Everything you know is wrong

Thanks to WJBD Radio's site, via Explorator, we hear news of a, uh, counter-intuitive discovery:

An Iuka man who believes the lost Tomb of Alexander the Great may be located in Romine Township in extreme southeast Marion County encouraged the county board's Community Relations Committee Tuesday night to pursue development of the site a tourist attraction.

Harry Hubbard, presented artifacts he said were earlier looted and sold from the underground cave, along with a number of books and maps that he says confirm the location of the cave.  "The county could be rolling in revenues coming in from the outside.  Any country in the world would love to have this repository within their boundaries.  Any state, any municipality.  The county has it within its boundaries and it can be exploited," Hubbard explained.  He believes there are still gold and riches buried in the cave, even after what he calculated was the removal of over five thousand pieces and over six-million dollars in gold by Russell Burrows.  Hubbard believes Burrows was led to the site with the help of local residents in 1982. 

Hubbard outlined how the artifacts were sold through Olney antique dealer Thelma McClain and Museum Curator Jack Ward of Vincennes, Indiana, both of whom have passed  away.  Hubbard had the opportunity to go through a filing cabinet where Ward had kept an extensive record of the sales of items taken from the cave as well as photographs.   He also showed a listing of items he believes were taken from the cave sold at McClain's estate auction.  Hubbard says authenticity of some of the artifacts has been confirmed by a Forensic Lab in Sante Fe, New Mexico.

Hubbard says even with all the information he has not been able to get any state historic officials interested.  As a result, he used his own money to pay for geological equipment that was used to pinpoint the location of the man made cave.    He believes he has found the location, but feels the opening was sealed by Burrows or the entrance collapsed on its own.  Hubbard says the current property owner is from Belleville and has not expressed interest in helping with the investigation.

Hubbard feels the county can act because of the historical significance as well as reports of skeletal remains in the cave.  "There is eminent domain.  There was a crime committed.  If I had the second Burrows book, which my burned up, and even in the red book he talks about finding skeletons.  Well, that's a crime.  You can rope the whole thing off with police tape for that matter and say 'okay, we want to get to the bottom of this crime'.  Our thing is if someone went to Burrows that had a badge and said 'hey you're coming with me, show us where these things came from'." Hubbard suggested.  He says Burrows has never been cooperative in showing the location of the cave.   Burroughs has since moved to Colorado....

More at the site.

This must have been the most interesting meeting those county councillors had experienced in a long time.  And the reporter, too.

Re-creating a lost art on Facebook

A long time ago, not quite so far back as Plato's time, but before Google, there was a particular kind of conversation that intelligent people would enter into. They would be sitting around drinking coffee or beer, at a party or at work, and stumble onto some interesting subject. Someone would ask a question and no one would know the answer. Since the people involved were intelligent and well-informed, they would attempt usually in a good-natured way, to figure it out.

I have been half jokingly saying for months now that this kind of conversation is obsolete. The answer to all of these interesting and obscure questions seems to be "look it up!" ( Meaning on the Internet, probably using Google.) At least for people temporarily isolated from the net, an art was dead or maybe just dying.

I discovered over the last week that I was too pessimistic. Subject of some significance came up in a post to Facebook: have the Afghans beaten every army of invasion which ever tried to take the country? Including Alexander the Great?

This precis of Afghan history has become a great cliché for obvious reasons, and I am not sure I believe it. I drew the line at Alexander. The person who raised the issue this time is an intelligent military historian so I engaged in the conversation. And so did several other people. It was really neat. And the issue remains unresolved. As so often in the old days.

What this proves to me is that there is always room for intelligent conversation that goes beyond the mechanics of "looking it up." I you really want to discuss the fortunes of empires in what is now Afghanistan, you are going to need a good library and a convincing argument. Wikipedia is not good enough.

Image: an ancient Greek symposium.