Something unusual has been dug up in the Judean desert north of the waterway of Nahal Zohar. An ancient pyramid, dating back to the Hellenistic period, is emerging from the arid sandstone which has concealed it for 2,200 years. Don’t be fooled by the name: this pyramid was not built by Greeks, although they certainly
Near the city of Matlock in Derbyshire lies Farley Wood, a sprawling mix of pine for logging amidst old growth harking back to an ancient time when dense forests covered the British Isles. Locals have long known about the strange stone at the heart of the wood, standing straight upright like a pillar some two
A new study from a team of researchers at the University of Cambridge has upended centuries of theory as to the origins and evolution of… us. We are not who we thought we were, it seems. Previously the longstanding scientific consensus was that Homo sapiens was one of a family of human and near-human species
It never rains but it pours when it comes to the tombs of ancient Egyptian pharaohs, said nobody ever, but the metaphor certainly seems appropriate at the moment. A month ago we reported on the first discovery of an Egyptian Royal tomb (from a period of united Egypt) in a century, then a hoped-for second
The Bronze Age Collapse was, definitively, the end of the Bronze Age. By the time the ancient civilizations had picked up the pieces and rediscovered how to write and interact with each other again they had an entirely new and exciting discovery to work with: iron. Iron can be made into harder and more durable
For those of you who watched the recent sequel to Gladiator, imaginatively named Gladiator II, firstly you have our sympathies. Whatever that mess was, it was closer to ill-conceived fantasy than a heroic, historical epic. But amidst the pointless diversions, the weirdly cheap sets and the endless toga flapping from a poorly cast and out-of-form