Claudia Winkleman's new chat show splits critics

By: SGK ADVERTISING ADDA on March 17, 2026 / comment : 0 BBC News, news

Jeff Goldblum, Vanessa Williams, Jennifer Saunders and Tom Allen starred in the inaugural episode.

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Carthaginian coin used to pay bus fare donated to Leeds Museum

By: SGK ADVERTISING ADDA on March 16, 2026 / comment : 0

A 2,000-year-old coin that was used to pay a bus fare in the 1950s has been donated to the Leeds Museums and Galleries. The rare bronze coin was struck in the Carthaginian city of Gadir, modern-day Cadiz, Spain, in the 1st century B.C.

The coin was paid to an unknown bus driver and made its way to James Edwards, then the chief cashier of Leeds City Transport, whose job it was to go through all the fares accumulated by buses and trams during the day and counting them all. When he came across a foreign coin or a fake or one that wasn’t acceptable legal tender for any reason, he set them aside. Some of them he gave to his grandson Peter.

Peter Edwards, now 77, said: “My grandfather would come across coins which were not British and put them to one side, and when I went to his house, he would hand me a few.

“It was not long after the war, so I imagine soldiers returned with coins from countries they had been sent to. Neither of us were coin collectors but we were fascinated by their origin and imagery – to me they were treasure.”

Peter has kept his public transport treasures in a wooden chest this whole time. One of them was unlike the others and hard to make it out so for decades he didn’t known where it come from and when. His research recently bore fruit, and he was able to identify it as a Carthaginian coin. The obverse features a portrait of Melqart, patron deity of the Phoenician city of Tyre, wearing the Nemean lion-skin headdress of Herakles. The reverse features two tuna fish with an inscription reading “minted in Agadir” above them.

“My first thought when I found out its origin was that I would like to return it to an institute where it could be studied by all, and Leeds Museums and Galleries kindly offered to give it a good home.

“My grandfather would be proud to know, as I am, that the coin is coming back to Leeds. However, how it got there will always be a mystery.”

The coin will now be part of the collection based at Leeds Discovery Centre, which includes coins and currency from cultures around the world spanning thousands of years of history.

* This article was originally published here

Meet the director nominated for two Oscars for two different films

By: SGK ADVERTISING ADDA on March 16, 2026 / comment : 0 news, films E

Getting nominated once for an Academy Award is a feat but Geeta Gandbhir is nominated twice this year - for two separate films.

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Meet the director nominated for two Oscars for two different films

By: SGK ADVERTISING ADDA on March 16, 2026 / comment : 0 BBC News, news

Getting nominated once for an Academy Award is a feat but Geeta Gandbhir is nominated twice this year - for two separate films.

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43,000 ostraca found at one site shed light on social history of Egypt

By: SGK ADVERTISING ADDA on March 15, 2026 / comment : 0

The latest excavation of the ancient site of Athribis in Lower Egypt has uncovered 13,000 ostraca. This brings the total number of inscribed pottery fragments found at the site up to 43,000 (40,000 in the last three years alone), making it the largest collection of ostraca discovered at a single archaeological site in Egypt.

The excavation of Athribis is a joint mission of the Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA) and archaeologists from the University of Tübingen. The site was the temple complex of the lion goddess (Ta-)Repit, and contained a mud brick settlement, necropolis and limestone quarries as well as the temple itself. It was occupied for more than a thousand years, generating an immense variety of texts dating to between the 3rd century B.C. and the 9th-11th century.

The earliest texts are tax receipts from the 3rd century BCE written in Demotic script, the common administrative script of the Ptolemaic and Roman periods. The most recent texts are Arabic inscriptions on vessels from the 9th to 11th centuries AD.

“The ostraca show us an astonishing variety of everyday situations,” says Leitz. “We find tax lists and deliveries, along with short notes about everyday activities, exercises by schoolchildren, religious texts, and priestly certificates attesting the quality of sacrificial animals. This mixture is what makes the find so valuable,” Leitz adds. “This everyday content gives us a direct insight into the lives of the people of Athribis and makes the ostraca an important source for a comprehensive social history of the region.”

The majority of the ostraca are written in Demotic script, followed by a considerable number of Greek inscriptions. A smaller but significant proportion of the sherds shows figurative and geometric designs. In addition, there are rare texts in Hieratic, hieroglyphic, Coptic or Arabic script. Athribis is also considered the world’s most important site for demotic-hieratic horoscopes, featuring more than 130 such texts. These birth predictions are important sources for the history of ancient astronomy and astrology.

Excavations began in 2005, but only about 1,000 ostraca emerged in the first 13 years. In 2018, a large group of ostraca was discovered in a 20-by-40-meter area (about 8,600 square feet) west of the Temple of Ptolemy XII. Archaeologists hit the motherlode three years ago, when 40,000 ostraca were unearthed in a 40-by-40-meter area (about 17,200 square feet), along with thousands more pot sherds that had no writing on them.

More ostraca are expected to be discovered as excavation continue. Meanwhile, the ones that have been found already are being digitized, transcribed and translated, work that will take years.

“This impressive project demonstrates the power of joint, long-term research. Through expertise, patience, and passion, inconspicuous pot sherds are transformed into a vivid picture of past worlds,” says Professor Karla Pollmann, President of the University of Tübingen.

* This article was originally published here

From Mr Nobody to Oscar nominee: How one man took on Putin

By: SGK ADVERTISING ADDA on March 15, 2026 / comment : 0 BBC News, news

Pavel Talankin's film Mr Nobody Against Putin has already won a Bafta, and is now competing for an Oscar.

