Sublime
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to get the best impression of what an enclosed prehistoric space would actually have felt like, you could not find anywhere better than the chambered tomb at Maes Howe. I am so grateful that history has allowed this astonishing monument to survive more or less intact.
Francis Pryor • Scenes From Prehistoric Life
The construction of Nan Madol
Erling Kagge • Walking: One Step at a Time
After the beginning of the raids in the eighth century, foreign loot was sometimes repurposed as jewellery—book mounts from ecclesiastical volumes turned into brooches, English sword fittings similarly remade, coins pierced and hung on necklaces. In Norway there is an Irish or Scottish reliquary, almost certainly plundered from a monastery, that se
... See moreNeil Price • The Children of Ash and Elm
With the construction of their crowning achievement, the Suez Canal, Egypt’s fate as Britain’s most…
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Reza Aslan • No god but God (Updated Edition): The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam
“a town partly destroyed by fire and deserted in haste.” Here, sometime around or after 1200 BC, “loose objects were left abandoned in the courtyards and valuables were hidden in the ground. Bronze arrowheads—one of them found stuck in the side of a wall of a building—and numerous lead sling bullets scattered all over the place are eloquent proof o
... See moreEric H. Cline • 1177 B.C.
The suggestion that we are looking at the documentation of an early fourteenth-century BC voyage from Egypt to the Aegean, rather than a record of Mycenaeans and Minoans coming to Egypt, seems plausible for the following fascinating reason. There are a number of objects with the cartouche (royal name) of either Amenhotep III or his wife Queen Tiyi
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