Mitylene (Asia Minor) hectae electrum coins, ca. 500 B.C. (image public domain) By John Saul – WHY WAS ONE WORD USED FOR TWO SUBSTANCES? In former times the word electrum designated two substances which to us are very different. One was amber and the other was an alloy of gold […]
By Walter Borden, M.D. The American Founders, including Madison, Jefferson, and Adams in creating our constitution studied the history of republics going back to Carthage, Greece and Rome. Adams in particular cited ancient Greece with long references to Solon, known as “the Law Giver”, one of the Seven Sages, and […]
By Hilary Letwin – Sitting for one’s portrait is not the first thing one might expect to do in self-isolation during a global pandemic. But, that is precisely where I found myself on a recent gray Tuesday morning, posed on my balcony in Vancouver at 9 am, my morning coffee […]
Fig. 1 Pont du Gard side view (photo P. Hunt, 2015) By David S. Spain, Ph.D. – One of the favorite examples of Roman aqueduct technology is the famous Pont du Gard in southern France. The arcaded Pont du Gard is part of the 50 km long aqueduct from springs […]
In 2005 while working with Cultural Heritage Imaging and monastery chanoine Jean-Pierre Voutaz, Archiviste for the Order of the Grand-St-Bernard at the Simplon Hospice in Switzerland’s Simplon Pass, Marlin Lum took these photographs of the local landscape and its environs. Electrum Magazine is proud to feature stunning photographs of our […]
by Melissa Guertin Edvard Munch may not now be screaming over his work’s repeated purloinings (1995, 2004) from several museums, since they’ve been returned, but Isabella Stewart Gardner should be turning over in her grave because the 1990 heist of twelve masterpieces from her lovely Boston palazzo museum is still […]
By Andrew Herkovic The ancient Library of Alexandria, real as it once was, is essentially the stuff of myth. What we usually understand as libraries, even the most ambitious of libraries, don’t much resemble the myth or the reality of the original at the shore of the Mediterranean. Though it […]
By Danny Wood Three brothers, Danny, Ben and Sam Wood, search for archaeological traces of Hannibal, the Carthaginian warrior, as they cycle his two thousand mile trail from Spain to Tunisia, for a BBC Television documentary We’d just finished riding up the Tourmalet, known as one of the toughest Tour […]