The British Museum's touring exhibit "Treasures of the World's Cultures" has attracted over 80,000 visitors in its first month.

"It is amazing that such an exhibit on foreign cultures has become so popular in Beijing," said Yao An, deputy curator of the Capital Museum of Beijing...

... The exhibit displays 272 artefacts including a 3,000-year-old mummy, an ancient statue of Dionysus, son of Zeus, a 2,100-year-old gold pendant featuring Aphrodite and Eros, and Leonardo da Vinci's works.

Treasures on show also include ancient Egyptian tablets, Greek busts, Roman sculptures and the world's oldest tool...

Touring exhibit of British Museum popular among Beijingers, People's Daily, China, April 28, 2006.

On a deserted green hill above the Aegean Sea, archaeologists have unearthed what may be the palace of Ajax, one of the greatest heroes in Greek mythology...

... Among the finds are tools, Cypriot pottery and bronzes, proof of relations with the eastern Mediterranean. But the most stunning discovery is a single bronze scale from an armour breastplate that bears the stamp of a famous Egyptian pharaoh.

Translated by professors Jacke Phillips and John Ray at Cambridge, it is the name of Rameses II who ruled Egypt during the 13th century BC. Lolos said it was possible that Salamina men had fought as mercenaries in the army of Rameses.

"The piece is ... unique," Phillips said. "I know of no other armour scale with a hieroglyphic inscription..."

Ajax's long-lost palace discovered on Greek island, Reuters via The Scotsman, UK, April 28, 2006.

Frustrated with the poor quality of many Web sites dealing with ancient Egypt, a professor at the University of California has decided to create an online encyclopaedia devoted to Egyptology.

Willemina Wendrich, a professor of Egyptian archaeology, had watched in dismay as the best resource for her subject, a seven-volume encyclopaedia in German, got more and more out of date because of the prohibitive cost of updating it.

Meanwhile, her students at UCLA were doing research for papers on the Internet, and being led astray. "The Web has a lot of wonderful information, and a lot of horrible information," she told Reuters in a telephone interview Thursday.

The UCLA Encyclopaedia of Egyptology, which will go online in 2008, will be peer-reviewed and will update when there are new discoveries, Wendrich said...

A single completely unrelated photo of the Psusennes gold mask was released with the story by Reuters and can be found here on Yahoo's Anthropology & Archaeology slideshow.

Egyptologists launching online encyclopaedia, Reuters via CNN, USA, April 28, 2006.

cf. Egyptologists launching online encyclopaedia, Reuters via CNN, USA, April 28, 2006.

A burnt olive tree has helped to resolve a controversy over dating key events in the Mediterranean that took place more than three millennia ago.

The new dates would change the chronology of the Minoans, Greeks, Cypriots and others by a century, realign history and raise questions about the Egyptian chronology and the genesis of Classical civilisation.

The rewriting of the history of the Aegean has come in part from an elaborate study of charcoal and seed samples from a number of sites dated to between 1700BC and 1400BC, and partly from a single olive tree. The gnarled stump was found in a volcanic rock layer on the Greek island of Santorini (Thera).

During the second millennium BC, it was the site of a massive eruption that blasted ash and rock for many miles around, burying many thriving civilisations in the Mediterranean, including Crete's famed Minoans...

Olive tree rewrites classical history, The Telegraph, UK, April 28, 2006.

cf. Olive Branch Buried by Volcano Revises History, Live Science, USA, April 27, 2006.

cf. Cultural recalibration, Science Magazine, AAAS, District of Columbia, USA, Vol. 312, no. 5773, April 28, 2006, p. 496. This is the Science article summary, a subscription is required to obtain the full version in PDF format.