Ancient Egypt
Egyptian art is big business. The decline of classics has created a gap waiting to be filled, and Egyptian things have the advantage of not being Eurocentric, while being familiar enough not to be...
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Classical worlds
Classical art, though ancient, is not static in modern scholarship. The recent revelation of key sites (such as the villa of Herod Atticus at Astros), or fresh interpretations of familiar monuments (...
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Far Orient expressed
It is hard to write down reactions to a dictionary. We do not read dictionaries, but rather collect the right tools from them for all our various mining ventures. To that end, the Dictionary of Art...
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Images of India
The Dictionary of Art is an awesome effort by Macmillan, but my main impression of its coverage of India is of disappointment at the number, quality and the size of the illustrations. Perhaps a...
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Islamic light and lustre
Islamic culture's most striking visual achievement is an art of light and colour, a mastery of lustrous surface reflections and aqueous depths. The small and mostly muddy black and white...
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Marvels of the Maya
The Dictionary devotes no fewer than 228 pages to "Native North American art", "Mesoamerican, pre-Columbian art,'' and "South America, pre-Columbian art''. Each subject is covered by some 76 pages on...
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From Asante to Zulu
It is immediately obvious that this is an unusual publication. Few dictionaries require fieldwork of a reviewer but this is so vast that Mohammed must go to the mountain and read it in the publisher'...
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Speaking Volumes: Time Series Analysis: Forecasting and Control
Denise Osborn on George E. P. Box and Gwilym Jenkins's Time Series Analysis: Forecasting and Control . I first heard of Box and Jenkins in about 1971 as a graduate student in economic statistics at...
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First impressions
This week's First Impressions comes from a novel by a good man who was born in West Africa: "My first act on entering this world was to kill my mother. I was heaved - a healthy eight pounds -...
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Chronology
Neolithic 7000 - 1700BC Histories: hunter gatherers became farmers around 7000BC. Main cultures: Peiligang and Cishan in north (6500-5000BC); Yangshao in centre and W along River Wei (5000-3500BC),...
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New discoveries from the early dynasties
Recent archaeological finds in China have revolutionised our understanding of that country's ancient civilisation. Some of the astonishing artefacts are on show at the British Museum, where on...
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The industrial revolution
The term "Bronze Age" is a leftover from the early days of archaeology when archaeologists thought that the use of this alloy of copper, tin, and lead marked a distinct stage in human history. But...
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Conference Timetable
The articles on pages I-V are based on papers to be presented this week-end at "Mysteries of Ancient China: New Discoveries from the Early Dynasties" at the British Museum in London. The...
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Questions in jade
GINA BARNES describes the artefacts unearthed at Niuheliang, a Neolithic site northeast of Beijing, which has been claimed as the ultimate source of Chinese civilisation Niuheliang, an unusual ritual...
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The mystery of the pits
The discovery at Sanxingdui of two pits filled with deliberately shattered bronzes, jades and fragments of gold and animal bone is the single most startling archaeological find of recent years. The...