
Author
Norman MacDonald
When artist Norman MacDonald compared his own brushes, inks and watercolors in his Amsterdam studio to records of those in Egypt as long as 3,500 years ago, he says he “realized again how little the tools of a painter’s craft have changed.”
Articles by this author
I Witness History: I, Eternal Bodyguard
History
I’m from Kemet. You call it Egypt. Now I live in Texas. Crafted from wood and ritually painted nearly 2,000 years ago, my job in afterlife protection never ends. I haven’t always done it so well.The Canary Islands Connection
Food
History
Since antiquity, foods and food cultures have migrated from the Middle East westward as far as the Canary Islands. After 1492 the Canaries became a leading port of departure to the New World, and new research shows that Canarian culinary influences flowed particularly to the dry lands that today straddle the border between Mexico and the us. Those influences led to crops and livestock that have helped produce the region’s distinctive cuisine today—from albóndigas and atoles to sopapillas and zalabias.I Witness History: I, Down the Drain
History
I was carved to adorn a soldier's ring, but one day in the steamy bathhouse of the Second Legion Augusta, I came unglued, slipped my mooring, and then darkness–and plenty of rotten company–for nearly 2,000 years.I Witness History: I, Horn of Africa
History
Royal trumpet of Pharaoh Tutankhamen, I was born to command armies, priests and whole populations. But my days with him were few. Layed to rest with my mouthpiece toward my 19-year-old pharaoh, I fell silent for 3,262 years. Then one of you tried to play me.I Witness History: I of the Storm
Arts & Culture
History
“You have marveled at me since beyond memory, at once dreading the flash of my blinding light and eager for my return. My brilliance was recorded and sung about; my rumbles of warnings, in pithy Latin on a North African stone inscribed—’FVLGVR CONDITV’--‘Lightening was buried here.’”Six Degrees of Suriname
Arts & Culture
Independent since 1975, Suriname began as an English and then a Dutch colony. Now among the western hemisphere’s most culturally diverse countries, it also lays claim to the hemisphere’s highest percentage of population identifying as Muslims: 14 percent. Our Canada-born, Amsterdam-based, award-winning illustrator-author paid a visit to sketch and listen.I Witness History: I, Pillar of Justice
History
At first, you humans used us rocks for fighting and tool-making. Then I evolved, showing how we can actually mediate your incessant quarrels. In Akkadian cuneiform dictated by Hammurapi, my royal Babylonian collaborator, I formed of my stony flesh not weapons, but words; not tools, but rules.I Witness History: We, The Syndicate of Troy
History
We are about a thousand years old when we heard the brazen clash of the Trojan War – muffled by meters of earth above us – but when the Boss pulled us out of the ground in 1873, he made us say we'd been on the battleground. What a joker! The Boss was chasing fame, not truth, and we've been locked up ever since. So here we are to set the record straight, all 9000 of us, in your court of public opinion.