The scholar-elite class of dynastic China were not always engrossed in studying or affairs of state. This gourd with ivory-carved lid held live crickets, who were set to fight in staged cricket matches for the amusement of the Chinese intelligentsia. From 19th-century Qing China, the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
The Great Pyramid of Giza is almost unfathomably old, but new information about its construction gets published with such regularity that it’s worthy of a…