Photographs from the collection of the Ethnographic Museum in Belgrade

Selection of portraits by Polish artist Michał Maksymilian Rekucki (1884-1971),

Source: rempex.com.pl, ostoya.pl, artinfo.pl

An Unusual Roman Mosaic Glass Bottle, 1st Century AD

Formed from slices of a cane with an opaque white circle in a translucent light amber-colored matrix to form a squat unguentarium with a short cylindrical neck and pear-shaped body.

This small bottle is an unusual mixture of ancient glass making techniques with sections from a cast mosaic cane that were fused together and then blown to create the final shape. Usually such vessels are formed from layers or opaque white and blue or purple glass or four to six larger sections as with gold-band vessels.

Nüshu (literally “women’s writing” in Chinese) is a syllabic script created and used exclusively by women in the Jiangyong County in Hunan province of southern China. Up until the late Qing Dynasty (1644-1912) women were forbidden access to formal education, and so Nüshu was developed in secrecy as a means to communicate. Since its discovery in 1982, Nüshu remains to be the only gender-specific writing system in the world. Read more here.

I really had to reblog this, guys.

This is really cool.

I want to know how much fanfic eas found written in this language. No but for serious.

Left-hand Dagger

This daggers comes with two-stage blade tapering sharply to a long narrow point, a lower portion with a notched and punched back edge, and a ricasso formed with a pair of scrolling arms for blade-catching. The inner face is indented for the thumb, and both sides are decorated with punched abstract patterns and struck with a small rectangular mark.

It also features a cross potent, iron hilt chiselled in low relief, comprising lobated triangular guard drawn up to a chiselled button projecting towards the pommel, finely cut with a pierced tiered arrangement of leafy tendrils spiralling on differing flowerheads.

There is a grotesque human half-figure is suspended in the centre with a pair of monstrous serpents and a demon mask. The break tips are pierced and chiselled en suite, the quillons are straight, the pommel globular and pierced, and both the quillons and the pommel are chiselled en suite with the guard.

Ancient cistern found under barn in Turkey's Mardin

Excavations in the southeastern province of Mardin’s ancient city of Dara have unearthed a 6th century cistern. The Roman-era cistern was found in a field used as a barn.

Nihat Erdoğan, the director of the Mardin Museum, said excavation works have been ongoing in the 3,000-year-old ancient city of Dara, located on the road to Mardin’s Nusaybin district.

Erdoğan said the majority of the Roman city of Dara remained under village houses.

“As excavations continue in Dara, artifacts from the Roman and Persian eras come to light. The latest excavations discovered the Roman-era cistern, which is 18 meters in depth and 15 meters by width. This place was filled with earth that we later emptied. Its ruined ground has been restored as part of a project led by the cultural and natural heritage conservation board,” he added. Read more.

17th century Nuremberg style wheel-lock rifle.

from Carol Watson’s Orange Coast Auctions

Burial chamber discovered in Turkey’s Kastamonu

A burial chamber has been unearthed in the Kayı village of the Daday district in the northern Turkish province of Kastamonu.

The burial chamber is believed to have been built for a noble person named Paphlagonia who lived in the region up to 2,000 years ago.  

The chamber, which has been damaged because of illegal excavations, has a diameter of 22 meters and is five meters in height. The restored chamber has similarities with mausoleums built by the Romans, according to officials.

Şahin Yıldırım, an academic at Bartın University’s archaeology department, said they initiated work in the region last year after being notified of an illegal excavation. Read more.

Wax anatomical models of man and woman; half-skeleton, half-living, in fashionable Regency garments.

It’s unknown if these models were intended as a darkly comic “memento mori” sort of novelty, or a teaching aid, or both.

The skeletons are accurate enough to have been used to teach students how the articulations line up in the living body, so even as a novelty, they may have had an educational use.

Models located at Science Museum London, originally created ca. 1810-1830.

For some early monks, impaired hearing amplified sounds of silence

SAN ANTONIO — Early Christian monks’ vows of silence may have attracted not only the devout but also a fair number of hearing-impaired men with a sacred calling.

A team led by bioarchaeologist Margaret Judd of the University of Pittsburgh found that a substantial minority of Byzantine-era monks buried in a communal crypt at Jordan’s Mount Nebo monastery display skeletal signs of hearing impairments. Judd presented these results November 19 at the annual meeting of the American Schools of Oriental Research.

Judd has directed excavations at Mount Nebo since 2007. Her new results focus on a two-chambered crypt containing skeletons of at least 57 men presumed to have been monks. Oil lamps found in the crypt date to the 700s.

About 16 percent of these men displayed damage to middle ear bones caused by infections known as otitis media. Read more.

Glassmaking may have begun in Egypt, not Mesopotamia

SAN ANTONIO — Ancient Mesopotamians have traditionally been credited with inventing glassmaking around 3,600 years ago. But Mesopotamians may have created second-rate knock-offs of glass objects from Egypt, where this complex craft actually originated, researchers reported November 19 at the annual meeting of the American Schools of Oriental Research.

Arguments that glass production originated in Mesopotamia largely rest on artifacts recovered nearly a century ago at Nuzi, a site in what’s now Iraq. Glass finds there included colored beads, vessels and pendants.

It’s unlikely those discoveries come from the dawn of glassmaking, said conservation scientist Katherine Eremin of Harvard Art Museums. She and an international team of colleagues, led by archaeologist Andrew Shortland of Cranfield University in England, determined that glass items excavated at Nuzi represent a mix of ancient Mesopotamian items and glasswork from later occupations, some as recent as the 1800s. Read more.

Onfim was a child who lived in Novgorod, Russia, in the 13th century. He left his notes and homework exercises scratched in soft birch bark (beresta) which was preserved in the clay soil of Novgorod. Onfim, who archaeologists believe was six or seven at the time, wrote in Old Novgorodian; besides letters and syllables, he drew battle scenes and drawings of himself, his family, and his teacher. [x]

Here is a picture of him as a knight stabbing someone.

(At least, he wrote his name next to the knight. Either it was supposed to be him or he was signing his masterpiece. Either way, still adorable.)

Several pictures of the original birch pieces can be found here:  [x]

(Fact Source) For more facts, follow Ultrafacts

“people have always been people”

@weighedandmeasured look at these drawings from a past little friend my heart is so full

Contemporary made English Queen Anne style flintlock pistol,

from Neahkhanie Flintlocks

According to UNESCO, the site of San Agustín in Colombia is host to the largest collection of megalithic sculptures in South America. San Agustín is a massive necropolis strewn with some 40 burial mounds and 600 stone statues fashioned from volcanic rock. These statues range in height from only a few inches to around 20 feet! They depict grotesque monsters, club-wielding warriors and animals such as eagles, jaguars and frogs. The vast majority of the monuments date to between the 00s to 700s CE. Sadly, little about the site is understood – why it was created, what kept it in use for over 600 years, and why the site was finally put out of use.

 Roman Green Glass Unguentarium, Early 3rd century AD

Gothic Military Belt Fitting & Buckle, 5th-7th Century AD