Stories and mysteries from the medieval era.
Medieval
My Son is a valley of brick towers built to Shiva by the Cham kingdom of central Vietnam. In 2025 a trench there uncovered a processional brick road missed for a century.
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Medieval
Each Chimú king built a walled mud-brick palace and was buried inside it, which is why Chan Chan holds ten. In 2026 archaeologists opened a burial platform the looters had missed.
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Medieval
In the 12th century Merv may have been the largest city on earth. A chronicler said the Mongols killed over a million there in 1221, a figure the arithmetic does not allow.
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Medieval
A plain in Myanmar holds more than ten thousand Buddhist temples. Land given to them paid no tax, and that may have emptied Bagan's treasury.
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Medieval
Ninety years before Columbus, Zheng He led fleets of some 300 ships to East Africa and brought home a giraffe. Later Ming officials stopped the voyages and lost most of the records.
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Medieval
For about six hundred years Srivijaya controlled the sea lanes between India and China, yet left so few ruins that a French scholar had to argue in 1918 that it existed.
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Medieval
Two boys entered the Tower of London in 1483 and disappeared from the record. Bones that may be theirs lie in a Westminster Abbey urn, and permission to test them has been refused.
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Medieval
Bronzes from Igbo-Ukwu in eastern Nigeria are so finely cast that scholars refused to accept their ninth-century radiocarbon dates. The dates have held.
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Medieval
Some 80,000 printing blocks carved in 13th-century Korea have lasted in an unheated wooden hall. When a modern vault was tested, its trial blocks began to rot within months.
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Medieval
Two boats full of slain warriors were found under an Estonian roadworks. They look like Viking ship burials, but they are decades older than the Viking Age is supposed to be.
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Medieval
Angkor was never lost: it was the largest city of the pre-industrial world. Lidar maps and tree rings from a Vietnamese cypress show how drought and floods broke its canals.
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Medieval
In 1944 an Australian soldier found coins on a beach in the Wessel Islands. Five were struck at Kilwa, off Tanzania, centuries before Europeans reached Australia.
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