Islam was a religion which owed its rapid success to conquest. From 622 AD and led by Muhammed himself, Muslim armies swept across the Middle East and unified Arabia into a single entity. The greatest adversary they faced in their sweep eastward was mighty Persia. This ancient and venerable culture of fire worshippers had dominated
It is March, 1942, and the US is reeling from the Japanese surprise attack on her surface fleet at Pearl Harbor three months before. A lone, Clemson-class destroyer, the USS Edsall, crosses the Indian Ocean headed for Tjilatjap, the only deep-water port on the island of Java. The Edsall is far from cutting edge. Launched
A team of researchers from St Andrew’s University in Scotland have made an astonishing discovery regarding an ancient ruin at the other end of the country. The rectangular earthworks known locally as “King Arthur’s Hall” on Cornwall’s Bodmin Moor have been found to be much older than had been thought. The name itself was always
Writing is one of the most important inventions in the entire history of civilization. The ability to record conversations, agreements and stories is literally what separates history from prehistory, and those civilizations who wrote things down captured their cultural identity for all time in doing so. And now, in a new study published in Antiquity,
A new study of ancient Egyptian sculpture has taken a new approach by looking at the fingerprints left embedded in the artwork. A study of these fingerprints has revealed much about their working practices. The study, by Oxford University PhD student Leonie Hoff and published in the Oxford Journal of Archaeology, uses the fingerprints to
A new and unknown Egyptian tomb has been found in Luxor in Egypt. What makes this discovery so exciting is that, while most tombs are empty or partially destroyed, this one contains intact burials. The Egyptians viewed the afterlife as the start of a journey for which life was only the prelude. As a result