In Province, France, some amazing ruins from Ancient Rome provide testimony to the wealth and engineering skills the empire’s elites commanded. The Pont-du-Gard still exists as part of the once-enormous aqueduct that brought water 50 kilometers away into the town of Nîmes. Built around 50 CE, it had to have an extremely low gradient to […]
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Romanesque architecture (dating from about 1050 on) is my favorite style of them all. Romanesque buildings are rare, their interiors are shadowed and their stone heaviness is evocative and mysterious, and the sculptures are whimsical. The latter quality is clearly evident in a tiny church from the 13th century Ardeche village of Chambonas. This church,
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The Phaistos Disk has resisted scholarly attempts at translation for over a century, illustrating the ways that cryptography operates exactly the opposite of the “Indiana Jones” method: no flash of laterally thinking insight will work here. Dating from about 1700 BCE, the Phaistos Disk was found on the Island of Crete, and is made of
Women’s interest in birth control can be traced back in time as far as historical records permit. This Ancient Egyptian condom might date from the Pharaoh Tutankhamun. Not shown – because we only have a description in the Kahun Medical Papyrus from 1825 BCE – is a pessary (a mixture of substances inserted into the
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Behold the Cairo Toe, the earliest surviving prosthesis ever made. About 3,000 years ago in an Ancient Egyptian chamber lying west of Luxor, Egypt, a high-status woman was buried, and accompanying her remains was an artificial big toe made of leather and wood to fill in for a missing digit. The site was at Sheikh
This cast of a Mesopotamian ruler dating from 2300-2000 BCE is a fine example of the artistic skill of some of the world’s earliest metallurgists. Usually we think of the Bronze Age, when people first started metalworking, as marked by the mixture of copper with tin — a classic combination which produced a pliable, hard,
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Although my posts for the next few weeks are mostly going to be repeats as the website gets built, I couldn’t help but write up this story about willow tree bark and aspirin. Dear reader, you, like me, may have been under the impression that for millennia, people in different parts of the world relied
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At first glance, these small statuettes seem to have little in common with each other. The one on the left is an Ancient Roman copy of Poseidon from the first or second century, originally made by the Greek artist Lysippos in the 3rd century BCE. The one on the right is a sandstone carving of
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The Temple of Dendur is a must-see in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Hundreds of tourists check out this Ancient Roman-era Egyptian building every day, where it stands in an enormous glass-walled room, surrounded by a huge moat of water evocative of the Nile River from whence it originally came. The
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Today (September 16, 2023) several students from Shippensburg University’s history department travelled with Dr. John Bloom and me to the Meadowcroft Rock Shelter, an American Indian site in eastern Pennsylvania. The first slides you see come from the sandstone overhang that made a natural roof for the Meadowcroft encampment, as well as the main area
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The New York City Metropolitan Museum of Art has a fantastic exhibition on the color of Ancient Greek statues right now. When we look at the statues of the Ancient Mediterranean today, we are familiar with the unadorned stone or bronze, like the sphinx from about 530 BCE featured here. However, a team of art
These figures painted in the Manda Guéli Cave in central Africa in prehistoric times show humans amidst animals they have domesticated. They illustrate the importance of pastoralism in human history, which isn’t just something that changed some people’s food supply (instead of foraged plants and animals, pastoralists focus on the nutrients from their domesticated beasts).
Pre-History Lactose Tolerance Read More »
Both birth control and abortion were common practices in the Ancient Mediterranean world. Although many examples of imperfect methods exist in our sources, (for instance, in the fourth century BCE Hyppocrates suggested that prostitutes wanting to abort should jump up and down, slamming their heels into their glutes) there were effective ways of ending or
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By the time Gaius Appuleius Diocles retired from chariot-racing at age 42, he had amassed the equivalent of $15 billion, becoming the highest-paid athlete of all time. This third-century mosaic shows a charioteer from the white team: Diocles, who lived in the second century, spent most of his career racing for the red team. Sources:
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The two pictures in this post seem to have nothing to do with each other, but they are connected by a surprising history: “white gold,” aka guano, i.e. bird excrement. This stuff once drove human cultures in these now depopulated areas. The first image shows the Atacama Desert of Chile, the driest non-polar desert in
My science feeds are abuzz with the story behind an article published this month of November 2022 in _Nature Ecology & Evolution_ that redates a human invention — deliberate cooking of food — to 780,000 years ago, long before Homo sapiens evolved. The species Homo erectus (see first image) is the likeliest human ancestor that
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Just last month, this stone slab from an Ancient Roman military camp in Britain was discovered. Historians have identified it as a board for the game called “Ludus Latrunculorum” or “the mercenary game” which we know about from other sources. The speculation is that it ran along the lines of “checkers.” It offers a glimpse
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The Heraea was an Ancient Greek holiday featuring sporting events with women participants. Done in honor of Hera, the goddess of fertility, the competitors raced each other for prizes. The runner featured here is a Spartan, and she wears the short tunic and one-shoulder garment typical for that city-state.
The women in these murals from the New Kingdom Era of Ancient Egypt 16th-11th centuries BCE are wearing perfume cones on their heads. Flowers and aromatic spices such as Jasmine and frankincense were cold-pressed into lard or beeswax. The cones would have been worn for special occasions, and would have slowly melted, making the cone-wearer’s
Perfume Cones from the New Kingdom Era of Ancient Egypt Read More »
An ancient bristlecone pine over 5,000 years old is the oldest living thing on earth (at least, as far as scientists could document in 2016). That means it was contemporary with the first urban civilization in Sumer! The tree grows in the White Mountains in California in the Inyo National Forest. The location of the
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