>what is anthropeum?
anthropeum is a daily game where you guess the (rough) location and age of ten artifacts pulled from the Met collections.
you can play the game at https://anthropeum.com/
this is a thread to discuss today's game, post your scores, or talk about anything related to historical artifacts, treasures etc..!
History / anthropology links (ill add more l8r,,)
>Statues also Die, Dir. Renais, Marker
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GR8KprsNng
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Spoilers below, make sure to play todays game b4 reading! V.V
Jul 14 2026
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73,184 · top 41% of players today!
Im quite sad i placed so low today u.u but im happy i had a good idea about every single piece, including the kushite ram..
i really wonder how much the imagery changed in egyhpt towards nubia during the kushite occupation?
this crystaline flask really really blew me away, i mean its so reminiscent of that dark age embedded gemstone style that i swore it had to have been byzantine- or some other asian facing european country, but woww it was Mughal??
its almost reminiscent of a faberge..
im having trouble differentiating mughal and ilkhanate styles TBH.. like its very clear that this is a mongol-persian thing from the faces, but maybe i need to learn to differentiate persian from farsi.. seems quite hard!
i was so convinced it was mughal that i completely forgot about the ilkhanids lmao
holy s***
heres my score. top 92%..... i was able to identify the continent / country for most of them. but rly struggled with era.
great work friend!! i always always always understimate the age of olmec and mayan stuff in favorof the much more recent aztecs.. its really hard to read the age of meso stuff !!
Anthropeum.com · Jul 15 2026
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64,974 · top 43% of players today!
noo this is so hard. getting fomo abt not having lived in every period ever
oh my god that 7th one from today looks so cool
Jul 15 2026
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68,466 · top 27% of players today!
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i rlly got chancay and moche ceramics mixxed up this time >.< ishkld know going forwards that the chancay havcee this almost jomon-style of fat figured chara, very little geometric adherence
I love this website a lot. I play it every day with my friend slipni and then we get upset at how persian was used ALL OVER THE ISLAMIC WORLD FROM TUNISIA TO INDIA and being able to distinguish arabic from farsi actually doesnt help at all
ok THIS one i recognized as a specific tell of a culture, but then i cldnt remember what it was, I learned it was decorative scarification,
https://www.randafricanart.com/Scarification_and_Cicatrisation_among_African_cultures.html
It looks like it was practiced in a suprisingly wide swath of africa! i rlly thoguht it was limited to the congo river basin,, but theres people up in ethiopea and as west as the sea doing it.. i think it remains to be seen if you can tell a region's scarification by specific design details (thin geometric lines, larger bumps, repeated "medalions" etc.. ) but i clndt find much on this for now
some links
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamadermatology/article-abstract/2588550
https://sci-hub.ru/storage/dace/1840/e5723d959919fa0109dfabac963ea40d/schildkrout2004.pdf
https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annurev.anthro.33.070203.143947
its really intresting how little coptic styles resemble their egyptian predecessors,,
great article on the different kinds of sepik river carving families, (akthough it is written by a buyer-seller..)
https://www.new-guinea-tribal-arts.com/sepik-carving/
this kind of rib imagery i have never found in any other culture!! its so unique to papua
how the heck do i tell which millennium cuneiform is from?
Anthropeum.com · Jul 16 2026
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68,648 · top 42% of players today!
Anthropeum.com · Jul 15 2026
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37,999 · top 99% of players today!
Today was pretty tough. I really had no idea with the indian circle - manhole type looking thing - and was really off with papa new guinia - altho i considered it for a diff object. I still have no reference regarding era so I'm spit balling that - i only have intuition with location.
>>3mqq6izscgs2v
good work ^_^ two tips i haf for you is that alot of meso poetry has this kind of "loop spout", as far as I know, no other culture has this kind of thing
as well as looking at pictures of both islamic caligraphy, and the roof of mosques to see what the muslim visual language is like, its very ubiquitous!
>>3mqq7gfcalx2q
i will never forget this.
Anthropeum.com · Jul 15 2026
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88,498 · top 1% of players today!
so many cool things today. im surprised i did well, a few felt like shots in the dark. i think my favorite was #7, the huge wooden figure
>>3mqq7ula4hk2v
boss. i thought 90+ was a good thing now I realize its all inverted and Im at the bottom of the barrel.
>>3mqq7ula4hk2v
Those hooks are so good, I’ve learned they are effigies made to recruit spirits to make the next hunt easier, and if it is, then some of the meat from the hunt gets impaled onto it
looking at todays spanish-inca poncho I was wondering if it could even have been central american, cause I didnt think camelids went up that north, apparently i was right..
the question i have now is what did the central americans use for textiles ??? salish wooly dogs??
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macuahuitl
ok so time for a bit of a conspiracy.. so like u guys know the macuahuitl right? that super iconic serated club design.. the wikipedia says its so well known and wide spread, so how come there are litterally only 3 known examples of them in history, all of them having burnt down in the 1800s?? isn t this so weird??
todays selection was incredibly good.. rlly rlly loved the azerbaijani carpet..
Jul 17 2026
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72,136 · top 15% of players today!
ヽ(´ー｀)ノ Jul 19 2026
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71,092 · top 19% of players today!
green fn>>3mqnsyy6uns2p
· Jul 20 2026
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84,373 · top 3% of players today!
new highs .. i had a fiasco where i knew it was rapa nui but couldnt find it on the map!! i looked for 20 mins!!
(;´Д`) Jul 21 2026
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51,370 · top 87% of players today!
time to study...
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