This Saturday Athens’ stunning New Acropolis Museum throws open its doors in a $4.1million opening ceremony, following years of heady anticipation. Thousands of foreign dignitaries and heads of state are scheduled to arrive from all over the world – all except Britain. The opening of Greece’s most lavish museum has already thrown open the debate surrounding the 160m-long Parthenon marble friezes, taken by the British Lord Elgin in 1811. Britain has long since argued that Greece does not have a sufficient space in which to display the magnificent marbles – a claim Greek officials argue the New Acropolis Museum shatters.…
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Thanks to being fenced off by English Heritage to much druidic chagrin, Stonehenge is now largely the preserve of sedate tourist visits. Yet four times a year – during both equinoxes and solstices – the great stones are opened to the public in order to celebrate the ties between Britain’s most famous prehistoric monument and the heavens. This Sunday on June 21, the summer solstice welcomes a whole host of druids, hippies and revellers to marvel at the giant megaliths – which many claim to have been an ancient temple to the sun. Last year some 30,000 foolhardy fun-lovers braved…
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Desperate to figure out before the Summer Solstice 2009 what Stonehenge is all about, but you can’t decide which theory – sacrifices, calendar, discotheque, burial site, religious temple, neolithic art – to go with? Don’t panic!Worth1000.com‘s finest Photoshop artists present us with a few alternative – but very plausible – theories about the iconic stone circle’s construction, use, location and present state. Which of the options below do you deem to be most likely? Take the poll, let us know! Option 1: One Giant’s Game is Man’s Neolithic Monument Most scientists claim humans started piling up earth, wood and rocks…
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An archaeological excavation in Jerusalem has revealed an ancient aqueduct that brought water to the Sultan’s Pool – a Herodian Reservoir that gets its name from Suleiman the Magnificent, who restored the site in the 16th century – and to the Temple Mount, supplying clean water to the city’s residents and visiting pilgrims for drinking and purification. Most Jerusalemites identify the Sultan’s Pool as a venue where large cultural events are held; however, from the Roman period until the late Ottoman period it was one of the citys most important water reservoirs. The excavation, directed by Gideon Solimany and Dr.…
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South of Corso Still on the trail of some of the lesser-known Roman sites, at the weekend I found myself wandering around a quiet area south of via del Corso. Testaccio is still very much a people’s neighbourhood. Old men gather on benches in shady piazzas, constantly gabbling away about who-knows-what (hotly debating the government’s latest PR disaster or contesting who won the last game of boules, it’s difficult to tell in their Romanaccio dialect), while children play with the pigeons. There aren’t many tourists to be seen, even though the area holds a couple of attractions. I stop short…
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Chinese archaeologists started the third of a series of excavations at the famous terracotta army site on Saturday, hoping to find more clay figures and unravel some of the mysteries left behind by the “First Emperor“. Archaeologists hope they might find a clay figure that appeared to be “in command” of the huge underground army, said Liu Zhancheng, head of the archeological team under the terracotta museum in Xi’an, capital of Shaanxi Province. Liu and his colleagues are also hoping to ascertain the success of decades of preservation efforts to keep the undiscovered terracotta figures intact and retain their original…
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Think of Stonehenge and it immediately conjures up a number of strong visual images the huge, iconic sarsen stone trilithons, naked hippies at summer solstice, weird druid guys with big hoods and a legendary scene from This Is Spinal Tap. But what did it actually look like in its day? Its widely assumed that Stonehenge once stood as a magnificent ‘complete’ monument, but we need to bear in mind that this cant actually be proved about half of the stones that should be present are missing, and many of the assumed stone sockets have never actually been recorded through excavation.…
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A Flint Michigan ex-construction worker with too much time on his hands has solved a 5,000 year old conundrum by proving how it was possible for Neolithic man to erect with nowt but his bare hands, gravity and a lot of patience Stonehenge. Well, sort of. The appropriately named Wally Wallington, who apparently has a passion for moving heavy items, is presently building his very own replica of the legendary standing stones in his back yard. Hes doing it using a variety of elementary techniques that he believes prove Stonehenge could have been built in far less time than modern…
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Lord Elgin isn’t the only Brit taking the blame for removing some of ancient Greece’s greatest marble treasures – and the Parthenon is far from the only place raided by a zealous Brit in a bid to bring the ancient world to the smoggy streets of London. During an extensive dig carried out between 1857-59, Newton and his merry band of hacks travelled to the Ottoman – now Turkish – peninsula of Datca, where they began excavating the famous merchant city of Knidos – a picturesque Monte Carlo of the ancient Greek world, famous for its wealth, opulence and magnificent…
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The Domus Aurea, also known as the Golden House, was the emperor Nero‘s grand palace, with more than 150 rooms gilded, frescoed and clad in marble. Spanning an area of eight hectares, it was built over the Oppio, Celio, Palatine and Esquiline hills in Rome in 65 AD, following the great fire that destroyed 10 of the city’s 14 neighbourhoods. When Nero killed himself just three years after its construction, the Domus Aurea was opened as a public park. Some of it was destroyed immediately and the giant lake, known as the Stagnis Neronis, was filled so that the foundations…