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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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…
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Would you walk on someone’s grave? Or cross someone’s back yard if they asked you not to? Or risk your life if you knew someone else would feel responsible if you died? They’re simple questions of common sense and respect, but neither comes into the equation when it comes to climbing the world’s most famous monolithic site. The traditional Aboriginal owners of Australia’s Uluru (also known officially by its European name of Ayer’s Rock), ask tourists to not to climb their sacred site. It’s considered by the local Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara (or Aangu) people to be sacred because it links…
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Ordinarily, Britain’s Got Talentdoesn’t have a lot in common with history, though I suppose there will be a footnote onSusan Boylein the ‘History of Reality TV’ when it’s finally published. Or in Simon Cowell‘s autobiography. But none of this matters toMary Beard, whose excellentTimes Online blog, It’s A Don’s Life, covers subjects that have everything and nothing do with history. Beard, aprofessor in classics at Cambridge and the classics editor ofThe Times Literary Supplement, this week confessed to watching the final of BGT, posting a blog under the header: ‘A classicist watches Britain’s Got Talent‘. The Times describes Beard as…
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The University of Oxford is the latest British research institution to agree to return the remains of indigenous Australians to their homeland. Aboriginal remains are scattered across the globe after they were shipped abroad for ‘research purposes’ following the colonisation of Australia by the British in 1788. It is the intention of the Australian government to repatriate all remains, and the hope of the Aboriginal people to bring all scientific analysis on their ancestors to a halt. Aborigines, who refer to the colonisation of Australia as ‘invasion’, had occupied the continent for more than 40,000 years prior to the discovery…