Archaeology Odyssey, July/August 2005
Features
In the fourth century B.C. a man named Antikrates from Knidos, on the southwest coast of Anatolia, was struck in the face by a spear. The spearhead lodged so deeply in his head that it could not be removed. He lost his vision and 016lived with the spearhead in his face. Antikrates probably […]
Ancient history books are full of dates. One reads, for instance, that the Great Pyramid at Giza was built around 2500 B.C., not 3000 B.C. or 2000 B.C., and that Jerusalem was captured by the Babylonians in 586 B.C., not 566 B.C. But how do we know these dates are accurate? Couldn’t ancient history […]
Gilgamesh is at once our newest and our oldest, most venerable epic poem. Unlike Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, which have been broadly known since their composition around the late eighth century B.C. (except during the medieval Dark Age, when Greek learning was largely lost in the West), the first clay tablets inscribed with the Gilgamesh epic were found just 150 years ago, at the ancient Assyrian site of Nineveh in present-day northern Iraq.