ll remove it. The main thing that I’m thinking now is that the header looks like the Iraqi flag … that is bugging me, but it actually kind of fitting because of my interest in the ancient city of Babylon. Hmmm, sorry for the off topic post, but I just had to vent my frustration!!

BTW, if you ever find something that makes you think wow, or gets you interested in an aspect of ancient history, let me know so that maybe I can post something about it and we can all share that wow moment.

The Iraq flag (it must be the colours and/or contrast between them, maybe I could change the font that I use to Arabic!)

It has been pointed out by a few readers that the posts from this blog are not well formatted when viewed in an RSS reader such as Google Reader. I’m endeavouring to fix this over the next couple of days. Apologies that this has been the case.

I haven’t really found that much interesting in the net today about the ancient world so I thought that I’d post one of my favourite YouTube videos. A stunning (and I mean stunning!) 3D recreation of the city of Babylon.

With belteshazzar.org I am aiming to create something like the video below (although probably without the heavy metal music!). The difference of course is that with the web interface users are able to travel back and forward in time at will and suggest cities/empires/empire borders.

BTW. When there is more data in the belteshazzar.org map I plan to add an animation function.