It’s the only Roman lamp of its kind ever found in the UK. The British Museum has some fragments of similar lamps, but the only other place a lamp so complete has been uncovered is in Pompeii.

Conservator at Colchester and Ipswich Museums, Emma Hogarth, who restored the object said it is a rare and exquisite example of craftsmanship.[...]

The lantern resembles a modern hurricane lamp and the naked flame would have been protected by a thin sheet of horn — now decomposed — that had been scraped until it was translucent.

“What is particularly amazing about the lantern is that the chains it was suspended from still look and move like any modern chain and had not corroded into a metal lump,” said Hogarth.

The lamp dates to between the 1st and 3rd centuries A.D. Suffolk had a number of wealthy villas in the 2nd century. The quality of the lantern suggests that it may have come from one of them.

And now in an even rarer treat, here’s some video taken of the find on the day of the rally:

Awesomely named MEGA — Middle Eastern Geodatabase for Antiquities — the database uses Google Earth satellite images and archaeologist field reports to catalogue over 10,000 ancient sites in Jordan. Some of the information was available in a local Jordanian database, but it wasn’t web-based and was clunky to browse and update. Now anybody in the know can easily record any news about a site’s condition, from encroaching development, looters, environmental threats, whatever is relevant.

Obviously real-time updates are not going to stop someone from looting a site, but it will help authorities track problems almost as soon as they happen, and get a better idea of how to apportion protection and conservation resources.

It was the devastation of Iraq’s archaeological sites in the wake of the US invasion that actually inspired this project. The looting of the National Museum in Baghdad got much of the attention at the time, but the Getty thought they could devise a database to help authorities cope with the archaeological sites being destroyed by looters. Unfortunately, the chaos in the country over the next few years kept the Getty from being able to work with local Iraqi experts, so the project never got off the ground.

“The idea of shipping a couple of big computers to Iraq and hoping that they would get there and that it would all work just seemed too crazy,” said Alison Dalgity, a senior project manager at the Getty who helped develop MEGA.

And so the institute accepted an invitation from Jordan to develop the system there first, a plan that coincided with a sea change in Web-based mapping tools and the rise of open-source software, meaning that the system could exist on the Web and be built and updated cheaply.

It’s not even live yet, but already Jordanian authorities are so delighted with the database that they’re considering opening it to everyone, not just authorized experts but tourist schmoes like the rest of us. Jordan isn’t exactly comfortable with open information sharing when it comes to official government data, so it says a lot that they’re seriously considering upending their customary attitude towards transparency to share the wealth of their archaeological sites.

Jordan’s experience with MEGA might be something of a template for Iraq and other antiquities-rich countries. Change the Google settings and the names, and then it’s just a matter of data entry.

They’re at least 2,000 years old and may have been painted earlier. Very few examples of Hellenistic painting have survived, and what’s left is mainly fragments. We have very little Nabatean art at all, so finding such extensive pieces with intact color and detail under the layers of filth is remarkable.

At the instigation of the Petra National Trust (PNT), conservation experts Stephen Rickerby and Lisa Shekede restored the paintings to life. The work took three years, and was completed only last week. “The paintings were a real mess,” Rickerby said.

He described what has emerged from the blackened layers as “really exceptional and staggeringly beautiful, with an artistic and technical quality that’s quite unlike anything else”.

Three different vines, grape, ivy and bindweed – all associated with Dionysus, the ancient Greek god of wine – have been identified, while the birds include a demoiselle crane and a Palestine sunbird with luscious colours. The scenes are populated by putti-like figures, one winged child playing a flute while seated in a vine-scroll, others picking fruit and fighting off birds pecking at the grapes. The paintings are exceptional in their sophistication, extensive palette and luxurious materials, including gold leaf.

Petra, in what is now Jordan, was the epicenter of an immense trade network linking East and West. As traders in everything from Indian spices to Levant aromatics, Nabatean culture was influenced by its trading partners, hence the Hellenstic style of these paintings which decorate the dining room, main chamber and a smaller recess of what appears to have been a rock-carved spa for the elite.

