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Unknown, Yuny and His Wife Renenutet, ca. 1294–1279 B.C. Metropolitan Museum of Art.

They were buried in a cliff tomb near Asyut, in Middle Egypt, inside a chamber built for a different man, Amenhotep. An excavator named Khashaba found it there. Renenutet shares her name with an Egyptian goddess of grain and harvest. Nobody knows if that was on purpose.

A limestone statue of a couple, Yuny and his wife Renenutet. She sits beside him, one arm looped around his back. She holds a menat, a beaded necklace shaken like a rattle in temple rituals for the goddess Hathor. Still carrying its original paint.

Unknown, Carved Bowl, 1200–300 BCE. Cleveland Museum of Art.

Deep grooves cut across the surface once held red pigment, now mostly gone. Nobody knows what the pattern meant. The people who carved it left no writing behind to explain it. Three thousand years on, it's still unread.

It was pulled from a grave in the Tepecoacuilco River Valley. Buried alongside it: a hematite mirror polished smooth enough to reflect a face, jade ornaments, and a small figurine. The rim pinches inward at the center, a shape that may be copying a squash.

Five inches tall, carved from travertine, a milky white stone that forms in hot springs and caves. Aztecs centuries later called this material tecali. Olmec artists rarely shaped it into a container. This bowl, made somewhere between 1200 and 300 BCE in Guerrero, Mexico, is one of the exceptions.

Unknown, Polychrome Oinochoe (Wine Jug): Deer and Lions (?), c. 600–575 BCE. Cleveland Museum of Art.

This was made around 600 to 575 BCE in Vulci, an Etruscan city in central Italy. Etruscan potters were copying black-figure pottery imported from Corinth, Greece, right down to the shape. Trefoil mouth, raised handle for pouring, banded patterns top and bottom. All borrowed.

Two deer graze on stylized plants near the widest part of this jug. Behind them, two animals close in with bared teeth and long hanging tongues. Look at their heads. They have horns. Lions don't have horns. The deer don't seem to notice either way.

Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, The Apotheosis of the Spanish Monarchy, 1760s. Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Tiepolo died in Madrid in 1770. He never returned to Venice, and his grave there has never been found. The ceiling survived him. It still spans the throne room of the Royal Palace, one of the largest fresco cycles he ever painted.

Tiepolo spent years painting it, an aging master covering gods and clouds across the throne room of Madrid's Royal Palace. By then the Spanish court had a new favorite: a painter with a cooler, sparer style. His work eclipsed him.

Giovanni Battista Tiepolo was 66 when Spain's king summoned him to Madrid. He left Venice and never went back. This oval sketch, from the 1760s, is his study for the ceiling: putti and women spiraling upward, an allegory of the Spanish monarchy's glory.

Unknown, Fabulous Winged Creature with Human Face, probably from the foot of a candlestick, 12th century. Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The candlestick it once supported is gone. Melted, lost, or just outlived by its own foot, nobody recorded which. Stands like this often had three matching creature-feet gripping the floor. Only this one made it here.

A human face glares out between two bronze wings, cast around 900 years ago in the Meuse valley, in what's now Belgium and the southern Netherlands. Copper alloy, barely bigger than a fist: 2.75 x 4.4 x 3.1 inches. Its job was simple. Hold up a candlestick.

Unknown, Female Worshiper, c. 1600–1500 BCE. Cleveland Museum of Art.

Most Minoan bronze votives got melted down, snapped, or lost over the last 3,500 years. This one still has its face, its jewelry, even the individual locks of hair. Only a handful of figures this complete exist anywhere.

She's dressed for the occasion. A flounced skirt over a sleeved robe, hoop earrings, bracelets, a necklace, all worked into 5.5 inches of bronze. Someone left her at a shrine as an offering, one worshiper standing in for another.