The Swiss past with a modern twist. Follow the flow of the rivers Sihl and Limmat into downtown Zurich, and you will arrive at a scenic fork in the water. Here is the home of the country’s newest cultural attraction: Archaeology in Switzerland, the first permanent exhibition to take up residence in the recently opened […]
Category: Museum
Turin’s Egyptian Museum
Nadia Durrani and Andrew Selkirk visit Turin’s transformed Museo Egizio. When Turin’s Egyptian Museum (Museo Egizio) was opened in 1824, the hieroglyphic codecracker Jean-François Champollion declared that now ‘The path to Memphis and Thebes passes through Turin’. Yet, by the turn of the current millennium, few visited: its displays and facilities were outdated and cramped, […]
Sicilian splendours
Sicily, one of the world’s great crossroads of culture, is the subject of the British Museum’s latest must-see exhibition, Sicily: Culture and Conquest. Curators Dirk Booms and Peter Higgs take us behind the scenes, telling the story using five of their favourite objects from the displays. Sicily sits in the centre of the Mediterranean, its […]
Germanicia Mosaics
Aysegul Gurgezoglu Tuzun visits Kahramanmaraş Archaeological Museum in Turkey Germanicia, beneath the modern city of Kahramanmaraş in southern Turkey, played host to many civilisations during a long and illustrious lifetime that stretches back to the Stone Age. Hittites, Urartians, Assyrians, Persians, Macedonians, and Seleucan kings have all ruled here, each conquering and renaming this important city, […]
Bogotá’s Gold Rush
Modern Colombia boasts a treasure trove of ancient sites, including the mountain city of Ciudad Perdida (see CWA 53), the megalithic sculptures at San Agustín, and the burial chambers of Tierradentro. The country’s star attraction, though, is Bogotá’s Museo del Oro – often cited as one of South America’s greatest museums, and home to more […]
Museum: Smithsonian Institute
Ceramics of the Ancestors Central America’s ancient past at the Smithsonian Institution By 1500 BC, the inhabitants of Central America had settled in large villages. This more sedentary lifestyle and the development of maize farming that came with it allowed rapid population growth, and the evolution of complex and sophisticated forms of organisation, religion, and art. […]
Life and Death in Pompeii and Herculaneum: Ordinary people in extraordinary times
What was life like in Roman Empire? The new exhibition at the British Museum will give visitors a unique opportunity to find out. Curator Paul Roberts explains his ambitious project to recreate a typical 1st century AD house and garden, bringing a slice of Pompeii and Herculaneum to London.
Ice Age art at the British Museum
Perhaps one of the most exquisite works of art in the world today is that created by a man or woman about 13,000 years ago. Skilfully carved from the tip of a mammoth tusk, it depicts two reindeer swimming one behind the other and is naturalistic, detailed, and charmingly tender. It was found at Montastruc, […]
Meet the Vikings: at the National Museum of Scotland
The stereotypical Viking of popular culture is a marauding raider in a horned helmet, but the archaeological record provides a much more nuanced view. Vikings!, a touring exhibition drawing on the collections of the Swedish History Museum in Stockholm, explores some of these ideas, showing the inhabitants of Medieval Scandinavia not just as warriors, but […]
Nomads and Networks at the Smithsonian Institute
Recent excavations at Iron Age kurgans (burial mounds) in eastern Kazakhstan have uncovered spectacular artefacts preserved beneath the permafrost. Once belonging to elite members of the nomadic communities who inhabited the Eurasian steppes in the 1st millennium BC, these objects bear witness to far-reaching networks of communication and cultural exchange extending across Central Asia and […]
Spilling the beans on BRONZE … coming soon to the Royal Academy
The Royal Academy is planning a spectacular and innovative new exhibition that will bring together an eclectic collection of bronze artefacts spanning the world and time. Simply called Bronze, it will display more than 150 rare and precious works of art, from the 14th century BC Trundholm Chariot of the Sun – on special loan […]
Artefact: Sarcophagus of Seti I
This magnificent alabaster sarcophagus comes from the tomb of the 19th Dynasty pharaoh Seti I. It was discovered in 1817 by Giovanni Belzoni, a flamboyant Italian Egyptologist – and former barber, circus performer, and hydrologist. Belzoni discovered the intricately carved coffin during his excavation of Tomb KV17 in ancient Thebes, now known as the Valley […]
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