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From Mr Nobody to Oscar nominee: How one man took on Putin

By: SGK ADVERTISING ADDA on March 15, 2026 / comment : 0 news, films E

Pavel Talankin's film Mr Nobody Against Putin has already won a Bafta, and is now competing for an Oscar.

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Mosaics from early Christian churches found in Albania

By: SGK ADVERTISING ADDA on March 14, 2026 / comment : 0

Fragments of two mosaic floors from Late Antiquity unearthed in Berat, Albania, have been identified as the remains of Christian basilicas. This sheds new light on the urban layout of the ancient city of Antipatrea about which very little is known.

Berat is a UNESCO World Heritage Site because of its unique historic downtown characterized by 18th and 19th century Ottoman structures and urban design, but human presence in the area goes back to the 4th/3rd millennium B.C. and there is evidence of an urban settlement in Berat defined by defensive walls dating to the 7th-6th century B.C. According to Livy, the walls were destroyed and the city burned down by Roman forces under the command of consul Publius Sulpicius Galba in 200 B.C. during the Second Macedonian War.

After that, there are no references to Antipatrea in ancient sources until the 5th century, when Eastern Roman Emperor Theodosius II (401-450 A.D.) was said to have rebuilt the walls and renamed the city Pulcheriopolis after his sister Pulchera. It was an episcopal seat in the Byzantine period, and Justinian the Great built a fortress on the hilltop that would later be rebuilt several times until it fell under the rule of Venetian Republic in 1420.

Because of its historically significant urban center and because of its many cycles of destruction and reconstruction, almost no archaeological material from Antipatrea’s ancient history has come to light. There has never been a systematic archaeological investigation of the city’s historic center. The first excavation began in 1973 and continued for two years, focusing on the castle/fortress in the upper city. Remains of ceramic kitchenware and imported pottery from Late Antiquity (4th-6th century A.D.) were found near the castle gate. After that, there was one more excavation of the castle area in 1987 and then no further archaeological exploration.

The first mosaic was discovered during construction of a new network of water hydrants in the castle in 2012. It was fragmentary and a burn layer on the surface attested to how the building had met its demise. It covered an area of about 20 x 11 feet and featured geometric designs in polychrome tesserae (white, red, pink, violet, gray and black) and a very fragmentary inscription in Greek that was probably a dedication to the donors who funded the construction of the church.

The second was unearthed during construction of a new drainage system under the foundations of the King’s Mosque in the lower city in 2018. It was a much smaller fragment, about 7.4 x 2.6 feet, of a polychrome mosaic created in the opus tesselatum technique. It too showed traces of burning on the surface and a fragment of a Greek inscription.

One word is clearly preserved: Theotokos, meaning “Theotokos” or “Mother of God.” The inscription mentioning the term “Theotokos” is an important clue for dating the mosaic. This title took on a central place in Christian theology after the Council of Ephesus in 431.

For this reason, researchers believe that the mosaic was created after this event. In combination with other archaeological findings, such as coins found in the layers above the mosaic, including one from the time of Emperor Justinian II, it is assumed that the mosaic dates from the late 5th century or early 6th century AD.

While the findings were published locally, the discoveries were only revealed outside of Albanian publications in late 2025 as international researchers studied the documented finds, their construction methods and materials, design styles and inscription fragments. Motifs found in the mosaics — intersecting octagons, ivy scrolls, undulating interlaced bands, offset adjacent scales, laced circles, guilloche borders, simple filet borders — were compared to decorative models of other mosaics in Albania, North Macedonia and Italy, but researchers believe they were created by local craftsmen. One border element, a dentilled simple filet border with dentiles three tesserae wide, found in the castle mosaic is unique on the archaeological record of Albania.

The materials used – limestone and terracotta – match the sources found in the region. The style is particularly similar to mosaics from nearby sites such as Bylis and Butrint. This suggests that there was a network of craftsmen who traveled between cities and decorated early Christian churches throughout the Balkans.

The two mosaics in different locations, the one in the castle inside the old walls and the one in the lower city outside the walls, show that there were at least two churches in the city in Late Antiquity. The significant “Theotokos” inscription, the rarity of the dentilled simple filet border, the impressive size of the mosaic inside the old walls all point to Antipatrea having been been an important early Christian community. It also lends a new perspective on the Codex Beratinus Purpureus Phi, aka the Codex of Berat, a 6th century illuminated manuscript of the Gospel of Matthew and the Gospel of Mark written in silver ink on purple parchment that was kept at Berat since at least the 14th century. Previous scholars didn’t think the highly important manuscript, one of just seven “purple codexes” was directly connected to the city, that it coincidentally found its way after it was produced elsewhere. The discovery of the mosaics and basilicas is evidence that the city was much more prominent during the time of Justinian the Great than previously realized, and makes it entirely plausible that the Codex came from there.

* This article was originally published here

Musician Labrinth says he is 'done with this industry' and hits out at Euphoria

By: SGK ADVERTISING ADDA on March 14, 2026 / comment : 0 BBC News, news

The British star composed the music for the first two seasons of HBO's popular teen TV series.

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TV's Carol Vorderman 'wouldn't say no' to a career in politics

By: SGK ADVERTISING ADDA on March 14, 2026 / comment : 0 news, films E

The former BBC Radio Wales presenter says she would stand as an independent.

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