Fun fact. When Emma of Normandy arrived in England to marry Aethelred II in 1002 her name was considered too foreign. It was therefore changed to the much more normal Aelfgifu.
Strangely, Aelfgifu as a baby name seems to have completely died out #aelfgifu #emmaofnormandy
A surviving fifteenth-century stained glass roundel from Lincoln Cathedral representing the month of March.
The #NormanConquest is credited with reshaping England, but was 1066 really all that?
🔓 The new Head to Head is free for 7 days
www.historytoday.com/archive/head...
Map of Northern Athabaskan (Alaska, Yukon, Northwest Territories, BC, AB,SK) and Southern Athabaskan (US Southwest) language families
Fun fact: in 852 CE, there was a massive eruption of Mount Churchill in Alaska, which forced a bunch of Dene speakers to migrate south, where they became the Apache and the Navajo. That’s why Athabaskan is the most widely dispersed indigenous language family in North America
Looking right at you from the center of her ravishing lace collar: a woman, painted by Frans Pourbus the Younger. Today was his day.
OTD 1478 George Duke of Clarence (bad bro of Edw IV & Rich III) convicted by Edw of treason after rebellion & claiming Edw had used poison & witchcraft against him. Geo was executed in Tower of London supposedly by being drowned in a butt of Malmsey wine, his favorite drink.
Memento, homo, quia pulvis es, et in pulverem reverteris."
#AshWednesday
BL Add 37049; The Carthusian Miscellany; England, N.; 15th century; f.32v
Sutton Hoo helmet. Excavated 1939 in a 7thC ship burial, both functional as a helmet & highly decorative. Helmet, which had degraded to fragments over centuries has been painstakingly reconstructed more than once. On display @britishmuseum.bsky.social #suttonhoo #suttonhoohelmet #anglosaxon #saxon
An artificial metal casing of a hand with moveable finger joints.
This artificial hand is nearly 500 years old. It consists of a metal casing which wrapped around the forearm stump & was secured by leather straps. An internal mechanical structure (now missing) may have allowed the fingers to move. The fingers can flex at the largest knuckle joint. #MedicalHistory
#OTD in 1384, Count Louis II of Flanders died after an eventful reign which included revolts and tricky international politics (100 Years’ War). He commissioned a grand chapel in Kortrijk where would be buried, but opted for another location in the end. Photo: city of Kortrijk
Urnes-style Uppsala memorial runestone
🐲 Urnes-style Uppsala memorial runestone (U 614) from Torsätra, dating to the late C11th.
📝 'Skúli and Folki raised this stone in memory of their brother Húsbjǫrn. He fell ill while collecting payment on Gotland' (Historiska).
The runemaster was most likely Visäte.
My 📷 Historiska museet
Scene of a church interior showing two painted effigies of knights from 1480-1520. The knights lie on raised tombs lit by huge windows casting streaked shadows upon them.
Knight-time prayers. Fifteenth century splendour at St Michael’s, Stanton Harcourt. A special place!
Cleethorpes
North Sea Friday Folk #2 — lives shaped by the shallow sea on our doorstep
Today it’s the turn of St Hild, first abbess of Whitby Abbey
Shown here with ammonite fossils at her feet — a nod to the legend that Hild turned local snakes to stone
📸 Wilson44691 (CC0)
South door, interior #StMaryEastBrent from the #ScamperDownTheSomersetCoast #HuttonToBrentKnoll leg. Cross braced. Styles that extend around the 2-centred head and a ledge that looks as if it was shaped with an adze. A sheer door delight #AdoorableThursday
Billy Fane. I might be misremembering that he had a poetry section in The Evening Chronicle in the eighties.
A recently discovered statue from 10,000 BCE - depicting a woman carrying a goose - is ‘the earliest figurine to depict a human–animal interaction’ www.discovermagazine.com/a-12-000-yea...
French prisoners of war at New Alresford, Hampshire
Viking shield boss with punctures
🛡 This Viking-Age shield boss has been pierced several times by a spear, likely in a ritual killing of armour deposited in a grave in the same way that swords were bent, possibly to 'kill' their power and prevent reuse 🧟♂️ ⚔️
Probable grave find from Fjällsta, Västmanland 🇸🇪
My 📷 Historiska museet
Tobacco smoking caught on quickly in Africa, with people smoking it via locally produced clay pipes. In Kongo they made long-stemmed pipes, as in bottom right with Queen Nzinga. In 1612 a Swiss merchant noted that 'they can bear hunger for a long time, as long as they have "magkay" or tobacco.'
