Ancient
Wonders built by hands long gone, and the mysteries they left behind.
10 articles
ANCIENTScanners just picked up signs of a hidden passage behind the most famous tomb on Earth. Where does it lead?
A buried corridor, a missing queen and a ten-year scientific fight. New scans around King Tut's tomb have reopened one of archaeology's biggest arguments.
ANCIENTTwenty five tonnes. Eighteen kilometers. No wheels.
Britain's tallest prehistoric standing stones weigh more than 25 tonnes each, and scientists just traced their source to a quarry 18 kilometers away, skipping a much closer one entirely, on purpose.
ANCIENTA tomb built for a man whose entire job was secrecy.
Archaeologists in Saqqara found the tomb of an official called the keeper of the king's secrets, filled with more than a hundred carved statues meant to serve him forever in the afterlife, but his own body is nowhere to be found.
ANCIENTAll roads led to Rome. Except they did not. They led to Ankara.
Researchers mapped nearly every known Roman road, three hundred thousand kilometers of them, and the best connected city in the whole empire was not Rome at all, it was a city in modern day Turkey.
ANCIENTSomewhere Under This Valley There May Be a Sleeping Giant
A seventh-century monk described a reclining Buddha hundreds of metres long in the Bamiyan valley. One archaeologist has spent decades looking for it.
ANCIENTThe Last Pharaoh Tomb Was Found in 1922. The Next One Took a Century.
A flooded tomb in a valley everyone assumed belonged to queens turned out to hold the last missing king of the 18th Dynasty. Almost nothing was left inside.
ANCIENTA Lost Human Species Was Just Found in a Cave in China
Denisovans were identified in 2010 from a finger bone and a genome. A cave in Yunnan has finally given them bodies, tools, and a forest to live in.
ANCIENTThis Is One of the Biggest Tombs on Earth, and Nobody Has Been Inside for Over 150 Years
This is one of the biggest tombs on Earth, and nobody has been inside for over 150 years.
ANCIENTThere is a room under Italy and it is believed to be full of books.
Eighteen hundred Roman books survived a volcano. Then people started trying to open them.
ANCIENTEgypt Has Lost Three Cities to the Sea, and the Last One Is Still Standing
Two of them are completely underwater. The third is the one you have heard of, and most of it is still above water.