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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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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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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Many of us have had need to wrap presents in the last few weeks, but maybe only some of us waited until early this morning on December 25 to start wrapping their children’s gifts. (Yours truly, ahem). The discipline of intentionally folding paper into different shapes is known as origami because this practiced flourished
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
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
You are looking at one of the most puzzled over artistic products of Early Medieval Britain — it is one panel of a rectangular container known as the Franks Casket. Made in 7th-century Northumbria in northern England, it has a fascinating hodgepodge of Germanic/Celtic/Ancient Roman influences, and scholars still debate the exact meanings of the
In recognition of St Valentine’s Day, I thought I had better write about demon sex in the Middle Ages. And Church theologians thought this actually happened, where demons could appear to a woman and have sex with her, making her pregnant. The character Merlin from Medieval Arthurian legend, was born from a woman and
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Here are three close up images from one of the most famous Chinese ink paintings ever created, the _Nine Dragons_, by Chen Rong. Chen Rong produced this handscroll in 1244, and it is massive — over ten meters long! (32 feet) The aesthetic qualities are immediately grasped even if you don’t know a darn
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Let’s talk about apotheoses in domes in art, shall we? This term comes from Ancient Greek and means “to make into a God.” Some heroes of Classical myths ended up ascending into the heavens to be with the other Olympians, such as Hercules. In Ancient Rome, emperors beloved by the Senate could be given the
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The grumpy faces you see here belong to invaders captured by the Pharaoh Ramses III (about 1186-1154 BCE). Many scholars have interpreted these men as the infamous “Sea Peoples,” about whom little is known for certain, but to whom historians have attributed the collapse of many civilizations in the Bronze Age. The Sea Peoples
You’re looking at an 18th-century illustration from one Marie-Jeanne Valet, aka “the Amazon”, aka “the Maid of Gévandan”, showing her getting attacked by a monstrous creature. The 19- or 20- year old Marie got these creds for having successfully fought off the enormous and bloodthirsty animal, which was something that as many as 100 people
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After the Roman Empire collapsed in Western Europe, the literature that had flourished went into abeyance. For instance, the entire genre of playwriting just went out of existence. It was finally a tenth-century woman named Roswitha of Gandersheim who revived this art. Her plays today read charmingly clunky, like fourth-grade presentations. As with much about
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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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The Ancient Greeks were right to have the story of how Prometheus brought fire to the human race front-and-center in their mythology. Fire is an amazing thing — most vertebrates flee from it when it happens in the natural world. But we humans learned to control it, and that revolutionized our existence. The control of
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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
This grizzly painting of two polar bears rending apart the remains of human corpses with a shipwreck in the background is the subject of a fascinating urban legend. Called _Man Proposes, God Disposes_, it was painted by artist Edwin Landseer in 1864 to depict the tragic failure of Englishman Sir John Franklin’s Arctic expedition 19
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This painting by the Early Modern European artist Pieter Brueghel the Younger shows a line of dancers, but they don’t look like they are having that much fun — for instance, the two women in the center are staring off into space, not paying attention to the musicians in their path. And that’s because they
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