Around 1200 BC, the eastern Mediterranean fell apart. The great empires of the Bronze Age collapsed, many cities were destroyed or emptied, writing disappeared from much of the region, and long-distance trade shrank to almost nothing. Archaeologists call what came next the dark age, and the name is earned: with few texts and almost no […]

Ancient geographers listed many cities called Arsinoe, from Cyprus to Cilicia (in what is now southern Turkey), from Ephesus to the Gulf of Suez. Most of them were linked to the Ptolemies, the dynasty that ruled Egypt after the death of Alexander the Great. One, however, lies far from the Nile. It stood in the […]

In a lab at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) in Japan, a slab of diamond smaller than a pencil eraser hangs from a carbon fiber rod about 5 centimeters (2 inches) long. The rod is attached to a graphite plate that floats in mid-air above four magnets. Nobody touches it. When a […]

The shoulder blade is such a wide and flat bone that in some areas it becomes almost translucent when held up to the light. That is why it is rare to find it whole, even in modern burials, and why it so surprised archaeologists from the University of Cambridge that from Shanidar Cave, in Iraqi […]

Tucked among the Greek temples that made Agrigento famous, on the south coast of Sicily, there is a narrow valley of orange and olive trees. An international team has been digging there for three years. The third season in the Kolymbethra valley and on the Case Montana plateau ends on October 24. According to the […]

Some medieval books can’t be read by anyone, and one of them has become almost a trademark of the genre: the Voynich manuscript, kept at Yale University and dated to the 15th century. It has inspired novels and theories of every kind. Specialists often place another volume right behind it on the list of enigmas, […]

A man in Behbeit el-Hagar, a village in Egypt’s Gharbia province, was working on a plot of land in front of his house when he came across a block covered in carvings. He told the local antiquities inspectorate. What came out of the ground afterwards, according to a statement from Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and […]