Earlier this month, beer-drinkers from around the world convened at Oktoberfest to celebrate their favourite bevvy. Associated with fights and bloated bellies, beer gets a pretty bad press these years. But the brew has been drunk for millennia, and it seems that the ancients had some surprisingly positive benefits for the drink. The invention of beer is impossible to attribute to either a period or country. The easy fermentation process means that civilisations around the world probably started producing beer independently around the same time. Early evidences of beer existence have been found in Iran and Iraq and date back…
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The life of Heinrich Schliemann is as legendary as the city he claimed to have discovered. A quintessential 19th century adventurer and amateur archaeologist, his obsession for Troy took him around the world and to Turkey and Greece. Fascinated by Homers epic narration, Schliemann stopped at nothing to discover the historical sites named by the poet. The veracity of his findings is however often questioned. Heinrich Schliemann: fanatic obsessed by his boyhood dreams or successful antiquarian? A Boyhood Dream Born in 1822 to a poor Protestant minister father and an unpublished literary critic mother who died when he was nine,…
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The worlds of cosmetics and archaeology have recently collided over two unexpected discoveries. Over the course of the past week, researchers have discovered that Neanderthals used make-up and that Cleopatra‘s face paint was good for her eyes. Which fact is most surprising? The first thing that springs to mind when thinking about Neanderthal man is definitely not refinement. Its more beard, dirt, animal skins, grunts and women carried by their hair. Like so many clichs depicted in classroom textbooks and carried on by Hollywood, this idea is probably far from the truth. Thanks to scientific research undertaken in Murcia, in…
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The Neues Museum (New Museum), the latest museum to benefit from the renovation programme on the Museumsinsel, first opened in Berlin in 1850. Built to display a collection of Egyptian artefacts as well as ethnographic, prehistoric and early historic collections, it was at the time the solution to a lack of storage space in the Altes Museum (Old Museum). Wartime damage and economic shortage kept the building shut for decades, until its long-awaited re-opening tomorrow. Frederick William IV ordered the construction of the museum in 1841. Like the other four museums on the Island, it is a model of neoclassicism…