NM Betancur

Thanks for the follow-back!

Bronze head of a woman or goddess, torn from a full-sized statue. She wears a lunette diadem with inlaid silver patterns, with a star in the middle. Her wavy hair is center parted and pulled back into a bun. She looks directly into the camera with inlaid silver eyes, set beneath shadowed brows. With her mottled brown and green patina, the effect is frightening! British Museum (1928,0416.1)

This bronze head of a goddess with her spooky, hypnotic inlaid silver eyes, will be roaming the shadows tonight on All Hallows Eve! Still looking for her body, 2,000 years later … 😱 🏺 1/

Hellenistic, 150-100 BCE, Mersin, Turkey. #BritishMuseum
📸 me

Cruck frame barn, dated c 1550, from Llanerch Banna (Flint) and now at St Fagans National Museum of History.

Such curved timbers known as crucks will feature a fair bit in my upcoming online talk on 25 Nov, Dating Ancient Buildings.

Booking is now open.
www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/dating-anc...

Enslaved Potter’s Art, Displayed at Boston Museum, Returns to Heirs at Last

This is a big deal. Kudos to @mfaboston.bsky.social for its actions. The institution is proving an important precedent for the restitution of objects that others should follow. www.nytimes.com/2025/10/30/u...

Artist Amy Sherald: The 60 Minutes Interview Amy Sherald spent years painting in obscurity, and almost died from a rare heart condition. Now 52, the artist behind Michelle Obama's official portrait is one of America's most celebrated painters.

ICYMI: Drop everything and spend 13 minutes with Amy Sherald--with her singular vision and talent, with her clarity about her central place in the jagged American story. You will be stirred by it all. www.cbsnews.com/video/amy-sh...

The stones

Mên-an-Tol is probably from the Bronze Age, making it around 3,500 years old (little evidence has been found). It consists of four stones, the most unusual being the circular and pierced upright stone. The other three stones are more regular granite pillars. #StandingStoneSunday

The picture shows a terracotta horse with a rider on four wheels.

Children loved to play with toys in #Roman times too: some 1,800 years ago, a child in Cologne was buried with a terracotta horse with a rider on wheels. It was certainly a much-loved which the child was also supposed to play with in the afterlife.

📷 Römisch-Germanisches Museum Köln
🏺 #archaeology

How the Discovery of Single-Celled Marine Organisms Resulted in One of the Most Influential Illustrated Books Ever Published No creatures from the microscopic world have managed to captivate the human imagination as authoritatively as radiolarians. Since the late nineteenth century, they’ve made their existence known in …

Radiolarians are still largely unknown, but it is believed that they hold information about the evolution of life on Earth and how climatic conditions have changed over time.

lithub.com/how-the-disc...

Description from the BM: “Bronze head from a statue of Hypnos. Wings are shown sprouting from his temples, and his hair is arranged into a series of locks, some falling freely, others tied in a knot at the back of the head. Museum number: 1868,0606.9. © The Trustees of the British Museum.“

😴Hypnos, the personification of sleep💤

We’re celebrating all the delights of restful slumber with this beautiful bronze head of Hypnos (not sure about where the rest of the body may be!).

#ReliefWednesday #ClassicsTober25 #AncientGreece

"To be human is to be emotional. And if we strip that when we tell our story, we’re doing ourselves a disservice." Paleoanthropologist Ella Al-Shamahi, who hosts the BBC and NOVA PBS docuseries “Human,” leans into the complex and dramatic sides of early humans' history: buff.ly/9nWuXng

My book is now officially out - a little early!

And what luck, you can now get it for 50% off (Or for 40% off after this sale ends with code E25KTRST)

#ancientbluesky #classicsbluesky #byzantinebluesky

#SpoliaSunday leads into the vicolo dell'Atleta in #Trastevere in #Rome, where a piece of #sarcophagus front with the familiar #strigilate curves that represent the ripples of the river #Styx was reused in the C14 as the side wall of an entrance, now walled up. #AncientBluesky 🏺

View from up high looking down into Pompeii with the via Nocera gently winding its way up the slope under the arch of the Nocera Gate. Beyond Vesuvius looms with its peak in shadow and its foothills are speckled greens and browns.

I particular like the colours of Vesuvius looking as though someone has fashioned it out of a lump of smooshed-together-different-coloured Play-Doh.

A pottery owl figurine displayed on a transparent pedestal. The figurine is intricately painted in black, red, and beige, with finely detailed feathers, large round eyes, and a slightly tilted head.

It's time for a timeline cleanse!

A small Corinthian aryballos in the shape of an owl (circa 630 BC). It served as a perfume container.

