A mysterious ancient writing system called Linear Elamite, used between about 2300 B.C. and 1800 B.C. in what is now southern Iran, might have finally been deciphered, although some experts are skeptical about the findings. What’s more, it’s unclear whether all the artifacts used to decipher the writings were legally acquired. Only about 40 known … Read more
The Denisovans, together with the Neanderthals, are the closest extinct relatives of modern humans. It wasn’t until 2010 that scientists announced that the they existed, so much about them remains unknown. However, fossil and genetic evidence suggests the Denisovans lived across a wide range of areas and conditions, from the cold mountains of Siberia and … Read more
The “Book of the Dead” is a modern-day name given to a series of ancient Egyptian texts that the Egyptians believed would help the dead navigate the underworld, as well as serving other purposes. Copies of these texts were sometimes buried with the dead. The “‘Book of the Dead’ denotes the relatively large corpus of … Read more
The Goths were a people who flourished in Europe throughout ancient times and into the Middle Ages. Sometimes called “barbarians,” they are famous for sacking the city of Rome in A.D. 410. After the Western Roman Empire diminished, two Gothic kingdoms rose: the short-lived Visigoths and the longer-lasting Ostrogoths. The earliest surviving written records mentioning … Read more
The seven wonders of the ancient world were a selection of exceptional pieces of architecture and art in the Middle East, North Africa and southern Europe. A number of ancient and medieval writers from Europe and Middle East debated and described what are today called the seven “wonders” of the world (not all writers used … Read more
In internet history, credit for the initial concept that developed into the World Wide Web is typically given to Leonard Kleinrock. In 1961, he wrote about ARPANET, the predecessor of the internet, in a paper entitled “Information Flow in Large Communication Nets.” According to the journal Management and Business Review (MBR), Kleinrock, along with other … Read more
The mysterious Antikythera mechanism, thought by some to be the world’s first computer, was first “started up” on Dec. 22, 178 B.C., archaeologists have now found. Discovered by sponge divers in a Roman-era shipwreck near the Greek island of Antikythera in 1901, the elaborate ancient computer, which looks like a shoebox-size contraption with gears and … Read more
The unicorn is one of the most famous mythical creatures, often depicted as a white horse with a spiraling horn erupting from its forehead. It’s not hard to imagine a horse with a horn, and for much of the mythical creature’s history, people thought it actually existed. But where did this myth come from? Unicorn-like … Read more
The graves of dozens of what may have been early British kings, queens, princes and princesses from the era of the mythical King Arthur have been revealed by a new study. It suggests that British royal graves dating from between the fifth and the seventh centuries A.D. have been overlooked until now, possibly because they … Read more
A gold-hilted dagger found in the tomb of King Tut surprised archaeologists when they discovered that it was made of a material forged in outer space. Now, two new studies are painting conflicting pictures of the origins of the mysterious weapon, which may have been wielded by arguably the most famous ancient Egyptian pharaoh. One … Read more
