The Pskov-Caves Monastery is a Russian Orthodox monastery located in the town of Pechory, in the northwestern part of Russia. The monastery was established during the 15th century AD and is well-...
As long as humanity has had beliefs in a higher power, the use of magic, spells, curses, and incantations have featured widely across cultures. A number of influential texts or ‘grimoires’ (textbooks...
A possible medical breakthrough has been made by experts, all thanks to a 1000-year-old medieval English medical text. A treatment, that dates to the Dark Ages , is helping researchers to treat a...
The Dead Sea scrolls have been analyzed up close revealing the origins of the animal skins upon which they were written. Discovered in the Qumran Caves , near the Dead Sea, in 1946, the Dead Sea...
Using voluminous data left behind by our ancestors, modern scientists have discovered a correlation between volcanic activity and periods of bitterly cold weather in Ireland. They uncovered this...
The oldest Buddhist scrolls ever discovered were made on birch bark and spent two millennia folded in clay pots, in a cave, situated along the northern border of Afghanistan and Pakistan, and now...
A drollerie (also spelled as drollery) is a type of marginalia found on Medieval manuscripts. Drolleries are amusing, often grotesque, figures drawn on the edges of manuscripts and may be found in...
Handwriting is one of those things most people don’t really give a second thought to today – we live in a world where we are surrounded by text and the vast majority of the time it is printed rather...
Today, there are over six million people that speak a language that evolved out of the Maya civilization, which inhabited parts of what are now Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, Honduras and El Salvador for...
As a millennial and a teacher of millennials, I’m growing weary of think pieces blaming my generation for messing everything up. The idea that young people are ruining society is nothing new. I teach...
Mystery and intrigue are inherent to the Holy See. People will always wonder what religious authorities are conspiring to behind closed doors, what treasures lie within the vaults of the Vatican...
Adding to the list of names among the greatest libraries of the past, the Bayt al-Hikmah (translated as ‘The House of Wisdom’) was established in Baghdad, the capital of the Abbasid Empire, around...
The Dead Sea Scrolls are a set of nearly 1,000 manuscripts in Hebrew, Aramaic, and ancient Greek, which contain some of the oldest known versions of the Hebrew Bible and are said to be one of the...
Across the Greco-Roman world, there were many collections of scrolls, some kept by private individuals in personal libraries and others stored in public libraries such as the Great Library of...
The largest private collection of manuscripts is remarkable not just for the number of items it possesses (over 20,000) but for the breadth and depth of human history it encompasses. The Schøyen...
Throughout history a large number of books have been banned only because they contained various uncomfortable truths or tales. Such books have been systematically hunted down and destroyed by...