Ancient Artifacts Quotes

South Africa had a long record of studies in prehistory, going back to the end of the last century.

I was astounded to learn that Alaskan caves might be hiding secrets about the earliest people ever to enter the Americas. That's when I began to picture a story that would start with kayaking and lead into the caves.

On the Italian side, we can trace the family back 2,000 years. I have a cousin in Rome, a famous archaeologist, Count Andrea Carandini, who was in Lombardy and came across some pottery with the original name of the family, Carandinus, painted on it.

Nobody has ever convinced me that ancient aliens have visited Earth. Not even close.

I like both Greek and Egyptian. More Greek stories have survived, so we know more about them. They've always been my favorite. On the other hand, I like the Egyptian stories because they're not as commonly known and they have an exotic flavour.

I was always fascinated, even as a child, by antiques and ancient times. I always felt I should have been born in the 17th or 18th century. They really had a big stone castle with authentic furniture.

Israel is the very embodiment of Jewish continuity: It is the only nation on earth that inhabits the same land, bears the same name, speaks the same language, and worships the same God that it did 3,000 years ago. You dig the soil and you find pottery from Davidic times, coins from Bar Kokhba, and 2,000-year-old scrolls written in a script remarkably like the one that today advertises ice cream at the corner candy store.

You think you're in another civilization, another time, and then you see antennas coming out of these hovels, and your mouth falls open when you see the descendants of the Incas shouting 'Columbo! Columbo!'

I have very interesting hobbies like archeology and photography.

What can be more soul shaking than peering through a 100-inch telescope at a distant galaxy, holding a 100-million-year-old fossil or a 500,000-year-old stone tool in one's hand, standing before the immense chasm of space and time that is the Grand Canyon, or listening to a scientist who gazed upon the face of the universe's creation and did not blink?

To excavate a pyramid is the dream of every archaeologist.

Antiquities, or remnants of history, are, as was said, tanquam tabula naufragii: when industrious persons, by an exact and scrupulous diligence and observation, out of monuments, names, words, proverbs, traditions, private records and evidences, fragments of stories, passages of books that concern not story, and the like, do save and recover somewhat from the deluge of time.

You have to remember that not every creature that was evolving left behind its skull or its tools for our convenience tens of thousands of years later. Most bones or most tools rot or get buried and are never found again.

They decided the mummy would be unwrapped, for the titillation of the ladies, just after dinner.

I'm fascinated by anything that deals with the unexplained. I love any show that totally makes me want to know more. How did they build these pyramids? Why did they find these carvings that look like spaceships?

Antiquities are history defaced, or some remnants of history which have casually escaped the shipwreck of time.

Eventually, when I started studying Egyptology, I realized that seeing with my naked eyes alone wasn't enough. Because all of the sudden, in Egypt, my beach had grown from a tiny beach in Maine to one eight hundred miles long, next to the Nile.

No tools have yet been met with in any of the gravels occurring at the higher levels of the valley of the Seine; but no importance can be attached to this negative fact, as so little search has yet been made for them.

I think it's always good to read local authors or relevant books. In Egypt, I studied hieroglyphics and read everything about the mummies.

No amounts of stone and bone could yield the kinds of information that the paintings gave so freely.

I simply think that there are things in this world that are relics. We have unsettling remnants of Atlantis. They have found things off Bermuda, great walls and things of that sort. This seems to indicate that there were races and cultures that went before us. And to me, that's an unsettling idea.

Some people have criticized the United States and the United States military for guarding oil fields and not guarding the Iraqi National Museum which had priceless antiquities in it. They say that this shows a fundamental lack of respect for Iraqi history. I want to remind those people of this: The oldest relics in the museum, 5,000 or 6,000 years old. That oil is 65 million years old. You had to guard that. ... Those antiquities will only last another 5,000 or 6,000 years. When we burn that oil, those fumes will linger long after.

Beyond Greek mythology, history just didn't have a strong resonation with me.

I went to the Heidelburg Castle, a 1200-year-old castle, looked around. It was pretty awesome, but you know, they've got a coffee shop in there, and they have some sections closed off. I wanted to see the part where they tortured people, but it was cool, though.

I'm somebody who likes codes and ciphers and chases and artwork and architecture, and all the things you find in a Robert Langdon thriller.