Yesterday I wrote a post about a religious boundary line from Ancient Rome — one that was powerful enough to halt even state-sponsored violence within its borders. And today, here is another: this time, from the Medieval cathedral of Durham, England. This is the original “Sanctuary Knocker,” cast in bronze in 1155. As _The […]
The Durham Sanctuary Knocker Read More »
This skeleton is a photo montage of a very decorated burial. The man was between 35-45 years old when he died, but his remains date back to about 34,000 years ago — one of the earliest human interments in the historical record. This man’s grave, found in the region of Sunghir, Russia, reflects a vastly
The Paleolithic Burial in Sunghir Read More »
Here you see La Posada, constructed in 1929 in Winslow Arizona — the last of the Fred Harvey Hotels still in operation. The Fred Harvey Company’s restaurants and hotels shaped the architectural landscape and culture of the American Southwest — packaging the American Indian, Spanish Mission Revival, and US cowboy culture for middle-class tourism. And
I love how scientific technologies are helping us understand the earliest millennia of human history ever better. This drawing, for instance, features an artistic re-creation of skull fragments dated in 2017 that have helped to overturn our understanding of human evolution. Basic questions, such as “how long have Homo Sapiens been around?” And “where
Appearances of Homo Sapiens Read More »
Martin Luther King famously quipped “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice”. That arc sure does feel like it’s taking its time, but this man temporarily bent it a little narrower — much like he used to bend iron horseshoes with his hands. This is Joe Greenstein, a
This is a Sheela-na-gig: a type of statue or carving found on European Christian buildings from the Central Middle Ages showing a naked woman overtly displaying her vulva. Whatever messages they were intended to make — fertility blessing, pagan remnant, or grotesque ridicule — contrasted with the high value of female virginity promoted by the
This is a Late Roman mosaic of a peacock, probably from north Africa. When the Roman state withdrew its armies and state apparatus from Britain in the late fourth century, the peacocks that had dotted the wealthy estates of the Roman aristocracy went away as well. But we would be grossly mislead to imagine that
You are looking at an artist’s rendition of a device known as “the staff of al-Tusi” which sounds like a magical weapon straight out of Tolkien but in fact was a genius scientific tool made by one of the most important mathematicians in history. Sharaf al-Din al-Muzaffar al-Tusi (c. 1135-1213) lived in various cities
The Linear Astrolabe of al-Tusi Read More »
It’s pleasant, from where I write this post in my ice-bitten and wintery grey state of Pennsylvania, to look at this lovely plant. Here is _Indigofera tinctoria_ the most important plant to make the dye colored indigo — a color that meant beauty to some, but misery to many others. Indigo is one of
The purple color of this Victorian dress testifies to the discovery of “mauve,” the world’s first synthetic dye. And it was a really, really big deal. The color was produced serendipitously by a brilliant 18-year old named William Henry Perkin in 1856, who didn’t start out his career path to become the millionaire founder
The Discovery of Mauve Read More »
Might I introduce to you Monsieurs and/or Madames skulls “D 111” and “D 112”? For such boring names, these heads – carefully plastered, tended to (de-mantibled), and decorated (check out the eye shells) — are some of the best evidence we have for how some early cultures thought about death, ancestor worship, and property.
Neolithic Death Rights Read More »
This fleshy female figure, found facing frontal with felines (haha say that ten times fast) comes from one of the earliest human civilizations that developed agriculture, the Neolithic settlement of Çatalhöyük. The ruins are wonders, spanning thousands of years from 7,500-6,400 BCE, built up layer upon layer of 18 levels. Çatalhöyük gives lots of evidence
This is a book that of which I am not a fan. _The Alphabet Versus the Goddess_, by Leonard Shlain, argues that the development of the written word allowed patriarchy to flourish. Sigh. Shlain’s background was in surgery, and the premise of his thesis is rooted in physical claims. “Alphabet literacy,” he asserts, gains
The Alphabet Versus the Goddess Read More »
Based on the following description, whom do you think I might be describing?:. This man lived during the first century of the Roman Empire. According to ancient sources, he was born to a woman who was visited by a supernatural being who told her that she would conceive a divine son. As the child
This sphinx with doodles on its back is way cooler than it looks. At 23.7 cm/9.3 inches, it’s not much larger than a paperweight. But it contains a key to understanding the invention of the alphabet, one of the most significant technologies humans ever developed. Dating to about 1800 BCE at an Ancient Egyptian
In Medieval Europe, horses were highly valued animals, and great amounts of resources went into their care and training. Horses, like the one shown in this miniature painting (c. 1200-1210), would have mainly belonged to the aristocracy, who prized them not only for their labor, but their use in battle. Sources show that nobles
This statuette of a nursing mother having her hair done captures an ordinary moment of a civilization long gone by. Dating between 1981-1500 BCE, it comes from the world’s oldest urban civilizations in Ancient Mesopotamia. It was in among peoples in this era that slavery was first documented. And among the first types of people
The Slaves of Mesopotamia Read More »
The way Ancient Romans treated their dogs mirrored the social relationships among Roman people, and this was at times horrific, and at times truly creepy. As Robin Fleming presents in her recent lecture “Dogsbodies and Dogs’ Bodies: A Social and Cultural History of Roman Britain’s Dogs and People,” Ancient Roman elites kept pet dogs,
Roman Children and Roman Dogs Read More »
Ancient Romans were so used to human brutality and violence that they took its existence for granted. Whether the violence was directed by slave owners to their human property, on display at the regular games and gladiator matches, or observed at the very public slaughtering of animals for religious sacrificial purposes, it was normalized.
Ancient Romans and Animal Brutality Read More »
This post is three days past the memorial day of the person featured here, Saint Agatha of Sicily. She’s one of my favorite regulars in the history of Christian artwork — right along the arrows all over St Sebastian and St Lucy with her eyeballs or Catherine of Alexandria with her wheel or John with
Saint Agatha of Sicily Read More »
