Passionate about History

Relief depicting Thutmose III at Deir_el-Bahari courtesy of Wikimedia Commons contributor Hedwig Storch I have run a number of experiments using ChatGPT to analyze various aspects of ancient ...

http://passionateabouthistory.blogspot.com/2023/03/examining-achievements-of-thutmose-iii.html

During the early Bronze Age the Hatti, who were neither Semitic nor Indo-European, inhabited central Anatolia. They were actually distinct from the Hittite but as the Hittite expanded beginning a...

http://passionateabouthistory.blogspot.com/2021/07/the-storm-god-of-hatti-then-hittite.html

 Art historian Christopher L. C. E. Witcombe points out there is plenty of archaeological evidence to indicate that women occupied an important if not dominant position within the practice of Mi...

http://passionateabouthistory.blogspot.com/2021/07/were-women-dominant-in-minoan-society.html

 When the so-called "Griffin Warrior" was discovered near the Palace of Nestor in Pylos, the young man who died around 1500 BCE was buried with some 2,000 objects, including silver cups, beads m...

http://passionateabouthistory.blogspot.com/2021/06/mycenaean-gold-seal-rings-with-minoan.html

My husband and I have been watching the "Qin Empire Epic", a Chinese produced series, on Amazon Prime.  Although I can't always keep up with the subtitles (I can't read that fast from across the...

http://passionateabouthistory.blogspot.com/2021/05/changes-in-historical-perceptions-of.html

Machu Picchu and the Golden Empires of Peru featuring 192 Artifacts, Including the "most-impressive collection of Andean gold ever to travel the world", is coming to the Boca Raton Museum of Art,...

http://passionateabouthistory.blogspot.com/2021/05/machu-picchu-and-golden-empires-of-peru.html

Researchers using ultraviolet-visible spectroscopy have discovered ancient Mesopotamian art, like classical art of Greece and Rome, was often brightly colored although studies have shown the numb...

http://passionateabouthistory.blogspot.com/2021/05/the-use-of-color-on-early-mesopotamian.html

 Today's featured "Antiquities Alive" virtual exhibit - The first batch of images from my friend Allan Gluck of the "Mesopotamia: Civilization Begins" exhibit at the newly reopened Getty Villa:�...

http://passionateabouthistory.blogspot.com/2021/05/first-look-mesopotamia-civilization.html

 In 1981, archaeologists studying key farming developments proposed that farm communities adopted dairying sometime between 4,000 and 3,500 BCE and  began using livestock for more than just mea...

http://passionateabouthistory.blogspot.com/2021/05/neolithic-cheese-production.html

The Getty Villa has reopened and is now hosting the special exhibit "Mesopotamia: Civilization Begins."  Some of the objects are from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.  Others are on ...

http://passionateabouthistory.blogspot.com/2021/04/mesopotamia-civilization-begins-exhibit.html

In 2015, I had the opportunity to photograph artifacts in the Smithsonian's Sackler Gallery of Asian Art.  In it, I found this spectacular fragment of a gold breastplate dating to the Iron Age I...

http://passionateabouthistory.blogspot.com/2021/04/iron-age-iii-gold-cuirass-fragments.html

 This unusual vase shows a human head of which all but the area of the eyes, nose, and mouth is enclosed in the head of an animal. The softness of the pelt is indicated by the way in which it ti...

http://passionateabouthistory.blogspot.com/2021/02/spotted-cats-mythological-beasts-of.html

The Medes were an ancient Iranian people who spoke the Median language and who inhabited an area known as Media between western and northern Iran. Around the 11th century BCE, they occupied the m...

http://passionateabouthistory.blogspot.com/2021/02/pre-achaemenid-art-neo-assyrian-or.html

While I was researching the Cypriot ear spirals yesterday, I noticed this bronze bust of a priest with silver inlaid eyes dated from the 3rd - 4th century CE at the Miho Museum.  The museum iden...

http://passionateabouthistory.blogspot.com/2021/02/bust-of-priest-with-silver-inlaid-eyes.html

 According to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, spirals with ornate animal-head terminals are frequently found in Cypriot tombs of the Classical period. Terracotta and limestone votive statues ill...

http://passionateabouthistory.blogspot.com/2021/02/cypriot-gold-spiral-earrings-local.html

I've photographed a number of huge bronze cauldrons, including spectacular examples found in the Midas Mound Tumulus at Gordion in Turkey. But I had never given any thought as to how these huge v...

http://passionateabouthistory.blogspot.com/2021/02/wheeled-cauldron-stands.html

Most of the knowledge regarding Urartu comes from a series of clay tablets found among ancient Assyrian ruins.  They hold the reports from Assyrian intelligence agents that were sent to various ...

http://passionateabouthistory.blogspot.com/2021/02/more-urartian-art.html

Assyrian inscriptions of Shalmaneser I (c. 1274 BCE) first mention Uruartri as one of the states of Nairi, a loose confederation of small kingdoms and tribal states in the Armenian Highlands in t...

http://passionateabouthistory.blogspot.com/2021/02/part-of-urartian-throne-with-deity-on.html

Sasanian silver plates were usually hammered into shape and then decorated using a variety of complex techniques.  Gilding was often used to highlight the hunter, usually the king, and sometimes...

http://passionateabouthistory.blogspot.com/2021/02/sasanian-royal-gifts-of-silver.html

 Although the Hellenistic Egyptian historian Manetho portrayed the Hyksos invasion of Egypt during the Second Intermediate Period as violent and brutal, archaeology points to an Asiatic presence...

http://passionateabouthistory.blogspot.com/2021/02/the-hyksos-and-stag.html

From Syria, Mesopotamia, and Egypt in the south to Thrace, Anatolia, and the Caucasus in the north, and from regions as far west as mainland Greece all the way east to Iran, the great royal house...

http://passionateabouthistory.blogspot.com/2021/02/the-stag-god-of-ancient-near-east.html

Finally had a chance to watch "The Dig", about the discovery of the Sutton Hoo ship burial on Netflix last night.  I enjoyed it (despite what some critics said) and read up on it a little this m...

http://passionateabouthistory.blogspot.com/2021/02/the-dig-and-rdwald-of-east-anglia.html

The Tiwanaku (Tiahuanacu) Empire was a Pre-Columbian polity in western Bolivia based in the southern Lake Titicaca Basin.  Its capital, Tiwanaku, was founded around 110 CE during the Late Format...

http://passionateabouthistory.blogspot.com/2021/01/the-tiwanaku-tiahuanacu-empire.html

The Phoenicians as a politically, religiously, and perhaps even ethnically distinct entity on the Levantine coast emerged at the end of the Late Bronze Age about 1200 BCE, as one of the successor...

http://passionateabouthistory.blogspot.com/2021/01/phoenician-mortuary-practices-of.html

In May 1960 Swedish archaeologists discovered the earliest example of a beaten bronze cuirass at Dendra, dated to the end of the fifteenth century BCE (Late Helladic IIIA - about 1400 BCE). It fo...

http://passionateabouthistory.blogspot.com/2021/01/the-mycenaean-dendra-panoply.html