This is the third in an occasional series of posts about my favorite ‘vanished’ civilizations (the first was on Carthage and the second was on the mysterious Tocharians). I put the word ‘vanish’ in scare quotes because in fact few if any civilizations truly disappear: they simply transmute. Ancient Carthage was destroyed as a state …
Category Archives: Classical World
The True Colors of Classical Sculpture
Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Phidias Showing the Frieze of the Parthenon to his Friends, 1868, (72 x 110.5 cm) Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, Birmingham, UK. Continuing the theme of the previous entry a bit, here are some fascinating images created by the German archeologist Vinzenz Brinkmann and his research team. (For more on Brinkmann and his …
Vanished Civilization 1: Carthage
My people shall, by my command, exploreThe ports and creeks of ev’ry winding shore…– Queen Dido in John Dryden’s translation of The Aeneid, Bk. I First in a series of once-weekly posts on my favorite vanished civilizations, I present THE CARTHAGINIAN EMPIRE. To understand Carthage, one has first to understand the Phoenicians, who were originally …
Benjamin Breen 