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Medieval Italy gave birth to the most talented sculptors, such as Michelangelo and Gian Lorenzo Bernini and Rome hosts some of the most famous sculptures such as the Pieta, Moses, David and the busts...
Two thousand years after the death of Ovid – the Roman poet who was banished by Augustus from Rome to the remote town of Tomis on the Black Sea in 8 AD – the reason for his exile remains a mystery...
Today human cultures suffer nuclear power station meltdowns, rivers of plastics destroying natural environments and petrol fumes clogging cities’ airways and human arteries, but ancient history is...
Confucian values in ancient China held that since one's hair is a gift from one's parents it is to be treated with utmost respect. This rule applies to men and women alike. Haircuts were therefore...
In 1512 Portuguese navigator Pedro Mascarenhas, identified a group of islands in the Indian Ocean east of Madagascar as the Mascarene islands (modern-day Mauritius, Réunion and Rodrigues). The...
One version of an old story has it that when Prince Siddhartha Gautama was born, a local priest visited the family compound and prophesied that the young man would grow up to be either an emperor or...
In the Greek Peloponnese, high atop the summit on Arcadia’s Mount Lykaion (Wolf Mountain) lies an altar at one of the oldest and most revered of all primordial sanctuaries. Towering at nearly 5,000...
Regressus ad Uterum refers to the spontaneous regression to a time or a situation when a person or an entire nation felt like a child in the womb of their mother; safe and with the unhindered...
Treasure legends sometimes have a kernel of truth, but are then exaggerated, embellished and transformed, told over and over again until the facts fade and leave only fantastical tales, but look hard...
Thousands of years ago, an unknown culture carved and raised hundreds of stone stelas and sculptures on the Pacific coast of southern Guatemala. Together, they provide some of the strongest evidence...
Discovering the origin of civilisation is the holy grail of anthropology and archaeology. Essentially, this means understanding how man transformed from un-civilised Palaeolithic hunter gatherers to...
These days, the dusty, sunbaked ruins of Çatalhöyük in central Turkey do not receive a lot of attention, except from tourists and archaeologists, but around 9,000 to 7,000 years ago it was a busy,...
Human hair has always played an important role in culture and in society. For men and women alike, styling one's hair seems to be an innate human desire to emphasize their beauty and power. Thus,...
Although history textbooks often present information as if it is set in stone and firmly established, recent research into ancient civilization reveals one embarrassing fact that continuously seems...
Although the Tarot is the most widely used ‘book of images’ in the world for the purpose of fortune-telling , many people are oblivious to its origins. A popular belief exists that the Tarot...
Although New Zealand and the Philippines are separated by more than 5,000 miles (8,000 km), the stories of how people first migrated to them, and how those stories were treated by scholars, show...
Cycles of nature were at the core of the ancient practice of divination to decipher the will of the gods. Many different methods of divination were practiced in antiquity, such as dream...
A fascinating and incredible mystery is linked to ancient India, a journey into the remote past of a land that still has to reveal to the whole of humanity many of its 'stories' and its wonders. The...
For thousands of years humans have found good reason to stab, chop, slice and dice each other up, and the choice weapon which has endured the tests of time is the sword. Historically, kings, emperors...
The term, ‘Big Bang’ was coined by the English astronomer and cosmologist Sir Fred Hoyle in 1949. But when he first employed it, during a BBC radio broadcast on astronomy, it was meant to be derisive...
Pirates, maybe even more than mermaids and sea serpents, are the most fascinating and misunderstood entities of maritime history and while it is known today that mermaids were seals and giant...
In many folk tales from around the world there are accounts of a midwife who is taken by fairies to help with a birth. Apart from the overall otherworldly nature of these tales, the mode of transport...
In Rome "I saw written on top of a door." ( Inferno , III, v. 11, Dante) In Rome, hidden a corner of Piazza Vittorio Emanuele II, one will find the last remnant of the Academia dell’ Arcadia , an...
Could the underground cities in Cappadocia, Turkey date back to 12,800 years ago? In 1963, so the story goes, a man living in Cappadocia excavated some large stones from his basement while renovating...