The Nabateans were experts in water control; a marked advantage, you can imagine, in the middle of a desert. Nabateans took advantage of the canyon flash flooding, channeling it with a system of dams and conduits, creating an artificial oasis that would last for hundreds of years until an earthquake in the 4th century A.D.

Christie’s claimed when they put up for sale that they were bought in 1969 and “similar” to the 8 identical pairs of elaborate gold earrings found in 1988 in the royal tombs at Nimrud, the ancient capital of Assyria. Iraqi officials spotted them in the catalogue and reported them to Interpol, stopping the sale.

Donny George, the former director of the Iraq Museum who was on the Nimrud excavation and who personally photographed the treasures, recognized the earrings as from Nimrud. He pointed out that the gold work at Nimrud was exceptional and unique, that there was no such thing as a “similar” piece.

The earrings were among the 613 items of jewellery and funeral ornaments that make up the Treasure, found in 1988 in two previously unexplored burial chambers, belonging to a ninth-century BC queen and princess, in the ancient city of Nimrud.

Sent to the central bank at the time of the first Gulf War in 1991, the Treasure has hardly ever been on show. But it was once described by an American investigator seeking to recover lost Iraqi artefacts as making the tomb of the Egyptian King Tutankhamun “look like Walmart”.

The treasure remained in the vault of the central for 20 years, surviving the 1990 Gulf War, depredations of Saddam Hussein’s son Qusay (he helped himself to almost a billion dollars in cash plus hundreds of gold bars from the bank), Shock and Awe, looters trying to break into it with rocket-propelled grenades and AK-47s, and a major flood. A team of Iraqi, US and British archaeologists, plus an awesome reservist Marine Col. Matthew Bogdanos who in civilian life is a New York prosecutor with a classics degree along with his legal one, were able to rescue the Nimrud treasure from the flood.

At the time they thought it was fully accounted for, but somewhere between the summer of 2003 and winter of 2008, those earrings migrated out of Iraq into Christie’s hot little ask-no-questions hands. Even now Christie’s refuses to say who the seller was or even comment on the story at all. New York Customs enforcement will only say that no legal action has been taken.

Because there is no alphabet in Chinese, putting together all the characters to print even a few words is hugely time-consuming, never mind the 4000 or so characters that make up the average novel. Chang’s Ri Xing Type Foundry has 2 million individual pieces of lead type.

Handwritten Chinese, using brush and paper, is considered an art form and an indicator of its practitioner’s scholarship and aesthetic sensibility.

In communist China, many characters have been replaced by simplified forms to promote literacy, but purists say they lack the heft and balance of the originals.

Taiwan, an island of 23 million people 160 kilometers (100 miles) off the Chinese coast, still uses the traditional versions, regarding them as the heart and soul of Chinese culture. The older characters are also in use in Hong Kong, though no movable-type foundries exist there.

And everywhere, word processing is threatening to make the old skills extinct.

Chang is dedicated to preserving this cultural and historical asset, no matter how obsolete it may seem. Movable type was invented in China, after all, in 1040 A.D., a full 400 years before Gutenberg developed the printing press in the West. Its inventor, Bi Sheng, used wood type, but that was soon abandoned in favor of clay which had no grain nor warping problems after being soaked in ink. Metal type took another 200 years to appear, first in Korea then throughout the Mongol Chinese empire.

When Chang’s uncle started Ri Xing Type Foundry in 1969, there were 5000 print shops in Taipei. Now there are only 30 of them left, and Chang’s is the only remaining foundry.

To keep this thousand-year-old tradition alive, Chang has had to sell his family home, and since the print shop hasn’t actually turned a profit in 10 years, he created a museum of movable type where people can buy lead characters as novelties. They look totally cool. He needs to get a website up because I bet people from all over the world would buy them for the coolness alone. It would be wonderful to see a dying traditional craft benefit from the Chinese character trend so overused in tattoo art.