The exhibition Roma: La Pittura di un Impero, which opened this week in Rome at the eighteenth century Scuderie del Quirinale exhibition space, may come as a bit of a shock to afficionados of the classic Roman style. These ancient realist paintings look more like the works of 18th century masters than the ancient Romans. Think of Roman art and you might think of marble statues, imposing architecture and intricate mosaics: the sculpture of the Dying Gaul at the Musei Capitolini or the Alexander Mosaic from Pompeii are just two examples of the thousands of famous Roman artworks that are…
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Metal detecting enthusiasts are enjoying a halcyon period this week, as four extremely rare Norman coins have been unearthed in Gloucestershire dating back to the reign of William the Conqueror. The coins, which were discovered by an as-yet unnamed finder, are believed to have been minted in Gloucester between 1073 and 1076. And while they may have been overshadowed by the recent Staffordshire Saxon hoard – and even a recent Roman coin haul in Shropshire – archaeologist Kurt Adams tells the BBC the 0.8mm-thick coins are extremely uncommon. A coroner will soon decide whether the cache can be kept by…
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When Egyptologist Kei Yamamoto excavated The Terrace of the Great God at Abydos he came across a collection of curiously-fashioned goblets. Were these bottomless vessels evidence of the builders’ reverence to a remarkable place of ancient worship? 3,800 years ago, during the Middle Kingdom period in Egypts history, there was a temple to Osiris at Abydos. Nothing of it survives today, but based on the location of later temples, archaeologists have a rough idea of where it would have stood. They also know that just in front of the Osiris templewas an area known in the Middle Kingdom as the…
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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…
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If seems that Britain (the Hoard made it to ‘most viewed’ on the BBC website today) – and Heritage Key (mine is definitely not the first blogpost on the topic) – can’t get enough of the Mercian Treasure baptised ‘the Staffordshire Hoard’. Realising what an incredible find this is – or standard archaeological procedure? – Birmingham University Archaeology published the actual unearthing of the collection of Anglo-Saxon hoarded wealth, at that point still looking more like little stones than the actual gems they are. In the video you see the archaeologists carefully searching the sand, digging up the precious artefacts… but…
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Salima Ikram Leading Expert on Animals in Ancient Egypt Professor Salima Ikram is one of the world’s leading authorities on animals in Ancient Egypt, and has published several books about the culture, which she has loved since childhood. Dr Ikram currently holds the post of Professor of Egyptology at Cairo’s American University, and frequently appears in magazines and on television to discuss Egypt. She is also a grantee of the National Geographic Society’s Committee for Research and Exploration. Born in Lahore, Pakistan, in 1965, Dr Ikram studies Egyptology and Archaeology at Pennsylvania’s Bryn Mawr College. She then earned a M.Phil.…
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Kazakhstan has become the latest hotbed of UFOspeculation, as experts announce the discovery of a set of geoglyphs in a remote mountainous region of the huge central Asian county. The huge lines, created either by removing topsoil or by decorating with various stones, have been spotted in the country’s southern Karatau range. And though many will draw comparisons with the better known ‘Nazca Lines‘ of Peru, the Kazakh geoglyphs are strikingly different. Rather than depicting the menagerie of fish, lizards, monkeys, birds and other animals favoured by the mysterious Nazcas, they show a humanoid figure huddled between two odd-shaped structures.…
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If youre wondering where Scandinavians got their blonde hair and impressive bone structure from then you can tick hunter-gatherers who inhabited the region at the end of the Ice Age off your list. It seems that an immigrant people from the Eastern Baltic region, who drifted into modern Scandinavia in the Stone Age around the time of the advent of farming are the real genetic ancestors of modern Swedes, Danes and Norwegians and even the Saami people of northern Scandinavia, according to new research straddling the boundaries of genetics and archaeology. The study, published recently in the journal Current Biology,…
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A research team from the University of Liverpool, led by Evolutionary Anthropology PhD student Emma Nelson, reckon theyve made some tenuous inroads into establishing just how much early human-like primates liked to play the field when it came to sex. With it, they may have found some clues as to why Homo sapiens managed to see off Neanderthals as the dominant species on the planet. The secret is in the ratio between the index and ring fingers on human hands, which are thought to be telltale indicators of how much androgen and with it, testosterone a person is exposed to…
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Two ancient mastodons recently discovered in Northern America suggest that the Clovis people of the region, thought to have brought about their own extinction, may have been blasted by a massive exploding comet from outer space. The mastadons – one from a site in Upper New York State, the other in the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM)in Toronto Canada – reveal evidence that a comet may have exploded above Northern America 12,900 years ago. The Clovis people, who inhabited Northern America at the time, were big game hunters. Until recently, it had been thought that they had contributed to their own…