Images

A sketch of a scene from a Greek 5th century BCE red-figure vase depicting the slaying of the one-hundred eyed monster Argus Panoptes by Hermes. (British Museum, London)

A scene from a 7th century BCE Cretan jug depicting Ariadne and Theseus. (Archaeological Museum of Heraklion, Crete)

A bird-shaped pestle. Stone, 6000-2000 BCE. Oro Province, Papua New Guinea. Most modern vegetables and cereals were first cultivated around 10,000 years ago. This pestle was made for grinding taro, one of the crops farmers in Papua New...

Stone chopping tool. 1.8 - 2 million years old. Found in Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania. This chopping tool is an example of the oldest known objects deliberately made by humans. This tool was found with the fossil remains of an extinct human...

Clovis spear point. Flint, 13,000-14,000 year old. Found in Arizona, United States of America. Clovis points were the most widespread evidence of a successful settlement in North America by fully modern humans about 14,000 years ago...

Ice Age drawing of a bison, on limestone, about 13,000-14,000 years old. Found in Montastruc, France. Over, 100,000 years ago the first fully modern humans in southern Africa began to create works of art. These people then migrated to...

Limestone funerary stela, 100 BCE-100 CE. Egypt. This funerary stela commemorates the death of a man named Didymos. It was made during the Ptolemaic period or soon after the Roman conquest. This image was taken at the National Museum...

Shabti of Taharqo. Granite, about 664 BCE. Nuri, Sudan. The Kingdom of Kush was an ancient power in what is now Sudan. Between 747 and 656 BCE there was a power shift in Egypt and Kush and the Kushites ruled both. The Kushites adopted...

Pandanus fibre basket. Collected 1911-1912 CE. Port Essing, Arnhem Land, Australia. Baskets like this conical shaped one have been identified in Arnhem Land rock art dating back more than 20,000 years. Baskets were made to carry a variety...

Jade, 5000-3600 BCE. Biebrich, Germany. This axe is made of European jade mined in prehistoric quarries in the Italian Alps. It appears to be an object of beauty rather than function. It would have taken several days to polish this jade...