In this 1904 Halloween greeting card, divination is depicted: the young woman looking into a mirror in a darkened room hopes to catch a glimpse of her future husband.
Halloween falls on a Monday this year, which means you can celebrate all weekend! We’re here to make sure your feasting and frivolity is not only fun and delicious, but also ties you back to your ancient past. Check out the links below to learn more about Halloween’s connections to antiquity and scroll down for some yummy ancient treats to make that will be sure to dazzle your trick or treaters! Continue reading
There are so many ancient dishes and ingredients that we eat every day and never consider the long and storied histories behind them. That’s why AntiquityNOW makes an effort to reveal the fascinating pasts of the foods we love. Two of our favorite ancient foods are curry and turmeric. Now you can learn how to cook the world’s oldest curry, which features turmeric in its ingredient list. The curry was discovered in 2010 by two Washington State University archaeologists who “used starch analysis to trace the world’s first-known or ‘oldest’ proto-curry of aubergine, ginger and turmeric from a shard of pottery found in the ancient Harappan civilisation near modern-day Delhi.”
What would you do if you were just going about your business, doing your job and suddenly you discovered a piece of history? Recently, a man in Ireland was faced with that very situation. As he was cutting turf from a bog, to be burned for warmth, he happened upon a 22-pound chunk of bog butter that is estimated to be over 2,000 years old! Of course, if he had read our blog post about ancient butter, he would have known that finding ancient “bog butter” really isn’t that unusual. This 22-pounder joins other finds, including 3,000-year-old and even 5,000-year-old samples.
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