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Ancient History
These astounding inventions show that civilizations of the past were a lot more advanced than we might have thought.
The history of hell doesn't begin with the Old Testament. Instead, hell took shape in the 2nd century from Mediterranean cultural exchange.
Tikal, one of the biggest cities the Maya ever built, was home to a vast and flourishing society.
Discover how the threads of myth, legend, and artistry have been woven together by storytellers to craft history.
This minimalist map unties Asia’s mountainous geography, centered on the “Pamir Knot.”
In ancient Rome, collective bathing was the norm. In the West today, it’s the exception — and that’s too bad.
The stench of death is actually fairly pleasant.
In an attempt to prove Christianity inferior to communism, a Soviet scientist hoped to play God.
Historians have been able to piece together a clear picture of how the average Roman citizen spent their waking hours.
His crime was so great, he was not only sentenced to death but his name was to be erased from memory.
Dive into China's profound intellectual legacy through five seminal texts that have shaped millennia of thought.
Though over three billion people speak an Indo-European language, researchers are not sure where the language family originated.
It's a bird! It's a plane! It's a medieval airship!
Dive into seven texts that continue to shape Western philosophy, from ancient Mesopotamia to Greece's brightest minds.
39mins
Throw away your history books — here’s what life in ancient Rome was really like, according to Cambridge scholar Mary Beard.
The design was as intricate as that of modern-day, factory-fabricated denim jeans, and just as durable. The ancients had fashion.
Never mind.
A clock, designed and built in Europe, ran hopelessly at the wrong rate when brought to America. The physics of gravity explains why.
Nero’s reputation as one of the most malevolent emperors in Roman history might be partly slander.
Six hundred years in the history of trousers.
The history of cartography might have been very different if the Latin version of Muhammad al-Idrisi's atlas had survived instead of the Arabic one.
Explore how belief shapes destiny, from Oedipus Rex to modern geopolitics.
In Kannauj, perfumers have been making monsoon-infused mitti attar for centuries.
A 1.5-million-year-old hominin bone shows signs that the victim was eaten by lions — and humans.
The use of the letter x as an unknown is a relatively modern convention.
Today, many Maya sites are polluted with toxic levels of mercury. The contamination likely originated from cinnabar paints and art.
The arsons were no accident, archaeological evidence suggests.
Only Caesar lived to tell the tale.
The Te’omim Cave in the Jerusalem Hills is filled with skulls and oil lamps — objects a new study says may have been used in dark rituals.