Come to Xian, and youll no doubt head straight to see the citys famous Terracotta Warriors exhibit, or the mausoleum of Chinas first emperor, Qin Shi Huang. You might make the trip out to the Big Wild Goose Pagoda or Maoling Mausoleum, and check out a couple of the museums, such as the Shaanxi History Museum, Xi’an Banpo Museum and the Xian Museum. But theres a lot more to Xian than these, admittedly stunning, sites. The ancient capital also has a stash of hidden treasures. Heres a handful of my favourites. Tomb of the Second Emperor Whether or not this…
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Work is ongoing in China on a major project to restore Daming Palace – the 1,100 year-old ruling centre of the Tang Dynasty in modern Xi’an (formerly the Tang capital, Chang’an) – and around it build an expansive National Relics Park. The project was officially launched in October of last year, and is hoped to be completed by October 2010. Daming Palace was established in 634 AD, in the eight year of the reign of Emperor Taizong. It was the largest of three major palaces in Chang’an, and the political hub of the empire for 240 years, until the Tang…
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Work is ongoing in China on a major project to restore Daming Palace the 1,100 year-old ruling centre of the Tang Dynasty in modern Xian (formerly the Tang capital, Changan) and around it build an expansive National Relics Park. The project was officially launched in October of last year, and is hoped to be completed by October 2010. Daming Palace was established in 634 AD, in the eight year of the reign of Emperor Taizong. It was the largest of three major palaces in Changan, and the political hub of the empire for 240 years, until the Tang moved their…
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BRITISH WRITER DISCOVERS THE PHARAOHS LOST UNDERGROUND Wednesday, 16 September 2009 A British writer has staked claim to finally finding the lost underground of the Pharaohs which has been rumoured to exist since the construction of the Great Pyramid nearly 5,000 years ago, creating a stir that is set to rock the Egyptological world. Armed only with the forgotten memoirs of a nineteenth century British engineer, history and science writer Andre Coolings, tracked down the entrance to this forgotten tunnel system and was the first to explore it in modern times. Is it possible that Coolings has beaten the Egyptologists…
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Less than 24 hours is all your need to build Rome these days: a team of developers from the University of Washington and Cornell University has come up with an algorithm that can aggregate thousands of tourist photos from social network photo-sharing websites and create a three-dimensional virtual city model from them. Highly popular tourist sites such as Rome work well currently there are more than two million photos of Rome on Flickr. The Washington University team has also used its technology to recreate the cities of Venice and Dubrovnik. But how does the technology work? And how can the…
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Named after the Greek goddess of love and fertility, Aphrodisias was named in 2BC century, and the Temple of Aphrodite was built in the 1st Century AD. Captured in this photograph by balavenise, we can see the beauty in the relic of it’s glowing stone against the dusk purple sky. In Roman times, Aphrodisias flourished thanks to the benefit of investment in the area, and a town was built with the temple as a focal point. The town became famous for its marble crafting skills (partly due to the copious amounts of marble found in the area), and sculptures produced…
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New research suggests some of Egypt’s most famous ancient temples charted the heavens in much the same way as Stonehenge, with many built to align with various stars as well as the sun and moon. One of the country’s most recognisable landmarks, Luxor‘s Karnak Temple, was constructed so that New Year coincided with the midwinter sun hitting its central sanctuary. An article in New Scientist reports that Many of the temples, some dating back as far as 3,000 years, would have been precisely aligned so that their people could set agricultural, political and religious calendars by them. Experts have long…
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The Heritage Key office may be bristling with excitement at the prospect of our own Virtual Stonehenge – the progress of which you can see right here each week.. errr.. starting next week. But the anticipation has clearly proved too much for this online architect, who thought he’d have a go at the megalithic masterpiece himself. Andreas Trunk’s Stonehenge reconstruction is the first in a series exploring circular buildings of the ancient world, the next being Delphi’s famous Marmaria, and we reckon this is a pretty good first shot. Taking the stones as they are today, Trunk attempts to explain…
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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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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…