Off and on over the past eleven years, I've thought about how cool it would be to have photo galleries on the archaeological sites of different countries.
The end result might be a "visitor's guide to the country", or at the least something useful for people to look and learn about the amazing archaeological sites around the world. But, I don't travel much, and so I've been dependent on Flickr and other photo sharing options. Recently, one of my fellow guides here at About.com suggested asking people to submit photos for these galleries. And a joint project like that sounds like fun to me. Hope it does to you, too.
So, if you've visited an archaeological site recently and have photos you want to share, drop me a line!
Here are some photo essays I've gotten started, but we could really do any country that happens to please us.
Photo by
Dan Huby
Wordless Wednesday and Wordless Wednesday on About
After Sunday's column on White Horses and Genetics, I've had some good comments, an excellent question and some assistance from some colleagues.
First, Katherine, our excellent guide to Horses, says that she has known some dappled horses to take more than 10 years to turn completely white.
N.S. Gill, our fabulous guide to Ancient History, tells me that the name Leucippus (leucippos/leukippus/leukippos) means "white horse" in Greek. Leukos/leucos is white and hippus/os is horse. Leucippus was a Pre-Socratic philosopher who developed the atomist theory, and lived between about 480-420 BC.
And finally, Leif Andersson, lead author of the academic article from which Sunday's column was written, wrote to ask if I was aware of any other ancient white horses, other than that mentioned in Herodotus. Here's what I could come up, in roughly chronological order:
- The Mahabharata, an ancient Hindu epic with roots perhaps as old as 1200-800 BC, contains several references to white horses
- Uffington Horse, 1000 BC, geoglyphic art carved into the upland chalk of
Dover Oxfordshire, about 130 miles WNW of Dover, which is probably cheating, but is the only thing I could find to make a nice picture. It's cheating because you couldn't carve any but a white horse into the chalk.
- Lysistrata, a darkly comic play by the Greek playwright Aristophanes about some women taking steps to stop their men from fighting in useless wars and written about 411 BC, includes some dialogue about finding a white horse for a sacrifice.
- Kung-sun Lung (aka Gongsun Long), was a Chinese philosopher who lived between 325–250 BC, and he wrote a famous essay about reality and logic called the The White Horse Dialogue.
- The book of Revelations 6:2 and 19:11 in the New Testament of the Judeo-Christian bible, written in the first century AD, references a white horse.
- The Mabinogion is a Welsh myth which comes from two manuscripts dated between AD 1350 and 1410. In it, the horse goddess Rhiannon rides in on a white horse to meet the hero Pwyll. The Mabinogion, for what that's worth, is thought by some scholars to be based on the Mahabharata.
If anybody has any other suggestions, please feel free to comment!
