An elaborate, beautifully painted tomb was found when rains washed away soil and revealed a capstone on a hillside in China. The tomb dates to the Yuan dynasty, about 700 years ago. Scholars believe...
When explorers began making maps as they explored the world a couple of millennia ago they included land masses that later could not be found. As recently as 2012 an expedition went to one of these...
The Neolithic Hongshan culture has revealed itself to researchers through its long-preserved bounty of jade artifacts, its ceremonial monuments, its burial traditions, and its influence in the...
In summer 2014 in just one Norwegian county a team of archaeologists found 400 Stone Age artifacts uncovered by glacial melt. “Mittens, shoes, weapons, walking sticks – lost in the high mountains of...
Routine landscaping last year led to a Norwegian man inadvertently uncovering extremely rare Viking Age artifacts. When Leif Arne Nordheim pulled up flagstones from his lawn, he revealed a rusty iron...
The Umayyad- and Abbasid Caliphate of the Arabs had invaded and occupied the Sassanid Persian empire for 144 years when in 10 July 795 AD, a child was born in a village called Balal Abad situated...
Drilling holes in the head, otherwise known as trepanation , is the earliest surgical technique known. Holes were bored into a patient’s skull in an attempt to relieve physical ailments and mental...
The Amarna period, roughly 1353-1336 BCE, introduced a new form of art that completely contradicted what was known and revered in the Egyptian culture. The pharaoh Amenhotep IV not only changed his...
Archaeologists digging in the Burnt City of southeastern Iran have excavated a piece of leather adorned with drawings from the Bronze Age. The Burnt City, known as Shahr-e Sukhteh in Persian, is a 5,...
A team of scientists claim to have recovered the oldest known copy of a gospel, dating back to the 1 st century AD, which they extracted from papyri used to create an Egyptian mummy mask, Live...
In the 17 th century, Europeans came to what they called the New World and started divvying it up and parceling it out under the rubric of ‘exploration’. One particularly grasping Frenchman was...
A multidisciplinary study of a geoglyph located atop a hill in Kanda in the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM), has unravelled a series of incredible features of the ancient structure,...
Archaeologists have excavated a home in what may have been the site of a small 15 th century town near a historic Irish castle that was later the ground for a battle between the MacDonnell family and...
A small Roman bronze figure representing Silenus, the mythological companion and tutor to the wine god Dionysus, has been found on the Danish island of Falster. The miniature bust dates back nearly...
The characteristic of Cynocephaly describes the head of a dog upon a human body. This trait is a theme upon which there are several variations, with representations showing up in several cultures and...
Archaeologists in Japan have unearthed a huge stone-paved moat in Asuka, Nara Prefecture, which they believe is part of a burial mound for an ancient emperor. The finding adds to a string of...
People wore domestic cat fur clothing in medieval England, and archaeologists may have found a site where such leather was produced in the 13 th century. Archaeologists digging in Norwich, England,...
Ancient Egypt was one of the most powerful civilizations of the ancient world, but it was under attack by other peoples at various times throughout its history. Consequently, it had a powerful...
About 7,000 years ago in the Sahara Desert, artists painted giraffes, cows, goats, dogs, and people who appear to be swimming in a dog paddle-type motion. Some scientists believe the artists...
The first dynasty of China described in classic texts and historical documents was the Xia Dynasty, established in 2070 BC in the Yellow River valley. However, the origins of Chinese civilization...
Human bones as old as 9,000 years have been unearthed on the Japanese island of Okinawa. Researchers hope they will help elucidate what people’s lives and burial practices were like in the...
The Roman bath system was one of the most intricate and complex of the ancient world. Composed of various rooms for mental and physical cleansing, the Roman baths were more than a source of hygiene;...
Native American philosophy is centered on observations of the world and is an integral part of deeply held spiritual beliefs. For the Muskogean tribes of the southeast United States and the Chickasaw...
The discovery of an unidentified text in Hungary has led to more than 200 years of attempts to determine who authored it and to decipher its contents. Many scholars have studied the text, known as...