Recently I shared Great works of art you can see on a cruise, offering a visual tour of great artworks from the Renaissance to the modern period. I received much positive feedback about that visual gallery, and it was easy to search and curate, so I thought it was time to go further back in time.

Here are Great ancient works of art you can see on a cruise -- that is, as soon as cruising picks up again (soon, I suspect!). By ancient I'm stretching it a bit to include works from B.C. up to and including the Middle Ages. I tried to include artworks beyond our narrow Euro-centric prism. 

Now, there's always some dispute about what constitutes "art." Slaves who hauled blocks of stone through miles of desert weren't exactly thinking they were creating great artworks, were they?

So I'll leave it to each of you to decide whether a piece is a work of art, or an edifice that's a monument to a ruler's vanity. To me, if it's an expression of something greater than ourselves, if it makes you feel something, if it elicits an emotion, a smile, a furrowed eyebrow -- it's art.