‘Antiquities’ are objects (things) such as ornaments, furniture, statues, clothes, utensils, metal objects that were used very long ago and are still found intact or partially damaged that show us how the people of the very past lived, e.g. a wooden table of some hundred years old, an earring of a queen who ruled some thousands of years ago and even the original hand-written book of Shakespeare.

In the present usage, ‘antiquarian’ is more commonly used in its adjective form to refer to people or things of the past, e.g. ‘antiquarian sale’, ‘antiquarian books’, ‘antiquarian exhibition’, etc.