Josephine Quinn

There was​ a fashion in the Bronze Age Levant for decorating hollow bones: take the femur or tibia of a cow, scoop out the mucky stuff, polish it up and scratch geometric patterns on it. The bone tube – as archaeologists call such objects – on display in Paris as part of the exhibition Trésors sauvés de Gaza: 5000 ans d’histoire (until 2 November) has a...

The seaside​ was invented in the 18th century, along with freedom, fraternity and the rights of man. The beach was Britain’s contribution to modernity, a product of the Industrial Revolution and the rise of cities. A new interest in fresh air and exercise took hold, especially among the upper classes: labour took care of the bodies of their workers. Before that the coast was a source...

My first visit​ to the British Museum was on a date, and under duress. My objection wasn’t to elite cultural institutions or stolen goods, but to visiting a museum about Britain. I was studying classics to get away from all that. I can still remember the bewilderment of walking into those first long galleries with their five-legged bulls and giant stone kings. I saw the Rosetta Stone...

Sometime​ in the late 160s CE, the Roman doctor Galen suffered a great misfortune: the loss of almost all his slaves to a disease he called (in Greek) ‘the protracted plague’ – a term used for any major epidemic. In a treatise discovered in a Thessaloniki monastery in 2005, Galen boasts that he was not at all moved by this tragedy, nor indeed by one far worse in 192, when a...

Christian evangelicals​ in the United States sometimes like to identify the ancient Persian emperor Cyrus the Great with Donald Trump. Both are vessels for God’s plan on earth. This may seem surprising: Trump is no more obviously Christian than Cyrus, who died half a millennium before Christ was born, and neither would score highly on a morality test. But, it turns out, the leakier...