As shown by the excitement surrounding the discovery of Tutankhamun 100 years ago, mummies and Egyptian tombs have an impressive ability to capture our imagination. Richard Marranca speaks to Egyptologist Salima Ikram to find out more about these funerary finds, from early medicinal mummies to recent revelations at Saqqara.…
At the end of last year, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston – the city known as ‘the Athens of America’ – opened a renovated suite of five galleries devoted to the art of Greece, Rome, and Byzantium. Lucia Marchini speaks to curators Christine Kondoleon, Laure Marest, and Phoebe Segal…
Michael Ventris' decipherment of a mysterious ancient script, Minoan Linear B, was dubbed by The Times as ‘the Everest of Greek archaeology’……
Neil went on to propose using what R G Collingwood called ‘the historical imagination’ by blending data and interpretation to ‘tell the story’. He was convinced that this ‘must be done if archaeology is to be interesting and worthwhile’.…
Calum Henderson explores the lives and works of war photographers Gerda Taro, Endre Friedmann, Françoise Demulder, Anja Niedringhaus, Lee Miller, and Catherine Leroy.…
“The Dieulafoys were unconventional to the point of scorn: Jeanne routinely wore male clothes…”…
As all who worked with him here would agree, he was not just a man of extraordinary and wide-ranging intellectual and professional ability, but also a hugely generous, thoughtful, and kind collaborator and colleague...…
Neil was an interesting person, as he lived two lives. One was as an archaeologist, as a tour guide, excavator, and valued contributor to our magazines. But he also had another life, as a revolutionary Marxist...…
In the 1930s, an admirer remembered Japanese antiquarian Ninagawa Noritane fondly as ‘simple-hearted and unpretentious. He was frugal and sometimes walked around wearing a lampshade hat woven with rush.’ He added, perhaps unnecessarily, ‘It should be said that he was a rather extraordinary individual.’ Certainly Ninagawa lived in extraordinary times.…
Laura Knight was blessed with some of the essential qualities of any great artist: a broadness of outlook and a fascination with the riches of ordinary life. A new exhibition of her work at the MK Gallery in Milton Keynes is subtitled ‘a panoramic view’. It brings together more than…
“Our present Hispanic-Peruvian civilisation cannot stand except on an indigenous pedestal.”…
It is hard to disagree with the astronomers. They clearly felt that naming a single lunar crater after Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc in 1935 was insufficient and, in 1993, honoured him again, this time with an asteroid. But astronomy is only part of the story, for Peiresc was the very…
The astonishing thing about Paul is his photographic memory. I recall he once joined a Roman sherd from Butrint with a piece from the maritime villa at Diaporit, three miles away.…
Central to Childe’s conception of history was the creative potential of hunters, farmers, craftworkers, engineers, and scientists, and the way in which elites wasted surpluses on wars, monuments, and luxuries…
Frost fitted herself out with an improvised breathing hose at a party in order to explore a 17th-century well.…
The first volume of The Antiquities of Athens and Other Monuments of Greece (1762) had an impressive 500 subscribers, but its influence was most strongly felt only in the early 19th century, when Greek Revival became the dominant style of British architecture.…
His talents may have been limited and he may have been fundamentally lazy: but was he bad? Could we not say that he made the best use of his limited talents – and the empire flourished?…
'In 1638, Kircher was lowered into an awakening Vesuvius to advance his geological knowledge.'…
No other Australian was so dear to the public as ‘Bluey’ Truscott... He was idolised and idealised, but not put on a pedestal.…
He was not, Jacques Francis insisted as prosecution witnesses tried repeatedly to have his testimony thrown out, a slave. They called him ‘blackamoor’ and ‘infidel-born’, but he called himself famulus rather than servus – a member of the household, a worker alongside free servants. At this historical distance, it seems…
