Homer’s Iliad is one of the oldest stories which has survived. Coming out of the Greek Dark Age and describing events which occurred more than three millennia ago, it is a richly wrought and beautiful poem, but also something of a puzzle. The events that it describes, whereby an alliance of Bronze Age Greek states
Few individuals have changed the world, and fewer still manage to do so, as Alexander the Great did, before the age of 30. Ascending to the throne of Macedonia at the tender age of 20, over the next decade he carved out one of the largest empires the world has ever seen, leading his undefeated
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
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
You all know about Pythagoras, the triangle guy? His brilliant theorem to calculate the lengths of the sides of a right-angled triangle is elegant, and unlike almost every other idea the ancient Greeks came up with (with apologies to Euclid) it turned out that he got it right first time. We still use his equation