Archaeology Odyssey, September/October 2003
Features
Iraq Update
In the July/August 2003 issue of Archaeology Odyssey (see “Plundering the Past”), I reported on the terrible events that took place during the second week of April at the National Museum and other cultural heritage sites in Baghdad. Fortunately, my suspicion that early assessments of the losses...Read more ›
Traveling the Silk Road
In the 1870s, the German geographer Ferdinand von Richthofen coined the name die Seidenstrasse—the Silk Road—to refer to the 5,000-mile-long trade route that connected China and the Mediterranean in ancient times. Richthofen thus imbued the immense terra incognita of Central Asia with romance. But he also created...Read more ›
Old Samarkand
Nexus of the ancient world
In 1881 the great French novelist Gustave Flaubert published his Dictionary of Accepted Ideas. If we were somehow granted permission to add just one item to this revered classic, it should be “Samarkand: a name that makes you dream.” One of the most glorious...Read more ›
“Look on My Works”
The many faces of Ramesses the Great
You barely notice him in the cacophony of the modern city. Austere, stiffly formal, he is either too large or too small, slightly ridiculous amid Cairo’s dissonant traffic. The 31-foot-tall, 90-ton granite statue of the Egyptian pharaoh Ramesses II (1279–1213 B.C.) was found in the 1920s in...Read more ›
Male Fantasies
When it came to sex, the Greeks kept their options open…
By around 500 B.C. the Greeks had developed a strange (for us) model of romantic love. While adult men were expected to take a wife and raise a family, they were also allowed considerable license in fulfilling sexual desires. Poets, philosophers and artists celebrated the passion of...Read more ›