If you’ve ever heard the saying “cut off your nose to spite your face,” have you ever wondered where it came from? Legend has it that Saint Aebbe, also known as Saint Ebba or Æbbe the Younger, was a...
A grammatical puzzle from ancient India has baffled scholars for 2,500 years. Now, a Cambridge scientist has finally cracked the meta-code underlying the ancient ‘language machine’. Pāṇini was a...
Cussing has been around since the time we could stub our toes. Though we’re all familiar with the swear words of the modern age, what about swear words from before our time? Believe it or not, there...
A linguistic expert has decoded curious symbols on a 2,100-years-old bronze hand that was discovered last year at an Iron Age castle in Spain. The symbols represent the “earliest” text ever...
Conventional archaeology claims that writing was not invented until some time between 3000 and 4000 BC in Sumeria . However, the discovery of a far older artifact in northern Greece appears to...
As crazy as it sounds, it’s now well attested that the letter “A” started out its evolution as the Egyptian hieroglyph for an ox. But its truly mind-blowing transformation came when turquoise miners...
A new study has shown that the origins of human communication began with hand gestures, and not sounds. The research team discovered this after tasking volunteers to describe words using grunts and...
In 1798, the French under Napoleon Bonaparte launched a military campaign in Egypt. Along with soldiers and military personnel, Napoleon brought a large number of scholars and scientists known as...
An isolated African script is revealing secrets about the unknown evolutionary origins of handwriting and the development of writing. The Vai script was created just two centuries ago to solve the...
Researchers excavating an estate dating back to the 12th and 15th century, have discovered a complete birch bark letter in the historic city center of Veliky Novgorod in north-western Russia. The...
When Irish academic, Dr. Martin Worthington, embarked on learning how to speak the now-extinct Babylonian language of ancient Mesopotamia, little did he know that his knowledge would be used in a...
At the dawn of the Neolithic revolution , which occurred around 10,000 years ago, humans began eating less raw wild foods and more processed meals. A study published in Science shows how this...
Easter Island is best known for its gigantic stone monumental statues . But it has produced a number of other intriguing artifacts, including wooden rongorongo tablets and other items inscribed with...
Over three decades ago, walking up a wide and elegant marbled staircase passageway in a museum, a funerary relief bust of Haliphat in a secluded alcove first caught my eye. From that moment I was...
It is an intellectual pleasure to find friends and topics that intertwine over time and lead to greater understanding. It is like lifting a heavy velvet cloth and discovering ancient and precious...
A question has puzzled paleoanthropologists for decades. Could Neanderthals produce and understand the equivalent of human speech? Were Neanderthals verbally and linguistically capable, just like...
Archaeologists are preparing to launch the third major excavation of an important site on the Jiroft plain , in the Halil River valley of southeastern Iran . The Konar Sandal remains were exposed...
Did you know that many words we use today such as “husband,” “happy,” and “egg” are of Old Norse origin? No? Well, this isn’t surprising, as in the minds of many people the Vikings were nothing but a...
This article presents a major breakthrough in Maya art and archaeology, revealing the sophisticated way that Maya artists animated ancient artworks. There is a lot of excitement surrounding the...
The genetic background of modern day Europe can often be a complicated topic to talk about. History often brings the migrations of faraway peoples, which is how the Indo-Europeans merged with the...
Oceania was the last region to be settled by humans and the last part of Oceania to be settled by humans was Polynesia. Polynesians are famous for their voyages to remote islands in distant parts of...
Egyptian hieroglyphs are among the oldest writing systems in the world, dating back some 5,200 years. Known in ancient Egyptian as the “language of the gods” and said to have been created by the god...
The Sumerians were the first known people to settle in Mesopotamia over 7,000 years ago. Located in the southernmost part of Mesopotamia between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers (modern day Iraq),...
The Armenian alphabet is the script developed for the writing of the Armenian language. This alphabetic writing system was developed during the 5th century AD and is still in use today. The Armenian...
