Ancient Masks Go On Exhibition In Jerusalem

The oldest mildstone masks have discovered and have displayed at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.These stone masks have been discovered in near the Jerusalem's Judean desert and hills.

The 9,000-year-old limestone masks think to be the world's oldest mildstone masks.They have been made to look like the spirits of dead ancestors and it is possible that they were used in religious or traditionals ceremonies.The masks have round gaps displays of noses, eyes and teeth.

The 9,000 year old masks have found near Jerusalem and offer a rare glimpse of some of civilisation's first communal rituals.They were found in the range of about 20-mile in Jerusalem where the Judean hills meet the Judean desert.Each mask stone weights about one or two kg.

James Snyder, said all of the masks were discovered near Jerusalem."It's quite exciting," said James Snyder, director of the Israel Museum, which is hosting the seven-month exhibit."When you go back to objects that are this old, that are so much before the theology that becomes Judaism, Christianity and then Islam, to feel that there is a kind of a connection, that this is all part of a continuous story, is something that is pretty thrilling."

"The masks dated back to the creators of civilisation",Debby Hershman said, the exhibition's curator.Hershman also said that the people who created the masks were the creators of civilization and were first farmers."

It took 10 years of carbon-14 testing for experts to decide origin of the collection, the Associated Press news agency reports.

The Face to Face exhibition opens for public from March 11 to September 13 at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.

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Black Hole of Calcutta:-

The "Black Hole of Calcutta" was a tiny prison cell in Fort William, in the Indian city of Calcutta.According to John Zephaniah Holwell of the British East India Company, on June 20, 1756, the Nawab of Bengal imprisoned 146 British captives inside the airless room overnight. When the chamber was opened the next morning, only 23 men (including Holwell) were still alive.

The dimensions of the room is (24 feet x 18 feet), it would not have been possible to cram more than about 65 prisoners into the space.

According to a calculation by Professor Brijen Gupta in the 1950s, the total of prisoners shut in the black hole was probably sixty-four, of whom twenty-one came out alive. He also produced evidence that Siraj-ud-daula did not order the prisoners to be shut in the black hole and knew nothing about it until afterwards.

Vengeance was swift. Robert Clive marched on Calcutta and set siege to Fort William, which was also bombarded by an accompanying fleet of warships under Admiral Charles Watson. The fort fell to the British in January 1757 and in February with an army of a mere 3,000 men, Clive routed Siraj’s army of perhaps 50,000 with their cannon and war-elephants at Plassey.Siraj fled to Murshidabad, where he was killed by his own people and his body thrown into the river.

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