Medieval
A plain in Myanmar holds more than ten thousand Buddhist temples. The same devotion that raised them, acre by tax-free acre, may have quietly emptied the treasury that paid for it.
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Ancient
A king carved his side of a coup a hundred metres up a Persian cliff, in three languages, where no one could reach it. Twenty-three centuries later it became the key that finally let the world read cuneiform.
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Ancient
For four centuries the Hittites rivalled Egypt from a fortress in the Anatolian hills — then vanished so completely that for three thousand years they survived only as a puzzling name in the Bible. What dug them back up was an archive of thirty thousand clay tablets, one word for water, and a treaty whose copy now hangs at the United Nations.
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Ancient
No stone lies within a hundred miles of it, yet hunter-gatherers hauled in copper, soapstone and quartz and raised the largest earthworks in ancient North America — one great mound thrown up, new work suggests, in a single wet season, by people no one was ordering about.
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Medieval
Ninety years before Columbus, a Chinese eunuch admiral led fleets of three hundred ships to the coast of Africa and brought home a giraffe. Then his own government let the ships rot and tried to erase the record that it had ever happened.
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Ancient
A city as old as the pyramids of Giza, raised in a Peruvian desert without pottery, metal or writing — and after five thousand years of digging, no one has found a single wall built for war.
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Ancient
A drainage ditch behind two old mounds in Gongju opened onto a Korean king who had been sealed away since the 520s — the only royal tomb of his age that could still say its own name. Then the archaeologists emptied it in a single night, and never forgave themselves.
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Ancient
One of the first pieces of Africa’s oldest sculpture spent years on a pole in a Nigerian yam field, scaring off birds. The people who made it left thousands of faces in the ground — and not one word to say who they were.
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Modern
She was the mightiest warship in the Baltic, and a light gust sank her a few hundred metres from the quay. Raised whole after 333 years, the Vasa is now fighting a slower enemy brewed inside her own timbers.
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Ancient
Under a ruined Georgian town lay five skulls so unlike each other that scholars nearly split them into separate species. Then a single hillside forced a harder question: how many kinds of human really walked out of Africa?
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Ancient
A geologist chasing old shorelines found burnt bone in a dead lake — the oldest cremation on Earth. Forty-two thousand years on, Lake Mungo’s dead were carried home and buried again.
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Medieval
For six hundred years Srivijaya ruled the sea lanes between India and China — then vanished so completely a French scholar had to prove it existed. Now divers are pulling its gold from a river, and losing it all over again.
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