For those of you who are interested in the Hellenistic era or late Republican Rome, please be sure to read this National Geographic Magazine article on the infamous Queen Cleopatra VII, published in their July 2011 issue. Click here to access the article.
This week, exciting news has emerged from the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu. An article in the Times of India has reported that Roman pottery remains have been discovered in the village of Naduvirapattu, located outside the city of Tambaram. In ancient times, Tamil Nadu lay at the nexus of overseas trade between East and West. Please read this article by clicking here.
If you are based in Germany or are near the vicinity of Berlin, be sure to visit a special show entitled “Pergamon: Panorama of the Ancient Metropolis,” at Berlin’s Pergamon Museum. The show, which opened earlier this month, includes a spectacular panoramic recreation of the city during the second century CE. Please read more about this exciting museum show, via the Wall Street Journal, by clicking here. The reviews and public reception has been overwhelmingly positive!
For those of you interested in urban archaeology and the painstaking process of uncovering the past beneath our cities, please check out this recent article in France Today. It’s a gem! Also, for those of you interested in the Romans, be aware that there is a new biography on the infamous Caligula by the Swiss historian, Alyos Winterling. Please read the review in Canada’s major newsweekly, Maclean’s, here.
Our goal at Ancient History Encyclopedia is always to give you great content that cannot be found elsewhere on the internet, but we cannot deny that various universities and journals have already published excellent research papers (usually PDFs) that we would like to publish here on the site. Unfortunately, these papers are usually protected by copyright. Now we have found a way around this: We can now embed external papers as articles, but the papers remain on the site they were published on! While we still encourage you to write your own content for the site, it would be great if you could also add external papers as articles, whenever you find them! Simply create a new article, choose the “I want to link to an existing article on the internet” option, link to the paper, and add an abstract — done. You can find an example here.
Dye was already being produced and used 100,000 years ago, an international team of researchers found in South Africa. They discovered two bowls containing traces of dye from sea snails in the Blombos-Cave near Cape Town. It is still unclear what the dye was used for: body paint, skin protection, or paint for art? The two bowls are now on display in the Iziko Museum in Cape Town. Read the original news story at Spiegel Online (in German).
I am proud to present a massively improved timeline search and visual timeline: I have categorized every timeline entry (which took quite a while, considering we have over 1000 entries, even though I did get some help) and you can now search the timeline by category. Categories include “Philosophy & Religion”, “States & Territories”, “War(fare) & Battles”, among others. I’ve also greatly improved the visual timeline feature: Each timeline entry is coloured according to its category, and the positioning of entries on the timeline is now working much better. I’m hope you’re going to love this feature! As always, feedback is most welcome!
The Israel Museum has published six of the Qumran Scrolls on its websites. For each of the scrolls there is a high-resolution image viewer as well as a description of the scroll and where it was found. You can view the Qumran Scrolls on the Israel Museum website.
Here is further listing of exhibitions in the United States and Europe: Before the Pyramids: The Origins of Egyptian Civilization. This exhibition explores ancient Egypt’s Pre-Dynastic and Early Dynastic material culture and shows how these objects inform on our understanding of Egyptian culture and civilization. The most fundamental aspects of ancient Egyptian civilization–architecture, hieroglyphic writing, a belief in the afterlife and allegiance to a semi-divine king–are linked to Egypt’s Pre-Dynastic era, which predates the famous pyramids of Giza by about a thousand years. The exhibit includes over one hundred objects, including works of art and ceramics in addition to recovered objects from the tombs of the first kings and of the retainers who were buried alongside them. Recent studies and research is presented in tandem with the exhibit. Oriental Institute Museum, Chicago, IL (USA). Now through December 31, 2011. Life and Death in the Pyramid Age: The Emory Old Kingdom Mummy. This exhibit situates an ancient Egyptian mummy–excavated at the religious center of Abydos by archaeologists, in Middle Egypt, in the 1920s–in the context of …
Bigthink.com posted an interesting article that examines the “missing link” between the art of Antiquity and art of the early Middle Ages. Art found in the city of Dura-Europos might fill in this gap of the “Dark Ages” in art history. Read the full article on bigthink.com.
