Hangtu

Hadrian's Wall

The major and longest-lasting northern frontier to the Roman province of Britain. (For alternative frontiers at earlier and later date, see Fosse Way and Antonine Wall.) In 122 the emperor Hadrian visited Britain, and authorized the construction of this new frontier, stretching from the Solway Fi...

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Hadrian's Wall

Hadrian’S Villa

Near Tivoli, 29 km from Rome, this amazingly extensive and architecturally capricious Imperial villa was built for the Emporer Hadrian over the years 125135 ad. Some find the choice of site odd, located as it is upon low-lying ground of dubious attraction, and possibly at a disadvantage to the vi...

archaeologsEnglishArchitectural

Hadrian’S Villa

Gymnasium

[Greek gymnos\ ‘naked’]. A classical Greek institution that combined athletics training and practice (for men only, except at Sparta) with open house for philosophers and teachers. The Academy of Plato and the Lyceum of Aristotle were both gymnasia. The sports training related to preparation for ...

archaeologsEnglishArchitectural

Grubenhauser

[German: ‘sunken huts’]. Most early medieval settlement sites in northern Europe are characterized by two types of building: timber dwellings built on the ground surface which have left traces of postholes, stake holes and beam slots, and sunken huts or Grubenhauser. The archaeological remains of...

archaeologsEnglishPlace Names, Architectural

Grubenhauser

Great Wall Of China

Dating as a connected whole from the Qin dynasty (221-206 bc), the Great Wall linked together ramparts built independently during the 4th and 3rd centuries bc by the Eastern Zhou states of Qin, Zhao, and Yan. Though building materials varied with locality, the Qin wall consisted mainly of rammed ...

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Gerzean

See Pre-dynastic Egypt.

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Gaza

Palestinian site underlying the modem town of Gaza. No excavations have taken place, but it is known to have had Philistine, Egyptian and ‘Peoples of the Sea’ occupation. The nearby cemetery of Deir el-Daleh has produced Egyptian material. Ten km south is the mound of Tell el-Ajjul, which was exc...

archaeologsEnglishArchitectural

Gawra Tepe

A tell, northeast of Nineveh in Iraq, which has provided a cultural sequence from the 6th millennium be to the mid-2nd millennium bc. The earliest material was of the Halaf period, while the succeeding period shows increasing contacts with the southern Mesopotamian Ubaid culture. Belonging to thi...

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Gawra Tepe

Erechtheum

A religious building on the North side of the Acropolis at Athens, named after the legendary King Erechtheus of Athens, and put up in the name of various cults to house cult objects and to cover cult areas. It is a large and complex rectangular building in the Ionic style, built of white Pantelic...

archaeologsEnglishArchitectural

El-Amama

A city in Upper Egypt built as his capital by the Eighteenth Dynasty pharaoh Akhenaten during the 14th century bc. Palaces and temples, erected to support the worship of the divine sun-disc Aten, were abandoned and largely destroyed on Akhenaten’s death. The art of this brief period of monotheism...

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El-Amama

Dynastic Egypt

The history of ancient Egypt is traditionally tied to a framework of 30 dynasties of kings, or pharaohs, who ruled over the country from the time of its unification into a single kingdom in about 3100 bc until its conquest by Alexander the Great in 332 bc. This scheme, summarized below, is based ...

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Dynastic Egypt

Doric

(1) One of the principal regional dialects of ancient Greece, traditionally named after the tribe of the Dorians. (2) In classical architecture, the ‘Doric order’, a plain, early Classical, Greek style characterized by a simple, often rather stubby column, fluted but without base, with a capital ...

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Dông-Duong

Important archaeological site in the Amaràvatî region of northern Champa, now central Vietnam. The main building is a big monastery built in brick and dedicated to Lokesvara by king Indravarman II in 875. This is the first evidence of the existence of Mahayana Buddhism in Champa; it is also recog...

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Dông-Duong

Decumanus

See cardo.

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Dammayan Temple

One of the largest Buddhist brick monuments in Pagan, northern Burma, built under king Narapatisithu in the late 12th century. It is similar in style to the Ananda Temple.

