If you think that people in modern western society are obsessive about their pets, get a load of the ancient Egyptians. Throughout ancient Egyptian history, particularly from around 700 BC until 400 AD, there is evidence that certain animals – all from cows to cats, dogs, birds, fish and even lowly beetles (scarabs) – were worshipped as being able to communicate with the gods, and even serve as their living embodiments on earth. As Professor of Egyptology at the American University in Cairo Salima Ikram described in a pair of exclusive video interviews with Heritage Key, Egyptians would rely on…
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Think you know all there is to know about these goliaths of the ancient world? Heritage Key picks out ten key facts about pyramids. 1. There are actually 118 pyramids in Egypt. Sure, you might have heard of Khufu‘s, or Khafre’s – or even Djoser’s incredible Step Pyramid at Saqqara, the first known pyramid ever built. But what about the ones which don’t grab the headlines: Amenemhat III‘s Black Pyramid of Dashur looks more like Ayer’s Rock than an Egyptian tomb, and Sahure’s fine mausoleum in Abusir once stood 47m high. 2. The 118th pyramid was unearthed by Egypt’s most…
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The legendary Ninth Legion – Legio IX Hispana (The “Spanish Legion”) – was one of the oldest and most feared units in the Roman army by the early 2nd century AD. Raised by Pompey in 65 BC, it had fought victorious campaigns across the Empire, from Gaul to Africa, Sicily to and Spain and Germania to Britain. No one knows for sure why, but sometime after 108/9 AD, the legion all but disappeared from the records. The popular version of events – propagated by numerous books, television programmes and films – is that the Ninth, at the time numbering some…
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Question – who can completely fill up a cavernous 1,500 seat domed hall on a Saturday night in Toronto? Answer – Dr. Zahi Hawass “I don’t get to introduce rock stars,” said Art Gallery of Ontario CEO Matthew Teitelbaum. Well tonight he did. Forget the critical New Yorker article, the mixed reviews of the new Tut exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario, or the fact that local Toronto media largely stayed away from this lecture. The world’s most well-known Egyptologist completely filled Convocation Hall, with people who had all paid a small admission fee (no more than $18) to…
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For any solider fighting wars away in foreign lands, letters to and from family and loved ones take on enormous resonance and importance. We’ve all seen the TV and movie versions of army life in the world wars, in which the handing out of letters is a ritual frought with excitement, emotion, and rivalry. The same situation was probably played out thousands of years earlier, as some remarkable ancient letters attest. While the first letters ever written were probably cuneiform imprints onto clay tablets, penned in Mesopotamia and Egypt, by the time the Roman civilization began to expand around the…
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Earlier this month, beer-drinkers from around the world convened at Oktoberfest to celebrate their favourite bevvy. Associated with fights and bloated bellies, beer gets a pretty bad press these years. But the brew has been drunk for millennia, and it seems that the ancients had some surprisingly positive benefits for the drink. The invention of beer is impossible to attribute to either a period or country. The easy fermentation process means that civilisations around the world probably started producing beer independently around the same time. Early evidences of beer existence have been found in Iran and Iraq and date back…
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There’s no doubting the natural durability of cave and rock art – in many cases ancient paintings, carvings and sculptures have resisted tens of thousands of years of the withering effects of history and the elements to still be around to reveal their splendor today. Yet, that’s not to say that their continued survival is guaranteed, particularly as many sites become more and more popular as tourist attractions and therefore increasingly subject to human wear and tear. Other examples simply don’t have the protection they need and are at the mercy of vandals and robbers, while some are threatened by…
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A date has now been set for the return of some of the Vindolanda Tablets to the museum at Vindolanda in Northumberland, following an announcement this week that the UK’s Heritage Lottery Fund is to donate £4 million towards the costs. The date now set for some of the tablets to be housed at the Vindolanda museum is spring 2011 – they will come on loan from the British Museum for a period of five years, after which the loan can be renewed. The tablets – a collection of 1,600 documents etched on thin wooden boards – represent the earliest…
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The ancient Egyptians weren’t the only ones that mummified their dead for the sake of posterity. In more modern times, there have been multiple examples of mummification, using a range of weird and wonderful techniques from simple embalming to submerging the cadaver in a chemical-filled preservation tank, or perfusing it with wax, effectively rendering the corpse a giant human candle. Here we examine ten of the most famous examples of modern mummies, their stories, and some of the methods used to preserve them for eternity. The deceased range from an Argentinean First Lady, a Soviet Head of State and various…
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The Great Pyramid of Giza is one of the world’s oldest and most iconic ancient structures – a 4,500 year old mass of more than 2.3 million limestone blocks, built as tomb for Fourth dynasty Egyptian Pharaoh Khufu. Reaching 138.8 meters into the sky, for thousands of years it was the tallest man-made structure on earth. The Great Pyramid has attracted explorers and tourists by the bus load for decades. But not all of its secrets have yet been revealed. One set of features that remains a source of bafflement to experts are the two narrow shafts – each about…