Three elongated terracotta amulets lying side by side on a light background.

NB! · Archaeology · The East · Humour

Three terracotta phallic amulets found during excavations at Omrit in northern Israel

Three terracotta penis amulets have been found at excavations in Omrit in northern Israel. A fairly ordinary find for ancient Rome, with its obsession with phallic imagery, which dominated public life

Stone fragment with traces of soil lying on white cloth

NB! · Archaeology · The East · Humour

A small find beside a large pharaonic block unearthed nearby

Still, a mite like this is hardly likely to cause a sensation when a whole pharaonic slab is being hauled out of the ground next door. What is one to do?

Workers and onlookers stand in mud around an excavator bucket holding a silt-covered stone find.

NB! · Archaeology · The East · Observations · People

An 80-centimetre bust of Seti II with a cartouche found near the Ramesses colossus

An 80-centimetre bust of Seti II has been found close to the Ramesses. A rather interesting character, and the sculpture is labelled with his cartouche, unlike the giant, within an 8-metre radius of whom there is not a single inscription

A huge stone head of a statue lies on the ground, with men and women standing around it on a dug-up site.

NB! · Archaeology · The East

Giant statue found in Heliopolis is attributed to Ramesses II by its location

A giant statue of Ramesses II was found in Heliopolis today. That is to say, the sculpture itself bears no indication of whom it depicts, but it was found opposite the entrance to the tomb of Ramesses, from which it was concluded whose it is

NB! · Faith · The East · Nature · Ethnography

It is said that the restless souls of the samurai wander the seabed in the form of heikegani crabs, whose shells bear the imprinted faces of warriors

NB! · Archive · The East · Science

The Constellation of Aquila from an Eleventh-Century Astronomical Handbook, in Honour of Galileo's Birthday, 453 Years Ago

Coming Up · Archaeology · The East · Museums · Education · Saint Petersburg

Hermitage lecture hall holds lecture series on Khorezm, next one on 12 February

The Hermitage Lecture Hall has launched a lecture series, “The Desert Castles of Khorezm”. Those of you in Saint Petersburg, do drop in for a cup of tea. Khorezm is a millennia-old Asian oasis, where excavations have uncovered settlements lost in the sands, irrigation works and necropolises. The next

NB! · Faith · The East · Pop Culture · Ethnography

The image of the demon Pazuzu (or simply Zu) from ancient Assyria and Babylon is also in active use in modern culture

NB! · The East · Books · Education

It is held that on 17 January 1492

It is held that on 17 January 1492 the first textbook of modern grammar was presented to Isabella I. Yet the first such textbook, though Arabic rather than Spanish, had been written as early as the 8th century by the Persian Sibawayh

The East · Books · Monarchies · Mores

Porphyrogenitus status in Byzantium and its role in succession and marriages

The lines "and before the younger capital old Moscow paled, as before a new empress the porphyry-clad widow" also mention a derivative of the Ancient Greek πορφυρα, πορφυρεος, "purple, crimson, dark red" The porphyra is an imperial mantle of a characteristic crimson colour. Oddly enough,

Coat of arms with a red and blue shield, count's coronet, ermine mantle and a soldier in a tricorne holding it, with a green turban lying beside.

NB! · Aristocracy · The East · Observations

Coat of arms of the Counts Kamensky with one supporter and an overturned Turkish turban

The only coat of arms in Russian heraldry with a single supporter belongs to Count Kamensky; where the second supporter should be, there is an overturned Turkish turban. Very witty, I think

NB! · Faith · The East · Ethnography

This sleeve badge with a "swastika" was worn by commanders of the Kalmyk units of the Red Army's South-Eastern Front in 1918-20

This sleeve badge with a "swastika" was worn by commanders of the Kalmyk units of the Red Army's South-Eastern Front in 1918-20. Among Buddhists the symbol is called «lungtn, lungta», "whirlwind, vital energy"