A pioneering Scots team could be the answers to saving some of the world’s greatest historical monuments. The six-strong group from Historic Scotland and the Glasgow School of Art are making waves across the world, as they use cutting-edge laser technology to map world heritage sites across the globe. First up on the team’s list will be Mount Rushmore, in South Dakota, USA. And the group are confident they can use their American-made CyArk 500 scanner to model the carved faces of former presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln to within 3mm. The subsequent models could…
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Travel writer and photographer Ethel Davies knows the Roman coast of North Africa better than most (see her top 10 sites here). We asked her to give us an insight into how her favourite image came about. “As a professional travel photographer, I accrued a great number of images over the course of the two years of intensive work and study for North Africa: The Roman Coast (not to mention the various trips I took before my research began),” says Ethel. “Its virtually impossible to choose a favourite, as each image represents a place, an experience and even a feeling.…
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An alien necklace in King Tut‘s tomb? Too right, and it’s no myth or quackery. A pectoral found during Howard Carter‘s 1922 expedition to the boy-king’s funerary masterpiece is thought to contain the remnants of a meteor impact in the desert, thousands of years before the first stones were laid in Saqqara. The amazing story began 77 years after Carter’s discovery, when Italian geologist noticed something odd about a yellow-green scarab in the pectoral’s centre. Subsequent tests proved the lump of glass was older than any Egyptian civilization – a lot older, in fact. After much research, experts traced the…
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The Antikythera Mechanism is one of the most debated – execpt perhaps the Elgin Marbles – Greek artefacts. Where the frieze of the Parthenon leaves us with mainly one single question, ‘Who does it belong to?’, this no-doubt ingenious ancient device raises a myriad questions like, ‘When and by whom was it created?’; What purpose did it serve?’; ‘How did it look in its entirety?’ and, ‘What was it doing on board of the Antikythera Wreck?’ Scholars around the world are working hard to resolve these issues, and every year new answers surface. One thing all the scholars agree on,…
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Lost for moves? Tired of busting out the same old body popping/moonwalk/drunk-uncle-at-a-wedding? You could take your dancing lines from Jacko, Wade Robson or even Michael Flatley (if you don’t mind being alone for the rest of your life). But how about Tutankhamun? The boy-king may be making waves in stateside museums right now, but he’s been influencing the best underground dancers on both sides of the Atlantic for over twenty years with the ‘Tut’ – and I don’t mean Steve Martin’s Saturday Night Live performance. Amateurs be warned: it may take a bit more practice than karaoke night down the…
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Like the ancient world? Like early civilization? Like pyramids? I’m guessing if you’re reading this you probably do, so you might enjoy a new documentary series airing on the Discovery Channel next Monday evening. Out of Egypt examines the links between ancient cultures, our modern fascination with them, and the myths and legends which have endured thousands of years. Fronted by glamorous Egyptologist Dr Kara Cooney, the first episode, ‘Relics’, sees the team travelling to Mexico, Vietnam and Sri Lanka to ask just how powerful a part relics have played in the world’s most famous cultures. Dr Cooney explores the…
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An amateur enthusiast has reignited Scotland’s rock art heritage this week, by discovering more than 90 ancient cup marks on a rock in Perthshire. The stunning find was made by George Currie at Ben Lawers, near Loch Tay. Similar discoveries have been made in the area, but Mr Currie’s is the first containing so many marks. Some cups still show the signs of individual blows by their maker’s tools, while others are encircled by a ring. The purpose of the marks remains a mystery, though Derek Alexander, an archaeologist for the National Trust for Scotland, is convinced the area is…
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He’s been legless for millennia – in fact he’s been missing everything from the neck down. But this week saw an ancient Akkadian statue’s head, dating from between the 21st and 23rd centuries BC, united with a replica of his body in Iraq’s Baghdad Museum (also known as the National Museum of Iraq). The head, discovered in the ruins of the ancient city of Ashur in 1982, has been conspicuously bodiless – until Berlin’s Pergamon Museum agreed to send its own replica body, which was itself found in 1905. The deal also sees a copy of the head move in…
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If you were planning on including a bit of Roman heritage in your Summer travel plans, then it’s worth bearing in mind that you don’t have to make the trip all the way to Rome to see something as impressive as the Colosseum. South eastern France was annexed by the Romans as early as 125 BC and the region is rich with a wide variety of monuments dating from the empire that brought it aqueducts, villas, wine and roads more than 2,000 years ago. Here is a look at some of the main Roman heritage sites to discover in the…
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You know something’s in vogue when it pops up on The Onion, the world’s best-known satirical newspaper. And so it was this week that immortality-seeking First Emperor of China Qin Shi Huang made the grade following the ‘discovery’ beneath Disney World in Orlando of a “legion of terra-cotta Mouseketeers”. According to the spoof article which was kindly sent to us by one of our Heritage Experts, Ethel Davies a Disney World maintenance crew discovered more than 8,000 ‘Mouseketeers’ underneath Cinderella Castle. The statues were thought to date back to 300BC. It was likely constructed during the Pre-Eisnerian period, one of…