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A surgeon letting blood from a woman's arm, and a physician by a Flemish painter (18th century) (Wellcome Images / CC BY-SA 4.0)

Nature’s Medicine Cabinet: Ancient Medicines, Remedies and Tinctures That Worked

When those unfortunate moments occur in life that require medical assistance, one should be thankful to be alive today and not even as far back as the last decade. Common ailments like halitosis may...
A Centenary Of Modern Naval History 1616 to 1716

A Centenary Of Modern Naval History 1616 to 1716

History is composed not only of facts, but also of dates and if one needs to pinpoint a chronological beginning to what is considered modern naval history, historians and naval experts all agree on...
The Genesis Of Modern Religions In Ancient Egypt

The Genesis Of Modern Religions In Ancient Egypt

It is an irony of history that the three great religions of Europe and the Middle East, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, did not originate there but rather had their genesis, like the human species...
Theodora by Giuseppe de Sanctis (Public Domain)

Sociae Mimae: Ancient Roman Actresses Doing It For Themselves

When Thespis, a Greek performer, stepped on the stage in 534 BC and became the first known man to speak words as a character in a play or a narrative, he broke the tradition where ancient Greek...
Évora at night

The Temple Of Diana And The Witch Of Évora

In the World Heritage Site of Évora, the capital of Portugal's south-central Alentejo region, one of the best-preserved Roman temples in the Iberian Peninsula dominates the centre of a large plaza at...
Grianán of Aileach (Bruno Biancardi / Adobe Stock)

Ireland’s Tuatha Dé Danann: Descendants Of The Fallen Angels From Canaan

Rebellious, fallen angels, who were expelled from heaven to earth populate the mythologies and religious texts of the three main Abrahamic religions. However, the term ‘fallen angel’ appears neither...
The Bocksten Man is the remains of a Medieval male body found in a bog in Varberg Municipality, Sweden (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Windover Bog Bodies Resetting Human Habitation Timeline In America

When anthropologists think about bog bodies, their thoughts usually turn to Ireland. Waterlogged sections of land rich in dead plant material that has, over the centuries, converted to peat, provides...
The Seven Dolls figurines

Buried Power Of The Seven Dolls At Maya Dzibilchaltún

What makes Dzibilchaltún so perplexing, are the seven crudely made clay figurines found buried below the altar in what has become known as the Temple of the Seven Dolls. At its peak Dzibilchaltún,...
Crossing The Caucasian: The Mongol Invasion Venturing Into The Land Of The Rus

Crossing The Caucasian: The Mongol Invasion Venturing Into The Land Of The Rus

In 1221, to avoid being captured by the invading Mongols, Rashid, the Shah of Shirvan, abandoned his capital Shemakha, where the Genghis Khan’s generals Subotai and Jebe had ordered a siege tower to...
The four evangelists by Peter Paul Rubens. Sanssouci Picture Gallery. (1614) (Public Domain)

A Genesis Apocryphon: Are Humans Offspring Of Gods?

When the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in 1946, and gradually released to the public over the course of the next few decades, it provided valuable insight into the minds of those who wrote the...
A Mongol melee in the 13th century. (Public Domain)

The Great Mongolian Raid Of Georgia And The Siege Tower Of Corpses

By late 1220, after being relentlessly pursued for months by Genghis Khan’s generals Shah Ala ad-Din Muhammad II of Khwarazm , wearing a torn shirt, died exhausted, poor, and from pleurisy. With the...
A small schist statuette shows Prince Thutmose as a miller grinding grain. Louvre Museum, Paris. Design by Anand N. Balaji (Public Domain); Deriv.

