Apologies for the lapse in postings, it’s the end of the year and things have been rather hectic. At Trinity Valley, we have just graduated the class of 2012 (congratulations to all of you) and next week is finals. I will try to begin posting again soon! Thank you for your patience and for those of you who have expressed concern!
Best,
A new website, Giza 3D, has launched on which you can explore the Giza Pyramids online in 3D. The project was launched by engineering firm Dassault Systèmes under direction of Harvard University and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.
What makes the website and project unique is that it is not simply a 3D rendition of the pyramids, but rather incorporates up to date archaeological and historical data into its mapping as well as allows users to explore art work, writings, and architecture in high resolution detail. Users can explore finds (that are now in museums) in their original positioning and have interactive access to research.
To learn more about this project, visit the Giza 3D website and read the in depth article at Discovery News.
Today I would like to highlight Open Yale Courses on iTunes U. iTunes U is a collection of academic resourc
es for both secondary and post-secondary schools around the world. The Open Yale Courses includes introductory classes on subjects from philosophy to astronomy. All courses are free, downloadable, and playable on your Mac or PC via iTunes or on your iOS device.
Funerary Mask of Tutankhamun, 1333-1323 BCE | Tomb of Tutankhamun, Valley of the Kings, Thebes| Egyptian Museum, Cairo, Egypt | Image and original data provided by SCALA, Florence/ART RESOURCE, N.Y. artres.com scalarchives.com
On May 9, 1874, future archaeologist and Egyptologist Howard Carter was born in London, England. Carter would find fame in 1922 upon discovering the tomb of Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun in the Valley of the Kings.
MIT and Harvard University have announced a joint venture: edX which, starting the Fall of 2012, start providing free online courses for all. Students will receive a grade, but no actual credit (sorry, no Harvard Degree without enrollment). The hope is to provide ready access to online education along with prime educational material to interested parties. This is an exciting and innovative step in online education.
Stanford has just launched Orbis, a self described: “Geospatial Network Model of the Roman World reconstructs the time cost and financial expense associated with a wide range of different types of travel in antiquity.”
Scholars, laymen, educators, and students can use this tool to made traveling networks (by land and sea) for more than 751 ancient sites in the ancient world and are able to examine mileage distance, travel difficulty, and estimated time for traveling by foot or boat.
This is an amazing and innovative tool for those working in the ancient world. It is easy to navigate and quick to adapt. I highly recommend playing around – try to figure out how long it would take to get from Londinium to Antioch as a civilian or a soldier, by land or by sea.
To play around with the site, check it out at Stanford’s Orbis Website or following them on twitter @orbis_stanford
The domestication of dogs is one of the few universal domestication events – everywhere that you find humans, you find dogs. Human beings have inarguably benefited from the domesticated of canines. Dogs are used as: hunting aids, herding animals, guards, pest control, beasts of burden, companionship, and even food. However, it looks like it hasn’t been only humans that have benefited from the relationship. Apparently, domesticated dogs (as opposed to their wild, wolf counter-parts) use human beings as beneficial tools.
Human beings provide their canine companions with food, shelter, and even socialization. After generations of selective breeding, dogs have developed a keen eye to observe human body language – especially the practice of “pointing.” Domesticated dogs will begin to follow human pointing gestures as early as four weeks. Wolves, even those raised by humans, never develop this skill. Additionally, when presented with a need to overcome a problem to reach a goal (usually food), dogs will ‘give up’ and look to humans for aid fairly quickly.
To learn more about the research, see the article in Scientific American.
A. Cemal Ekin | Hagia Sophia, Istanbul, Turkey | © A. Cemal Ekin, keptlight.com
Nearly 50 images of the Hagia Sophia by A. Cemal Ekin are now available in the Digital Library. Located in Istanbul, Turkey, the Hagia Sophia (“Holy Wisdom”) is a masterpiece of Byzantine architecture. The current building was built by Emperor Justinian I between 532 – 537 CE.
One of the most famous love stories of history, that of Antony and Kleopatra, has had a new piece to the puzzle added with the discovery of a new statue that archaeologists believe depict their children: Alexander Helios (the Sun) and Kleopatra Selene II (the Moon). The children, twins, were Kleopatra’s second and third child (having already given birth to Caesarion, the son of Julius Caesar). They would have a third child later, Ptolemy Philadelphus.
Caesarion, a potential and dangerous heir to rival Augustus, was put to death. However, the children of Antony and Kleopatra were actually given to Augustus’s sister, Octavia (the Roman legal wife of Mark Antony) to raise and educate. Reportedly, she loved them deeply and grieved the loss of her adopted sons. Years later, the sons of Antony would disappear from history, but the daughter, Kleopatra Selene, was married off to King Juba II (a prominent Eastern King) and seemed to serve as co-regent.
To learn more about the discovery, see the article in Discovery News.
Over 870,000 photographs of the municipal operations of New York City have been made public and tell the history of the city through a unique medium. Some of the photographs date back to the mid 1800s and highlight the unique physical and cultural evolution of the city – highlighting the construction of various important buildings and structures, the rise and fall of celebrities, and even grisly gang-land murders.
The publication and availability of these photographs is a move by the Department of Records to make these records more readily accessible via the internet.
“We all knew that we had fantastic photograph collections that no one would even guess that we had,” Kenneth Cobb.
The database, while impressively large, still has some prominent gaps that the city is consistently working to fill – and it is growing daily.
To learn more about the project, read the article at MSNBC (or the Photoblog here) or search the archives yourself at the NYC Department of Records.
1914 - Painters Suspended from the Brooklyn Bridge
1936 Babe Ruth and his Second Wife Signing Autographs for the Crowd
1918 Police Investigate the Homicide of Gaspare Candella
