Imagine yourself flipping through a worn and wrinkly 1,000-year-old book, before spotting a scribbled note in the margin about curing a headache with crushed herbs. That’s not the “Dark Ages” of superstition we’ve all heard about. This is a glimpse into a world where medieval Europeans were clever with their health and had surprisingly resourceful
Imagine yourself stumbling upon a jagged triangular stone glinting in the Mediterranean sun, with its sharp edges hinting at a mysterious past. What you’ve just stumbled upon was once known as glossopetrae or “tongue stones”. For centuries, people across Europe believed these objects were the petrified tongues of mythical serpents or dragons. Glossopetrae had been
On the windswept hills close to Hadrian’s Wall in northern England, at the Vindolanda fort, archaeologists have found a stone relief of Victoria, the goddess of victory. This sarcophagus, completed around AD 213 and measuring 47 cm tall, 28 cm wide and 17 cm deep, likely marked the royal entrance of a grand archway celebrating
Two amateur metal detectorists have found something unexpected in the commune of Breaza in Mureș County, in the heart of Romania. A Dacian treasure trove of silver artifacts has been found, dating back some two thousand years. The Dacians were skilled metalworkers and this new discovery does not disappoint. The horde, found by detectorists Dionisie-Aurel
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
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