Wednesday, March 07, 2007

Excavations at Liduma?

Update, March 7, 2007:

The University of Sydney has an interesting illustrated press release on these excavations at Jinjun: Rich finds on royal road


Update, March 1, 2007:

More news (but not much more) on the Iranian/Australian expedition in Nurabad Mamasani, Fars province. The article includes these interesting photographs





An Iranian/Australian team are excavation a site which they claim, in a news story, to be the place Liduma, mentioned in the Persepolis Fortification tablets

MAVI reviewed

Update: March 7, 2007: Achemenet et M.A.V.I. (Musée Achéménide Virtuel Interactif) have also been reviewed in the following:

Le Site à la loupe: Le monde achéménide en ligne - 2 mars 2007, par Corinne Welger-Barboza, in OBSERVATOIRE CRITIQUE des ressources numériques en histoire de l'art et archéologie, 2 mars 2007.



MAVI has been listed in Intute

Intute is a free online service providing access to the very best Web resources for education and research, selected and evaluated by a network of subject specialists. The service is brought to us by a consortium of UK universities and partners.

Following is the text of Intute's description of MAVI:

"The virtual Achaemenid museum is a multimedia-rich interactive website focusing on the Achaemenid Empire (ca. 560 to 330 BC), also known as Persian Empire. The website publishes a database of artefacts from several museums representing a broad selection of categories and archaeological sites of provenance. It is possible to browse the artefacts in the "consultation" section by museum; archaeological site; category; or iconographic theme. A large sub-section publishes drawings by early travellers to the region. Any object can be saved as link in a special section, "my archive". Section "discovery" publishes a few audio and video presentations of key topics such as the "The Middle-East 550 B.C."; "Cyrus' conquests"; and "Pasargades". The help section is also a brief multimedia presentation and it is very useful to familiarise with the interface. At the bottom left there is a menu which allows to perform keyword searches, to add and access the records saved in "my archive" and to jump to any previously accessed record. For each record there are a few textual details and generally at least one picture, often more than one. Captions and texts change according to the picture displayed, and therefore multiple records may be available for a single object, one for each available photograph or drawing. At the top of each picture there is a menu labelled "tools", which allows zooming; reversing colours; transforming to greyscale; pan; copy; and paste pictures. Among the categories are buildings (architectures); coins; paintings; statues; vessels (both ceramic and metal vessels); and others"