As we mentioned in a previous article, only one percent of all the literature produced by the Romans in Antiquity has survived to our days. The oldest surviving text in Latin is a hymn recited by the priests of Mars during their annual festival, which was found inscribed on a stone in Rome in 1777. […]
Guillermo Carvajal
Degree in Geography and History, specialized in Art History, researcher, ex-librarian, in the blogosphere since 2005 with La Brújula Verde. I write about history, art, culture, travel, geography... Working on content and advertising for blogs.
Posted inGeography, Travel
The largest cave in the world is so high that it could house 40-story skyscrapers
In the year 1991, a man named Hồ Khanh discovered a cavity in the Phong Nha-Kẻ Bàng park on the coast of Vietnam, about 500 kilometers south of the capital Hanoi. As he later recounted, he felt a gust of wind and heard the running of a river inside. The whole park contains numerous caves […]
Posted inAntiquity, Prehistory
A single family remains in the Erbil citadel, the oldest continuously inhabited settlement in the world
The Near and Middle East are full of cities of proven antiquity, such as Byblos, Sidon, Jericho, Susa… Less well known is the city of Erbil, in Iraqi Kurdistan, at the center of which is a fortified mound that claims to be the oldest continuously inhabited settlement in the world: the Erbil Citadel. In November […]
Posted inAncient Greece, Art
The Colossus of Dionysus and the kouroi of Flerio, Greek statues from the 6th century B.C. that remain unfinished in the quarries of Naxos.
The island of Naxos is the largest of the Cyclades in extension, famous and coveted since ancient times for its wealth and its white marble, with quarries exploited until today (only those of crystalline marble). As it happens in Egyptian quarries, where obelisks remain, or in those of Rapa Nui, with half-finished moai, in those […]
Posted inAntiquity
The fantastic cargo of the Uluburun, a Bronze Age ship of uncertain origin
In 1982 an amateur diver searching for sponges off the coast of the city of Kaç in Turkey came across something spectacular. The wreck of a ship sunk with all its cargo at the end of the Bronze Age, in the 14th century BC. The wreck and the ship were named Uluburun, after the strip […]
Posted inAncient Greece
The Nymphaeum of Mieza, the place where Aristotle instructed Alexander the Great.
When Alexander the Great was already at war in Asia, strange news reached him from his homeland: his tutor Aristotle had made public his teachings, those same doctrines with which he had imbued the mind and soul of the young Macedonian, allowing the whole world to know them. Alexander’s displeasure is reflected in the alleged […]
Posted inAntiquity, Culture
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, sometimes more rugged and convoluted. Some contributed in part to the decipherment of the Anatolian hieroglyphs, in a sort of curious domino effect. In 1694, the Cippi of Melqart, two pedestals bearing bilingual inscriptions, in […]
Posted inGeography
The mysterious seismic pulse that repeats every 26 seconds, coming from the Gulf of Guinea
Seismic detectors around the world have been capturing a curious and strange phenomenon for decades. Every 26 seconds the earth emits a pulse, a small microseism barely perceptible, that nobody knows why it happens or what causes it. Until recently, no one knew where it came from either. The first to document the phenomenon was […]
Posted inArt, Middle Ages
The Chartres Cathedral’s great labyrinth
About 80 kilometers southwest of Paris stands the city of Chartres, one of whose main cultural attractions is its Gothic cathedral built between 1194 and 1220. It was built in the same place where other churches and cathedrals had been before, the first one around 360 A.D., all of them destroyed by fires: the first […]
Posted inGeography
The world’s largest globes
A globe is a three-dimensional scale model of planet Earth represented on a sphere where, sometimes, the topography of the surface is shown (obviously exaggerated because, depending on the scale, it would be difficult to see). The circumference of the planet is approximately 40 million meters. The oldest of those that remain is the Erdapfel […]
