Ancient art and art from antiquity and cultural treasures from the past

this is fucking beautiful when i had dreams of becoming a conservator this is what i was dreaming about

 

Never seen this before and it's so beautiful - the light! the shading! the empathy ! - and it's pretty damn old...

 

this is amazingly well preserved:





Oldest known book from the medieval age, unique in terms of the preservation. St Cuthberts Gospel. Over a thousand years old.

there an anglo-saxon exhibition starting in october at the BL where this will be. I might go, from further reading they have managed to amass quite a haul of rare and old stuff from the time. Also when reading about this: Apparently the orthodox church still produces jeweled binding books.


British Library acquires the St Cuthbert Gospel the earliest intact European book

edited for spelling

 

Just to preserve the link...
Prehistoric art hints at lost civilisation

Be interesting to see how this develops. Rhino's in India?

 

Indian rhinoceros - Wikipedia

 

Was really excited to see this a few weeks back. Essentially believed to be a Bronze Age star map for charting the sun's movements. It got dug up at the end of the nineties before going on walkabout and turning up in Switzerland where the state seized it. I find the idea of it remaining in use for a sustained period and it being added to and changed over the course of it's use really intriguing.
The Prehistoric Museum in Halle is excellent.It covers a pretty big sweep right the way with artifacts from Homo Erectus sites up to the Iron Age. And fucking massive pre-ice age elephant and mammoth skeletons.

 

Ha, I was just coming on here to post about this. Its amazing isn't it. So beautiful and representing some astounding scientific knowledge. The earliest definite representation of the cosmos known, dating to 1600BC.

It's a bronze disk of around 30 centimeters (12 in) diameter and a weight of 2.2 kilograms (4.9 lb), with a blue-green patina and inlaid with gold symbols. These are interpreted generally as a sun or full moon, a lunar crescent, and stars (including a cluster interpreted as the Pleiades). Two golden arcs along the sides, marking the angle between the solstices, were added later. A final addition was another arc at the bottom surrounded with multiple strokes (of uncertain meaning, variously interpreted as a Solar Barge with numerous oars, as the Milky Way, or as a rainbow).

The disk as preserved was developed in four stages (Meller 2004):

1. Initially the disk had thirty-two small round gold circles, a large circular plate, and a large crescent-shaped plate attached. The circular plate is interpreted as either the Sun or the full Moon, the crescent shape as the crescent Moon (or either the Sun or the Moon undergoing eclipse), and the dots as stars, with the cluster of seven dots likely representing the Pleiades.
2. At some later date, two arcs (constructed from gold of a different origin, as shown by its chemical impurities) were added at opposite edges of the disk. To make space for these arcs, one small circle was moved from the left side toward the center of the disk and two of the circles on the right were covered over, so that thirty remain visible. The two arcs span an angle of 82°, correctly indicating the angle between the positions of sunset at summer and winter solstice at the latitude of the Mittelberg (51°N). Given that the arcs relate to solar phenomena, it is likely the circular plate represents the Sun not the Moon.
3. The final addition was another arc at the bottom, the "sun boat", again made of gold from a different origin.
4. By the time the disk was buried it also had thirty-nine holes punched out around its perimeter, each approximately 3 mm in diameter.

 

I'm reading a book of essays by Rebecca Solnit at the moment, and she has a bit in about the sky in the Southwest of America. Apparently the folks there (I'd have to look it up again to remember who precisely) would use the angle of the rising and setting Plough constellation against the mountains and hilltops to mark the change of seasons. Reminded me of Carrowmore on the west coast of Ireland where there's a sequence of cairns and tombs aligned with the rising and setting sun. So you can stand at the tombs and look at the ridgeline to see how far the sun has moved throughout the year. The ridge of hills charts neatly to the solar phases, and structures (still visible today) built correspond to particular dates.
Somehow it had always passed me by that being able to chart seasons and the passage of time accurately translates to agricultural knowledge and power. One of those things I've read countless times and never actually processed.

 

Yes and I think the marking of the seasons is vital to understanding how their understanding of what they had observed scientifically translated to their every day existence.
There was a great doc on BBC 4 last night about the stunningly well preserved Bronze Age site of Must Farm alluding to the use of such knowledge to know when to sow crops, which was vital to early civilisations and central to their cultures.

BBC Four - Britain's Pompeii: A Village Lost in Time

 

Re the Nebra Sky Disc...What a rare and wonderful thing. I read around it last night after seeing your post (and also reminded myself I haven’t watched the later season(s) of ‘Detectorists’).
Interesting and lovely. Thanks.

 

It's lovely isn't it, I made a few oil burners using that for inspiration.

Need to get around to getting a big book o prehistoric art so I can use that in my ceramic works.

 

Haaretz has an article saying divers have found a missing piece of the antikythera device

 

No, they haven't. Story was doing the rounds this week.

Uproar over ‘ancient computer’ find

TL : DR a bronze disk was found a few years ago, speculation was it was a cig buy it's most likely jist a bronze disk off something.