Lord Byron has been described as “mad, bad, and dangerous to know”, but there is an other reason – besides his regular escapades – why the British may have deemed this famous poet to be ‘wicked’. Byron was a bitter opponent of Lord Elgin’s removal of the Parthenon marbles from Greece, and “reacted with fury” when Elgin’s agent gave him a tour of the Parthenon, during which he saw the missing friezes and metopes. He penned a poem, the Curse of Minerva, to denounce Elgin’s actions. Although Byron never intended to publish this poem, a copy was stolen from him…
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A team of archaeologists using sonar technology to scan the seabed have discovered a graveyard of five pristine ancient Roman shipwrecks off the small Italian island of Ventotene. The trading vessels, dating from the first century BC to the fifth century AD, lie more than 100 meters underwater and are amongst the deepest wrecks discovered in the Mediterranean in recent years. Part of an archipelago situated halfway between Rome and Naples on Italys west coast, Ventotene historically served as a place of shelter during rough weather in the Tyrrhenian Sea. The ships appear to have been heading for safe anchorage,…
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Digital Digging – run by Henry Rothwell – is a resource for anyone with an interest in archaeology, history, cartography and … digital reconstructions! Digital Digging’s ‘Model Room’ is where they store their virtual reconstructions, created especially for you to explore yourself using Google Earth. It holds a selection of the timber and stone circles of Wessex and Somerset, including Durrington Walls South Circle, Woodhenge, Stanton Drew and the Sanctuary at Avebury. You can look at the image page of each reconstruction or download the associated .kmz file and download the model into Google Earth, where you can get inside…
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Stanford photo scientists are out to reinvent digital photography with the introduction of an open-source digital camera, which will give programmers around the world the chance to create software that will teach cameras new tricks.If the technology catches on, camera performance will be no longer be limited by the software that comes pre-installed by the manufacturer. Virtually all the features of the Stanford camera focus, exposure, shutter speed, flash, etc. are at the command of software that can be created by inspired programmers anywhere. The premise of the project is to build a camera that is open source, said computer…
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Ancient Egyptians may be best known for building pyramids, but internationally renowned maritime archaeologist Cheryl Ward wants the world to know that they were pretty good sailors, too. Ward and an international team of archaeologists, shipwrights and sailors recently built a full-scale replica of a 3,800-year-old ship and sailed it on the Red Sea to re-create the voyage Egyptian female pharaoh Hatshepsut took to a place the ancient Egyptians called God’s Land, or Punt. A 2006 discovery of the oldest remains of seafaring ships in the world in manmade caves at Wadi Gawasis, on the edge of the Egyptian desert…
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Every now and then a news story comes to light about the so-called Celtic mummies of China. The story has been making rounds for most of this century, from scientific conferences to ABCNews. Without detracting from the wonder that is the Cherchen mummies, lets set the record straight concerning the Celticness of these men and women” writes Emma Wohlfart on her blog PastPresenters. What arguments does she offer and err.. were we mistaken too? Emma – who introduces herself as a twenty-something writer with an archaeology degree, a laptop and a maxed out library card – agrees that there were…
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Combining religion and science is impossible unless you’re willing to get err… creative? Not quite true: although they might quarrel about the details, archaeologists and the scriptures do quite agree on major historical facts such as the destruction of Jericho, the rule of Herod the Great as well as King David’s. Archaeology can help determine the lifestyle and practices of people living in biblical times and such shed light upon the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament. The biblical archaeology school focusses on doing exactly this, and Professor Don Benjamin in his book ‘Stones and Stories: An Introduction to Archaeology…
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While Heritage Key’s virtual engineers and construction team are still building away on our Nile Villa – a virtual, avatar-accessible reconstruction of an ancient Egyptian villa from the city of Akhetaten, Amarna – Flickr user Higdon took a more physical approach, and resurrected an ancient Egyptian nobleman’s villa using Lego blocks. IMGP6481, originally uploaded by d-higdon. We’ve already encountered Legohenge – a Stonehenge build with Lego blocks, protesting druids included – in our Top 10 Stonehenge Replicas, there is an official ‘Lego Egyptian Mummy’ on sale (1183 in the Adventurers Egypt series) as well as a ‘Treasure Tomb’ (3722), a…
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Browsing through Flickr sometimes feels like a treasure hunt. I’ll never be disappointed – great photographs get uploaded to it daily – but once in a while you find that really Astonishing Photograph, especially since more and organisations started making their archives available to the public through the Commons and private Flickr streams. Today was one of those ‘Wow!’ days, as I discovered the Flickr stream of the Egypt Exploration Society – as the EEShas been working in Egypt since 1882 – filled with marvelous photographs from ‘ancient times’. My 5 favourites from the ‘the early days of Egyptology’: Ahnas…
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Some scholars consider the ancient Harappan pictograms of the Indus Valley in South Asia to be random. Not so, says Rajesh Rao of the University of Washington. He calculated the conditional entropy – a measure of randomness – of the script and found that it is most likely a language. Next, Rao will analyze the texts structure using simple statistical software. The ancient twin cities of the Indus Valley – Harappa and Mohenjo-daro – are part of one of the oldest civilizations known to man. They were huge metropolises holding over 30,000 people each. A series of symbols dating to…