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Dammayan Temple

Damb Sadaat

A prehistoric site in the Quetta valley of West Pakistan which was occupied during the 3rd millennium bc. The population of this period lived in well-built mud-brick houses consisting of several small rooms, used tools of copper, and had wheel-turned pottery painted in black designs on a buff or ...

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Damb Sadaat

Cross Dating

Dating by relation to established chronologies. Artefacts from an archaeological site are often dated by correlation with typologies of similar artefacts in the surrounding area. The method is based on the assumption that typologies evolved at the same rate and in the same way over a wide area or...

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Cross Dating

Cordoba

Early in the 8th century, Visigothic Spain was conquered by the Arabs and became the independent caliphate of Al Andalus with its capital at Cordoba. The city quickly rose to become one of the finest in Europe, rivalled only by Baghdad and Constantinople for its wealth and splendour. Cordoba was ...

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Cordoba

Corbel

A way of building in stone that can be used to bridge columns or walls or to roof chambers, but which lacks the keystones of the true arch or vault. It is built up of successive stones each of which juts out over the one below until the gap can be closed by a simple capstone. This method of roofi...

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Corbel

Column

A Latin architectural term denoting a cylindrical pillar, usually of wood or stone. In classical architecture a column is visually composed of three parts, the base (not always present), shaft and capital. The shaft, when of stone, would typically be made up of several superimposed drums, so join...

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Cold Working

Most metals, such as copper, bronze, gold and silver, are soft enough to be worked whilst cold. Operations such as hammering and beating (including repoussé and chasing), cutting and engraving could be carried out without any heating to make the metal softer. Iron and steel, by contrast, have to ...

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Cold Working

Circus

An oval race-course with a central wall (spina) and columned turning points (metae), particularly for chariot races. There were several examples in ancient Rome, the greatest being the Circus Maximus. It is essentially a Roman development from the Greek stadium

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Chavin

[Chavin de Huantar]. In the period 900-200 bc (see Early Horizon), the Chavin Horizon art style became the dominant cultural influence in Peru. Probably developed in the medium of low-relief stone carving, it was ultimately expressed in other media as well, for instance, pottery, metals and bone....

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Chavin

Château Gaillard

The magnificent castle of Château Gaillard was built at Les Andelys in Normandy by Richard Coeur de Lion, King of England and Duke of Normandy, on his return from the Third Crusade in 1196. It was situated on a promontory overlooking the Seine to control the approach to Rouen, the capital of Norm...

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Château Gaillard

Co

Tipperary, Ireland, which rises dramatically above the surrounding plain, and houses a cluster of important ecclesiastical buildings of the medieval period. St Patrick consecrated Cashel as a bishopric and it later bcame the see of the infamous Bishop Cormac who was killed at the battle of Ballag...

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Co

Caryatid

Properly, a standing female figure sometimes substituted in a classical building for a column (usually of the Ionic order). Notable examples are to be found in the Cni-dian and Siphnian Treasuries (6th century bc) at Delphi in Greece, and one porch of the Erechtheum temple on the Acropolis at Ath...

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Cardo

[Latin: ‘hinge’]. Term for the main north-south axis of Roman towns and military forts and camps. Technical use of the term seems to originate with Roman agricultural surveying practice, where cardo denotes the principal north-south axis of the site, about which other measurements ‘hinge’. In a t...

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Capital

In architecture, the decorative topmember of a column, usually made of wood or stone. Portraying a moulded part (echinus) below, and a flat slab (abacus) above, it eases the visual transition from column shaft to the roofing beam (architrave) above. Decoration was normally according to one of the...

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Buddhism

The Buddha, who lived in India in the 6th century bc, challenged the religious teachings of the Brahmans, who dominated Indian civilization at the time. An early convert to Buddhism was Bimbisara, king of Magadha, but its most extensive development was under the Mauryan empire of Asoka in the 3rd...

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Buddhism

Breccia

Sediment composed of angular fragments of gravel.

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Brak

A tell site of c30 hectares on the Khabur River in northeast Syria overlooking an important river crossing. Material from the Halaf and Ubaid periods indicates a long history, but the site is best known for its sequence of rich temples of the late Uruk and Jemdet Nasr periods, when it was clearly...

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Brak