Esoteric Source

Everyone curses the tax man, but Romanian witches angry about having to pay up for the first time are planning to use cat excrement and dead dogs to cast spells on the president and government.

Also among Romania’s newest taxpayers are fortune tellers — but they probably should have seen it coming.

Superstitions are no laughing matter in Romania — the land of the medieval ruler who inspired the “Dracula” tale — and have been part of its culture for centuries. President Traian Basescu and his aides have been known to wear purple on certain days, supposedly to ward off evil.

An ancient Egyptian temple of Ptah, located in the village of Meet Rahina near Memphis, just south of Cairo, now sits in stinking effluent.

The temple, built during the reign of Ramesses II (1279 BC - 1213 BC) and once a major tourist attraction, now serves as a home for stray dogs, reports Almasry Alyoum.

200 genuine objects from the ancient Egyptian era to modern times held in a bank vault for decades were handed over to the Supreme Council of Antiquities.

 Early this week, in a scene which could have been taken from The Da Vinci Code, the Ahly National Bank of Egypt (ANBE) handed over to the Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA) 200 artefacts that had been deposited there since early in the 20th century.

As another disaster strikes the ancient city, Mary Beard argues that such sites are far too costly for any one country to maintain.

The latest disaster to hit Pompeii was not a particularly serious one by the standards of that unfortunate city – battered by an earthquake in AD 62, destroyed by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 and hammered by Allied bombing in 1943 (there were rumours that the enemy was camped out there). Last Saturday, a small building known as the House of the Gladiators on Pompeii’s main street collapsed. One of a series of recent collapses, it was followed by the usual lamentations from the world’s press – Pompeii is falling down thanks to the neglect or corruption of the Italian authorities; the very house where the town’s gladiators once passed their short lives is no more.

Human skulls or ancients mummies are being removed from British museums for fear of insulting minority religious groups, academics have warned.