Pharaoh Khasekhemwy ruled ancient Egypt during the 2nd Dynasty, in the 27th century BCE, between 2727 and 2700 BCE. He unified Upper and Lower Egypt after a period of turmoil and established his capital in Hierakonpolis, in the southern region of the country. Khasekhemwy was the first Egyptian pharaoh known to have commissioned statues of […]
Statues
Posted inArt, Travel
The Talking Statues of Rome
Statues don’t talk, evidently, and they never have, except when some clever priest of Antiquity used a hollow in the stone to deliver whatever message he was interested in. But that’s not the case we’ll discuss today with the statue parlanti, or talking statues, because these expressed themselves in writing. They are a series of […]
Posted inAntiquity, Art
Farnese Atlas, the First Known Representation of the Celestial Sphere
Atlas was one of the Titans in Greek mythology, son of Iapetus and the Oceanid Clymene, and brother of Prometheus. After the war against the Olympian gods, Zeus condemned him to hold up the vault of the sky (or celestial sphere) on his shoulders for all eternity. Herodotus claimed that Atlas (also known as Atlante) […]
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 […]
