#History

The Merneptah Stele—Cairo JE 31408—is a gray granite Year-5 victory hymn Flinders Petrie cleared in 1896 at Merneptah’s mortuary temple on the Theban west bank. The closing Canaan strophe names Ashkelon, Gezer, Yanoam, and a people written Ysrỉꜣr—widely read as Israel—under a people-determinative rather than a city-state ring.

A 16-piece Hellenistic silver service tied to the Sicilian site of Morgantina entered the Met. Italian investigations and the broader Met–Italy negotiations (same era as the Euphronios package) produced a 2006 title transfer; the silver stayed on loan in New York until permanent return to Sicily, with ceremonial installation at the Museo Archeologico di Aidone on 3 Dec 2010. Rotation clauses with the Met appear in contemporary reporting. Distinct object class from the Euphron

On the eastern outskirts of Amman, the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B settlement of ʿAin Ghazal produced some of the earliest large-scale human statues known from the Near East. Lime-plaster figures and busts—standing forms about a metre tall, plus striking two-headed busts—were deposited in carefully dug caches in the mid-seventh millennium BCE.

The Great Altar of Pergamon—Attalid marble of the second century BCE, famous for its Gigantomachy frieze—stands today as a reconstructed monument inside Berlin’s Pergamonmuseum, under the custody of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin and the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz.

The Spirit Cave burial (Nevada), long dated ~10,600–10,700 years old, sat in museum/scientific custody while the Fallon Paiute-Shoshone Tribe sought repatriation under NAGPRA. After tribal-permitted ancient DNA work, Moreno-Mayar et al. (*Science*, 2018) showed closer relatedness to present-day Native Americans than to other global populations — undermining “Paleoamerican unrelated race” talking points. Interior Secretary Sally Jewell announced return of remains and funerary

The Mesha Stele—also called the Moabite Stone—is a black basalt monument inscribed in Moabite for King Mesha in the ninth century BCE. It was found at Dhiban (ancient Dibon) in 1868, shattered soon after in a crisis of Ottoman pressure and local resistance, then reconstructed in Paris from recovered fragments and a papier-mâché squeeze.

In 2012 JPMorgan Chase’s Chief Investment Office Synthetic Credit Portfolio produced multi-billion-dollar losses (the “London Whale”). The Senate PSI March 2013 case history and January/September 2013 OCC and Federal Reserve consent orders and civil money penalties document risk-governance and supervisory failure.

In the 1960s, looters emptied tombs near Güre / Uşak (western Turkey). The Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired hundreds of Lydian precious-metal and wall-painting pieces (the so-called Karun / Lydian Hoard) through the New York market. Turkey sued; in September 1993 the Met agreed to return 363 objects, which went to Turkish museums (later centering on Uşak). Early U.S. museum–source-country settlement that predates the better-known Euphronios accord — perfect Pack 3 provenan

Soviet *aktivnyye meropriyatiya* named influence operations beyond classic espionage. U.S. Active Measures Working Group reporting entered presidential paperwork via a 1983 FRUS memorandum on State Special Report No. 110; CIA CSI’s INFEKTION study documents one AIDS-origin disinformation campaign; Mitrokhin/ISC and a 2019 State disinformation report supply custody and continuity without turning the phrase into incense.

Former MI5 officer Peter Wright’s Spycatcher memoirs triggered UK confidence litigation, an Australian High Court refusal to enforce foreign secrecy interests (1988), House of Lords rulings on lifelong duty versus futile continuing injunctions after worldwide publication, and ECHR Article 10 review of injunction timing. Memoir allegations are not judicial findings.

The April 1961 Bay of Pigs landing failed within days. CIA Inspector General Lyman Kirkpatrick’s October 1961 Survey of the Cuban Operation blamed Agency planning and capability; DDP rebutted; FRUS Vol. X and Pfeiffer Official History Vol. V, released via NS Archive FOIA, make that internal fight public.

From 1956 to 1971 the FBI ran COINTELPRO, a set of covert programs that used informants, forged mail, and smear tactics to disrupt domestic political groups—later exposed by stolen Media, Pennsylvania files and the Church Committee.

In April 2009, Niels H. Harrit, Steven E. Jones, and co-authors published “Active Thermitic Material Discovered in Dust from the 9/11 World Trade Center Catastrophe,” reporting red/gray chips they interpret as unreacted nanothermite.

On 11 September 2001 BBC World (and CNN) aired reports that World Trade Center Building 7 had collapsed or was collapsing before the ~17:20 EDT fall. BBC Editors blogs by Richard Porter (2007) deny advance scripts and frame any premature report as error amid wire confusion. NIST’s NCSTAR 1A attributes WTC 7’s collapse to fire-induced progressive collapse, not explosives. The Archive documents the timing claim and both institutional replies under contested/L2 without baptizing “BBC knew demolition” or dismissing the timing as trivial.

Church Committee-era testimony and later memoirs describe extensive CIA relationships with journalists and media organizations; "Operation Mockingbird" as a single named worldwide control program remains partly documentary and partly later reconstruction.

The peaceful, spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism was secretly funded by a Western intelligence agency to finance a guerrilla war.

The Soviets used a hidden, sci-fi style device that required no batteries, wires, or active electricity to spy on the U.S. Ambassador for seven years.

In the span of just a few decades, the entire civilized Western world completely collapsed into a dark age, a sudden apocalypse that historians once thought was an over-dramatized myth.

During Prohibition, the U.S. government was actively poisoning industrial alcohol supplies, effectively killing citizens to deter them from drinking.

Academic elites insisted the ancient cities and wars mentioned in Bronze Age epics were entirely fictional, until a wealthy believer dug them up.

Immediately following World War II, the U.S. government secretly smuggled top Nazi scientists and war criminals into America to give them high-ranking jobs.

Local legends on a remote Indonesian island insisted that tiny, hairy, human-like creatures lived in the caves and stole food. Scientists dismissed it as campfire folklore—until they dug up the bones.

Rumors circulated for decades in the American South that the government was intentionally giving African American men syphilis or withholding treatment from them.

Archaeological and historical evidence supports the existence of giants as described in the Book of Enoch and other ancient texts.