All Essays
Greek and Roman Art
Greek settlers and the Scythian peoples around them profoundly impacted each other's culture and art for centuries.
Anatoly Grablevsky
May 1, 2024
Across the regions of the empire, gladiators and their preparation for fights were depicted through various media, including terracotta oil lamps, figurines, glass vessels, pottery, and relief sculpture.
Marlee Miller
August 1, 2023
Medusa is a deadly and cryptic other, but she is also ubiquitous, with an undeniable energy that inspired artists to repeat her semblance and story in diverse ways across literature, lore, and art through ancient Greece, Rome, and beyond.
Madeleine Glennon
March 1, 2017
Examining Egyptian art during these 300 years reveals strong continuities in its traditions but also interactions with Greek art, whose forms and styles swept the world with Alexander’s armies.
Marsha Hill
October 1, 2016
Today, the former imperial capital at Aksum contains some of the best-preserved examples of Aksumite-style architecture, including stelae from the third and fourth centuries, and obelisks, royal tombs, and palaces dating from the sixth and seventh centuries.
Kristen Windmuller-Luna
April 1, 2015
A member of the sedge family, the papyrus (Cyperus papyrus) was an integral feature of the ancient Nilotic landscape, essential to the ancient Egyptians in both the practical and symbolic realms.
Janice Kamrin
March 1, 2015
With minor variations, the papyrus roll was produced essentially the same way throughout its approximately 4,000-year history.
Rebecca Capua
March 1, 2015
In the seventh and sixth centuries B.C., and especially in the first half of the sixth century B.C., Sparta and its region, Laconia, had its own workshops in several genres of artistic craft, such as vase painting, metalwork, ivory and bone carving, and even stone sculpture.
Agnes Bencze
June 1, 2014
A pendant to the official cults of the Greeks and Romans, mystery cults served more personal, individualistic attitudes toward death and the afterlife.
Kiki Karoglou
October 1, 2013
We have no surviving histories or literature in Etruscan, and the only extant writing that can be considered a text, as opposed to an inscription, was painted in ink on linen, preserved through the fortuitous reuse of the linen as wrappings for an Egyptian mummy.
Theresa Huntsman
June 1, 2013