An internationally touring exhibition featuring mummies and artefacts from Graeco-Roman Egypt has opened in the UK for the first time at the newly refurbished Manchester Museum. Amy Brunskill visited to find out more.…
On 10 May 1894, Aquincum Museum in Budapest opened its doors to the public. Here, in anticipation of the forthcoming anniversary of that event, David Breeze recounts his connection to the museum and its archaeological park.…
Review by Dylan K Rogers To say that the Roman world was overflowing with water is an understatement. Recently, scholarship has increasingly begun to explore the numerous ways water impacted the lives of ancient Romans, from understanding the design of aqueducts in the countryside to the social impact that fountains…
Julius Caesar campaigned to conquer France for five years before the war of attrition reached its climax at Alésia. The patchwork quilt of tribal territories vacillated in their submission to the Romans.…
Review by Bernadette McCooey Animals as animals is the main premise of this work, as all too often animals are reduced to their economic or social significance, both in the literary and archaeological record. Thankfully, this refreshing approach to early medieval Iceland, from the 9th century to about the 13th…
Review by Helen Whitehouse Originally published in French (Mosaïques d’Alexandrie: pavements d’Égypte grecque et romaine, 2019), this handsome volume now appears in an excellent English translation by Colin Clement. Excavations in Alexandria, on land and at sea, over the last 40 years have revealed more material evidence of the Ptolemaic…
Among the artefacts on display are 180 original bronze objects from the Naples National Archaeological Museum and the Archaeological Park of Pompeii.…
Open 10am-5pm daily (1 April to 30 October)Weybourne, Norfolk, NR25 7ERwww.muckleburgh.co.uk+ 44 (0)1263 588 210 The Muckleburgh Military Collection is the largest privately owned military museum in the United Kingdom. It was opened to the public in 1988 by Michael Savory and his father Squadron Leader Berry Savory, who had…
Festivals IWM Duxford flying season: 50th anniversary April-October 2023IWM Duxford, Cambridgeshire, CB22 4QR, UKwww.iwm.org.uk/duxford-air-shows-50+44 (0)20 7416 5000 In the summer of 1973, ‘Duxford Air Day’ was first staged at the historic aerodrome in Cambridgeshire to celebrate the area’s aviation heritage. The event quickly became a permanent fixture, and it has…
REVIEW by COLIN POMEROY A renowned writer on air combat in World War II, Professor Patrick Eriksson is well known for his detailed research, something he fully demonstrates in this new book, which takes its name from the fighter pilot’s call when a target was in sight. The book actually…
REVIEW by MARC DeSANTIS Popular memory of the Second World War is inconsistent. Certain events, such as the Battle of Britain, El Alamein, the Atlantic Campaign, D-Day, and Operation Market Garden, loom large in modern consciousness. Other events and fronts, such as the latter stages of the Italian Campaign or…
Lebanon is a powerful vision of men at war, made real and intense by the fact that we never once move outside the tank, and only see the outside world from the interior.…
REVIEW by TOBY CLARK During the First World War, a young soldier called Douglas Gillespie used a letter home from the trenches to expound on an idea for remembering the dead after the fighting was over. Gillespie proposed a path from the English Channel to Switzerland, following the route of…
The exhibition 'The Van de Veldes: Greenwich, art and the sea' continues at the Queen’s House in Greenwich, London SE10 9NF, until 14 January 2024.…
REVIEW by DAVID FLINTHAM Until relatively recently, there were more terms relating to fortifications than to probably any other area of military history. Confusion is easy, especially since many of the words and phrases come directly from languages other than English. Jean-Denis Lepage has set himself the challenge of identifying…
REVIEW by MARC DeSANTIS The death of Alexander the Great in Babylon in 323 BC left the empire he had conquered without blood heirs ready to take up the heavy burden of governance. Thus, in the days following his passing, that task was left to a small group of Macedonian…
REVIEW: CALUM HENDERSON The new German-language adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, which arrived on Netflix last autumn, pulls no punches in its depiction of the savage violence of World War I. In the film, helpless young men are cut to pieces by machine-guns, buried…
Review by Michael Potterton Thirty years ago, when I was a history and archaeology undergraduate at University College Dublin, the phrase ‘Ireland and the Crusades’ seemed almost as absurd as ‘Ireland and the Palaeolithic’ or ‘Ireland and the Renaissance’. Times change, of course, and thankfully all three have become fruitful…
Review by Kathryn Murphy In Facing the Enemy, Andrew Tibbs presents analysis of Roman fortifications and the Scottish landscape, focusing on the positioning, intervisibility, orientation, and interconnectivity of Flavian sites. Stemming from his PhD thesis, this volume discusses one of the first systematic applications of Geographical Information Science (GIS) to…
Ancient myths meet archaeological treasures in this new blockbuster at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. Carly Hilts went along to learn more about the great palace at Knossos, legendary location of the Minotaur-haunted labyrinth, and real-life repository of Minoan culture.…