Unpicking our ancient past is a nigh-impossible challenge. Piecing together who we are and where we came from has been likened to sifting sand through a screen, trying to find the odd grain which might offer another clue. For the truth is history is mostly lost. Almost everything of what we were simply doesn’t survive,
Bronze Age Greece is seen as a golden age. This is Homer’s Greece, the Greece of the Iliad and the Trojan War, of city states and island kingdoms, of great heroes and gods and monsters. But it may surprise some to find that we actually know very little of this time. Once all the epic
The high Bronze Age saw the first emergence of complex cultures. Successive innovations in agriculture had produced a food surplus, perhaps the first meaningful one in history, and these foodstuffs could support the first cities. These complex urban centers appeared in four different places, developing alongside each other essentially at the same time along what
Archaeologists in the village of Stobreč in Croatia have unearthed an ancient Greek settlement. What makes this find especially exciting is that the oldest finds date back some 3,500 years, placing them firmly in the era of the Greek Bronze Age, the era of the Trojan War. This golden age for Greece saw a series
An excavation team led by Dr. Ahmed Saeed El-Kharadly have uncovered an ancient sword in Egypt’s Beheira Governate in the north of the country, between Alexandria and Cairo and in the heart of ancient Egypt. The sword was found at the Tell Al-Abqain archaeological site, in what appears to have been a military storage complex
Of all the city states of ancient Greece it is Sparta who stands out as the home of the most formidable fighting force. Athens may have been more powerful and more prosperous, but it was Sparta who bred the best warriors. Soldiery, and physical toughness were an intrinsic part of Spartan life. Famous legends of