When Alexander the Great was already at war in Asia, strange news reached him from his homeland: his tutor Aristotle…
Archaeology
“This has become the archaeologist’s grandiose task: to make dried-up wellsprings bubble forth again, to make the forgotten known again, the dead alive, and to cause to flow once more that historic stream in which we are all encompassed.” (C. W. Ceram. 1949. Gods, Graves and Scholars.)
How the Karatepe bilingual inscription from the 8th century B.C. led to the decipherment of Anatolian hieroglyphs
Just as the Rosetta Stone was fundamental in the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs, other writing systems followed a similar process,…
The Lemnos Stele, a funerary inscription from the 6th century B.C. that links the Pelasgians to the Etruscans
In 1885, a unique stele was found as part of the walls of a church in the town of Kaminia…
The Great Marib Dam, one of the engineering wonders of antiquity
Yemen is a relatively fertile country, thanks to its location on the seashore and its humid climate. It has valleys…
How a lawyer bought Stonehenge in 1915
Stonehenge is England’s most important prehistoric monument and undoubtedly the world’s most famous chromlech. UNESCO added it to its World…
A 4,500-year-old Mesopotamian pillar contains the first deciphered inscription about border disputes
A marble pillar or stele that has been preserved in the British Museum for 150 years bears a cuneiform inscription,…
The Dur-Kurigalzu ziggurat that medieval travelers mistook for the Tower of Babel
In the Iraqi desert, some 30 kilometres west of Baghdad, stands an impressive mound that, at first sight, looks like…
The ancient sculptors of the stone heads and potbellies of Monte Alto, Guatemala, knew the magnetic properties of the rocks
On February 1976 archaeologists found a sculpted turtle head with magnetic properties in the ceremonial center of Izapa in the…
Rivers and seas made of mercury inside the tomb of China’s first emperor, sealed 2,200 years ago
The famous terracotta warriors are only a part of the gigantic mausoleum of Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of…
How archaeologists found the origin of the legend of King Midas, who turned everything he touched into gold
One of the best-known legends of antiquity is that of the Phrygian king Midas, who turned everything he touched into…
