Images

This tablet lists purchases of land by a man named Tupsikka, with payments made in baskets of barley. One transaction reads "The price of the field is 90 gur-sag-gal 16 quarts of oil". Stone tablet...

Silver coin of "Abdalla ibn Khazim". From Merv (modern-day Turkmenistan), circa 684 CE. Found inside the Buddhist monument (called deposit A) at Manikyala, modern-day Pakistan. This shows that coins from several places...

Some Greek cities used images for their names, so "readers" did not have to be literate. Zancle, a city founded by Greek colonists in Sicily, incorporated the sickle-shaped harbor (sickle=zanklon). Silver third stater...

Early Iron Age Celtic people copied Greek coins, often faithfully reproducing their designs and inscriptions. This suggests that Thracian die-engravers were illiterate, as legible Greek letters were gradually...

In ancient Egypt, many transactions were made in metal, measured using weights like this. Once coinage was introduced, a Greek system was combined with the Egyptian one. This quartzite weight was inscribed with...

This clay nail is inscribed with details of the wealth of Sin-Kashid, king of Uruk in Babylon. Excavated by Sir William Loftus at Uruk (Warka), Southern Mesopotamia, modern-say Iraq. Circa 1900 BCE. (The British...

This is a bowl for mixing wine and water. Greek, made in Athens around 450-440 BCE. Said to be Aegina, Greece. (The British Museum, London).

Greek wine was chilled by letting it stand in a psykter, which was in turn placed in a wine-mixing bowl filled with cold water or snow. Greek, made in Athens around 510 BCE. Attributed to the Dikaios Painter. From...

As the stupa (Buddhist monument) had been enlarged and rebuilt over the centuries, worshippers added new deposits. When he opened the stupa, General Ventura recognized that the deeper objects were the oldest ones...

When General Jean-Baptiste Ventura opened the Buddhist monument (stupa) at Manikyala in 1830 CE, he found a coin depicting Tigin, a king of Kabul. The presence of the coin shows that the stupa was still being used in 700 CE...