He is one of the most famous figures in human history, the subject of countless legends, and a commander regularly claimed as the greatest of all time. But who was Alexander the Great really? We know that he was born…
Alexander the Great’s ambitions of conquest took him far from his Macedonian home and into Asia and Babylon, where he died. Ursula Sims-Williams investigates the mythical legacy of Alexander in the East, where different traditions cast him variously as an accursed figure, a philosopher-king, and even a prophet.
Having learnt Arabic, Hilda would hire and pay their workers. She slept in a hut at Tarkhan with 80 skulls by her bed, living off canned pilchards and bully beef.
by Prof. Joyce Tyldesley.Headline, 2022ISBN 978-1-472-28984-1Hardback, £22. Do we need another book on Tutankhamun? The author herself has already published two Tutankhamun-focused works – the 2012 Tutankhamen’s Curse (reviewed in AE 71) in particular already covers much of the same…
Beneath the foundations of the staircase, the workmen found a wooden chest containing human bones and pieces of velvet. Charles II arranged for the remains to be reinterred in Westminster Abbey, but the bones were re-examined in 1933.
by Garry J. Shaw.Yale University Press, 2022ISBN 978-0-300-26743-3Hardback, £16.99. So much has been written about Tutankhamun and his tomb since its discovery that it is an achievement for any writer to find an original angle to illuminate their narrative. Garry…
Gilbert was one of the first Americans – of any ethnicity – to undertake archaeological work in Greece. There, he is likely to have met Heinrich Schliemann, rediscoverer of Troy, and certainly he did groundbreaking excavation work on the neighbourhoods of Athens
The award, presented annually since 1999, focuses on non-fiction writing, ‘bringing the best in intelligent reflection on the world to its new readers’
REVIEW BY SIMON BAKER Anyone with more than a passing interest in the history of the SAS may well be familiar with the regiment’s genesis myth: in 1941, a tall Commando called David Stirling, in hospital after a nasty parachute…
I was conscious of being several decades older than most of the other graduates, but as Rosemary Cramp said when I told her about my plans, ‘Nobody under 50 should study for a PhD because they don’t have enough experience to make an original contribution.’
Review by Diana Bentley. Few episodes in antiquity are more gripping than the epic struggle for political supremacy and survival between Octavian, heir of Julius Caesar; his rival, politician and general Mark Antony; and Cleopatra, ruler of Egypt. In his…
Historian Janina Ramirez tells Diana Bentley about her latest work delving into stories of celebrated archaeological discoveries and the people behind them, and of the medieval women all-too-often overlooked by history.
A letter in the Penn Museum archives sets Richard Hodges and Alessandro Pezzati on the trail of a memorable moment in the pioneering days of archaeological broadcasting.
With the Florence Nightingale Museum having recently reopened, Carly Hilts dropped by to learn more about the life, legacy, and legend of the ‘Lady with the Lamp’.
Review by Christopher Catling. Reading this book reminds me of the University of London’s Warburg Institute Library, which has a unique classification system designed by the library’s founder, Aby Warburg (1866-1929), to encourage serendipitous discovery: looking for one book, your…
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...
The early stages of Benediction (written and directed by Terence Davies) deal with this story in a very cursory way. There is no treatment of Sassoon (Jack Lowden) as a war hero. The distant conflict is covered by extremely poor-quality black-and-white archive.
One of the most tragic consequences of the First World War was the idea and the reality of ‘the missing’. All earlier wars had victims of which no trace was ever found, but the world’s first global industrialised conflict created…
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…
Professor Charles Higham will be a familiar figure to CWA readers. Not only does he write a regular column for the magazine, but he is also a world authority on the archaeology of Southeast Asia. When COVID shut down international…
Almost half a century before the ownership of slaves was finally outlawed across most of the British empire, a devout young student at St John’s College, Cambridge, entered an essay competition and won first prize. That 1785 essay – entitled…
These days, John Craxton is perhaps best known for the vibrant, sun-drenched illustrations he produced as book jackets for his close friend, the travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor. As a young painter in the 1940s, however, he was a leading figure in the post-war British art scene, alongside Graham Sutherland, John Piper and Lucian Freud.
The artist John Craxton had a close relationship with archaeology. It began in his early years in England, where he encountered excavations of Roman mosaics, medieval churches, and an idiosyncratic museum. But, above all, it was the art of Greece that he longed for, as Ian Collins explains.
Few figures in history have seen their reputation rise and fall quite like Domitian (AD 51-96). The third and final ruler of the dynasty founded in AD 69 by his father Vespasian, he became one of the longest-serving emperors, praised during his 15-year reign as a living god, but later remembered as corrupt, murderous and deeply depraved.
Augustus was the first Roman emperor. When did he come to power?
“Our present Hispanic-Peruvian civilisation cannot stand except on an indigenous pedestal.”
Beyond Notability is a new project examining the role that women played in archaeology, history, and heritage in Britain between 1870 and 1950. The three-year £929,729 research project is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and led by the Institute of Classical Studies at the University of London’s School of Advanced Study, in partnership with the Society of Antiquaries of London and the University of Southampton Digital Humanities.
Oliver Cromwell was the pivotal figure of the English Revolution. He emerged from relative obscurity to become Parliament’s greatest commander of cavalry in the Civil War, the leader of the radical wing of the mainstream revolutionary movement, and, eventually, the…
Suetonius’ Lives of the Caesars offers a series of sensational biographies of Roman rulers from Julius Caesar to Domitian, highlighting moments of depravity, viciousness, scheming, and excess.
His work included ethnographic research into different forms of shipbuilding, especially the construction of vessels without the use of metal fasteners, which took Seán to sites near and far, from the west coast of Ireland to the east coast of India.
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
Which Egyptian leader is reputed to have been Nefertiti's son-in-law?
In the autumn of 1939, after they signed a pact agreeing to carve up Poland, Hitler and Stalin were depicted in a cartoon as a newly wed couple walking down the aisle. Hand in hand, with Stalin the bride and…
MHM Editor Neil Faulkner recalls one of the great works of military history.
Self-taught archaeologist John Pull made discoveries of national significance in the South Downs around Worthing, but his humble origins saw him sidelined by more privileged professional peers. With a recently extended exhibition at Worthing Museum and Art Gallery bringing his story back into the spotlight almost 100 years after his investigations began, Current Archaeology's Carly Hilts visited to find out more.