Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads 1860 during the Second Opium War, at which time the fountainheads were looted. They were originally made by an Italian Jesuit, Giuseppe Castiglione. In May 2015, Sean Parker paid US$4.4 million at Phillips for the small (gold) version of the 12-sculpture work by Ai Weiwei. In June 2015, a large (bronze) version sold at auction for $5.4 million. Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads is an artwork by Chinese contemporary artist and political commentator, Ai Weiwei. The work comes in a small (gold) and large (bronze) version. Created in 2010, the zodiac heads (a Rat, Ox, Tiger, Rabbit,
Greek alphabet which the sequence of the alphabet could be recited and memorized. In Phoenician, each letter name was a word that began with the sound represented by that letter; thus "ʾaleph", the word for "ox", was used as the name for the glottal stop , "bet", or "house", for the sound, and so on. When the letters were adopted by the Greeks, most of the Phoenician names were maintained or modified slightly to fit Greek phonology; thus, "ʾaleph, bet, gimel" became "alpha, beta, gamma". The Greek names of the following letters are more or less straightforward continuations of their Phoenician antecedents.