Displaying items by tag: ancient

The world's oldest bible is among 200 objects tracing Egypt's religious evolution in an exhibition at London's British Museum, which opens Friday and spans the 1,200 years since Cleopatra's death.

Titled "Egypt: faith after the pharaohs", the exhibition covers 12 centuries, from the country's integration into the Roman Empire in 30 BC to the fall of the Islamic Fatimid dynasty in 1171.

The burgeoning list of appalling acts by ISIS has grown even longer: The Islamic extremist group has blown up a nearly 2,000-year-old temple in the historic ruins of Palmyra, Syria.

UNESCO, the United Nations cultural organization, called the destruction of the Temple of Baalshamin a "war crime."

Maamoun Abdulkarim, Syria's director-general of antiquities and museums, said Sunday that sources in Palmyra informed him that ISIS members rigged the temple with large quantities of explosives and detonated them.

A trove of 2,000 delicate gold spirals that date back to the Bronze Age was recently discovered in Denmark -- and archaeologists are trying to figure out what the ancient coils were used for.

The 3,000-year-old spirals are made of thin, flattened gold wire and were found during an excavation in the town of Boeslunde, on the Danish island of Zealand.

Each tightly wound coil is about one inch long. All together, the gold spirals weigh more than half a pound.

Police have arrested two curators of a new Cairo museum for allegedly stealing ancient artifacts and replacing them with replicas, the antiquities ministry said on Wednesday.

Looting of the country's cultural heritage has increased since the popular uprising that ousted Hosni Mubarak in 2011 and during the years of political turmoil that followed.

Last Saturday, a hapless museum-goer was taking in the ancient exhibits at the Heraklion Archaeological Museum on the Greek island of Crete, when she suddenly tripped and fell. In doing so she, grabbed onto a 4,000 year-old Minoan vase to break her fall and shamefully smashed the prehistoric artifact, the "Daily Mail" reports.

The Greek Culture Ministry said the culprit suffered minor injuries to her legs, while the vase on the other hand, was completely destroyed. Restorers at the institution are optimistic, however.

A selection of 100 works from the nearly 10,000 acquired during the tenure of the Shelby White and Leon Levy Director of the Brooklyn Museum, Arnold Lehman, is being presented in his honor on the occasion of his retirement in the summer of 2015. "Diverse Works: Director’s Choice, 1997–2015," on view through August 2, 2015, includes works in a wide range of media from every corner of the globe. Spanning many centuries, the exhibition brings together important objects from all of the Museum’s collecting areas.

The selections range from an ancient Chinese mythical carved figure (5th–3rd century b.c.e.) to contemporary works by Kiki Smith and Chuck Close, and a mixed-media collage (2013) in a customized frame from the American artist Rashaad Newsome.

This weekend marked the reopening of Pompeii's Villa of Mysteries after two years and €900,000 ($973,600) worth of careful restorations to the building's ancient frescoes and mosaics.

The villa is one of the best-preserved homes in Pompeii, which was buried in the ashes of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79, and remained lost until its excavation in 1748. The Villa of Mysteries is best-known for its brightly-colored red and orange paintings of life-size figures, believed to depict the initiation rights of the cult of Dionysus, the wine god.

A new museum in Washington will showcase a wide variety of art, history and culture through ancient textiles and a significant collection on the history of the nation's capital — while also signaling a major expansion in the arts for George Washington University.

The university opened the $33 million complex Saturday on its downtown campus where two museums will share one facility. The six-story complex is the new home for Washington's 90-year-old Textile Museum and its collection of 19,000 artifacts, along with a new museum featuring maps and documents tracing the capital city's history.

Back in the day, Egyptians had a lot of gods. To those of us living in the modern era without degrees in archaeology, their names are perhaps most familiar from pop schlock like “Raiders of the Lost Ark” making hay with Egypt-y stuff: Ra, Geb, Shu, Osiris, Set, et cetera.

But then there was Amun. In ancient Egyptian mythology — we’re talking 3,000 years ago here — Amun was the king of the gods: the Jupiter, the Zeus, the Odin, the Big Kahuna.

Amun was important enough to have a temple — that goes without saying. But Amun was so important that the guardian of that temple, a nobleman named Amenhotep, got a fancy tomb. And photographs of that tomb have just been released by Egypt’s antiquities ministry.

An ancient statuette and an 18th-century painting that were stolen from Italy decades ago have been returned to its government after turning up in New York.

U.S. prosecutors and the FBI gave the artworks to an Italian official Tuesday.

The painting of “The Holy Trinity Appearing to Saint Clement” is attributed to the renowned Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, also called Giambattista Tiepolo. It disappeared from a Turin home in 1982.