According to the Gospels, Herod was the king when Jesus was born. Though there is no historical evidence for Jesus, a tomb belonging to Herod has been found in West Bank. It contains a sacrophagus believed to contain Herod’s remains. The tomb was found in Herodium, the only site which carries Herod’s name.

An ancient staircase used in a royal funeral procession led an Israeli archaeologist to solve a 2,000-year-old mystery, the location of the tomb of the Roman-anointed “King of the Jews,” Herod the Great.

The pieces of the “large unique” sarcophagus, made of Jerusalem reddish limestone and decorated with rosettes, was discovered on the northeast slope of the mesa, where archaeological excavation began in August 2006.

“Only very few similar sarcophagi are known in the country and can be found only in elaborate tombs,” he said.

It “was broken into hundreds of pieces, no doubt deliberately,” Netzer said, adding that it appeared to have been destroyed between 66 and 72 AD during the first Jewish revolt against the Romans.[Israeli
archaeologists unearth King Herod’s tomb]

According to the legends, Moses was born at a time when the Pharaoh
had ordered all male children to be killed by drowning in the Nile. King Herod
of Jerusalem, who lived in the first century BC, in a similar fashion ordered
all male children to be killed to prevent a threat to his rule. There was a
prophecy that he would lose this throne to the newly born King of Jews and like
Kamsa, he wanted
to preempt it. Historians believe that this incident was copied from the Exodus
to show Jesus as the new Moses and it never happened.

Herod died a natural death, unlike Kamsa and  was buried in Herodium as per
the documents of historian
Josephus
Flavius.  They were not able to find his grave, till this week.

See Also:
Herod’s
Tomb: The Hebrew University Press Conference

The spectacular Indian rock art is not very well known both in India and outside. Though the most famous one is Bhimbetka (near Bhopal), there are other sites like Karabad,Shamla Hill and others. Now a record is being set in India, for the longest chain of ancient rock art.

The 12-km-long site, with most of its petroglyphs or pre-historic rock carvings intact, has been discovered in Mandsaur district of Malwa region, which is also home to Bhimbetka, the UNESCO world heritage site, 45 km south of Bhopal. The Rock Arts Society of India (RASI), which knew about the existence of the site for sometime, has now gone official saying the site in the Vindhyan tableland, a plateau lying north of the central part of the Vindhya range, is indeed the “longest chain of rock arts in the world”.

“Nowhere in the world has anybody come across such an extensive chain of rock arts with little interruption. What’s exciting is most petroglyphs are intact,” internationally acclaimed paleontologist and former RASI secretary G L Badam told TOI.

Earliest carvings in the chain are mostly of animals like rhino, nilgai , bear, panther, elephant, monkey, turtle and crocodile. But there are also pictures of cow, bull, buffalo, pig and horse. Experts have called the discovery of the Bhanpura rock arts as “an important milestone in the history of anthropology”. “The presence of a variety of rituals, processions and fighting scenes goes to prove the continuity of the art and early man’s culmination into community living,” said Badam. [World’s longest rock art chain in Vindhyas]

Mini-continent discovered

A mini-continent that was formerly joined to India has been discovered deep under the southern oceans by the world’s most powerful ice research vessel, said German scientists. They spoke as the ship, the Polarstern, docked on Saturday in its homeport of Bremerhaven, Germany, after a 19-month research voyage to Antarctica.
The ninth phase of the voyage was a study of the undersea Kerguelen Plateau, which was orphaned after the ancient continents separated, with India drifting away from Antarctica. The findings suggest that the plateau, about the size of Germany and France combined, is just the tip of a bigger piece of lost continental crust, the scientists said.
Geophysicists did seismic and magnetic surveys to explore the gap between the little-understood plateau and East Antarctica, the Alfred Wegener Institute of polar research in Bremerhaven said. “This plateau was created by a massive volcanic eruption shortly after India and Antarctica separated about 120 million years ago to form the Indian Ocean,” said geophysicist Karsten Gohl.
“For the first time, we have been able to see how the succession of volcanic deposits at the southern side of the Kerguelen Plateau, which reach right to the Antarctic continent, mostly have continental crust underneath them.
“Our findings show that a continental fragment of a size hitherto never suspected must have existed between India and the Antarctic.”