We’ve come a long way from the time when Ugg would mutter inanities to Uggetta in the cave, present her with a wad of crushed up flowers and move in for the kiss- and if she resisted he would reach for his club, gives it the old ‘knock on the head and drag away’ routine. Nowadays, for example, we do all the inanities on dating websites or in noisy bars. The rules of romance and courting have been shifting rapidly in the last 50 years and now many people are so clueless as to what they are supposed to do…
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The Ancient World in London is in full swing: we’ve got events, competitions, quests, articles and interviews going up by the day, packing your lucky brains with fascinating info and exciting adventures. And hot on the heels of all this is the Ancient World in London video series, the first episode of which you can see right here, right now. Each video will feature amazing places, strange artefacts and intriguing experts – as we take our three intrepid explorers on no fewer than 25 adventures in and around the capital. We’ll be meeting mysterious druid priests, famous historians and avid…
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Who is the man in this picture? How did this fellow, whose maternal ancestry is East Asian, end up in a modest grave in southern Italy about 2000 years ago? Its an enticing question and one that has been in the news ever since Heritage Key announced the story of this mans discovery. Just a quick recap; a team of scientists based at McMaster University in Hamilton Canada have found that this man, buried in a Roman cemetery at Vagnari, in southern Italy, is of East Asian ancestry on this mothers side. They determined this through mitochondrial DNA testing. The…
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Egyptology photographer Sandro Vannini has been busy photographing tombs across Thebes for his new book “The Lost Tombs of Thebes:Lost in Paradise” and you can watch him at work in a Heritage Key video which also features Dr Zahi Hawass and Dr Janice Kamrin (Watch the video). During his photo-spree in this Ancient Egyptian city, Sandro took images of archaeologists hard at work at the site of TT34 – The Tomb of Montuemhat. Described by the excavation lead Dr Farouk Gomaa as “one of the largest [tombs] in Thebes“, the University of Tbingen archaeologist and his team are searching for…
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When you think of King Tut, do you see a young boy, struggling with the enormity of his power; a slender adolescent in control of the world’s greatest empire? Of course not, because you’re like me: you see the magnificent death mask, the coffins, shrines, shabtis, daggers, beds, decrepit mummy(with or without penis) et al. We ancient world-lovers are just magpies with laptops really. But do you ever wonder why, when Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvonburst into the tomb in 1922, they could see so many ‘wonderful things’? Why wasn’t Tutankhamun’s funerary procession made ancient swag, like those of nearly…
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Egypt’s Minister of Culture Farouk Hosni and Dr. Zahi Hawass returned a piece of red granite belonging to an ancient Egyptian temple to its rightful place – the base of Amenemhat I’s naos. Both officials are on an inspection tour along the Avenue of Sphinxes that connects the Temple of Luxor with that of Karnak, home to the Ptah temple where the naos is to be found. The naos pieace was returned to Egypt last October by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, after it was purchased by the Museum from an antiquities collector in New York in…
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Egypts Minister of Culture, Farouk Hosni, and Zahi Hawass, Secretary General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA), along with the governor of Luxor, Samir Farag, will embark today on an inspection tour along the Avenue of Sphinxes that connects the Luxor and Karnak temples. During this visit, they will install the piece of red granite that was returned to Egypt by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in its original place at the Ptah temple at Karnak. Built by the 30th Dynasty king Nectanebo I (380-362 BC), the avenue is 2,700 meters long and 76 meters wide, and lined with…
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Four Senet boards were found inside the tomb of King Tutankhamun and suggests that the boy king was a keen player of the ancient game. In Ancient Egyptian society, senet was regarded as much more than just a game, however – it was a matter of life or death. The game involves throwing casting sticks or knucklebones, and over time became regarded as talismans for the journey into the afterlife with luck being a key deciding factor in the game. Those who would win games of senet were believed to be blessed by powerful gods such as Osiris, Ra and…
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Last week we told the first part of the story of Lord Carnarvon, one of Britain’s greatest explorers: his love of cars, planes, travel, and – most importantly – his obsessive passion for finding Tutankhamun‘s treasures. But what became of the cavalier adventurer, and why is there not a single one of his finds in Britain? By the time Carter and Carnarvon had broken into the tomb of Tutankhaum, Carnarvon was already a frail man. His leg badly disfigured in a car accident in Germany, the aristocrat had only originally come to Egypt on his doctor’s advice, to escape the…
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When the entrance to the Tomb of King Tutankhamun (KV62) was discovered by the great explorer Howard Carter and his financier Lord Carnarvon, they could never have dreamed of the treasures which awaited them inside. These two men worked together to track down King Tut’s burial place, as explained in a Heritage Key video with Lord Carnarvon’s modern day ancestors the Earl and Countess of Carnarvon (Watch the Video). Egyptology photographer Sandro Vannini has spent much of the past decade photographing the fascinating artefacts discovered inside KV62, as well as capturing the tomb itself on film. But an angle that…