In the grand necropolis of ancient Thebes on the west bank of the Nile stands a sprawling mortuary complex to one of ancient Egypt’s greatest pharaohs. Known as the Ramesseum, this mortuary temple was a place of worship to the dead Pharaoh Ramesses II, also known as Ramesses the Great. Great columns rise in lines
The Sahara is the largest desert in the world, a vast arid wilderness stretching across north Africa. For millennia it has been a near insurmountable barrier separating the Mediterranean from the rest of the African continent. The ancient Egyptians, clustering along the shores of the Nile, depended on the desert for their defense. For them
Homer’s Iliad is a problematic text. On the one hand, it tells us of a time before the Bronze Age Collapse in the twelfth century BC, a lost era before the Greek palaces burned and the survivors of catastrophe forget, for centuries, how to read or write. Such resources detailing this world are few, and
There were twelve “core” gods of the ancient Greek pantheon. In the first of these articles we looked at the Big Three, that is Zeus, Poseidon and Hades, and in the second we looked at the main goddesses. Now we get into the really interesting stuff: the specialists. The greater gods may have had responsibilities,
Recently there has been a bit of a kerfuffle around ancient Egypt. Three new royal tombs have been uncovered in as many weeks, and that’s something of a big deal when the last one we found was Tutankhamun’s in 1922. The latest news comes from a group of three researchers, Corrado Malanga, Armando Mei and
The island of Great Britain has a strange and unusual history, and part of the challenge is connecting the history we know with the landscape we see today. As more and more discoveries are made, the story only gets weirder. We have stories of battles, kings of ancient myth. We know of invading armies and