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One thing that ancient historians cannot do often enough is emphasizing that, right at the moment when Rome was reaching its greatest hegemony over the Mediterranean and Europe, there was an empire right on the other side of the world that was at least as large, and at least as populous as the Roman Empire, […]

This is the corner in the outer wall of a second-century BCE house in Delos. You can clearly see that a different type of stone has been used to reinforce the corner, and it is hardly possible to miss how they have been decorated. The phallus played an important apotropaic role in Greco-Roman culture and […]

Though the Romans are renowned for their use of concrete, which allowed for quick construction and liberated architects from the constraints imposed by stone-blocks that had dominated Greek and Hellenistic architecture, it should not be overlooked that heavy concrete was and remained very much an Italian phenomenon: it is found throughout the Roman empire in […]

If Ptolemy’s Golden Peninsula could be identified with the Thai-Malay peninsula, the city of Kattigara is bound to remain a mystery: it simply cannot be securely identified on the basis of the evidence we have at our disposal. Of course, this has not kept people from making more (or less) educated guesses. Based on the […]

Corinth, Roman Forum. Remains of an inscription showing the partially erased names and titulature of a Roman Emperor. The text is thought to have read: Imp(erator) Caesar divi M(arci) Antonini Pii Ger[m(anici) f(ilius) divi Pii n(epos) divi Hadriani pron(epos) divi Traiani Parthici abn(epos)] / divi Nervae adnepos [[M(arcus) Aurel(ius) Comm[odus 3]]] / ex testamento Cornel(iae) […]

Over the last weeks, this series has focused on Java and Bali, and it became clear that ties between the Far East and the Far West in the first centuries of our era were closer and more direct than one would expect on the basis of handbooks and scholarly discourse – even though it is […]

The problem with beads, of course, is that they are beads. They’re small, unremarkable objects that do not carry a very explicit intrinsic message. Of course, they can mean the world for the individuals to which they belong, as part of a necklace or bracelet, but it is very hard to see how the people […]

In een opiniestuk in de Volkskrant betoogden Louise Elffers en Thijs Bol afgelopen maandag dat vroeg selecterende onderwijsstelsels—zoals het Nederlandse—hun ‘uiterste houdbaarheidsdatum’ hebben overschreden en dat het tijd is om ook in Nederland werk te maken van latere selectie in het onderwijs. Hun betoog volgt op de discussie die zich vorige week ontspon nadat een […]

If the evidence from early first millennium CE West Java discussed last week leaves no doubt that parts of the island were integrated into the larger regional maritime networks of the era, there was no unequivocal evidence of stuff from beyond India arriving in Java – there is a clear possibility that some of the […]

So, let’s just start with the place that got me into this thing in the first place. What was happening on the island where my grandparents were born when the Romans were building their riverine frontier in The Netherlands? Very little of the pre-colonial history of Indonesia is part of the western historical canon. Some […]