Rebecca T's blog

It seems like I’m never going to get to build the Pyramids in my ancient Roman settlement – never mind the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. I’ve spent all my money on lemon trees and fountains and now my people are deliriously happy, but not generating the bucks or resources I need to expand my empire. It’s a situation that a lot of social gamers might find themselves in today, as social gaming gurus Playfish launch their latest game on Facebook – My Empire.

My Empire is a city building sim, where the player gets to build a Roman town, unlocking new building types as the game progresses, and (this is the social network part) inviting friends to help them build monuments and other major structures.

114 Terracotta Warriors, and several artefacts, have been discovered in the mausoleum of China’s first emperor, Qin Shi Huang. The warriors were discovered in No 1 pit, the largest pit, and retained some of the richly-coloured paint that all of the warriors would have displayed originally. They also showed signs of man-made fire damage, prompting speculation about who may have harmed the warriors.

In an article by China Daily News, Xu Weihong, head of the excavation team, said:  "The total area of the excavation was some 200 sq m and we were pleasantly surprised to find rich colors on Terracotta Warriors."

It’s been a tense few days on the Heritage Key fantasy election trail. Since the world’s ancient leaders first went to the polls on Saturday, voters have turned out in typical numbers to exercise their right to vote. Early indications show that this year’s election is a two-horse race: firmly in the lead is Alexander the Great, with Rome’s Augustus closing in as a close second.

Tomorrow, a happy collection of hippies, druids and general revellers will climb up Calton Hill in Edinburgh to celebrate the ancient festival of Beltane. In my experience, the festival is a positive, celebratory, and quite spectacular event with near-naked hippies sporting all-over body paint and leaves and dancing around fires, drinking warm cans of cider. There are drums – hundreds of them, practically making the whole hilltop vibrate – and hypnotic chanting. Revellers express their joy and drunkenness much in the same way as they do at Hogmanay – by dancing around on the spot outdoors, and kissing passing strangers. It’s a good party!

I went to see How to Tame Your Dragon at the weekend - a beautiful and delightful film by Dreamworks Animation about Hiccup, a distinctly un-Viking-like young boy from a village of blood-thirsty Vikings. Hiccup discovers that creatures who are different from them are not necessarily the enemy – a discovery that his marauding fellow Vikings are unlikely to believe easily. Differentiating ‘foreign’ from ‘invading’ is a difficult concept that mankind has long struggled to grasp. But do we really still live in an era where a social message like this is necessary - are we still as socially and politically sophisticated as animated Vikings?

Plans to close the University of Glasgow’s Centre for Battlefield Archaeology as part of funding cuts have been met with strong criticism from prestigious quarters since coming to light earlier this month.  The centre, part of Guard and the Department of Archaeology, is an arm of the university which offers archaeological services to external organisations. Its biggest claim to fame is its work supporting Channel 4’s Time Team programme. The Director of the Centre for Battlefield Archaeology, Dr Tony Pollard, has appeared on some of the Time Team programmes, including excavation of a WWII bunker in Ypres, Belgium, and even co-presented Two Men in a Trench - a BBC series on battlefield archaeology. But can the centre's media credentials help save it from closure?

It seems that Michael Jackson wasn’t the only person to put himself through extensive cosmetic surgery in order to make himself look like a bust of an ancient Egyptian. Nileen Namita, a 49-year-old artist from Brighton, has undergone no less than 51 cosmetic operations, spending over £200,000 pounds in the process, in order to sculpt herself into the living image of Queen Nefertiti.

A few weeks ago, I speculated that Jeff Koons' statue Michael Jackson & Bubbles was inspired by Tutankhamun. With his deathmask-like face and opulent gilding, Koons' Michael seemed eerily reminiscent of the boy king. One extremely expensive burial featuring in-your-face-Tut'esque golden coffin later, the parallels between the two icons started adding up. Now, an ancient Egyptian statue in Chicago's Field Museum has been seen to show a shocking similarity to the face of the late Michael Jackson.

An article on Spiegel Online on Sunday made a shocking claim – the bust of Hatshepsut, in Berlin Museum, may in fact be a fake. IOL reports:

The bust in brown granite of female Pharaoh Hatshepsut, who ruled Egypt for 22 years, is one of the draws at the German capital's Egyptian Museum and is only outshone by the limestone bust of exquisite Queen Nefertiti.

Scientists at the Technical University of Berlin have discovered the Hatshepsut stone is rich in the minerals magnesite and siderite.

No other bust from the Nile region is made of such rock, suggesting that the 16.5cm figure might be a modern fake.