Chances are you have never heard of Khirbet ez-Zeiraqoun, also known as Khirbet ez-Zeraqon. Its a 25 hectare fortified town in Northern Jordan that was occupied during a period known as the Early Bronze III (2700 BC -2300 BC). This time period was a high water mark for many great civilizations. The royal burials at Ur, the construction of the Pyramids at Giza and the rise of the twin cities of Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa in the Indus Valley all these things happened in this narrow stretch of time. Khirbet ez-Zeiraqoun was excavated in the 1980s and 90s, and the analysis…
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Two powerful Bronze Age figures laid to rest with special reverence; two large ritual complexes in places of kingly significance; each in a bend of a river valley; two burials with remarkably well-preserved contents; and two impressive daggers. The quartz-handled dagger of King Tutankhamun is part of probably the most famous treasure hoard excavated from the dry, dusty desert of Egypt by Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon 87 years ago; the dagger excavated by teams from Glasgow and Aberdeen Universities in Forteviot in August 2009 is still being conserved after being freshly lifted from a cist burial in the rich…
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A huge granite block, believed to be part of a temple belonging to Egyptian queen Cleopatra, has been lifted from the sea at Alexandria. The nine-tonne stone, quarried in Aswan some 700 miles south of the city, is expected to be transported to a new museum celebrating the sunken city. The block is thought to have been the pillar of a temple to Isis at Cleopatra’s palace. Alexandria became a centre of commerce and education during antiquity, but was razed by a 4th century AD earthquake. The stone is one of a series of underwater discoveries made by the Greek…
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“The whole discovery of Tutankhamun needed both ingredients to make it work. It wasn’t all Howard Carter, certainly not only Carnarvon. But it needed the two of them.” George Herbert, 8th Earl of Carnarvon, ebbs deeper into the bond which drove two of archaeology’s greatest characters to the biggest discovery of all time. But how did the two men, so different in background and expertise, even forge such a strong relationship? Lord Carnarvon – or to give him his full tongue-twisting title, George Edward Stanhope Molyneux Herbert, 5th Earl of Carnarvon – was an aristocratic explorer and adventurer of the…
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One of the most intriguing and mysterious ancient sites in Britain is Stonehenge, which continues to this day to captivate and fascinate the public. Standing in solitude in the hills of Wiltshire and pre-dating the pyramids of Egypt, the ‘henge‘ itself was constructed first. A henge is formed in the shape of a circular ditch and bank with a single entrance in the north-east section, but millennia of erosion and weathering means that tourists today may not notice it. However, thanks to GeoEye who have kindly provided Heritage Key with a high resolution map of the Stonehenge area, we can…
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I dropped my phone last week and it stopped working. As the daughter, sister, and wife of engineers, I generally regard most broken things as a challenge and I am quite often able to fix them, so I gathered tiny screwdrivers and a good light source and prised the handset open. Inside was a world mostly unknown to me, of miniature circuit boards, teeny candy-striped transistors, and delicate little welds. I identified the problem, but it was beyond repair, so I went out and bought another phone with a renewed respect for the intricacies inside the things we use every…
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In the age of video games, board games might not be the popular pastime they once were. But they have a venerable history. Board games originate thousands of years ago as a spare-time preoccupation of the upper-castes of civilizations from South America to China, Egypt and northern Europe. Each ancient civilization had their own board game of choice. In the Egyptians case it was senet, a complex contest of chance that dating from as long ago as 3500 BC represents the oldest board game in history. The most famous senet board yet discovered comes from the tomb of the legendary…
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An illegal Roma gypsy camp might be one of the last places you’d expect to find yourself on an expedition in search of an ancient Roman bridge. But this is what happened to Professor Hans Bjur and his colleagues as they were researching their project on the historical and modern context of one of Rome’s oldest roads. As they made their way through a more neglected corner of Rome’s Ponte Mammolo suburb, they followed the directions to where the bridge should have stood, only to find themselves in the midst of a temporary settlement. While the Swedish researchers were the…
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Three ritual beds were found inside the Tomb of King Tutankhamun (KV62), made up of four pieces of gilded wood and bound together with hooks and staples. Assembly instructions were painted on the beds in black paint, with each bed representing a different animal deity. The ritual beds are on display at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, where Dr JaniceKamrin explains the purpose and history behind them in a video for Heritage Key (You can watch that video by clicking here). Each bed was photographed by the renown Egyptology photographer Sandro Vannini, of which the images are brought to the…
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Fancy pitting your powers of perception against some of historys masters of deception? Then heres your chance. Art and Illusions: Masterpieces of Trompe l’il from Antiquity to the Present Day, the first major exhibition on visual illusion to be held in Italy, is on at Florences Palazzo Strozzi until January 26. Visual illusion has been used in art for thousands of years to trick and deceive us. This exhibition is designed to chart this fascinating story of trompe lil, or optical deception; the story of the tug-of-war between reality and its simulation. The show places optical illusion not only in…