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Ancient History
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.
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.
Giambattista della Porta's contributions to codebreaking changed the course of communication.
These clocks burn powdered incense along a pre-measured paths, each representing a different amount of time.
Those white, marble statues you see in museums all over the world were originally painted with bright colors.
Mounted on horses and armed with unique, powerful bows, the archers of Genghis Khan inspired terror wherever they rode.
Stoicism is popular today but often misunderstood and misapplied. In fact, a naive interpretation of Stoicism is damaging to your well-being.
A classical equivalent to Chanel No. 5.
Hybrid animals emerge when two different species from the same family reproduce. For many years, the kunga’s lineage was just another genetic mystery.
In numerous cultures worldwide, women were just as involved in bringing home the prehistoric bacon as their male counterparts.
Perhaps there was something theatrically satisfying about a learned man waving around a flask of pee, looking at it from all angles, sniffing it, and making bold proclamations.
People discovered prehistoric fossils long before Charles Darwin published "On the Origin of Species." The remains of these unknown creatures often puzzled their discoverers.
It's like combining Google Translate with a time machine.
They had the technology. So why didn't they use it?