Should you start panicking when your colleague donates you the mummies that their kids are too grown-up for to play with? Of course not! (or so I kid myself.) Thanks to Meral I now am the proud owner of my first ever mummy, which we named ‘MacMummy’ because of his provenance (and utter failure to decipher the hieroglyphs on his coffin). I managed to capture him in this shot early this morning, when MacMummy was just waking up to the smell of freshly made coffee in a setting that strangely resembles KV62, albeit it a little out of scale (The…
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I believe I’ve found the ideal solution to ‘what music will we play in the office’. As we never seem to be able to reach agreement on the channel (really? Brit pop? Sounds from outer-space?), for tomorrow, I suggest we tune in on ‘Anglo-Saxon Aloud’, a website by Michael Drout that contains daily* readings of the entire Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records – which includes all poems written in Old English. Professor Michael DCDrout (an American teaching English at Wheaton College, blogs at Wormtalk and Slugspeak, and *has a dog named Lancelot that likes lfric a lot – or not at all)…
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“What’s in a name?” opined a portly Englishman recently, whose entire family had been handed ASBOs for verbally abusing their neighbours. This sort of stoic ignorance blights the English, much like bad hair or David Cameron, and it’s been going on for centuries. Boudicca was a Celtic warrior queen, a bloodthirsty battle-axe who massacred her way through Colchester, London and St Albans in 60AD (see a video on Roman Colchester here). By the time she’d been defeated at the mysterious Battle of Watling Street a year later, all three cities lay in tatters, and 80,000 were dead. Not a forgettable…
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Good news for all fans of ‘light’ historical films such as The Mummy, Return of the Mummy and 10,000 BC. Even greater news for fans of the – sublime – comic (although BD, ‘bande dessine’ is more correct) series by Tardi. ‘Les Aventures Extraordinaires d’Adle Blanc-Sec‘ has been made into an adventure movie by Luc Besson (Taxi, Kamikaze, Leon, The Fifth Element), which will star lots of Mummies, at least one Pterodactyl and enough demon worshippers and mad scientists to keep the film going. Indiana Jones, beware emancipation! 😉 Set in 1912, before the Great War, the adventure starts when…
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In these times, who would make an animated movie that was intentionally two-dimensional? Deflated and only minorly shaded, but visually ravishing. Flat, but filled with ancient swirls and Celtic knots. And who would have thought such a film would become a major hit? ‘The Secret of Kells’, a spirited retelling of the provenance of one of Irelands most cherished artefact, the Book of Kells, was a success in Irish, French and Belgian cinemas alike, got an Oscar nomination for Best Animated Feature Film and is now well on its way to conquering the United States of America. It is also…
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In 1908, more than a decade before the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb, American retired lawyer and archaeologist Theodore Davis made a remarkable discovery. While excavating in the Valley of the Kings in Egypt, he unearthed about a dozen large storage jars. Their contents included broken pottery, bags of natron, bags of sawdust, floral collars, and pieces of linen with markings from years 6 and 8 during the reign of a then little-known pharaoh named Tutankhamun. The significance of the find was not immediately understood, and the objects entered the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art as a mystery. It…
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The Age of Conquest, an exhibition just opened in the Capitoline Museums, explores the question: how did Rome’s conquest of Greece (146 BC) influence Roman art? The answer is of course that the influence was huge: Roman copies of canonic Greek masterpieces ensued, there were aesthetic influences in the decoration of sanctuaries and funerary monuments, while every-day domestic objects mimicked Greek styles too. That’s not to say that Roman art was particularly inferior to its Greek counterpart in the second century BC. Roman art at that time owed much to the sophisticated and accomplished artworks of the Etruscans (such as…
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In celebration of our chilly northern climate, the Ontario Archaeological Society will be holding their annual symposium in Killarney Ontario from Sept 24-26, a town on the northern tip of Lake Superior. The symposium is called “Shibaonaning – the place of the clear passage.” It willfocus on the archaeology of the Canadian Shield. Its a vast, rocky, forested area of Canada that covers Northern Ontario, Quebec, Manitoba and parts of the arctic. At eight million square kilometres, its nearly double the size of the entire European Union. Although it’s chalk full of mines, the rocky terrain makes it difficult to…
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We set the task of nominating London’s most influential invaders and talking-up the Big Smoke’s most important ancient sites in the first two rounds of our Ancient World in London Bloggers Challenge, and got some fantastic responses from the blogosphere. In round three we’re posing a new question, to again be answered in blog form in competition for prizes both real and virtual. It’s sure to prove contentious: Should the British Museum return the Rosetta Stone to Egypt? This Ptolemaic era Egyptian stele – created in 196 BC and discovered by the French in 1799 at Rosetta in Egypt –…
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Photographers – thank you for getting your cameras out in support of our photography competition ‘Ancient Spotted Photo Contest‘. There were a lot of really great photos submitted, and it has been incredibly hard to choose a winner. But after a lot of consideration we have decided on the winner of the first photo competition of the Ancient World in London series of quests. We are delighted to announce that the winner of Ancient World Spotted is David Merrigan, for his photo of London’s Sphinx. There are actually two of these Sphinxes, set either side of Cleopatra’s Needle in Westminster,…