Search Results: Chinese rock

Ancient China covered a vast and ever-changing geopolitical landscape, and the art it produced over three millennia is, unsurprisingly, just as varied. Still, despite continuous indigenous technical developments, changes in materials and...

Rock art, that is paintings and carvings on natural rock formations, is one of the earliest forms of creative expression and a universal phenomenon among prehistoric societies. An instrument of communication rather than simply art, it is...

Dragons appear in the mythology of many ancient cultures but nowhere else in the world was the creature quite so revered as in China. There, in marked contrast to other world mythologies, the dragon was almost always seen in a positive light...

Calligraphy established itself as the most important ancient Chinese art form alongside painting, first coming to the fore during the Han dynasty (206 BCE - 220 CE). All educated men and some court women were expected to be proficient at...

Sioux: Black Rock with family, painting by George Catlin, 1854. Ethnological Museum, Berlin.

Mosque of the Dome of the Rock (Qubbat al-Sakhra) located on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. It was erected by the Muslim caliph Abd el-Malik in 688-691 CE but Suleiman the Magnificent (1520-1566 CE) was responsible for the mosque’s renovation...

Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, originally constructed in 691-692 CE in the reign of Caliph Abd al-Malik.

Spider Rock, Canyon de Chelly, Arizona, USA. The canyon boasts 5,000 years of habitation, including the Ancestral Pueblan Culture from c. 700 CE.

The Zen rock garden of Ryoanji temple, Kyoto, Japan. The garden dates to c. 1500 CE but the exact significance of its 15 stones is unknown except that they are designed to promote meditation.

The rock drawings of Valcamonica are prehistoric petroglyphs carved in the glacier-polished, grey-purple Permian sandstone of the Camonica valley that extends for 90 km in the Italian provinces of Brescia and Bergamo in Lombardy. The name...