ancient art Archives - Page 2 of 2 - Tales of Times Forgotten

How Difficult Is It to Determine If an Ancient Artwork Is Authentic?

Fake ancient artifacts are all over the antiquities market. For a layperson with no expertise in ancient art, telling the difference between a bust created by a forger to look like an ancient bust and a real ancient bust is virtually impossible. For a trained expert, it is easy to spot certain obvious forgeries, but there are still many forgeries out there that are good enough to fool even the best experts.

The antiquities market, though, is incredibly sketchy at the best of times and downright illegal at the worst of times. If you’re trying to buy ancient artifacts, forgeries should be the least of your worries.

What Did Jesus Really Look Like?

One of the greatest mysteries of ancient history is the true appearance of Jesus of Nazareth. Most people today have an image that immediately pops into their head when they hear the name “Jesus” of a tall, handsome white man with long, flowing hair and a beard and maybe a halo. This is certainly not what the historical Jesus really looked like. In fact, the image we all have of Jesus actually has a quite fascinating origin. In ancient times, Jesus was represented in a wide variety of different ways, some of them downright bizarre, but the standard image we all know and recognize eventually became the canonical one.

We don’t know much about what the historical Jesus looked like, but the gospels and other ancient sources do provide some details that can allow us to reconstruct a very general sense of his possible appearance.

Did the Ancient Egyptians Have Electric Lighting?

It has been widely claimed on the internet that the ancient Egyptians had electric lighting. This claim is made largely based on an extremely tendentious interpretation of a series of relief carvings from the southern crypt of the ancient Egyptian Temple of Hathor at Dendera and the fact that some Egyptian tombs and temples do not currently have very much soot on their ceilings.

Unfortunately for those who want to believe that the ancient Egyptians had electric lighting, they simply didn’t. As I will show, the reliefs from Dendera almost certainly don’t depict lightbulbs and there is a much more reasonable explanation for why some Egyptian temples and tombs do not have soot on their ceilings.

Why Is Tutankhamun So Famous?

Pharaoh Tutankhamun is undoubtedly the most famous of all ancient Egyptian pharaohs. He is one of the very few Egyptian pharaohs that most ordinary people are able to name. Most people have never heard of Hatshepsut and even fewer have heard of her nephew and successor Thutmose III, but everyone has heard of Tutankhamun. He even has a Batman villain named after him!

Things were not always the way they are today, though; up until the discovery of his tomb in 1922, Tutankhamun was utterly obscure. If you asked someone on the street in 1921 who Tutankhamun was, no one would have been able to tell you. Even if you asked an Egyptologist about him, many of them probably would not have known who he was. Ironically, it is precisely because of his former obscurity that Tutankhamun is so famous today.

The Real Reason Why the Venus de Milo Is So Famous

Everyone has heard of the Venus de Milo. It is easily one of the most famous, most instantly recognizable sculptures of all time. It been referenced, imitated, and spoofed countless times in popular culture. Have you ever stopped to wonder why it is so famous, though? Why is it that we all revere this one particular statue? Well, as it turns out, the present-day hype over the Venus de Milo is, to a large extent, the result of wounded French national pride in the early nineteenth century.

National Museum of Brazil Fire Should Come as a Warning

You may or may not have read about the devastating fire that engulfed the National Museum of Brazil three days ago on September 2, 2018. The museum housed over 20 million objects, including the largest collection of ancient Egyptian, Greek, and Roman artifacts in Latin America and one of the largest in the entire western hemisphere. While the extent of the destruction has not yet been fully assessed, it is highly probable that nearly all the artifacts in these collections were destroyed or irreparably damaged by the fire. The entire interior of the building appears to have been reduced to nothing but ash and broken rubble. Worst of all, this destruction was not a freak accident of nature or an inevitable result of the Second Law of Thermodynamics; this disaster was entirely preventable. It was entirely the result of sheer human carelessness.

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