It is known as one of the worst episodes of the war in Iraq: one of the world's greatest archaeological collections ransacked while American troops stood by, unable or unwilling to act. But now a different picture is emerging of the looting of the National Museum in Baghdad. Only a few dozen significant pieces, not thousands as originally reported, were stolen. And many, a new investigation has found, may have gone missing long before the Americans arrived in the Iraqi capital.

US officials revealed yesterday that several of the most important pieces that were thought to have been stolen have now turned up safe. The world-famous treasure of Nimrud, an extraordinary series of priceless 4,500-year-old gold artifacts, has been found in a flooded vault under the Iraqi National Bank. Other key parts of the museum's collection, including tens of thousands of Greek and Roman gold and silver coins, have been found in strongrooms in the Baghdad museum itself. Staff there now say...

He comes from a dynasty of high achievers yet Stephen Freud – brother of Lucian and Sir Clement – spent 40 years selling ironmongery. Here he breaks his lifelong silence to tell Adam Lusher about living in the Freud shadow and the family feud he longs to resolve.

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There was no name on the door. Just a simple sign that read, rather obliquely, "Successors to Charles Harden". For sale were drawer pulls, switch plates and every kind of doorknob imaginable, from the most basic to the most ornate, in dusty boxes that matched the shop's air of eccentricity.

It was as if Stephen Freud, the owner of the little hardware shop just off Baker Street, craved not so much anonymity as invisibility.

The brother of artist Lucian and MP-turned-broadcaster Sir Clement, and grandson of Sigmund, Stephen has remained so determinedly unnoticed that Wikipedia, the on-line encyclopedia, was still asserting last week that "Ernst Freud had two...

Probably the least embarrassing of all the cock-ups perpetrated by BA and BAA during the opening of Heathrow Terminal 5 a few months ago was the claim that Richard Rogers’ building was the largest free-standing structure in Britain.

Wrong. That record has been held for the past 1,880-odd years by Hadrian’s Wall — which is, in my view, a rather more impressive sight.

Walking along the Walltown Crags with my family last month, I kept stopping to admire this extraordinary relic of Roman times. The long, low stub of the rampart snaked eastward over the uneven line of crags and bluffs like the articulated tail of a stone lizard.

What had once (probably) been a crenellated battlement up to 20 feet high, studded with turrets and mile-castles, was reduced to a few courses of fine-hewn stone topped with ragged turf. Over the centuries, it had seemingly fused into the landscape. In a sense, this feat of engineering has become a geological feature.
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When we picture the 1930s, the images that spring to mind are, almost invariably, black and white. Although the end of the decade saw Judy Garland's Dorothy following a brilliantly yellow road to the Emerald City in The Wizard of Oz, for most of us, the film's monochrome Kansas sequences still equate with the "reality" of the era.

Colour processing came of age at this time, but it was a while before the mass media got the message. Think of the Thirties and we think of a monochrome Chaplin in Modern Times or the Marx Brothers in Room Service. Newsreel footage of the time, saturated in the despair of the Depression and international unrest, matched Hollywood for silver-screen starkness. The absence of colour in Picasso's gruesome mural-monument to the slain in Guernica (1937) seems to say it all: the outlook in Europe was grim - why cast it in Technicolor?

A new TV series, though, looks set to challenge our assumptions and reprogramme our collective...

It is the very symbol of the glory that was Rome. It figures on the badge of the Serie A side, AS Roma. It was used as the emblem of the 1960 Rome Olympics. For Benito Mussolini, Italy's fascist dictator, there was nothing more representative of the might of the empire he hoped to revive than this magnificent, life-size bronze of a she-wolf suckling the city's legendary founders, Romulus and Remus.

Only problem: it was made 1,700-1,800 years later than supposed.

Until two years ago, the so-called Capitoline Wolf was almost universally recognised as an Etruscan statue from the early part of the 5th century BC. But, according to an article published yesterday by one of Italy's most eminent archaeologists, radio-carbon tests have shown it was manufactured in the Middle Ages.

Prof Adriano La Regina, formerly Rome's top heritage official, said about 20 tests were carried out last year at the University of Salerno. In a front-page article for the daily La...

How about this for the next instalment of the Indy franchise: "Indiana Jones and the Dodgy Antiques Dealer"?

Less than three months after the Quai Branly Museum in Paris discovered that a crystal skull once proclaimed as a mystical Aztec masterpiece was a fake, it is now the turn of the British Museum and the Smithsonian Institution to find they were victims of skull-duggery.

Scientists from those two prestigious institutions on Wednesday said their crystal skulls were cut, honed and polished by tools of the industrial age, not by Mesoamerican craftsmen of yore.

"The skulls under consideration are not pre-Columbian. They must surely be regarded as of relatively modern manufacture," they say.

In an age when it can feel as if trash is about to breach the levees and flood the entire cultural landscape, two announcements have offered evidence of the surprising healthiness of the nation's appetite for the highbrow.

The first was that the British Museum has overtaken Blackpool Pleasure Beach to become Britain's most popular cultural attraction. In the past year 6.04 million visitors crossed the threshold, trumping Blackpool on 5.5 million and Tate Modern with 5.23 million.

The second piece of news was even more important for staff at the museum and those who care about its fortunes. Neil MacGregor, the director and the man who has overseen the transformation of its fortunes, confirmed that he would not be leaving to head the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York...

Cable network History -- formerly known as the History Channel -- is retelling the stories of World War II and the September 11 attacks from a fresh perspective.

The network has ordered a 10-part series, "WW II HD," for 2009 that will make use of 3,000 hours of restored color archival footage and hundreds of pages of unpublished diaries and journals to create what History said will be one of its most ambitious projects ever.

Meanwhile, the network has compiled amateur and professional footage shot on September 11 for "102 Minutes That Changed America," a 102-minute special that will retell the events of that morning in real time.

"WW II HD," which History said will be "visually astonishing," will follow the experiences of a handful of men as their paths cross throughout the war. Their own words will be read by known talent, though the names will be announced at a later date. The goal is to present the events...