archaeology
It’s a wonder that the Parthenon remains standing at all
From a temple to Athena, it became a Byzantine, then Latin, church, a mosque, a powder magazine and finally a ruin. Lord Elgin’s vandalism was hardly anything new
What Ovid in exile was missing
The poet complained bitterly of the barbarism of Tomis, on the Black Sea – but it was actually a thriving entrepot with a rich culture, like many of the Roman empire’s remoter cities
The Assyrians were really not so different from us
Selena Wisnom shows us children toiling over their writing tablets, taking pride in schoolwork, and a heartbroken scribe finding consolation in literature after the death of his king in battle
Bones, bridles and bits – but where’s the horse?
Ancient equine remains provide fascinating clues to migration and warfare – but the animals themselves seem largely absent in William T. Taylor’s history of the horse
What became of Thomas Becket’s bones?
Alice Roberts’s examinations of violent deaths in the past take her to the site of Becket’s murder in Canterbury cathedral and the later destruction of his shrine by Henry VIII
Is an unknown, extraordinarily ancient civilisation buried under eastern Turkey?
I am staring at about a dozen, stiff, eight-foot high, orange-red penises, carved from living bedrock, and semi-enclosed in an…
Merlin’s stones
When it comes to Stonehenge, we are like children continually asking why and never getting a conclusive answer. There are…
It all streams past
To write about London and its rivers is to enter a crowded literary field. Many aspects of watery life in…
The city of the plains
‘Everyone knows the Alexandria in Egypt,’ writes Edmund Richardson, ‘but there were over a dozen more Alexandrias scattered across Alexander…
Looking for a new England
Dan Hitchens on our love affair with the Anglo-Saxons
A race against time
In 1835 the first two Egyptian antiquities were registered in the British Museum: a pair of red granite lions from…
A battleground for archaeologists
Armageddon began as Har Megiddo, the Hill of Megiddo in northern Israel. The theological aspect is Christian. For Jews, ancient…
Kathleen Jamie’s luminous new essays brim with sense and sensibility
There is a moment in one of the longer pieces in Surfacing, Kathleen Jamie’s luminous new collection of essays, when…
Norfolk may be flat, but it’s never boring
Francis Pryor claims he would be a rich man if every person who told him that the Fens were ‘flat…
Is one of history’s most rousing speeches apocryphal?
As rousing death-and-glory speeches go, it is one of the best. With a besieging Roman army only hours from storming…
A cold archaeological gaze: In the Garden of the Fugitives, by Ceridwen Dovey, reviewed
Visiting Pompeii, it is hard to miss the garden of the fugitives. It is on every other postcard in the…
Holy mackerel! Civilisation begins with fishing
Fish. Slippery, mysterious creatures. They are mysterious because of where they live, in vast waters, and because they elude the…
Learning to talk
One of the great achievements of science is that so many of its branches, from astronomy to zoology, have been…
Curious shades of Browne
On the evening of 10 March 1804, Samuel Taylor Coleridge settled at a desk in an effort to articulate what…
A neglected corner of Roman history
When Ovid was seeking ‘cures for love’, the most efficient remedy, he wrote, was for a young man to watch…
Rescuing the past from the teeth of time
John Aubrey investigated everything from the workings of the brain, the causation of winds and the origins of Stonehenge to…
‘Tell it not in the future’
Sam Leith finds the most sacred site of Ancient Greece still a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma
