Thanksgiving on the lunar calendar has been celebrated all across Asia for a very long time. It was the time when people ― even married women who were tacitly restrained from visiting their mothers and fathers after getting married and living with the in-laws ― got together and tried to convey their good status by giving gifts. “After women served all the holiday visitors they were allowed to v...

NEW DELHI (AFP) ― More than 200 languages have vanished in India over the last 50 years, a new study says, blaming urban migration and fear among nomadic tribes of speaking their traditional tongues. The extensive study, conducted throughout the country over four years and released this week, has found 230 languages have “elapsed” while another 870 have survived the test of time in richly divers...

PARIS (AP) ― “Winged Victory of Samothrace,” the hulking Hellenistic sculpture that dominates the Louvre Museum’s most frequented staircase, is taking flight ― away from tourists’ gazes for a restoration project. Officials at the famed Paris museum said the 2nd-century B.C. sculpture was set to be dismantled, hoisted onto rollers and wheeled into a closed cabin in another Louvre gallery for stru...

PARIS (AFP) ― Archaeologists drawing on a wide range of tools said on Wednesday they had pinpointed the crucial time in world history when Egypt emerged as a distinct state. Experts have wrangled for decades as to when turbulent upper and lower Egypt were brought together under a stable, single ruler for the first time. Conventional estimates, based on the evolving styles of ceramics found in h...

PARIS (AFP) ― Forgotten and abandoned for over 70 years, casts of the art treasures at the Khmer temple complex at Angkor in Cambodia are coming out of storage to be rediscovered in a Europe that first shunned them. The statues, reliefs and temple decorations in the style of the original ninth to 15-century monuments at the site in northern Cambodia are to be exhibited in Paris’ Musee Guimet in ...

MALLAWI, Egypt (AFP) ― Magdy Tahami looks in disbelief at what remains of Egypt’s tiny Mallawi museum. The ground is littered with glass from the display cabinets, which once housed its precious collection, after a mob attacked and looted the building, during a nationwide crackdown on Islamist protesters. Before, hundreds of antiquities, statuettes, gold and jewels told the history of Egypt, fr...