The frontispiece of the manuscript depicting Homer surrounded by the Muses! Isn't gorgeous?
The calligraphy of Ioannes Rhosos is just superb. Two decades later again in Florence, Demetrius Chalkokondyles and Demetrius Damilas, also Byzantine Greeks, produced the first printed edition of the works of Homer using typefaces.
*I like the calligraphy though.
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That was such a trip! Follow a soldier as he prepares and goes to war.
"The animation depicts key aspects of the hoplite experience: training; sacrifice, reading a liver for omens, and departing; the build up to battle; battle; and the aftermath of battle."
Extraordinary and beautiful. The amazing treasure of Tillya Tepe in Afghanistan from the 1st BC- 1st AD.
Greek, Persian, Indian, Chinese motifs/techniques and influences blending together with local ones, syncretisms and combinations of deities and mythologies...
Read below⬇
*Note: pictures aren't mine. I made the collage though, so I've put my name just to avoid all the lazy accounts to just take it for their own use. I'll post the sites soo you can make your own collage. It's easy guys 😘 (don't be that lazy)
Historic context: Nomads from the northern steppes overran Bactria around 145 BC, bringing an end to the Greco-Bactrian kingdoms that had flourished there. Of course they didn't erase the existing cultures but they add their own traditions, combining them and creating a new.
The Antikythera mechanism. An ancient Greek hand-powered orrery, described as the oldest example of an analogue computer used to predict astronomical positions and eclipses decades in advance.
~150 BC to 70 BC, Greece
📍National Archaeological Museum, Athens/Greece
Entering an ancient Greek sanctuary what you would have seen? Dismantled body parts made of clay was undoubtedly something common and expected..heads, arms, legs, genitalia. Everything.
Small #Thread about this very interesting Greek practice #Archaeology#Ancientgreeece
People in ancient Greece they’d go to temples/sanctuaries associated with a healing deity. Asclepius was the most important of those and his sanctuaries were the equivalent of our idea of a hospital or medical center.
"After Asclepius “cured” them in exchange for an offering or a fee, grateful supplicants dedicated votives in the shape of the body part he healed. It’s believed such carvings either commemorated successful healings or were requests to get him to pay attention to ailing limbs"
The Byzantine mosaics of Hosios Loukas are some of the best available anywhere today for the character of a church interior in the first centuries after the end of Iconoclasm that had ravaged the Roman state (8th & 9th c.).
~Mosaic of Saint Paul, 11th c., Greece #MosaicMonday
An incredible artifact...
This device, consisting of a sundial and geared mechanical calendar, is the second oldest known of its kind. The earliest known example is the #AntikytheraMechanism.
It dates around 400-600 BCE, Byzantine Empire.
"16 locations are inscribed in Greek on the sundial plate, translated as: Constantinople, Syene, Thebaid, Africa, Alexandria, Antioch, Rhodes, Athens, Sicily, Thessalonika, Rome, Dalmatia, Doclea, Caesarea Sratonis, Palestine, and Ascalon."
"The owner of this device would have been able to use it as a sundial to tell the time in 16 locations across the ancient world and would have been able to predict the positions of the Sun and Moon in the zodiac and the lunar phases."