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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Description Nicole Favish heads to Stonehenge to experience the Spring Equinox – the point in the year where the day and the night are of equal length. It’s also one of only four times of the year (the others being the Autumnal Equinox, and the Solstices) where the public are allowed to roam inside the stone circle. Nicole speaks to the Druids and mingles with the crowds to find out more about Stonehenge and what makes this time of year so special there. You can read more about this video in Sean’s blogpost, as well as viewing the full Ancient…
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London is a complex delight of cultures and crime, of poverty and wealth, of gang warfare and suburban bliss, of traffic jams and serene parks and gardens. People of all races and religions flock to London always have, always will. Some have come more peacefully than others. When discussing attacks on London, the idea that comes into your head is of some foreign power invading the city or, in more modern times, attacking from the air. The reality is that the majority of the attacks on the capital have come not from a foreign enemy but from members of the…
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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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Some of you, like us, may be visiting Stonehenge for this Saturday’s Spring Equinox celebrations (see event listing here). Yet I suspect a fair few more of you will be sinking pints of Guinness in homage to Saint Patrick tonight, staggering home wearing a green top hat which looked oh-so-cool a few hours ago. But if you’re going to be on the Emerald Isle this weekend, why not combine the two, by visiting Loughcrew, Ireland’s best-known megalithic cairn. At the Spring and Autumn equinoxes, Loughcrew’s cairn T is bathed in light, and the sun symbols on its back chamber can…
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A group of ancient Chinese mummies found in China have long fascinated experts and the public, largely because the bodies look more distinctly European (or even Celtic) than Asian. Now a new scientific report published last month says the oldest of these mummies dating back almost 4,000 years likely originated outside of China, from a mixture of places such as Europe and Siberia. What’s more, these ancient people had an “obsession with procreation”, burying their dead alongside symbolic vulvas and giant phalluses. For decades now, the ancient corpses have been found in Chinas Tarim Basin, a desert region near the…
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So you’ve bagged a seat in your nearest Irish boozer, scrummed your way to the bar and ordered a pint of the black stuff, and your furry shamrock hat is firmly ensconced on the head: congratulations, you are officially ready to start celebrating St Patrick’s Day. But who is St Patrick? We trace the history of the brewer’s favourite saint back to ancient Roman Britain. Irish or not, Catholic or not, and whether you actually like Guinness or not these are small considerations now that the 17th of March is an international day of merry-making and general festivity. It’s an…
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What’s 84 miles long, 1,888 years old and marked the edge of Roman rule in Britain? Hadrian’s Wall of course – and the landmark got a spectacular makeover this weekend with a line of beacons stretching its entirety. The event, named ‘Illuminating Hadrian’s Wall’, marked the 1,600th anniversary of the end of the Roman occupation in Britain, and needed no fewer than 1,100 hardy volunteers to brave the harsh winds of northern England to make it happen. We know it’s a far cry from London – about 300 miles, in fact – but it’s a once-in-a-lifetime chance (make that once-in-about-250-lifetimes)…
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The BNP hit national headlines again last weekend, as Britain limps towards this year’s general election. After having voted to scrap their ‘whites-only’ membership policy, the far-right group introduced a measure whereby prospective members are vetted for up to two hours on whether they support the ‘integrity of the indigenous British’. We, the native British people, the party’s website valiantly claims, will be an ethnic minority in our own country within sixty years. Thankfully Central London County Court ruled the membership move discriminatory, so Nick Griffin and his cronies will have to go back to the drawing board for another…