While the fate of Afghanistan as a military project for the United States continues to hang in the balance today, as President Barack Obama mulls whether to deploy 40,000 more troops in this “graveyard of empires,” there was a rare piece of good news from Kabul: Hundreds of looted artefacts are back where they belong, in the National Museum, Kabul. You may remember that Afghanistan has managed to distinguish itself by managing to hold onto a huge portion of its cultural and artistic heritage in the form of artefacts dating back as far as 2,000 BC. It’s a wonderful tale…
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Egypt has decided to suspend all archaeological cooperation with the Louvre, after the French museum refused to return fragments of a Theban Tomb. The news was confirmed today by Dr. Zahi Hawass, head of Egypt’s antiquities department. The artefacts were excavated in a tomb near Luxor, and according to Dr. Hawass were stolen by the French. This decision endangers planned conferences at the Louvre, as well as the French team’s current excavations at Saqqara, the ‘city of the dead’. A boycott of the Louvre‘s Egyptological activities also ensures no archeological expeditions sponsored by the French museum could go ahead in…
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It was announced last week that the hotly disputed Lewis Chessmen are to be reunited for the first time in 150 years, when a number of the bulk of pieces held by the British Museum in London arrive for a tour of Scotland, the country where they were discovered, throughout 2010 and 2011. They aren’t the only historical artefacts of Scottish origin that the Scots stake a fierce claim to, or have had to fight to get back. Calls for repatriation have been made over all from the Safe Conduct letter – written by the King of France and taken…
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Kashgar has for centuries been a destination for visitors from all over the world. Originally, it was a pivotal point on the ancient Silk Road trading routes, standing at the crossroads of the route linking Kyrgyzstan to Islamabad in Pakistan, and the one heading to modern-day Istanbul and Damascus from the larger Chinese cities to the east. Today, a team from the Asia Institute at Australia’s Monash University, working with Chinas Xinjiang Normal University, is hoping to help put Kashgar back on on the traveller’s map this time not as a trade destination, but as a tourist one. Monash’s Kashgar…
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The discovery of a unique amphitheatre and other structures at Rome’s ancient maritime port is putting the archaeological site of Portus on the map. For decades it’s been a much over-looked site next to Fiumicino’s international runway and scholarly attention has focused on neighbouring Ostia Antica, but experts now believe it is a unique site that should rank alongside monuments such as Stonehenge or Angkor Wat. I spoke to Professor Simon Keay, director of the Portus Project and leading expert in Roman archaeology at the University of Southampton and the British School at Rome about the findings of the excavation,…
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Scottish Minister for Culture Mike Russell is expected to announce today that the Lewis Chessmen a collection of 93 individually hand-carved walrus-ivory chess pieces dating from the 12th century, found on the Isle of Lewis in 1831 are to be reunited again. A proportion of the 82-piece set belonging to the British Museum in London will arrive home on loan, to join up with the 11 other artefacts currently held by the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh. Theyll go on tour around the country in coming months, taking in destinations including Stornoway on the Isle of Lewis. The Lewis…
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The infamous excesses of Emperor Nero have made a spectacular comeback yesterday, as archaeologists unveiled his legendary rotating banquet hall. Experts excavating in the Domus Aurea (Golden Palace, literally ‘Golden House’) on Rome’s Palatine Hill have found what they claim to be the remnants of a platform and mechanism described by the ancient historian Suetonius, in his opus The Twelve Caesars. The incredible discovery was made during routine maintenance work at the Palace, which is now located beneath theBaths of Trajan. “This cannot be compared to anything that we know of in ancient Roman architecture,” says head archaeologist FrancoiseVilledieu. An…
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The recession isnt being kind to the ancient world. Two leading publishers of history titles have just gone bust, and there are fears that more will follow. Italian publishers White Star have become the latest victim, following British publisher Thalamus into receivership last month. White Star, which opened in 1984, was one of Italys leading publishing house and one of Italian publishings star exporters. Its extensive multi-lingual catalogue features more than 600 titles ranging from archaeology, art and nature to technology, photography, ethnology, mountaineering and marine biology. Its impressive archaeology and civilisations collections alone carry something from every corner of…
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To say that archaeologist Sarah Milledge Nelson has had a productive career would be a gross understatement. The University of Denver archaeologist has held the John Evans professorship. A position that every faculty member, at her university, competes for, but only one person gets each year. She wrote the book on Korean archaeology – literally – and has written or co-written somewhere in the neighbourhood of a dozen books, as well as numerous articles. She’s done fieldwork throughout Korea and extensive work at Niuheliang, a Neolithic site in China. She even pens works of historical fiction. Right now she’s working on…
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Amid all the excitement over the return of HBO’s Rome to our cinemas in 2011, as well as ongoing whispers about a remake of I, Claudius, it is only natural that our thoughts turn to those Roman emperors immortalised in a way they would never have dreamed possible. In Rome, Pullo and Vorenus stole the limelight but Ciarán Hinds was a dark and charismatic Julius Caesar. So how does he compare to other screen versions of the character? Rex Harrison was overshadowed in the role in 1963 by Richard Burton’s Mark Anthony in Cleopatra, and who could out-beef John Gavin’s…