antiquities

thumb|240px|A centaur struggling with a [[Lapith on a metope from the Parthenon, in the British Museum (London), part of the Elgin Marbles]] thumb|240px|right|An Assyrian [[lamassu in the Louvre]] thumb|right|240px|Chinese ritual bronze|Chinese ritual wine server (guang), circa 1100 BC Antiquities are objects from antiquity, especially the civilizations of the Mediterranean such as the Classical antiquity of Greece and Rome, Ancient Egypt, and the other Ancient Near Eastern cultures such as Ancient Persia (Iran). Artifacts from earlier periods such as the Mesolithic, and other civilizations from Asia and elsewhere may also be covered by the term. The phenomenon of giving a high value to ancient artifacts is found in other cultures, notably China, where Chinese ritual bronzes, three to two thousand years old, have been avidly collected and imitated for centuries, and the Pre-Columbian cultures of Mesoamerica, where in particular the artifacts of the earliest Olmec civilization are found reburied in significant sites of later cultures up to the Spanish Conquest.

A person who studies antiquities, as opposed to just collecting them, is often called an antiquarian.