Ancient
Egypt traded with Punt for a thousand years, hauled home its myrrh trees and gold, and never wrote down the way there. A buried harbour and the teeth of a mummified baboon are finally dragging the God's Land back onto the map.
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Mythology
Greek poets sent Jason to the end of the world for a fleece of gold. Ancient geographers left a quieter note in the margin: in Colchis, people really did catch gold in sheepskins — and in 2014 scientists proved it still works.
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Medieval
For a while in the twelfth century, Merv was the largest city on earth. Then a Mongol army came in 1221, and a chronicler set down a death toll so vast the tallymen needed thirteen days just to count it — a number the arithmetic still refuses to allow.
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Ancient
For most of a century the servants in Ur's death pits were said to have sipped poison and fallen asleep beside their queen. Then someone slid their skulls into a CT scanner — and found the holes a weapon had left.
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Ancient
When a Kushite army sacked Rome's Egyptian frontier, its queen carried home the severed bronze head of Augustus and buried it under a temple step, so every worshipper would tread on the emperor's face. She fought Rome to a standstill and out-negotiated it — and we still cannot read a word she left behind.
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Ancient
Five thousand years ago, Irish farmers with no metal and no writing built a hill that swallows a single sunrise a year, and set a stone box above the door to aim it. The light still arrives on cue; almost everything else about Newgrange is still being fought over.
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Ancient
A Celtic grave on the upper Seine held a Greek bronze bowl taller than the woman buried with it — the largest metal vessel to survive from all of antiquity. Seventy years on, the argument over who she was is still unsettled, and her gold has just been stolen.
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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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