Archaeology · The East · Observations · Science · Society · Humour
By right of the first. When political regimes justify their claims to some territory by length of tenure, one can always object that somebody other than them was there first. And somebody other than those first ones. And than them, too. If one is so inclined, one may go all
The East · Monarchies · Observations · Heritage · Society · Humour
The Fund for the Royal Private Collections commissioned an appraisal of roughly a thousand objects. Under suspicion are a golden amulet necklace and historical weapons from Indonesia, acquired in the colonial era. I can just picture how the Dutch East India Company would have laughed at so modest a discovery.
NB! · The East · Monarchies · Observations
The Mongol Empire and the Roman Empire. The former collapsed overnight; the latter lasted from the end of the Second Punic War until 1453.
Archaeology · The East · Art · Museums
The photograph shows a fragment of a relief of the 2nd century BC from Aphrodisias. It is now kept in the Istanbul Archaeological Museum. The relief depicts giants with serpent bodies in place of legs. This iconography appears in the Hellenistic period and stresses the giants' link with the
The East · Science · Society · People
In 2022 a Swiss programmer from Lausanne, Solal Pirelli, while going through the proceedings of conferences held under the aegis of the Association for Computing Machinery, discovered systematic anomalies in volumes published under the chairmanship of the Jordanian computer scientist Shadi Aljawarneh of the Jordan University of Science and Technology.
Archaeology · Archive · The East · Museums · Science
The National Museum of Denmark has held a collection of some five-thousand-year-old clay tablets from Mesopotamia and Syria in storage for about a hundred years. Since the material is cuneiform, nobody took the tablets seriously. Until the Hidden Treasures project of the University of Copenhagen and the
The East · London · Museums · Society
On a panel about the Hyksos people of the 17th–16th centuries BC, the wording Palestinian descent has been replaced with Canaanite descent, and similar amendments have been made in the gallery of Egyptian sculpture. The changes followed a letter from the British lobby group UK Lawyers for Israel, which
Aristocracy · The East · Monarchies · Mores · People
The title "Queen of the Hellenes", rather than "Queen of Greece", is not diplomatic courtesy but a political declaration. Olga Konstantinovna Romanova was a granddaughter of Nicholas I and a daughter of Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolayevich. In 1867, at the age of sixteen, she married King
Archaeology · Faith · The East · Museums · Heritage
In 1625, in the environs of Xi'an, the ancient capital of Tang China, Jesuit monks discovered beneath creepers and a layer of earth a stone stele almost three metres high, bearing a text in Chinese with Syriac insertions. The stele is dated to 781. The inscription described the
Archive · The East · Books · Moscow · Science
The Fundamental Library of INION RAS has opened trial access to the largest archive of digitised Chinese newspapers, the Contemporary Chinese Newspaper Full-Text Database, to a reprint database of the social sciences, and to Artron, with its albums and images on art. Until 30 June all of this may
Archaeology · The East · Science · Nature
On the hills of Shulaveri and Gadachrili in Georgia, archaeologists led by David Lordkipanidze have found charred grains, impressions of ears in mudbricks and seeds of wild goat grass some eight thousand years old. A laboratory at the Weizmann Institute has confirmed the radiocarbon dating: 5800-6000 BC. The point
Archive · Faith · The East · Society · People
After he burned the portrait of Lenin, he was arrested, beaten and declared mentally ill, then dispatched for compulsory treatment to a psychiatric hospital. He died in 1995 and was later canonised as a saint.