On The Trail Of The Mysterious Crown Prince Thutmose: The King Who Was Not To Be – Part I

Amenhotep IV, the youngest-known son of Pharaoh Nebmaatre Amenhotep III-heqa-Waset, ascended the throne at the height of Egypt’s golden age. The seeds for that efflorescent era of the Eighteenth...
Callanish Stones (spanishjohnny72/ Adobe Stock)

The Ancient Celtic Thresholds Of Liminal Time And Space

The ‘Veil of Isis’ is an ancient metaphor and allegorical motif of mythology where nature is personified as the goddess Isis covered by a veil representing the mystery and inaccessibility of nature's...
Leonidas at Thermopylae, by Jacques-Louis David (1814). (Public Domain)

Thermopylae A Speedbump for the Persian War Machine

If there is a single event that made Sparta ’ s military legend a seminal moment when the ‘Bronze Lie’ was forged, it is the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 BC, fought 10 years after Marathon . Nearly...
Ancient ruins and island in water (Nikolai Sorokin / Adobe Stock)

Plato’s Prehistoric Athens Destroyed In A Neolithic Landslide

The Ancient Greek philosopher Plato wrote his Atlantis story in two documents called the Timaeus and Critias . These writings date from about 360 BC and are the only known works that describe the...
Joshua and the walls of Jericho. (Archivist / Adobe Stock)

Beat The Drum, Sound The Bugle, Play The Bagpipe: Music In Warfare

Since prehistoric times when hunters tapped along to the rhythm of drips in caves and carved the first bone flutes and skin drums, music has always been an integral part of the hunt and warfare,...
Nazareth and Mary’s Well by Felix Bonfils, (1880) (Public Domain)

Life Of A First Century AD Rural Nazarene Versus A City Sepphorite

Nazareth was inhabited since the Bronze Age, and pottery dating from 900-600 BC confirms an Iron Age settlement there, but the Assyrian, Babylonian and Persian invasions turned the region into a...
Odalisque by Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant (1882) (Public Domain)

Divine Queen Thea Musa, The Parthian Basilíssa

The victory of the Parthians over the Roman General Marcus Licinius Crassus at Carrhae in 53 BC is perhaps the single most significant event in Rome's engagement with Parthia. The loss of Roman...
The Nightmare, by Henry Fuseli (1781) (Public Domain)

Ancient Demonic Shadows Of Today's Alien Body Snatchers

The demons that tormented the people of history were considered to be angels cast out of heaven for defying God, and similarly, today’s aliens are believed to come from distant, incomprehensible,...
The Fall of Phaeton by Peter Paul Rubens (1604) National Gallery of Art (Public Domain)

Hippoi Athanatoi: Immortal Horses of the Gods And Heroes

The gods of Olympus often procreated semi-divine children with morals, but not all of their offspring were human. Especially Poseidon, god of sea and horses, sired a lineage of immortal divine...
Boab tree sunset near Derby, Western Australia (Summerdrought / CC BY-SA 4.0)

Australia’s Enigmatic Boab Tree Seeding The Out-Of-Australia-Theory

The Out of Africa Theory is the dominant - though not only - model for the geographic origins and subsequent migration of modern humans. While it has been tweaked over time to generally now encompass...
Noh-Arashiyama by KOMPARU Zempo (Public Domain)

The Art Of Noh: 14th-Century Japanese Dance Drama

Since the 14th century AD, Noh has been a major form of classical Japanese dance-drama. It is the oldest major theatre art form that is still performed on a regular basis to this day. Noh , which is...
A painting by Charles Le Brun, French painter and art theorist, depicting Alexander and Porus during the Battle of the Hydaspes (1673) design by Anand N. Balaji (Public Domain); Deriv.

Alexander’s Indus Folly: Bizarre Search for the Source of the Nile in India

When the Macedonian monarch Alexander III, popularly known as Alexander the Great , arrived in the northwest of the larger Indian subcontinent in 327 BC following his conquest of the massive...
Reconstruction of a Guanche settlement of Tenerife (CC BY-SA 3.0) and reconstructed face(Provided by author) Deriv.

The Face Of A Canary Island Guanche Woman, Reconstructing Ancestors

The narratives of history relate the fates and dates of nameless, faceless people who came before us, often reduced only to numbers, but when forensic facial reconstruction puts a face to history,...

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