The 2023 excavation at Italy’s Bagno Grande archaeological site revealed an Etruscan-era structure, a bilingual inscription, and a marble Apollo statue, confirming the area’s long-standing religious and healing purposes.
Sculpture
Posted inAncient Rome, Art
The Extraordinary Tomb of the Haterii, a Roman Family who Adorned it with Reliefs of the Monuments they Built
Located next to the ancient Via Labicana, about 8.4 kilometers southeast of Rome, the Tomb of the Haterii is one of the most beautifully decorated tombs that have survived from the Roman Empire. Built between 100 and 120 AD, it offers a fascinating insight into funerary art and customs of the early imperial period. The […]
Posted inAntiquity, Art
The Warrior of Capestrano: The Strange Iron Age Sculpture Representing the Second King of Rome
In September 1934, a farmer was tending to his fields in the municipality of Capestrano, in the Abruzzo region of Italy, when his tools came across fragments of stone that would soon reveal themselves to be part of a grand sculpture. After notifying the authorities, archaeological excavations began, uncovering one of the masterpieces of pre-Roman […]
Posted inArchaeology
Sculpted head of a warrior with serpent helmet found at Chichen Itza
Archaeologists working at the Maya archaeological site of Chichén Itzá in Yucatán, Mexico, have made an exciting new discovery. During ongoing excavations funded by Mexico’s Archaeological Zones Improvement Program (Promeza), the sculpted face of a warrior emerged among the ruins of Structure 3C11 in the area known as Temple 6 of Maudslay. The partially preserved […]
Posted inAncient Greece, Art
The Colossus of Dionysus and the kouroi of Flerio, Greek statues from the 6th century B.C. that remain unfinished in the quarries of Naxos.
The island of Naxos is the largest of the Cyclades in extension, famous and coveted since ancient times for its wealth and its white marble, with quarries exploited until today (only those of crystalline marble). As it happens in Egyptian quarries, where obelisks remain, or in those of Rapa Nui, with half-finished moai, in those […]
Posted inArchaeology, Art
The ancient sculptors of the stone heads and potbellies of Monte Alto, Guatemala, knew the magnetic properties of the rocks
Archaeologists discovered that ancient Mesoamerican sculptures from 2000 BC in Monte Alto, Guatemala, had deliberate magnetic properties, predating similar artifacts from Izapa, Mexico, dated 1500 BC.
Posted inArchaeology
Reliefs at the Hittite Sanctuary of Yazılıkaya Could Depict a Lunar Calendar
Yazılıkaya is a site about 3,200 years old believed to have played a significant religious role in the ancient Hittite Empire. According to a new theory, the reliefs found at the site may have served as a calendar to mark days, synodic months, and solar years. Yazılıkaya, which means carved rock in Turkish, is a […]
Posted inAntiquity, Art
The monumental rock relief excavated by the Hittites on Mount Sipylus more than 3,000 years ago
When he speaks of Laconia in the third book of his Description of Greece Pausanias comments that the inhabitants of Acriae boasted of having the oldest temple of the Mother Goddess in the Peloponnese. But immediately afterwards he mentions that the oldest image of that goddess is elsewhere: The people of Acriae say that this is the […]
Posted inAncient Egypt
Ibn Wahshiyya, the Nabataean who could have translated Egyptian hieroglyphs before Champollion
Today we are going to discover an almost unknown individual, a good representative from other times, who may have been the first to decipher the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs almost nine centuries earlier than is believed. We are referring to the Arab scholar Ibn Wahshiyya. In mid-September 1822, Jean-François Champollion managed to finish off the work […]
Posted inArt, Modern Era
How Galileo Galilei made calculations for the Statue of Philip IV in Madrid
Does a sculptor have to resort to mathematics to make a statue? Moreover, would he need a wise man like Galileo Galilei? Well, as incredible as it may seem, that happened in Madrid in the middle of the 17th century. Between 1634 and 1640 the Italian artist Pietro Tacca had to ask the famous sage […]
