The deep red color you see here decorated the wall of an Ancient Roman aristocratic villa in the first century BCE. The color was known as vermilion, and it was made of the mineral cinnabar, precious to Ancient and Medieval peoples. They loved the hue they could get by mixing it with various bases. But […]
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There are so very many eccentric and grand homes built by early 20th-century millionaires, and they draw me like honey draws a fly. The exquisite pictures here all feature just one structure in the palace complex called the Quinta da Regalreira built by Antonio Augusto Carvalho Monteiro dating to 1904 — it is the “Initiation
This second-century BCE Etruscan urn shows the death of Actaeon. The myth was popular in the Ancient Mediterranean world and tells a story about a fated hunter, Actaeon, who gazed at the virginal Goddess Artemis/Diana. This forbidden act caused the Goddess to transform the man into a stag, and he was then devoured by his
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Here you see the Spider, one of the most important geoglyphs that form the Nazca Lines amid the arid coastal plain of southern Peru. The Nazca peoples constructed this and other shapes and lines between 500 BCE and 500 CE, in one of the world’s driest regions. Today the Nazca Lines are a UNESCO World
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In the second century of the Common Era, China’s Han Dynasty oversaw an unusually long period of peace and prosperity. Nonetheless, military conflicts punctuated the era, and often the elite aristocratic families were involved. The Wu Family Shrines document such events, and featured prominently in one of the stone chambers there, amidst many other bas-relief
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Early this morning (as in, from 2:30-4:30 a.m.) my part of the world was treated to a near-total lunar eclipse. The shadow of the earth crept across the full moon’s surface, eventually turning it a reddish color (due to the refraction of light through the Earth’s shadow). As anyone who has seen a lunar eclipse
“They will see that there is in it nothing more than Natural, and nomore than the necessary result of the Motions of the Sun and Moon.” — so wrote astronomer Edmond Halley about the solar eclipse that he predicted for 1715. For millennia, eclipses – especially solar eclipses — had been considered frightening events that
How we treat the dead reflects much about what the living believe. In the Ancient Mediterranean, pagan cultures considered the proper burial of the deceased to be of critical importance: otherwise, the dead person’s spirit would have a restless afterlife. On the other hand, the world of the living was to be kept separate from
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Chariot-racing was one of the most popular sporting events in Ancient Rome. Throngs of people (up to 250,000 in Rome’s Circus Maximus) would crowd the stands, supporting their favorite teams (marked by the colors blue, green, red, and white) with fervorous shouting and cheers. The charioteers were much admired, and although some drivers could make
In the United States today is the Thanksgiving holiday, and a common symbol (besides a turkey cross-dressing as a Pilgrim) is the cornucopia, or “Horn of Plenty”. This sounds like a magical item from the modern gaming world, but it goes back to Ancient Greek and Roman times. Here, for instance, is a fourth-century
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Pittsburgh’s unusual geography — with three rivers that conflate at different spots amidst steep hillsides — made it difficult for pedestrians to traverse. Starting in the 1870s, German immigrants started building funicular railcars to make getting around easier. Today only two of these remain, and the one featured here is the Duquesne Incline. Built
Pictured here is a circular plaque, commemorating the location of Fort Duquesne in 1774. Today not even ruins remain, but the location is memorable, lying at the tip of a spit of land called “the Point,” right at the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers in downtown Pittsburgh. As can be surmised from
The Mattress Museum of Contemporary art was started in Pittsburgh in 1977, when an old mattress factory was turned into an unusually immersive art experience. The rooms have installations that are intended to be viewed in their particular locations, and the various tableaus and rooms are a mixture of permanent and artist-in-residence exhibits. The
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Take a moment to ingest the various components of this Late Roman artistic scene, because they’re really weird. This is just one small part of an enormous (36’x23′) floor mosaic discovered just last year during the COVID lockdowns on an English farm in Rutland. The discovery is quite the find: first, the enormous room
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History geek that I am, I unsurprisingly find athletic activities with antique lineages highly compelling. But getting a handle on what many early sports were like is difficult because evidence is lacking, and this is certainly the case with capoeira. The painting you see here is “Capoeira or the Dance of War,” by Johann
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This painting documents one of the oldest stories ever recorded, and it’s all about how evil entered the world. And the blame goes straight onto women, and frankly it’s exhausting. _Eva Prima Pandora_, or “Eve the First Pandora”, done by Jean Cousins around 1550, conflates the stories of the Ancient Greek first mortal woman,
“The pishtacos would kidnap people and change them into tallow to sell them for soap,” reads this ghastly modern cartoon. Legends about the pishtacos as boogeymen have been around the Andean cultures of Peru and Bolivia since the 1600s. Traditionally depicted as a white man with a beard and blue or green eyes, the pishtaco
Yup, you are seeing what you think you are seeing: it’s a sex scene, and it comes from the Lupanar of Pompeii, the largest brothel discovered in the famous Ancient Roman city. “Lupanar” translates both as “brothel” and “wolf-den,” and another name for a prostitute is “lupa”. Calling a sex worker a wolf is
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These rocks from the northern shore of Lake Superior are from the dullest period in our planet’s history, apparently. Most of us humans of the early twenty-first millennium do not do well with being bored. Imagine, then, one billion years of it. From 1.8 to 800 million years ago, Earth’s life forms remained relatively
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Yesterday I did a post about the “boring billion”: a period of Earth’s history when very little changed. Today I offer the exact opposite, which is the most exciting two minutes in all of existence. And those in fact were the first two minutes of everything, at the start of the Big Bang. We
