The Valsgärde burial field near Uppsala in Sweden is known for its magnificent boat graves from the 600s and 700s AD. Archaeologists have identified more than 90 graves from the Iron Age, but two...
Construction workers in Israel have rediscovered a pair of ancient stone Roman coffins that had been found 25 years earlier and then forgotten. The two Roman-era (63 BC-324 AD) stone sarcophagi were...
Performing excavations in an area where new sewer lines are currently being installed, Swedish archaeologists have announced a remarkable and borderline miraculous find. While digging in half-frozen...
A shabti is a funerary figurine used by the ancient Egyptians. These statuettes were placed in tombs as grave goods and were believed to function as servants for the deceased in the afterlife...
Ancient beliefs are often a complex puzzle and putting the pieces together can often be extremely challenging. Time has its way with unwritten traditions, and little of what wasn’t written down...
Recently, an American professor has for the first time analyzed the First Book of Breathing , a famous ancient Egyptian book that reveals incredible insights into the afterlife. What happens to us...
The loss of a pet is always tragic. However the way we have treated our pets after their death and the beliefs we hold about what happens after our cherished animal is gone have changed over the...
Once again archaeologists at a famous necropolis in Egypt have made astonishing discoveries. They have uncovered many ancient Egyptian coffins that are perfectly preserved. The most recently...
By far, Loki’s most well-known children are the ones he had with the giantess Angurboda. These include the wolf Fenrir, the Midgard Serpent Jormugandr, and the goddess Hel. Legends say that the...
Maeshowe is a Neolithic chambered cairn and passage grave situated on mainland Orkney , the world-renowned, ancient monument-peppered archipelago located off the north east coast of Scotland...
The most widely read work of Florentine politician and writer Dante Alighieri, the Divine Comedy dictates a tale of the three realms of the afterlife as believed by the Italians of the Middle Ages...
An ancient Egyptian board game that was similar to Ludo or backgammon is offering new insights into ancient religious beliefs. It was not only a game, but it was seen as a way for the dead to...
The idea that the human soul might take the form of a swan to journey from this world to the next could be one of the oldest fundamental beliefs of human kind, or so suggests a new discovery from the...
The idea of the human soul has fascinated humankind for thousands of years. Cultures around the world have sought to explain the soul or spirit in a wide and fascinating variety of ways. The soul is...
An amazing cache of mummies has been found in Egypt near one of the world’s oldest pyramids. Polish archaeologists discovered several hundred of them at the site. The unearthing of the mummified...
As god of embalming and the dead, the afterlife and lost souls, Anubis is one of the most prominent and mystical gods of ancient Egypt . He was known since the earliest periods in the history of the...
A team of Chinese archaeologists from the Nanjing Archaeological Institute and the Liyang Museum have made a highly-unusual discovery inside a tomb in eastern China near the ancient capital city of...
Ancient Egyptian beliefs about the afterlife shaped every aspect of their culture and society. A find in a 3,500-year-old shrine is throwing new light on the beliefs of provincial Egyptians. Experts...
More so than females, the male Norse explorers who took residence in Iceland more than 1,000 years were buried with their horses and new DNA evidence proves that the horses slaughtered to accompany...
Like many ancient societies, the Vikings believed in an afterlife, and these were based on the religious beliefs they held. The current understanding of Viking funerary practices has been discovered...
Once upon a Time, they all lived happily ever-after. In the 1891 publication The Science of Fairy Tales , the folklorist Edwin Sidney Hartland devoted three chapters to ponder over ‘The Supernatural...
Joanne M. Pierce / The Conversation When a family member or a friend passes away, we often find ourselves reflecting on the question “Where are they now?” As mortal beings, it is a question of...
2,500 years ago a woman in Sicily lost her battle with cancer. The scars of the disease left marks on her skull and may help researchers solve the mystery why she was buried in such a way that she...
500 graves dated to between the 12th and 16th centuries were found in a cemetery at Nyárlőrinc, a village in southern Hungary. They contained a unique set of bones. In 2005, Dr. János Balázs, a...
