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.
Read more
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.
Read more
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.
Read more
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.
Read more
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.
Read more
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.
Read more
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.
Read more
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.
Read more
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.
Read more
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.
Read more
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.
Read more
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.
Read more