The wreck of Ernest Shackleton’s Endurance, the ship whose arrest in pack ice began one of humanity’s most extraordinary survival stories, has been discovered in unusually excellent shape, considering its ordeal. Now, 100 years after Shackleton’s death, the Endurance 2022 missio.....
Maya stelae are monuments created by the ancient Mesoamerican culture of the Maya. They are made up of tall, sculpted stone shafts and are sometimes connected with low circular stones known as altars, though their exact function is unknown. Although plain monuments may be found across the Maya re.....
According to tradition, Vikings performed a magnificent and cruel torture rite that entailed spreading a person’s ribs from their spine to represent eagle’s wings and dangling their lungs out through the wounds while they were still alive. The ceremony is shown in the TV show Vikings .....
It has discovered how Mary, Queen of Scots, and Elizabeth I kept their correspondence secret. Understanding the mechanisms employed for confidentiality in some circumstances, such as the last letter sent by Mary before her execution, might help us had better evaluate the contents contained within.....
Just over a decade ago, a clump of 4,000-year-old hair wrapped around a whalebone comb led to the first-ever reconstruction of an ancient human genome. The hair was obtained in the 1980s and housed at a museum in Denmark after being frozen in arctic permafrost in Greenland. It wasn’t until .....
In today’s mainstream culture, the vampire may take numerous forms, from Alucard, Dracula’s dashing progeny in the PlayStation game “Castlevania: Symphony of the Night,” to Edward, the passionate, idealistic lover in the “Twilight” series. In many ways, today&#.....
A ghost has been discovered on a 3.500-year-old tablet at the British Museum, along with instructions on how to keep the ghosts of the dead from bothering the living. The discovery is the subject of a new book on how one of the oldest civilizations treated the undead. Dr. Irving Finkel is the Bri.....
A 900-year-old sword, along with a range of other objects from the same period, was discovered by a scuba diver off the shore of Carmel, northern Israel, giving insight into the role the area played in the Crusades. In some places of the Middle East, it appears as if you cannot dig a hole without.....
A series of 120,000-year-old bone tools discovered in North Africa maybe some of the world’s oldest concrete evidence of cloth-making, marking a turning point in humanity’s cultural and cognitive evolution (and a blow to the longstanding era of nakedness). Because furs, leathers, and .....
When historians go to an archive or do research, we never know what we’ll find. We can get a general idea of what’s in a historical record or a database with the help of archivists and librarians, but we never know what might or might not be beneficial to us. When we approach our rese.....
The Fakr Ad-Din Mosque (Arabic: مسجد فخر الدين زنكي), also known as Masjid Fakhr Ad-Din, was erected in the thirteenth century by the first Sultan of Mogadishu and has a formal architectural design. In Mogadishu, Somalia, it is the city’s oldest mosque. It’s in Hama.....
In 1605, Sa’dian ruler Abu Faris al-Wathiq (reg. 1603-1609) commissioned the Zawiya of Sidi Bel Abbes or Zaouia of Sidi Bel-Abbès (Arabic: زاوية سيدي بلعباس) in Marrakech to honor a prominent twelfth-century Sufi preacher. In Marrakesh, Morocco, it is an Islamic religious co.....