This lovely iron sword with its wood- and lacquer- decorated scabbard comes from the 2nd century BCE Han Dynasty, and well symbolizes its founding leader, Liu Bang, posthumously named Emperor Gaozu, “the High Founder”. The man who started a Chinese Dynasty that lasted over 400 years was born from a peasant lineage, making his success […]
VIKING HOARD ALERT! Not, like, the immanent threat of hoards of Vikings coming to invade, but the other sort of hoard — as in, the stashed treasures from Viking-age Scandinavia and Britain, buried for safekeeping but never reclaimed by their owners. Hundreds of such hoards have been discovered in modern times, many by amateur treasure-seekers
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This is a set of bone sewing needles found in the Cave of Courbet near Toulouse, France, dating to around 13,000 years ago. Trace the history of the sewing needle and you will trace one of the key technologies that enabled Homo sapiens to migrate around the planet, and to outlast our closest human relatives,
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This surrealist painting by Mariusz Lewandowski, called “demiurgos unmoved mover” shows a haloed figure standing outside of a frame which contains a scene of a vast sky and water tumbling over the lip of the picture — maybe the figure is just watching the image, or maybe they are actually tipping it. Either way, the
Paleo-anthropologists have recently analyzed the skeletons of two humans dating over 2,300 years ago from Ancient China which suggest that deliberate amputation of the limbs of one leg might have been done as a type of legal punishment. The skeletons came from the former Eastern Zhou Dynasty (771-256 BCE) near the modern city of Sanmenxia.
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In the US, Mother’s Day is this Sunday, so I thought it appropriate to introduce this fine specimen, representative of what many Paleo-anthropologists consider the earliest known mother of all hominids (including us Homo sapiens). This is the Ardipithecus ramidus, and she lived about 4.4 million years ago in what is now modern Ethiopia. Her
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Check out these Viking-era teeth, dating between 972 and 1025 CE. Discovered in 2009 in Dorset, England, they came from a burial pit of Scandinavian men who had all been decapitated after suffering violent deaths, as in, a mass execution (51 skulls were in the grave, and many of their accompanying bones were adjacent). These
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This is one of the coolest sources of Ancient Egyptian mythology, dealing with magical healing spells, the myth of the death and resurrection of the God Horus, and, most interesting from my perspective, the enormous power of the Goddess Isis. Dating from 380-342 BCE, the “Metternich Stela” has a hecking ton of hieroglyphs detailing magical
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One of the most fascinating monsters in human cultures is the ghoul — here, you see a particularly nasty one about to be done in by the hero Shah Namah in a 10th-century Persian manuscript. The legends of ghouls extend back in time to the pre-Islamic Arabian Peninsula, but have persisted into modern times, much
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Giants appear in many ancient mythologies, and the Bible is no different in this way. One specific origin story for Biblical giants comes from the book of Genesis, which explains how the nephilim came about (6:1-4): “When humankind began to multiply on the face of the earth and daughters were born to them, the sons
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Here’s the Devil from the movie _Spawn_ (1997), and he looks a lot like the demon Mavet (Canaanite Mot), who personified death in ancient Judaism. The role of demons in Jewish and Christian history changed during Biblical times. In the Ancient Mesopotamian world, the _daimons_ were originally not as evil as their eventual manifestations —
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Here is poet and painter William Blake’s “Angel of the Revelation”, illustrated between 1803-1805, and you might notice the giant, mostly naked (it was the Victoriano age) figure does not have wings. And this is because Biblical angels didn’t. (In the Abrahamic tradition, the winged Seraphim and Cherubim eventually were considered angels, but in the
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The Seraphim were terrifying Biblical monsters, even if contemporary Christianity imagines them as more benign angelic creatures. They appear in the Hebrew Bible (Christian Old Testament) in several places, and although English translations of the Hebrew “Seraphim” (singular “Seraph”) often appear only in the vision of the prophet Isaiah, in fact they are mentioned elsewhere
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One of the joys about cutting-edge studies that merge scientific data with the discipline of history is the chance to answer questions that we never thought we’d be able to. This photo of Greenland’s ice sheet gets at the way that climate scientists are trying to understand one of the most transformative aspects of earth
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This reconstruction of a Swedish woman from 7,000 years ago (using DNA as well as bone and archaeological burial remains) tells us she died when she was between 30-40 years old. Despite this relatively young age by modern standards, it is likely the female members of her community were healthier than many of her global
This is a photo of The Cave of Hands in Argentina, which is about 10,000 years old. The crowding of the hands is reflective of the way that humans for a long time have formed large communities. What is fascinating is that many anthropologists think they know just how large these average societies were. And
This statue of a worshipping man is from the third millennium BCE is from Ancient Sumeria, and I like the way his lips are pursed, almost like he has a half-smile. Judging his age by the long beard, I think his IRL corresponding figures would have had good reason to smile: they, unlike most other
The interwebs are all a-flutter this week over the pronoun identification of this Roman emperor, Elagabalus, né Marcus Aurelius Antoninus. The given name is confusing enough, being a pastiche of other famous Ancients, but historians are more confounded by other aspects of Elagabalus. As an article from last week’s _Guardian_ put it: “Was Roman emperor
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See the tiny flat rock out in the distance, supported by two vertical slabs? They made up part of a dolmen in Ardeche, France. These particular dolmens were structures created 3,000 years ago by neolithic peoples. They are megalithic tombs (meaning pre-historic and made of rock) and were originally much larger — their purpose was
The Chauvet Caves in Ardeche, France, contain some of the oldest artwork made by Homo sapiens. 36,000 years ago, during one of the last ice ages, the people who adorned Chauvet did so with extreme sophistication. They really thought about how viewers would perceive their paintings in light of the curvature of the cave walls
