King Tut will be staying in Toronto for two more weeks. The Art Gallery of Ontario announced today that his departure will be delayed until May 2 due to demand for the exhibition. The shows next stop is Denver the start date of which remains unaffected. Visiting hours for the Toronto show have also been extended to accommodate the crowds. To accommodate weekend visitors, the Gallery has extended the exhibitions hours on Friday and Saturday evenings. Visitors will now be able to purchase tickets for entry at 4:30 pm, 5:00 pm, and 5:30 pm. The King Tut galleries will remain…
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The 5,000-year-old skeleton of a young girl known as Charlie, found buried on a hilltop at Avebury in Wiltshire, will remain on public display at the nearby Alexander Keiller Museum where it has resided for 50 years.A campaign for its reburial by the Council of British Druid Orders (CoBDO) was defeated overwhelmingly by weight of government guidelines and expert and public opinion. The CoBDO argue that its disrespectful for the bones of our ancient ancestors to be stared at or stored in cardboard boxes in dark basements when not the immediate subject of study. In 2006 they selected Charlie who…
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While creating the next instalment of our Ancient World in London video series on ancient astronomy, we came across an odd little artefact called the Ishango Bone. Exotic-sounding, it’s little more than a knobbled baboon’s fibula, but the 25,000-year-old notches along its length are much more than a caveman’s conquests. Discovered in the then-Belgian Congo by Jean Heinzelin de Braucourt in 1960, the bone was first thought to be around 10,000 years old. Yet later tests pushed its date back another 15,000 years, around 20 millennia before the first-ever civilizations sprang from the Middle East. Today it remains on display…
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5,000 years after they’ve helped construct the gigantic stone circle, aliens return to Stonehenge. Early this morning, the tourists standing in line to access the stones had a strange encounter:a little, green almost-human shaped extraterrestrial skipped the queue – the outrage! – and was the first thread on the almost sacred grass around the monument. When asked what took them so long to return, alien scout Verde Raymaker stated:”Well.. errr.. we kinda lost track of the coordinates. Until they unearthed Bluestonehenge, an amplifier doubled the strenght of the signals emitted by Stonehenge, we did not have a clue we we’ve…
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In April 2008 visual artists Khadim Ali and Jayce Salloum travelled from Karachi Pakistan to Kabul Afghanistan, and then into Bamiyan the region famous for its giant Buddha statues that were destroyed by the Taliban in 2001. We spoke to them about their unique experiences of the site. Ali is Hazara, the same background that many of the people who live in Bamiyan are from. His parents were born just to the south of the region. The Taliban treated the Hazara brutally, killing them and burying them in mass graves. Today the Taliban wage an insurgency in the south and…
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A team of archaeologists has unearthed five chamber tombs in the Nemea Valley, just a few hours walk from the ancient city of Mycenae. The tombs date from ca. 1350 1200 BC, roughly the same time that Mycenae was thriving. The people buried in the tombs were likely not from the city itself, but rather from Tsoungiza, an agricultural settlement that lies next to it. The cemetery has been named Ayia Sotira. But despite a wealth of human remains, there have been no discoveries of elite burials. Are the archaeologists yet to discover the prize tombs, or could this be…
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Housed inside Cairo’s Egyptian Museum are many of the artefacts from King Tutankhamun’s tomb (KV62) including the Ritual Figure of Sekhmet, which was discovered in 1922 by the great explorer Howard Carter and his financier Lord Carnarvon. The two men who had a trusting and close bond, as well as a love for Egyptology as explained by his modern day ancestors in a Heritage Key interview (Watch the video about Carter and Carnarvon). Included in the discovery were 34 ritual figures, believed to be of significant importance in the burial ceremony. Egyptology photographer Sandro Vannini has been capturing many of…
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In three weeks the King Tut exhibit Tutankhamun: The Golden King and the Great Pharaohs will be leaving Toronto, heading off to the mountains of Denver. The exhibition has been a huge success, and has prompted a new wave of Egyptomania unseen since King Tut’s 1979 visit to the city. It wouldnt be appropriate for the king to leave without a send-off, and the Art Gallery of Ontario has an interesting one. This Wednesday the gallery will play host to the premiere of Osiris and Isis the Opera. Composed by Colin Mack and directed by Guillermo Silva-Marin, this show will…
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Channel 4’s digital channel More4 has kicked off a juicy seven-week series of documentaries fronted by historian Bettany Hughes. The Ancient World began on Wednesday 24 March with a new film about Alexandria, the city founded by Alexander the Great in 332BC. Hughes travelled to Egypt in search of the city’s ancient origins, delved beneath the streets and explored the sunken ruins that are all that remain of what was once the largest city in the world. Alexandria is one of the world’s greatest ancient cities. It’s a hugely fascinating place and a topic ripe for exploration. For centuries it…
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Each year up to 40,000 pour into Stonehenge for the Summer Solstice, banging drums, singing songs and generally having a wild time (here’s a guide on taking photographs at Stonehenge). But it’s just one of four times each year that the stone circle is open to the public, the other three being Winter Solstice and the Spring and Autumn Equinoxes. While some see it as a chance to get up close and personal to one of the world’s best-known landmarks, or just to have a party, to others Stonehenge is a spiritual centre, an ethereal round table from which to…