Search
Ancient History
Queen Calafia seems like she could have sprung from the pages of a modern fantasy novel.
The 1,200-year-old "Book of Ingenious Devices" contains designs for futuristic inventions like gas masks, water fountains, and digging machines.
Archaeologists turn to other scientific fields to fill in the picture of how victims lived and why they died.
A non-invasive method for looking inside structures is solving mysteries about the ancient pyramid.
The strange bronze artifact perplexed scholars for more than a century, including how it traveled so far from home.
Though ultimately incorrect, the ancient Greek philosophers blazed a conceptual trail for humankind to understand the nature of reality.
This year marks 2,000 years since the birth of the Roman author of the first natural encyclopedia.
If you get married in South Africa, don't be surprised if someone shows up to the ceremony dragging along a smelly goat.
A wide-scale examination of early Neolithic human skeletons reveals the violent history of a supposedly peaceful period.
Could the prevalence of flood myths around the world tell us something about early human migration or even the way our brains work?
“We suffer more often in the imagination than in reality.”
Most philosophers merely contemplate the world, but what about the ones who actually tried to change it?
Ancient humans crossed the Bering Strait land bridge from Asia into North America. But some of them went back.
X marks the spot. The Dutch town of Ommeren has been swamped by detectorists armed with shovels looking for $20-million treasure.
Far from practicing witchcraft, the experimentation of medieval alchemists helped bring about the Scientific Revolution.
Adopting a healthy scepticism towards inherited ideas means “emptying the container of the Self.”
Some objects were softer than others.
Ancient bones reveal that domesticated felines were at home in Pre-Neolithic Poland around 8,000 years ago.
Studying the display of personal wealth across time can help us better understand the history of socioeconomic inequality.
In many city-states, it was perfectly acceptable for older men to have sexual relationships with young boys.
An unexpected ancient manufacturing strategy may hold the key to designing concrete that lasts for millennia.
Wealth concentration among elites was common in ancient nations, but the scale on which it took place in Egypt’s 18th Dynasty was unprecedented.
The Athenian rich paid their taxes because they craved the social success of being perceived as "useful."
The amazing life of “Gudrid the Far-Traveled” was unjustly overshadowed by her in-laws, Erik the Red and Leif Erikson.
To the Greek philosopher, all of our actions ultimately aim at our own pleasure.
Seneca thought the use of ice was a "true fever of the most malignant kind."
"The Da Vinci Code" popularized the idea that Christians stole much of their theology. It's wrong, especially regarding Christmas.
A Cambridge Ph.D. student has solved a grammatical problem that has befuddled Sanskrit scholars since the 5th century BC.
Some of the weirdest characters in Greek mythology were Athenian kings.