On display at Antikensammlung München

A lovely Sunday to all of you 🌞

📷 me

It is a little known fact that tonight's clock re-adjustment was pioneered by German-British artist Frank Auerbach, to the great dismay of the proponent of the original change, politician Konrad Adenauer

Most of the image is of a white mosaic and the top part is small pumice stones

That magical moment when the pumice is gently cleared away revealing, for the first time in nearly 2000 years, a white mosaic.
#MosaicMonday #Pompeii

Two mouse shaped terracotta pieces, each with a filling spout on the top of the body, hollow tails at one end and ears on the head. Left is coloured black with a vine decoration in white and red around its body, white eyes and whiskers. Right is pale beige with a leaf painted behind its head and a hippocampus on each side.

#TerracottaTuesday
Two little baby feeders c. 320 BC, both made in Sicily, then Magna Graecia.
One Gnathian (style from Apulia) w ivy chain decoration; one w hippocamp figures.
And who wouldn't want to feed their baby through a mouse's tail??
#Ancient #Greek #Pottery 🏺
BM

Un paysage sur Mars, capturé par le rover Perseverance ! ©NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS/ASU/NeV-T

Un paysage sur Mars, capturé par le rover Perseverance !
©NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS/ASU/NeV-T

Three ancient roman shoes with pierced decoration displayed on dummy feet.

Here are three wonderfully preserved Roman shoes that were discovered at Bar Hill Roman fort on the Antonine Wall in Scotland in the early 1900s. Shoes made for men, women and children have been found there, reminding us that frontier zones were not an exclusively military environment. #FindsFriday

The engraved entrance stone to the famous Neolithic passage tomb of Newgrange at County Meath in Ireland. 📸 My own. #TombTuesday #Newgrange #Prehistory #Ireland

For #FindsFriday just a few of the fabulous Viking age beads discovered at Haithabu/ Hedeby - 📷 Schloss Gottorf Museum.

Scotland’s first new broch for 2000 years wins planning approval The approval of the Caithness Broch Project’s plans represents a major milestone for their bid to build a “faithful replica” on a site near Latheron.

Broch-tastic news. Taking experimental #archaeology to the extreme! Such a fantastic project, great news for #Caithness and Scottish archaeology. #IronAge #Broch #Scotland

www.northern-times.co.uk/news/scotlan...

Helen Levitt adopted children's play as her leitmotif, the imaginative play of children taking over city spaces.

N.Y.C. Masked Children
1942
Gelatin silver print
6 1/2 × 8 7/8"
Holden Luntz Gallery

#helenlevitt #streetphotography #nmbetancur #halloween

www.holdenluntz.com/artists/hele...

The photo was taken underwater. It shows a partially uncovered mosaic on the ground of the sea and a fish swimming above it.

For #MosaicMonday this fantastic photo of a mosaic (and a lovely fish 🐟) that was discovered in the submerged ruins of #Roman Baiae.

Photo: Parco Archeologico Campi Flegrei

Circular clay tablet with three lines of cuneiform text across the middle. Modern ID in ink at the bottom reads UET 6/225

"The dog understands: 'Take it!' It does not understand: 'Put it down!'" True 3,900 years ago when a young Mesopotamian scribe copied the proverb onto a round school tablet; still true today! #cuneiform #Mesopotamia #dogs Tablet: BM U.17207.77, CDLI P346305; sculpture: Louvre AO 4349, CDLI P386356

FBI returns stolen Hernán Cortés manuscript to Mexico The FBI has returned a priceless manuscript page signed by Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés to Mexico.

The FBI has returned a priceless manuscript page signed by Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortes to Mexico.

No Country for Travellers? No Country for Travellers? explores the rise and nature of British travel to Spain and Portugal between 1760 and 1820, across a region that is conventionally overlooked in studies of British travel to...

Rosemary Sweet and I have written a book about #18thc British travellers to Spain and Portugal, and I'm really happy it's now free to download here: uclpress.co.uk/book/no-coun... (hard copies also available!) #skystorians #c18th

2,178 Occult Books Now Digitized & Put Online, Thanks to the Ritman Library and Da Vinci Code Author Dan Brown In 2018 we brought you some exciting news.

2,178 Occult Books Now Digitized & Put Online, Thanks to the Ritman Library and Da Vinci Code Author Dan Brown

A lock of hair may have just changed what we know about life in the Incan Empire Inca society kept records by encoding information into knotted cords called khipu. A new analysis of hair woven into these cords suggests this record-keeping was practiced by commoners as well as elites.

Inca society kept records by encoding information into knotted cords called khipu. A new analysis of hair woven into these cords suggests this record-keeping was practiced by commoners as well as elites.

A dragon's head made of bronze, with an open mouth showing sharp, jagged teeth, textured scales along the face, a pronounced ridge along the top, a visible nostril and eye, and evident interior space suggesting it is not solid.

#RomanFortThursday: The only surviving draco, a standard of the #Roman cavalry. The dragon's head was mounted on a post with a long and colourful fabric tail. It probably had a device in the opening of the mouth for making a (hissing?) noise. Found in the fort of Niederbieber...🧵1/2

🏺 #archaeology