When European travelers arrived in China, they discovered an indigenous Christian population, a fact that shocked many of their contemporaries back home. The existence of China’s Christians was however confirmed by a spectacular stela from the town of Xi’an. In the early part of the 17th century, a Chinese scholar […]
Graffiti — the scourge of inner cities and municipal authorities; an ugly, vulgar blight on the urban landscape that costs cities millions every year to clean. Such is hardly a “hidden gem.” But think about this for a moment: Despite the modern image of vandals armed with spray paint tagging […]
In a previous post I discussed the survival of the Sarmatian legacy in the Ossetian people, who escaped the destruction of their kingdom by sheltering in the mountain valleys of the Caucasus. There was also a second group of Alans that chose to flee west to Hungary following the Mongol […]
Egyptology as a modern discipline was born with Jean-François Champollion’s decipherment of the Rosetta Stone and the Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic script in 1822. However, Egypt and its ancient culture had evoked fascination in Europe since Classical Greece, and peaked during the Renaissance. However, we rarely hear about the attitude of […]