Han art: An embroidered Chinese boddhisatva (on cloth) wearing a pearl necklace When was the Han Dynasty? There were three big changes in Chinese art in the Han Dynasty. One [...]
Late Shang bronze pitcher from Henan, about 1100 BC, with inscription (Musee Guimet, Paris) What if you were a bronze-smith in ancient China? Use colored pencils to draw your own [...]
Western Zhou bronze vessel from China (now in the Musee Guimet, Paris) Western Zhou art The first part of the Zhou Dynasty is called the Western Zhou, and it runs [...]
Terracotta warriors The Qin Dynasty didn't last very long (only 15 years) and so there wasn't time to develop any special style of art. Mostly even experts can't tell Qin [...]
Wei Dynasty camel (northern China, 500-550 AD) (Musee Guimet, Paris) It was in the time of the Three Kingdoms that the first artists appear whose names we still know today. [...]
Chinese woman playing an erhu: early bowed instruments Plucking a hunting bow to make music Central Asia was the place where people invented the ancestors of violins and cellos. Siberian or Mongolian [...]
Tillya Tepe gold crown - Afghanistan, ca. 100 BC-100 AD Art you can carry around Because the people of Central Asia started out as nomads, riding their horses and camels [...]
Turkmenistan painting in a Chinese-Islamic style The collapse of the Mongol Empire in the end of the Middle Ages meant that artists scattered to the courts of many smaller states [...]
A rock gong in Africa from the Stone Age The first music Birds probably made music long before people, perhaps soon after they evolved in the late Jurassic period, about [...]
A mosaic floor made up of tiny blocks You make the simplest kind of mosaic by taking a lot of black and white pebbles and arranging them on a bed [...]
