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Ancient Origins Premium offers a wealth of knowledge and a variety of learning methods (articles, eBooks, webinars, expeditions and more) that will help you embark on a journey you will never forget!

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,...
Sunset silhouette of Orford castle in Suffolk (Steve Mann / Adobe Stock)

Shuckland: Where Legends Haunt The Landscape

Shuckland encompasses haunted landscapes where legends, folklore, history and even tales of villains and heroes (but mainly villains) seemed to permeate the very fabric of the place and imprint their...
Plesiosaurus dolichodeirus (:Dmitry Bogdanov/ CC BY-SA 3.0)

Dragon Sharks, Fish Flippers And Other Real Life Monsters Of The Primordial Soup

From the human perspective oceans appear endless and unchanging, but in reality they are in a constant state of flux, continuously evolving over vast periods of time. Many modern humans seem...
Akhenaten pic compliments of Jo from her trip. Osiris is a bronze/gold statue of the god, Louvre (Rama / CC BY-SA 3.0) (author created).

Akhenaten Heretic Pharaoh: The New Osiris

Did Egypt’s Heretic Pharaoh outlaw the God of the Dead, or become him? Akhenaten has been called ancient Egypt’s ‘Heretic Pharaoh’. From 1354-1337 BC Akhenaten so drastically altered his country’s...
Galleons, Stallions Of The Seas

Galleons, Stallions Of The Seas

The 17th-century was of fundamental importance for everything related to naval design in the centuries to follow. In the 1600s a vessel called a galleon, took center stage in international maritime...
Summer Solstice Sunset at Stonehenge, UK (Phil/ Adobe Stock)

The Lonely Stones That Square The Cosmic Circle

Both beneath and beyond Stonehenge in England, the Great Sphinx and Pyramid of Khafre in Egypt, Machu Picchu in Peru, Chichen Itza in Mexico and Newgrange in Ireland, exists an underlying code that...
Ramapough Lenape Indian Nation Flag (Ramapoughnative/ CC BY-SA 4.0)

Modern Science Steps In To Revive Ancient Ceremonial Stone Landscapes

On the winter solstice of December 20, 2019, Chief Vincent Mann of the Ramapough Lunaape Munsee Nation Turtle Clan, accompanied by some members of the Turtle Clan, ‘keepers of the pass’, and members...
12th page of Kunijo Kabuki Ekotoba showing Izumo no Okuni, the founder of kabuki theatre, on stage. Edo Period, Keichō era (1596—1615) (Public Domain)

Asian Storytelling: Rakugo, Pingshu And The Art Of Sitting Seiza

Intertwined with the development of mythologies, storytelling predates writing and the earliest oral storytelling was animated with gestures and expressions thrown in for good measure. Tools to...
Attack of the Sea Peoples on Syrian fortification. Historical illustration. ( Lunstream / Adobe Stock)

The Elusive Origins Of The Danuna Of The Sea People

Scholars tend to lean more on archaeology and ancient Egyptian inscriptions to seek the identities of the elusive Sea Peoples. This is not a simple endeavor, but in summary the Sea Peoples were an...

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