The fight goes on for the repatriation of Australian Aboriginal remains stored in museums across the world, with two artworks now added to the list of artifacts campaigers want returned Down Under. A delegation from the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre in Hobart is in the UK this week to lobby institutions among them the Wellcome Trust, and Oxford and Cambridge universities to return the skulls, bones and other Aboriginal remains held in their collections. This follows their success earlier this month in having the remains of a skull from a Tasmanian Aborigine returned to Australia from the National Museum of Scotland.…
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The literary world is waiting for a bombshell. Controversial Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown is about to release his latest historical fantasy tale – The Lost Symbol – on the public. But what does this mean for the history books industry at large, and should the work of Dan Brown be considered historical fiction at all, or merely fantasy? Judging by the healthy state of historical fiction at the moment, it could be that history pulp has helped stimulate readers’ and writers’ interest in proper historical fiction. In his review of Ben Kanes The Forgotten Legion, Roger Michael Kean…
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Tourists are taking the piss quite literally when it comes to Uluru, the sacred Aboriginal ‘rock’ in the middle of the Australian desert. Andrew Simpson is the general manager of Anangu Waai, an Aboriginal-owned company that runs culturally sensitive tours of the World Heritage-listed Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park. He claims that tourists are not only disrespecting local heritage and beliefs by climbing Uluru in the first place, but they are “shitting on a sacred site” when they get to the top. Waiting half an hour to get to the bottom again, he says, is just too much of an effort…
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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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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…
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Egyptology researcher Paula Veiga, author of Health and Medicine in Ancient Egypt: Magic and Science is fascinated by the ancient Egyptians’ concepts of health and medical practice. We caught up with her to chat about religion, medicine and magic, and what lessons health professionals can learn from studying the ancient world. HK: Your background is in tourism – how did you go from tourism to religion, infectious diseases, medicine and magic in Egypt? PV: I have been attracted to ancient history since I was a child, and I collected all those National Geographic editions on ancient civilisations – my favourite…
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A blog by Bija Knowles got me thinking about travel to ancient destinations. In particular, Bija talks about Libya and its move towards promoting itself more as a tourist destination. Libya has long been one of the Holy Grails of travel writing because it’s been so difficult to get into (and to get around) it independently until now. This story by Jim Keeble has more on how the country is finally opening up to tourism. It’s the same in countries along the old Silk Road routes, which are more tourist-friendly than ever. This encourages more people to discover the historic…
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The fight to save ancient treasures goes on. There are the bigger battles, the ones to save important heritage sites from war-time destruction see Kashgar, Iran and Iraq. There are the battles against neglect, as in the case of Libya. Then there are the battles against the downright stupid. The careless. The ignorant. The culturally desolate wastelands that can sometimes be found inside the human body. In Western Australia, the state government is set to prosecute a cement and quarrying company for allegedly decimating 10,000-year-old Aboriginal rock art. The Age newspaper reported that the company CEMEX admitted breaching a national…
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Some 35,000 years before Stonehenge mysteriously appeared on the Salisbury Plains, there was human life Down Under, in the outback and in the bush. Before markings were made at Chauvet or Lascaux, before the pyramids and before Rome rose and fell, what is now known as Australia was inhabited by pockets of tribal hunter-gatherers. They went about their business, surviving one of the harshest environments on Earth, for thousands of years until the white man came along, thrusting them from an ancient world and into a modern one. For one of the oldest known (and surviving) civilisations, there is surprisingly…
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Schools out for summer – it’s playtime now. And while there are plenty of computer games to whet your appetite for the ancient world, there’s also still a lot of fun out there to be had with a bit of glue and some decent instructions. From projects for big kids to those with slightly less nimble fingers, there’s something it seems in the ancient world for everyone. Build Your Own Stonehenge from Running Press may not come with the more than 150 rocks that feature in the life-size version, but it does come with a good two dozen that you…