Empires may rise and fall, but the impact they have on their conquered subjects and the future may continue beyond their passing, for better or for worse. The Spanish Empire, which began in the 15 th...
For over a thousand years until its fall to the Ottoman Turks in 1453, the city of Constantinople was one of the greatest urban centres in the Christian world. At the heart of this city was the Hagia...
In 977 AD, a Persian poet named Ferdowsi began on a grandiose poetic journey that would take him 33 years to complete. He used ancient Persian tales which had been told from generation to generation...
It turns out Caesar Augustus was an undeserving braggart. He claimed, “I found Rome a city of bricks and left it a city of marble.” But new research by a university professor has found that only a...
An extraordinary fossil find in the desert of Ethiopia is pushing back the dawn of humankind by approximately half a million years, and rewriting what we know about the evolutionary branching that...
More than 1.2 million rotations of the Earth on its axis since her death, Queen Hatepshut has not been eradicated from memory by her ancient successors. Far from it. Still today, nearly 3,500 years...
In many ways, the old Norse beliefs of Scandinavia are strange and wonderful. The old pagan religion had gods and goddesses of music and fertility, nature deities, elves, dwarves, giants, magical...
The 12 th century is generally regarded as a period of European decline. In other parts of the world, however, this was certainly not the case. In South East Asia, the Khmer Empire was enjoying its...
Archaeologists have unearthed the skeletal remains of 200 people underneath a supermarket in Paris on the site of an old hospital where victims of the Black Plague had been known to be buried. It was...
Archaeologists have been met with surprise upon surprise as they excavate coffins and remains found at the medieval grave site of England’s King Richard III. The opening of a unique lead coffin found...
The Sagas of the Icelanders have long been preserved as the most comprehensive specimen of the literary culture of the 13 th and 14 th centuries of Iceland. In writing these sagas, many attributes of...
Archaeologists have concluded that pre-agricultural Stone Age hunter-gatherers on the Isle of Wight 8,000 years ago obtained domesticated wheat from farmers on the continent of Europe. That is 2,000...
Scenes depicted in a Chinese medieval travel book gave clues to researchers, helping them locate what is said to be a 13 th century military outpost used by Mongolian conqueror Genghis Khan. As...
Mummification of the deceased is a fairly well-known practice from ancient times. Most notably, the Egyptians utilized a mummification process that led to today’s cliché image of a deceased body...
Two years ago, an aerial search of the dense jungle of Honduras fuelled by local legends of a lost ancient city, revealed miles of seemingly man-made features. Announcements quickly spread that...
Archaeologists stumbled upon a surprising find in 2009 when they uncovered a preserved brain in a skull, buried in an Iron Age pit in Yorkshire, England. Known as the Heslington Brain, the find has...