Born on this day in 1503, Girolamo Francesco Maria Mazzola, better known as Parmigianino. Here, his marvelous self-portrait in a convex mirror, 1524.
Ife was the religious and royal center of the prosperous Yoruba people. When first discovered, Western scholars were so shocked by the beauty and construction of Ife objects that they could not believe that indigenous tribes could have made them and so they put forth the theory that Ife must have had a connection to the lost Greek colony (Western, of course) of Atlantis! Ife artists created stunning sculptural works in stone, terra cotta, brass and copper that are prized for their naturalism. This particular brass head is of a ruler (“Ooni”) or high ranking noble; he wears a complex headdress/crown depicting beads, tassels, rosettes and feathers. The crown has traces of black and red paint. The face is marked with lines of a scarification pattern, which would have signified royal or high social status of the person. The holes around the mouth may have anchored a ceremonial beard or veil made out of glass beads. There are larger holes at the neck indicating that perhaps the head was attached to a wooden effigy for ceremonial purposes, although the actual purpose of the head is uncertain.
January's theme: Sculpture
IFE HEAD, 14th – early 15th century. British Museum, London, UK.
This striking brass head from Ife, Nigeria was made with the lost wax casting technique and attests to the sophistication of the Yoruba culture in West Africa.
#arthistory #art #Sculpture #Africa
George Clifford, 3d Earl of Cumberland, became Queen Elizabeth's Champion at the Tiltyard in 1590. Wears her bejeweled glove pinned to his hat, ready to do battle in her honor, in fab miniature by Nicholas Hilliard.
A cat-shaped ceramic vessel (200-700 CE), likely depicting a jaguar, puma, or pampas cat, attributed to the Recuay or Paracas culture from the northern highlands of Peru 🇵🇪
The vessel features an oversized, toothy grin and a bird figurine perched on its head.
MET Museum
#archaeohistories
The old year departs.
The King and Queen: from The Lewis Chessmen, 12th Century, walrus ivory figures from a group unearthed at Uig Bay on the Scottish Isle of Lewis in 1831; part of 11 figures which remain in Scotland. 82 other pieces are on display in The British Museum.
National Museum Scotland
My photo shows a small figurine of an amber bear carved some 10,000 years ago during the Danish Mesolithic period. The bear is seen in profile facing right. The legs are incomplete. The ears, muzzle, and mouth are defined. The figurine is displayed on a small metal stand. The display lighting shines on the bear’s head and neck enhancing the translucence of the orange amber. The neck of the bear has a polished groove indicating it was once suspended on a cord or string. Length 6.5cm. The Fanø bear was found in 1991 on a beach on the west coast of the Danish island of Fanø, located off the south-western coast of Jutland. In the Stone Age the Danish coastline was different from today. “Since then the coastline has been influenced by later changes to the sea level as well as the rising up of the land after the last Ice Age. This rising of the land is still going on today. North of a line on the map the land has risen up and south of the line the coast has become submerged because of the subsequent rise in sea level. Therefore a proportion of Stone Age settlements south of the “tilt line” now lie under water or at the edge of the beach. Thus objects can be washed out in the sea and later be found on the beach”. The Fanø bear is one of a small number of amber bear figurines from the Baltic Sea region which have been assigned to the Mesolithic period by means of a typo-chronological approach Amber has many amazing properties: it’s warm to the touch, it’s a glossy translucent colour when polished, it gives off a fragrant scent when burnt, and when rubbed against fur or hair it can produce static electricity which ‘magically’ emits green sparks in the dark and can make hair stand on end.
As the year draws to a close, I’m signing off 2025 with a magical find!
An ancient amber bear. Carved some 10,000 years ago, it washed up on a beach at Fanø, Denmark, from a submerged Mesolithic settlement in the North Sea.
✨ Happy New Year all! ✨
National Museum of Denmark
📷 by me
#Archaeology
The Unlikely Life of King Henry VII of England
thefreelancehistorywriter.com/2017/04/28/t...
Can people please note that the Romans did actually know what forks were.
And, quite wonderfully, this multi-utensil is believed to have been made in... Switzerland.
For the... army
