Antiquities Exhibits

The wild boar features prominently in the cultures of Indo-European people, many of which saw the animal as embodying warrior virtues. Cultures throughout Europe and Asia Minor saw the killing of a boar as proof of one's valor and strength. Neolithic hunter gatherers depicted reliefs of ferocious wild boars on their temple pillars at Göbekli Tepe some 11,600 years ago. Virtually all heroes in Greek mythology fight or kill a boar at one point. The demigod Herakles' third labor involves the capture of the Erymanthian Boar, Theseus slays the wild sow Phaea, and a disguised Odysseus is recognised by his handmaiden Eurycleia by the scars inflicted on him by a boar during a hunt in his youth. To the mythical Hyperboreans, the boar represented spiritual authority. Several Greek myths use the boar as a symbol of darkness, death and winter. One example is the story of the youthful Adonis, who is killed by a boar and is permitted by Zeus to depart from Hades only during the spring and su...

Although scholars disagree on the dating of the evolution of tesselated mosaic from earlier pebble mosaics, most agree this occurred during the 3rd century BCE.  Mosaics are thought to have appeared in Pompeii in the late 2nd and early 1st centuries BCE.  More complex three dimensional scenes were introduced during the Pompeian Second Style about 80 - 20 BCE.  Like panel paintings, sometimes mosaics were mounted in frames so they could be moved during renovation or demolition.   Although elaborate mosaics depicted divine characters or mythological scenes, others depicted still life, animals, and scenes from everyday life. I photographed this mosaic in Pompeii back in 2007. Like other visitors to Pompeii, based on other images of this mosaic I've seen on Flickr, I initially thought this was a mosaic of a wolf.  But as I examined it closer, I think this may actually be a mosaic of a wild boar based on the apparent tail, the stripes above the hind quart...