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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Attribution: Mollow2 Anuradhapura Sri Lanka Key Dates Singhalese capital by 380 BC Abandoned after invasion in 993 AD The Sacred City of Anuradhapura was established around a cutting from the “tree of enlightenment” and was the Singhalese capital by 380 BC. At its heart is the Sacred Bo tree which is said to date back to 245 BC. It was a flourishing religious capital for 1300 years until it was abandoned in 993. Anuradhapura is said to be the capital of the Rakshasa King Ravana in the Hindue epic Ramayana. The ruins of Anuradhapura consist of bell-shaped dagobas, monastic buildings and pokunas…
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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…
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, Director General of the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA), recently attended ceremonies marking the reopening, after major restoration work, of a number of Islamic monuments in Cairo. It follows his appearance at similar ceremonies recently marking the completion of a number of big-budget developments in and around the area of Luxor and the Valley of the Kings. Islamic Monuments The restored Islamic monuments all in the Al-Darb Al-Ahmar area of Cairo include The Al-Imam mosque, the Al-Layth mosque, the Al-Set Meska mosque, the Ali Labib house and the well zone of Youssef, at the Salah El-Din Citadel. The…
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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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We know lots about the Great Pyramid of Giza – it’s age (about 4,569 years), who it was built for (the Fourth Dynasty Egyptian King Khufu), who designed it (Khufu’s brother, the architect Hemienu) and even who rolled up their sleeves and did the work (tens of thousands of skilled labourers from across the kingdom, as opposed to slaves as was once believed). But ask a room full of experts how it was built, and you can expect a whole lot of head-scratching and beard-stroking, followed by heated argument and possibly some light fisticuffs. The main bone of contention is:…